Black-Eyed Susans

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

– Lydia, age 15, reading the words of Sigmund Freud while lounging on her father’s boat, 1993

Tessa, present day

1:46 A.M.

Effie is standing on my front porch holding a lumpy brown package. Her flimsy robe is billowing out behind her. The neighborhood is dead asleep, except for us and a few streetlights. Before she knocked, I was wide awake trying to read The Goldfinch but thinking about Terrell.

Three days left.

“I forgot to give you this earlier.” Effie plops the package into my arms. “I saw some girl in a purple dress drop it off. Or maybe it was a handsome man in a suit. Anyway, I saw it on your front porch this afternoon. Or yesterday. Or maybe a week ago. I thought I should bring it in for you.”

“Thank you,” I say, distracted.

Tessie scrawled on the front. No stamp. No return address. It feels squishy, with something stiff in the middle.

Don’t open it. A Susan, warning me.

I cast my eyes past Effie, onto the dark lawn. I survey the lumps of bushes crouching between our property lines. The shadows dancing to a tuneless rhythm on the driveway.

Charlie is at a sleepover. Lucas is on an overnight date. Bill is at the Days Inn in Huntsville because Terrell begged him.

Effie is already floating back across the yard.

Lydia, age 16

43 HOURS AFTER THE ATTACK

This is not my best friend.

This is a thing, with a Bozo the Clown wig and a slack face and tubes running everywhere like an insane water park except the water is yellow and red.

I’m holding Tessie’s hand and squeezing it, timing every squeeze by my watch, because her Aunt Hilda told me to. About every minute, she said. We want her to know we’re here. I’m trying not to squeeze the part of her hand where the bandage is turning a little pink. I overheard a nurse say Tessie’s fingernails were ripped out, like she was trying to claw her way out of a grave. They had to pick yellow flower petals out of the gash in her head.

“It can take like eighteen months for toenails to grow back,” I say loudly, because Aunt Hilda said to keep talking because we don’t know what she can hear and because I’d already reassured Tessie that her fingernails will only take six months.

As soon as I heard Tessie was missing, I threw up. After twelve hours, I knew for sure something evil got her. I started writing what I’d say at the funeral. I wrote how I wouldn’t ever again feel her fingers braiding my hair or see her draw a lovely thing in about thirty seconds or watch her face go animal when she runs. People would have cried when they heard it.

I was going to quote Chaucer and Jesus and promise I’d devote my entire life to looking for her killer. I was going to stand at that pulpit in the Baptist church and throw out a warning to the killer in case he was listening because killers usually are. Instead of saying Peace be with you, people were going to flip around in their pews and give each other jumpy stares and wonder from now on what exactly was living next door to them. There’s a knife in every kitchen drawer, pillows on every bed, anti-freeze in every garage. Weapons everywhere, people, and we’re ready to blow. That would be my message.

Tessie thinks humans are basically good. I don’t. I’m dying to ask if she thinks evil is an aberration now, but I don’t want her to think I’m rubbing it in.

The monitor over the bed is screeching for the hundredth time, and I jump, but Tessie doesn’t move. I feel like my hand is squeezing a piece of mozzarella cheese. It hits me full blast for like the tenth time that she’ll never be the same. There’s a bandage on her face that’s hiding something. She might not be pretty anymore, or funny, or get all my literary references, or be the only person on earth who doesn’t think I’m a total ghoul. Even my dad calls me Morticia sometimes.

The beeping won’t stop. I punch the call button again. A nurse swings open the door, asking me if an adult is coming back in soon. Like I’m a problem.

I don’t want to be dispatched to the waiting room again. There are a million people in there. And Tessie’s track coach was driving me crazy. Repeating how lucky it is that the calvary got to Tessie in time. Calvary is where Jesus died on the cross, you moron. I tell the story to Tessie again, even though I already did a few minutes ago.

Tessie’s eyelids flutter. Except her Aunt Hilda warned me her eyes do that regularly. It doesn’t mean she’s waking up.

I picked out Tessie in second grade, the instant I sat down at the desk next to hers.

I squeeze her hand. “It’s OK to come back. I won’t let him get you.”

Tessa, present day
1:51 A.M.

I close the door. Finger in the security code.

Turn around and almost stop breathing.

Merry’s face is pressed into the mirror’s reflection on the wall.

