Grim and Darling

CHAPTER SIX

Dear Self,

You wake up in Mrs. Sherman’s flower bed with your mouth tasting of metal.

You are cold, and shivering, and slimey. In the damp light from the window, you can see a speckle of wet across your arms and hands, and when you wipe your face, your palms come back glistening. Inky black, but you know it’s not ink. For all you know, you are the blood-battered hostage of a war. The gutted victim of a homicide. The bystander to a triple takedown.

But you don’t know anything.

All you know is your mouth tastes horrible, and you need to get home.

There are roses around your ears and violets between your fingers, and you’ve crushed her peonies beneath your feet. You can hear her from the house, the off-key singing she does because she’s still stuck in a youth spent chasing a Broadway dream that died somewhere in the Midwest with a positive pregnancy test and a bad case of deadbeat dad. She was probably wearing that see-through robe and smoking those black cigarettes, indulging her drinking problem with a mixture of gin and whiskey She was probably inspecting every wrinkle in the mirror, pulling her temples back, and her chin up, and her lips tight over her teeth.

She was probably going to come outside in the morning and flip her shit over her ruined flower bed.

You duck through the darkened yard, avoiding the glow from the windows like some dark nocturnal creature. Mrs. Sherman lived on the complete opposite side of town, and it’s kind of amazing that you made it this far without getting picked up by the cops. Thank god for that, because you’re only wearing a bra and a pair of sweatpants, and you’re fucking freezing. You hop fences and run down alleyways to get home, hiding behind some especially smelly trash cans when one of those cop cars rolls slowly by. You scare a cat that screeches beneath someone’s porch and fling yourself into the dark when the living room light bursts on. You get caught up in a wild morning-glory bush that’s eating up a fence you scrambled over, and you end up trailing flowers all the way back to your house.

You should have known something was wrong.

You should have known.

Even from the end of the driveway, the house felt hollow. Like the space in a bowl waiting to be filled, like the see-through squares of a window, suddenly empty, and nothing more. You should have known the moment you stepped through the door, but you don’t. You don’t notice anything out of place until you make it to the kitchen, and you slip. Your feet go out from underneath you, and you land knees and palms in a puddle of something wet and warm and thick. You stand, unsteady, feet still slipping, and reach for the lightswitch.

The kitchen floods with a weak yellow glow from the ancient overhead light, and you can’t move. You can’t blink. Can’t breathe. Can’t feel your heart, or your skin, or your eyes. Can’t cry, or swallow, or sob. You can’t even scream. You drop your eyes to your feet, and you don’t look up. Reaching blindly for the old rotary phone on the wall with the long curly cord, you press the phone to your ear as the panic starts to rise. You wait with something concrete blooming in your throat and weight like a hurricane sitting on your breastbone, and when the line clicks on and his gruff voice comes through the speaker, you lose your shit entirely.

You can only whisper even though you feel like screaming.

“Dad?”

Sincerely,

Me

NEXT

AN:

*falls down at the alter of Hadley Hemingway*

Grim and Darling

Chapter Five

Three months after it happened, the blood and the knife and the dead girl and the missing sister, I started investigating my first suspect.

Matthew Blanchard.

I didn’t even know why I was following him. He was just some loser from the edge of town who had eight mangy dogs and a rotting double-wide. He was fat and balding and smelled like fish. If he couldn’t even bathe regularly, I don’t know why I thought he was capable of murder, but I followed him anyway. He didn’t work, not that I could tell, just orbited steadily between the sagging couch on his front porch, the stinky bar down on Columbine, and the grocery store where he bought dog food in bulk and cans of tuna fish by the thousands. He would be the last person on earth who was fast enough, smart enough, or sly enough, to break into my house and murder a couple of girls right underneath my nose.

But his boots. Those boots. They matched that print in the yard.

At least I thought they did.

Until I stole one off his porch and realized it wasn’t the right size.

After Matthew, it was Stanley Franklin.

He owned the hardware store downtown, and I knew it was too easy, too obvious, but he had access to that same kind of screwdriver they found underneath the porch. The Dewalt with the fat black and yellow handle like gripping a giant bee in your hand with its stinger all rusted and dull.  I spent hours loitering in the aisles, pretending to inspect electrical couplings and threepenny nails, while I watched Stanley out of the corner of my eye. He always wore plaid. Plaid in different colors and patterns, but always plaid, and always tucked into his jeans. He never took off his wedding ring and never took off his baseball cap either, but that was because he was balding beneath it. He had a nice smile, but serial killers always had nice smiles until you knew what they were capable of. I snuck into the back of his pickup and snapped the lock on his toolbox with a bolt cutter.

He did have that same brand of screwdriver. In fact, he had that particular screwdriver, not only one but two of them. Both of them shiny, rust-free, obviously well taken care of.

