Follow her down, p.5
Follow Her Down, page 5
A sudden, inexplicable feeling of protectiveness floods my veins as I watch Sera through the store window. She’s a complete stranger, but I recognize a haunted soul when I see one. She could also be a potential next victim, of either Rick or Red Hands, or both if they’re one and the same.
She’s not mine.
But I’ll make sure no one else gets to pretend she’s theirs.
8
Eddie
You’d think I’d be used to the smell of murder and the flies, their buzzing a low, persistent hum that vibrates in my molars, but I’m not.
Margot kneels on the floor, positioned center stage on a threadbare rug that may have been floral once, before it soaked up too much red. Her hands are clasped together around a burned rose as if in prayer, pleading with a god who didn’t show up.
“Jesus,” Deputy Miller mutters beside me, his voice choked. He’s young, still green enough for his stomach to rebel. He turns away, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. “How do you get used to this?”
“You don’t,” I say, stepping carefully around a pool of congealing blood and the remnants of a broken mirror. “You just learn to hold it in until you’re alone.”
Margot has blonde hair, dyed bright red, now matted dark at the roots. Her face is slack in death, but her eyes are open—wide and blue and utterly vacant. There are ligature marks on her wrists, deep purple bruises that speak of a struggle. Her ankles show similar abrasions. She fought. Hard. But not hard enough. Red Hands always wins this particular argument.
Sheriff Vincent appears at the door, his face a mask of grim authority. “Crowe. Took you long enough. Did you stop again to help a couple raccoons cross the road?”
“Something like that.”
I have a bit of a reputation for being a softy towards those in need, whatever the species, but in a world that more and more lacks empathy, I don’t plan on changing anytime soon.
I kneel beside the body, careful not to disturb anything. “Who found her?”
“Anonymous tip called into dispatch thirty minutes ago.” Vincent’s gaze sweeps the room, lingering on the blood-spattered wallpaper. “Male voice, muffled. Said we’d find ‘truth’ here.”
Classic Red Hands. He loves an audience. He wants us to see his work, to understand the message he’s carving into flesh and bone. His calling card—the red handprint—is smeared on the wall above the victim’s head, stark against the faded floral print. So is his message:
THE TRUTH IS LOUDER THAN HER VOICE.
The handprint looks human, but it’s not traceable. Red Hands wears ultra-thin latex gloves molded with generic fingerprint whorls. In other words, he could be anyone.
Margot’s dyed hair, new boyfriend, new job at the local grocery store, and her recent acceptance to nursing school suggested a fresh start. She was reinventing herself.
Just like all the others.
Red Hands’s type. Women shedding their old skins, trying on new identities like ill-fitting coats. To him, they’re frauds. Pretenders. And he’s the judge, jury, and executioner, peeling back their layers until only “truth” remains.
I examine Margot’s hands, unsurprised to find her fingernails painted a vibrant, candy-apple red. The fresh color looks garish against her pale skin, applied thickly and unevenly. The cuticles are ragged, the skin around the nails stained with the color.
This red is aggressive. Loud. A statement.
“Polish was applied post-mortem like all the others,” I observe, lifting one of her limp hands.
This cheap, bright-red polish, at least in Red Hands’s mind, reveals her, forcing us to see the dissonance he perceived. Look, he seems to be screaming without sound. Look how false she was.
Red Hands doesn’t take trophies like some serial killers. The BTK Killer, who was active in the mid-1970s through the early 90s in and around Wichita, took all sorts of trophies.
But Red Hands leaves them. Relics of the lives his victims tried to leave behind, like pictures sometimes, bottles of pills, or broken mirrors from the victims’ houses spread out beneath them. He also poses each victim with a burned rose between their clasped hands, a symbol of rebirth.
My mind flickers, unbidden, to the gas station. To Sera Vale, restocking chips with that detached grace. Her dark hair—freshly dyed, roots already betraying her. Her blue eyes, holding secrets like shivs. She’s exactly Red Hands’s type. A woman hiding in plain sight, building a new identity from scratch.
