Grim and Darling

CHAPTER TWENTY two

“So, you like that Edward guy, huh?”

I choke on my spaghetti. You’d think it was the only thing either of us knew how to cook, or that we really, really loved marinara, but we don’t, and there’s lots of other meals both of us are pretty good at cooking. This one, though, this one is just easy and simple, and there’s a comfort about it that neither of us could explain. So we just stick with it.

“I, uh -” I sputter.

“Don’t even try lying to me.” Dad grins. “You know shit-all about cars. Tell him that, next time, he’s gonna need a better excuse to get you away from the house.”

“We really did go look at a car.” At least that part is the truth.

“You know, I checked up on the old Cullen house.” Dad eyes the meatball on the end of his fork. “That place is a downright shit hole.”

I nod. It is.

“He’s out there by himself, huh? All alone?” Dad is fishing again, cop fishing, which isn’t much different from regular fishing, but I can’t tell him about Alice. I just can’t. He deserves to know, but I can’t ruin him like that. For one, he’d never believe me. Two, if he found out it was his sweet little baby girl who killed all those people, Alice, the culprit behind all of his unsolved murders, it would wreck him. Devastate him, maybe even more than her disappearance. Plus, I’m still not entirely convinced her current situation is better than her just being gone with no explanation. Was an eternity as a creature of the night better than being dead?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

“He registered for school yet?” Dad shoves some more spaghetti down, and I try not to let mine come back up. Of course he thought Edward was in high school. That smooth skin and the hair and the jaw, he was a hundred-year-old vampire who didn’t look a day over prom, pep rallies, and locker combinations.

“He has a GED,” I hedge, nervous and mutilating my meal with my fork.

“Smart kid. Why don’t you do that?”

I glare across the table at him. “I’ve asked you. You said no.”

“Really?” Dad’s eyebrows furrow, and he squints at me like he’s trying to remember that conversation. “When?”

“Two years ago. When I was desperate not to go back to school because this whole town treats me like a leper. Remember?”

I can’t help it that my words come out harsh and mean and full of venom, but fuck. I cried at this same stupid table for days telling him how bad it was. I didn’t talk to him for two whole weeks after he refused to let me homeschool, and it was the longest two weeks of my life. I hated not speaking to him, but he just didn’t get it. He didn’t hear the whispers or see the ugly shit scrawled on my locker in permanent marker. Didn’t understand that the teachers all looked at me with an equal mixture of pity and disgust, or that the students all avoided me like I carried some highly contagious disease. He didn’t know that I spent lunch time in one restroom stall or another, or that I was failing PE because I stopped going. The locker room was worse than prison, and twice, I’d been pretty sure the cheerleaders were going to drown me in a toilet before they let me up for air.

“Well, maybe this year you pull out.” He shrugs like this is no big deal. “Bust through the coursework. Thought about college yet?”

I just stare at him. Here he is making conversation about post-high school education like everything is normal, like everything is the same, like I have all the time in the world to daydream about college. All I can think about is little vampire Alice three miles away from us, probably munching on bunnies and planning her wedding to Edward.

“No,” I grumble.

---

I’m hoofing it to Edward’s place when the yelp of a police siren has me flattened up against a tree trunk, my heart up in my throat. Newton slows to a crawl beside me, the white cruiser dingy from the wet asphalt roads, his window scrolling down between us. He doesn’t take off his sunglasses, and he doesn’t stop chewing a big fat wad of gum, and my stomach doesn’t give up the disgusted roll it always does whenever I see him.

“Got a call about a suspicious death out on Lexington.” He smacks his gum between his teeth. “Want to come?”

“Why?” I scrunch my nose up and stay put.

“Well, I don’t know, kid,” he huffs. “You’re always snooping around; I thought you’d want to tag along.” Newton throws the car in gear and looks dead ahead like I’m not even there. “Either way, you’ve got three seconds to decide.”

I’m planted ass to leather in the front seat of his cruiser before the tires even start to roll.

The whole car smells like cigarettes - a hot, stale, rotten smell like a chemical truck upended on a highway somewhere, and the hot sun on the hot asphalt cooked the shit out of the whole mess of toxic waste. And then Newton rolled around in it.

I lower my window four inches.

“Your dad ok, kid?”

“Quit calling me that,” I snap, arms across my chest before I even have time to think about it. I lean into the wind rushing into the cab, forehead to the glass. “I’m not a kid.”

“Yeah, you are.” Newton nods like he’s the end-all and be-all on these kinds of things. “Your dad though, he ok?” he repeats.

“I guess,” I grumble, looking out the window at the green blur of the world flying by. “Depends on what you think ‘ok’ means.”

