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Beth.
The bitch is calling herself Beth.
BETH
Room 313 of the Atlanta Motel is as bad as I thought it would be, a dark, damp space that reeks of cigarette smoke and body odor. The bedspread is a throwback to the ’80s, a threadbare, floral thing covered in stains I don’t want to think too much about, which is why I slept fully clothed and curled up under a scratchy bath towel I spread across the sheets. The air-conditioning unit under the window rattled and wheezed all night long, but on a bright note, it drowned out the shouting coming from the room next door.
I haul my body off the bed and turn off the air. The room falls into silence, my neighbors on either side still sleeping off whatever they shoved up their veins. I peek out the curtains onto the catwalk—empty. Beyond it the sun is blazing, beating down on the parking lot with an almost-hostile brightness. People call this place Hotlanta for a reason.
In the tiny bathroom, the remnants of last night’s makeover are lined up on a narrow glass shelf and in smudged lines on my face. My emo makeup, black-lined eyes and dark-stained lips that no amount of soap could scrub off, and hair a color God could never have intended. The box promised me a rich reddish-brown, but the chemicals on my short, overprocessed locks came out less Radiant Auburn and more Bozo the Clown. I look ridiculous, but also completely unrecognizable.
I brush my teeth and return to the bed, pulling my new computer from the box and firing it up for the first time. The screen shuttles me through the setup, and I pause at the prompts. Name. Email address. Geographic location. Every one of them feels like a trap, each answer a potential land mine. I think of all the people who are looking for me—the Reverend, Erwin Four, Martina, you—and remind myself to be careful.
Once the computer is activated, I hop online with the code I got at check-in. Say what you will about this shithole motel, but its Wi-Fi is top-notch. The World Wide Web at my fingertips, and at lightning speed.
I enter the address for the local Pine Bluff newspaper in the search bar. The screen loads, and there she is. Sabine, the top story. And then I read the letters above her head, and the room in the air turns solid.
Missing Pine Bluff woman found dead.
A wave of nausea pushes up from the pit of my stomach, catching and swelling in my throat. I hold it back with a hand pressed hard to my lips, but the effort breaks me into a cold sweat.
Sabine is not missing.
She’s not in hiding.
She’sdead.
The knowledge hits me in a cold, horrible, horrifying rush, and I feel weightless. Not quite falling, not quite steady on the bed. I see Sabine’s face on the Reverend’s television screen and each of those times I went searching for more news, hoping, praying she was safe somewhere, hiding. I double over, hugging myself and fighting a sudden pressure in my chest. Is this what a heart attack feels like?
The truth is, I should have expected this. Since I first heard Sabine was missing, I’ve been frantic for some sort of update. The dread has been building for days, trembling in the hollows of my bones during the day, poke-poke-poking me awake at night with a worry that was too big, too terrifying to sleep through. This news has been coming all along. On some level, I’ve always known.
Outside on the catwalk, two men are negotiating a drug deal. They’re arguing about price, debating quality of product, but their voices are muffled by the roaring in my ears. All I catch are broken words, fragments of sentences, like the ones swimming on my computer screen.
Body. Badly decomposed. Autopsy.
I spring to my feet and pace in front of the bed. How stupid was I to think this was only about me? About me running from my past, from you. I was prepared to fight for my freedom, to pay for it with blood and broken bones, but I never stopped to consider that I might not be your only victim.
I sink onto the bed, my eyes growing hot. Poor, sweet Sabine.
I read the rest of the article in chunks, digesting the details with a rising horror.
Sabine was strangled, her neck broken in two places, the bones and windpipe crushed. Her body was weighted and dumped into a pond off Highway 133, where it rotted for at least a week, maybe more. Something—a boat, the wildlife—worked her free from her underwater grave, and she bobbed and floated until a hunter and his dog found her facedown in the reeds. She’d been picked apart by buzzards.
Buzzards, oh my God.
I picture Sabine’s body decaying away at the bottom of some unnamed pond, and the image knocks the breath out of me. For a second or two I can’t move, can’t eventhink, and then my brain kicks into overdrive, flashing the faces of people I’ve seen splashed across the news. That heartsick doctor. Sabine’s twin sister. Her husband. People who loved her, who prayed for her and wanted her back. My heart breaks at the idea they’re picturing the same thing.
I drop my face in my hands and give in to my tears, crying for Sabine, for her friends and family, for me. For my own grief and fury and horror and rage and guilt.
Most of all, for my guilt.
Because I know Jeffrey is not the one who wrapped his fingers around her throat. He’s not the one who squeezed until two bones snapped, not the one who left her for the buzzards.
I know it was you.
BETH
Ten days prior