Grim and Darling

Chapter Fifteen

I’m staking out Mike Newton.

He’s got all the makings of a murderer. The too-big ego. The too-small brain. The rage issues and the big hands and the same size shoe as that bootprint in my front yard. He has a shed he’s been building in the backyard for over a year now that is full of tools like hammers to bash in brains and hacksaws to cut off limbs and screwdrivers to pick locks with. He has his cop knowledge of crime scenes and blood splatters and fingerprints.  

He probably has a copy of Catcher in the Rye underneath his pillow.

Newton’s house was given to him by his grandparents. Actually they died, in all honesty, and no one wanted it because his grandmother had a fondness for pink chintz, and his grandfather adored his cigars, and by the time they passed, the house was a monument to shitty interior decorating and stale tobacco. It could only be described as gingerbread fabulous, all the scalloped edges and rose-colored siding, but it smelled like the wrong end of an ashtray so it sat on the market for six years before Newton’s parents gave up on selling it and just passed the whole mess on to their son.         

“Get off my lawn, kid.”

I’ve been watching him hulk around the yard for almost an hour now. He’s holding a beer bottle and kicking at lumps of grass and mumbling under his breath. He has basically let the place go to shit. The pink paint is peeling, and the roof is missing shingles, and the once manicured lawn is now just weeds and overgrown contempt. He’s standing in the middle of his shit pile, staring at me.

“I’m not a kid!” I flip him off with both hands and take two steps backward until my feet hit the road, which is public property. I keep my fingers in the air.

“You’re too young for me, Swan.” He grins like a leech. Like a pedophile. Like a sex addict who likes to lick toes, and his eyeballs rub all over me while his tongue swipes his lips. It’s enough to make my stomach roll right over.

“Gross, Newton.” I struggle not to shudder.

“Aw, you know why you’re here.” He’s slurring his words, and his thumb is stroking the side of that beer bottle, and I wish I could kick him in the mouth.

“I do. But you don’t.” I glance toward the shed, wishing so so bad I could get inside it to find something, anything, to prove that this guy is a psychotic dickwad, if not a murderer.

I head into the woods, aiming like a crow for home, knowing I’m going to have to do some bushwhacking because the last thing I want right now is for my dad to see me hoofing it along the empty roadway. He’d flash his lights and probably flip the siren once to get my attention and then interrogate me the whole way home to find out why I didn’t ask for the truck again.

No way am I explaining today to him.

Oh, and by the way, Dad, your deputy probably murdered Alice.

Newton might actually be a waste of my time. Maybe it’s all a waste of my time. Three years is too long, and evidence might only be a figment of my imagination. Even if I found Alice, did I really want to find her? Maybe I was better off as an only child. Maybe I was better off not being someone’s older sister because lord, did she annoy the fuck out of me most of the time with her shitty pop music and her crappy clothing choices and her incessant need to be right all the time.

She probably felt the same way about me.

Would Alice keep looking? If it was all switched around, and we swapped places, would she keep looking for me? Would she want me back bad enough to stake out Newton or follow moldy Matthew Blanchard from his trailer to the bar and then back again like five thousand times? Would she tag along with Dad on call-ins just in case something seemed familiar? Would she have gone through my room and taken what she wanted before the door got shut and never re-opened?

“You’re wasting your time.”

I scream. Turn and swing out with a balled-up fist and connect with something rock hard and freezing cold and oh god, it hurts. My fear scream turns to a pain scream, and Edward is standing there in front of me with a shocked look on his face like he really didn’t expect that sort of reaction. I’m not sure what he thinks should happen when he sneaks up on people like he does.

He didn’t even have the decency to wince.

“You have got to stop doing that.” I glare at him, nursing my aching fist. It feels like I punched a brick wall. Edward shrugs and looks back toward Newton’s house, now just a few pink spots of color through the trees. He sighs heavily, shakes his head, and looks back at me.

“He’s bad news; you should stay away from him.”

“No shit... he’s a fucking loser,” I grumble. “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t kill someone.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“That shed. He’s hiding something.”

“Maybe, but probably not.”

My throat tightens, and my heart slows. My eyes narrow, and I’m scowling at him.

“For someone who doesn’t know anything, you sure do seem to know a lot,” I accuse him. “If you’re not going to help me, then you’re just hurting me.”

He says nothing. Not one fucking word, and his face is that infuriating beautiful blank slate. I make an awkward animal noise in my throat that’s all frustration and exhaustion and turn around to stomp my chucks and my cut-offs and all my self-righteous rage back home so that I can ice my hand, cry into my sheets, and maybe take a shower for the first time in a week. Instead, I march my sorry ass right into a thicket of blackberries, getting tangled and torn. I have to fight my way out of the damn bush like I’m in a wrestling match with a heavyweight twice my size. Edward just stands there and watches me, hands in his pockets, shoulders kind of slumping.

