Chapter Seventeen Kaitlyn
Chapter Seventeen
Kaitlyn
It feels a little surreal that—after nearly a month of researching him, following him, tracking his every move both online and in real life—Townsend now sits next to Kaitlyn in her car. Or, rather, her sister’s car. That was the first bit of information they needed to clear up.
Once he blocked her vehicle, rendering her unable to escape, she stepped out of the car and put her hands in the air.
As though she were the culpable one. Then again, she had slipped into the gated neighborhood by following closely behind the car in front of her, so she was technically trespassing. He had the upper hand.
“You’re not Amanda,” he said, sounding perplexed.
Equally confused, she replied, “Of course I’m not.”
“Then why do you have Amanda’s car? And why have you been following me?”
“I’m Amanda’s sister. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her.”
“Nothing happened to her.” He said this coolly, factually. It pissed her off.
“She’s been missing for months, dude. Did you not know that?”
“She’s not missing. She broke into my girlfriend’s house last week.”
Kaitlyn felt suddenly woozy, a combination of the heat and this new information, which wasn’t making any sense. “Do you think we can go inside and talk for a minute?”
“You’re not coming into my house.”
“Can we at least sit in the car?”
Townsend looked at her carefully, as though trying to decide if she was a threat.
“I just want to sit in the AC and talk. It seems like you have as many questions as I do.”
“Fine,” Townsend agreed at last. “Just for a minute.”
Now they sit side by side in Amanda’s car, the AC spitting out cold air and a thousand unanswered questions lingering between them.
This close, Kaitlyn can smell his sweat, see every pore on his face, watch his chest rise and fall.
She’s spent so long fixated on the idea of him that she’s forgotten that he’s real, made of tendons and muscles and occupying space.
He scares her and fascinates her in equal parts, but it’s hard to summon the hatred she’s felt toward him for weeks now that he’s here and next to her.
And though Kaitlyn has preferred girls to boys since the sixth grade, there’s no denying it: Townsend is handsome, albeit in a generic, forgettable way.
I should let someone know where I am, Kaitlyn thinks, just in case this doesn’t end well.
But the only other person she’s spoken to all day—other than her ShrinkGPT therapy chatbot—is the persistent data science professor, with whom she had a brief text exchange earlier that day.
To ask her for help would only send the wrong message, and she doesn’t need any more drama in her life right now.
She could use a few more friends, though.
“What makes you think Amanda broke into Talia’s house?” Kaitlyn finally asks.
Townsend pauses, seeming to clock the use of his girlfriend’s name but ultimately letting it go. “She was hanging out with a friend, and Amanda left a note on her bathroom mirror without Talia even realizing she was there.”
“What did the note say?”
“‘The police won’t protect you from me’ or something like that. I can’t remember exactly.”
“Why the fuck would she say that?”
Townsend blinks, taken aback by Kaitlyn’s outburst. “Because your sister has been saying shit like that to me and to my girlfriend for a while now. And I thought she’d been following me, too, but”—he gestures to the car—“apparently that’s been you.”
Kaitlyn feels her unwavering conviction—the only thing that’s been keeping her steady and, frankly, sane since she determined that her sister was missing—slowly start to crumble. “I thought you did something to her. I reached out to you. You wouldn’t return my messages.”
“So you decided to stalk me?”
The word makes her uneasy, stalk. “I wouldn’t say I was stalking . . .”
“And go to the police about me? And write shit on the internet about me?”
The more he says, the worse her crimes sound. Kaitlyn could have never imagined that Townsend Fuller, of all people, would be able to convince her that she was in the wrong.
“You and your sister are both fucking psychos, you know that? She’s harassing me, you’re stalking me .
. .” Townsend sighs deeply, and the smell of tequila fills the car.
“I’m powerful,” he adds. “I could easily make you both go away.” It occurs to Kaitlyn that he’s been drinking and that it may have been foolish to invite him into an enclosed space, where no one can witness what he might do.
Which is probably what compels her to tell him what she does next.
“I have a gun.”
“What?”
“I have a gun,” she repeats, less certain this time. “In the trunk of my car.”
Townsend gawks at her. “Are you threatening me?”
It was a stupid thing to say—especially to a man who, to his credit, is likely pretty powerful—but Kaitlyn can’t back down now. “I’m just stating a fact.”
For a moment, they simply stare each other down, Townsend’s face contorted with rage. Kaitlyn needs to distract him, get the conversation off herself and back on Amanda.
“You said my sister has been harassing you and your girlfriend. Do you have any proof of that? Any messages?”
“Every last fucking one.”
“Could I see some of them?”
He scrolls through his phone and then presents her with the screen. Kaitlyn leans across the center console to read the message.
Don’t think I forgot about you bxtch. I know your with Townsend now and I know it’s not going to last. Watch your fxcking back. As soon as it falls apart I’m coming for you both.
A chill runs down Kaitlyn’s back. She turns off the AC. “She sent this to Talia?”
It’s a mistake to use Talia’s name again, because Townsend’s face instantly darkens. “How do you even know my girlfriend’s name? Or where my parents live? Or where I live?”
“I—”
“How do I know it’s not you who’s sending these crazy messages rather than your sister?”
Now Kaitlyn feels like she can’t breathe. She turns the AC back on. “It’s not me, I promise. But Amanda would never threaten someone like that either. That isn’t like her at all.”
“If she’s not like that,” Townsend says, his face closer to hers than she would like, “then why did she kill your parents?”
This question is so outlandish, so unexpected, that Kaitlyn wonders if she’s heard him wrong. “What?”
