The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die Read online

  I write more and more slowly. All I can think of are questions. I don’t have a single answer, and it makes me exhausted trying to think of how I’ll ever be able to find out. It’s warm inside the McDonald’s and my stomach is full of food. Even my headache is easing.

  I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until Ty touches my arm. I jerk awake so hard that the back of my head slams into the wall. The echo of a sound hangs in the air. I’m pretty sure it came from me and that it was a scream. I’ve got my hands up in front of my face like I’m trying to stop someone from hitting me. I let them fall back onto my lap.

  “Sorry, sorry!” Ty says, looking at the Band-Aids on my fingers. “It’s just that we’re closing now.” He’s holding a wide broom with blue bristles. In front of it is a pile of dirt, torn wrappers, and bits of old food.

  My face feels tight and red. “Can I just use the bathroom for a second?”

  “Um, sure.” Ty looks around and I realize we are the only two people left in the restaurant. Even the guy who was cooking fries when I came in seems to have gone. How long have I been sleeping?

  On my way to the restrooms, I stop to look out the window. The parking lot is mostly empty now. It’s all too easy to pick out Brenner’s SUV. I can’t stay the night in the parking lot. But where can I go?

  After I use the toilet, I splash water on my face. I want to sleep so badly, but even if I find another place to try to hide the car, I don’t think I’ll ever be safe enough to stop paying attention, to risk falling asleep. I take out the tiny first-aid kit and change the bandages on my poor fingers. Although they’re soaked with blood, I still have to peel them off, sucking in my breath at the sharp pain. My ring finger looks the worst, raw and shiny. Swallowing down a sudden flare of nausea, I squirt the minuscule tube of yellow antibiotic goop on both fingers, then put on new Band-Aids.

  I push the door open two inches and stop. Voices.

  One I recognize.

  “You’re sure you haven’t seen this girl?” a man says. “Someone thought they saw her coming in here.”

  I know that voice. I would know it anywhere. The man in the oxblood shoes.

  The last time I heard that voice, it was saying, “Take her out back and finish her off.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DAY 1, 9:20 P.M.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly I let the restroom door inch closed, careful it doesn’t clunk and give me away. There’s no place I can run. This bathroom is just a tiled box, with no windows and no exits other than the door. There’s no place I can hide. I could lock one of the stall doors and stand on the seat, but that wouldn’t fool anyone. I imagine the man in the oxblood shoes kicking in the door and then shooting me in the chest. If he wanted me dead a few hours ago, how much more does he want it now? Now that I have killed Brenner?

  But one thing is different. I have a gun.

  I stand with my arms straight out in front of me, my right hand holding the gun, my left hand steadying it. Or trying to steady it. I’m shaking so hard it’s a wonder I’m standing up. I can’t just let him take me. I’ll end up a body in the woods, the way he wanted in the first place.

  The door starts to open slowly. Wait, I tell myself. Wait.

  Am I going to shoot him or try to hold him off and get away? I don’t know. Either way, I need more than just a hand.

  Then a dark head begins to come through the door.

  My body makes the decision. Shoot him!

  My finger is already tightening on the trigger when I realize it’s Ty.

  His eyes go wide, and he flattens himself against the door. Hands raised, he slides to the floor.

  I look past him into the short hall. It’s empty. “Sorry! Sorry!” I drop the gun to my side.

  We speak at the same time.

  “Who the hell are you?” he yells.

  “Is that man still out there?” I step back so that I can see more of the hall. Still empty, except for a cart with cleaning supplies.

  He lets out an angry sigh and lowers his hands. “I told them you were never here and they left. But I’m not sure they believed me. That’s why I brought the janitor’s cart. So they would think I’m just cleaning up.”

  “Them? There’s more than one guy?”

  “There were two.”

  Two? Like the two men at the cabin? Maybe Brenner’s not really dead. Maybe the person who called Dillow was lying. I feel an odd surge of relief. “Was one of them thin and about five foot nine, with blue eyes and short brown hair?”

