Chapter 20

I retreated to my hotel at the conclusion of the trial each day. Before going to my room, I checked with the staff at the front desk to see if any mail had come for me. I still hadn't received a letter from William since arriving in Georgia a week and a half prior and I worried he hadn't gotten my new address or, worse, he'd seen me and decided that he didn't want to be my boyfriend anymore.

"Are you waiting for something important?" the woman at the front desk asked.

"A letter from a friend," I said.

"A love letter?" She raised her eyebrows.

"Something like that," I replied.

In the days since, she'd figured out that I was waiting for a letter from William Thompson when I mentioned that I was in town to watch a trial and told her not to be alarmed when the return address was a jail. I acted embarrassed when she put it together, but I think I wanted her to know.

"I'm obsessed with him," she confided in me when she found out that I was in town attending his trial. "I love all types of true crime. You always hear about serial killers in the past, but it's wild to have one today, right in my backyard. You know, my friend's cousin went to high school with Kimberly."

"Wow, what a coincidence," I replied.

I held back from bragging about how much closer I was to William than her. It was easy for proximity to danger to turn into a competition, the way that people liked to get into fights over whose childhood was worse and more traumatic.

"I'll be on the lookout for any letters," she assured me.

I resented that she would get to touch the envelope before I did. Things like that became important when physicality in a relationship was manifested through paper.

After checking in with the desk, I went to my room, which already felt like it had only ever been mine. Living in a hotel wasn't the fantasy I imagined as a child. I'd purchased a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a pack of plastic knives with the intention of making sandwiches for dinner in order to save money, but my hunger, which was both physical and not, usually got the best of me and I'd developed a habit of stopping at fast-food drive-thrus during my trips back, a type of cheap indulgence that I never typically allowed myself in my ordinary life.

I ate my food in bed, watching marathons of home renovation shows. I tried to do Jill's workout videos when I had the energy, which was almost never. The trial was a physical and emotional leech. Sometimes I wrote letters to William, but more often than not I went to bed early, falling asleep on piles of crumbs from my dinner, for lack of anything better to do.

A week and a half into the trial, I still hadn't connected with the Thompson family the way that I'd wanted to. The atmosphere of the courthouse made it difficult to start a conversation. Dotty, Lauren, and I weren't the only clique that had formed. The friends and families of the victims had formed their own kind of community, one that was rooted in grief. Anna Leigh's friends connected with Emma's friends, and Jill's sister led them through gentle flow yoga sessions in a spare room of the courthouse to help release the negative energy that built up in their shoulders. They traveled to the bathroom, the water fountain, and the food trucks parked outside in little pods. I knew that the pods were meant for protection rather than exclusion, but still, I felt excluded like they were the cool girls in high school and I was the loser.

I wanted to explain that originally I was on their side. I'm one of the people who helped figure out that it was William, I wanted to say. Only that wasn't totally true, as I'd seen William's picture and dismissed him as someone who couldn't possibly be guilty. They avoided me like they could sense William's presence on me even though I'd never touched his person. Being one of "those women" had a scent to it, apparently.

I know that I'm not here to make friends, but I wish they were friendlier, I wrote William. A selfish statement considering that William was hated globally.

Since I couldn't approach the Thompson family inside of the courthouse, I decided that I needed to find a way to talk to them outside. That was when I started minorly stalking the Thompson family.

Instead of going back to my hotel room after the trial, I followed Mark and Cindy Thompson. Their estate was an hour outside of the city and to ease the burden of travel, they'd gotten a long-term rental close to the courthouse that was big enough to also accommodate William's brother Bentley and his wife. I suspected they would find it unsettling if they knew how easy it was for me to track their location.

The first night that I tracked them, I followed them back to their rental and sat in my car across the street waiting for something to happen. A delivery driver arrived at one point with bags of food and my stomach grumbled as a reminder that I too needed to eat. Eventually, I drove home out of boredom and composed a dinner out of vending machine snacks.

I returned the next night with a laptop full of downloaded movies that I ended up not watching because Mark, Cindy, Bentley, and his wife left the rental and drove to a restaurant ten minutes away.

The restaurant was a steak house that was far out of my price range even in the best of times.

