Page 47 of Romance Is Dead

Everything slowed down as I rushed to Teddy’s side.

“Teddy!” I knelt on the floorboards, running my hands down his arms as I scanned his body for injuries. “I’m so sorry it took me so long to get here. I — ”

Chloe kicked out her leg, knocking me off balance and sending the bat tumbling out of my hand. It rolled across the floorboards before spinning at a stop near her feet.

“Well, that was easy.” She knelt down to pick it up. “I expected you to at least put up some kind of a fight.”

I wanted to tackle her — small, non-threatening Chloe, with her sweet, heart-shaped face and cherubic blonde waves.

I wanted to pull her hair and smack her and maybe push her down the stairs while I was at it.

But if the past month had taught me anything, it was that maybe I needed to stop reacting so quickly.

So I bit my tongue, hard, and instead rose slowly to my feet.

“I’m here to help you, Chloe. We can figure this out.” I gestured to Teddy. “We can all figure this out.”

I glanced down at him, hoping he would chime in. But he said nothing, his face tense and trained on Chloe. As though he was trying to anticipate what she would do next.

As though she’d already given him more than enough reasons to be frightened.

Chloe ignored me. “Who did you think it was?” She bent down and started rummaging through a duffle bag. “Like, you obviously didn’t know it was me until, like, now.”

“What? Why does that matter?”

“Oh, I was just curious.” She laughed, a high, trill sound.

“I was shocked you didn’t figure it out right away.

I left all those notes. At first I just wanted to scare you off from calling the police, which seemed to work.

But if I was going to psychoanalyze myself, I’d say maybe I wanted to be found.

I’ve been dying to talk to you about this. ”

I’d known it was Chloe since seeing her in the photo, but it wasn’t until that moment — hearing her say it — that it sunk in. “You pretended to be my friend. Why bother? I never suspected you.”

Chloe stood, holding something she’d fished from the duffle. “As much as I’d like to start my big villain monologue where I tell you why I did it, we’re going to need to relocate first.”

My heart accelerated. “Why is that?”

“You’ll see.” Chloe was positively vibrating with glee. “You’ll see very soon.”

“Why the hell should we follow you anywhere?”

“This is why.” Chloe held out the object in her hand: a gun, small but powerful-looking. “You’re going to help him out of that chair and do exactly what I say.”

My blood chilled. It was possible that it was a prop gun — there was all manner of fake weapons in the prop trailer. But it was also entirely possible that it was real, and after killing two people on set, Chloe wasn’t someone I wanted to test.

I rushed to help Teddy out of the chair.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, my voice squeaking as I bent over to grab his arms and help him stand up. “I should have believed you. I shouldn’t have pushed you away.”

“It’s ok.” His voice was low, his eyes never leaving Chloe as he got to his feet. “We’ll figure this out.”

I really wanted to believe him.

“Alright, you two.” Chloe pointed the gun at both of us. “March.”

Teddy and I leaned on each other as we slowly made our way across the attic and down the stairs. I ached to hold him close and explain all the ways I was sorry, to ask him if we could forget everything and start over. But there would be time for that later. I needed to believe that.

“How the hell did this happen?” I whispered. “I mean, you. Here. With her.” I glanced over my shoulder, trying to judge if Chloe could hear.

She was smirking.

“Go ahead!” she sang out. “Tell her.”

Teddy took a shuddering breath. “After you left, I was worried about you. We already knew the killer wasn’t just after you, but also had a key to your hotel room.”

“Those receptionists are so helpful,” Chloe said.

Teddy ignored her. “So I went down to the desk and explained that they’d given a key to someone they shouldn’t have and that person had broken in and if they didn’t want us to sue them, they’d tell us who they gave the key to.”

“Could we really sue them for that?”

“Doesn’t matter. They were able to give me a description and the only person it matched was Chloe. Which confused me at first, because she’d finished filming. She was gone. But then I remembered — ”

“What Brent said,” I breathed.

Teddy nodded. “He told you we shouldn’t be looking in the hotel, and then made a comment later that day that he didn’t want to be in this ‘freak show’ house. It made me wonder if we’d been right all along, that something in the house was the key to everything.”

“Me!” Chloe cried out happily.