She’s trapped on the other side of the glass, just like the night she pressed her face against the car window in the drugstore parking lot. How much effort it must have taken for her to throw herself up from the backseat, half-dead, half-drugged, gagged with a blue scarf, one last-ditch effort to hope that someone like me would happen along to rescue her. Of all the Susans in my head, Merry’s the least needy, the least accusing. The most guilty.

It’s OK, I say softly, walking toward her. It is not your fault. I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have saved you.

By the time I press my palm flat against the glass, Merry’s already gone, replaced by a pale woman with messy red hair, green eyes, and a gold squiggly charm in the hollow of her throat. My breath fogs the mirror, and I disappear, too.

Merry has shown up twice before. She appeared in the doctor’s office window when I was seventeen, five days after I got my sight back. Four years ago, she sang “I’ll Fly Away” in the back row of the church choir at my father’s funeral.

I walk over to the kitchen drawer, pull out a knife, and slice it across the package.

The Susans, a rising hum in my head.

Lydia, age 16

6 MONTHS BEFORE THE TRIAL

I’m pounding on the door and yelling Tessie’s name.

She’s locked me out. I’m stuck in her stupid pink fairy tale bedroom that was fine when we were ten. I woke up and she wasn’t in bed and now I can’t get the door to the terrace open. I told her I didn’t want her out there alone tonight because she’s blind and it’s dangerous and I’ve been left in charge. But, really, it’s because I think she might jump off her grandfather’s roof.

Today was another Sad Day. She’s had twenty-six in a row. I mark a smiley face on my calendar every day she smiles once. No one else is marking smiley faces on a calendar and yet if Tessie kills herself tonight, it will be the fault of Lydia Frances Bell.

Lydia was never a good influence. Lydia’s morbid. Lydia might have given Tessie a little push.

I put my ear on the door. Still alive. She’s playing something dirge-y on her flute. It takes a lot of breath to blow a flute. I wouldn’t want to stand too close and get a whiff. She hasn’t brushed her teeth for six days. No one but me is counting that number, either. One life lesson of the Tessie thing is that it’s harder to love people when they smell. Of course, there are a lot of good parts, too. It’s cool to be called her fairy tale friend by People magazine. And I feel a secret, tickly thrill all the time now, the same as when I’m staring into the ocean and thinking about how deep and black it goes, and what lurks on the bottom. I like walking around inside a terrible novel, living it, getting up every day to write a new page, even if people always see Tessie as the main character.

The door is budging a little, so I bang my hip into it a little harder. It was her grandparents’ stupid idea, not mine, to bring her to their castle for the weekend. Of course, they crashed at 9:30 and are half-deaf.

Surely she wouldn’t jump because of that Frida Kahlo remark I made at dinner. Her grandmother had given me a dirty look. I mean, it was her grandfather who brought it up.

He was telling Tessie about how Frida Kahlo had painted in bed after the terrible bus accident when she was eighteen that left her frozen in a body cast. Frida’s mother made this special easel for her bed. So Tessie’s grandfather asked her if she’d like him to make something like it for her. He was trying to inspire her, but it seems to me the lesson there is that a random bus accident screwed up Frida Kahlo pretty much for life, just like Tessie’s going to be. And all I said was that it was a good thing Kahlo killed herself because she was literally painting herself to death. I thought it was funny. Like, how many Frida Kahlo faces can the world take?

The door suddenly gives way, and I stumble onto the terrace. She’s sitting on the ledge with her back to me, wearing her grandfather’s extra-large white Hanes T-shirt, looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost. She forgot her nightgown on our little overnight trip, so she borrowed the shirt out of her grandfather’s drawer.

There are much better ways to kill yourself, I am thinking. And I wouldn’t wear that.

Maybe I should let her jump. It just pops in my head.

If she did, she’d probably just end up in a wheelchair because she’s just that lucky. Or unlucky. It’s such a freaky line. All this hard work to bring her back to life when I’m pretty sure she wishes she’d gone to sleep in that grave and never woken up.

I’m really, really pissed off tonight. More than usual. I’m crying. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up. All those stories in the newspaper, and yet the ugly, real story is never told.

She’s still playing the stupid flute. It makes me want to jump.

“Please get off the ledge,” I choke out. “Please.”

Tessa, present day

1:54 A.M.

I reach into the package and tug out a plastic bag.

A shirt is inside.

Crusted with blood.

I recognize it.

Lydia, age 17

10 WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL

I could draw twenty smiley faces in my calendar today.