“He’s been weird lately. Seems lost, kinda.”

“You do remember, right?” My voice sounds like the bad end of an atomic explosion, acerbic and burning. “What happened to us?”

“Of course, Bella. Who could forget?” He turns a little too hard off the highway, and the rest of my body smashes up against the door. “But he’s been different lately. Quiet, grouchy. I’m just wondering if everything is ok at home?”

“Why are you so interested?”

“I don’t know. I care about the guy, you know? He’s been better to me than my old man ever was. He’s like a father-”

“Don’t!” I cut him off. “He’s my father, not yours.”

We grind to a stop at the side of the road, and I realize that we made it clear out to east side of town in the time it took to have that awkward mess of a conversation. I glance over Newton’s shoulder at the little blue house tucked between two towering trees, a mess of wildflowers spilling around the front steps, and an even bigger mess of uniformed personnel crawling all over the yard.

There’s a woman sprawled in the grass.

She’s in a yellow dress, face down. Her legs are akimbo, and one arm is at such an unnatural angle that it can only have come out of the socket. Her neck is torn open. Her skin is blotchy, blue and purple. Her dark hair is matted in the back. Her feet are bare. I wonder if she suffered or struggled or screamed. I wonder if she was drug outside or ran out here on her own. I wonder if, when they pick her up, she’ll leave a body-shaped hollow in the grass.

I wonder if the ground beneath her face smells like her last breath.

I wonder if this was Alice, too.

Newton swaggers over to a short, mustached guy who I think is either called Sanchez or Hernandez, but I can’t remember which. He joined the force three years ago, and I followed him for four days before I decided he probably didn’t murder Alice. He had a penchant for My Little Ponies and life-sized furry fetish costumes, and if that’s the worst he could be, then he probably wasn’t all that into murdering little girls.

I stand at the edge of the grass, six feet away from the dead woman, which is too far to see the bit of her face that’s peeking out from underneath her hair, but not far enough that I can’t smell the faint traces of blood and guts and rot. She has to be at least twelve hours old, a fact which I fist pump myself for knowing when I hear Hernandez/Sanchez confirm it to Newton.

“Ten hours, give or take,” he says in that no-nonsense cop talk I hate more than just about anything else. No feeling. No emotion. Like they were talking about a car engine. “Found by the neighbors thirty minutes ago. Throat gouged up real bad. The living room is a mess, most of the struggle happened in there, but there’s no sign of forced entry. Door was unlocked, nothing broken in.”

“Forensics?” Newton asks.

“On their way, but you know Webber. He couldn’t be on time even if he tried.”

Both men scoff and continue to stare at the woman laid out before them. There’s a rookie poking around her feet with a pair of tweezers, and a mid-level brushing the door handle for prints.The two lone female officers are deep in conversation on the far side of the yard, both looking shaken, and a whole mess of uniforms are combing the perimeter of the yard, peering under bushes and kicking aside piles of leaves.

“Just seems odd, you know,” Newton mumbles, eyes glued. “It’s like that old man out on the Rez a few weeks back.”

“This? Nah.” Hernandez/Sanchez shakes his head and folds his arms the other way, shifting his weight.

“Then why’s her neck all torn up like that, huh? That’s no swift cut; that’s a damn hack job.”

“Old man died less brutal than this. Just some blood and some bloat.”

“Ain’t much of a struggle to take out an old man in a chair. Healthy lady, though? She put up a fight.” Newton is staring at the mangled neck of the dead woman. “There’s that new guy, came to town a couple of years back. Young kid. Lives out at the old Cullen place.”

He’s getting way too close for comfort.  

“This wasn’t Edward.”

The words are out of my mouth before I can even stop them. Both Newton and Hernandez/Sanchez turn to look at me, Newton with his jerked-up eyebrow and Hernandez/Sanchez with his scowl, and oh shit.

I should not have said that.

“Edward who?” Hernandez/Sanchez asks. He doesn’t even seem fazed that his boss’s kid is standing there, a teenager at a crime scene. In fact, I think it’s the first time he’s noticed me, ever.

“Edward Cullen.” I look down at my sneakers and kick at the dirt and mumble between my teeth. “He didn’t do this.”

“And how, exactly, do you know that?” Newton’s raised eyebrows are now slouched down low over his nose, his jaw tight, and he’s scowling at me. I’m probably going to have to find my own ride home. I straighten up, stick out my chin, and meet him right in the eyes.

“Because I was with him last night.”

Next

AN:

The next chapter is my favorite one. I literally squealed when I was writing it. 

All my love and thanks and adoration to HH. She puts up with a lot from me, my needy phone calls and my questionable comma usage, but still seems to want to keep me around. 

Thanks for reading!

<3