“Exactly.” Teddy’s voice was grim. “I figured if Chloe’s scenes were over but she was still sneaking around, sabotaging the tree and breaking into your room to wait for you, she had to have a different place to stay.

And maybe it was here in the house. So I came over this morning, ready to look for her. ”

“But he couldn’t bring himself to hurt a delicate little woman like me,” Chloe said, her voice babyish. “My mother swore all those self-defense lessons she signed me up for would come in handy, and I guess she was right.”

“Fuck you,” I spat.

“Enough.” Chloe pressed the gun into my back as she steered us into the kitchen. “We’re almost there.”

“Where now?” I glanced around at the cabinets and counters, at a loss for where we were going.

“Down. Into the basement.”

“There’s a basement?”

Chloe sighed heavily. “Over there. Through the pantry.”

With Chloe staying close behind us, Teddy and I opened the pantry door and flicked on the light.

I frowned — all I could see were shelves and shelves of products that looked far past their expiration date.

But as I peered closer, I noticed a gap on the back wall where the space seemed to make a turn.

Getting closer, I saw that around the corner, there was more space.

And at the end of that space there was a door.

My heart sank. Mara would have called the cops by now, but how on earth would they find us? Not only would they not know to look in the pantry, but the door was so hidden it was nearly impossible to see unless you knew it was there.

Even if the police did get there in time, they wouldn’t know where to look.

Chloe stomped her feet behind us. “Get moving!”

Careful not to trip, Teddy and I gingerly stepped down the stairs. There was no light to illuminate the stairwell, so I prayed the whole way down that this wouldn’t end with me falling and breaking my neck. How anticlimactic would that be.

Reaching the bottom, Chloe stepped onto the ground next to us. “Here we are. Home sweet home.” She flicked on the light switch, and I gasped.

On the walls of the basement, which looked like it hadn’t been renovated or updated since the 1800s, were posters of me — my movie posters.

There I was, running through the woods and looking behind me, the poster for my first starring role.

Another showed me possessed by a demon, my head thrown back as my eyes glowed red.

There was even a poster for Escape from Camp Nowhere , a direct-to-streaming film that hadn’t done particularly well.

I didn’t even know there had been posters for that one.

Creepiest of all, a mattress was pushed up against one wall, complete with rumpled sheets and a pillow that looked recently used.

“You’ve been living down here?” Memories of the strange sounds echoing through the house filtered back. The thought made me gag.

“Sometimes. Especially since I checked out of the hotel,” Chloe said cheerily. “Now get moving. Those chairs over there are for you.”

Following her directions, we sat on what looked like two old dining chairs. Keeping the gun trained on us, she deftly tied me to a chair with one-handed knots and then finished tying Teddy up on the other. I immediately strained my wrists and ankles, testing the knots: they were tight.

Chloe placed the gun on a nearby shelf and sat down in an old velvet armchair across from us, stretching out her legs and folding her arms behind her head. “Now. I bet you want to know all about how I did it.”

I rolled my eyes. Every fiber of my being wanted to tell her no, actually, I didn’t want to hear it.

I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of laying out her story piece by piece, bragging about how clever she was and how she avoided being caught the entire time.

But the truth was I did want to know. Desperately.

“I guess I’ll start with a question. Quinn, do you remember the day we met?”

I nodded curtly. “The first day of Ghost of Puzzle Face , apparently.”

“That’s right!” Chloe looked genuinely delighted.

“I was an extra, even though I was only six at the time. It was the best experience of my life.” She sighed wistfully.

“There I was, playing hooky from school so I could be in a real movie. And there you were. You were amazing. I knew I wanted to be just like you when I grew up.”

“I’m not that much older than you,” I grumbled.

Chloe ignored me. “You were my hero. So imagine my excitement when I was cast in the lead of House of Reckoning , which was already generating so much buzz.”

“Hang on — ”

“That’s right,” Chloe snapped. “I had the lead, before production decided I wasn’t good enough and begged you to sign on instead.”

Could that be true? My mind raced back to the first conversation I’d had with production.

It was true that I hadn’t auditioned and that they had approached me.

They’d given me the pitch and were thrilled when I accepted.

Then they’d said something, something I hadn’t registered at the time.

Something about being relieved to have an “actual” professional on board for the role.

“Oh, shit.”