Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

I either give too many shits or no shits at all.

I can’t seem to find that middle ground

for moderate shit distribution.

—True fact

“Can you repeat that?” I asked, not sure I’d heard her correctly.

She faced me again. “I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never dared. See?” she said with a sparkling grin. “I told you, you’re supernatural. Less than twenty-four hours after meeting you, and I’m having sex for the first time and spilling all my secrets.”

She was stalling. I waited for her to gather her thoughts and courage. Surely, she didn’t mean she’d actually killed a man. It had to be a metaphor for puberty or something.

“When I was twelve, I went to a cousin’s birthday party at Baymore Park. She was turning sixteen and invited me to the cookout. I was so excited to hang with her. She was the cool cousin. Very popular. Very enigmatic.”

“And you wanted to be just like her.”

She shrugged. “I did. But she was also a bit wild. Always in trouble. And most of that trouble revolved around boys.” She started rubbing her hands, and I knew this was not going in a good direction.

I took one of her hands in mine and kissed her knuckles. “Take your time, hon.”

She nodded and seemed to think back. “She wanted to go for a walk in the woods, but she was grounded. They only let her have the party because they’d already paid for everything. But my aunt and uncle didn’t trust her. That was when I realized why she’d invited me to her party when she never gave me the time of day. Not that I blamed her. I was a twelve-year-old geek. She was the homecoming queen. We may as well have lived on different planets.”

“I wish I would’ve known you when you were a geek.”

“Oh, you do. I still am. I just hide it better.”

“You think?” I asked in doubt.

She punched me, despite the fact that I’d been sideswiped. Zero respect. “Because my cousin promised we’d be together, they let us go. They thought I’d be a good influence on her.”

“Had they met you before that day?”

A bubble of laughter escaped her. “Smartass.”

“Sorry,” I said, not sorry in the least. “Go on.”

“We walked deep into the forest to a set of caves I didn’t even know existed. A boy came out. No, a man. He was way older than my cousin with a beer in one hand and abottle of mouthwash in the other.” She looked at me and shrugged. “I still don’t get that part.”

I wasn’t about to tell her. I braced myself for what came next.

“Anna told me to stay outside, said she’d just be a minute, and went into a cave with the man. Only she didn’t come back out for a long time. I walked around a little, but it was getting dark, so I went inside. There was no one there. I figured she must’ve come out when I was walking around and headed back without me.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? She left you there?”

“It was partly my fault.”

“No, Halle, it wasn’t.”

“I should’ve stayed put like she said.”

I decided not to argue with her. “What happened after that?”

“The sun was setting, and I’d been walking around for hours. I have, like, zero sense of direction. Anyway, a man found me and told me he was part of a search party. Said the whole town was looking for me. I found out later that wasn’t true. Worried she’d get into trouble, my cousin told everyone we got into an argument, and I went home. No one was looking for me. My parents didn’t even know I was missing.”

I pulled her hand to my chest and held it there. “I’m so sorry, Halle.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you remember what the man looked like?”

She nodded. “He was huge, like a bear, with a long, dark beard, thick glasses, and a baseball cap.

Paul Meacham was a big guy, but that was where the similarities ended. I’d looked him up on the company website last night. But a beard, thick glasses, and a baseball cap were all perfect articles to help obscure an identity.

“The man started playing tricks on me as we walked. He would take sticks and pretend I had bugs on my legs or accidentally fall into me and, well, touch me inappropriately. Then he would laugh like it was all a joke.”

An indignant heat erupted as I listened. She was so vulnerable. So innocent. But I had yet to figure out what this had to do with the Nordstroms’ head of security. Had he been working for them yet? Or did he go to work for them because of Halle? And what did any of this have to do with him? She knows him. Surely, she would’ve recognized him from the forest.

“He kept asking if I wanted to stop and rest. I kept saying no. I got a very bad vibe from him and knew pretty quickly I was in trouble.”

Smart girl.

“Finally, he pretended to hurt his ankle and insisted we stop, but when we did, he grabbed my arm and tried to push me to the ground.” She was visibly shaking now, and a tear slipped past her lashes. “I fought him with everything I had in me. Then I kicked him, and he tripped on a limb. He fell back and hit his head on a boulder.” She swiped at her tears, annoyed with herself. “I took off. I ran until it was too dark to go farther, then I saw lights. I walked to a cabin and asked to borrow a phone. My parents picked me up an hour later. They thought I was staying the night with my cousin.”

“And you never told them what happened?”

“I never told anyone. I was too ashamed.”

“Why?” I asked. “None of that was your fault.”

“For being stupid enough to believe my cousin. For being stupid enough to walk away when she told me to stay put. For being stupid enough to believe the man, even though no one else was searching for me. And for killing him.” A sob shook her shoulders, and I pulled her into my arms. “I just kept waiting for the cops to knock on my door. For a set of handcuffs to be locked around my wrists. But that never happened. And to this day, part of me is still waiting.”

I ran a hand over her hair. “Are you sure he died?”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “There was so much blood. It soaked into the rock and pooled on the ground around him.

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Hikers found his body a few months later,” she added, knowing where I was going.

“They found him?”

“Yes,” she said between hiccups.

Everything was finally making sense. Well, almost everything. “You think he’s been haunting you all this time?”

“I know he has. It started right after.”