“You’ll hurt yourself if you struggle.” He makes like he’s going to step forward and disentangle me from the hell-bush, just one hesitant foot forward, but he stops himself mid-movement when I finally wrench myself free.

“Leave me alone,” I spit, near tears, my lips trembling the way they do when I’m about to lose my shit entirely.  “Ow,” I moan, biting back tears and clutching my wrist while a slow slip of blood drips toward my wrist.

That’s when everything changes.

Edward is suddenly ten feet away, a leap so fast I couldn’t even see it. He’s paler than ever, gone white and grey as the last summer’s snowdrifts, his eyes big and dark and round. He’s shaking, a tremble from head to foot like we’re in the middle of a blizzard and not the hot, humid forest. He’s got his hand over his mouth like he’s trying to keep himself from screaming.

He looks like he just watched someone disembowel a cat.

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

Edward’s eyes blink once, twice, once more, and he makes this sad, empty sound in his throat as he lowers his hand. His mouth is open, and his lips are still grey, and there’s two big sharp teeth pricking the swell of his bottom lip and what the fuck am I even looking at right now?

“Holy fuck.”

Next

AN:

In less than twelve days, I get HH in my loving arms.

Happy holidays, folks. I'm feeling the giving spirit and might drop another chapter here soon. Wait for it, wait for it . . .

Grim and Darling

Chapter Fourteen

I sit on the highway for half an hour before I finally work up the courage to turn down the driveway.

Dad let me borrow the pickup. It’s the first time. Ever. I’ve never driven alone, never wanted to or needed to before because no friends means nowhere to be. Until now. Until Edward. When I asked Dad for the keys this morning, he looked shocked enough to pass out in his reheated spaghetti.

“Where are you going?” he asked, sounding like there’s nowhere a girl like me would want to be other than right there in that kitchen with the spaghetti and the memories and the stifling father-daughter awkwardness. I shrugged. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Certainly not “There’s this creepy, cold, totally hot guy who has been hanging around for some reason, and he finally told me where he lives, so I want to go stalk him.’

I’m pretty sure that would go over like a lead balloon.

“Not out to the Rez, right?” Dad’s big bushy eyebrows smashed together like two caterpillars getting frisky, and I had to try so hard not to laugh out loud because that was totally mean, and he’d probably think I wasn’t taking this Rez thing seriously enough. Billy Black’s death was still unsolved, and even though the coroner thought it was an animal attack, some people are more animal than human, so who knows, really?

“No. Just. . . around, I guess.” I shrugged again. This was awkward. Really awkward. He kept frowning at me for what felt like forever before he shook his head and seemed to give in.

“Ok, but be easy on her.” He dropped the keys into my palm, still warm from his pocket. “She’s a hell of a lot older than you and twice as stubborn. Double pump the clutch, and remember that the left blinker doesn’t work. Use your arm signals. I don’t want to have to pull you over later.”

I fled before I had to ask him how to double pump anything.

The driveway is just how I imagined it: so overgrown that it’s barely a dent in the foliage. There aren’t any tire marks in the dirt ruts that cut through the grass, at least not that I can tell, and I wonder just how Edward gets to and from town without a car. He runs like a bullet, but that doesn’t mean he runs back and forth every day, right? I mean, he’s way too sick and wheezy for that. I still can’t shake the fact that he reminds me of a doctor who injected himself with some disease just to try out a new cure, still unsure if it’s going to work even as he’s sticking a needle into his arm.

I bump through the woods, fighting to keep the old truck’s wheels in the sunken tracks, wondering just what the fuck I’m doing. Part of me thinks I’m going to show up there and march right in the front door without even knocking, drag him to his couch to kiss him crazy for a while; go silly and stupid on not enough air and too much boy. Another part of me is pretty sure I’m going to turn around before I even get there, that I’m not brave enough or brash enough or even dumb enough to be doing this right now. There’s an even another part of me that hopes he’ll yell at me, chase me away, tell me to go home.

Then maybe I’ll never see him again because I’ve never been more confused about anything in my life before he showed up and threw the whole thing upside down.

Before I have a chance to get freaked out and eight-point turn the truck around, I’m breaking through the trees, and there it is.