  “What? No. The guy who asked about you had silver hair, and the other guy was bald. The first guy said you just escaped from a mental hospital.” Ty looks like he thinks that’s a likely possibility.

  “That’s not true. But I’m not sure what is. I’ve lost all my memory.”

  I wait for Ty to say something, but he doesn’t.

  “I don’t even know my own name,” I continue. “All I remember is coming to in a cabin a few hours ago. Not a mental hospital. A cabin. And I was on the floor, and the guy who was just talking to you was standing over me telling this other guy to kill me.”

  Ty’s eyes narrow. “To kill you?” he repeats in a flat voice.

  “I know it sounds crazy. But I swear it’s true.” Would I believe Ty if he were telling me the same story? The scary thing is I don’t think I would.

  “Why would two men want to kill you?”

  I must sound like the kind of person who wears a tinfoil hat and carries a dirty plastic baby doll. “I don’t know. All I know is that guy was angry, and he said that I didn’t know anything. And then he told the other guy to kill me and he left. I didn’t even see his face. Just his shoes. But I’ll never forget his voice. Then I managed to get away. And I ended up here.”

  I expect Ty to look even more dubious. Instead he says, “I read what you wrote on your napkin. That’s why I lied to them.”

  I try to remember exactly what I scribbled down. A bunch of questions with no answers.

  “Do you think you hit your head?” His eyebrows draw together. “Or someone hit your head?”

  “I don’t think so.” I run one hand over my scalp. “I don’t feel any bruises.” Gingerly, I touch my lips. “I think someone hit me in the mouth though. It’s all cut up inside, and one of my teeth is loose.”

  Ty starts to push himself to his feet and then stops. “Is it okay if I get up?”

  “What? Why?”

  He points at the gun, and it’s only then that I realize I’m still holding it. At least it’s not aiming at him anymore. I slide it into my coat pocket.

  Ty gets to his feet, steps closer, and tilts his head to regard me. “Your pupils are the same size. Do you have a headache? Do you feel sick to your stomach or dizzy?”

  “I had a headache earlier, but it’s not so bad now. The food helped.” I take a deep, shaky breath. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “I believe that you think you’re telling the truth.” Ty’s voice trails off.

  “But it’s a crazy story,” I fill in for him.

  “Yeah. Except I saw the bandages on your fingers. And on the napkin you wrote that someone pulled out your fingernails. Did that really happen?” I’m guessing we’re about the same age, but for a second, Ty looks really young.

  “When I came to, I saw a chair with ropes.” A shudder races over my skin. “And on the table were a pair of bloody pliers and two fingernails. My fingernails.” He grimaces. “So, yeah. It really happened. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t remember it.”

  Gently, Ty lifts my wrist and looks at my damaged hand. Only now do I notice the brownish bruises, shaped like fingerprints, circling my wrist. “There’s a first-aid kit in the back,” he says. “Should I get it?”

  “No thanks. I just put on new Band-Aids. My fingers look gross, but at least they’re not bleeding anymore. They told this security guy who tried to help me that I pulled my fingernails out by myself.”

  He shakes his head and lets go of my wrist. “It’s hard to bel
ieve anyone could do that once. Let alone twice. And anyway, you’ve got that.” With his chin, he indicates the pocket with the gun. “That doesn’t seem to fit in with what they were saying. I mean, if you broke out of a mental hospital, where would you get a gun? I don’t think they arm the guards at a place like that.”

  Now I wish I had stayed at the restroom door and eavesdropped on every word. “What else did they say besides Sagebrush? Did they tell you my name?”

  “Katie. Like you wrote on your napkin.”

  “Did they tell you my last name?” It seems like something I could hold on to. Another piece of the puzzle that is me.

  “If they did, I don’t remember it. I was busy trying to decide if I was going to tell them about you. They did have a photo of you.”

  “A photo? What did it look like?” I think of my family. “Did it show anybody else?”

