“You two here again?” The blond waitress had her hand on her hip and her lips pursed, but the edges curled up into a provocative smile.
“I guess this is kind of like our place,” her father said, talking to the waitress over Beth Anne’s head.
“Our place!” Beth Anne repeated, helping herself to one of the coffee-stained menus.
She hadn’t seen a Black Bear Diner menu in ten years, but the one in her hands was authentic, coffee stained. It smelled vaguely of maple syrup and had that sweet pancake-batter smell. It was old and crisp, the ink smeared and faded. She had no idea how it came to be on her desk, in her room.
She thought again of the ransacked house, the tortured look on Denise’s face.
Detective Schuster.
The yellowed newspaper clipping.
“Our place,” Bex muttered, her blood going ice-cold.
Twenty-Two
Bex and her father were back at the Black Bear Diner. She was still seventeen but dressed in the heavy, navy-blue dress that she always wore when her father took her out. Bex looked at her feet and saw her folded, lace ankle socks and Mary Janes.
“You never could sit still, Beth Anne.”
Her father shook his head, and Bex could see that he hadn’t aged at all. The planes of his face were still smooth, still relaxed back into that charming smile. His eyes crinkled at the corners as he looked down at the paper in Bex’s hands.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
He jerked his chin toward the newspaper and Bex looked down, recognizing the article that Schuster had handed her.
“Nice to see you two again. Ready to order?”
Bex’s breath lobbed in her chest when she looked up at the waitress. It was the same woman who always waited on them, but her skin was ash gray and puckered. Her milky, unseeing eyes gaped in too-big hollows. Dirt and blood were caked in her ear and along her hairline. Bex tried to avert her eyes but they were drawn to the woman’s hands, to her fingers wrapped around the pencil. Her fingernails were filthy—the few that remained—jagged and broken. The nail hung from her middle finger, and her ring finger was gone.
Bex tried to get out of the booth, but her feet no longer touched the floor. She clawed at the vinyl seat, but the waitress cocked her head and smiled a gruesome, skeletal smile.
“Leaving so soon?”
Bex tried to scream but only a soundless puff of air came from between her parted lips. The woman in the booth behind them turned and smiled. She had the same zombie-ish look as she pursed her greasy, black lips and pressed a broken, swollen index finger against her lips and swung her head.
“No, no, no,” she said softly. When she shifted, Bex could see that she was the woman with the scarf and she was wearing it now. But as the woman shook her head, Bex could see that the scarf was covering three thick grooves carved into her neck. The blood was glossy; it bubbled and looked fresh.
“Daddy!” The voice that came from Bex was not her own. It was desperate and breathy, childlike.
Another woman strolled into the diner, her short denim shorts revealing elegantly long, tanned legs. She wore a half shirt and a belly ring, her blond hair flitting around her shoulders. She wasn’t ashy and gray like the others, but her smile was just as gruesome, just as horrifying. She pressed her finger to her bluing lips and shook her head, the action making the silver heart locket around her neck bobble and catch the light.
“Darla!”
Bex’s T-shirt was soaked. So was the sheet wrapped around her. Her hair was wet and matted against her forehead and she shivered.
“Oh my God.” She looked around, taking in her mint-green bedspread, the soothing pale walls, the furniture she had come to recognize as “hers.” She was safe. She was home.
The sunlight started to knife its way through the blinds and Bex threw open the window, staring at the scene outside: a flat driveway. A housing subdivision. Perfectly manicured and cultivated lawns and native plants and chunks of ocean grasses. She was almost five hundred miles from where the police had last seen her father, but now she saw him in every clump of shrubbery, behind every tree. Every sigh of the wind was him, his hot breath on the back of her neck, his finger pressed against his lips reminding her to stay silent.
Bex took the hottest shower she could stand, but she was still shaking when she got out.
? ? ?
It was midmorning when Detective Schuster called Bex. She watched the phone vibrate its way across her desk, picking it up on the fourth ring. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to the detective—but she wasn’t sure she had a choice. Either way, she didn’t want Michael or Denise to hear her phone ringing and come check on her. She didn’t want this to be her life.
“Hello?”
Detective Schuster’s voice wasn’t jovial or light. He was all business right from the get-go. “Have you considered what we talked about?”
What you talked about? Bex wanted to scream.