They Never Learn, page 7
This murder will be riskier than most, though, especially with the task force sniffing around. I always study my victims thoroughly—I have to know them, inside and out, to know how best to kill them. But I can’t wait much longer, and not only because of the fellowship.
I need to kill again. The urge seems to come harder and faster every time now, the desire building in me like a scream. Tyler barely kept it at bay for a month.
In the window, Kinnear shuts his book and swallows the rest of his wine. For a second I imagine slipping inside, sneaking up on him. Smashing the wineglass and dragging the jagged remains of the stem across his throat. If only I could kill him in such a satisfying way.
I dig my gloved hands into my pockets, hunch my shoulders so my black scarf covers my chin. This is about the time he usually leaves the bar. So far, whether alone or accompanied, he’s always headed straight back to his modern monstrosity of a house a few streets away, but I have to make sure the pattern holds. Any minute now—
“Scarlett!”
My shoulders shrug even higher, because that voice belongs to the last person I want to run into right now.
Samina Pierce.
14 CARLY
“Maybe I got the time wrong,” I say.
I steal a glance over at Wes, leaning against the car door next to me. He’s drumming out a nervous rhythm on the dented metal, and the vibrations travel up my spine.
“No, she said six fifteen.” He takes his phone out again. “I ran into her after her last class, and she said, ‘See you at six fifteen.’ ”
This was Allison’s idea in the first place, spending Friday evening in Pittsburgh. She wanted to check out this thrift store in Shadyside, eat at some new Ethiopian restaurant, maybe try for student rush tickets at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. She’s been talking about it all week (“I have to get out of this town, I need some culture!”).
But now she’s nowhere to be found. “You could try calling her again,” I suggest.
Wes’s jaw muscles jump. I can’t tell if he’s furious with Allison or worried about her. Maybe both. She’s usually at least ten minutes late to everything, rushing in in a flurry of sorries, but not showing up at all isn’t like her. At least, as far as I know. I have to keep reminding myself we haven’t known each other all that long.
“Yeah. Okay.” Wes takes his phone out again, but before he can dial her number, the screen lights up with a text. His face falls.
“What?” I lean closer to look. When he holds the phone out to show me the message, our shoulders touch.
So sorry can’t make it tonight, maybe next week?
Wes sighs and slips the phone back into his jeans pocket. I feel a flare of annoyance so sudden and hot it’s like flames singeing my skin. But that’s not fair. Maybe she has a good reason for canceling.
Or maybe she got a better offer from that slimy asshole Bash. He’s pretty much all Allison talks about now—that and Cabaret. But that’s about him too, I guess.
I push off the car and start to walk away before Wes can see how upset I am.
“We could still go,” Wes calls after me.
I stop and turn back to look at him, my Doc Martens grinding into the parking lot gravel.
“I mean, if you want.” He sounds noncommittal, but I can’t tell if he really doesn’t care or he’s just trying hard to come off that way.
It’s already getting dark. It’ll take an hour to get to Pittsburgh, at least. And what will Wes and I even talk about without Allison? She usually does 90 percent of the talking.
But if we don’t go to Pittsburgh, then I have nothing to do besides go back to my room and sit there alone all night, studying and waiting for Allison to come back. And she might not come back—or worse, she might come back with Bash. The way he looked at her in the dining hall the other day, it’s obvious they’re going to start hooking up soon if they haven’t already.
“Okay,” I say.
“Yeah?” Wes says, squinting against the glare of the floodlights in the parking lot.
“If you don’t mind driving all that way.”
“It’s not that far. Besides, I’ve missed being behind the wheel. Allison and I used to drive all over Indiana when we were in high school.” He runs his hand over the top of the car like it’s a beloved pet instead of a rusty hulk that’s probably older than we are. “Once we even drove all the way to Chicago. Her parents were so mad. Do you drive?”
I shake my head. I got my license when I was sixteen like everyone else in my class, but my hometown is so small you can walk almost everywhere, and driving fills me with stomach-churning dread. It’s so much responsibility. So easy to take a life or cut your own short.
“Let’s go,” Wes says, unlocking the doors. “Copilot picks the tunes.”
I get situated in the passenger seat, brushing some Sheetz sandwich wrappers onto the floor, and choose an album at random. Punk-pop guitar fills the car, loud enough to rattle the windows. Wes taps his fingers against the steering wheel in time with the beat as he peels out of the parking lot. As we turn onto the county road that leads out of town, he starts singing along under his breath—something about being “so tired of having sex.” My face flushes.
“Great choice,” he says. “This is my favorite Weezer record.”
“I’ve never heard it before,” I admit.
Wes looks over at me. “Seriously?”
I bite my lip and nod. Now that we’re in the car, headed out of Gorman, it’s starting to sink in that I’m completely alone with him. I’ve never been alone with a guy before. All my father’s warnings flash through my head—boys only want one thing—but I can’t imagine Wes being any kind of threat. He’s barely over my height, way skinnier than I am. It’s guys like Bash my father meant to warn me about, not guys like Wes.
“So what kind of music do you like?” Wes asks.
“I don’t really…” I look down at my twisting fingers in my lap. “I mean, I mostly read.”
