False Idols: A Dark College Romance, page 3
I hold the phone so hard that the plastic creaks in my hand. “I-I’m at home and she’s on the trail. She’s dead. Please hurry, you have to come or he’s going to kill me too!”
“Stay calm. Is your home a safe location?”
I nod, but then remember she can’t see me, so I answer her. “Yes, I’m safe now. But he’s coming and-” I turn in time to see my mom make a run for the cord, she’s going to try and yank it out of the wall. “Mommy, no! Don’t!” I have to force my body between her and the cord to stop her from getting a hand on it.
“Hang up the phone, Nevaeh!” My mom screams at me. She slaps me, but I don’t let go of the phone.
“Who is after you? Who else is there with you?”
“My mom is here and-and we’re scared,” I blurt out. I don’t know how else to explain my mom beating on me while I’m on the phone with the 911 operator. Shame wells up in me just like it always does when my mom acts out. “She doesn't mean it,” I say quickly.
“Who is chasing you? Are the doors locked?”
“Yes they’re locked and it was Beau Du Pont.”
The line falls silent, because I know they are thinking what my mom thought when I told her. It can’t be Beau Du Pont. Someone from his family wouldn’t kill. If they report this and they’re wrong, there will be hell to pay, but I know what I saw.
“Are you sure of the identification?” They ask after another second.
“Please, you have to believe me. It was him. I-I saw him,” my voice cracks and I start to cry again, “there was so much blood on her. She’s dead.”
“What is your address? We have units on the way. Stay indoors. I need you to stay on the phone with me now. What’s your name?”
“Nevaeh Santiago,” I whisper.
“Where do you live, Nevaeh?” They prompt again and I give them my address on autopilot. I can’t stop seeing the girl or hearing the sick rattle of her breath. I squeeze my eyes shut but I can’t make it stop. “Everything is going to be okay, Nevaeh,” the operator tells me, but I hear sirens. I’m glad I hear the sirens. It makes me stop hearing the girl. They’re getting louder and I run to the door to look out the front window.
“I can hear the cops. Are they here already?” I ask. Bloom isn’t a big city, but how can they be here already? I shove my face through the curtains and look out the window in time to see the cop cars blow past us and continue on up the road. They’re heading for Bloom Point, they have to be. We’re too far outside of town. There’s nothing past the trailer park but Bloom Point.
My mom comes to stand beside me and pulls the curtains back from the window. The road in front of the trailer park entrance is alive. Cop car after cop car flies past, sirens screaming, and red and blue lights flash and light up the night. Our neighbors come out of their trailers and stand in their driveways and on the streets that crisscross through the trailer lots. They’re gathering together in groups as they watch the never ending stream of police heading up to Bloom Point. The operator is talking but I can’t focus. I’m staring at the blood on my arms and the smear of dirt I left on my mom’s white lace curtains. We don’t have many nice things in our house, but these curtains are the nicest. She’s going to give me hell for ruining them. But when I look at her she isn’t busy noticing the stain on her curtains. She’s pale and shaking and staring out at the scene unfolding in front of us. A cop car speeds into the trailer park and comes to a screeching halt in front of our trailer, and a second later a policeman is banging at our door.
Everyone in the trailer park is watching us now, not the cops driving past.
“Nevaeh, what did you do?” My mother whispers, while the cop keeps banging on our door for us to open up.
“I didn’t do it, mommy. Beau did.”
BEAU
PRESENT DAY
“Nevaeh Santiago.”
I stare up at the cement ceiling and roll my shoulders in a last ditch effort to get comfortable, but it’s impossible on the state issued mattress I’m laying on. Doesn’t matter though, I always try anyway. I fold my arms behind my head and clear my throat before I say her name again.
“Nevaeh Santiago.”
Those two words hang in the air above my head and I hear my cellmate Ben groan at hearing them again. I don’t give a shit. I’ve said her fucking name every day for the past four years, since I landed in this shit hole nightmare—that’s 1,461 days, because of fucking leap year. Ben’s been with me for the past three years and he’s used to my morning routine by now, but it doesn’t stop him bitching about it.
