DADDY’S HOME.
They burned into her retinas, into her mind, and paralyzed her. All around Bex, lockers slammed and kids shuffled down the halls, the din of doors opening and closing and chatter and overhead announcements that the last bus was leaving all morphing into one crashing whoosh that swelled in her ears and slammed through her mind.
Daddy’s home.
Somehow, Bex turned. Somehow, she scanned the hall and the few students left. No one acknowledged her. No one snickered behind their hands or tried to hide a sinister smile, responsible for this sick joke.
Daddy’s home.
She tried to breathe but it was like she couldn’t remember how. Her chest tightened, her head pounded, and her vision blurred.
Just a joke.
It had to be.
She was nine years old, and her grandmother had dropped her off at vacation bible school at Our Lady of Grace out in High Point. It was a glorious summer day, the kind that whitewashed everything and prickled your shoulders and hung on in memories as summer perfection. Her grandmother had plaited Beth Anne’s hair into two long braids that hung down her back, nearly to her waist, the white blond almost blending into her pale cotton tank top. Sue Reynolds was holding her hand.
Sue Reynolds had the soft-edged accent of her Georgia home. It was her first summer in North Carolina, visiting her grandparents, and when they had dropped her off in their beaten-up Coup de Ville with the mismatched hubcaps, the other kids had stuck their tongues out at Sue, had turned their backs. Not Beth Anne.
Beth Anne sat silently next to Sue and held out half her sandwich. Sue took it without looking at her, the way misfits did, and chewed carefully, still quiet. When she and Beth Anne finished their last bites simultaneously—dumping the soggy crusts in the grass for the ducks—they smiled shyly. Sue found Beth Anne’s hand.
“Do you like ponies?” she whispered.
Beth Anne was about to answer that she did, but a whistle cut through the humid-heavy air and distracted her. That first rock hit Beth Anne in the temple, shooting a starburst of pain through her head. She had to blink several times to get her vision to clear, and when it did, she saw the kids in front of the church, a half dozen of them with narrowed eyes and angry, wicked grins.
“Killer!” A redheaded boy standing on the bottom step of the church porch cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Killer!”
Another boy, one step down from the first, selected another rock, his arm reeling back for the throw.
“She’ll kill you!” a third kid yelled.
Sue looked at Beth Anne, eyes wide, and broke her hold to protect her head as a handful of pebbles rained down on them.
“Hey, new girl.” A brunette Beth Anne had never seen before ran toward them. “Stay away from her. She’s a psycho. Her daddy murders mommies and eats them!”
Another rock came sailing from the church, this one hitting Sue square in the chest. The girl looked at the dirty mark it left on her T-shirt and then at Beth Anne as if she was the one who put it there. And in a way, she was.
“Come on!” The brown-haired girl snatched Sue’s wrist and pulled her up, tugging her into a run. “You can’t play with her,” the girl admonished. “No one can. She’s bad like her daddy.”
The taunts of the kids—killer, murderer, psycho—still rang in Bex’s ears, still hung in her head. The postcard trembled between her fingers, the fading image she still held of her father sharpening in her mind. Pale complexion. Larger-than-life stature. Kind eyes.
She shoved the postcard deep in her backpack, smashing her books on top of it.
Bex Andrews didn’t have a father.
It was only three o’clock, but the thick haze of gray fog made it look later and Bex shivered at the damp chill. School had let out less than ten minutes before, but the grounds were emptying at record speed as kids crossed the street en masse and a long line of SUVs and minivans snaked through the front lot, collecting kids and disappearing into traffic.
“Bexy!”
Bex whirled at the loud voice and waved at Laney who was hanging out the driver’s side window of a VW Bug painted a hideous fluorescent green that shone through the fog. Bex could see a spray of silk daisies wobbling on the dashboard and something with a crystal hanging from the rearview mirror. Even though Bex barely knew her, the whole car seemed to scream “Laney.” Chelsea was in the passenger’s seat, staring at her cell phone, when Bex jogged over.
“Hey, you need a ride?” Laney asked.
“Oh.” Bex was stunned, still certain that somehow the week had been a colossal joke that she was the unwitting butt of, that the postcard was simply the start of her old life chipping away at her new one.
“You don’t even know where she lives,” Chelsea said, snapping her gum.