I sink into the mattress immediately, and pretty soon, I’m in a dream—or maybe it’s a memory. It feels a little bit like both, somehow strange yet familiar at the exact same time. I’m twelve years old, sitting in my reading nook, my bedroom pitch-black, with the glow of my tiny reading light illuminating my face just slightly. My eyes are skimming the book in my lap, engrossed in the words on the page, when a noise from outside breaks my concentration. I look out the window and see a figure in the distance, moving silently across our yard in the dark. It’s coming from the trees just beyond our property, the trees that line the entrance to a swamp spanning miles in either direction.
I squint at the figure, and pretty soon, I can tell it’s a body. A fully grown adult body dragging something behind it. The sound begins to drift across the backyard and leaks through my cracked-open window, and soon, I recognize it as the scraping of metal against dirt.
It’s a shovel.
The body walks closer to my window and I press my face against the glass, dog-earing my book and putting it down. It’s still dark, and I’m still struggling to make out a face or features. As the body inches even closer, almost directly below my window now, a floodlight turns on and I find myself squinting at the sudden brightness, my hand shielding my face as my eyes try to adjust to the light. I remove my hand and confusion washes over me as the person below my window is finally illuminated enough to see. It isn’t the body of a man, as I had originally assumed. It isn’t my father, the way the memory should have actually played out.
This time, it’s a woman.
She turns her head to the sky and looks at me, as if she knew I was there all along. We make eye contact, and I don’t recognize her at first. She looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t know how or why. I look at her individual features—eyes, mouth, nose—and that’s when it finally clicks. I feel the blood drain from my face.
The woman below my window is me.
Panic starts to surge through my chest as twelve-year-old me stares into the eyes of myself, twenty years older. They’re completely black, like the eyes of Bert Rhodes. I blink a few times and look down at the shovel in her hand, covered in a red liquid I somehow know in my gut to be blood. Slowly, a smile forms on her lips, and I break out into a scream.
My body shoots upright, and I’m covered in sweat, my screaming still ringing throughout the house. But then I realize—I’m not screaming. My mouth is open, panting, but there’s no sound coming out. The sound I’m hearing is coming from somewhere else; it’s a loud, screeching sound, almost like a siren.
It’s an alarm. It’s my alarm. My alarm is going off.
Suddenly, I remember Bert Rhodes. I remember him in my home, sticking sensors on my windows, pointing his drill in my direction. I remember his warning.
I never wondered what it was like to lose my life. I’m talking about taking one.
I fling myself from bed, hearing the frantic sound of footsteps downstairs. He’s probably trying to disable it, stop the ringing before coming upstairs and strangling the life from my lungs the same way he strangled those girls. I run toward the closet and fling open the door, my hands searching blindly across the floor for the box that holds Daniel’s gun. I’ve never used a gun. I have no idea how to use a gun. But it’s here, and it’s loaded, and as long as I can have it in my hands when Bert walks into my bedroom, I’ll feel like I have a fighting chance.
I’m flinging dirty clothes across the floor when I hear the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Come on, I whisper. Come on, where is it? I grab a couple of shoeboxes, opening them up before tossing them to the side when I see nothing but boots nestled inside. The footsteps are closer now, louder. The alarm is still blaring through the house. The neighbors are surely awake, I think. He can’t get away with this. He can’t kill me with the alarm going off like this. Still, I keep searching until my hands find another box pushed into the corner. I grab it, yank it closer, inspect it in my grip. It looks like a jewelry box—why would Daniel have a jewelry box? But it’s long, slender, about the right size for a gun, so I open the lid quickly, feeling the presence of a person just outside my closed door.
My breath catches in my throat as I look down at the box now opened in my lap. Inside, there is no gun, but something far more terrifying.
It’s a necklace with a long silver chain, a single pearl on the end, and three small diamonds clustered at the top.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Chloeeee.
I hear a voice outside my bedroom door, barely audible above the shrieking of the alarm. It’s calling my name, but my eyes are still glued to the box in my hands. The box I found pushed to the back of the closet. The box that holds Aubrey Gravino’s necklace draped gently inside. All of a sudden, the sounds swirling around me evaporate away and I’m twelve again, sitting in my parents’ bedroom, watching that tiny ballerina twirl. I can almost hear the chimes, that rhythmic lullaby lulling me into a trance as I stare at the pile of jewelry ripped from dead skin.