Chapter 47 Audrey
Audrey
Emily—-not Emily—-watches me as I digest the information. Melinda says nothing. She hasn’t lowered the gun.
I look down at the diary in my hand. The pages well thumbed, dog--eared, sections of it marked and notated so she could get the details right. I toss it onto the ground between us. “You studied this. You studied her. So you could become her.”
“So I could understand her,” she says softly.
“Who are you really, then?” I ask.
Something flashes in her eyes, deep and wounded. “My name is Stranger,” she says. My heart seizes, but she only smiles faintly. “I found it carved down there. Some other girl’s final gift to me.”
Found it. Like Meghan had. Not her. It isn’t her. And it couldn’t be. I’d know Janie if I saw her again, no matter how long it had been, no matter how changed.
Wouldn’t I?
I swallow. “You left the beads. You left those handprints on the walls,” I say.
“For Jenny Red--Hands,” Stranger says, her smile sharp.
“She came for me, you know. She killed the man who hurt me and she helped me disappear.” Melinda’s breath hitches as Stranger tilts her head toward the older woman.
“My Jenny. She’s the one who talked Liam and Andrew into it.
With logic and threats and promises and pity.
She told them what Emily did. And took responsibility for killing her.
She convinced them Emily’s death was a problem—-
a liability. But that I was the way out of it. They’d already gotten too deep to turn back, and it was such a neat solution.”
“We didn’t have a choice,” Melinda says, but she doesn’t believe it. It’s just a lie she’s told herself often enough she can’t let it go.
With Stranger slotted into Emily’s place, they could all hide their sins, and their father’s.
“Andrew came around easily enough,” Stranger says.
“It was a deranged plan, but the only one we could all agree to. A way to protect everyone. At least those of us still breathing. I think he even got comfortable with it eventually. Not Liam, though. It broke his heart. But he went along with it. Even came up with the idea for the car accident.”
That dark road. The car sliding out of control.
“Why?” I ask.
“We looked alike, but not that much alike,” Stranger says.
“He’d done some of his own stunts on City Rescue.
He knew how to crash without actually hurting us.
Andrew messed up my face beforehand, to be sure.
Just enough to justify a bit of reconstructive surgery.
We fixed my face, and I went blond—-easier than trying to match the same hair color.
I haven’t seen my own face in the mirror in years. ”
“You still have a scar,” I say. I touch the side of my nose. I noticed it one of the first times we met, but I didn’t think anything of it.
She actually looks pleased that I noticed. “I asked for that special. In case anyone Emily knew thought I looked odd, it sold the injury story,” Stranger says. She laughs a little. “But no one ever did. Not one person missed her. Another way we were so alike.”
“Why stay so long? You could have left. You could have told someone,” I say.
Stranger’s gaze is distant, unfocused. “At first, I was afraid. But then I found . . . peace. A life, even if it wasn’t my own. Melinda took care of me. She really did.”
“We couldn’t make it right. But I did what I could,” Melinda says. The way they look at each other in that moment—whatever is between them, it might be twisted, but it’s real.
Stranger continues. “And . . . I couldn’t leave them. The girls before me. I felt like I was supposed to stay. I didn’t know why, not for the longest time, but then I realized. They were all there to help me. I thought I was the last, but I wasn’t. I was waiting for the last of us.”
“Meghan,” I say.
She looks at the woman who is not quite her sister.
“I wanted to be like you, Melinda,” she says.
“I wanted to help someone. She reminded me so much of myself. And I thought I could help her get away. But she found the bunker, and she was so smart, and the questions she asked—-she worked out so much of it.”
“And you told her the rest,” I say.
There is an aching loneliness in those eyes. She had been hidden for so long. And then this girl comes along—-this girl who is seeking the witch in the woods Stranger once wished would save her. I wonder how it came out—-bit by bit, or all at once, the lure of confession too powerful to resist.
“Not all of it,” Stranger whispers. “But enough.”
Melinda hisses. “How could you—-Stranger, you can’t—-after all this time—-” She sounds on the verge of tears, but Stranger hushes her. Reaches out. She brushes the hair from Melinda’s face and presses her brow against hers.
“It’s okay. She’s gone. She stayed in the cabin a little while until I got her a new ID. Money. She’s safe. She knows how to keep a secret,” she says.
“No. Liam—-before he died. He said, ‘She came back,’ ” Melinda says. “I didn’t know what he meant.”
Stranger stiffens. She looks at me questioningly. “When he called you . . .”
My mouth is dry. I try futilely to draw some moisture into it. “He wasn’t making much sense. I couldn’t tell what he meant. He said that . . . that it was all going to work out. But ‘she’ was angry.”
“She who? Meghan?” Melinda asks. The gun isn’t pointing at me anymore. I try to take comfort in that.
“He said that she wouldn’t listen, and so he told—-told someone something. That’s when he stopped talking,” I say.
“Shit,” Stranger swears. She shakes her head. “Meghan thought I should have turned you all in. I convinced her, but . . . that was before.”
“Before Melinda got up on television to talk about how Terry Butler was a serial killer,” I say blithely. Melinda flinches. There weren’t many people who knew the name carved in that bunker. But Meghan was one of them. She’d left that comment. And then she’d decided to do something about it.
“Would she have gone by the house?” Melinda asks.
Stranger looks uncertain.
“If she was looking for you, would she go to the house?” Melinda repeats.
“Maybe,” Stranger says, shrinking back.
“But you weren’t there. Liam was,” I guess. “If Meghan confronted him . . . He said he told. He didn’t tell either of you.”
“Andrew,” Melinda says. She looks at Stranger, eyes wide. “Where is she? Where would she be? You said the cabin.”
Stranger nods. Melinda swears.
“It’s not going to take long for Andrew to figure that out if he hasn’t already. We need to get there. Now.”
I pull my phone out of my pocket. Melinda raises the gun.
Her voice is steady now. “No phones. No cops. And you’re coming with us.”