My mom just brought us freezing cans of Coke with straws, and Chips Ahoy on a plate. She said it was good to hear us laughing so much again. I locked the door after that. It was Tessie’s idea to draw these fake pictures for her new doctor, a big shocker, because it’s more like the kind of thing I would come up with. Tessie was never a big liar but I’ve never had a problem if it’s a means to an end. She told me she’s not ready to let this new doctor peer into her soul. The soul thing was just her mimicking the doctor she got stuck with right before this one. That idiot told her she could cure her blindness if she jumped off the high dive and opened her eyes underwater. I’ve never seen Tessie’s dad so mad as when I told him. He might as well be suggesting she kill herself!

Tessie’s wearing these white nerdy pajamas with lace that her Aunt Hilda gave her. If she could see, she wouldn’t be caught dead in them. But she can’t, and it’s kind of sweet. They make her look all innocent, like the world isn’t ending.

“Do you have the black marker?” Tessie’s asking.

“Yes.” I perfect a grimace on a flower and hand it over.

For once, I’m not embarrassed to draw in the same room as Tessie. She had to go blind for that to happen. Everything she draws is always so perfect. I like this picture. I definitely draw better when Tessie’s no competition.

Still, I’m thinking this picture’s a little literal. A field of monster flowers. A girl cowering. It needs drama.

I add another girl right on top of the other one. Scratch in some red. Are the girls fighting to the death? Is one killing the other? Are the poor little flowers actually just worried and trying to make it stop?

Ha-ha. Let him wonder.

Tessa, present day

2:03 A.M.

My eyes are glued to the brown stain on the pink shirt. My shirt. She borrowed it from me a very long time ago and never returned it.

It’s a lot of blood.

Not for the first time, I’m numbly contemplating the idea of Lydia, murdered.

Lydia was fond of ketchup, I remind myself. Of corn syrup and red dye, manipulation and guessing games.

There’s something else in the package.

A college-ruled notebook. I recognize it, too. There used to be a whole box of them.

A date is scribbled on the front of this one. And a name.

The L curls up on the end, like a cat’s tail. I’d seen her write that L a hundred times.

My hand hovers between the notebook and my cell phone.

Deciding how to play.

Lydia, age 17

3 WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL

“I’m Lydia Frances Bell,” I introduce myself, wishing I hadn’t added the Frances. Or used the Lydia, which I never felt was my true name. I’m more of an Audriana or Violetta or Dahlia. I should have given him a fake name. Tessie would say it was stupid to introduce myself to him in the first place. She’d be mad. I told her I was just going to sit in her doctor’s class one time to observe and not even raise my hand. I’ve come twice since then. Tessie is driving me freaking crazy. Last night, she nearly tore my head off when I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and brought it to her room. I mean, get over it. It’s a sandwich.

Today is the first time I signed up for his office hours. I feel as fully prepared as I can be. I’ve researched everything I can about him. I’ve read his lecture series From Marilyn Monroe to Eva Braun: History’s Most Powerful Bimbos. I devoured the case study of that girl who survived being buried alive by her stepdad, which got everyone all into him being Tessie’s therapist when his name appeared on the list of candidates. He’s been a visiting professor at three Ivy League schools. He never teaches anything with 101 in the title. I couldn’t find much personal, so that was a bummer, and nothing about his missing daughter, but I’m sure he’s a private man and is totally devoted to his life’s work.

“I’m so glad you dropped by, Lydia,” he’s saying. “I’ve seen you sitting in the front row.” His smile is a draught of sunshine. He makes me think in Keats.

I lay down my copious notes on his last lecture, about the dark triad of personality, so he can see right away what a good student I am. He asks me whether I agree with Machiavelli that we are not helpless at the hands of bad luck. It was apparently a rhetorical question, because he’s still talking. I love the sound of his voice rolling over all those four-syllable words. I feel like he is having sex with my brain.

I have ten brilliant questions all set to impress him, and I haven’t asked a single one.

He has rolled his chair over from behind the desk. His knee is pressing against my leg in this delicious pleasure-pain thing. I can barely think with his knee on mine and yet he acts like it’s not even there.

I know I need to tell him I’m the Lydia who is Tessie’s best friend, but not when he’s looking at me like that.

Next time.

Tessa, present day

2:24 A.M.

I’m whipping through the pages. They’re brutal. Nicking me, stabbing me, kicking me in the gut. Blowing me a few kisses. Love and resentment, all mixed up.

A whole other Lydia going on when I was sixteen years old. A picture behind a picture. I flash back to that night on the terrace when I thought we dredged up everything. Every unspoken pebble of anger. Every benign tumor that had been growing since our friendship began-the tumors that live under the skin of every relationship until the unforgivable moment that changes their chemistry forever.

