She knew what Jude was thinking. She could hear his thoughts.
If Jude believed that I could bring Claire back from the dead, Claire who was mangled and crushed to pieces, who was buried in a closed casket in Rhode Island under six feet of earth, he was absolutely detached from reality. Completely delusional.
The only way out of this would be to act like his delusion was real.
“Jude,” I said, my voice pleading. Practiced. “I want to bring Claire back. Tell me how to bring her back.”
The muscles in his face twitched. “You have to be motivated,” he said mechanically. Then smacked Stella again. Hard.
The muscles in Noah’s arms went rigid, tense beneath my grip.
Jude’s eyes raked over Noah and a smile formed on his lips. “Yes, join us,” he said to him. “You can help.”
Something changed in Noah, then. He relaxed. “And how, precisely, would I do that?” His voice had become more than just blank. It was bored.
Stella coughed. Bowed to the ground, spat blood on the sand. Then looked up at me, her stare direct. “You have to be scared,” she said to me. “If you’re afraid enough, he thinks, you’ll do it.”
So Jude did want me afraid. Everything he did was designed to terrify me. Showing up at the police station so I would know he was alive. Stealing Daniel’s key so he could come and go whenever he wanted, so he could take pictures of me while I slept, so he could move my things around, like the doll, and I would know he had been there, violating the place I should have felt safe.
He killed the cat and told me why with a message in blood.
But that wasn’t enough. He didn’t want me to feel safe anywhere, with anyone. Not with my father—so he nearly ran us off the road. And not at Horizons—so he used Phoebe to scare me. He gave her the picture and had her scratch out my eyes, he wrote that note and had her deliver it. He played me like an instrument and used Phoebe like a tool, to unsettle me, to push me, to make me afraid when he couldn’t be around to do it himself.
I thought it was all for revenge. For Claire. To punish me for what I’d done to her and to him. And no doubt that was part of it. But in his mind, it was also a means to an end.
An end I couldn’t possibly deliver.
I had to be motivated, he said. If I was afraid enough I’d do it, he thought.
But I was afraid. I was terrified. And Claire was still never going to come back.
I didn’t know how to pretend otherwise anymore. “Jude,” I said. “I swear, I would do it if I could. I’m sorry.”
He cocked his head at me. Studied me. “You’re not sorry,” he said plainly. “But you will be.”
Then, in a movement so sudden I almost couldn’t make sense of it, he grabbed a fistful of Stella’s thick curls, lifting her up and bending her back at once.
Megan screamed. Jamie looked away. Adam made a surprised noise.
Noah was on edge again, I could feel it. But he didn’t move from my side.
I was seething. “You think if you torture her, I’ll bring Claire back?” I asked, my voice rising in fury. “If I could do it I’d have done it already—”
Jude let Stella fall back to her knees. He looked down at her.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
A smile crept across Jude’s mouth.
The way she sounded, the way he smiled, set my nerves on fire. “What?”
Jude looked up at me, and his grin grew wider. “Tell them,” he said to Stella. When she didn’t speak, he tugged on her hair. “Tell them.”
“She—” Stella screwed up her face, and her eyes flicked to Jude as he crouched beside her. “She knew,” Stella whispered, looking straight at him. “Jude’s part of it. She knew—oh my God, she knew, about all of us, the whole time—he’s part of it, she promised him you’d bring Claire back if he brought you here, she told him how to make you do it, and she left the rest of us here to see what you would do, oh God—”
“She?” Jamie whispered.
“Kells,” Noah said.
“Jude’s part of it?” I asked, my voice brittle and breaking. “He’s part of what?”
What was he? What were we?
“I can’t hear,” Stella wailed, “there are too many voices!” Then Stella whispered and mumbled; I could only catch one word. It sounded like “insurance.”
“How do we get out?” I asked quickly. That was what I needed to know, before Stella lost it. How to get out.
“You can’t,” Stella moaned.
“I was let in,” Jude said calmly.
I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest.
Dr. Kells had let Jude in. The adults were all gone. There was no one to help us, no one who would come.
“He killed Phoebe,” Stella said, her shoulders shaking. “But it looks like you did it, Mara—that’s what they’re going to say. They need you—”
Jude slapped her cheek. Stella sucked her full lips into her mouth and looked down at the sand. She wasn’t going to say anything else.