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“I hate to tell you this, Becca, but you have the wrong person.” She pauses. “The good news, however, is that I believe everything you’re saying.”
My head drops, trying to unravel the riddle she’s just presented to me. “What?”
“I believe you that there’s a murderer in the Mystery Maidens,” she says. “But it isn’t me.”
“What do you mean, it isn’t you?”
“Everything you’ve been saying makes sense. All your research lines up. Granted, I didn’t know about the slashed tires and the hit-and-run. Those events seem to be targeted at you. But when it comes to the girl that was murdered last week, I believe you.”
I squint my eyes closed, bright circles dancing across my eyelids. I’m so exhausted and distracted, I’m having trouble following what Marley’s saying. Out of all the reactions I predicted, this wasn’t one of them.
“You believe me?”
“Yes. Someone in the writing group is committing murders, it just isn’t me,” she says. “And now, I suspect it isn’t you.”
I’m still struggling to follow when the waitress returns with Marley’s food. The smells hijack my senses, add to my wavering sense of displacement.
Marley begins cutting into her meal with a fork. “Let me get a couple bites in, and I’ll explain,” she says. “I’d reconsider ordering if I were you. Like I said, we could be here a while.”
TWENTY-FIVE
A dollop of whipped cream sits on Marley’s upper lip. She takes several more bites of the sugary meal before speaking.
“I’ll give it to you, I’m impressed,” she says. “I mean, given how crazy everything you just said sounds, I can’t believe there’s two of us that believe it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That one of the women in your group is a murderer.”
“I don’t think it’s one of the women in the group,” I say, pointedly. “I think it’s you.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” She points her finger at me. “I can see why you think that, though. In your narrative, all these weird happenings didn’t begin until I’d joined. It makes sense you’d be suspicious of the newest member, but your timeline is off.”
“What timeline?”
“The girl who was murdered last week in an eerily similar way as the girl in the story you shared,” she says. “That wasn’t the first murder.”
I blink rapidly, struggling to follow along.
“You’re saying there’s been another one?”
“Two, by my count,” she says. “Which makes the woman found in the ditch the third victim.”
“You joined the group two weeks ago,” I say. “I didn’t notice any murders similar to the ones in our stories until then.”
“That’s because they happened more than a year ago.” Marley picks her phone out of her coat pocket and taps on the screen. She lays the device flat on the table, and points. “Right here. A Whitaker University student was found bludgeoned. He was killed in almost the exact same way as a story that, I believe, Danielle wrote.Flower Manis the name of it, I think.”
She swipes a few times, pulling up a second article. “Here’s the second murder. Another man died unexpectedly. This time, the death was just like a story April wrote, but I forget the name. All her stories sound the same to me after a while.”
I glance at the article, searching for details and facts.
“I don’t understand. Why do you think these murders are connected to the stories from group?”
Marley leans back, crossing her arms again. “I know about the stories because Victoria shared them with our creative writing class. I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between them and the actual deaths on campus.”
“Anyone could have died that way,” I say. “There’s no connection to the group.”
“I’m guessing that’s exactly what the police said to you when you told them about your Layla story.”