The 9th Girl (42 page)

They went into a living room with a dead Christmas tree and a fireplace. An old photo of Gray sat on a side table. Her hair had been long and plain, and she looked sad and small.

“I’m really sorry for your loss, Mrs. Gray,” Brittany said. “It’s terrible what happened.”

Gray’s mom motioned for her to sit down. “Thank you, Brittany. It’s very kind of you to come by. I know Penny didn’t have many friends.”

“She had a few,” Brittany offered, feeling badly for Gray.

Julia smiled sadly. “You’re the only one I’ve heard from.”

“I’m sorry. I guess kids just don’t know what to do, considering what happened and all.”

“You don’t have to make excuses, Brittany. Penny didn’t make it easy for people to like her. I know that more than anyone.”

“No, I guess she didn’t,” Brittany conceded. “But sometimes I think the people who are the hardest to get to know sometimes turn out to be the most worth knowing. I think Gray was like that.”

Tears came to Julia Gray’s eyes as she tried to smile again. She glanced away and took a drink of something that looked like it might have alcohol in it—a pale amber liquid over ice in a heavy crystal tumbler. The glass was almost empty.

“I don’t think I knew her very well,” she admitted. “She was my child, but that doesn’t make it easier. That makes it harder. Are you friends with your mom, Brittany?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lucky. Your mom is lucky,” she said. “I didn’t have that with my daughter. We didn’t get along at all. I would imagine she didn’t have many nice things to say about me.”

Brittany didn’t say anything at all. She was a terrible liar. And what could she say that wouldn’t sound lame, anyway?

“She probably told you about the fight we had that night before she came to stay with you,” she said, making an odd motion with her right hand, which was bound up in some kind of a brace, as if the fight she’d had with her daughter had been the cause of that. Or maybe the injury was the result of the fight.

Brittany said nothing. Gray was always fighting with her mother, though she had never said anything about the fights being physical at all. She couldn’t even imagine getting in a physical fight with her mother or anyone else.

“Did she tell you about that?” Julia asked.

“Not really.”

“She wasn’t very happy about me getting engaged to Michael,” she said. She took another sip of her drink. “She was always so jealous of anything good happening to me.”

Brittany squirmed in her chair, physically uncomfortable with being there and hearing this. It seemed a weird thing for a mother to say about her daughter. She couldn’t imagine why Gray would have been jealous of her own mother—especially when it came to creepy Michael Warner. Gray had plainly loathed the man.

Julia’s mouth trembled as she tried to smile. “You’re a very sweet girl, Brittany. You don’t strike me as the kind of girl who would have been friends with Penny. You’re so . . . normal. What brought you together?”

“The writer’s workshop last summer.”

“You’re a writer too?”

“Not like Gray. She was really good. But you probably knew that.”

“Penny didn’t share her writing with me.”

“Oh. Well . . .” Brittany brightened as the idea struck her. “You’ll have all her poems now. You can watch the videos!”

“Videos?”

She pulled the duffel bag around and unzipped it and dug around inside to pull out Gray’s MacBook.

“Everything is on here,” she said enthusiastically as she opened the laptop and turned it on. “Gray recorded everything. She was always shooting videos and taking pictures and recording stuff on her phone. I used to give her a hard time about it, but now . . . I guess it was a good thing after all.”

The computer came to life with a musical
ta-dah!
and a screen full of purple flowers.

“You’re familiar with her computer?” Julia asked.

“Yeah. I have the same one, but I mostly use my iPad now,” she said. “I can show you how to get to everything on it. It’s not hard.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very good with technology.”

“This is easy,” Brittany said, typing in Gray’s password.

“You know her password?”

“We made them up for each other last summer.”

And she hadn’t changed it, Brittany noted, despite the fact that Brittany hadn’t been a very good friend to her in recent months. Guilt sharpened its claws on her a little bit for that.

“Did she share that with a lot of people?” Julia asked. “That doesn’t seem like very good security.”

