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 . . .