“Shut the fuck up man,” he tells me, like he has every morning for the 1,095th time. “Every goddamned morning with that cunt’s name.”
I frown. “Watch your mouth when you talk about her or I’m going to break your jaw again, Ben.”
Ben mutters something but he keeps it under his breath. Good. If I hear him talking about Nevaeh like she’s trash, I’ll make him pay. No one talks about her like that. I turn on my side and look at the photos that are taped up on the cement wall. Cement is everywhere here. Prison is a fucking tomb. A cold, cement, tomb. But I’m going to get out.
I’m not fucking dying here. I know that for a fact, because two days ago my lawyers came by. There’s big news. Good news about what happened to me. What they say I did to Carrie. I never would have hurt her. She was sweet, more than willing to give me anything. Carrie was the girl I wanted. I never would have done anything to hurt her.
But someone did.
Someone cut her to pieces and let me take the fall. And Nevaeh helped them do it. I reach out and tap my finger on the photo I know the best. It’s the one that’s the oldest. I printed it off the computers in the common area a month after I got here and realized this was going to be my life.
I wanted to look at the girl that fucked my life up beyond all repair. FUBAR is what the old timers call it. Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. I slide my finger along the curve of Nevaeh’s cheek. She’s smiling big for the camera, but she’s got her arms tucked close to her stomach like she’s trying to hide. Her dark hair is neat and pulled back into a ponytail and she’s baby faced with chubby cheeks and all that shit. She’s young here. Fifteen, tops. That’s how old she was when she lied and said I killed Carrie. This photo came from the Crown of Thorns website where it listed her as a top volunteer for the church. I didn’t notice her then, didn’t even realize we went to the same church. I don’t think I ever really saw her until that night.
She was the girl that cleaned my house. I saw her sometimes with her mom and tried to be nice to her. She worked hard, so did her mom. I recognized her when she had her light on Carrie’s body. Funny thing about how life works. I went my whole life not noticing Nevaeh Santiago and now her name is the first thing I say every morning and she’s the last thought I have every night.
It’s been that way for four fucking long years. Being locked up does a lot for a man’s focus and attention. After they gave me a life sentence for Carrie’s murder, I started paying attention to Nevaeh. I wanted to know everything about her. If she got an award, I knew. She wrote on a weird blog site for about a year—crappy poetry, the normal emo shit, and I knew. I had the RSS feed sent to my email. It wasn’t hard to keep track of Nevaeh and her mom, Terri Santiago. My mother was all too happy to make sure she kept them as close as she could. She knew I was innocent and she wasn’t going to let them get away from her. Du Ponts play the long game, and my family was nothing if not patient. Patience is the first step to power. Without patience, plans fail. Patience meant legacy, it meant deep roots. In a town with a long memory, patience created opportunity.
I could be more than patient when it came to Nevaeh Santiago. Maybe not before, when she was no one to me. But the night she pointed her finger and named me The Reaper? Oh, that’s when Nevaeh became mine.
I might not be the sick fuck that terrorized the tristate county area, raping and murdering college coeds, but I wasn’t the innocent choir boy everyone knew me as either. He died in these cement walls. Now, I’m all that’s left. I don’t even know what I am anymore outside of being obsessed with Nevaeh. Nevaeh is my life. The only thing that has kept me going for four years is my obsession with revenge. If my mom wasn’t blinded by the fact that I’m her son, she wouldn’t tell me what she does about Nevaeh. If she knew to look closer, she’d realize the son she knew is dead and gone. That I’m going to hurt Nevaeh. But even when I do, she won’t believe it.
She’ll take my side over Nevaeh when I’m out and so will the entire town. It won’t be hard to convince them to go after her when she put an innocent man away for murder. They don’t have to know that I’m not innocent anymore. That I became just as bad as the serial killer still free, in order to survive.
