“He’s no gentleman, see?” she’d said.
Still holding the phone, I ran into the den and perched in front of the computer. Quickly, I typed those words into the search bar. There were no results — until I deleted the word he.
“Detour,” I said.
“What?” Wyatt asked.
“On Tuesday, Marnie quoted a line from a movie called Detour. Maybe she was memorizing the script for her audition.” I scanned the screen.
“We should tell someone,” Wyatt said. “We should — Dad?”
“What?” I asked.
“Hang on, Willa.”
The sound was muffled, like he’d set the phone down, and then there were loud voices and lots of thudding footsteps.
“Wyatt?” I asked, gripping the phone tightly. “Are you okay?”
“Kind of,” he said, sounding rushed. “But I can’t talk right now.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because I’m getting arrested.”
Then he hung up.
I stared at my phone, paralyzed. This was too much to process. Wyatt arrested, Marnie missing …?
I needed to call Mom. I would have to confess that I’d lied about staying with the Delaines, but honestly I wasn’t even afraid of that. I just wanted her home so I wouldn’t be alone. It was irrational to think that the murderer would come after me now, but fear isn’t the most rational force in the universe, is it?
The low-battery warning popped up on my phone, and I got up to take it to the charging cord that was always plugged in by the entrance to the kitchen.
The charger was gone — Mom or Jonathan must have packed it. But I noticed for the first time a little white envelope leaning against the back door. I slipped open the door and grabbed it. The logo in the corner said Pool Pros Inc., and someone had scrawled, Jonathan, I found your stepdaughter’s necklace in the filter.
My necklace …?
With my heart in my throat, I dumped the contents of the envelope into my open palm.
It was a thin silver chain, with a solid silver charm.
A rose.
I stepped back.
This was the necklace from my visions.
I buried my face in my hands, my whole body tingling with dismay. My first instinct was to call Wyatt — but then I realized that he was probably on his way to jail.
Think, Willa, think.
This was the necklace I’d seen in my visions — but only in three of them. Brianna’s, Faith’s, and … and the one we couldn’t identify, with the roses on the table.
The one where the victim had taken the necklace off and put it in her pocket, so it might fall out and be discovered.
And it had fallen out. And it had been discovered …
In our pool.
I got a flash of the ghostly body floating serenely overhead that first night, while I kicked and struggled at the bottom of the pool.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “It was Paige, it was Paige, it was Paige.”
The phone buzzed in my hand. The battery bar was red, and I just had a chance to see a text from Mom before it died altogether:
Jonathan’s going to meet Reed halfway. He feels bad making Reed do a 4 hour round trip.
I had another charger up in my bedroom. I turned to leave the kitchen, but stopped in my tracks when I saw the hallway.
The walls were covered in writing, words that were familiar to me by now …
THIS IS THE KIND OF DREAM YOU DON’T WAKE UP FROM, HENRY
Written over and over and over.
“I get it, Paige,” I said. “I understand.”
I peered toward the foyer and saw that the words were there, too. They seemed to cover every surface in the house.
I spun back to look around the kitchen, only to see that these walls weren’t the exception — except, instead of the line about Henry, they were covered with the number 818 — 818 818 818 818 818 818 818 —
As I stared around the room, the screen of Jonathan’s laptop flashed to the front page of Paige’s now-forgotten blog. Then it began to scroll downward.
Finally, it stopped on the very post that Wyatt and I had read, the one about Diana Del Mar.
I studied the page.
“What?” I asked out loud. “What am I looking for?”
The screen scrolled down by itself, revealing the comments — well, the single comment. I looked at the commenter’s name — G.A. Green — and then copied and pasted it into the search bar.
Nothing.
I sat back, thinking, and then clicked on the hard drive icon. I was crossing all sorts of boundaries, breaking all sorts of rules, but I didn’t care. I was too close now.
I browsed the names of Jonathan’s folders and even poked through some of the contents, but nothing jumped out at me. I was about to quit, but then I clicked on a folder labeled Development Notes, revealing a single file called Special Projects Status Report.
My heart flip-flopped.
The document consisted of a simple chart with six rows of information.
I scanned down the first column: Scales, Fisher, Green, Bernard, Frowe, and Lovelock.
An uneasy vibration began to thrum somewhere inside me. I knew those names from somewhere.
The second, third, and fourth columns contained simple two-letter pairs, four-digit numbers, and then a letter/number combination.
The top line, Scales, read BL, 0517, B32.
My focus shrank to a pinprick as I read down the list, as fast as I could make myself. I couldn’t stop, because if I stopped I would lose my mind.
Fisher:FF, 0609, K29.
Green:PP, 0818, and a blank column.
Bernard:LJ, 1031, H14
Frowe: TR, 0318,V9.
Before I made it to the end, I clicked the mouse to close the document. I couldn’t bear to look at it any longer.
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
BL was Brianna Logan. FF — Faith Fernandes. LJ — Lorelei Juliano. TR — Tori Rosen. The four-digit numbers were the dates they went missing — the dates of their “auditions.” And the letter-number combinations were the locations of each film in Jonathan’s DVD inventory.
That was when it hit me — the memory of where I’d heard the names Scales, Fisher, Bernard, and Frowe before: in the articles I’d read about the murders. They were the names of the bogus talent agencies that the girls had written in their calendars.
So my stepfather, who owned all of the movies that had inspired the killings, also had weird, almost hidden files pertaining to each of the victims.
And Paige Pollan was one of them. 818, the number she’d been trying to tell me all along, wasn’t part of a phone number — it was a date. Her date. August 18. Green must have been the name Jonathan used when he booked her “audition.” He’d hand-picked her off the Internet after finding her blog post about Diana’s movie.
I hung my head, a wave of nausea passing over me. Paige must have thought she was so lucky, to be discovered by a talent agent.
And all along, she‘d been one of the Hollywood Killer’s victims. Only for some reason, no one had made the connection. Probably because her death was ruled a suicide. There was even a note … but that was a scene in its own way, wasn’t it? It was an homage to Diana’s death.