I was wrong. There was so much more.

I’m trying to reconcile the girl in this notebook with the one who gave me back my breath with a brown paper bag. Who hugged me all night when my mother died, and braided my hair when I was blind. Who read me breathless poetry. Who wrote notes in Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite cipher, with invisible ink made from lemon juice, and stuck them in a crack in my tree house for me to find the next day. So I could hold her words up to the sun.

I feel sick.

The phone rings. I jump up, knocking over a bottle of water.

Lydia’s ink begins to blur.

I blot frantically at the pages.

The phone shrills again. Insistent.

I stare at the Caller ID.

Outler, Euphemia.

At least a quarter of the pages left. I don’t know how Lydia’s story ends. Or how quickly my time with the journal will be up. I have to figure, very, very soon.

I pick up the receiver.

“Sue? Sue?” Full-on Effie panic.

She lowers her voice.

I think the damn digger snatcher is here.

Lydia, age 17

2 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL

Tessie is screaming at me.

You gave my diary to the doctor? You rifle through my things?

“I had to give jurors the full picture.” Good grief, she is freaking out. I thought she’d get it. “I gave him the diary to protect you. I testified to all that stuff to help convict Terrell.”

“Yeah, right. You had to tell them I didn’t bathe? That you found lice in my hair? That I stole painkillers out of Aunt Hilda’s medicine cabinet?”

“I’m sorry I said the boys call you Suzy Scarface. That was a very unfortunate headline.”

“Do they really call me that, Lydia?” Tessie looks like she’s about to cry. But I can’t give in. She always wants things both ways.

“You testified for you,” Tessie is saying. “So you could be a star.”

We’re standing on her grandfather’s terrace like we have a million times before. She’s shaking, she’s so freaking mad at me. But, like, I’m getting madder by the second, too. Doesn’t she understand everything I’ve done for her? She’s yelling, and I’m yelling right back, the catfight of the century. Finally, she doesn’t have a comeback. There’s just silence and black night and us, breathing hard.

“I saw you with the doctor.” Her tone creeps me out.

“What are you talking about?” Of course, I know what she’s talking about. But which time? How much does she know? I take a stab. “You mean the time I gave him your diary?”

“I guess. I was walking Oscar at the college. What did you think you were doing, Lydia? Get out.”

Her grandmother is suddenly at my back, clawing my shoulder, wheezing a little, because she had to climb all those stairs. She never liked me much. “Girls-”

“Get out, Lydia,” Tessie sobs. “Getoutgetoutgetout.”

Tessa, present day

2:29 A.M.

I’m crossing the yard, running. Barefoot. It feels like a dream. A starry night above my head. A sweet, drifting perfume, nauseating.

Shadows hang off every tree, ready to smother me. I focus on the light trickling out of Effie’s kitchen window. On the cold steel in my hand. On the idea of Effie, alone with a monster. The one eating her brain, the one who turned girls to bones, the one who used to brush my hair and secretly despise my weakness. Maybe all three.

Waiting for me. Using Effie as bait.

What is that on the ground? I bend and brush my fingers on the grass. Confetti. It litters a path between my house and Effie’s. I rub the bits of paper between my fingers. Watch the pieces tumble and float downward like brilliant abstract thoughts.

It isn’t confetti.

The grass is littered with black-eyed Susans.

Someone has ripped off their body parts and left me a trail.

I’m gasping, sucking at air that is evaporating.

Van Gogh’s sky is spinning above me.

My head is exploding with images, and settles on one.

He has finally wiped the mud off his face.

My monster. The Black-Eyed Susan killer.

He’s clean, and shaved. Smiling.

The Susans yip with joy. That’s him that’s him that’s him!

I can feel his arm trapped around my shoulder. Smell the cologne on his suit coat.

Hear his lazy, reassuring drawl.

If you had three wishes, Tessie, what would they be?

Lydia, age 17

3 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL

We made love twice. He’s already on the edge of the bed.

“I’m going to take a shower, sweetheart,” he says. “Then I’m going to have to run. So pack up, OK?”

Sweetheart. Like I’m a 1940s thing on the side. How about getting a little more mythological? Calling me Eurydice? Or Isolde? I’m thinking that Lydia Frances Bell deserves better right now than scratchy sheets and pack up and sweetheart.

The shower is already running.