And she works for Rick.
Rick Davies. Rick, with his too-easy smile and wandering hands. Rick, who was accused of harassment by Margot before she quit the Gas N’ Go. Rick, who always seems a little too calm when the news of another woman’s disappearance breaks over the city like a bad storm.
Does Gas N’ Go sell nail polish? I wouldn’t doubt it.
A chill creeps down my back, colder than the stale air in the death room. Rick fits the profile. His access to the women, his behavior, his proximity. His entitlement. The way he views women—as things to be handled, polished, possessed. Or discarded if they don’t comply.
Vincent is talking, his voice a low drone about canvassing the neighborhood, checking Margot’s recent contacts, the usual protocol. I nod, my mind racing ahead, already forming a plan.
First: Interrogate Rick and see if he sweats.
Second: Get Sera away from that job without tipping her off. Without making her feel like a victim or a target. I can already tell she won’t accept charity. She won’t trust a rescue. I’ll need leverage. Something she wants more than her job, more than money, but she can’t be making that much there anyway.
Protectiveness surges, hot and fierce. She’s a mystery wrapped in danger. A liar with haunted eyes. And she’s standing right in the kill zone.
I won’t let Rick—or Red Hands—touch her.
Miller gags again, stumbling towards the door. Vincent sighs, the sound heavy with disdain for weakness. I ignore them both, staring at Margot’s prayerful pose, her garish nails. A woman silenced, posed, painted. A message in blood and cheap polish.
Red Hands thinks he’s revealing truth. All I see is another mask—the one worn by the monster hiding behind a gas station counter and leering smiles.
Time to peel it back.
9
Sera
I’m buried alive, and it’s the most peaceful I’ve felt in years.
Dirt fills my mouth, gritty between my teeth. My lungs burn for air they can’t have. I press my palms against the wooden ceiling of my coffin, feeling splinters drive under my fingernails as I claw at it. The pain is exquisite, real in a way nothing else has been since he took everything from me.
I should be screaming, though no one would hear me six feet under. Instead, my lips curve into a smile around the soil in my mouth.
This is where I belong.
The thought arrives with perfect clarity. Down here in the dark, with the earth pressing in from all sides, I am exactly where I should be. Not hunting. Not hiding. Not pretending to be someone I’m not.
Just buried, waiting. Just becoming something new beneath the surface.
My fingernails peel back as I scrape harder at the wood. Blood mingles with dirt. The pain sharpens everything—my thoughts, my purpose, my hunger for what comes next.
I wake not with a gasp, but with a smile and a thin sheen of sweat coating my skin.
The bedroom is dark, but not as dark as my dream. My sheets are damp, twisted around my legs like restraints. For a moment, I lie perfectly still, letting the feeling of being buried linger in my muscles, in my bones.
Then I hear it.
Scratching, faint but persistent, like fingernails dragging across old wood. It’s coming from below, from the sealed basement door I still haven’t opened.
I’ve been in this house for nearly a week now, and each night, the sounds from the basement grow more insistent. Sometimes it’s scratching. Sometimes it’s a low, rhythmic thumping, like a heartbeat. Sometimes it’s a whisper so quiet I can’t make out any of the words.
My shadow daddy visits me most nights, his presence slipping through vents and under doors. Sometimes he brings me to shuddering orgasms with his cold touch or another wine bottle or my loaded gun. Other times he just watches, a deeper patch of darkness in the corner of my room.
The scratching grows louder, more frantic. Then, suddenly—
KNOCK.
One hard, deliberate sound that absolutely does not come from the basement. It echoes through the house, bouncing off walls and settling in my chest.
The front door. Someone is at my front door at—I check the clock—8:17 in the morning.
I slide out of bed and pull on an oversized T-shirt that barely covers my ass, but I can’t find my panties. Oh well.