“I don’t think she shared it with anybody else,” Brittany said, refraining from saying that Gray had no one else to share her password with, unless it was with one of her coffeehouse friends. Britt didn’t know any of them.

She swept the cursor around the screen, pointing and clicking until she came to the page she wanted.

“These are all the poems she posted to YouTube,” she said, scrolling through the list of videos. She clicked on one at random and turned the sound up.

Suddenly, Gray was looking at them both, and her voice came out of the computer’s small speakers like a ghost.

I’m not who you see

I’m me

Face is a mask, a shell

You think you know me

You don’t

Ink and steel is a suit of armor

A test to sort the worthy

You don’t like me?

Good

Close the store, lock the door

I’m saved.

Saved the trouble, saved the pain.

The poem said a lot about who Gray had been, and why. It only occurred to Brittany belatedly the impact the words might have on Gray’s mother, who had never been able to get past her daughter’s defenses—and maybe had never really tried. Gray had said her mother hated everything she had ever done to express herself—her hair, her piercings, her tattoo, the way she dressed.

Julia Gray brushed stray tears from her cheeks, her hands trembling.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gray. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Brittany said. “I just thought that you’d be able to see her again and hear her voice.”

And be reminded of every fight they’d ever had and every reason they hadn’t gotten along.

“It’s okay, Brittany,” she said. “It’s not your fault my daughter shut me out of her life—especially lately. I don’t know what made her so angry, do you? I wish I understood. Did she share things with you? Her feelings, her life. Did she tell you things?”

Brittany shook her head. Gray had never been one to confide. She was too guarded. She best expressed herself through her poetry, and even in that she cloaked her pain and experience in verse. She had always spoken in riddles, alluding to experiences and ideas Brittany knew nothing about. She had always put it off to Gray being Gray, an artist.

But even as she thought that, Gray’s words to Christina came back to her from that night at the Rock & Bowl. The thing Christina had made her promise not to tell. It wasn’t true, Christina had said. Just a cruel lie from an angry Gray, striking out with her best weapon: her words. Brittany wondered now if that was the truth or if Gray’s words had been the truth.

“Brittany?” Julia Gray asked.

How could she say it? It probably wasn’t true. Julia Gray wouldn’t want to hear it. What purpose would be served in repeating something said in anger, designed just to cut the other person as deeply as possible?

She could see it in her mind’s eye, though, like a scene from a movie: Gray almost nose to nose with Christina, her expression as vicious as her words. Christina’s eyes going wide in shock, then narrowing to slits like the eyes of a snake.

I fucked your precious father.

Christina’s father. Julia Gray’s fiancé.

“No,” Brittany said, pushing to her feet. She couldn’t look at Julia Gray now. “She didn’t tell me anything. I should probably go,” she said. “I need to get home.”

Julia stood and went with her to the foyer.

“Thank you again for coming, Brittany. You’re a kind, sweet girl,” she said. “I’m glad to know Penny had a friend like you.”

She embraced Brittany tightly, with more emotion than seemed appropriate, and a strange chill went through Brittany just before Julia Gray said, “I’m so sorry. I really can’t let you go.”

46

“I’m sorry I don’t
have a trunk for you to fall out of,” Fitz said as he put Dana Nolan in the back of the van.

She had finally given up and succumbed to the relief of unconsciousness. He went on speaking to her anyway. She was like a doll now, a thing he could play with. She couldn’t answer him. She wouldn’t scream, didn’t move, didn’t react, didn’t resist. She was more inanimate object than human.

“Then again,” he said, “that was really sloppy. That was what really pissed me off—that they would think I would be that careless and that sloppy. That was offensive to me.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he told her. “And with great success, I might add. But here’s the thing with being that good: No one knows. Genius wants recognition.”

He covered her with a blanket, just in case. Couldn’t have someone looking in the window while they sat at a stoplight. Those were the kinds of stupid, sloppy mistakes that ended with incarceration.

The key to success was riding that fine edge of the ego.

He had been the tactical master for a long time. Tonight he would take it to the next level: art.