Angela  Webber. She worked the graveyard shift at the gas station that sat on the county line, almost four miles out of town. She got divorced a few years ago and had fallen off of every wagon. She was forty pounds heavier. Forty ounces of beer every forty hours. Forty years old with only four years left to live, but I didn’t know that part yet. She used hair dye like other people used toothpaste and smoked a pack and half a day of those long skinny cigarettes that smell like vanilla. Her mouth was puckered, her eyes were pinched, and she never smiled, not once in the whole time I watched her. Her daughter died years ago, before I was even alive, because one of those vanilla cigarettes caught the curtains, and the house went up faster than a hay barn in August. She always scowled at us when we came in to buy gum and sour candies, licking her lips like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to yell at us, or eat us. Exactly the kind of woman Alice probably annoyed the bejesus out of at the end of a long shift.

I followed Angela until I intercepted a piece of her mail, a printout from Dr. Singer‘s office, basically convinced that she had stolen Alice to replace her dead daughter.

Her blood type was O positive.

Timothy Samuels.

The librarian. Who better to be a murderer than the smartest guy in town?  Too much quiet time, too many books, enough research to cover his tracks and pull off the perfect crime. Big brains and idle hands and all that nonsense. It was obviously the reason he’d gotten away with it. He lived in a cute little house on the main drag painted pastel blue with every color of tulip imaginable in the front yard. A cherry tree and a porch swing and a bird bath. A little white fence and a big crumbly chimney and lace in the windows. It was the kind of place they made movies about. A basement of horrors, except he wasn’t even in town that night.

He’d been on vacation in Hawai’i with his mistress while his wife was at a knitting conference somewhere in the Midwest.

Three years later, I was still at it.

Three years later, no one has escaped my scrutiny.

I followed the girl who bagged groceries at the D&R out near PA, the one with the lazy eye and the alcoholic boyfriend. I followed the guy who ran the old antique store at the end of Main Street, the one that was really just a place for everyone to drop off their junk and call it vintage. I followed a nurse from the clinic who stopped at the liquor store on her way home every day and woke up shit-faced every morning. I followed a group of boys who plagued the high school hallways and smoked weed in the abandoned opera house on the weekends. The lady who taught yoga at the community center. The guy who cleaned the courthouse on Wednesdays, the police station on Fridays, and the library on Tuesdays, at nine pm sharp. I followed the entire town, one way or another. Everyone came away with clean noses, clean hands, clean consciences.

At least when it came to dead girls.

I was going to solve this shit if it killed me.

I was beginning to suspect that this shit might actually kill me.

Next

AN:

Hadley Hemingway is the sun to my meadow.

Grim and Darling

CHAPTER FOUR

I don’t know much about Alice’s disappearance, but I do know a few things:

One.

I know that the lock on the front door had been tampered with, was basically demolished, and there was a shitty rusted screwdriver found underneath the porch.

The police tried to lift prints.

They got nothing.

Two.

I know that there was a size 11½ men’s shoe print in the mud at the edge of the yard, facing the house. It was from a Carolina brand boot, the tread worn down more on the outside of the sole than the arch, like someone bearing their weight wrong.

Maybe a back problem. Maybe a bad case of sciatica. Maybe a limp.

Three.

I know that the blood in the kitchen was type B.

Four.

I know that there was a big knife missing from the kitchen. The one with the smooth birchwood handle. The one that my dad liked to descale fish with.

Five.

I know that there was a trail of blood that led from the back door into the forest at the north side of the yard. They brought in dogs. They brought in metal detectors. They did grid searches and even summoned in a lady who claimed she could speak with the dead, but nothing. No knife. No Alice.

Nothing.

Six.

I know that Rose didn’t die of blood loss or blunt trauma. There was a bruise an inch thick all around her throat in the shape of two big hands. Her death certificate declared her cause of death as asphyxiation.

Seven.

I know that there wasn’t a single trace of Alice. No sign of a struggle. No blood or hair or fingernails popped off in a fight to escape.

Eight.

I know that her body still hasn’t been found.

---

I am going to solve this shit if it kills me.

It’s not that the police aren’t doing their job, but they aren’t. They aren’t doing it well, or at all. It might be because of my dad. They don’t want to disappoint their boss or have to break bad news themselves. So they avoid it altogether. It might be because of me, the dead-eyed daughter who watches their every move and asks too many questions they don’t have answers for. It might be because of the day my mother drank half a bottle of vodka before she drove down to the station and pitched a screaming, spitting fit at the front desk, then charged the back rooms. She accused all of them of being lazy, worthless assholes who were content to leave her baby girl dead in a ditch somewhere before she stumbled back to the car and hightailed it out of town, never to be seen again.

So, fuck the police.

If it comes down to me, it comes down to me.