The house is enormous. Giant like it should have been a hotel. A hostel. An orphanage. There have got to be fifty rooms, and there are windows everywhere. There’s a big wide porch and a big gabled roof. It would almost look elegant with those columns, the black shutters, and the red door, except that the paint is peeling, and the stairs are sagging, and a few of those shutters are hanging on by a thread. It looks fancy from far away and kind of shitty the closer I get. The truck crawls to a halt in the grassy driveway, and I stare up at the place, expecting crows on the roof and ghosts in the windows and something living underneath the porch. I can’t believe he lives here because no one should live here.

It’s definitely haunted.

“You’re here.”

I scream. Loudly. And almost faint. There are stars and black fuzz and everything warps wildly. I’m pretty sure my heart fled clear down to my feet. My stomach is in my mouth, and all of my blood in in my brain. Edward puts a hand on my back through my open window as I fight to regain my breath. I push him away, flapping my hands in the air like a drowned bird.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” I pant, my vision stabilizing, and my heart slowly edging back into its proper place between my lungs.

“I’m sorry. I forget that hu-” His eyes go wide, and he lets out a sharp breath. “Girls,” he corrects himself.  “I forget that girls startle so easily.”

“It’s not just girls,” I hiss, resisting the urge to call him a sexist jerk. Or worse. “I’m pretty sure anyone would freak out if you snuck up on them like that.”

“I think it’s fair to say that you snuck up on me, too. What are you doing here?”

“You’ve been to my house.” I say, and even though I don’t mean for it to, my voice sounds accusing anyway. I get out of the truck, the cool air on my flushed cheeks making my skin prickle sweaty and goosebumped.

“I like your house better.”

“Why?” I ask. My house could fit in the living room of his. My house has a rotting foundation and asbestos siding and the non-existent ghost of an eight-year-old. It might not be haunted the way his is, but it feels emptier somehow.

“Because you’re there.” His answer is absent, thoughtless, as though it came easy without a bunch of justification or convincing or even editing. Like he meant it. Like he didn’t even think for a moment about not saying it. I blush. Hard. Cheeks flaming and ears on fire and I shuffle in the overgrown grass beside him, fingering the frayed edges of my cut-off shorts and resisting the urge to cross my arms over my chest.

My scuffed up sneakers are just inches away from his shiny shoes.       

There’s something about him that makes me feel clumsy and unpolished. Like I shouldn’t be here in my chucks and unbrushed hair. Like I should be dressed in some fancy black ball gown, reclining on a velvet fainting couch with pearls around my neck and a glass of something alcoholic in my hand. Like my hair should be in ringlets and my nails should be painted.

Like I should be elegantly anguished, but I’m not.

I’m just disheveled anxiety.

“You’re not going to invite me inside?” I rub the top of my sneaker against the back of my leg.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says, taking a sharp step back like he’s worried I might try to tarnish his virtue or take advantage of his virginal heart or something. He has his hands in his pockets and his eyes on his shoes, and I expect a blush, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, he goes grey.

“Why not? I won’t try to kiss you or anything,” I tease, slapping on a forced grin because I’d actually thought about doing exactly that on the way here. The faint disappointment that I won’t get to do such a thing is stronger than I thought it would be.

“That’s a shame.” He stares at me so hard I swear he’s going to burn a hole right through me.

“Why isn’t it a good idea then? Me coming inside?”

He glances toward the house, the big dark windows and the heavy red door, his face puckered and his hands twitching nervously at his sides.

“Haunted, remember?”

---

I go home and spend the entire night wondering what he meant by “That’s a shame.”

Next

AN:

I wrote Hadley Hemingway a mushy love letter. It's over at The Lemonade Stand, as part of their grammar gratitude special feature. I cried lots while writing it, and had to reread it eleven billion time because I didn't have a beta to look it over. There's still mistakes in it. 

Check it out - it says more than I ever could here:

Bee's love letter to Hadley

Grim and Darling

Chapter Thirteen

Eight things about your dad:

One.

He is essentially the “good cop.” Not all of them go into the job with a pure, unadulterated drive for civic duty, but he did. Your grandfather was killed by a drunk somewhere out on the Wyoming flatlands, and your grandmother was robbed at gunpoint on a street corner in Phoenix. The gun didn’t kill her, but the fear-induced heart attack did. The police never found the guy who stopped her life, so Dad’s always been a bit of a vigilante.   

Two.

He probably loved your mom at some point or another.

Probably.

Maybe.

Three.

He definitely doesn’t anymore.

Four.

He still refuses to teach you how to shoot a gun. You ask him every year on your birthday, but he seems to think you’re better off not knowing. You’re not sure if that’s because he doesn’t want you to accidentally shoot your own foot off, or that he worries you may take things into your own hands and actually off someone for real someday.

Either way, he doesn’t trust you with a firearm.

Five.

Spaghetti is a literal food group.

Six.