I do find my gun, though, and I carry it with me.
The scratching from the basement has stopped. The whole house seems to be holding its breath, waiting.
I pad barefoot down the stairs, my free hand trailing along the banister for balance. The knocking doesn’t come again.
At the front door, I hesitate. Through the peephole, I see nothing. Just my empty porch, lit by the rising sun. No figure waiting.
Still, I lift my gun, unlock the door, and open it a crack, tense and ready to slam it shut again or start shooting, just in case.
The porch is really empty.
Wait, no, not quite empty.
On the porch sits a black velvet box, about the size of a shoebox, tied with a crimson ribbon. The bow is perfect, each loop symmetrical, as if someone spent a long time getting it just right.
I glance around, scanning the tree line, the driveway, the shadows under my car and along the street. Nothing moves, but someone is watching. I’m certain of it.
“I know you’re still there,” I call into the morning, squeezing my gun tightly.
The wind picks up, rustling the dead leaves on the porch, but the breeze carries no response.
I bend and pick up the box. It’s lighter than I expected, though I’m not sure what I was expecting. Something shifts inside, a solid weight sliding from one end to the other. For a moment, I think about leaving it, about closing the door and pretending I never saw it.
But that’s not who I am anymore. I don’t run from dark things. I embrace them.
I bring the box inside and lock the door.
In the kitchen, I place the gun and the box on the counter and stare at it. The velvet is so black it seems to absorb the sunlight streaming through the window. The ribbon is the exact color of blood.
I know I should be cautious. It could be anything—a bomb, a snake, anthrax. But my fingers itch to untie that perfect bow, to lift the lid and see what’s been delivered to me so early in the morning.
I pull one end of the ribbon, and it unravels smoothly, falling away from the box like a crimson waterfall. The lid lifts easily, revealing tissue paper inside, black and rustling as I peel it back.
What’s beneath steals my breath.
A hand.
A man’s hand, severed cleanly at the wrist. It’s pale but not waxy, posed with a strange elegance, fingers slightly curled as if holding something precious. And indeed, nestled in the palm is a small, folded photograph.
With trembling fingers, I pluck the photo from the hand’s grasp. I unfold it, and the room tilts around me.
I know this face. I’ve memorized it, hated it, dreamed of erasing it from existence.
David Farley. His friend. His alibi. The man who testified that I was “confused about what happened” and that Vincent was “a gentleman who would never hurt a woman.”
The hand in the box must’ve surely belonged to him. The fingers that once pointed at me in court, dismissing my truth, are now permanently curled, holding the evidence of his betrayal.
There’s no note. There doesn’t need to be one.
The message is clear: someone knows what Vincent did to me. Someone believes me. And that someone has decided to do something about it.
Does this mean that David is dead? Or just minus one hand?
I sink to the kitchen floor, the box cradled in my lap. My thoughts flicker and shift.
Was this an act of justice…or an attempt to get my attention?
Then a deeper thought surfaces: Does it matter?
Someone saw me—the real me, not the mask I wear now, not the fake identity I’ve constructed. Someone saw Penny beneath Sera’s skin and decided she deserved vengeance.
“You saw me,” I whisper to the hand, to the empty kitchen, to whoever delivered this perverse gift. “You finally saw me.”
I carefully wrap the tissue paper back around the hand, around the photograph. I place the lid back on the box and retie the ribbon, making sure the bow is as perfect as it was when I found it.
There’s a faint scratch from the direction of the basement, like a finger being dragged across a vent. A question, maybe.
I press my palm to the velvet lid and smile. The scratching grows louder, more insistent.
“Yes, I know who it was,” I tell my shadow daddy. “That Scottish guy at the gas station who knows my username. He must know everything.”
It isn’t fear curling in my chest as I sit there with a man’s hand in a box on my lap. It’s something worse…or something much, much better.
