Page 53 of She’s a Doll

“What the fuck are you looking at?!” she shouted at them.

They hurried on.

“Sheesh. What’s the world coming to? A girl can’t even get high and have a menty bendy with a haunted doll on her own damn property.”

So what do we do? I asked, staring at her. If we can’t kill him, how do we make this right?

“I wanted to find evidence, lock him up.”

I can’t do that, I said quietly. I don’t have any evidence. I don’t have anything.

“Well . . . I guess that leaves one option.”

What?

Her eyes flicked back to me. She sucked one last drag from the joint and then dropped the smoldering stub to the ground. It guttered and died in the wind. “I have an idea,” she rasped, smoke spilling from her mouth with every word.

Better than just killing the fucker?

“OK. I know your heart is set on killing him.”

I don’t have a heart.

“Your weird doll insides are set on killing him,” Nicola amended. “But when Plan A doesn’t work out, you can’t stop. You’ve got to pivot to Plan B.”

And you have a Plan B?

She looked at me, eyes bloodshot, shivering. “I have a Plan B.”

17

Plan B sucked.

It really, really sucked.

I’d had my mind pretty firmly set on killing Kyle. Actually, I’d had my metaphorical heart and not-so-metaphorical soul set on it. But I couldn’t think of a way to do that without Nicola’s help. And I needed Nicola’s help. She was right: Before she found me, I was broken, destroyed. I couldn’t do this without her. I didn’t want to do this without her. I didn’t want to go back to being alone.

And so, even though killing Kyle was the only outcome that felt like anything close to justice, I agreed to Nicola’s new plan.

Instead of killing Kyle, we’d haunt him.

Nicola had a lot of suggestions for how to do this. After she glued my foot back on, she wiped her whiteboard clean with her sleeve and began writing them down.

Plan B

Send him creepy messages from Lu’s Instagram account.

Print off some of Lu’s old missing-person posters and put them in his letter box.

Spray-paint “I killed Lucy” on his car.

It was a carpet-bombing strategy. A psychological war designed to hit him a dozen times in a dozen different ways, wear him down, and force a surrender. It was also indirect. Not safe, but safer. Nicola wasn’t going to end up with a murder charge, and, as long as we kept it up, eventually Kyle⁠—driven mad by his own guilt⁠—would confess and spend the rest of his life rotting away behind bars.

That was what Nicola reckoned, anyway.

I thought it all sounded rather Victorian. Even if we could drive him mad by rapping, tapping at his chamber door, convincing him to turn himself in wouldn’t be easy. Convincing him to jump off a cliff would be even harder . . . but I’d figure out how to twist that knife once we had it buried in his chest.

Just because Nicola didn’t want to kill him didn’t mean I wouldn’t take an opportunity if it came my way.