He used to go fishing every weekend. He had a special spot, special vest, special pole, special hour, and to anyone else he probably seemed superstitious. Maybe he is. But it worked for him. He called it “therapy,” the killing of fish.

Seven.

The only time you’ve ever seen him cry was about a week after the whole Alice thing. You had a nightmare and went looking for your dad because he was big and strong and brave enough to fight off whatever demons had followed you into your dreams, but when you found him, he was crying. On the couch, in the dark, unopened beer between his feet, his face between his hands. You stood in the doorway listening and watching and not moving because you’d never seen him like that before and it scared you even worse than that nightmare.

Eight.

Alice completely ruined him.

---

“Got you something.”

Dad puts a paper gift bag on the book in front of me, the handles tied together with a purple ribbon. I look up at him, immediately full of suspicion.

“You got me a gift?” I look at him like this is really a test.

He shrugs and is probably blushing, but that fucking beard of his is so big these days, I can’t really tell. “Yeah. So what?”

“You got me a gift,” I say, shaking my head. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Just wanted to.” He’s all shrugging shoulders, rolling eyes, and shuffling hands as he turns away to make a pot of coffee. I pull the bag toward me and undo the ribbon. Inside, there’s a shirt. A pretty shirt. Shiny and sequined and made of really soft fabric, the double-washed kind. But it’s purple.

“It’s purple,” I say.

“Yeah. Thought it’d look nice on you.”

“Purple.”

What is going on?

“Yeah. Purple. It’s a color.” He rolls his eyes at me like I’m not getting his joke.

“What are you even saying right now?” I shake my head at him, and he grunts, leaning back against the counter and staring at me hard for a full minute before he speaks.

“I’m worried about you. You’re always…” He waves his hand at me, his eyebrows raised like his point is obvious or something.

“I’m always what?”

“In black.” He waves at me harder, and I look down at myself. He’s right. Black pants. Black sweatshirt. Black sandals. My t-shirt is black, and my beanie is black, and even my nail polish is black. He doesn’t know this part, but my underwear is black too.

“I like black.” I shrug, glaring at the purple shirt.

“I can tell. But it’s not a happy color, Bella. Maybe if you tried to wear something… else, you wouldn’t be so sad anymore.”

Like happiness is determined by the color of your clothing.

“I’m not sad.” My voice goes hard, and my muscles all stiffen up like I’m suddenly made of stone. This is the very last conversation I want to be having with him, except for the sex talk. Maybe. That one might be less awkward than this.

“Bella,” he sighs and rubs his eyes with his thumb and his finger.

“I’m not sad!” I yell it this time, sitting in my chair and feeling small because my feet don’t even reach the floor, and my dad is trying to make me wear colors, and everything in the world is terrible right now.

“Yes. You are. You know how I know that?” He asks like he wants an answer, so I just keep my eyes on the stupid purple shirt and shake my head.  I hear him sigh. “I know because I’m sad. It takes one to know one, kiddo.”

I finally look at him, and oh god, his eyes are watery. Big and wide and wet like baby animals in Disney movies, and he’s chewing on his bottom lip, and I hate this. I hate that we’re in the kitchen on a perfectly nice day having this conversation because some fucking worthless asshole came in here and took my sister and left us with this big empty space with nothing to fill it up. I hate that my dad is so worried about me that he bought me clothing, and I can’t even think about him in a store picking this out because it’s almost too embarrassing to comprehend it. I hate that part of me wants to burn the stupid purple shirt, but another part of me, a small secretive part, wants to wear it.

“I just thought we could both start small,” he says. “I’m gonna start fishing again. Thought you could wear something that isn’t black. We could do it together.”

“If I get rid of all my black, I won’t have any clothes left,” I grumble. I’m actually kind of glad to hear that he’s going to take up fishing again. He really liked it, always had a tan and smelled like the woods, and the freezer always had something in it. He smiles that lopsided smile, the only one I’ve seen for years now, and ruffles my hair as he leaves the kitchen.

“I’m not asking for a rainbow. I’m just asking for a little bit of sunshine, ok?”

Next

AN:

Hadley is my forget-me-not and gives me soft places to land.

Thank you for fixing this up, baby.

<3

Grim and Darling

Chapter Twelve

Dad storms in the door at 10:14 a.m.

He looks tired, like he hasn’t slept at all, and he must have driven overnight to get home this early. He flies right by me and starts digging through a laundry basket on the end of the couch, pulling free a clean uniform and stripping out of his old clothes right there in the living room. He’s breathing hard as he hops into his slacks, panting as he tugs on his socks.