I like being chosen like this.
I like being believed.
10
Sera
Death should decay. But the hand in its velvet coffin? It stays pristine and mocking, like the lies its owner told about me under oath.
I’ve spent the morning hunched over my laptop, reading about David Farley’s “tragic accident.” According to the local news sites, he was attacked outside his home the very day I arrived in Wichita. He survived, minus one hand. The article describes a “brutal, unprovoked assault” and mentions that Sheriff Vincent Harrow has assigned his best detective to the case.
The very same bad-boy-looking Detective Eddie I met at the gas station who unnervingly looked through me rather than at me? The one with dark hair flopping over one blue eye and the most chiseled jawline I’d ever seen?
Regardless, the irony is delicious. Vincent is investigating the mutilation of his own alibi. Is he worried? Does he know it’s connected to me?
My guess is no.
There’s a photo of David from last year’s Christmas parade, his arm slung around Vincent’s shoulders, both men grinning like they’ve never ruined a woman’s life.
I remember David on the witness stand, his face a mask of fake concern: “Yeah, I saw them in the club talking. She was clingy, you know? And when he tried to walk away, well…some women just can’t handle rejection.”
Some women just can’t handle having their drink drugged and waking up bleeding and bruised and near death. Some women can’t handle being told they “wanted it rough” when they know—they fucking know—they never consented to anything at all.
The article says David will undergo months of physical therapy after getting a prosthetic. Good. I hope every second hurts. I hope he feels phantom pain in the fingers that no longer exist. I hope when he reaches for things—his coffee, his car keys, his dick—he remembers what was done to him, and why.
I close my laptop and walk to the hallway closet where I’ve hidden the box. Not out of shame or fear, but because it’s precious. Evidence of the first time anyone has taken my side since the night it happened. It may as well be a love letter.
I lift the lid, check that the hand is still there. It is, of course, pointing right at me like an accusation.
Grinning, I carefully replace the lid and push the box deeper into the closet.
A laugh bubbles up from my chest. It makes me giddy that David’s not dead, just maimed and marked, forced to live without his right hand. The one he raised in court to swear on the Bible before lying for Vincent.
“Perfect,” I whisper.
One perfect gift has made me feel lighter than I have in weeks.
Later, when I leave for work, I pause at the front door. The house feels different today, more attentive. The silence has texture.
“Bye, Shadow Daddy,” I say to the empty hallway.
In response, a long scratch sounds behind the locked basement door.
Smiling, I head to work, hoping I see my stalker again.
I want him to know I got it. And I love it.
***
Every ding when the door opens makes me look up, searching for James’s muscular frame and boyish smile. But he doesn’t come.
Customers flow in and out. They buy their cigarettes and lottery tickets and sugary drinks. They either hardly look at me, or they stare too long at my chest, my hips, my ass.
None of them look at my eyes like they mean it. None of them see me.
Every man feels wrong because they’re not James, and it pisses me off. I didn’t ask to want him here. I don’t need him. I don’t need anyone.
And yet my stomach drops each time the door opens and it’s not him. His absence feels deliberate, pointed, like a punishment. Or a game.
By hour two, I’m angry. By hour three, I’m pouring myself coffee so aggressively that it splashes onto the counter. As I wipe it up, a shadow falls across me.
“You’ve been jumpy today,” Rick says, standing much too close.
His aftershave is cheap and too strong, like he’s trying to cover something rotten underneath.
“Really?” I mutter, not looking up.
“I’ve been watching you.” His voice drops lower. “The way you keep looking at the door. Waiting for someone?”
I straighten up, clutching the dirty rag. “Just doing my job.”
He smiles like he thinks I’m flirting, but all I’m doing is picturing him dangling from a hook. He steps even closer, so close his breath grazes my cheek.
“You do your makeup like you want attention, but then you act like you don’t know what to do with it,” he says, his small eyes glittering with something ugly.
