Chapter 31 Chloe
CHLOE
SIX MONTHS LATER
“Ireally wish you’d just come stay with me.”
I slump down in the Adirondack chair on my back patio, my feet pressed against the railing. It’s warm and breezy for January, although it’s supposed to turn cold later this week. I think I’m looking forward to it. The warmth reminds me too much of summer. Of that night.
“You can stop asking,” I say numbly, watching the lake. “I’m staying.”
Abi sighs, the sound tinny on my computer speaker.
I’ve got her and Penelope both up on a Zoom call, my computer balanced on the little table beside my chair.
These weekly Zoom calls were the only way I could get Penelope to leave my house about a month ago.
She showed up two weeks after that night, her backpack slung over her shoulder and her eyes hard and glinting.
I’m not letting you stay in this house alone, she said.
Now, though, I’m used to it, being alone.
“I have plenty of room,” Abi continues. “Even with Rowan staying here. You know that.”
Rowan. Rowan’s her new boyfriend, and I know there’s a story there, although Abi’s keeping quiet about it.
Honestly, she’s been kind of strange ever since this summer, too, like she’s keeping secrets.
Penelope and I talked about it while she was here—probably in some attempt to distract me.
But Penelope didn’t seem to think she needed to drive down to Texas to stay with Abi like she did with me.
Granted, I haven’t exactly been at my best since that awful fucking night in August.
“Dude, have you even looked at the weather forecast?” Penelope says now. I tear my eyes away from the lake to look at her face on the screen. “They’re saying you’re going to get snow.”
“You think I can’t handle snow?” I laugh mirthlessly.
Penelope rolls her eyes. “You can. But North Carolina can’t. What if you lose power? You’re completely isolated out there.”
I don’t say anything, mostly because I can’t argue with her.
Penelope saw it firsthand for the few months she stayed with me: the way, one by one, every single person who had a lake house the night of the Verity Hollow Murders has moved out.
We went for walks down the road, and I could see her counting the new For Sale signs as they went up.
There are even more now, swinging disconsolately in the January wind. No one’s buying. And why the fuck would they? The subdivision now shares its name with a fucking murder spree.
The Verity Hollow Murders. Another notch in Theo’s axe handle, I guess, along with the Veritas Murders, the only other one of his sprees to get a name.
I know because I keep looking them up, reading the names of all his victims, the way some people drag razor blades over their skin. Because I want to feel the hurt.
“Chloe?” Abi prompts. “What do you say? Just for a few days, to avoid the whole snowstorm situation.”
“There’s not going to be a snowstorm.” I glance over at the computer screen, my two friends frowning into their respective cameras. “Maybe a dusting, at most.”
Silence. I am almost certain that the two of them are messaging each other privately, trying to work out their next plan of attack. It’s been like that since that night.
That’s how I think of it. Not the Verity Hollow Murders, which sounds like something from a bad horror movie. That Night works so much better.
That Night Theo Shorn murdered five people and orphaned a child.
That Night I blew a hole through Theo Shorn’s heart. Fair play, though, because he certainly blew a hole through mine.
As for Oliver—well, he didn’t have anyone else, just like I guessed. Another social worker, a younger one, swept him up in the aftermath and sent him to live with a foster family that won’t even let me text him.
“I’m tired of hearing about the weather,” I say blandly.
“Chloe, we’re just worried about you,” Abi says. “We’ve been worried about you.”
“I’m fine.” I push out of the chair and lean up against the banister, staring across the water at the peninsula. Theo’s territory. My skin gets a hot, itchy feeling, an agitation that’s terrorized me since that night.
“At least promise you’ll keep an eye on the weather reports,” Abi says. “And keep me posted if you change your mind.”
“Or I can come stay with you again,” Penelope offers.
I look over at them again. Penelope studies me in the camera. Abi sighs.
“I don’t need anyone to come to stay with me,” I tell them. “But I’ll watch the weather forecasts, okay?”
And then I snap the laptop shut.
I don’t go back inside, though, just keep staring across the water at Theo’s territory. Whenever I get like this, there’s only one thing that makes the agitation go away, and that’s dragging out Oliver’s old boat from where I keep it stored in my garage and rowing across the water.
It’s sick. I know it is. But I can’t stop myself. I don’t even know what I’m looking for whenever I do it.
I snatch up my laptop and stalk back inside, tossing it onto the couch as I make my way into the garage.
My thoughts grind around, the way they always do after my weekly Zoom check-in.
Jumping back to that hot, August night. To the days that followed.
The hours I spent at the police station, telling my story over and over, like they were trying to catch me in a lie.
The time I spent on the phone with Oliver’s social worker, an overworked woman named Sofia who would assure me, with the patience of a schoolteacher, that he was fine.
We just want things to be normal for him, she kept saying. For him to settle in with his foster family.
