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I didn’t go to sleep again after that. I don’t think I will tonight either.
I need to get this out. I need to say it. I need to tell someone. I need to tell someone that I don’t think that Anna slipped and fell into the water embankment that day. I think that Sylvia lured her there and pushed her without Anna realizing it. Call it a mother’s instinct. But I stupidly pushed the thought aside, because how do you approach something like that? No mother ever wants to think their child is evil.
The day Anna died, the day she drowned in the city pool, I think Sylvia pushed her into the pool. I truly do. She’s always been so jealous of Anna. And the pool was so crowded and loud that day, no one would have heard, or acknowledged, if Anna had screamed. Everyone was screaming.
I think she did it.
I think she killed Anna.
There is something wrong with Sylvia, really wrong. I know it. I know it in my gut.
I am scared of her.
32
Rhett
My eyes pop open. I sit up, grasping for the steering wheel. I’d laid down the driver’s seat—as far as it would go anyway—hoping to get a solid night’s sleep.
No dice.
At least a half-dozen faces, each twisted and contorted with anger, are peering into my windshield, screaming, jabbing stubby little fingers into the air.
Screaming and pointingat me.
Dawn, barely broken through a thick blanket of clouds, washes the crowd’s faces in a creepy, bluish tint.
A string of brown spittle splats across the window, this from a man yelling angrily through a wad of chewing tobacco. My pulse kickstarts, my sleep-hazed brain trying to figure out whatthe hellis going on.
“Where is she?” an overweight woman screams, her wrinkled skin mottled with hives.
“Youmonster,”adds another, this one wearing a baggyThorncrest Cheer Momsweatshirt and a knitted scarf pulled tightly around her neck like a noose. Her nose is as red as a cherry from the cold morning air.
“Go back to jail where you belong,” a man yells behind her, baring rotted yellow teeth.
“Yeah, we don’t want you here!” the crowd jeers, their thick coats bouncing off each other like a human game of bumper cars.
Sylvia.
The news of her disappearance has been leaked to the gossips—and, as expected, they thinkIam responsible.
Shit.Shit, shit, shit.
I jab the key into the ignition—yes, the medieval Ford I’m driving still uses an actual key—and glance at the clock as the engine coughs to life. It’s only six forty-five in the morning. News of Sylvia’s disappearance must have hit the local diner not long after its 5 a.m. opening.
“Move! Get out of the way,” I mouth, swinging my arm from side to side as I shove the gear into reverse.“I said move!”
“He hit me! He hit me!” A woman melodramatically screams before my truck has even moved an inch.
Fists pound the side of the truck as I reverse away from the tree I’d parked under.
Once away from the crowd, I peel out, onto the street and watch the silhouettes fade in my rearview mirror.
My body spins into a borderline panic attack, the visceral response immediate, embedded deep inside my psyche from my experience twenty years ago. Theexact sameexperience—angry screams, spit, threats—hurled at me while I walked into the courtroom. Me at twenty-four, now me at forty-four.
I roll down the window, gulp the cold, crisp morning air.
I take a deep breath. Another, and another.
