He leaned closer. “Why not?”
She said nothing. She fought his grip on her wrist, and he gently retaliated with his other hand, pressing his nail gun against her belly. His knuckle on the trigger. Something about the thing’s color — a sickening Crayola-orange — made it look like an oversized child’s toy.
He repeated himself, his hot breath tingling on her neck: “Why not, Darbs?”
“I was . . . I was kind of an awful daughter.” Her voice trembled but she steadied herself. Then, like a levee breaking, it all came out: “I took advantage of her. I manipulated her. I called her horrible things. I stole her car once, with a shoelace. I’d leave, for days at a time, without telling her where I’d gone or who I was out with. I must have given her ulcers. When I . . . when I left for college, we didn’t even say goodbye. I just got in my Honda and drove to Boulder. I stole a bottle of her gin from the cabinet on my way out.”
She remembered drinking it alone in her dorm room. The sour burn in her throat, under a bleak wallpaper of stranger’s graves, of names and birthdates drawn in charcoal shadows of crayon and wax.
Ashley nodded, sniffing her hair. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“I am.”
“You’re lying—”
“I mean it,” he said. “I’m genuinely sorry for your loss.”
“I wouldn’t be,” Darby said through her teeth. “If it was your mom.”
She felt more tears coming, stinging her irritated eyes, but she fought them. She couldn’t start now. That would come later. Later, later, later. After the cops kicked down the door and raked Ashley and Lars with bullets, after Sandi was handcuffed, when Darby and Jay were safe in an ambulance with wool blankets draped over their shoulders. Then, and only then, could she properly grieve.
Ashley furrowed his brow. “How’d you steal a car with a shoelace?”
She didn’t answer. It was an unremarkable story. Her mom’s Subaru had been broken into once before, and the dumbass thief had mangled the ignition with a screwdriver trying to hotwire it. It took two keys — one for the door and one for the ignition. Darby had acquired one, but not the other.
You rotten little bitch, her mom had said from the porch, watching her own Subaru pull into the driveway at 3 a.m.
You rotten little bitch.
“And . . .” Ashley put it together. “That’s how you broke into our van, huh?”
She nodded, and another tear hit the floor.
“Wow. It’s like tonight was meant to be.” He grinned again. “I’ve always believed things happen for a reason, if that’s any consolation.”
It wasn’t.
Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea. But to Darby, her mother had always been an idea. Somehow, after eighteen years of living in the same tiny two-bedroom house in Provo, eating the same food, watching the same television, sitting on the same sofa, she’d never truly known who Maya Thorne was. Not as a human being. Certainly not as the person she would have been, had Darby never existed. Had she really just been the flu.
Oh God, Mom, I’m sorry.
She almost broke. But she couldn’t — not in front of him. So it stuck thickly in her chest like a wet, knotted towel, a dull ache in her soul.
I’m so sorry for everything—
Ashley inspected her for another long moment. Another thoughtful breath. The dense odor of his sweat. She heard his tongue move behind his lips, like he was wrestling with words he couldn’t quite say. When he finally did speak again, his voice was different, overcome by some emotion she couldn’t identify: “I wish you were my girlfriend, Darby.”
She said nothing.
“I wish, so badly, that you and I . . . that we’d met under different circumstances. This, all this, isn’t me. Okay? I’m not evil. I don’t have a criminal record. I’ve never hurt anyone before tonight. I don’t even drink or smoke. I’m just a business owner who got involved in a little thing that went south, and now I have to clean up this mess in order to protect my brother. Understand? And you’re getting in the way of that. So I’m asking again, before it gets ugly — where are my keys?”
She stared back, rock-hard, giving nothing.
Over Ashley’s shoulder, she could see the clock. The characters on it. Orange Garfield still offering those roses to pink Arlene. Her blurry eyes focused on the minute hand — almost vertical now. 4:22 a.m.
Five minutes until the cops arrived.
“Did you hear me, Ashley?” Sandi stood up. “Are you having a psychotic episode? Keys or no keys, it’s over. We’re all going to prison.”
“No. We’re not.”
“How do you figure?”
Ashley didn’t answer. Instead, his dark silhouette turned back to Darby, and his grip on her wrist changed. His fingers walked over her skin like clammy octopus tentacles, rearranging themselves around her, tightening. And he lifted her hand up, up, sliding against the wall . . .
Sandi raised her voice. “What are you doing to her?”
Darby craned her neck to see — he was holding her right hand against the supply closet door. Right up against the door’s hinge. Pressing her fingertips flush against the golden jaws, where the brass was spotted with old lubricant and brown cavities of rust. She saw her pinkie fingernail, painted crackle-blue, her vulnerable flesh seated in there like a tiny head in a guillotine.
Five minutes.
She looked back at Ashley, her gut twisting with panic.
He had the nail gun tucked in his armpit now, leaning to grasp the doorknob with his free hand. “You might not remember this, Darbs, but earlier tonight, you made fun of me for my phobia of door hinges. Remember that? Remember what you called me?”
She closed her eyes, squeezing acidic tears, wishing it would all go away—
“Yeah, oops, huh?”
—But it was real. It was all really happening, right now, and it could never be undone, and her artist’s fingers were about to be crushed by unsympathetic metal.
Sandi gasped. “Jesus Christ, Ashley—”
“Don’t do it,” Jay begged, fighting Lars. “Please, don’t—”
But the tall shadow of Ashley Garver wasn’t listening. It leaned in close to Darby, licking its lips, and she smelled something sweetly bacterial, fetid, like decaying meat. “You’re giving me no choice. If you tell me, I promise I won’t hurt you, okay? You have my word. Where. Are. My. Keys?”
Fiveminutes—fiveminutes—fiveminutes—
She forced herself to open her eyes, to blink away the tears, to steady her gulped breaths, to look the monster in its green eyes. She couldn’t take the bait. She couldn’t submit and play this game, because the instant he knew where his keychain was, he’d kill her. There was no other option. Ashley Garver was many, many things, but above all else, he was a pathological liar.