Rosebush (35 page)

I stopped his hand. “What happened then?”

He looked at me quizzically. “But you love having your hair stroked.”

I felt like my stomach was trying to crawl up my throat. I swallowed, hard. “In a little while. Tell me, what happened with Elsa?”

“I told her to tell you I was outside and wanted to talk to you, but you didn’t come back. I was just about to storm the battlements myself when I saw you come out with one of your girlfriends, so I assumed you were okay and I took off. But man, I felt bad the next day when I heard what happened. I knew I should have stayed. That you needed me.”

“What girlfriend did I come out with?”

“One of the ones wearing wings. Why do you rich people dress up so weird anyway?”

“But which one?”

“I couldn’t see. It was dark and raining.” He got up and started pacing. “Why are you giving me the third degree? I left after that. And I’ve done nothing but help you. I care for you so much.” He bent to kiss me and I pulled away.

“What’s wrong, J. J.?”

“This. What we’re doing. I can’t go through with it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not going out with you. It was a mistake. I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Whatever there is between us is better as friends.”

He looked like he’d been slapped, even started to rub his cheek. “You don’t mean that. You can’t mean that. We’re perfect together.” He paused and got a wild expression in his eye. “Wait a second.” Grabbing my phone, he checked the caller ID. “I knew it. That bastard, David. The ‘stay soft’ man. He called you and you’re getting back together with him.”

“No. It has nothing to do with him. You—you stalked me.”

He laughed. “Stalked you? I tried to
protect
you. I memorized you, learned everything I could about you so I could love you. It’s exactly what a good photographer does for his subject. Is that a crime?”

“I just don’t feel the same way about you as you do about me.”

His chiseled handsome face showed incredulity and something else. I saw a bead of sweat starting to form at his temple. “No. You don’t feel, period. You’re terrified of feeling, aren’t you?” He bent and put his face near mine. His expression was mean. “Scared of getting carried away. That’s why everything in your photos is cold and dead. Because
you’re
cold and dead. Or close enough.”

“I’m sorry, Scott. It’s just not right.”

“Not right? Do you want to know what’s not right?”

He was really sweating now and his eyes were bulging out. He was no longer handsome at all. He went to a big backpack he’d propped in a chair and pushed things around inside it until he found what he was looking for. “I’m not the bad guy here. I’m the good guy. You want to know who the bad guy is? Look at that.”

He threw a piece of paper on the table. “I hope you’re happy,” he said, storming out. Leaving me alone with a Xerox copy of an auto-body repair estimate from the day after the party for an Audi A4 bumper registered to David Tisch.

Vehicle hit a post
is what it said. I realized it was true. I’d been dumb as a post anyway.

“It looks like you were kneeling in the middle of the street, waiting for the car to hit you,” Officer Rowley said the first day I met her. “There are generally only two explanations for that kind of behavior.”

But she was wrong. There was a third. You might kneel in the street without moving if you knew the person driving the car and had every reason to believe they’d stop.

Chapter 31

I knew I should
call for help. Reach out and push any of the buttons on the phone in the middle of the conference table and ask for Officer Rowley or Loretta or anyone. The news about David’s car—no wonder he’d come with Ollie that first day—made the whole convenience store theory impossible. And the other thing Scott had said, about me being outside with one of the girls I’d come with. “Girls with wings.” That could only be Langley or Kate.

If Scott saw me come out of the house with one of them, it meant that Ollie had lied. He didn’t follow me out of the house. But someone else did.

The harder something is for you to handle, the more deeply it will be buried, Dr. Tan had said.

That’s when Ollie had shown up. That’s why I listened to him. Because I’d been too stunned to move.

“I should have stopped,” Kate had said. Did she run me over? And then retrieve the friendship ring to put on my finger so no one would know we’d had a fight? And when she told David to leave me alone, was that so he wouldn’t ask any more questions and stir up my memory?

“You’ll pay for that,” Kate had said. And she’d had every right to be angry, I realized. At the beach, last summer, I’d used her. I’d thought I was going along with what she wanted, but it wasn’t that simple. I was taking what I needed. Love. A sense of being important to someone. I thought it was okay—it was her idea after all. But it wasn’t okay. Because I’d known it meant more to her than it did to me and I took it anyway. I owed her an apology.

If I lived.

The hospital phone on the table was ringing. Without thinking, I reached for it. “Hello?”

“Does she haunt you?”

“Who?”

“Bonnie, of course. The girl you killed.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Would she be dead if it wasn’t for you?”

