Chapter Thirty-eight
I shift in the sheets, a gentle beeping making its way into my awareness.
I open my eyes slowly and take in the heart monitor that’s squiggling lines on to a screen. I move my hand – there’s a pulse ox on my finger. An IV in my wrist. I shift again and feel pain in about a dozen places, starting with my throat when I swallow. I probe it gently with my free hand.
Also, I’m in a hospital gown and suddenly all I can think is, who the hell saw my naked body?? I have vague memories of an ambulance arriving – police cars too – of EMTs loading me on to a stretcher, of me saying, ‘Where’s Liam? I need to go with Liam—’ and then it’s all pretty fuzzy.
Liam. His name pulses in my head with sudden urgency. Where is he? Is he alive? And Brooke – what happened to her?
I reach for the nurse call button and press it. A voice answers through a speaker.
‘How can I help you?’
‘I need to know if Brooke Walsh and Liam Porter are OK. Can someone please check? Right away?’
There’s a pause, like the nurse is digesting my word vomit.
Then, ‘Give me a second.’ There’s a silence. ‘Ma’am, I can confirm both parties are in this hospital and in stable condition.’
Oh thank God. ‘I need to see Liam. Can I get a wheelchair? Can someone please take me to him, right now?’
Another silence. ‘I’ll ask your nurse to stop in, but ma’am, I believe the police are on the way to your room.’
She disconnects. I ease my head back on the pillow. But on the heels of the relief that Liam is stable, and close by, there’s a terrible stabbing pain in my heart.
My friend is dead.
My friend was a serial killer who was murdering women under my very nose and I had no idea and she almost killed me and now she’s dead.
I bow my head and sit with that for a minute. It’s weird, because I’ve thought she was dead for months. I organized a freaking memorial service. But now she’s really dead. I saw it happen with my own two eyes. Saw her disappear into the retort and take her own life.
I’ve spent the last half a year trying to put the puzzle together, trying to find the truth. Now I have the truth. And the truth is terrible. I relax my head on the pillow again and breathe. Fuck.
It’s hard to imagine everything that was actually going on while we were living together. While Zoe and I were crossing paths in the apartment, sharing a few hurried meals of frozen this or that, she was killing, cremating and painting the first two victims into her series.
Zoe had a semi-personal connection with Kayleigh and Crystal – but what about Brooke? Did they ever meet? Or did Zoe just find her on Insta and decide, you have to die? Maybe I’ll ask Brooke one day, if she even knows. Or maybe it’s better to let that go.
Suddenly I remember the toxic roommate story Zoe told Bill.
A total lie, to cover the fact that she probably spent that night at the funeral home reducing one of her victims’ feet to ashes downstairs.
And as usual, she pulled the victim card.
Why did I never see the toxicity of that pattern before?
My friends saw it. But I was too close. Zoe was my ride or die – the whole point was to accept each other one hundred per cent.
I rub my hands over my face, feeling the pain in my arms, a twinge in my shoulder and a nerve in my back that feels messed up.
I think of Liam, launching himself off the gurney to save my life and body slamming Zoe. George, blazing in at the last possible minute. Elsie’s voice saying, I found them. The look in Zoe’s eyes right before she leapt into the fire.
She was a killer. But also my friend. I loved her, and I have no doubt that she loved me. We had good times together. Great times. And she did unforgivable things. How am I supposed to hold those contradictions? I almost wish that she was just a monster. That would be easier.
It hits me that this is the pain of being alive – this coexistence of the precious and the horrible – and that I’d better start figuring out how to live with it.
I exhale.
At least I won’t be figuring it out alone.
*
The cops just left, and I’m sitting upright in bed, picking at a truly terrible lunch. All I can say is, this nasty-ass hospital ‘chicken’ on ‘rice’ makes my frozen lasagna look gourmet. I wonder if Liam is eating the same thing. They haven’t let me see him yet.
Barnett and his partner just spent over two hours with me. I told them as much as I could and answered so many questions that my tongue feels tired. Not to mention my heart. I wish there was a shortcut through this, but I already know there isn’t.
They showed me pictures of some of the evidence they had collected from Devin’s house, such as Zoe’s work-in-progress, which I confirmed was a portrait of Brooke.
Barnett also filled in some of the missing pieces for me, like how George and Elsie managed to be first on the scene.
My call to get Devin’s address freaked Elsie out, but she didn’t feel like there was enough info to call the cops, so she called my emergency contact.
George. Trouble is, George was at the spa.
The second she got her phone back, she and Elsie connected, became instant besties – my words, not Barnett’s – and decided to head to Devin’s together.
They were just driving up when they saw Devin’s van tear away.
George and Elsie followed us back to the funeral home. The rest is history.
Brooke, it turns out, survived by the skin of her teeth. Zoe had pumped her with drugs and left her for dead, but medics arrived on the scene just in time and were able to save her life.
After the cops left, I took a nap, and when I woke up, they brought me lunch.
I’m just lifting a forkful of something pale and stringy-looking when there’s a knock at the door.
‘You have a visitor,’ says a cheerful voice.
‘Come in,’ I call out.
The door opens. My heart leaps, because it’s Liam, in a wheelchair pushed by a hospital transport person. I take him in – a hospital gown, one eye blackened and mostly closed, his arm in a sling. But alive.
The fork clatters down and I burst into tears immediately.
