Hey, I wasn’t dead — that was something, right?
After the initial flurry of activity, the room was deserted, just me and Mom.
“Don’t you want to go see Jonathan?” I asked. “I’ll be okay for a few minutes.”
“He’s fine,” she said. “I talked to him before.”
“But maybe you should —”
“Willa,” she said softly. “He’s worried about you. He wants me to stay here. I’m not leaving you, sweetie. Not tonight.”
And she didn’t. When I woke up in the morning, she was curled up in the faux-leather visitor’s chair, her hand still wrapped around mine. She told me the doctor had been by to let her know the white pills Reed had given me were sedatives, designed to make me sleepy and weak. They would be completely out of my system within a few days.
And Reed was in police custody. He would live, but he might be paralyzed. I nodded, trying to take everything in.
I thought about the house, and wondered if Paige’s ghost was gone now. If she was at peace. I hoped she was.
I was sitting up and having some orange juice when a knock came on the door. Mom and I looked up and saw Wyatt Sheppard standing there.
“How did you get past security?” Mom asked, a little alarmed.
Wyatt turned bright red.
“It’s cool, Mom,” I said. “He has connections. This is my friend Wyatt.”
This explanation didn’t entirely satisfy my mother, but she nodded anyway and shook his hand. Then she stood up and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll go check on Jonathan.”
When she was gone, Wyatt took a step into the room. I sat up straighter, my pulse speeding up — a fact made embarrassingly obvious by the beeping monitor next to my hospital bed.
“I …” he said softly. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a first.”
He didn’t even come close to laughing. His lips were turned down at the corners. Not a trace of his usual smirk. And his voice was low and strained. “Did he hurt you?”
“Not badly,” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to go through it again, but I’ll live.”
“Willa,” he said. “Don’t talk to me that way.”
I looked at him in surprise. “What way?”
“Like this isn’t serious. I — I feel very serious about this. About you.” He took a deep breath. “When I heard what happened, I felt like … like I’d been ripped in half. I wanted to find that guy and tear his head off.”
“There’s no need for that now,” I said, managing a little smile in spite of the stinging tears in my eyes. “He’s going to jail. Forever.”
Suddenly, I remembered thinking of Wyatt in what I’d feared would be my last moments.
“What about you?” I asked as Wyatt took a step closer to my bed. “You got arrested, right? What happened?”
Sinking into Mom’s vacated chair, he breathed into his hands and shook his head, like he didn’t know where to begin. He told me the story of the police showing up at his house, how he’d been taken to the station and fingerprinted, and then how his dad had stepped in and called in a mess of favors to keep Wyatt from being charged with trespassing — or worse.
So Wyatt wasn’t going to jail. He was, however, grounded. He didn’t even ask his parents how long the grounding would last. He figured it would let up around graduation.
But given the circumstances, his parents had allowed him this one trip to the hospital.
“Given what circumstances?” I asked.
“Given that I … I begged,” he said. “I told them that my best friend was almost murdered by a serial killer, and if they didn’t let me come see you —” His voice broke, and he looked toward the bright window, blinking furiously.
“Stop,” I said. “It’s okay.”
My best friend, he’d said.
“I’m glad you came,” I said. “I wanted to see you.”
And Wyatt reached over carefully and put his warm hand on top of mine. I laced my fingers through his and we sat there like that until Mom came back.
I was discharged from the hospital two days later, but the house was still an active crime scene, so we couldn’t go back yet. Jonathan booked a suite in a hotel and started making plans to sell the house. As far as he and Mom were concerned, we couldn’t be rid of it fast enough.
My feelings were a little more complicated.
So much bad happened there, I wrote in my journal. But it wasn’t the house’s fault. In a way it seems like the house was a victim, too. Maybe it hated its own role. Maybe the house is what gave Paige the strength to resist. Maybe somehow the spirit of Diana Del Mar was fighting alongside me the whole time I was fighting back.
Or maybe I’m
I stopped and held the pen away from the paper before I could write the word crazy.
I didn’t think that anymore, so it was time to stop saying it.
Over the following week, we talked to the police endlessly. I explained in as much detail as I could without including any ghosty parts. Luckily, the story still made sense — how I’d started to get a weird feeling about Reed that day. How I found Diana’s workroom and recognized the name of the movie. How Reed and I fought our way to the top of the stairs, and then he slipped in a puddle of his own blood and fell. Everything checked out, and the police didn’t seem suspicious.
Besides, I was a pretty decent teller of half truths at this point in my life.
We were bombarded with requests for interviews and quotes. Some producer friend of Jonathan’s even wanted to buy the movie rights. But Mom took charge and deflected them all. She talked to the lawyers, the media, even Jonathan’s agents. She handled it all like it was second nature to her. Jonathan was pretty impressed.
I, personally, would never have expected anything less.
Reporters dug into Reed’s past and cobbled together a portrait of a serial killer — smooth, confident, charming, but alienated. Bad-tempered, with a record of lashing out in school. The victim of an inferiority complex made worse by the loss of his parents and his time with a grandfather who was described by their neighbors as “mean as a snake.”
It was so strange to try to remember how I felt about Reed back before I learned what he really was.
I could recall the slow gentleness of his manner, his soft smile, his placid eyes. It was like he’d been two people. Himself, and not himself. And what would have happened if I’d never found out the truth? We might have gone on taking walks and having casual, flirtatious encounters in the kitchen. Sneaking kisses … Part of me even wondered if, without the Bernadette Middleton debacle, he never would have looked at me as a potential victim.
When you thought about it that way, I guess you could say Marnie kind of did me a favor.
I’d have to face Reed again at the trial. I can’t say I was in love with the idea, but I wasn’t scared.
It takes a lot to scare me, I’ve discovered.
When I went back to school two weeks later, everyone on campus seemed to regard me like a stolen relic from some ancient tomb — worth catching a glimpse of, but not worth venturing too near.
Marnie practically glowed from all the attention, though from time to time I caught phantomlike flashes of fear in her eyes. She and I were bound by something deep, something I could read in her expression whenever she looked at me. I had saved her life. But I could tell that she didn’t want to talk to me, or be near me, or generally have anything at all to do with me.
Which was fine — I was done judging Marnie. Everyone copes in their own way. Not just with almost being murdered, but with being alive. With having parents who die, or ignore you. Maybe someday she’d learn that the truth, however uncomfortable it may be, is worth looking for.