I slip naked out of bed, shivering. He always keeps it freezing in his apartment. He doesn’t like the noise of the furnace coming on and off. Whatever. I grab his shirt off the floor and slip my arms into it. Flap the long sleeves like a bird. It’s his last day at school before his China sabbatical. He says Tessie doesn’t ever need to know we slept together, which is, like, huge. I’m thinking she’ll get over the testimony stuff. I give her a month.

These packing boxes are freaking everywhere.

Maybe I’ll explore. Find a memento he won’t miss.

I stick my hands in the pockets of his old man suits. I wish he’d let me dress him. His shirts are way too starchy. They scratch my neck. I thumb through a stack of textbooks that would bore the crap out of me. I rove around in his boxer shorts drawer. Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary.

The shower’s still running.

I open and shut more empty drawers. Check out the freezer.

Thumb through a pile of mail. Geez, even Tessie leaves me better surprises.

I almost didn’t bother to open the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

That’s where I found them.

Straggly yellow flowers with black eyes, sitting in the dark.

Tessa, present day

2:34 A.M.

I’m kneeling. Staring at a petal stuck to my hand. Pulsing with rage.

At him. At myself, for knowing all along but being too afraid to see.

At Lydia.

I don’t know how much time has passed. Seconds? Minutes? The light still glows steadily from Effie’s kitchen.

You control your mind, Tessie. The doctor. In my head. Leering. Mocking.

I will myself to stand.

Petals are everywhere, glued to my knees, to the soles of my bare feet.

I reach down to brush them off.

They are not petals.

They are tiny, twisted scraps of Kleenex. Fragments of tissue that have disintegrated in the washer. The ones constantly nesting in the pockets of Effie’s robes and sweaters.

This is Effie’s trail. It leads to her front door, miles away from the grave where Tessie went to sleep.

Except Tessie is waking up. The old Tessie, who outran boys, who beat a plodding heart, who risked scabs and bones and scars, who did not lose because her dead mother cheered her across the finish line.

I see Tessie crouched on a track in blinding sunlight. Heat rises in visible waves. Her eyes are down. To finish first, she will spend the least amount of time possible in the air, over the hurdles.

Her fingertips are poised on gritty dirt.

Mine are twisting Effie’s doorknob.

Both of us, ready for the gun to go off.

Lydia, age 17

10 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL

He’s like a serial killer Mr. Darcy, offering me his hand so that I can step into the boat bobbing away off the ratty dock. We took this wiggly little path down from the cabin to get here. His idea, the rental cabin. Our special goodbye night, he says, before he takes off for China or wherever he’s really going. This place is remote as hell. I wonder if he brought other girls here. Or does he choose a new spot every time? Everything’s black. The water, the sky, the forest of trees behind us. And what about that tarp in the bottom of the boat? Does he really think that Lydia Bell is this stupid? Of course, I’m stepping into a boat with a serial killer but that’s what you have to do when there’s no real evidence and you’re the very last hope.

“Careful,” he warns as I step down. “Want to drive?” While I sit, he’s yanking the outboard string, having a little trouble getting it all revved up. I could offer advice but I don’t.

“No, thanks,” I say. “I’d be scared. I’m just going to sit back and look at the moon if I can find it. I have a flashlight. Maybe I’ll read to you.” I wave the book in my hand, The Ultimate Book of Love Poems: Browning to Yeats, even though I have a photographic memory and I’ve read this book a billion times.

“I didn’t know anything was capable of scaring you,” he teases. Hmm, I’m thinking, the scared thing might have been too much.

“You’re going to love it out here on the lake in the dark,” he’s saying. “Just your style. Wait to read until we get to a good spot. I’ll cut the motor and we can drift a little. Drink a little wine.”

He’s about two miles out, slowing the boat down, when I flick on my flashlight, open the book, and begin. “‘You love me. You love me not.’”

The words get lost in the noise of the engine.

“What?” Impatient. “I told you not to read yet.”

I go silent, which is hard.

He kills the motor in the middle of the lake.

I’m prepared, of course. Ten questions are typed out in my head, numbered one under the other. I shut the book.

Question No. 1: “Did you kill those girls?”

“What girls, sweetie?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t love you anymore? That I would tell?”

“Lydia. Stop.”

“Did you know who I was that very first day in your office? That I was Tessie’s best friend?” I want him to say no. I want him to explain.

It’s hard to see his face in the dark. His body remains perfectly relaxed. “Sweetheart, of course I knew. I know everything about you and Tessie. You are fucked-up little girls.”