“How was Seattle?” I ask, and he stops, a limp sock in one hand, and his mouth hanging open for a moment before he closes it, staring at me like I’m suddenly speaking a different language.

“Seattle?” he asks, blinking at me like an owl caught up in a barbed wire fence.

“Yeah, Seattle. The guy?”

“Oh, that. It was nothing.” He shakes his head, muttering to himself and shoving his arms into the sleeves of his cop top, strapping on his holster and loading his gun. I watch every move, most of it memorized, shaking my head in disbelief.

“That’s it?”

“Yep,” he huffs, fumbling with the second sock, totally ignoring me..

“You’re just giving up?”

“I’m not giving up!” He yells loud enough to startle me, loud enough that I jump in my skin. He’s breathing hard, and his hands are shaking, and his face has gone pale. When he finally looks at me, his eyes are heavy and dull. “I’m not giving up, Bells. I’ll never give up. But I’ve got a murder on my hands right now that I’ve got to go deal with. I can’t handle this friggin’ inquisition from you.”

I watch him tuck his gun and sit on the couch to lace up the ugly black shoes they make him wear, my own mouth hanging open.

“A murder?” I whisper. It’s about all I can manage, my heart jammed so high up in my throat I can barely breathe around it.

He just nods, double knotting his laces.

“Another one?” I ask. I must sound bad because that gets him to look up at me. The corners of his eyes pinch, and he shakes his head. I nod. He shakes harder.

“It’s not him, Bella.”

“But it could be.” I’m still whispering, and I’m not sure if it’s just my voice trembling or my whole body. He’s still shaking his head as he stands, wiping his palms on his thighs.

“It’s not. There’s a body. There’s blood. There’s no forced entry. It’s not him, Bells.” He takes a step toward me slowly, like he doesn’t want to startle me, and puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be back before dinner.”

“Can I go with you?” I ask. It’s not that I’m scared to be alone. Not that I think maybe I’m a loose end that needs to be tied up or chopped off or trimmed back by the person who got my sister but left me sleeping in the next room. It’s not that I think that I might be next.

It’s that there’s been another one, another murder, and I need to see it for myself.

“Bells…” He’s trying to say no, shaking his head, his eyes narrowed, so I make myself look extra sweet and even push up a few watery tears to make him think it is about the fear, the “don’t leave me alone, Dad” plea any other seventeen-year-old would give her old man.

He totally buys it.

“Ok. Let’s go.”

---

Billy Black is lying face down in a pool of his own blood on the floor of his bedroom.

The tiny, slumped trailer smells like what hell probably smells. It’s dank and dusty, and the curtains are molded. The refrigerator is leaking the faint traces of doom and decay, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is Billy. He’s been lying there for five days, and he’s starting to go putrid. Starting to turn a little black around the edges. I guess for most people this would seem gruesome, but I’ve already done a slip and slide through my own kitchen, the familiar tile doused in blood, so this sort of small time on the shock factor scale. I’ve spent so many nights researching decomposition that the FBI is probably watching my computer; I know exactly what is going down here, and none of it bothers me as much as it probably should.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Shut the fuck up, Newton,” I hiss. I don’t look around, but all the hair on my arms stands on end, and I clench my fists to keep myself from gagging. I can’t see him, but I know he’s there.

“Not just my opinion, sweets. Whole staff thinks it’s kinda odd how he lets you tag along.”

Mike appears, leaning against the doorframe beside me, hands in the pockets of his police-issue pants, watching the coroner poke around in the blood puddle Billy is sprawled out in. Mike Newton is a hometown boy who had big dreams and big plans and big ambitions, but too little gumption to make anything of himself. He was a little too dumb for law school. A little too slow for a football scholarship. A little too rowdy for the State Patrol. His last three girlfriends lasted less than two months apiece, and he has a close, personal relationship with Smitty, the scary tattooed guy who runs the liquor store on the Rez.

Really personal.

He doesn’t know I know that part yet.

“Oh, yeah?” I laugh. “The same staff that helped you bury your arrest record? How’s Amanda, by the way? ” I can barely remember it, but the underage girl and the gram of coke he was caught with are the reasons he’s still a local lackey. Mike goes red and stammers something I can’t understand. I narrow my eyes at him because I know it makes me look more like my dad and then lean in really close because it’s totally intimidating if you do it fast and hard enough. He smells like wintergreen and cigarettes and not enough deodorant.

I watch Newton retreat with his tail tucked up so far between his legs that it’s practically nonexistent as I hear the coroner say “blood loss” and “surface wounds” and “animal attack.”

Next

AN:

Hadley is my one true love. All of my gratitude to her for making this less of a mess and more of a readable mystery. (Also, thanks for making ME more readable and less messy.)