I roll my hand impatiently, like I want her to continue.
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” she says. “You wouldn’t tell us anything. Lang said you were in shock. We took you to the hospital and they checked you out. Nobody had … done anything … or hurt you—”
“No evidence of any assault,” I say, “sexual or otherwise.”
“No, nothing like that,” she says. “Just this.”
She takes my hand, turns it over, palm up, and traces the small scar on my hand, about an inch long.
“You had that cut on your hand.”
“That’s how I got that cut?” I look at Chloe. “Mom always said I got it chopping a tomato when I was little.”
Chloe nods. “Sometimes we tell our children little white lies to protect them,” she says. “Anyway, your family left the island that day and never came back to the Hamptons. They asked you about it for a while afterward. Days, weeks. But you wouldn’t talk about it. Or couldn’t. And then … life went on. Finally, they just dropped it. The nightmare with a happy ending.”
I don’t remember any of this. Or at least, I thought I didn’t remember.
“I was at the beach the whole time?”
Chloe looks at me like she’s unsure of the answer.
“For God’s sake, Chloe, speak.”
She breathes out. “No. That’s the thing. The spot where they found you—I had personally looked there with your mother. It was one of the first places we checked. I’m sure of it. You weren’t there at first.”
“So I wasn’t at the beach, and then seven hours later, I was.”
She nods.
“But you don’t know where I was for those seven hours.”
She shakes her head, her expression grim. “Seven hours of hell.”
I look over her shoulder at Lang’s house, now empty, soon to be sold to a young couple with a baby. A new life in a new town. New memories, new dreams.
“Get in the car,” I say.
“Jenna—”
“Get in the car, Chloe.”
“Why?”
“You’re going to show me.”
The drive doesn’t take long. She directs me, but I’m beyond being surprised at this point. There are any number of roads that lead to the sweeping beach, but I know which one before she says it.
I drive down Ocean Drive and park in the parking lot and make her get out and walk onto the beach until she shows me the exact spot where I was found.
“Right here,” she says. “I’ll never forget the sound your mother made when she saw you sitting here.”
Those nightmares—they aren’t random spooky dreams. They aren’t some glimpse into the future. They aren’t telepathic visions of other victims’ experiences.
They’re my memories. Repressed memories.
I look out over the ocean, then turn my back to it, looking north.
Looking at the second house from the end, looming over the coastline. The house at 7 Ocean Drive. The Gothic facade, the spears aimed at the sky.
The memories, the flashbacks are at their most intense when I’m inside that house. Paralyzing panic attacks, every time I set foot inside that mansion.
That’s where I was for seven hours, when I was a little girl.
I was inside the Murder House.
80
MY CAR BUMPS violently over the rough road, sending my head banging against the roof. I stop on the shoulder, not wanting to pull into his driveway—not wanting to announce myself in advance.
I remember you now, he said to me when I accosted him at the cemetery.
I find his driveway, walk up to the front porch, and reach the door.
“Open up, Aiden!” Pounding the door so hard that my knuckles start to bleed.
Nothing.
You shouldn’t have come back, he said to me when he caught me looking into his basement.
My chest heaving, my emotions skittering about, I move to the window closest to the front door and look inside.
The window is open, a screen letting in fresh air. I lean in, kick the screen off, push it into the house, and get one leg and my body through the window.
Just as Aiden is rushing past me, panic on his face.
He cries out in surprise and tries to avoid me, but I grab hold of his arm, getting a poor grip, enough to spin him slightly before he wrests his arm free. I’m off balance, my back leg just coming through the open window, and I fall to the floor as he continues to run.
“What did you do to me?” I shout as I get to my feet and race after him.
He reaches a door—looks like a bedroom door—and opens it and closes it quickly. I reach it a moment later, just as I hear the click of the dead bolt.
I pound on the door.
“What did you do to me? What did you do to me when I was a little girl?”
Punching the door like it’s his face, the blood from my knuckles smeared across the white wood.
I rear back and give the door a kick. An interior door, not as substantial as an outside door. And it’s been a while, but once upon a time when I was training, I had a pretty good kick.