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Eden is quiet beside me. I steal a glance at her, and her eyes are on Liddy, filled with tears.
I’ll get you out of this, I silently promise her.
“So, now what?” I ask her. “You killed them. You kill us and frame the ex-con for the murder? Then, what?”
“Then, I’ll live a happy life.”
“You really think you’ll be happy? Killing them doesn’t make what they did to you go away. It’s still all there in your head.” I tap my finger to my temple.
“It will work. It has worked. I feel better already, and I’ll be a hundred percent better when I tie this up with a nice little bow by killing the two of you.”
“Why kill us? Why not just frame me for the murders of those four and let me go back to prison for it?”
“Because I can’t have you proclaiming your innocence. And what if you got off with it? Then, the police would be out there, looking for a new suspect. No, I can’t have that. This works so much better. You murdered all those people who’d made your life miserable in high school. You held on to that resentment for years, and it festered and grew in prison. When you got out and saw how good their lives were in comparison to yours, you just snapped. And her …” She points the gun at Eden. “You’d been in love with her for years, and she ends up being your parole officer. You wanted her … made advances, but she rejected you all over again. So, you kidnapped her and killed her, and finally, you turned the gun on yourself.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it planned to a T.”
“I do.” She smiles. “Thank you for fucking her. This will make it all the more believable. That you raped her, took what you had always wanted, and then killed her. Then, you couldn’t deal with what you’d done, so you killed yourself. This, with you guys, I came up with it on the fly, and I’m pretty proud of it, if I say so myself. But the rest of this plan has been a long time in the making.
“I tried to move on with my life—I really did. But you can’t understand what it was like for me, seeing them just carrying on like they’d done nothing wrong, like they hadn’t stolen everything from me. They’d destroyed my life, and people thought that they were these perfect fucking people, even my parents and grandpa! But I knew better than everyone. I knew the real faces behind those masks they wore, and I knew that I had to get rid of them. I spent a lot of years trying to come up with ways to kill them. But it had to be perfect, so there would be no risk that I’d get caught, and then Grandpa told me that you got paroled and were coming home, and it was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. I would have been a fool not to go ahead with it. Wipe those sick bastards off the face of the earth once and for all.”
“You don’t need to kill Eden though. She never did anything to you.”
“And that’s exactly why. She sat back and did nothing. She might not have been there when those bastards raped me. But she sat by for years and did nothing all the times they bullied me at school. Taunted and teased me. And all the other kids’ lives that they made miserable, including you.” She points the gun at me. “She might not have taken part, but her silence was just as bad, if not worse.”
“I’m … sorry I didn’t do anything to help you back then,” Eden says to Liddy with a watery voice. “Or anyone else they were hurting. I didn’t know about the awful things they did to you, when they … raped you. But I did know that they were bullying people, and I never spoke up. Maybe if I had … things would be different now …” She trails off.
I want to hold her, but I won’t make any movements that might set Liddy off.
I need to get Eden out of here. I need to stop stalling for time and just go for it. It’s likely I’ll get shot, just got to hope it’s not a killing shot. But I’d rather go out fighting than just sit back and do nothing.
Just like I did that night, I have to fight for my life again.
But it’s not just my life I need to fight for now. It’s Eden’s as well.
I estimate that Liddy is standing about six feet away from me. If I stand, she’ll shoot me before I get near her. So, I need to go low. Tackle her and make a grab for the gun.
