Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Saylor
The first message arrives in the morning while I'm brushing my teeth.
The weekend was long.
Friday night ended with Rookie's voice on the phone telling me to lock my doors, and when I got home, his Harley was idling at the curb.
He waited until the lights in my apartment came on.
He texted me once: Inside?
I texted back: Yeah, I’m inside.
He didn't leave for another ten minutes. I watched from the window until his taillight disappeared down the street.
He hasn't asked about the phone call again. But he's been different. More watchful. Showing up at Backroads before my shift starts instead of after. Texting me at night to make sure I'm home.
He knows I lied to him about nothing being wrong. He's giving me space to tell the truth on my own, and the patience is killing me worse than the questions would.
I click on the message.
A DM on Instagram from an account I don't follow. No profile picture. No posts. Created this month.
Hi Saylor! I'm doing research on the Halstead case for a project and I think you might be related to Dennis Halstead. Would love to chat if you're open to it! No pressure.
The exclamation points make my skin crawl.
I delete the message, block the account, and rinse my mouth.
My toothbrush goes back in the holder. My hands go flat on the bathroom counter.
Breathe. It's one message.
People dig into old cases all the time.
True crime is a hobby now, a pastime, a thing people do on their laptops while they eat dinner.
My father's crime isn't special to them. It's content.
By Thursday, three more accounts have found me.
Different names. Different platforms. One on Instagram, one through my university email, one in the comments of a photo I posted months ago of a sunset over the Monongahela River.
The comment says: Is this Morgantown? Beautiful area. Wasn't there a famous case there?
Famous.
Christine Pelletier was stabbed thirty-two times in a parking lot and this person called it famous, like it's a landmark, like it's a place you'd pin on a map and visit.
I delete every message. Block every account. Clear my comment section. Set my profiles to private.
It doesn't help.
Because whoever is doing this already has my name. Already connected Bell to Halstead. Already knows I'm in Morgantown, at WVU, in my early twenties.
The forum post from last week laid it all out like a treasure map, and now people are following the trail.
I sit on my bed with my phone in my lap and scroll through my own profiles, looking at them the way a stranger would.
Photos of campus. The Mountainlair. A coffee cup with my name on it. A selfie with my mom at Christmas, both of us smiling, the tree lit up behind us.
My mom's face. On my public profile. Accessible to anyone who clicked the right link and followed the right thread.
I delete the Christmas photo, then I delete a whole bunch more.
I sit there with my thumb hovering over the button that would wipe the entire account and start over, the way I wiped the name and started over. I wonder how many times a person can erase themselves before there's nothing left.
I put the phone face down on the nightstand and don't touch it for the rest of the night.
Mom calls Wednesday evening. I'm at the kitchen counter eating cereal because I haven't been to the grocery store and the milk expires tomorrow anyway.
"Hey, baby." Her voice has the lightness she uses when she's about to say something she doesn't want to say.
I set the spoon down. "What happened?"
She exhales. "I saw the truck again."
My hand curls around the edge of the counter. "Where?"
"The gas station on Beechurst, near the pharmacy." She's moving while she talks. I can hear her footsteps on the kitchen tile, pacing the way she paces when the anxiety won't let her sit.
"I was filling up, and he was parked on the other side of the pumps. Same truck. Same man."
I curl my fingers around the edge of the counter. "Did he say anything?"
"No. He didn't get out." Her footsteps stop. "He waved at me, Saylor."
Her voice tightens. "Through the windshield. Like we're old friends."
The cereal turns to paste in my mouth.
He waved.
Not a threat. Not a confrontation. A wave. Casual, friendly, the gesture of a man who wants you to know he sees you without giving you anything concrete enough to report.
My mother is being stalked by a man who understands exactly where the line is between legal and criminal, and he's dancing on it.
"Mom, you need to call the police."
Her laugh is short and hollow. "And tell them what? A man waved at me at a gas station? They'll tell me to stop being paranoid, how he was simply being friendly."
She's right. She's absolutely right, and that infuriates me.
"Has he come back to the house?"
"No. Not since the locks." A pause. "But I see the truck, Saylor."
Her footsteps resume, faster now. "On my street when I leave for work. At Kroger when I'm shopping."