  “It was kind of grainy. Like it was printed from online or something.” Ty raises his arms over his head, fists clenched, and pastes on a grin. “It looked like this. Like you were celebrating a big win.”

  I want so badly to be that girl again. The girl I used to be. The girl I don’t remember. The girl who smiled and had something to celebrate.

  My breath is coming a little easier now, but I still feel like a rat in a trap. “Can you do me a favor? There’s a dark blue Honda SUV out in the parking lot, like, five rows back and 45 degrees to the left. Can you see if it’s still there? And then I’ll leave. I promise.”

  Ty pushes open the door. In a minute, he’s back, shaking his head. “It’s there. But it won’t do you any good. Three guys are going through it—the two who asked about you and another one.”

  I want to just sit down on the floor and give up. “Then they know I’ve got to be in one of these stores. Except most of them are probably closed now. They won’t stop looking for me. And they’re going to find me.”

  “There’s still other places here you could be.” He looks up at the ceiling, thinking. “There’s something like eight movies showing at the theater complex, and the Ben and Jerry’s is still open. And there’s a brewpub on the other side that doesn’t close until twelve. But yeah, it’s not that many places.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” I rub my temples. The headache’s back, and the food, which tasted so good going down, now threatens to come back up. “The minute I leave this bathroom, they’ll see me. Out there in the restaurant it’s nothing but windows.”

  Ty tilts his head, thinking, and then nods. “I have an idea.”

  CHAPTER 12

  DAY 1, 9:36 P.M.

  “You really think you can get me out of here without those men noticing?” I ask Ty. “Out of McDonald’s or out of the shopping mall?”

  His dark eyes look directly into mine. “Both.”

  I look away. “I don’t know.” What am I doing dragging the guy who closes McDonald’s into my problems? Even with the gun, the chance that I’m going to end up dead must be close to a hundred percent. “It’s probably not safe for you to help me. I mean, those men—they really want to kill me. If you get mixed up in this, you could get hurt. Maybe even killed.”

  Ty hears me say the words, but I can tell he doesn’t really believe them. Maybe I wouldn’t either if some guy hadn’t dragged me out into the woods. He starts speaking as soon as I stop talking.

  “Look, the reality is that you need to let me help you. Or you might as well just walk out that door with your hands up.”

  I’m so tired. It’s almost tempting to do what Ty says, even though he didn’t mean it. To walk out there and give myself up. To pretend that if I do, the next stop will be a clean white bed at the Sagebrush Mental Health Center. Instead of a muddy grave in the woods.

  Then I remember the pink and white chips that used to be my fingernails. If I give myself up, maybe it will be worse than just a bullet in the head. “Okay. What’s your plan?”

  Five minutes later, Ty wheels a big brown square garbage can into the restroom. It barely fits through the door. I open the lid. He’s put a new black plastic liner in it, but my nostrils flare at the reek of mold and rancid grease that still wafts from it. I lift my leg to climb inside, but the top edge is higher than my waist and too flimsy for me to balance on.

  “Here. Let me help you.” He clasps his hands and leans down to make a step for me. I put one foot in, then raise the other and swing it over the edge of the can. Nearly losing my balance, I steady myself on his shoulder. I start to put my foot down, but have to turn it sideways when I realize there’s only a narrow rectangle at the bottom. The rest of the space is taken up by big indents that must hold the wheels. After I jam my first foot behind the second, the plastic creaking at every move, I crouch down and try to figure out where to put my arms. My mind offers up a memory, not really my own, but of a photograph from the 1950s, people crammed into those phone booths shaped like upended glass coffins. My right knee is pushing against my chin, one shoulder is twisted awkwardly. But I’m in.

  When Ty closes the lid, it stinks even more and it’s hard not to feel like I might smother. He groans when he tries to tip it back on its wheels. “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world,” I think. Or rather, I remember. I have a dim memory of a classroom, a blackboard, a teacher reciting those words.