I’m watching his hands, fiddling with a coiled rope.

It’s official. Lydia Frances Bell loved a serial killer.

My heart is pounding pretty hard, which is to be expected. I keep my eyes on the rope. “Where are you really going on that plane?”

“Surely your big brain has better questions than this, Lydia. But to answer… I’m not sure yet.”

“I have ten questions total.”

“Fire away.”

“Do you really have a daughter named Rebecca?”

“I do not.” He’s grinning.

“No family? No friends?”

“Unnecessary, don’t you think?”

“My other three questions don’t matter.”

My fingers curl around Daddy’s gun in my coat pocket.

“I’m pregnant,” I say.

The gun, now aimed at his chest.

Blood drooling out of his shoulder instead.

I didn’t even hear it go off. A gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking. Like it might rain shards of glass. That’s what Tessie used to say.

I steady my hand.

“Wait, sweetheart.” He’s pleading with me. “We can work this out. You and I, we’re the same.”

Tessa, present day
2:44 A.M.

The foyer, dark.

“Effie?” I call out.

“In the kitchen, Sue.” Her voice traveling over from the next room. Lilting. Her panic erased. I smell something burnt.

I wonder if it’s gunpowder. If my neighbor has shot her digger snatcher dead with that little pearl-handled revolver she keeps loaded in her bedside table against my wishes.

You can do this. For Charlie.

I round the corner.

It is an ordinary tableau.

And a chilling one.

Lydia, a very alive, blond Lydia, seated at the table.

Effie, beaming and placing a blue-flowered china plate in front of her.

“There you are!” Effie enthuses. “False alarm! It wasn’t the digger snatcher after all. It was just Liz here. Which is a real treat.”

Lydia, smiling. Not buried in an anonymous grave. Not broken. Not sorry. A part of everything.

Her lips are slashed with bright red. I see the tiny, tiny black birthmark on her upper lip that one boy teased her was a tick. She’d held her hand over her mouth for a week.

Her left leg is crossed over the right knee at a slightly odd angle. She used to sit just like that one summer to hide a mark from her dad’s belt buckle. It became a habit she couldn’t break.

I knew her habits. I knew secrets that made her howl. I could tear her to shreds.

Lydia watches me carefully. Still not saying a word.

My gun clatters to the floor.

I don’t move. Because that was my move.

“You dropped something, honey,” Effie is saying. “Aren’t you going to pick it up? You might remember me talking about Liz. She’s the researcher from the national historical society who visits me now and again. She stored some of her boxes of Fort Worth research in my shed not that long ago. She visits societies all over the nation!”

I remember. Boxes, taped tightly shut. Charlie, helping Effie and a strange woman lug them to the shed.

“Liz came over tonight to get something she needs out of them, and didn’t want to wake me,” Effie continues. “I told her it was best not to skulk around here in Texas. She spends most of her time in more civilized places like Washington and London, isn’t that right?”

Lydia, this dyed, smiling, nodding Lydia, has been insinuating herself into Effie’s life. Pretending to be someone she isn’t. Spying, like she always did. Watching me. Watching Charlie. Delivering her diary to my doorstep. Returning my shirt, soaked in red. Playing her little games.

“Where is he?” I hiss at Lydia.

It was Lydia who always told me not to say the doctor’s name out loud. Seize control. Limit his power.

“The digger snatcher isn’t here, honey.” Effie, trying to clear things up. “Like I mentioned, it was Liz in the back yard. We were just discussing that little Mudgett man from Chicago who tried to build one of his murder castles downtown. Liz knows everything about old Fort Worth. I agree with her that a plaque should be erected on that lot where he planned his slaughterhouse for girls.”

“I’m sure she knows all about serial killers.” I can’t tear my eyes off her. The brilliant, familiar eyes. Expensive tortoiseshell glasses. Hair tied up in a chic, messy knot. A chunky Breitling leather watch hugging her wrist. A plain wide band of hammered silver on her right hand.

“He’s dead, Tessie.” The first words Lydia has uttered to me in seventeen years. Her voice, triumphant. “I killed him.”

“Of course he’s dead,” Effie prattles. “Mr. Mudgett died in prison in 1896. He was hanged at Moyamensing, Liz. You just told me a second ago that he twitched for fifteen minutes.”

Lydia, age 17

I press the trigger four times.

Simple as that for a fucked-up Texas girl.

I crawl over him to the wheel.

It takes eleven minutes to whip around the lake in the dark and find Dumbo. My marker. The large tree on the west shore with a single branch that curves up like an elephant’s trunk.

