She must have been too tired to think, or to register that anything appeared off or out of place. The days had been endless since murder mayhem began, and Ginny wanted so much for life to get back to normal, to get back to class and a regular schedule, and to figure out whether she and Betsy would have a shared afternoon off for Oprah and popcorn for another semester.
Ginny could have been halfway up the stairs before she registered that the hall light was on. Did she peer up at it and notice a few dead moths in the dome of frosted glass, like Betsy had, and realize that she had never seen it illuminated? Did she see how the yellowish light cast strange shadows down the carpeted stairs, showing stains she’d never seen before and odd scuffs and marks on the white paint of the walls? Did she pause at the top of the stairwell, sensing his presence? It would have taken a fraction of a second for the adrenaline to start coursing through her body and send the message to flee. Did the angle of the opening of the bedroom door give her any clues? Did anything inside the apartment, any inanimate object pulsate or quiver, like the door of her bedroom, mute and wooden but wailing like a siren in its eerie stillness?
Everything in Betsy’s vision up to that point plays out roughly the same way, no matter how many times she reviewed it in her head. But there were alternate endings, each playing out differently according to Betsy’s state of mind. In one version, Ginny makes it two steps down the stairwell before she slips and knocks noisily into the wall. That’s when Betsy arrives at the front door and hears the commotion inside. Ginny races down the rest of the stairs and the two friends run down the hill to safety.
In another version, Ginny lands hard on her ass on the fourth stair as the bedroom door flings open and the knob strikes the drywall in her room with a thud. Behind her, she hears the quick, heavy steps of work boots across the creaky floor. To her left, she sees a black blur, an arm swinging around to knock her head against the railing. He, the he she was so certain wouldn’t be waiting for her, slaps tape over her mouth and part of one nostril and presses it, hard, against her skin. He hooks his right elbow under her armpit and drags her back up the stairs, into the room, and onto the bed. Her right temple, again, stings from the blow, and her pulse roars in her ears. She strains her eyes to focus on the figure before her, silhouetted by the hall light. Then she sees the knife, and feels him press the weight of his body against hers. That’s when Betsy barges into the room with the golf club they keep in the hall closet downstairs, and she swings it hard enough that it makes a fleshy thudding sound as it lands on his skull, and the two of them are free. But in the most persistent version, the one that creeps back into her consciousness again and again, Betsy shows up in time, but she does nothing. Nothing at all. Then Ginny dies.
“I’m going to pull this tape off now if you promise not to scream. If you scream, you’re dead,” he growls in her ear. “This knife here,” he says, as he cut off her shirt, “would cut through you like warm butter. You hear me? Not a word. You scream, you fight, and that’s the end of you.”
Ginny nods furiously as he binds her wrists together and forces her arms over her head. Her body shakes uncontrollably.
“You let me do what I want and, honey, you can live,” he says, negotiating with her like he claims he did with all of his victims, plying her with lies. “You can go on your way, flipping your hair, laughing at guys like me, teasing guys like me.”
Her shorts were off now, and he’s at her underpants. She heard him fumble with his buckle. He reaches up to stroke her face and then pulls, hard, ripping the tape from her mouth. Her head reels backward from the pain.
“Somebody’s walking through that door any second now,” Betsy can hear Ginny saying the words before she spits in his face. “You’ll never get away with this. My friend’s going to walk in that door any minute, and you’re going to be done, do you understand? You’re never going to get away with this. You’re going to rot in prison and then in hell and I will not see you there.”
Maybe she reaches for his ear, as Caroline said. Thirty pounds of pressure. I could rip his ear off with my hand.
Downstairs, a key turns the lock of the front door. He clasps his hand over Ginny’s mouth and threatens to slit her throat if she screams. She struggles against his weight, jamming her knees and her elbows in the softest spots she can find.
They hear someone downstairs. McRae shifts his weight to the edge of the bed and a creaky floorboard gives way. Then they hear the crash of a chair, the clamber of footsteps down the hall, and the slam of the front door.
Then Betsy knows how the story ends. Ginny feels pressure on her chest, a hot sear of pain, a tearing sound coming from deep inside.
This isn’t real, she thinks, as she stares at the blank, white expanse of her ceiling. This can’t be real.
And the room around her starts to fade into what feels like a dream, and Betsy is falling backward.