Chapter 8
I’m back at my house. Standing in my kitchen with the yellow curtains Mom made, and crayon pictures Rosie drew stuck on the fridge with magnets.
I’m thirteen, wearing Dad’s old police academy shirt that hangs down to my knees and baby blue pajama pants with snowflakes on them.
Dad hasn’t started breakfast yet, which means I still have time before I have to get ready for school.
It’s January fifteenth. There’s no calendar open, but I know it in my bones. It’s January fifteenth every time I close my eyes.
I let Rusty out the back door like I do every morning. Dad’s twelve-year-old Malinois moves slowly on his arthritic knees. The morning air bites through my thin pajamas as Rusty wanders around the yard, his tail doing a slow, satisfied wag.
I don’t see the man watching me from across the street. I never see him in time.
“Rusty, come on, boy,” I call, my breath making little clouds in the freezing air.
He trots back toward me with that lopsided gait of his.
I’m closing the door when a hand catches it, forcing it back open.
Stanley Daniels steps inside the house. He’s of average height, with receding brown hair and the kind of face that you’d pass on the street and forget two seconds later. Except I’ll never forget it. Not as long as I live. He’s pointing a gun at me.
“Don’t scream,” he says, his voice so calm it makes my skin crawl. “Put the dog back outside.”
My hands shake as I open the door again. “Rusty, out. Go on.”
Rusty looks up at me with those confused brown eyes, like he knows something’s wrong but doesn’t understand what. I push him back outside, and he makes a small whine.
“Good girl,” Stanley Daniels says. “Now. Call your family into the room.”
My voice cracks when I yell for them. Dad walks in first. Mom follows in her scrubs from the night shift. Her hand flies out to push Rosie back behind the door frame, but it’s too late.
Dad steps in front of Mom, and I can see him doing the calculations—where the exits are, how fast he could get to the gun, whether he could get us out if he charged. “Take whatever you want. Just leave my girls.”
The cold barrel of the gun presses against my temple, and I whimper.
“Let’s all take a walk to the bedroom,” Stanley Daniels says. “Nice and slow. Can you do that for me, James?”
I want to scream at Dad to run. To grab Mom and Rosie and sprint to the front door without me, but I’m trapped inside my thirteen-year-old body, watching it play out the way it did in real life.
I follow them down the hallway and into my parents’ room.
Stanley Daniels tells us all to lie on the ground face down.
The carpet scratches against my cheek. Rosie cries next to me, while Mom whispers that it’s going to be okay.
Rope loops around my wrists. I scream as the plastic bag comes down over Dad’s head, and I’m barely able to see him through the tears blurring my vision, but then his eyes find mine through the clear film, and he—
I wake up gasping. My T-shirt is glued to my skin, and the unfamiliar room is dark except for strips of light cutting in through the blinds.
Where am I?
My first thought is that I’m dead, which would be a real plot twist considering how much effort I’ve put into not dying in the past couple of days, but that can’t be right because the last thing I remember is…
Oh.
I sit up all the way and scoot backward until I’m leaning against the wall, pressing my hand to my chest as I force myself to take slow breaths.
Mom taught me this breathing exercise once: I had to take a deep breath, as deep as I could, hold it as long as I could, inhale just a tiny bit more, and then exhale.
I don’t know if it’s the exercise that helps, or imagining Mom here walking me through it, but I’m breathing easier after a couple of minutes.
I can’t hear Rusty’s whine anymore, nor am I thinking about how he died alone at animal control only a month after the murders.
My mouth tastes like something crawled in there and died. I peer through the blinds. The sun hangs low behind the bare trees, casting shadows like fingers across the grass.
I dig my phone out of my jacket on the floor, tucking my hair behind my ears—4:52 PM. Jesus, of course I smell. I slept all afternoon.
Bob does a dance by the door, his cone swinging as he hops from one paw to the other.
I drag the chair out from under the knob, undo the deadbolt, and crack the door open, scanning the hallway like I’m about to rob a bank.
It’s empty. I step into the hallway and wait for Bob to hobble through the door.
I was so tired when Donny led me up here that I was barely paying attention.
The walls are decorated the same as the downstairs hallway, half wood wainscoting, half floral wallpaper.
I count seven closed doors. There’s a bathroom across from my room that Donny showed me, and a hatch in the ceiling that must lead to an attic.
