Page 50

FORTY-NINE

Lucy won’t look at Alex as they hoist her up from the ground, each of them taking one of her arms and pulling her roughly to stand.

“Walk,” Brian commands. Her feet flop uselessly at the ground, her legs rubbery.

Alex’s vision spins as she moves, the floor shifting and tilting wildly in her peripheral vision. There is something wrong with her head, she thinks with growing panic. They inch painfully down the hall toward the front of the house.

“In here,” Brian says, guiding them into the living room. They drop Alex onto a low sofa.

“Close the blinds,” Brian instructs Lucy. She scampers to all the windows, doing what he says and pulling the curtains across for good measure. Brian switches on a small table lamp. It lets off a yellowy glow. Alex blinks, taking in the built-in bookshelves heaving with hardcovers, the soot-stained mantel, and above it a large oil painting of a choppy ocean with seagulls swooping into the waves. She squints, trying to get a clearer view, and her head explodes in pain.

Alex moans slightly.

Brian stands above her looking down. His voice is calm. He is in control. “We have to get her out of here. Less messy. You pull my car around and open the trunk. We can probably drag her over that break in the fence. You can follow me. We’ll find a place on the way back. Somewhere in the woods.”

“I’m going back with you?” Lucy asks quietly.

“Where the hell else would you go? You’re not going to fucking leave me to deal with this on my own.” The irritation in his voice makes Lucy flinch.

“I’ve got an apartment in the city. My roommate will wonder what happened to me…” Lucy trails off. “I thought after I did this for you, I might stay there. I could even keep my mailroom job. No one has to know.”

Brian’s face breaks into a mean grin. The scar stretches grotesquely across his cheek as he laughs at her. “Lulu, you idiot. You think you’re going to keep your job? No. You are not going to live out some city girl fantasy. You did this and you are going to take care of it now. You’re coming with me.”

Lucy’s chin clenches helplessly. She opens her mouth to speak, but there is the sound of something falling and breaking in the hallway behind them.

At once Brian is on top of Alex. He pulls her up from the sofa, his thick arm circling her neck as though she is somehow responsible. “What’s that?” He growls, his mouth close to her ear as Alex gasps for breath. “Lulu, go look.”

Lucy pales, looking back into the dark of the hall. “But I don’t have anything to defend myself with. I—”

“Find something. I kind of have my hands full with your mess right now,” he snaps at her. Lucy pulls a cast iron poker from next to the fireplace. She holds it out with one arm, pointing her phone with the other. Her fragile shoulders shake as she heads into the hallway. For what feels like an eternity there is no sound but Brian’s breathing, ragged and arhythmic.

“The back door is wide open,” Lucy’s faint voice calls back, frantic.

Brian’s grip on Alex’s neck tightens. “Who did you tell,” he hisses into Alex’s hair. She struggles, trying to pull away as she gasps for breath.

“Who’s there?” Lucy’s thin voice echoes from the hall.

For a moment Alex imagines Howard Demetri has shown up, just like he said he would. She’d be happy to see him now, she realizes, imagining his long frame filling the doorway. Howard seems like the kind of person who could put an end to all of this. He’d have the police with him, of course; they’d listen to someone like Howard, wouldn’t they? Alex’s head is pulsing, woozy. But Howard isn’t coming, she reminds herself, replaying the conversation with Jonathan. It feels distant, a memory so vague now that she can’t quite decide if it actually happened. Her peripheral vision has a dark halo around it.

“I’m just meeting a friend here,” a voice says, too cheerful for the situation. Alex squints at the door, a mix of relief and terror filling her as a woman’s body fills the doorframe.

“Janice!” Alex croaks. “No. You can’t be here.”

“Shut up,” Brian shouts down at her as Janice steps into the room. She takes in Alex, covered in dried blood and trapped beneath the crush of Brian’s arm, and starts toward her. “Alex, my God, are you okay? What did you assholes do to her?”

“Who the fuck is this?” Brian says, jerking Alex back. She can hear the stress in his voice. He’s losing control. There’s nothing Brian hates more. And there is never a time when he is more dangerous. She realizes that he really didn’t have a plan for when he came here. Lucy must have told him and he just got in his car and drove, eager to stick his face in hers and tell her how much she’d fucked him up, to try to gaslight her again. But this time he doesn’t have some master plan to help him get away with her murder. This time it will have to be spur of the moment, which Alex knows is not his specialty.

“I called your office when Howard was arrested, and Jonathan told me you were here. Thought you might need some help, but looks like you brought some friends with you?” Janice glances at Lucy, then Brian. Alex watches her eyes land on the scar. Alex notices the slight shudder as Janice realizes she’s gotten herself into something very bad.

“Stay back,” Brian shouts at Janice. She hesitates a few feet inside the doorway.

“What do we do now?” Lucy cries from the edge of the room. All this time she has been standing back watching.

“We’ll bring them both,” Brian says. “Lu, bring me the zip ties.”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” Janice assures them, planting her feet firmly. “I’ve seen enough true crime documentaries to know how that works out.”

“You’re going wherever the fuck I tell you,” Brian says. “Lu! Bring me the fucking ties.”

But Lucy is looking past him toward the front of the house. She’s not moving.

“Let her go,” a deep voice commands from the far door.

The beam of a flashlight hits Alex square in the eyes. She blinks, and the light moves past her. Now Alex can see the outline of a figure. He is stooped, thin arms held rigid. He advances on them. As he steps into the room, she can see he’s holding a gun.

“Raymond?” Alex gasps, disbelieving.

