That stripe of heat went up the back of Bex’s neck once more. “Yeah…”
“You’re very popular today, Ms. Andrews.” The secretary leaned over and signed the bottom of the hall pass with a big, squiggly flourish. Bex could read the woman’s name as Mrs. Snowbury. “You have a message.”
Bex raised her eyebrows. “I do?”
Mrs. Snowbury produced another square of paper. “A gentleman called and asked if you were a student here. Naturally, we couldn’t give him that kind of information but he did leave a number.” She handed over the pink hall pass and the phone message, and Bex stared at them like they were about to bite her.
“He said his name was Brewster, I think. Or Schuster. It was a little hard to hear. The connection wasn’t so good. We normally don’t take messages for students, but it was slow and your file shows you’ve recently transferred so I thought…”
Bex couldn’t hear if Mrs. Snowbury had finished talking because her heart was clanging like a fire bell. Who knew she was here? Who knew she was Bex Andrews? Why would anyone call the school looking for her?
She snatched the notes from Mrs. Snowbury’s outstretched hand and may have muttered a thanks or an apology. She pushed out through the administration doors and speed walked in the direction of the nearest girls’ room, a bead of sweat rolling down the middle of her back.
“Hey, beautiful, I hope you’re rushing toward me.” Trevor was in the hallway, a lazy smile on his full lips that should have made Bex swoon. He opened his arms and Bex dutifully hugged him, her whole body stiff and humming, focused on the man in the sedan, the Raleigh-area phone call, and now someone trying to contact her at school.
“You okay?”
“I just… I… No, I’m not feeling so hot. Girls’ room.” She pointed over Trevor’s shoulder.
He looked stricken. “Do you want me to wait for you? I can walk you to the nurse.”
Bex shook her head. “No thanks. Just…excuse me.” She pushed past him and yanked open the girls’ room door, letting out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding when a wisp of cool air washed over her face. The bathroom was blessedly empty, the only sound the gentle whoosh of the breeze coming from the bank of open windows. Bex found a stall and went in.
What the hell is going on?
Her head was swimming with memories, dream images, things she’d made up. It was a consummate mess, and every image just ratcheted her anxiety up more. She stared at the note in her lap. The paper was already soft from having been balled up in her sweaty palm, and Mrs. Snowbury’s swirly cursive message was starting to bleed.
Brewster/Schuster? For Bex Andrews. Please return call at earliest convenience: 919–555–0512.
Raleigh.
“I don’t even know anyone named Brewster or Schuster,” Bex muttered. Maybe a reporter?
She thought back to the slew that had knocked on her door. It had seemed like hundreds at first, before the police made them stand back on the sidewalk. When the arraignment happened, there were fewer, most doing their harassing and postulating from the courthouse steps. The reporters were mercifully glued to the hallways of the hall of justice during her father’s pretrial hearing, gasping when Jackson Reimer pleaded not guilty, all their focus on him. It wasn’t until that night when news broke that Reimer had slipped custody that the cameras turned back to Beth Anne, back to her grandmother—the glare of camera lights flooding the living room from their station on the front lawn, the red record lights, the pointing fingers and hurled accusations.
Bex was going to be sick.
She whirled around, grabbing the sides of the toilet while her stomach rolled over itself.
What day is it? What day is it?
At one time, the dates of every one of her father’s crimes were imprinted in Bex’s mind. She knew the women’s names and their birth dates too, and she carried around guilt that made her shoulders sag and alternated her thoughts between the poor women who lost their lives at her father’s hand and the tiny, niggling possibility that her father was innocent. Either way, Bex had worked long and hard to erase those memories from her mind.
“September sixteenth. Melanie Harris.”
Melanie had been seventeen. She had blue eyes and, in her graduation picture, a wide smile that showed off two crooked front teeth. She had been a tennis player and worked at the sports club where Bex’s father played racquetball. She had gone missing on September twelfth, her naked, destroyed body found by a Food Lion clerk on the sixteenth. Melanie had been placed in her car, which was parked in the grocery store lot, her purpled, warped hands wrapped around the steering wheel.