I yank the photo down from its spot and knock a couple of others I cut out of the newspaper with it. Nevaeh’s toothy smile fills my vision. Even if I close my eyes I’d see the way one of her front teeth is slightly out of place. How her smiles are never even, but a little crooked. I’ve memorized every bit of her and the information my mom feeds to me helps me fill in the gaps of what I can’t find online. Nevaeh uses social media just like any other nineteen year old and if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t suspect she was the girl from the woods.
The girl they call the hero of the Mineral Belt Murder. She’s the girl that got away and put The Reaper behind bars. The one that saved a town and stopped a man with a trail of violence that spanned years across the state of Kansas. How no one knew The Reaper was behind over thirty rapes and murders within a 15 year span is anyone’s guess, but I’m no friend to the justice system or the fucking police after what they did to me. I was nineteen when they locked me up like an animal. How the fuck was I supposed to be responsible for any of that?
The logical answer was that I wasn’t. Not that it mattered. Not when the Bloom PD figured out the murders and rapes occurring across the tri state area were connected, that they were serial, they wanted it over. It’s not like they cared much how it was done when they were getting heat for letting a killer walk free. The State Attorney General even issued a public warning and statement about The Reaper and called on the community to find him. He didn’t directly go after the police department, but any idiot could read between the lines. The Bloom PD knew they had to end this. They looked stupid as fuck not realizing a serial killer had set up home base in their own backyard for years. When Nevaeh pointed the finger at me, she gave them their out on a silver platter and they took it.
What’s more sensational than catching a serial killer? Catching a serial killer that was the town’s golden boy. It was a no brainer. Roots or not, not even my family could stop it.
My hand clenches and the photo I’m holding wrinkles and folds in my grip, but I don’t care. I’m not going to need the photo or any of the others I’ve put up to keep me focused. It’s easy to get lost in here—to forget you’re a human being. As much as I hate her, my little Nevaeh has been my touchstone to who I was before. A reminder of what I lost and what I’ll take back from her. Not a day has gone by that I don’t know what she’s up to. Not even prison can keep her from me.
Her family moved from that shitty little trailer park into town, into a house near mine, and I knew. I have her address memorized and know exactly what kind of car she drives, even though she just got it two weeks back. It’s a busted up blue pick up truck her mom got off some college kid. Nevaeh’s socials are packed full of summer excitement. Nevaeh hasn’t gone far, not even with her graduating the year before with a 4.0 GPA. She took a Gap Year, a fancy European way of saying she took a year to fuck around. I wondered if she was going to leave Bloom then, but she didn’t. She didn’t apply for schools or choose to go to a school where no one knew her. Somewhere she could start over.
If she was smart, she would have tried to start over, but a high GPA doesn’t make you smart. That’s just a number on a piece of paper. My Nevaeh isn’t smart. She’s staying close to home, which suits me. Her life is about to explode because of that choice. I have dreamed of nothing but hearing Nevaeh beg for mercy. If she wants to stay close and make that easier for me, then so be it. The big news I’d been given a month before is almost enough to make up for the four years I’ve spent locked away in a tomb because I died six months in this shithole. Every day for six months, I’d fought for my right to eat and breathe, for the right to simply exist. That changed after I made an example of the biggest fucker in my block.
That was the day I lost my grip on who I’d been. The friendly, easy going kid that couldn’t hurt a fly was dead. I lost him then. And the inmate that squared up to me lost an eye. Not a bad trade. A soul for an eye feels like a one sided deal in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t it? It did to me.
Not anymore, though. I’ve got no use for a soul, but an eye? Now that’s valuable. I came out ahead with that trade, but it set the pace for the next three and a half years. I did what I had to. The only thing anyone respects in prison is focus. Focus begets strength. Strength creates brutality.
There was no room for redemption or the softness that came with life on the outside. You had to forget who you’d been before, what you’d thought your life would be, before the walls closed in around you and you simply existed. I made it for months without losing who I was before. The Beau Du Pont from Bloom, the small town idiot boy that went out of his way to be kind, giving and gracious. I was so fucking stupid playing the part of town hero that my family laid out for me. I was the star quarterback, the homecoming king. I was set for a full ride at Bloom State and even though I probably should have set my aims higher, I didn’t.
