“I’m sure she knows all about serial killers.” I can’t tear my eyes off her. The brilliant, familiar eyes. Expensive tortoiseshell glasses. Hair tied up in a chic, messy knot. A chunky Breitling leather watch hugging her wrist. A plain wide band of hammered silver on her right hand.
“He’s dead, Tessie.” The first words Lydia has uttered to me in seventeen years. Her voice, triumphant. “I killed him.”
“Of course he’s dead,” Effie prattles. “Mr. Mudgett died in prison in 1896. He was hanged at Moyamensing, Liz. You just told me a second ago that he twitched for fifteen minutes.”
Lydia, age 17
I press the trigger four times.
Simple as that for a fucked-up Texas girl.
I crawl over him to the wheel.
It takes eleven minutes to whip around the lake in the dark and find Dumbo. My marker. The large tree on the west shore with a single branch that curves up like an elephant’s trunk.
This is the creepiest spot in the lake. Dead Man’s Triangle. Good fishing, but if people go under here, they often don’t pop back up. I’ve driven a boat around this lake since I could see over the front and my father was a drunk, which means pretty much since the day I was born. Daddy and I had our best times on this lake. I gutted the fish without throwing up, and he swilled vodka out of Coke cans and always did.
My mind is so quiet. Like, quieter than it’s ever been. It’s weird. I stop the motor. Drift for a second. Better get back to business. It isn’t that hard to push him out of the boat. Plop. He sinks in less than a minute. I don’t feel a thing, watching him go under. I toss in the old book I found under his kitchen sink with the black-eyed Susans and the Cascade. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Blood had soaked the brittle binding, or I would have kept it. That book was my No. 8, 9, and 10 questions, but he was about to lasso me with that freaking rope.
It takes no time to motor back, yank up the tarp in the boat, and collect all our stuff around the cabin. Be out by 11 A.M., the notice on the back of the door instructs me. Make sure the boat is properly docked. Leave the cabin key on the table.
My teeth are chattering and my hands and feet are numb when I stick his key in the ignition, but I’m feeling pretty good about myself. I drive around to the Lake Texoma State Park camping area and dump the tarp and his suitcase in two giant garbage bins on either end.
I’m halfway to the rental place to return his car when I run out of gas.
Tessie, present day
2:52 A.M.
My monster’s dead.
My best friend’s alive, folding a white napkin into a tidy point.
So why do I feel this terrifying urge to run?
To scream at Effie.
Run.
Lydia, age 17
I thought Daddy was going to kill me. He had to pick me up at a Whataburger in Sherman. I had walked four miles. There was blood on my face and clothes. I told the woman behind the counter that it was a burst packet of ketchup when I asked if I could use the phone. Daddy is smarter than that.
He broke me just like he always does. I was so tired. I could barely move. He didn’t have to threaten much. I wish I could have called Tessie.
Daddy said a lot of things on the way home. You have no proof he was the killer. Under no circumstances will you have an abortion. Jesus Christ, Lydia. Jesus Christ.
I overheard him make a call to two of his salvage yard pals. He was paying them to gas up the doctor’s rental car and return it.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t get warm.
It seems like a million years ago that I stood behind a shed and watched him bury flowers under Tessie’s tree house.
Now my parents are on the couch making a plan and I’m out here in my back yard doing a little burying of my own. I’m calling it the little box of Bad Things. The key to the cabin that I forgot to leave on the counter. Tessie’s ring that I stole and stuck in a corner of my jewelry box because it was bad luck for her. My favorite Edgar Allan Poe book, because I thought I heard it ticking tonight on the shelf and I wasn’t going to live with that the rest of my life. I’m not ever going to be crazy like Tessie.
Tessa, present day
2:53 A.M.
She’s crazy. Lydia is crazy.
When should I have known? As soon as she sat down beside me in second grade with her red glitter pencils sharpened like ice picks?
She’s prattling now, like Lydia always does when she tells the truth, about Keats and the sky cracking over the lake and how the last thing I saw of him was a bald spot like a big mosquito bite and then black, black, black.
The doctor. My monster. Her lover.
At the bottom of the lake. The one where I taught Charlie to slalom. She probably skied right over him.
He was always dead.
Relief, flooding me. Realization, rocking me to hell.
I’m the one who kept my monster alive.
My best friend let that happen. Let me suffer. Let Terrell pay for what he did not do.
Lydia, a greedy flower. More like a black-eyed Susan than any of the girls in that grave. Controlling. Thriving in devastated soil.
“I watched him plant black-eyed Susans under your tree house four hours after we made love for the last time,” Lydia is saying smoothly. “I found them in little plastic pots under his cabinet and then I followed him and watched him dig the hole. You don’t have to hit me over the head.” She giggles.
He will never touch my daughter, I’m thinking.
He is bones.
Lydia loved him.
“You look strange, dear,” Effie says. “Tired. You should sit.”
“The flowers…?” I stutter at Lydia.
“Yes?” Impatient. Waiting for something.
Gratitude. Lydia’s waiting for gratitude. I strain against a flood of anger and disbelief. She held my sanity hostage for seventeen years and would like to be thanked for it. I feel a rabid urge to slap her, to tear at her shiny fake hair, to scream why until Effie’s old house shakes on its foundation.
Lydia is already restless, and I need to be sure. “Lydia,” I start again. “If he’s dead… who kept planting black-eyed Susans for me all these years?”
Her eyes steady on mine. “Are you accusing me? How should I know? They’re just flowers, Tessie. Are you still freaked out by a PB and J, too?”
“Liz’s job has not a thing to do with planting,” Effie interjects. “It’s Marjory Schwab over at the garden society who’s in charge of wildflowers. And it’s Blanche something who provides the sandwiches. Or maybe her name is Gladys. And it’s Liz, not Lydia, dear.”
“It’s OK, Effie,” I say.
Lydia dabs a napkin at her lips. More pretend. She hasn’t taken a bite of whatever Effie lump is on the plate in front of her. “I know you’re mad, Tessie. But perfect murders don’t just happen. Timing is everything. It was very O.J. of me to keep my shirt, don’t you think?”
“That’s… his blood on the shirt,” I say slowly. “The night you killed him.”
“Did you not finish the journal?” she demands. “I gave you forty-five minutes.”
My mind is shutting her out. Focusing like a laser on the one thing that is still important. That can still be fixed. Terrell.