The Forgotten Girl

Chapter 22

Maddie

I’m moving out of the house. I haven’t told my mom yet, but I can’t do it anymore. Crazy or not, being cooped up in the house with her lies, locks, and alarms is making my situation worse. I’ll get my own place. Go to work and spend the rest of the time by myself, trying to piece together my past, who I was, why I was locked up, and what happened to my sister. That I can do—I’m better at being alone anyway. Although I’m never really alone. I always have Lily. Part of me wonders if maybe I created her out of my sister. Perhaps when I lost my sister Lily, my Lily arose. But the idea is kind of frightening, because my Lily is frightening, which makes me wonder what my sister was like.

Over the next couple of days, I start looking for places to live and a new job, one that will satisfy my darker cravings, one where I can start over, and get some help from someone who isn’t my mother. I’m looking through the classifieds in the newspaper, trying to ignore the best that I can the picture of Bella on page nine, when my phone rings. River’s name flashes on the screen and I freeze. He never calls me, not outside of work, which makes me wonder why he is now. I think I know and even though part of me doesn’t want to know, the other part has to know, whether I need to be worried or not.

He starts off by asking me how I am, acting casual—too casual—I know something’s up and I think I know it before he even asks it—the real reason he’s calling me. He continues casually asking me why I haven’t been to work. “Is it because of Sydney’s death? Or because Bella’s gone missing?” he questions. “I know it must be hard for you, losing people you know.” The fact that he says it, tells me just how little he knows about me. Sometimes I think I’m numb to almost everything going on around me. I hardly feel any emotions except toward Lily. And fear when I’m put in a panicking situation.

“Yes and no,” I respond evasively, wondering if the police have talked to him yet. Perhaps that’s where the casualness is stemming from.

“Well, I hope you won’t stay away from work forever,” he says, then gives and elongated pause. “I kind of miss you… I know the place seems kind of cursed. At least that’s what people are saying right now, but I assure you the bar had nothing to do with either of their disappearances.”

I want to ask him how he can be so sure, but I bite my tongue. “How could you possibly miss me, River? You barely know me.” I barely know me.

“That’s not true…” he struggles for an answer. “I miss spending time with you… you should really come in today, even if it’s to talk. And your job’s still waiting for you, whenever you’re ready to come back.”

“I can’t do that,” I say, lying down on my bed and staring at the key on my nightstand, the one I found in my mother’s room. “Besides, I’m moving.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I’m figuring it out.”

He pauses, his breathing heavy on the other end. “Maddie, I don’t think you should go anywhere right now.”

“Why not?” I put the key in my pocket. I don’t even know why or if I’m the one who did it.

River pauses for the third time. “Maddie, we really need to talk,” he says as I roll over on my back and stare up at the ceiling. “It’s important.”

I tense. The way his voice deepens it carries a warning and it sends Goosebumps erupting across my skin and I uncontrollably shiver. He knows something.

“About what?” My voice is rickety just like my pulse.

“Come to the bar and talk,” he says, his tone lightening. “I’ll be at my office in about ten minutes.”

“I can’t do that,” I repeat as I sit up on the bed. “Trust me River, this is for your own good.”

“Maddie, this is important,” he stresses. “Just get down here as soon as you can.”

I grind my teeth in frustration, more with myself than anything. I should have been better with the detective, given him a better answer to why I was at Sydney’s crime scene that morning, because that has to be what this is about. Either that or it could be about Bella. Have the police gone to her apartment and found the bloody mess? Have they linked me to that somehow? But why would they go to River about that? I need to find out, just how much they—River—knows.

“Fine.” I get up from my bed, cross the room, and peek out the curtain at the sound of thunder. What will happen when I go back into the real world again? Around people. Around River. What if I lose control? What if I get arrested? Locked up again? What if the police show up? “I’ll be there in like an hour.”

You’re making a big mistake.

“Drive safe,” he says casually, his voice shifting to its normal, friendly tone. Like he didn’t just make things weird between us.

I don’t say anything, just hang up. I put the phone in my pocket, not bothering to cover up the short black skirt, knee-high socks, and tight t-shirt I’m wearing. My mom’s not home to see me, but quite honestly it doesn’t really matter anymore if she sees me dressed like this. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be today, a mixture of someone, perhaps Lily and Maddie.

I pull on a jacket as I prepare to head out because it looks like it’s going to rain, heavy clouds rolling in, a grumble of lightning in the distance. I hate the rain. I go over to the security box and try to unset the alarm, even though I don’t know the code. After several failed attempts, Lily gets irritated and pretty much forces me to walk out the door, setting off the alarm and sprinting out into the rain.

I take the bus because it’s the only form of transportation I have at the moment. On my way there, I debate getting off and taking another bus that goes up to the foothills, taking a detour up to the cabin, and just blowing off River completely. I haven’t seen Ryland since the night Sydney was killed. I want to talk to him about it, because he’s the only one I can talk to openly, but at the same time I fear that even he might think twice about being near me if I divulged I think I might have killed someone. What is his limit? How much is too much? Do I trust him No. I don’t trust anyone.

But I need to go see River and find out what he knows, whether I want to or not. So I head to the bar. By the time I get there, raindrops are splattering against the window and the ground like the blood I see in my memories. I can hardly see through it, it’s coming down so hard. I can make out the building across the street as the bus slows to a stop; the parking lot where I saw Sydney splattered in her own blood. I try to picture myself luring her over there. What would I have said that would make her go with me. Maybe we were fighting and she tried to run away from me. Maybe I chased her down and then just at the right moment, I stabbed her multiple times. But where would I get the knife? And what about Bella? Why would I hurt her? I liked her, well more than I liked anyone else.