"Do you have a reservation?" the host asked when I walked in. There was disdain in the question. If she had to ask, she already knew I didn't belong.

"No," I admitted.

She sighed.

"How many?"

"Just me."

"You can take a seat at the bar if you'd like, otherwise the wait is going to be over an hour."

I took the offer of a seat at the bar, disappointed that it faced away from the rest of the room. My chair was squished between a couple enjoying an appetizer and two friends out for drinks. My heart panged thinking about Meghan.

The lack of prices on the drink menu frightened me, so I ordered the cheapest thing on the dinner menu that I could find, which was a house salad. My neck hurt from straining to look behind me. I finally spotted the Thompson family seated in a corner. Mark and Bentley each had an amber-colored cocktail, while Cindy sipped something out of a martini glass.

I could tell, even from a distance, that Mark and Bentley dominated the conversation. They were those kind of men, the ones who liked to take hold of every room that they were in. Occasionally, Cindy and her daughter-in-law chimed in with a comment or a laugh, but largely they were quiet. I strained my ears trying to hear what they were saying, which proved impossible over the din of the restaurant.

My house salad was small, unsatisfying, and cost sixteen dollars. I hated thinking about how many items I could've purchased at Taco Bell for the same price. I kept waiting for something to happen and nothing did. The two men ordered more drinks. It was a large amount of liquor for a Tuesday, but I wasn't a teetotaler; drinking a few cocktails didn't imply a family that was evil to the core.

I finished my greens in a mere five minutes. The couple next to me had ordered steaks and I watched red juice dribble out of the meat as the woman cut into it. I didn't normally like steak, but now that it was being withheld, it was all that I wanted. I had the bartender give me another menu and I desperately scanned it, willing an affordable cut of meat to appear. Finding none, I begrudgingly paid for my salad and went to use the bathroom before leaving.

It was one of those nice restrooms with big swinging doors that offered total privacy and cleaning products strong enough to overpower any smells that attempted to permeate the air. I emerged from the stall to find William's brother's wife, Virginia, washing her hands in one of the sinks. We made eye contact in the mirror, a glimmer of recognition on her face before she quickly looked away. She opened her mouth as though she was going to say something and then closed it again. She dried her hands on a paper towel and left the bathroom without a word.

I was in a bad mood when I left the restaurant. All of that time and money spent for nothing. I hadn't illuminated the dark depths of the Thompson family and I was no closer to discovering the truth of what had happened with William and the murdered women. Instead, I'd watched them eat dinner at a distance and consumed some limp greens that failed to fill my stomach.

In my hungry, vulnerable state, I couldn't stop thinking about why William hadn't written me back since I'd arrived in Georgia. Had he ever really cared or had it all been a ruse to get me to attend the trial where I spent eight hours a day staring at the emotionless back of his head? In a real relationship, I thought, I wouldn't have to follow his family at all. Instead, he would introduce me to them himself and I would get to witness their psychoses for myself.

If William had been Max or any of the other men I'd dated, the kind who had a cell phone readily available in the palm of his hand, that was the point at which I would've started sending anxious, needy text messages, the kind that inevitably turned men off of me and that I could never stop myself from sending. As it was, all I could do was write him a crabby letter, and I planned the words in my head as I walked back to my room.

You asked me to be your girlfriend and then you respond with radio silence. I understand that I have low expectations, but they're not that low. I'm still a person, you know. I'm not like those women that you killed that won't talk back to you. That's the nice thing about a corpse, isn't it? They can never critique your actions, not like the living that are left behind.

Do you even want me here or was this all a game to you? Maybe it was stupid of me to think that you were being serious when you said you wanted a relationship. Haha. Gullible little Hannah, always looking for love. I guess you tricked me.

You say all these things about your family, but I've spent the last two days watching them and I have to say, they seem perfectly normal to me, enviable even. I think there's something broken inside of you that makes you hurt people this way. Stop trying to blame the world around you and take responsibility for your actions.

The door to my room beeped as I swiped my key card and then closed behind me with a bang. All of the words that I'd repeated to myself on the drive home vanished as I saw what was waiting for me on the bed: a packet of envelopes with a note from the front desk employee that said, "I wanted to make sure you got these."

William had finally written me back.