  For a minute I forget about the smell and how cramped I am. All I can think about is how two little shards of knowledge—a photo from the 1950s and an old quote from some Greek or Roman philosopher—just got knocked free in my brain. Does that mean I might start remembering more?

  We go bumping along. I’m so crammed in that I don’t get thrown around too badly, but I can feel my bones aching where bruises will probably show up tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow. A few times the cart drops down over a stair or a curb, and then the sound of the wheels gets deeper and more spread out, and I realize we’re outside. He’s wheeling me to the spot where they keep the shopping mall’s Dumpsters behind red brick walls. Consumers out to buy a bunch of new shiny stuff don’t want to be reminded that everything eventually gets used up and tossed aside.

  Finally we stop. “Back in a sec,” Ty says in a low voice, and then his footsteps move off as he goes to get his car. The plan is for him to drive around the block a few times, making sure he’s not followed, and then to take the back entrance into the mall and drive straight into this walled-off area to retrieve me.

  But what if someone else comes to get me first? I realize, too late, that the gun is in my pocket, not my hand. I try to twist my hand back to get it, but it’s impossible. Another memory comes to me, but this time it’s a real memory, it’s my memory, it’s not something I learned in school or saw on the Internet. In my memory, I am hiding underneath a bed, waiting for someone to find me. Playing hide-and-seek. I don’t know who I was playing with or how old I was or even whose house I was in. But I do remember what it felt like to tremble and wait and concentrate on not making a sound. To try to not even breathe.

  But back then it was half delicious. Now it’s just pure terror. Because the next person who swings that lid back could be the man in the oxblood shoes. The man who ordered my death.

  And then I hear something. The hairs prickle on my arms as I concentrate. The sounds become clearer. Footsteps. Coming closer.

  CHAPTER 13

  DAY 1, 9:49 P.M.

  Should I stand up now, grab the gun as I unfold my legs, try to take advantage of the element of surprise? But what if I knock the cart off balance and tumble out? I’m not sure I can even get out of here without someone helping me.

  A new sound is layered over the footsteps. My heart hammers in my chest. But then I recognize it. Some guy is humming. And saying an occasional word. “Baby … love … do that…”

  I raise my head infinitesimally, lifting the lid. I ignore how it feels wet against my scalp, until I can just see through the tiny crack between it and the can. About twenty feet away, a gangly guy is throwing a stack of cardboard into a large bin. White cords d
angle from his ears. I let my head drop.

  And feel a jolt of panic shoot down my spine when the lid makes a clunk settling into place. I freeze. Did the guy hear it? I hold my breath. He’s not humming or singing anymore. And I haven’t heard him walk away. Then I hear his footsteps start up again.

  What I can’t tell is if he’s coming toward me. Okay, I remind myself, he’s not one of the bad guys. He’s just somebody who works at the mall. If he does figure out that I’m here, I just need to make sure he doesn’t say anything. Most especially that he doesn’t yell.

  A bead of sweat traces down my back. I’m trembling so hard I’m sure he’ll see the garbage can shaking. Just when it seems the worst, when it seems that he will surely flip over the lid, his footsteps pass me by.

  I haven’t stopped shivering when I hear a car driving slowly toward me, the sound of its engine changing as it enters the walled space.

  It’s either Ty or the bad guys. Because who else would drive in here? And while I know it’s probably Ty, I hold my breath again as the engine is turned off, the door opens, footsteps approach. Then Ty’s voice says in a low whisper, “Okay. It’s me.” He flips open the lid. “Hurry.”

  “Why? Are they still here?” I put my hands on his shoulders and manage to get myself out without knocking over the garbage can. I’m too keyed up to think about how our bodies press together for a second.

  “That SUV you drove here is still parked in the lot, but I think someone’s keeping an eye on it. And it looks like there are two guys waiting outside the movie theater. One’s watching the main entrance; the other, the rear exits.” He opens the back door to his car. It’s something dark colored and small, with a narrow, deep dent in the front bumper and part of the hood that must match up to a pole someplace. “Cover yourself up with the blanket. We need to get you away from here.”