I’ve done a lot of research, most of it in the middle of the night, huddled underneath my covers. It’s one thing to wonder about the old lady down the street who sat in her recliner for six days before the postman bothered to look through the front window. Or that tourist from Germany who drove his car off the highway and sat submerged in the Bogachiel River for almost two weeks before the prison crew picking trashing up off the highway spotted the underside of his fancy rented cadillac. But it’s a whole other thing when it’s Alice. Death is not pretty, and actually is really fucking ugly when you’ve got your little sister in the back of your mind. The human body is a miraculous machine, and it breaks down in a very specific way. It depends on the temperature and the humidity and the exposure to sunlight, wind, and rain, but decomposition starts exactly four minutes after you die. One: Your body acclimates to external temperatures: algor mortis. Two: Your blood settles and discolors your skin: livor mortis. Three: Your cytoplasm turns gummy and stiff: rigor mortis.

Your fat literally turns into soap.

Soap.

The soap thing really got to me. That was the night I made a promise. I made lots of promises, actually. A promise to my dad that I’d find whoever did this so that he could stop killing himself trying to track down a mirage. A promise to my mom that I’d prove to her it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t hers for letting me be in charge that night. A promise to myself that I'd finally clear my name.

A promise to Alice.

Because no one wants to be soap.

Next

AN:

1) All hail Hadley Hemingway because that girl is GOLD STANDARD.

2) Do you need a warning? Because this is your warning.

No one wants to be soap, and I don't want to write fluff.

Grim and Darling

Chapter Three

“Hi,” I sigh and slump into the kitchen chair across the formica table from my father. Everything is a sigh. Everything is a slump. Every look my father gives me is the same, and today is no different. We sit in the kitchen because neither of us can set foot into the living room. I still avert my eyes when I pass Alice’s bedroom door on the way to my own, and he still averts his eyes when he talks to me.

“Hi, baby girl. How was school?” He asks this with a furrow between his brows and that deep heavy thing beneath his skin that darkens his eyes and deepens his wrinkles. He glances at me and then looks away, like he’s trying really hard not to remember something super shitty about me.

I slump further and shrug.

“Fine,” I say, even though I mean terrible. Fucking horrible. Intolerable, even though I still tolerate it. I don’t have much choice.

“I put some pork in the crock pot this morning.” He drops the subject because he knows exactly what school is like for me. I don’t know why he won’t just let me homeschool. Something about him not being around enough to supervise me, but I think it’s because the last time he left me alone and responsible in this house, the unthinkable happened.

“Smells good,” I mumble and study the table top. I have it memorized. Every fleck of silver. Every smidge of gold. Three years of afternoons spent studying it means that I could replicate every spot from memory, and there are a million of them.

We sit in silence for half an hour. This is typical.

He finally breaks. “I’m following a lead out of Seattle. A real scumbag with a rap sheet ten miles long. He was in the area that… day.” He chokes on the end of his sentence like a hard candy cracked suddenly in half and lodged wrong in his windpipe. His face reddens and the newspaper shakes.

“Oh, yeah? That’s good.” I try to sound interested, involved, hopeful, but everything is a sigh and a slump, and I can’t muster up much beyond basic apathy. He can tell, but he doesn’t let on.

“If I can just get a warrant for a DNA test, I may be able to prove something.”

My gaze drops even further to the cheap linoleum he plastered over the beautiful hardwood floor. It’s white and patterned with ugly square blocks, but it might as well not even be there. I can still see it, the brown and blonde and amber of the wood. The glistening ruby red stain, right there in the middle. It wasn’t Alice’s blood though, or Rose’s. The blood in the kitchen, that was someone else’s. It didn’t match the girls. Didn’t match me.

It’s the only thing that kept me out of jail, or juvie, or worse.

Between the black eye Alice gave me that morning and the blood in the bathtub from my misadventures in shaving, I looked suspicious. The fact that I didn’t remember anything between falling asleep at this exact spot at the table and waking up somewhere else entirely, I looked like a red-handed homage to guilt. I might as well have marched myself into the cop shop and ‘fessed up to something I didn’t do. Might as well have lynched myself from the flagpole in the town square for all to see, because they’d basically all decided I was guilty anyway.

I was a murderer. Even though I wasn’t.

“Seems like you’ve been sleeping better lately.” Dad breaks the silence like the sledgehammer that he is, no grace, no subtlety. He’s always been a wrecking ball. I roll my eyes before I look back at him and try to smile, but it hurts, and I can’t keep it up long enough to be convincing.

“Yeah. Sort of.” That’s a lie. He thinks I’m sleeping better because I haven’t been walking, but that’s not the truth. I’m not walking because I’m not sleeping. Between a rock and a hard place, between the walking and the sleeping, there is only the slim, unbearable middle.

Insomnia.

It’s harder than it looks.

The first few nights were easy, losing myself in a book, then a movie, then Tumblr and Pinterest, and some site dedicated to asshole cats being assholes. The next few nights were a little harder, pinching my arms and thighs and cheeks to stay awake. By now, I’m in tunnel vision mode. Zombieland. Everything outside the small circle right in front of me is meaningless and fuzzy. Out of focus. A blur.

Everything outside is fucked.

Next

AN:

Forever grateful for HH.

<3