Reading was my most reliable escape in childhood, the one way I could get away from my father while still trapped in the same space with him. That’s why I’m majoring in English.
“Tell you what,” Wes says. “I’ll make you a mix.”
“Oh, you don’t have to—”
“Just some of my favorites, and you can let me know if you like any of them.”
No one’s ever made me anything like that before. No one’s ever made me anything at all.
“That would be awesome.” I smile over at him, but he’s looking at the road, his profile glowing red in the dashboard lights.
The rest of the drive to Pittsburgh, we’re silent—except when the music runs out and Wes recommends another album to play next. I like that one even more: a solo female singer with a throaty, moody voice. She’s still crooning when we reach the Allegheny River. I hunch down in my seat so I can watch the bright yellow bridge girders blur by as we cross into the city.
We arrived too late to go to the thrift store, and then we can’t find the Ethiopian restaurant Allison wanted to try, so we end up at an Italian place instead, with white tablecloths and taper candles and soft piano music playing.
The second we’re seated, I start to feel panicky. This is totally the kind of place you would go on a date. But we’re not on a date, obviously.
“You want to order some breadsticks?” Wes asks.
“Sure,” I say, looking around the restaurant just so I won’t have to look right at him. Most of the other diners are couples a few decades our senior, wearing blazers and sheath dresses, sipping martinis. I feel stupidly underdressed in my baggy sweater and jeans, and Wes is even more out of place with his Star Wars T-shirt and rumpled corduroy jacket.
A few tables away, there’s one other person about our age, but she’s dressed far more stylishly than we are, in a blue minidress and matching stiletto heels. The candlelight catches the highlights in her long blond hair, making them shimmer like strands of jewels.
She’s so stunning, it takes me a second to notice her companion. He’s at least twice her age, hair shot through with gray, deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Smoky-blue eyes with dark shadows.
Oh my God, it’s my father.
15 SCARLETT
I force myself to smile and drop my shoulders. “Samina. How are you?”
“I told you, call me Mina.” She shivers, stamping her feet on the pavement. She’s carrying a reusable bag laden with food from the market down the street. A loaf of French bread and the neck of a wine bottle peek out of the top. “What are you doing standing out here in the cold?”
The bar’s heavy wooden door pushes open. A small clump of graduate students emerges. Not Kinnear. He’s still at the table, nursing the dregs of his wine.
Mina follows my gaze, her brow furrowed. I quickly refocus my attention on her. “Oh, I was just out for a walk. I love this weather, actually.”
That, at least, is the truth: fall has always been my favorite season, ever since I was young. All that death and decay clearing the way for something new.
“Not me,” Mina says. “Give me a sunny beach and a margarita any day.”
The front door of the bar opens again. This time I force my eyes to stay on Mina.
“I’m so glad I ran into you,” she says. “I was planning to stop by your office first thing tomorrow.”
“Oh?”
She huddles closer to me, the sleeve of her gray tweed coat brushing my arm. “Does the name Richard Callaghan ring a bell?”
I frown, tilting my head. Buying myself some time.
“You’d probably recognize him if I showed you a picture,” she continues. “Big guy, buzz cut. He was a janitor—cleaned the library for almost a decade.”
I steal another glance over at the bar. Kinnear’s table is empty. He’s not outside yet, but he will be soon.
He might not even see us. It’s dark, we’re all the way across the street. He’s probably distracted, a little drunk. He hasn’t noticed me any of the other times I’ve followed him.
Of course, now that I’m standing beside his ex-wife, Kinnear homes in on my location the second he exits the bar.
Kinnear smiles and waves, and Mina smiles back, and now he’s stepping off the curb to come talk to us. Goddammit.
But instead of crossing the street, he taps his watch with a simpering, apologetic smile and takes off in the opposite direction. He’s not walking toward his house, or campus—a major break in pattern. Of course, there’s no way I can follow him now.
Mina watches Kinnear’s back until he turns down another street and disappears from view. “You know, we’ve been divorced four times as long as we were married, and the dean’s wife still calls me ‘Mrs. Kinnear’—which was never my name, by the way.” She sighs, her breath coming out in a puff of white steam. “What about you? Ever been married?”
I shake my head.
“Good for you.” Mina’s lips quirk up in a sly smile, her eyes sparkling under the street lamps. With her looking at me like that, I barely feel the cold anymore. “Then again, if I’d never met him, I wouldn’t be here at Gorman, so.”
“Why did you split up?” I ask.
“Men like him don’t want a relationship, they want a fan club. The more members the better.” Mina laughs, playing this statement off like a joke, but her voice is too brittle with bitterness. “But hey, we all do stupid things when we’re young, right?”
I try to make myself smile in response, but my mouth won’t cooperate. The full force of the cold settles back into my bones.
Mina’s studying me again, the way she did in her office. “Have you had dinner yet?”
“No.” I know what she’s going to say next, and something inside me I didn’t even know was open snaps shut, locks tight again. “I’d better be getting home. Lots of grading to do.”
“Another time, then.” If she’s insulted or disappointed by my brush-off, she hides it well. “I’ll have Mikayla bring you the file on Callaghan. Let me know if anything jogs your memory.”
