CHAPTER 54
I was woken up by the frantic knock on the door. I’d been so exhausted after my sleepless night with Mike that I’d fallen into bed at seven and had slept deeper than I had in years. But I’d dreamed the same dream over and over again, playing in a loop, like a stuck record.
In the dream, I was the girl in a hurry, trying to climb the fence—not unlike real life. And Mike was the man who came to my rescue. Each time the dream reached a certain point, it stopped, and started again. It stopped at the moment that he held my hands, looked into my eyes and told me to breathe. And then, when I did finally breathe, I inhaled deeply and the smell of night jasmine filled my lungs and Mike leaned towards me and lowered his lips to mine and we were just about to kiss and then . . .
I am the girl climbing the fence again.
“Becca. Becca!” The knock on the door continued and I thought I heard Mike’s voice. And, when I didn’t answer immediately, he burst through the door.
“WHAT?!” I sat up in my bed.
“Oh,” he said flatly, looking at me in the bed. “I thought you might have disappeared.”
“No. I’m here,” I said. “I promised I wouldn’t go anywhere.” I tried to smile at him, but he didn’t smile back.
“You’ve made some promises in the past that you broke.”
Oh God, he was still so mad at me. I’d hurt him so much, and, in the process, I’d hurt myself, too, more than I can describe.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, looking down at the duvet on the bed.
“Doesn’t matter. Come to the library. I have something to show you. Ash and Emelia are already there.”
“Okay.” I climbed out of the bed and Mike immediately averted his gaze. I looked down and realized that I’d gone to sleep in an oversized T-shirt and panties, nothing else. And, during the night, the T-shirt had clearly become bunched in my panties and now I was fully on view.
I turned around quickly and immediately realized that I’d just made the situation worse, since my ass was now fully on display. And, by the feel of it, one of the sides of my panties had magically disappeared into the crack (as they do, sometimes) and now I was half-mooning him. I quickly reached around and pulled the panties back out. God, this was truly undignified. I heard him clear his throat awkwardly; I knew he’d seen.
“Library,” he said loudly, and then I heard him scuttle out of the room. “There’s coffee there,” he muttered. I turned around just in time to see his hand pull the door closed. Only the night before last, that hand had been all over my body, and now it was very clear that that hand, and the man attached to it, wanted nothing to do with me.
I walked into the room and gaped. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Mike had made photocopies of all the letters and diary entries, and had stuck them up on the walls in what looked like a timeline of events. In between them all, he’d stuck up other things, too: handwritten notes, photocopies of what looked like architectural plans, actual photos of people, newspaper articles. Some of these had bits of colored wool pinned to them, linking them to diary entries or letters. It was a spider’s web of information.
“You . . . you’ve created a serial-killer wall!” I exclaimed, looking at Mike.
Ash laughed. “You’re right. This is a serial-killer wall. They all have these.”
“They do.” I nodded.
“Hey, if you were a serial killer, what would your MO be?” she suddenly asked me.
“What do you mean?” I replied.
“Like . . . would you stick your dead victims’ bodies to the ceiling with chewing gum, or would you cut off all their toenails and use them to make sandpaper, or would you pluck their eyelashes out and stuff a pillow with them?”
“Ash!” Mike exclaimed.
“I’m just asking, cos she’s a writer and I bet she would come up with a good one.”
“Mynotmorbid girlfriend,” Emelia said, handing me a cup of coffee with a smile. “I don’t know how you like it; there’s milk and sugar there.”
I liked Emelia. She was uber-cool—one of those androgynous-looking women who have the guts to cut their hair short and dye it blue, who have the guts to get a nose ring and a tattoo on their neck.
“So?” Ash asked again. “Your MO?”
“I’d probably kill them with millions of tiny paper cuts,” I said.
“Oooh, that’s good.” Ash raised her coffee mug at me in a toast and we both took a sip.
“Right, now that we’ve finished murdering people, can we get on with this?” Mike interrupted.