“I think I really did it,” I say as I get off the bus and once again Lily has nothing to say. “It seems so easy to picture—someone dying because of me. And what happened at Bella’s… I can’t deny the blood.”

I stand on the sidewalk, staring at the bar, afraid of going inside. I listen to the rain drown the world. The thunder boom. The lightning crash. I remain there until a memory of me wrapping my fingers around a woman’s neck starts to slither into me, a venomous snake slipping its fangs into my skin. Until I can feel the rain drenching my body, the cold concrete against my flesh, hear the deep voice calling me a whore and that I deserve to be punished, see the flames ignite through the storm, her voice that sounds just like mine telling me not to be weak, to do whatever it takes to be strong. Be the darkness within you. It’s so much easier. Once it gets to that place, I jog inside, trying to outrun the images, but they’re always behind me, chasing at my heels.

The bar is empty as I stumble in, drenched in rain from head to toe. The place doesn’t open for another half of an hour. The faint smell of sweat and tequila is in the air, the lights are low, the chairs turned up. I think about the last time I was here. The chill of the freezer. The voice. The blood. I try to remember the rest. Connect the dots, but everything is still hazy.

I find River in his office, just like he said, talking on the phone. Lily is screaming inside me. Don’t do it! And then suddenly she’s out, walking around in River’s now clean office—he must have had someone clean up in here.

“No Glen, I don’t think this is a good idea.” He shakes his head as I stand in the doorway and wait quietly while he talks on the phone. “I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.” A pause. “Look, I don’t fucking care if I owe you, this is wrong… not to mention illegal.”

“Hmmm… interesting…” Lily says, watching him have the heated conversation. “He’s doing things with Glen, the drug trafficker.”

I want to ask what she’s implying but that would require talking aloud and making me look as insane as I am. So instead I stand there, listening to River argue with Glen while Lily wanders over to a shelf, glances at a stack of papers, then grins at me and says, “Well, well, well, what do we have here?”

I’m about to go over there when River sees me and his face drains of color. “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” He quickly hangs up. He stares at me for a moment or two then casually says, “We seriously need to get a bell on you so I know when you’re coming.”

I don’t respond, trying to measure him up before I go any further into the office. He looks the same as he always does, faded jeans, a dark grey shirt, a hint of scruff on his jawline, and he has a beanie on his head. He doesn’t seem afraid, like he thinks I’m a killer.

But then why did he need to talk to me?

Don’t trust him. No matter what.

“You look tired,” he notes, taking in my appearance as I inch closer to his desk. “And wet. Is it raining outside?”

“It is… and I haven’t been sleeping well.” Deciding I should sit down, I cross the room, combing my fingers through my wet locks of hair. “So what did you want to talk to me about?” I take a seat across from the desk.

He reclines back in the chair, crossing his arms, studying me with his head cocked to the side. Always watching you. “The police came to talk to me this morning,” he says. “They wanted to ask me a couple of questions about Sydney.”

“Oh yeah.” I pick at my nail polish, pretending to be blasé, even though I’m a nervous wreck. “Do they have any leads yet on who they think did it?”

“I don’t think they do yet.” He pauses, making heavy eye contact with me. I know what’s coming even before he says it. “They wanted to ask me a couple of questions about you, too.”

I drop my hand to my lap, refusing to look away from his penetrating gaze. No eye contact shows a guilty conscience. “Oh, yeah? What about?”

“About how you said you were here that morning because apparently we spent the night together.”

I twist a strand of my hair around my finger. “Technically we did.”

He tugs off his beanie and rakes his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in all directions. “Are you in some kind of trouble? The detective seemed really interested in you and if I’d spent the entire night with you or if that was a lie… he seemed convinced that it was.”

I unravel the strand of hair from my finger and put my hands on my lap, stabbing my nails into my legs to channel my anxious energy there. “What did you tell him when he asked?”

He smashes his lips together. One. Two. Three seconds go by. “That you were with me all night.”

I sit up straight in the chair, freeing a trapped out a breath I was holding in my chest. “You lied for me. Why?”

“Because I care about you.” He gives a shrug, like it’s no big deal, when it is. He leans forward and rests his arms on the desk. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“I’m not buying it,” I tell him with skepticism. “You can’t care about someone you hardly know.”

“I know you better than you think,” he says, his tone carrying an underlying meaning that sends a chill up my spine. “You just don’t want to believe I do. You want to be mysterious. Want people not to see who you really are.”

I don’t like where he’s going with this. I slouch back in the chair, keeping eye contact even though I desperately want to look away. “You might think so, but you’re wrong.”

“Am I?” he mumbles to himself without taking his focus off me. He seems so undecided, so confused. “I have to ask you something and I need you to answer me truthfully.”

“What makes you think I’d lie to begin with?” Maybe he does know me better than I thought.

You might want to prepare yourself.

What does that mean?

“Because I know you do a lot,” he says straightforwardly. “But I need you not to lie this time. I need you to give me this for lying to the police to you.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” I remind him. I know I should be being more cooperative, but he’s troubling me with his persistence for the truth. It worries me what he’s going to ask.

“I know you didn’t,” he replies. “But like I said, I did it because—”

“Because you care for me,” I finish for him. Is he being genuine? It seems like it, but I don’t think I’m the best judge to come to this conclusion. I can barely understand myself, let alone another person.

I place my arms on the armrests, knowing I have no choice but to let him ask his question. Whether or not I answer truthfully is an entirely different story. “What do you want to know and I’ll try my best to give you a real answer.”

You better be ready.

He seems undecided, taking a deep breath and exhaling. “I want to know whether I’m talking to Maddie right now… or Lily.”