Everyone else’s bedrooms are probably up here too.
Bob whines, and it takes me a second to find him even though he’s not far. He’s hobbled to the end of the hallway and stopped at the stairs. Smart guy, remembering the way out. I reach for him slowly, and am relieved when he doesn’t shy away.
Bob pees outside on the lawn. Once we’re back in the room, I get a whiff of my armpit and gag. That’s not what I want to smell like when I meet my housemates—colleagues.
Bob sits on the bathmat guarding me as I shower.
The pipes groan, and water hisses out. I let out this embarrassing little sound of relief as the spray hits my shoulders.
This is what heaven must feel like. Just me and unlimited hot water that I don’t have to have sex for, that won’t be interrupted halfway through because Dylan’s stepping in, asking me to get on my knees.
I wonder if he’ll even notice I’m gone. Probably not until he’s horny again. That thought should bother me more than it does.
Soaping up my hands, I hum a song from the last musical I got to be in at my middle school—The Addams Family.
I played Wednesday, which was total typecasting.
I wasn’t the strongest singer in my grade, but I was pale and had the natural resting face of someone plotting murder, according to the director, which in hindsight was a weird thing to say about a child.
I wonder if he remembers saying that to me.
If he does, he must feel really weird about it now.
The lyrics slip out, barely audible over the gushing water: “Puppy dogs with droopy faces, unicorns with dancing mice…”
I was so happy then. That was the last time I felt normal. I was a kid who loved to sing and had a family waiting for me at home, and I took it for granted.
I scrub until my skin turns pink and irritated from how hard I’m going at it. I wrap myself in a towel I find folded under the sink, and am ushering Bob into my room when a door slams downstairs, followed by the echo of voices floating up the stairwell:
“Would it kill you to once, just once, keep your mouth shut and follow the plan?” a girl snaps.
“The plan was to get information,” a man replies. “I was doing the plan.”
“What information did you get, exactly, while getting your face rearranged?”
Bob grumbles. I pause with my hand on the doorknob. Eavesdropping is wrong, but I’m desperately curious to see what the other people who chose to take this job are like.
Silently begging Bob not to bark, I creep down the stairs, clutching my towel hard against my body and praying, even though I don’t believe in God, that these stairs don’t creak and give me away.
I stoop into a crouch on the landing and do this awkward shuffle closer to the rest of the steps until I’m peeking around the wall.
The living room is empty. Across the living room, I can see movement through the cased opening.
There are people standing in the entryway.
A girl around my age yanks off one of her ankle boots and jabs the toe into the chest of a guy who towers over her by at least six inches.
She has pale, mid-length blonde hair tied into a ponytail, and is wearing a white button-down shirt tucked into slacks.
She’s wiry and has to be no more than five-two.
Her silver nose ring glints in the indoor light.
The guy she’s dressing down absorbs her lecture with a relaxed posture, brushing dirt from his shirt.
His sandy hair is short and sticks up in all directions.
He has a split lip caked with dried blood, and a left eye darkening into what I bet will be a shiner by the morning, but he’s giving her a toothy grin.
“You promised not to pull any fast ones on me,” the girl continues. “I said—I literally said this morning—‘Griffin, please don’t antagonize anyone today,’ but did you listen? No.”
“I had it handled.”
“Is that what we’re calling three guys about to drag you behind a dumpster?”
“DJ, come on. You’re acting like—”
“Like what? Like someone who doesn’t want you getting the crap beaten out of you at Philly’s nastiest bar? God—sometimes, I think you pick fights just because you know I’ll worry about you, and that’s not fair, because I worry about everyone all the time, and I don’t want to explain to Nico—”
“Explain to Nico what?”
DJ and Griffin turn around at the same time. I can’t see who it is through the wall, but I don’t have to. I recognize the voice.
DJ points at Griffin. “He ran his mouth to the bar owner and got punched in the face.”
“Why would you do that?” Nico’s voice is calm, like an adult realizing a kid has gotten their hands on a pair of scissors.
“The guy was an ass.” Griffin shrugs. “I was asking him about the body in the alley, but he said his regulars don’t appreciate outsiders asking questions about dead girls. I mentioned that for his regulars to be upset, he had to have regulars.”
“See?” DJ throws her hands up. “You can’t just say things like that to people.”
“That was unnecessary,” Nico says.