Euphoria filled him as he got behind the wheel of the van and started the engine. Tonight the world would be his stage, Minneapolis would be his canvas, Dana Nolan would be his masterpiece—a living piece of art.

They wanted to credit him with a zombie.

He would give them a zombie.

47

Brittany tried to pull away,
but Gray’s mother held her, saying over and over, “I’m so sorry. I can’t let you go. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop it!” Brittany said, struggling. “You’re scaring me!”

She tried again to pull away. Julia Gray grabbed her hair in each fist, fingernails digging into her scalp, and gave her a rough shake.

“Be still! I can’t let you go!”

“Oh my God.”

Brittany started to cry, huge tears slipping from her eyes, but she made no sound. She should have been screaming, she thought, but there was a part of her that couldn’t believe what was happening. This couldn’t be real. She had to be imagining it or misinterpreting it.

Her brain struggled and scrambled to make some kind of sense of it. Julia didn’t want her to go because she was lonely, because she was missing her daughter.
I’m the only one who’s come to say they’re sorry. I’m the only friend her daughter had.
She was just overreacting to the stress of losing her child.

I’m just overreacting,
Brittany thought.
She’s not really trying to stop me from leaving.

She tried to turn toward the door. Julia kept hold of her hair in her left hand and began striking her with the right, despite the fact that she had already injured that hand and wore a brace.

“You can’t go!” she snapped. “Stop trying!”

The scent of liquor soured her breath.

“Let me go!” Brittany said. Shouted. Screamed.
“Let me go! Oh my God! Stop it! Let me go!”

Frantic, she tried to scramble backward, her feet slipping and sliding on the floor. She kicked at her attacker. She slapped at her. She felt like a kitten pawing at a lion.

“Don’t fight me!” Julia screamed. “Stop fighting me!”

Brittany twisted and tried to lunge for the door. Julia came with her, suddenly rushing forward instead of pulling back. Their legs tangled and then they were falling, the back of Brittany’s head striking the heavy wooden door like a hammer.

Black spiderwebs flashed across her vision; then everything went dark as her phone silently vibrated against her belly in the pouch of her hoodie sweater.

•   •   •

R
U HOME YET
?

Kyle typed the words and sent the message and waited impatiently. He didn’t like the idea of Brittany walking to Gray’s house and back by herself. It wasn’t far, and it wasn’t a bad neighborhood or anything. He just thought a girl shouldn’t go walking around by herself at night, especially with all the talk about serial killers in the news and everything like that.

He would have felt better being there with her. Even if he had just walked her over and back without ever going in to see Mrs. Gray. He wished he had thought of that sooner.

He walked around his room feeling like a tiger in a cage, watched by the life-size cutout of Georges St-Pierre mounted to the back of his bedroom door. St. Pierre in fight shorts, bare-chested, muscles bulging, a serious expression on his face, his hands resting on his hips. A stack of Japanese characters were inked on his left chest, expressing the nature of his character—saying that he has a good side and a dark side but that respect is the most important thing. Respect for self. Respect for others.

Kyle imagined he felt his hero’s disapproval. GSP wouldn’t have let a woman walk alone in the dark of night. Ultor, the hero Kyle had created, would never have neglected his duty to protect. What had he been thinking letting Brittany go alone?

Gray was dead. Murdered.

His mom and Sam were downstairs talking about a serial killer.

Kyle flashed back to the scene from the morning—the nasty look on Christina’s face as she glared at Brittany from the passenger’s seat of Aaron Fogelman’s car, Fogelman’s rage as he had come at Kyle swinging his fists with bad intentions. Christina was angry with Britt. What if she and her henchman decided to do something to her? He could still see Christina lunging at Gray that night at the Rock & Bowl.

His hands were shaking as sent another text.

Where R U? Pls answer!

But she didn’t answer.

She was probably still talking with Gray’s mom, he reasoned. Kyle wouldn’t have had that much to say beyond
I’m sorry for your loss,
but he was a guy. Women liked to go on and on.