He said it was dangerous, driving back to where he’d left her. That if we did that and the police caught us, they’d separate me from Jenny forever. He promised, though, that he’d let me talk to her again.
And he kept his promise. Once we got checked in to this fleabag, we went to the pay phone outside. Gabriel dropped a bunch of coins in there and dialed a number that I secretly wrote down. I heard him talking to someone, telling them to put Jenny on. Just like before, she didn’t speak to me. But I heard her breathing again and I told her I love her and that I’m going to come for her soon and when I did, we’d be together forever. I would never let her out of my sight again.
That was enough. It had to be.
Oh, Aurora Grace, I don’t want to get into bed. I don’t want to go to sleep again, until life is normal and there’snothing to be afraid of and nobody gets hurt for asking simple questions. Until no one gets hurt at all.
Love,
Future Mom
4:00A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
It turns out the girl from down the hall isn’t a skank at all. She’s a hippie or something like that, I guess. But she’s super nice. Her name is Elizabeth.
Just after I finished that last letter to you, she knocked on our door and told me she noticed how swollen my jaw was. She’d brought an ice bag and a bottle of lime-flavored vodka, and we sat on the bed, drinking and talking while Gabriel snored on the floor. She asked me if Gabriel was my brother or my boyfriend, and I sat there saying nothing for quite a while. Thinking. Finally, I said, “He’s kind of both. And neither.”
Luckily, she didn’t ask me any more about my life than that, because I didn’t want to lie to her and at the same time, I didn’t want her to run away. We talked about so many things. Our hopes and dreams. Where we see ourselves in ten years. We talked about witchcraft too, because Elizabeth is into witchcraft. She says she thinks our meeting each other was an act of magick because we look so much alike—same size, same color hair. Same smile, even. It turns out that for years, she’s been wishing for a sister.
Elizabeth keeps a deck of tarot cards in her purse, and she read mine. I got Death, which Elizabeth says is not a bad card at all. In the Aquarian tarot deck, she said, the Death card means rebirth. A new beginning.
Elizabeth is going to Hollywood. She doesn’t want to be an actress, though. She wants to be one of those people who take still photos on movie sets. After about an hour of talking, we went to her room, and she let me try on some of her clothes and we did a photo shoot. I brought over some of Ed Hart’s props with me—a whip, a fake gun, some phony-looking handcuffs. I didn’t tell her where I’d gotten them, and she didn’t ask. She took some Polaroids of me, and then I took a great one of her—posing with the fake gun like Sergeant Pepper Anderson fromPolice Woman. (She insisted on making the “I love you” with the other hand, though, because like I told you, she’s a hippie.)
Elizabeth says she grew up in a commune in the desert. They raised llamas and chickens there. They made all their own clothes, and if anyone there used violence on each other, they got shut in the fruit cellar overnight. Elizabeth left, she says, because it was boring. No one to talk to except her brothers—she was the only girl—and she wasn’t allowed to smoke cigarettes or wear makeup and she had to read the Bible from cover to cover. I understand what Elizabeth was saying, but except for all those boys, it sounds like a perfect life to me. The Gideon compound, the commune is called. Just like the name on the cover of that motel Bible I read, back in West Covina, before I’d ever killed a man. It has to be some kind of sign.
Thirty
Robin
Just three days earlier, Santa Rosa High School’s golden couple had been crowned king and queen of the prom. Now, the lifeless bodies of Carrie Masters and Brian Griggs lay handcuffed together in a vacant lot, both shot in the back of the head execution style. In one of life’s cruelest ironies, the bleak, overgrown plot of land was just eight miles away from the school where Brian and Carrie had fallen in love, most likely oblivious to a quiet, sullen freshman by the name of April Cooper.
Had the hair-trigger temper of April’s lover Gabriel Allen LeRoy gotten the best of him yet again? Or had it been April herself who had done the brutal deed? Experts speculate that April Cooper trained the gun on the terrified teens as LeRoy bound them, using the handcuffs they’d stolen from Officer Neil Nelligan. And when she caught LeRoy ogling beautiful Carrie, the lethal wallflower flew into a jealous rage, murdering the angel-faced cheerleader and her adoring boyfriend in quick succession as her lover watched, aroused.
ROBIN SHOOK HERhead at the article on her screen—the cheesiest and most offensive one yet, from a 1979 issue of aTrue Detectiveknockoff calledCrime Stoppersthat some murder nerd had postedon Reddit. It wasn’t the best way to use her downtime on her first day back at work, but Robin couldn’t control it, the urge to search for information on the couple that had driven Quentin Garrison to kill her father.
He was all over the news now, Quentin—the “true-crime-podcaster-turned-true-crime-subject” angle impossible to resist. Leaving Grand Central Station on her way to work, Robin had seen Quentin’s bespectacled young face on the cover of both theDaily Newsand thePost. On one of them, the headline had read,“SERIAL” KILLER. The other had included a still from that cheesy old TV movie her mother had refused to let her watch—actress April and actor Gabriel aiming pistols at the camera—accompanied by a caption block titled,Killer Quentin’s Final Podcast. Lower on the front page had been a picture of “the victim.” Dad. No picture of Robin’s mother, thankfully. Though she guessed that was only a matter of time. Mom was at her house, where she’d agreed to spend “one night only, for your sake” the previous afternoon after her early release from the hospital. There was a police detail outside their place, a cadre of armed guards watching her nervous mother—a necessary evil.
At this point, there had to be at least a few intrepid reporters thrown into the mix, who had learned Mom was staying at Robin’s. She imagined them camped at the foot of her driveway, phones poised, waiting for shooting survivor Renee Bloom to go out for a breath of fresh air. Maybe the cops would scare them off.
Robin’s screen beeped—an incoming email to her work address, the sender (somebody from theNational Enquirer) and subject (Quentin Garrison) flashing briefly. This had happened so many times today already, she was starting to think she was being overly optimistic in her belief that there were just a few reporters outside her house rather than dozens. Poor Mom.
At least Quentin’s mother wasn’t alive to see this—her son in the lead role of psycho killer. As a journalist, Robin found it troubling how quickly the press had jumped on Quentin Garrison, bending and molding him into something that had to be so much simpler than who he was. She wondered if Quentin had seen the newspapers wherever he was. And as a daughter, she had to admit, she hoped he had. She couldn’t find it in her to fret too much over inaccurate press coverage when it came to the man who’d murdered her father. But she did feel sorry for the people in his life who had trusted him. His friends. That handsome husband. Had they known he’d just implode?
Robin’s phone extension buzzed. Eileen, again. “You okay, sweetie?” she said for probably the tenth time today—a real achievement considering it was only 11:00A.M.
Robin quit out of the article as though Eileen could see her screen. “Fine,” she said. “Just coming up with column ideas.”
Eileen said, “How do you feel about the idea of writing a personal essay?”
Robin’s jaw tightened. Last night, she and Eric had sat bolt upright in bed, awakened by a scream. Robin had hurried into the guest room to find Mom still asleep, thrashing and mumbling. She’d tried to wake her.Mom?she’d said.You’re having a nightmare.
But Renee had stayed trapped in the dream.Put it out, her mother had said in a rough, unfamiliar voice, her eyelids fluttering open and shut.Put out the motherfucking fire.Her whole life up until that moment, Robin had never once heard Renee swear.
Some personal essay that would be.
“I’ll think about it,” Robin said.