Brian’s arm drops from Alex’s neck as he brings it up to shield his face. She uses this moment to twist from his grip, pulling herself away from him into the middle of the room. She is too dizzy on her feet and wobbles, collapsing onto the carpet. Brian starts for her, but Raymond steps closer, nimble on his feet. The gun is steady.

“Step away from her or I will shoot you.” The voice booms out of Raymond’s slight body.

“Brian,” Lucy pleads, “he has a gun.”

“Oh, please,” Brian says dismissively. “It’s just some old guy.”

Raymond takes a deliberate step deeper into the living room, the gun locked on Brian.

“Please do what he says, Brian,” Lucy shrieks from behind him.

“I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want,” Brian snarls, stepping toward Alex.

“I wouldn’t,” Raymond says.

“Or what, you’ll shoot me?” Brian scoffs.

The violent velocity of a bullet pierces the air just to the right of Brian’s head, exploding against the mantel. Lucy ducks, and crumples to the ground. She lands near Alex on the carpet, tucking her knees around her head. “Oh my God, Brian.” Her scream turns into a low moan.

Raymond looks surprisingly calm. “The next one is going straight through your Neanderthal skull if you don’t move away from my friend there.”

“Oh? This is your friend?” Brian scoffs. He lets out a bitter laugh as he looks down at Alex, kicking her in the ribs hard enough that Alex gasps for breath. “Please. Do you even know her real name? You can’t trust this one. She’ll try to tell the whole world a bunch of lies about you. Make you out to be a bad person when all you’ve ever done is help her.”

“Right, you really do seem like a great guy.” Janice’s voice is thick with sarcasm. Brian turns on her, seething, and she backs into the wall. Alex struggles to pull herself up on her elbows, the throbbing in her skull making her body heavy.

“Do any of you know what a mess this girl was when I found her working at a hardware store in the middle of nowhere?” Brian roars, turning around the room. “Twenty-two years old and still living at home. She couldn’t even say her name without her face getting all red. I helped her. I got her out of her mom’s house. Out of her dead-end job. And how did she repay me? She disfigured me.” He points at his own face, mottled red with fury. The scar glows white.

“No, that doesn’t add up,” Raymond says, taking a step toward him. Alex watches the gun quiver slightly in Raymond’s hand, his finger lightly pressing on the trigger.

“Stop,” Lucy sobs, her fingers clenched in front of her. “Just stop it.” Raymond glances at her, and in that split second, Brian barrels across the room toward him.

“Ray! He’s moving!” Janice yells. But it’s too late. With shocking speed Brian lunges at Raymond, yanking his arm to the side and sending a knee straight into his diaphragm. Alex watches, horrified, as Raymond falls to the floor. He wheezes helplessly. Brian’s foot leaves the ground ready to strike. He is going to kill him, Alex thinks, her heart clenched. His heel comes down hard and she hears something crack below his boot, a shattering of bones. A shaky groan of pain comes from Raymond.

“Ray!” Janice screams.

Alex’s eyes travel across the carpet to where the gun has fallen. She rolls away from it and reaches behind her, the zip tie cutting into her as she stretches her hands out toward it, nearly there. Lucy spots it now too. She leaps across the floor toward Alex, her fingers closing around the barrel. Alex watches, her vision tunneling, as Lucy stands, the gun in her hand. She swings it at Janice, who backs away from Raymond’s crumpled body.

She points the gun at Alex. The barrel of it blurs in Alex’s line of vision. Staring her down.

Brian grins. “Oh, too bad your little rescue committee failed you. Bring the car around, Lu. I’m not letting her get away this time.” The air in the room shifts.

“This time?” Lucy says tentatively, her eyes bouncing between them. “What do you mean? I thought you said that she was depressed. That she left a bloody mess in your apartment, and you never saw her again?”

Lucy hasn’t been trying to prove Alex’s guilt all this time, Alex realizes. She was trying to prove Brian’s innocence. All she wants is what Alex wanted all that time ago, for the person she loves to not be a monster.

“The only accident is that she made it out alive. She was going to fuck me over. Just like she’ll do to you if you give her half a chance. She’d been writing in to that advice columnist trying to get my reputation smeared.”

“No one would have known it was you,” Alex says quietly, the room spinning.

“You don’t think someone would have figured it out? And if you were telling some stranger, who’s to say you weren’t out spreading rumors about me to other people? I know you told Sam a bunch of lies about what a victim you were. I could see it the way he looked at me.”

“I never did. You had me way too scared of you to ever do that.” The room starts to tilt again.

“I would have lost everything, and for what reason? Because I was dating some young nobody who had some deluded fantasy of being better than she was.” He is close to Alex now, his face ruddy with anger. She can see the whites of his eyes crisscrossed with angry red threads. The scar is the least ugly part about him.

Brian turns toward Lucy. “Give me the gun,” he commands, holding his palm out. “You don’t know what to do with it.” Lucy looks down at it in her hands. She’s grown pale and quiet.

“No,” she says. The word sends a ripple of shock through the room.

“What?” Brian says as though he must have misheard her.

“Why did you lie to me?” She is crying now, her shoulders shaking, but the gun stays rigid in her hand.

“Lulu, what are you talking about? I was trying to protect you.”

Alex is losing consciousness now. Stars swoop and spin across her vision as she struggles to stay awake.

“No—no, you weren’t,” Lucy says. “I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. You were trying to protect you . You only ever cared about yourself.”

“Lulu,” Brian starts.

“No. Stay away from me.” The barrel of the gun swoops up away from Alex.

“What the fuck, Lu?” Brian says. “You stupid bitch. Give me the gun.”

“No.” She raises it and pulls the trigger.

There is a loud thump of a body hitting the floor. Alex strains to see what is happening, but her vision has gone dark. She hears screaming somewhere that fades into nothing.