Before he can answer, Townsend’s phone vibrates in his hand. A picture of Talia fills the screen. Kaitlyn only gets a glimpse of it, but she sees Talia smiling sweetly and holding a glass of wine up to the camera. So unassuming, so effortless. So unlike Amanda in every way.
“Shit. I need to go.” Townsend reaches for the door handle.
“Wait!” Moments before, Kaitlyn couldn’t wait to be away from him, but now, she desperately needs him to stay. “What do you mean she killed our parents?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he steps out the door and—just before he can close it—leans in again, eyes narrowed into angry slits. “Leave me and my girlfriend the fuck alone. You and Amanda both. Okay?”
“Okay,” she agrees, because what else can she say? And then Townsend is gone, running back to his girlfriend and leaving Kaitlyn more confused than ever.
Back home, she checks Reddit, just to see if geminibaby530 has reappeared. No luck. Her thread does, however, have a new comment from a user named t_fuller90. She reads it, feeling more ashamed than angry.
Amanda Reade is Not missing. She is a bitter ex obsessed with revenge, and she’s ruining people’s lives. Do not listen to her sister’s claims. These bitches are in on something together and not to be trusted.
After all the time and energy Kaitlyn has spent looking for Amanda, it doesn’t seem possible that she could have been right here all along.
Her apartment is still untouched. Her Instagram is still inactive.
Neither her landlord nor her boss at the cocktail club where she most recently worked has seen her since March, and now it’s July.
And up until an hour ago, she never believed Amanda capable of such treachery.
But Kaitlyn saw Townsend’s face when she stepped out of the car—it seemed like he genuinely expected to see Amanda instead.
There’s also the matter of that message he showed Kaitlyn, containing Amanda’s trademark of swear words censored with x’s.
(“It’s considered not social media friendly to have obscenities in your captions,” she once explained to Kaitlyn.
“I have to keep my shit clean.”) That doesn’t necessarily mean her sister is guilty, of course.
It just means that things look really, really bad for her right now.
She can’t stop thinking about what Townsend said, when he claimed Amanda was responsible for their parents’ deaths.
They died in a car accident, and she knew this as a fact—she saw the pictures, surveyed the wreckage.
How could Amanda possibly have been involved?
Of course, Kaitlyn can’t exactly contact him to ask what he meant; Townsend has made it clear he wants nothing to do with her.
Living with this accusation and not getting any answers, however, is not an option.
Whether her sister is an innocent victim or a deeply troubled psychopath, Kaitlyn needs to know for sure.
For what feels like the millionth time in the past few months, she thinks about just what she would do if given the chance to speak with Amanda for ten minutes and get her side of the story.
A memory comes to mind. She’s eleven, and Amanda is nine. She’s just returned from soccer practice when Amanda beckons her into their shared bedroom, her eyes wide with worry.
“Kate,” she whispers. “You need to help me. I’ve messed up.”
Taking her hand, Amanda leads Kaitlyn over to her bed and then points beneath it. “What’s under there?”
“Just look.”
“Is it bad?”
“You’ll see.”
When Kaitlyn gets onto her knees and lifts the bed skirt, the stench hits her first. Like a rotting body—or what she imagines a rotting body to smell like.
Then she sees the brown paper bags—dozens of them, damp looking and carpeted with fuzzy, bruise-colored growths—and throws a hand over her mouth and nose.
“What have you done?” Kaitlyn asks, her voice muffled behind her fingers.
“I didn’t mean to,” Amanda says. “But no one brings lunch from home anymore.”
In a rush of tears, her sister explains how everyone in the third grade buys lunch from school, and she didn’t have the heart to tell their mother.
Instead, she’d borrow a dollar and a quarter from the office to buy pizza and then bring her bagged lunch home, where she’d hide it beneath her bed.
She always meant to throw them away, but as her collection grew, so did the task of destroying the evidence.
“It’s too big now,” Amanda tells her. “Mom and Dad are going to find out. They’re going to kill me.”
But Kaitlyn won’t allow that to happen. They wait until their parents go to bed before transferring the mess of moldy sandwiches into the trash bag Kaitlyn snagged from the kitchen earlier that night.
Then they creep out to the woods behind their house, where they bury Amanda’s secret beneath a tree.
Before they return inside, Kaitlyn asks Amanda to make a promise: Tell Mom no more bagged lunches.
“I will,” Amanda says, and Kaitlyn believes her. She helped her sister clean up her mess and did so without judgment; telling the truth is the least Amanda can do.
A loud pop shakes her out of her reverie. Then another. And another.
Gunfire, she thinks. But then she sees the explosion of color out her window. Fireworks. Of course. It’s the Fourth of July, and most people are celebrating. Then again, most people aren’t trying to decide whether their sister is missing or out of her fucking mind.
Kaitlyn grabs her keys and heads for the door.
Though not actually gunfire, the noise outside has stirred a desire in her.
She needs a pistol in her hand and a room full of people who don’t know the first thing about Amanda Reade.
Kaitlyn will fit right in, since apparently, she doesn’t know her sister either.
At least, not as well as she thought she did.
In the car, she fires off a question to her therapy chatbot on ShrinkGPT. “What should I do,” she asks, “when I feel like I’m losing control?”
“Identify controllable elements in your life,” the chatbot tells her in its resonant baritone—a voice she chose because it reminded her of Morgan Freeman.
“Make a list of stressors and determine which sources of stress can be reduced or even eliminated. I’ll set a timer and give you one minute to list those stressors out loud. Ready? Let’s begin.”
Fuck lists, she thinks. What she wants to know is whether Townsend actually did something to her sister. And if not? If Amanda is out there messing with him, not caring about the grief she’s putting her sister through? Then Kaitlyn might just kill Amanda herself.