Wish You Were Dead

He gazed steadily at me. “Look, I know you don’t know me and don’t have any reason to care about me, but I’m asking you to believe me. I’m begging you. The cops have a sketch. They have an FBI profiler telling them to look for a single male loner. The second you tell the police, I’ll be arrested for Molly’s murder, and by the time the cops figure out what really happened—if they ever figure out what really happened—your other friends will wind up dead.”

The address I’d gotten from Maura was in a town I’d never been to before. My GPS said we had twenty-seven minutes to go.

“Your friend Lucy,” Ethan said. “Was she popular?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And not real nice to kids who weren’t?”

“It wasn’t her fault.”

Ethan shrugged as if it didn’t matter.

“Was Megan … popular and not very nice?” I asked.

He nodded. “I can make excuses for her. Deep down she was really insecure and driven. But basically, yeah. She could have been nicer.”

“And you?”

“What did I know? I was just your typical high-school jock having fun.”

We rode a few more miles. The rain seemed to be letting up.

“Why does she do it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not a shrink.”

“But you must have an idea. You’ve been following her, researching, trying to figure it out.”

“Okay, here’s my theory,” he said. “But it’s mostly supposition, okay? I think maybe when she was a teenager, it was a seriously bad time for her. She was probably one of those plain, quiet girls—”

“But—” I began.

“Let me finish,” he said. “And for whatever reason, she got teased a lot. Stared at. Pushed around. Maybe her family didn’t have anything and she got singled out for that. I don’t know. I’m just guessing, right? So she grows up thinking someday she’s going to change. Become a totally different person. Make enough money to get all the cosmetic work done and be the person she always dreamed of becoming. The face, the breasts, who knows what else? But it doesn’t work. Whatever she dreamed would happen doesn’t. She changes everything but nothing changes. The dream she’s clung to for all these years is dashed. Whatever it was, whatever she waited all this time for, it doesn’t come true.”

“So she becomes angry, bitter, resentful,” I said.

“Worse,” said Ethan. “Vindictive, revengeful. Nemesis.”

“What about the eyes? The animals?”

“Who knows? She’s got that science background. Maybe she tried veterinary school for a while and couldn’t cut it. Excuse the unintentional pun. One thing I do know is something a lot of serial killers have in common is animal torture.”

“I thought serial killers were always men,” I said.

“Mostly men,” Ethan corrected me. “One out of six is a woman. Aileen Wuornos, Belle Gunness, Marie Noe. Not nearly as common as male serial killers, but not unheard of.”

“How did you figure out she was here in Soundview?” I asked.

“Before I left Kansas, I broke into the place where she’d lived while she was there. She’d done a pretty good job of cleaning it out, so there’d been no evidence … nothing I could show the police to prove I’d been set up. But I did find a printout of teaching jobs, and an ad for a chemistry teacher at Soundview High School was circled.”

We were getting closer. Each turn put us on a narrower, less well-paved, and less populated road, until we were headed up a hill with nothing but bare trees and ground covered with brown, dead leaves. Patches of mist drifted across the road, which was now only wide enough for one car, the asphalt crumbling and dotted with potholes. We came to a narrow gravel driveway that wound back through the trees and disappeared. On a post beside the driveway was a dented mailbox and a small peeling sign that said, HILLSDALE KENNELS.

I slowed the car.

“Keep going,” Ethan said.

I drove up the hill about a quarter mile, where the road ended at a driveway leading to the remains of a small dilapidated house. The roof had sunk in and the windows were broken. It was clear that no one had lived there in a long time.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Turn around and go back down. I’ll tell you where to park.”

About a quarter of a mile back down the road, he pointed at a small clearing. “Pull over here.”

I did as I was told.

Ethan sat still for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t have to come. It would probably be better if you didn’t.”

I didn’t want to go. I was scared half out of my mind. Heart thudding, stomach twisting. But I felt like I’d spent my whole life being scared. At some point I just had to stop and do something. “They’re my friends.”

He leveled his gaze at me. “Think about it. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. You have a lot to lose and not that much to gain.”

“Please stop trying to talk me out of this. If you try hard enough, you just may succeed, and I don’t want you to.”

He raised an eyebrow skeptically but said, “Okay, let’s go.”

We got out. The air was cold and moist, the kind of chill that creeps through your clothes. The rain had turned into a thick, misty drizzle, and our breaths came out in white vapor. The faint smell of wood smoke was in the air. Someone somewhere had a fire going. Ethan walked along the side of the road, looking to his left, in the direction of the kennel, even though it was invisible beyond the myriad tree trunks. He paused for a moment, then tilted his head toward the woods. We started to walk through the trees, the wet, dead leaves squishing under our feet.

Ethan stepped carefully, avoiding sticks that might crack loudly underfoot, and I did the same. All I could see were bare, dark tree trunks, but the scent of smoke seemed to grow stronger. I don’t know how Ethan could know where he was going, unless he was following that scent. I still couldn’t quite believe I was following this stranger— this person who’d broken into my own home, who was on the run from the law—deep into unknown woods. Had I lost my mind? Was I completely insane? And yet somehow I’d come to believe, very quickly, that I could trust him. I’d heard his side of the story. It made sense. Sometimes you had to take a leap of faith. Especially if it might mean saving your friends’ lives.

Ethan stopped. Up ahead, barely visible through the wet tree trunks, was a low, dark green house. Smoke curled up from a narrow cinder-block chimney. Ethan looked back at me and nodded as if to say, This is it. He started walking again.

I followed, glancing from his back to the house ahead. As we got closer, I could see a fenced-in enclosure. It could have been an outdoor kennel. There were low, wooden shelters inside—doghouses.

Ethan paused beside a tree. So far there’d been no sign of life or movement around the house. I moved up close behind him and whispered, “What do you think?”

“I think if there are dogs there and they start barking, we’re toast,” he answered, and gazed past me back in the direction of the road. “You don’t have to do this. You can still go back.”

“I know,” I said.

Our eyes met, and he nodded slightly as if accepting my decision. Then he turned and continued. I could see the fenced-in area now. Something moved quickly back and forth along the fence. A medium-size black dog. Ethan stopped. The dog was excited, as if it knew we were coming. Its tongue hung out and its tail wagged rapidly. Ethan didn’t move. I wondered if he was waiting to see if it would bark, or if the dog’s excited movements brought someone out of the house.

But nothing changed. The dog kept turning and turning by the fence. Ethan stepped slowly. The low green house looked neglected. A shovel and hayfork leaned against the wall near a door. The roof was missing shingles, and old branches lay on it. Some of the windows were cracked, and most appeared to be covered on the inside with plastic sheeting.

Ethan stopped about ten yards from the fence. The dog paced more frantically than ever, emitting little yelps