This is the creepiest spot in the lake. Dead Man’s Triangle. Good fishing, but if people go under here, they often don’t pop back up. I’ve driven a boat around this lake since I could see over the front and my father was a drunk, which means pretty much since the day I was born. Daddy and I had our best times on this lake. I gutted the fish without throwing up, and he swilled vodka out of Coke cans and always did.

My mind is so quiet. Like, quieter than it’s ever been. It’s weird. I stop the motor. Drift for a second. Better get back to business. It isn’t that hard to push him out of the boat. Plop. He sinks in less than a minute. I don’t feel a thing, watching him go under. I toss in the old book I found under his kitchen sink with the black-eyed Susans and the Cascade. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Blood had soaked the brittle binding, or I would have kept it. That book was my No. 8, 9, and 10 questions, but he was about to lasso me with that freaking rope.

It takes no time to motor back, yank up the tarp in the boat, and collect all our stuff around the cabin. Be out by 11 A.M., the notice on the back of the door instructs me. Make sure the boat is properly docked. Leave the cabin key on the table.

My teeth are chattering and my hands and feet are numb when I stick his key in the ignition, but I’m feeling pretty good about myself. I drive around to the Lake Texoma State Park camping area and dump the tarp and his suitcase in two giant garbage bins on either end.

I’m halfway to the rental place to return his car when I run out of gas.

Tessie, present day

2:52 A.M.

My monster’s dead.

My best friend’s alive, folding a white napkin into a tidy point.

So why do I feel this terrifying urge to run?

To scream at Effie.

Run.

Lydia, age 17

I thought Daddy was going to kill me. He had to pick me up at a Whataburger in Sherman. I had walked four miles. There was blood on my face and clothes. I told the woman behind the counter that it was a burst packet of ketchup when I asked if I could use the phone. Daddy is smarter than that.

He broke me just like he always does. I was so tired. I could barely move. He didn’t have to threaten much. I wish I could have called Tessie.

Daddy said a lot of things on the way home. You have no proof he was the killer. Under no circumstances will you have an abortion. Jesus Christ, Lydia. Jesus Christ.

I overheard him make a call to two of his salvage yard pals. He was paying them to gas up the doctor’s rental car and return it.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t get warm.

It seems like a million years ago that I stood behind a shed and watched him bury flowers under Tessie’s tree house.

Now my parents are on the couch making a plan and I’m out here in my back yard doing a little burying of my own. I’m calling it the little box of Bad Things. The key to the cabin that I forgot to leave on the counter. Tessie’s ring that I stole and stuck in a corner of my jewelry box because it was bad luck for her. My favorite Edgar Allan Poe book, because I thought I heard it ticking tonight on the shelf and I wasn’t going to live with that the rest of my life. I’m not ever going to be crazy like Tessie.

Tessa, present day

2:53 A.M.

She’s crazy. Lydia is crazy.

When should I have known? As soon as she sat down beside me in second grade with her red glitter pencils sharpened like ice picks?

She’s prattling now, like Lydia always does when she tells the truth, about Keats and the sky cracking over the lake and how the last thing I saw of him was a bald spot like a big mosquito bite and then black, black, black.

The doctor. My monster. Her lover.

At the bottom of the lake. The one where I taught Charlie to slalom. She probably skied right over him.

He was always dead.

Relief, flooding me. Realization, rocking me to hell.

I’m the one who kept my monster alive.

My best friend let that happen. Let me suffer. Let Terrell pay for what he did not do.

Lydia, a greedy flower. More like a black-eyed Susan than any of the girls in that grave. Controlling. Thriving in devastated soil.

“I watched him plant black-eyed Susans under your tree house four hours after we made love for the last time,” Lydia is saying smoothly. “I found them in little plastic pots under his cabinet and then I followed him and watched him dig the hole. You don’t have to hit me over the head.” She giggles.

He will never touch my daughter, I’m thinking.

He is bones.

Lydia loved him.

“You look strange, dear,” Effie says. “Tired. You should sit.”

“The flowers…?” I stutter at Lydia.

“Yes?” Impatient. Waiting for something.

Gratitude. Lydia’s waiting for gratitude. I strain against a flood of anger and disbelief. She held my sanity hostage for seventeen years and would like to be thanked for it. I feel a rabid urge to slap her, to tear at her shiny fake hair, to scream why until Effie’s old house shakes on its foundation.