The transport person wheels him around to my bedside, and Liam awkwardly reaches up from his wheelchair, and I awkwardly reach down from the bed, almost knocking over my water, in the most pathetic hug known to history.
But being touched by him right now is everything I need. As we embrace and deep sobs roll up from the depths of my soul, he rubs my shoulder – it hurts but I don’t say anything because I don’t want him to stop – and I rub his, letting all my feelings crash out on him.
Once his hospital gown is thoroughly wet and my energy is spent, I sniff and try to get back upright in bed without toppling over.
‘I’m a mess,’ I say, blowing my nose in a napkin.
‘Too bad, since I’m looking like James Bond,’ he says wryly.
I laugh, he laughs, and I can tell he’s in as much pain as I am, or more.
We sit in silence for a minute, studying each other. I’m sure he’s taking inventory of my injuries, just as I’m taking inventory of his.
‘I can’t believe you dove off the gurney with both your extremities zip tied,’ I say.
‘I couldn’t let you die.’
‘You could have seriously injured yourself.’
He laughs, wincing, and lifts his arm. ‘Pretty sure I did that.’
I start to laugh too, then my throat catches. ‘When I woke up here, I wasn’t even sure if you were alive.’
We fall silent again, our eyes locked together, somehow saying things our words couldn’t.
Finally, Liam speaks.
‘I wanted to come to your room earlier, but they had to take my statement. It took a minute.’
‘They took mine too. I guess my apartment is a crime scene now. They’re going through Zoe’s stuff.’
‘You can stay with me, if you want.’
I nod slowly. ‘Barnett told me that Devin is MIA.’
‘Yeah, I heard.’
‘He was so dedicated to Zoe.’ It hits me, how much he did for her. The ransacked studio makes sense now – it was Devin, getting her art things. And that was the most benign of the horrible things he helped her do. And they said I was codependent …
‘I looked into him months ago, after Zoe didn’t show for our meet-up,’ says Liam. ‘Good thing, or I wouldn’t have recognized him in that picture. Lonely guy. Loyal guy.’
‘It’s hard to believe he’d leave her at the last moment.’
‘Maybe his self-preservation finally kicked in?’ Liam pauses. ‘How did you find me, by the way?’
‘The photo book, same as you. You left it open. Also, this is so random, but I had this documentary on about dragonfish, which just so happens to be the fish I’d assigned to Devin, and they had this bit about the females actually being the ones with teeth …
’ I cringe, realizing how ridiculous this sounds.
Liam’s mouth turns up in a crooked grin. ‘Sounds like someone upstairs was trying to tell you something.’
I hesitate, then shake my head. ‘I don’t even believe in that. But what are the odds, right?’
‘What I’m hearing is, your obsession with assigning fish to people is causing you to reevaluate your entire philosophical paradigm.’
I laugh. ‘No comment. I’m going to need my lawyer present for this one.’ I pause to take a sip of water. ‘But fill me in on what happened with you.’
‘After I recognized Devin in photo with Zoe, I figured I’d stake out his house and look around while he was at work.
I watched him leave. Then I let myself in.
It was stupid not to let you know where I was – but you’d have insisted on coming, and I didn’t want you in danger.
At that point I was imagining he’d killed Zoe.
I thought I was alone in the house, but—’
‘Zoe.’
He nods tersely. ‘She caught me by surprise. By all accounts, I should be dead right now. I don’t know why she didn’t kill me right away.
All I can say is, I believe there are forces beyond us that intervened last night.
I can’t explain it. It’s not logical, but …
’ He looks contemplative. ‘I guess I’m grateful, is what I’m saying. ’
‘I can get behind the gratitude part.’ I raise a brow. ‘The higher-purpose stuff, we’ll have to argue about later.’
His smile returns. ‘Yeah. Arguing later. I like the sound of that.’
‘Or now. Since we’re kind of on a date.’ I pluck at my hospital gown and floof my hair. ‘Obviously.’
Liam releases a huge laugh, the sound of his baritone rolling through the room, making the sterile space feel rich and warm and cozy, and given what’s happened, maybe laughter should feel strange, but it doesn’t, it actually feels great, like really fucking great.
After he’s stopped laughing, he winces. ‘Ah – don’t make me laugh. My ribs.’
And that’s when I remember, with a rush, what he said last night, right before he passed out, his nose gushing blood.
I love you.
My entire body tingles, momentarily washing over me like a magical anesthetic.
Did he mean it? Was he in control of all his faculties? Does the truth come out when you think you’re going to die? Or do all the dramatic feelings just make you spout out random shit?
‘Um … so …’ I give him a significant look.
He lowers his chin to give me a long look. ‘What?’
‘Last night, when … you know. Things were crazy. Do you remember saying …?’
He squints his eyes, and I can see he is not tracking.
‘Sorry, what part of last night …’
Now it’s my turn to squint at him. Is he pretending not to remember?
No, I decide. He genuinely has no idea what came out of his mouth. To be fair, he was drugged, woke up briefly in the van and then Zoe knocked him unconscious again. There wasn’t a lot of time to get his thoughts in order or engage his long-term memory systems.
Anyway, it’s totally fine if he didn’t mean it. We’ve only known each other for … how many weeks? Erm, not many. It is way too early for the L-word.
‘You know?’ I say, waving a hand. ‘Never mind. Not important.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ He pauses. ‘Maybe you can tell me later.’
‘OK,’ I say, and dangle a hand over the bed. He takes it, threads his fingers through and squeezes.