“And you think you deserve to be haunted. You deserve to be arrested. You deserve to die.”

“I do.”

“You’re so wrong, Halle.”

She pressed her mouth together, refusing to believe me.

“Wait, how long after?” I asked. “How long between the incident and the strange events at your house?”

“I don’t remember. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that I was being haunted.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Maybe a couple of weeks? A month?”

I nodded in thought. “And how long did it take for his body to be found?”

“A few months. We were way off the beaten path. It’s a miracle it was discovered at all.”

“Perhaps.” Something else made sense to me now. “Is that why you didn’t want me looking for your ghost? You didn’t want me talking to him? You thought he would tell me what you did?”

She put a hand over her eyes as though doing so would shut out the painful truth. Once again, I wondered how much to tell her. But this was her story, not mine. She’d been lied to and betrayed by her cousin. By her own parents when they had her committed. By the man in charge of her security for years. She deserved to know the truth. To be in on the plan. But how would I tell her without alerting Meacham? He almost certainly had her phone bugged, but he could also have her bag, watch, or her key fob bugged. Deranged psychopaths should never be underestimated.

I grabbed my phone and did a search for the body they’d found. It had happened almost two decades ago, so it took some time to find the right one, but I did begin to wonder about Idaho and all the discovered bodies. Not that New Mexico was any different.

When I finally located a decent article about it, I asked her, “Do you mind if I show you a picture of the man they found? It’s from his driver’s license.”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I’ve seen it before, a long time ago.”

“Okay, if it bothers you, let me know.”

The look on her face, the one that suggested I hung the moon and regularly changed its lightbulb, had me questioning her sanity. Again.

“What?” I asked, wary.

“I’ve never had anyone treat me like this.”

“Like a human?”

“Like my story matters. Like it’s valid. Like my emotional distress is real and I was never crazy.”

“Like a human,” I reiterated. I turned my phone and showed her the pic of a man, clean-shaven

“I barely remember his face, but he does look like the man in the woods. Especially if you add a beard.”

“They said he’d been missing for seven months when he was found.”

“The timing sounds right. Do you think this is a different guy?” she asked, surprised. “How many dead bodies could there be?”

“Bear with me. When is your cousin’s birthday?”

“May 4th.”

“And the cookout was actually on her birthday?”

“Absolutely. Anna always insisted her birthday party be celebrated on her actual birthday, no matter what day of the week it fell on. She always said it was stupid to celebrate a birthday the weekend before or the weekend after, just because it was inconvenient.”

“She sounds like a peach.”

Halle snorted then questioned me with an arch of her brows.

I scrolled to the second paragraph. “Halle, this hiker didn’t go missing until a month after your cousin’s birthday.”

“What?” She sat up and took the phone. “That’s impossible.” She scanned the paragraph. “His family reported him missing when he didn’t show up for work on June 9th of that year.” She blinked up at me, then looked back at the article. “A month later. How did I miss that?”

I was saying far too much, considering our entire conversation—and other activities—was probably being monitored. If so, Paul Meacham was on to me. He’d know I suspected Halle wasn’t being haunted. That she was being stalked. But he wouldn’t know I suspected him.

“Are you saying my attacker isn’t the one who’s been haunting me?”

Now was the time to let her in on my suspicions and plan, but we needed a little more privacy. I reached over her, grabbed her phone, and walked to the microwave.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I slanted an index finger over my mouth and locked her phone inside. My worry was that there were other bugs. Walking through the hotel room as naked as the day I was born, I grabbed her purse and gave it the same silent treatment, locking it inside the microwave.

Then I picked up the whimpering furball.

“Don’t you dare!” she said, jumping up.

I chuckled and rejoined her in bed.

She took the pup from me, cuddled it to her neck, then gazed up at me with those cobalt eyes. “You saw my last moment in the bar the first time you looked, didn’t you?” she asked. Nothing about why I’d just put her belongings in the microwave. Just absolute trust.

“I did see it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. As far as you knew, I was just an unhinged lady who attacked you over a gas pump. I can hardly blame you for holding back. But what about you?”

“Me? I’ve attacked people over gas pumps, too. We have so much in common.”

“No,” she said with a giggle. “Can you see your own last moment?”

“Sadly—or thankfully, depending on your point of view—no.”

“But mine is for sure two months from now?”

I pulled her closer. “We can change that, Halle. We did it for Zachary.”

“I know. I have complete faith in you. But that’s not why I seduced you.”

“Are you sure you seduced me? Or was this all part of my evil plan?”

“I don’t think you have an evil bone in your body. You gonna tell me why my belongings are in a microwave?”

It was time. Would she believe me? Would she believe that she’d never been haunted but had been stalked? I drew in a deep breath and started to explain, when her last moment rushed into my head, the vision as clear and powerful as HDTV. Just like with Zachary, it appeared in my mind without even concentrating. It popped up because the time was so close.

I gaped at her as dread and disbelief slid over me like a blanket of dry ice. It caused a temporary state of paralysis. Of doubt and wariness and astounding denial. My throat constricted, and my eyes watered like I’d taken a shot of battery acid.

“Eric?” Halle asked, growing concerned.

We had indeed changed her fate. Changed her last moment. I lifted my wrist and checked my watch. Seven minutes. Halle had seven minutes to live.