“Can I see him?” I asked.
“Right now he needs to rest. We’ll let you know when he can have visitors—I’d guess two, three hours at most.”
I thanked her and she bowed her head before striding away, onto the next emergency, the next accident, the next mangled body clinging to life by a caterpillar’s gossamer thread. One flick of a twig and we’d lose ’em, snap. I sat back down by the Rusches, abruptly exhausted.
Still, questions fluttered. This was my chance—the universe making the intro I’d been too chicken to send when I found that memorial website.
“Can I ask you a little more about Jamie?”
Tom cracked his eyes open while Jenny squeezed hers shut.
“I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s painful to talk about. But…there’s some stuff I’ve been trying to piece together. About Kristen. And I bet you could help.”
“I don’t think this is the time,” Tom said, so loudly Jenny jumped. “We should stay focused on waiting for news about Kristen.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” I blushed all the way down to my toes.
They got out their phones, froze me out with their swiping and tapping. Jenny approached the front desk again, then returned and announced they wouldn’t know anything for another few hours at least. I shifted around, trying to get comfortable in the stiff-backed seat. I’d abandoned my backpack on the road, so I had no money, no ID, nothing.
“Do you need a phone?” Jenny frowned at me. “Do you want to call your parents?”
I shook my head. “I—I don’t even know their current numbers. And I lost my bag in the accident.” Panic whooshed through me and I blinked back tears.
“Aw, it’s okay!” Jenny leaned forward. “Look, where’s your hotel? I can give you a lift—you should probably pick up some stuff for when your boyfriend wakes up, anyway, right?”
I nodded at Jenny gratefully, and she swatted her husband’s arm. “Give me the keys.”
“You’re leaving?”
“It’s Hotel Rosita,” I blubbered, and she entered it into her phone.
“That’s only fifteen minutes away. We’ll be right back, Tom.”
I followed her out, feeling Tom’s eyes on our backs the entire walk to the door.
CHAPTER 43
“You know, I get why Tom doesn’t want to talk to you.” We’d been driving for a few minutes when Jenny abruptly turned off the radio. NPR, something about police brutality in India.
I gazed straight ahead. “I truly don’t know what Kristen is doing here. Like I said, I was trying to get away from her. Because she scares me.”
She sighed. “When I look at you, I just see Jamie. You even look a tiny bit alike.”
“So I hear.”
She glanced at me, then back out the windshield. The sun beat onto her face in a golden rectangle, but she didn’t flip down the visor. “Tom can’t understand why I kept in touch with Kristen either. He’s only here because he didn’t trust me to drive the four and a half hours in my emotional state. But I care about Kristen. I can’t help it. Even if she is bad news.”
I watched strip malls scroll past the window. “I’ve been learning that. That Kristen’s bad news. I’ve been trying to put the pieces together and…and figure out what was really going on with her, with our friendship.” I glanced at Jenny. “I’ve been wondering what happened to Jamie for a while now. Would you be willing to tell me?”
“Jamie died by suicide.” Her voice cracked, but then she regained her composure. “But before that, Kristen had her wrapped around her pinkie.”
She took an off-ramp, trundled onto a frontage road.
“They were best friends practically since birth. When we moved into the neighborhood, Jamie was only a few months old and Anne was pregnant with Kristen, so we grew close right away.” She reached out to turn the air-conditioning down, and I saw her fingers shake. “At first, I was thrilled that the girls got along so well. But as soon as they hit third or fourth grade, I started to worry. Kristen was always pushing Jamie to misbehave: ‘Come on, don’t be a baby, steal this candy from the cupboard or pocket this lipstick from the drugstore.’ Whoa.” She braked and tapped her horn at a BMW suddenly gunning around her. “The weirdest thing was, Kristen was always doing naughty things and then trying to convince Jamie she’d done them. Once I heard crying and rushed into the playroom, and Jamie was sitting there with her beloved American Girl doll in one hand and its head in the other. Kristen claimed that Jamie had ripped it off, but when I asked why, Jamie said she didn’t know.” Her knuckles were strangling the steering wheel, tighter and tighter. “Even after I’d sent Kristen home, Jamie stuck to her story. But when I checked the nanny cam, Kristen had decapitated the doll, not Jamie. Weird, childish stuff. But I wondered what was making her act out.”
The revelation swept through me. Kristen had been gaslighting people since she was young. Jenny figured it was just a little-kid quirk of Kristen’s, but I knew the truth; I knew Kristen was still at it, decades later. Scrambling my memories, accusing me of acts she herself had committed. Don’t play dumb—I watched you kill him. How easily she’d convinced me.
At least I was certain now: Kristen had killed Sebastian. My shouts had been the drumbeat, a desperate plea as she kicked the life out of him: Stop. Stop. Stop.
“And was…was the bullying the reason Jamie…？” I couldn’t finish the thought.
Jenny shook her head as we bumped into the hotel’s parking lot. She pulled into a spot and turned off the car, then leaned her brow against the steering wheel and sobbed.
I touched her shoulder gingerly. “Do you want to go inside, or…？”
She shook her head again. “I need to finish saying this or I’ll never get it all out.”
The car was already heating like a pot of water on the stove. “Um, is there any way we could turn the AC back on?”
“We have OnStar. When the car’s running, it records everything.”
It was so like Kristen—practical yet paranoid, sensible yet absurd. I nodded and unbuckled my seatbelt.
“Jamie was being abused,” Jenny said, fighting to keep her voice under control, “by her basketball coach. Kristen’s father. She didn’t tell anyone, but she wrote about it in her diary, which I found afterward.”
My stomach lurched. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” Kristen’s asshole father—he wasn’t just an asshole, he was a predator, a child molester. Had he abused his daughter too? She’d said she hated being alone with him. I’d spent so much time wondering what lay beneath her dark compulsions; I’d questioned whether Kristen was a run-of-the-mill sociopath or maybe a vulnerable child cracked open by her parents’ death or her grandfather’s casual tyranny. But if her own father had modeled a cycle she couldn’t help but reproduce—bullying, gaslighting, violence—well, it didn’t justify anything, but it might help explain it.
“I’m so sorry, Jenny. I don’t know what else to say.” My heart seemed to be folding in half like a soggy paper plate. Poor Kristen, poor Jamie, poor anyone else who got in that awful man’s way. It was no wonder Kristen hadn’t had any serious romantic relationships in all the years I’d known her.