28. Kennedy
Kennedy
I stared at Malachi, slowly shaking my head. “Me?” I said. “Why the hell would they talk about me ?”
“Because you were so important to your father.” He rose to his full height again, crossing his arms over his chest. “According to the others, you were the main thing he talked about. Apart from all the murder stuff, that is. For a long time, he claimed that you were the one thing holding him back from leaving for good. Because he worried he’d regret leaving you behind. ”
“Let me get this straight,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“First you claim that my father is a cold-blooded psychopath who murdered eight people and faked his death to get away from his boring suburban family life. And now suddenly he’s Father of the Year who adores his kids and doesn’t want to leave them? ”
“ Kid . Not kids,” he said brusquely, tilting his head.
“You know, it’s not true that all psychopaths are completely incapable of love.
Some are , and your father is one of them.
He didn’t love your mother—only married her for the illusion of normalcy—and he never bonded with your sister, either.
He didn’t hate either of them, of course.
He just didn’t love or care for them. But you… you were different.”
“How so?” I asked, jaw clenching.
Malachi lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug. “I suppose we’d have to ask him. All I really know is what his four friends told me. And that is: he genuinely loved you. Bonded with you the second you were born. Said as you grew, he started to wonder if you might be like him.”
I narrowed my eyes. “A psycho killer?”
He nodded. “Apparently he saw something in you. Signs. Traits he recognized in himself.”
“I’m not a psychopath,” I said in a low voice.
“I know.” Malachi smiled thinly, eyes glinting. Then he tapped the side of his head. “You’ve certainly got your issues. But you’re not like him. Or me. Not even close. I’m just telling you what your father thought about you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He stepped closer. “When he was still around, you two spent more time with each other than anyone else in your family, right?” he asked. “While your sister clung to your mother.”
“That’s not exactly a secret,” I mumbled. “Anyone could’ve told you that. Friends, neighbors, other family members.”
“If you say so.” Malachi smiled thinly again. “Christopher told me that your father spent every Sunday outside with you, taking you on hiking or fishing trips, or showing you how to fix things. Like car engines, for example. Is that true?”
“Again, you could’ve heard that from anyone who knows our family.”
“If you ask me, I think he was using that time to slowly groom you,” Malachi went on.
“Trying to mold you into a mini version of himself. That’s probably why he gave the two of you that stupid nickname.
To make you feel special. Like you shared a secret.
These things start slow, you know. Very slow. ”
I frowned. “What stupid nickname?”
“The outside kids. And he called your mom and sister the inside kids. Right?”
My heart lurched. “Christopher Miles told you that?” I asked, voice cracking slightly.
“Yes.”
There were only two people in the world who knew those silly secret nicknames that my father had assigned to our core family members back in the day. One was me. The other was him.
No one else. Or so I thought. And I certainly hadn’t told Christopher Miles about it, which meant my father must’ve told him.
And that meant…
Malachi wasn’t lying. Wasn’t delusional. He was right.
Oh my god.
The world seemed to tilt sideways, and I grabbed the edge of the wall to steady myself, even though I was still sitting. I felt like I might throw up. Or pass out.
Everything I’d ever believed was suddenly crumbling beneath me like rotting floorboards. The story Malachi had told me wasn’t just a sick, twisted fantasy he made up to torment me. He hadn’t fabricated it out of grief or madness or some need to justify his monstrous behavior.
It was real. Every awful, gut-wrenching part of it.
My father had faked his own death. He’d killed people. And he’d used me, his own daughter, to get away with it.
“No,” I whispered, but the protest came out hollow and weak.
Malachi crouched again, bringing his face level with mine.
“As I was saying, Christopher and the others told me that your father really struggled with the idea of leaving you. That it nearly derailed their plan,” he said.
“But he did leave in the end, obviously. So that got me thinking… maybe there was a chance that all the guilt and regret he felt over leaving you didn’t disappear.
Maybe it festered.” He leaned in slightly, eyes glittering.
“And if that guilt eventually grew strong enough, maybe he reached out to you in some way. Let you know he was still out there, alive and waiting for you to join him one day.”