I drag the rowboat down to the lakeshore, my heart thumping furiously in my chest. The sun beats down on me, winter-pale but uncomfortably warm.
The overgrown azaleas over at one of the empty houses nearby are starting to bloom early, blotches of bright pink that stand out against the yellow grass of the yard.
I drop the boat into the water and push out onto the lake. Despite the warmth, it’s quiet out here. Of course it is. I’m the only person living on the lakefront anymore. The other families that managed to escape Theo’s axe—
He goes door to door. He doesn’t want us here.
—All packed their shit and fled the second they could. I assume they’re rich enough to keep paying for a lake house and afford rent or another mortgage.
I’m not.
At least, that’s my excuse. It’s a shitty one; Abi and my mom have both begged me to come stay with them, rent-free, until I can offload the property. Penelope, when she was staying here, even tentatively suggested we go live with her sister.
I told them no.
That’s all I tell anyone these days. No, I don’t want company. No, I don’t want to leave for a weekend visit. No, I’m not having a nervous breakdown because I discovered five dead bodies and shot their killer, the man I had been fucking, with a shotgun.
Oliver’s rowboat slices cleanly through the water and then runs aground on the peninsula’s dirt-packed beach. For a second, I sit there, the warm breeze tousling my hair. I can’t imagine snow falling in this place, even though the weather forecasts are all in a panic about it.
I’ve never been afraid of snow, though. I’m certainly not afraid of snow in North Carolina.
I walk along the narrow, overgrown path leading to the cemetery, breathing in the scent of the poplar trees.
Already, my agitation is starting to slip away, although I still get a prickle on the back of my neck, like Theo really is the ghost that Oliver thought he was, and that he’s watching me through the shadows.
That prickle intensifies when I step into the graveyard. Theo’s old gravestone juts up, the winter having killed off the overgrown grass.
You’re waiting for him, aren’t you?
Penelope said that to me when the two of us came to the peninsula while she was staying with me. She said it in this graveyard, in fact, while I was staring down at his gravestone, my thoughts numb.
I denied it, vehemently. No, of course not. Are you fucking crazy?
A lie. And Penelope knew it, too, because she put her hand on my shoulder, and explained how it works in a soft, even voice. How when a Hunter dies, they’re supposed to bury themselves in the ground because that helps them come back faster, and that’s why Theo’s body disappeared the way it did.
Because they did lose the body, the cops.
Somehow in the chaos after the murders, as Oliver and I were wrapped in silver blankets and swept off to the Pinella hospital, Theo vanished.
The cops told me about it when I had to speak to them the day after, their voices stern and hard.
I was in a witness room, surrounded by stuffed animals, but there was still a sharpness in their tone that suggested I might have done something wrong.
Are you sure you killed him? This Theo Shorn?
The blood had pumped in my ears as I stared at the detective, a craggy-faced man with five o’clock stubble across his chin. His gaze kept flicking suspiciously to my neck, the bruises there already turning yellow.
I felt like I was on the verge of tears, but my eyes were dry. Too dry, almost.
He’s going to come back, Penelope said to me that afternoon, the sunlight already starting to feel like autumn. But you shouldn’t be here when he does.
I rub my arms like I can rub the memories away. They always hit me all at once like that, braided together, and the onslaught makes my heart feel heavy in my chest.
Still, I wonder where Theo is. If he really did bury himself, like Penelope said.
Sometimes at night, I imagine Theo, still with the ruin I made of his heart, dragging himself out of the Jenkins house, so slowly that the cops never notice until he’s gone.
I imagine him sinking into the wet mud and then getting pulled into the lake, deep in the sediment and river weeds, a corpse that’s not a corpse rolling across the sludge until he finally washes ashore.
I’ve never seen his body, though, so I don’t think it happened that way.
I leave the graveyard, following my usual hiking trail up to his cabin. It looks as it always does, when everything gets to be too much and picking my way through the overgrown woods to stand in this spot is the only thing that makes me feel calm. It looks abandoned.
It is abandoned, the porch still wrapped with yellow caution tape from when the cops searched the house.
That was the second time I got called out to the sheriff’s department, after they found some of Oliver’s drawings taped to Theo’s wall.
Drawings of me. They told me about them with solemn, concerned faces, how they found them along with a cache of bladed weapons, similar to the axe Theo used to destroy Oliver’s family.
That second interview, that was when I knew the cops didn’t suspect me of anything anymore. They told me I was lucky to be alive, that he was almost certainly planning to kill me, or worse. I did not ask them to explain what their idea of “worse” was.
Those drawings are in police custody now, of course, along with his weapons. I haven’t bothered going inside the house. I just come here and look at it, my arms wrapped around my chest, watching it slowly rot away into the woods, its sagging porch covered with dead leaves.