Her voice drops. "He's not hiding. He wants me to know he's around."
I press my forehead against the cabinet. The lemon cleaner smell fills my nose, and I breathe it in because it smells like safety, like my clean apartment, like the one corner of my life I can still control.
I'm already on my feet. "I'm coming over."
"You don't need to come over every time I call, sweetheart."
"I'm coming over." I grab my keys. "Put the chain on. I'll be there in ten."
She doesn't argue. She stopped arguing after the first time.
I drive to her house with my mirrors angled wider than usual, checking for headlights behind me. A dark truck. An older model. Blue or black.
Every vehicle on the road is a candidate. Every set of headlights is a question.
When I get to her street, I drive past the house once before pulling into the driveway. Scanning. Looking for a truck parked on the curb, a figure sitting in the dark.
The street is empty. Her porch light is on.
She opens the door before I knock. She always does.
We sit at the kitchen table with hot tea neither of us drinks and talk about what we can do, which is nothing, and what we should do, which is everything, and how the gap between those two things is wide enough to swallow us both.
"Maybe I should talk to him." She says it into her mug, not looking at me.
"No." The word comes out harder than I mean it to. "You don't talk to him. You don't engage. You don't give him anything to work with."
Her voice wavers. "Saylor?—"
"Men like him read engagement as invitation, Mom. Any response is a yes. Silence is the only no they can't twist."
She looks at me across the table, and her expression is one I've seen in my own mirror a hundred times.
Exhaustion. Not tired-from-work exhaustion. The bone-deep weariness of a woman who spent her whole life recovering from one dangerous man and now has to deal with another one.
"We could move." She says it like she's testing the words. Seeing how they sound in the air.
"We're not moving." I wrap my fingers around the mug and squeeze until my knuckles ache.
"We moved once. We changed our names once. We rebuilt once. I'm not doing it again because some man my father met in a cell thinks he's owed access to our lives."
She reaches across the table and covers my grip with her palm.
We sit there. The clock on her wall ticks.
Outside, the February wind pushes against the windows hard enough to make the glass rattle in its frame.
I stay the night again.
* * *
At Backroads on Friday, I burn through my shift on autopilot.
Pour, serve, wipe, restock. Running on autopilot carries me through while my brain cycles through the same loop it's been stuck in for days.
The messages. The truck. The wave. The forum post still sitting online with my name tagged underneath it.
Tildie is behind the bar with me tonight. She's mixing a whiskey sour for a regular when she glances sideways at me.
I'm staring at a glass I've been drying for ninety seconds. The same glass. Dry as a bone. My hands move in circles because stopping means thinking and thinking means drowning in those thoughts.
She doesn't say anything for a while. Serves the drink, takes an order, pours two drafts. Moves around me with the easy awareness of someone who's worked bars long enough to navigate another person's bad night without tripping over it.
Then, during a lull, she leans against the counter beside me and folds her arms.
"You don't have to tell me." She says it without looking at me, her attention on the room, watching the crowd the way a lifeguard watches water. "But I can see it."
My grip tightens on the glass. "See what?"
"You've been somewhere else all night." She unfolds one arm and taps the bar with her fingernail, a steady rhythm. "Your body's here. Your head left about two hours ago."
I set the glass down, pick up another one, and start drying it.
My grip tightens on the glass. "I'm fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine." She turns her head and looks at me. Amber eyes, direct, no pity in them. "I said I can see it. Those are different sentences."
The rag stops moving in my hands.
"Whatever's going on." Tildie turns back to the room, her voice dropping under the music. "You don't have to carry it by yourself. Carrying things alone is how you end up on the floor, and I say that from personal experience."
She pushes off the counter and grabs a bottle of bourbon from the shelf, pouring a neat double for Bloodhound without him having to ask.
I stand there with a dry glass in my hands and a crack running through me I didn't feel open.
She's not pushing. She's not asking. She's leaving a door unlocked and walking away, and the simplicity of it is what gets me.
Because Tildie knows. Not about my father, not about the cellmate, not about the messages. She knows what it looks like when a woman is holding everything together with both fists and running out of grip.
She knows because she's been there. Everyone in this bar knows the story.
Abusive ex. A baby she lost. Running to Morgantown with nothing, rebuilding behind this same counter.