I shook my head faintly, but the movement felt disconnected from my brain, which was still reeling from the horrifying truth bomb.
“So, if I wanted to have a real shot at finding him,” Malachi went on, “I had to look for evidence that the two of you were in contact. Some proof that you weren’t as innocent as you pretended to be.”
“Evidence you never found, because it doesn’t exist?”
“On the contrary, sweetheart. I found it.” He smiled again, but it didn’t meet his eyes. “I’ve been watching you ever since I heard that story from Christopher four years ago. And not just watching. Infiltrating . That’s how I know you’ve been lying all this time.”
I blinked, heat rising under my skin. I hated the part of me that still reacted to him. The part that noticed the way his jaw flexed when he was angry, or how his voice dipped when he called me sweetheart.
He was a killer. A psychopath. A man who’d just gutted me with the truth and left my world in tatters. And yet, my body hadn’t gotten the memo. It still responded to his nearness with heat and confusion, like some shameful muscle memory I couldn’t shake.
I told myself it was just adrenaline. A warped reaction to power and fear. But deep down, I wasn’t sure I believed that. Something darker was coiling in me. Something that wanted to be seen by Malachi, really seen, even now.
“Lying about what?” I finally bit out.
His jaw tightened. “Everything. You’ve been in contact with your father for a long time.
You knew he was alive. You knew he was a killer.
You’ve even spent time with him. But all these years, you’ve presented this sad, innocent image of yourself to the world.
The poor little girl who had her father so cruelly ripped away from her by a mysterious serial killer, leaving her totally broken. ”
“It wasn’t an image , ” I hissed. “It was the truth.”
He sneered, shaking his head. “Like I said before, you really are a phenomenal actress,” he said. “When I first started watching you, I actually fell for it. I really believed you had no idea about any of it. You were just so convincing .”
“Because I wasn’t acting!” I said, voice thick with disbelief, rage, and heartbreak. “I didn’t know the Carver wasn’t real, and I didn’t know my father and the others faked it all. I didn’t know any of it until five minutes ago!”
Malachi cocked his head. “Did you forget the part where I said I found cold, hard evidence that suggests otherwise?” he said. “In two different places, no less.”
My breath caught in my throat. “What evidence?”
“First off: the postcards,” he said, mouth curling into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “The ones I found in a box in your third dresser drawer.”
“You mean the troll mail?” I said, eyes widening. “That’s nothing! Just people pretending to be the Carver because they’re sick assholes who like to mess with grieving families!”
He shook his head. “The calls and letters that other families got were troll mail,” he said. “But not all of yours were like that, were they? And you eventually figured that out.”
“Figured what out?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a postcard. My breath hitched again as I recognized it as one of the troll postcards I’d received over a year ago. He must’ve stolen it from the box in my drawer last time he broke into my house.
“The postcards that were addressed specifically to you —not your mother or sister—all used gibberish wording. But when I applied a simple Caesar cipher, they all said the same thing.” He turned the card over and read aloud. “Kennedy, it’s me. I’m still alive. Please find me. Let me explain.”
My mouth went dry. “ What ?”
“Each one of these messages ended with a location,” he went on. “Different towns in different states. All shifting every few months. He was leaving you clues to find him, wherever he happened to be at the time. And you kept them because they were so important to you.”
“I was just doing what the cops told me to do,” I said, head shaking.
“They said I should hold onto anything possibly sent to me by Carver trolls, just in case one of those assholes ever escalated their creepy behavior. So that’s the only reason I kept all those nonsense postcards—because I kept getting them!
I never knew anything about coded messages! ”
He ignored that.
“One of the postcards had a South Dakota postmark. The date on that one really caught my attention, because it was sent in early December, 2020. In other words: right before the winter break in your freshman year at CBU,” he said.
“I’d actually just started looking into you at the time, so I’d been reading through all your texts and emails, old and new.
And I distinctly recalled you telling your friends that you’d spent the entire winter break all the way out in South Dakota.
Staying with another friend, supposedly. ”
“That’s true,” I said in a small voice. “I was.”