Lydia is already restless, and I need to be sure. “Lydia,” I start again. “If he’s dead… who kept planting black-eyed Susans for me all these years?”

Her eyes steady on mine. “Are you accusing me? How should I know? They’re just flowers, Tessie. Are you still freaked out by a PB and J, too?”

“Liz’s job has not a thing to do with planting,” Effie interjects. “It’s Marjory Schwab over at the garden society who’s in charge of wildflowers. And it’s Blanche something who provides the sandwiches. Or maybe her name is Gladys. And it’s Liz, not Lydia, dear.”

“It’s OK, Effie,” I say.

Lydia dabs a napkin at her lips. More pretend. She hasn’t taken a bite of whatever Effie lump is on the plate in front of her. “I know you’re mad, Tessie. But perfect murders don’t just happen. Timing is everything. It was very O.J. of me to keep my shirt, don’t you think?”

“That’s… his blood on the shirt,” I say slowly. “The night you killed him.”

“Did you not finish the journal?” she demands. “I gave you forty-five minutes.”

My mind is shutting her out. Focusing like a laser on the one thing that is still important. That can still be fixed. Terrell.

The doctor’s blood on the pink shirt. The fetus in the grave. Aurora’s DNA.

All connected. Science that could help free Terrell. If Lydia is telling the truth, the blood on that shirt links them all. The doctor not only fathered Lydia’s daughter, but the child of a murdered Black-Eyed Susan.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” Lydia sounds plaintive, just like she did at ten and twelve and sixteen. “I have three years of research about the doctor out there in the shed. Colleges he taught at. Girls who disappeared while he was there. Circumstantial, but it ties up pretty nicely. And we’ll get them to drag the lake, of course. And I’ll let them interview me but I’ll be too devastated to share everything.” She’s giddy with her Lydia-ness. “I showed up for a reason, Tessie. The last-minute stay will be a fantastic way to end my new book. Even if they kill him, I’m a hero for trying. The book’s all about the other surviving Black-Eyed Susan. Me. I tell it like a modern feminist fairy tale. You’ll love it. The point being, the monster gets it in the ass.”

“I’m beginning to think you are not with the historical society,” Effie says.

Lydia is sticking her fork into a piece of Effie’s cake. It’s almost to her lips.

I don’t stop her.

For the first time in a long time, I feel hope. Like a cool wind has whistled my head clean.

The monster, 1995

October third, nineteen hundred and ninety-five, 1 P.M.

Cheers to O.J., who just walked out of court a free man.

It’s our final session. Tessie’s got that telltale flush in her cheeks. She’s upset.

Her itty-bitty scar stands out on her tan like a new moon in a sky of freckles. No makeup covering it up today. I like that. A sign of restored confidence. The nuclear emerald eyes are sharp and focused. That glorious copper hair is pulled back flat against her skull like she’s about to run a race. The muscles in her face are taut and purposeful, not a limp bag hanging off bone like the first day she walked in here. She’s still biting her nails but she’s painted them carefully with a lovely lavender polish.

I want to tell her so many things.

How I intended to tear her apart, but it was much, much more thrilling to put her back together.

How Rebecca was both a flippant lie I told a lazy reporter and a metaphor for everything. Rebecca is the ghost who kept me company on the worst night of my life. She is every wife and daughter I will never have and every special girl who sat down in my class, lifted her eyes, and did not glimpse her fate.

I want to tell Tessie that sometimes-many times-I am sorry.

I want to finish that story I started about the sad boy who walked to a lonely house after school and turned on the heat.

Tessie had been worried about that boy, I could tell. When she’s sad, her face always crinkles prettily, like origami.

That boy’s mother always left a horrible surprise for him to find while she was at work. A dead baby bird on his pillow. A live water moccasin in the toilet. A cat turd in the Twinkies box. Gags, she called them.

The Saturday night that he put twenty crushed pills into his mother’s cheap red wine, she fell asleep on page 136 of Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier. She pronounced it doomayer, like the fat clod she was.

He had plumped up her pillow, flipped on the air conditioner to high in the middle of winter, and read the whole book before he called the police and told them she’d been suicidal for months.

“I saw you with her.” Tessie is taunting me.

I want to put my hand on Tessie’s knee to stop its jackhammering.

I want to place that well-thumbed book in her hand.

I want to tell her that red flowers, not yellow ones, had a special meaning for Rebecca.

I want to tell her that very soon, I’m going to run my finger over the butterfly tattoo on her hip. The one just like Lydia’s.