As if I could ever forget him. Callaghan wasn’t a garden-variety rapist or abuser like most of my victims. He was a voyeur—and he got away with it for years, jerking off while spying through peepholes he’d carved into all the ladies’ rooms in the campus library.
The stairwell I shoved him down was used so rarely, it took days for someone to find the corpse. They had to shut down the library for a week to air out the smell—and to seal up all the peepholes, which the new janitor discovered her very first day on the job.
“Of course,” I say. “Have a good evening.”
As Mina walks away, that same clutch of panic I felt in her office claws into my chest again. She doesn’t know. She can’t. All she’s figured out is that some of the deaths on campus don’t quite fit in with the others. She doesn’t suspect there’s foul play involved, and even if she did, she certainly wouldn’t have any reason to pin it on me.
But she’s still closer than anyone else has ever been to figuring out the truth.
After Mina leaves, I consider trying to track down Kinnear again. I don’t know where he was headed, but Gorman is small; there’s only so much town left in the direction he walked. I’m unsteady now, though. Distracted. Better to head home and warm up, then resume my surveillance tomorrow.
The door to the bar opens again, and two people come out. Jasper’s height and pale skin make him unmistakable, even—no, especially—in the dark. I can’t tell who the petite figure beside him is, though. They’re walking away, on the other side of the street, Jasper’s hand pressing into her back to urge her forward. They haven’t seen me.
But then Jasper turns—a casual twist of his neck, subtle enough his companion doesn’t see it—and looks me right in the eye.
He knew I was there the whole time.
16 CARLY
I’m halfway down the block before I realize I’ve fled the restaurant, leaving Wes behind.
My father. Touching that woman. That girl. She’s barely older than I am. It’s disgusting.
“Carly!” Wes calls after me, jogging to catch up. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
My father is a cheating bastard. I wish he was dead.
I open my mouth, but the words won’t come. My cheeks burn. I think I’m crying, but everything feels so removed, unreal.
Oh God, what if he saw me too? I don’t think he did, but what if he noticed me when I was running outside? He could come out here and confront me. Any second now, he might—
Wes puts his arm around me, and I’m too shaken to push him away. But once he’s touching me, it’s surprisingly comforting. My trembling starts to subside.
“Can we just… go?” I say, his warmth radiating along the side of my body. “I want to go.”
“Of course.” Wes slips off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders, even though I’m already wearing one of my own. “Of course, we’ll go.”
On the drive back, we’re just as silent as we were on the way here, but now the air in the car feels heavy, a storm cloud about to burst. A few miles outside of Gorman, Wes stops at a Sheetz station for gas, then goes inside the store to get us some snacks, since we didn’t end up having any dinner.
I’m not hungry. All I can think about is my father—the way he looked at that woman, the actual affection shining in his eyes. I knew it. I knew he was a cheater. The late hours at work, the frequent overnight trips, his insane jealousy if Mom even glanced at someone else herself. I tried to tell her. So many times I tried to tell her, and she refused to believe me. But I fucking knew it.
Wes gets back into the car, goose bumps stippling his arms below the wrinkled sleeves of his T-shirt. He takes a sandwich out of the plastic bag he’s carrying and unwraps it but doesn’t take a bite.
We sit there for a few minutes, the twangy music from the gas station speakers pinging off the surface of the car, before Wes breaks the silence.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened if you don’t want to,” he says, still looking straight ahead, the red Sheetz sign reflecting in the lenses of his glasses. “But—”
“I saw my father.”
Wes looks over at me, not understanding. He probably has a father who loves him. If he ran into him unexpectedly in an Italian bistro, he’d smile and hug him and pull up a chair.
“He was with…” I stare through the windshield, into the fluorescent light of the gas station. “Some woman.”
“So you think he’s cheating on your mom?” Wes says.
“I know he is,” I snap.
Wes flinches, and I stop, looking down at my hands. I’ve been twisting one of the buttons on Wes’s jacket so hard the thread is starting to fray. I drop it, pressing my palms down on my thighs to still them.
I wonder how he met her. At the insurance company where he works, maybe—she might even be his secretary, that old cliché. Or they met at a bar, or online, or at the goddamn grocery store. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how he met her, if he’s in love with her or she’s just one of many women he’s stringing along. The important thing is, now I know for certain. I have undeniable proof of the kind of man he is. My mother has to believe me now.
“I’ve suspected for a while,” I say. “But I didn’t know for sure. Not until tonight.”
Wes exhales, long and loud, and sets his sandwich down, still uneaten. “Wow. I’m so sorry, that’s…”
“I hate him,” I say, and the words sting on the way out, but it feels so good to say them, so satisfying, like peeling off a scab.
Wes stays quiet, so I keep going. I tell him about my father’s mind games, his weaponized silences, the way he controls how my mother wears her hair, how she dresses, what she makes for dinner. How whenever she pushes back, no matter how small her rebellion, he tells her she’d be nothing without him, helpless, destitute, alone. How every time, she believes him and takes him back and tells me I ought to show my father some respect, he’s done so much for us, he loves us, really. She swears.