Why would I, when I was a king in my hometown? Everyone knew me. Everyone loved my family and thought we walked on water. We’d been in the area for as long as the town had been in existence. That’s well over 150 years in one place. With that much living and dying, our roots ran deep in Bloom. But all of that meant nothing when Nevaeh Santiago opened her fucking mouth.
The girl that cleaned my goddamn toilet is the one that ruined my life. I’m going to destroy her the second I’m free. Because what no one else but my family and our lawyers know is that come this fall semester, I am going to be right there with Nevaeh when she starts her freshman year. Nevaeh has haunted me every day for the past four years and now it is going to be my turn to return the favor.
There won’t be a safe place for her in Bloom and she’s going to wish I’d died in here. She is going to wish that the fucking Reaper had killed her instead of Carrie. I’m going to make sure of it.
4
NEVAEH
Beau Du Pont didn’t kill Carrie Salt. That was her name. Carrie Salt. The girl I didn’t save, the one that was murdered on the Mineral Belt Trail while I puked all over myself.
Not a day has gone by that I haven’t dreamed of Carrie the way she was that night. I can see her standing perfect and beautiful outside of Beau’s jeep. When I remember Carrie Salt that way, her dress is spotless, so white and bright it shines in the moonlight. Sometimes in my dreams, Carrie looks at me, sometimes she talks to me, but I can never hear what she’s saying. When she opens her mouth it’s like a wave of static, a rushing sound that muffles every word that Carrie is saying to me. I don’t need to know what she’s saying to know that she wants me to follow her, though. Every time Carrie talks to me, she goes into the woods and I follow her. I’m helpless when she steps into the woods and I’m instantly the fifteen year old girl that didn’t know evil was real and the devil wasn’t only something I heard about at church.
No, the devil was real and he was The Reaper. He killed and cut his way through pretty girls like Carrie and I told everyone the devil was Beau. Beau. I loved him, or at least I thought I did. He was the only boy I’ve ever wanted, even after I sent him to prison—I still wanted Beau.
No one else compared to him. No one ever has.
It’s fucked up to still want the man you put away for murder, right? It is. I know it is, because for four years I have been in love with a murderer. One that I put behind bars. Now that they’re saying he’s innocent I don’t know which part of it is worse. The fact that I still want him, or that I always did. Even when everyone in Bloom said he was The Reaper and told me how brave I was, there was the fear—the thing that’s kept me up alongside the ghost of Carrie Salt. That maybe I fucked up and got it wrong. Maybe Beau didn’t do it. He was drunk when they found him, high too. The news I’ve read said that he was too fucked up to know what was going on when we ran into each other. That I got it wrong and he was barely keeping it together. I’ve replayed that night so many times in my mind over the past four years and every time it’s a little different.
Now I know the truth about three things in life.
I got it wrong. I ruined Beau’s fucking life. I still love him.
“Nevaeh! For the last damn time, hurry up, girl!”
I wince at my mom’s shrill scream from downstairs. I’m supposed to be packing for my move to Bloom State, but I keep stopping. I can’t keep packing. Every shirt that I fold or box that I tape up feels like a death sentence. A week ago, I had friends. Friends and even a boy that I flirted with sometimes, even if I didn’t mean it. They were all excited to have me at Bloom State with them. I took the year off after college to work for my mother. I always knew I would go to Bloom State eventually on account of the scholarship that was waiting on me. The town started a trust the same summer Beau went away and my living nightmare started. Even with a fully paid ride, I put off going, though. I said it was because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in, but that’s not true. I didn’t know what to do with myself because my life was picture perfect. The summer I survived the Mineral Belt, I went from a poor, awkward and quiet kid no one noticed to someone people went out of their way to talk to.
I didn’t deserve that. Not while Beau rotted away in prison and Carrie Salt was dead and buried. I couldn’t bring myself to go off to Bloom State with my friends and pretend none of it happened. That I didn’t lay in bed at night and stare at the ceiling replaying that hour over and over again until I wasn’t sure what I saw. Until the doubt creeped in and made me sick with the fear that I had done the unthinkable.