No one except the people who had been in my room with me the night before could have known about that.

“It’s time for you to pay for what you’ve done, Jane. Or what you didn’t do.”

And me. I knew.

Which meant I had to be hallucinating. This was all in my head. It was all—

“I hope you’re ready to die.”

I slammed the receiver down.

It wasn’t possible. I didn’t want to die. It wasn’t a hallucination—

—which meant someone was on their way to kill me.

I didn’t make this up. I didn’t—

—want to die.

I put my hands over my ears to stop all the voices. It was too hard; I couldn’t take any more. I picked up the phone and started pushing buttons wildly until Loretta’s voice said, “What are you doing, sweetheart?” next to me.

“Oh, thank God.” I put the phone down. “How did you get here?”

“Scott came up to your room to tell me you’d had a bit of a falling-out, but he was worried about leaving you down here alone, so—”

If Scott had been with Loretta, then he couldn’t have been the caller.

“We have to get out of here, Loretta.” I used my arms to move the chair toward the door, but I got stuck between the dining table and the wall. “Get this furniture out of my way.”

“Calm down, sweetheart.”

I gripped her wrist. “He called again, Loretta. The killer.”

She put a hand on my forehead. “You’re feverish.”

I ducked my head away. “That doesn’t matter. Someone is coming to kill me. I have to get out of here. Loretta, you have to help me.”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

I turned myself toward the edge of the table. If she wasn’t going to help, I’d find a way out myself. Palms pressed on the surface, I tried to stand. “There was no face. In the bathroom mirror I had no face. There were just hands.”

“Sit down, angel.”

My arms were shaking with the effort. “Don’t you see what that means, Loretta? Just an empty place. I know what they did.”

“Let’s get you back into the chair.”

“Kate. Kate said I would pay for what I’ve done. And David’s car hit a post.”

“Sit, sweetheart.”

“I’m not crazy. I’m not hallucinating. There’s no time. This is it. That’s what the killer said. It’s time to die.”

“Okay, sweetheart.”

“We have to leave. The killer is coming for me. No place is safe. I didn’t drink anything, but I got drugged anyway. Don’t touch anything. Anything could be poison. Don’t you see?”

“I see. Sit down and I’ll wheel you out of here.”

A wave of relief swept over me. I’d gotten through to her. “Yes. Thank you.” I collapsed into the chair, so happy I was sobbing. “Thank you, Loretta.”

Out of the corner of my eye I was vaguely aware of her doing something with her hand, and then I heard her voice into the phone, “This is Loretta Bonner in the West Executive dining room. I have a code four.”

“No.” I tried to hang up the phone. “He’ll find us first. We have to go.”

She pushed my hand aside. “Get me security and Dr. Tan stat.”

She didn’t believe me. Because of the medicine. She thought the medicine was making me hallucinate.

That’s when I saw what had been the solution to all of this, all the uncertainty all along. I could know! I could know if I was mad or not. I started clawing at the IV in my arm. “Take this out. Then we can be sure.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure. Don’t you see? We can know.” I was so excited to have thought of it I was laughing.

“Know what?”

“If the calls are real or if it’s just this, this poison, that’s been going into my veins.” I smiled at her and kept pulling on the IV. “It’s so obvious.”

She wrapped a strong hand around my wrist to stop me. “You need to calm down, sweetheart.”

“No. This is what I need to do. Help me, Loretta. I want to know what’s real and what isn’t. Get it out of me.”

Loretta was leaning over me holding my arms down. “Stay still, sweetheart.”

“It’s got to go. It’s got to end. It’s time for this to end.” If she was going to hold my hands down, I’d bite the IV out. “I’m done. I want it to go.” I twisted my neck to get it near my arm.

Loretta pushed my head back. “You have to stop this, sweetheart. Stop it and it will all be okay.”

“You’re lying!” I twisted away from her grip, my hand suddenly strong, and tried to raise myself out of my chair. “You’re against me. You’re all against me.”

I didn’t see the needle until she’d already plunged it into my arm.

Chapter 32

Whatever Loretta gave
me knocked me out cold. Opening myeyes, I didn’t recognize anything around me. I was in a completely different room. There were no windows, so instead of resting on the windowsill all my tokens of popularity had been moved from room 403 and placed on a shelf across from my bed. My face itched and when I went to scratch it, I couldn’t move my arms. At first I thought I was paralyzed again, but then I realized it was worse. I was in restraints.