You’re a traitor.
Michael and Denise’s bedroom door was open a crack and Bex racked her mind, trying to remember if that was the way they always left it at night. Or did they close it, and someone had gone in and…
Bex’s heart lodged in her throat.
Blood pulsed through her ears.
She pushed open the door with a single, trembling hand, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the near-pitch-darkness. She didn’t dare call their names. She couldn’t turn on the light, that old urban legend about killers hiding in the darkness under the bed bearing down on her.
Bex could see them then, Michael and Denise, their bodies outlined under the sheet. She stood in the doorway, watching them breathe, needing to make sure that their chests rose and fell rhythmically, even while she felt as if she was betraying her father and Denise and Michael all at once.
I don’t want to be here, Bex thought. I don’t want to do this. She had already changed her name and her looks and moved across the state. She was sure now that anywhere she went, Beth Anne Reimer and the Wife Collector would follow her. For Bex, there was no way out.
She stepped out of the doorway slowly, carefully pulling the door closed as she did. Bex let out a long breath and took another, stepping into her own room and doing a cursory scan. She smacked the lid of the laptop shut and was about to scold herself for letting her eyes play tricks and her imagination run away with her when a slight breeze pulled the edge of one of her curtains. Her breath hitched when she noticed the shoes. Big, heavy boots with rounded toes. Jeans with dirty, fraying hems pooling around the ankles.
Beth Anne was seven years old, and for the first time she could remember—maybe for the first time in her whole life—there was a blanket of cottony white snow on the ground. It was thin but it was there, delicate flakes clinging to the bare branches of the half-dead dogwood in the front yard, its gnarled branches made elegant by the glistening snow.
“Jacket on. And SHOES!” Beth Anne heard her gran trill.
Beth Anne was still in her nightgown. It was warm, flannel, the wrists gathered and puckered, a peplum around her ankles. Her father’s boots were in the hallway, rounded toes pointed toward the door. She slid her stockinged feet into the giant, clunky things, the tops reaching nearly to her knees. Beth Anne picked up one foot, then the other, each boot as heavy as a melon, but they stomped great tracks in the snow. Hard edged, defined.
“What in Sam heck are you doing out there in my good boots, little girl?”
Her father was framed in the doorway, hands on hips, eyes narrowed, but a hint of a smile on his lips.
“I’m playing a game!” Beth Anne yelled back.
“You don’t know any games!”
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. “I made it up!”
“You’re making tracks. In my shoes.”
He did a high-kneed jaunt out into the snow, swiping the girl up and nuzzling her close. “You made it look like I walked around this place all silly. Tracks here and tracks there.”
Beth Anne giggled, waggling her feet in the boots. Her father leaned in close. “That’s a good girl. They’ll never find me with tracks like that!”
“You like my game, Daddy?”
“It’s my game, Bethy. I make them up. I make them all up.”
Bex woke like a drowning woman breaking the surface of water: panicked, coughing, gasping for breath. Her whole body seemed to move in slow motion, that dreamlike state between dreaming and waking up where you have to move, have to run, or whatever was chasing you in your nightmare will cross over into your waking life. She blinked at the computer in front of her, the screen gone black.
The curtains. The boots.
Bex was still sitting at her desk, arms thrown in front of her, but her entire body was tense, a coiled wire. She forced herself to turn around before he approached her, before he crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder, dragging her back to the web page or to Darla’s dump site or into one of the horrible things his “fans” suggested.
Finally Bex forced herself to turn around, her fingers fumbling over the desk, looking for something to swing.
This is my dad. This is a monster. A criminal, a joke, a dream, my mind playing tricks on me.
She grabbed a handful of Bic pens and slowly crossed the room, each silent step on the carpet like a screaming beacon for evil to come get her. She reached out her arm, her fingers playing in the lacy edge of the curtain, her hand with the pens pulled back and ready to stab. She yanked the curtain open.
There was nothing there.
There is nothing there!
“Oh God,” Bex murmured, pressing her fingers against her temples. “I’m going crazy. Seeing things. I’m absolutely going crazy.”
That snowy day in Raleigh crashed back on Bex. It wasn’t the boots. It was the game. “It’s my game, Bethy. I make them up. I make them all up.”