Todd Strasser - Wish You Were Dead

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you just broke into my house and now you’re asking me to trust you.”

He sighed and nodded. “You’re right. I did that because I’m desperate. I’ve been on the run for a long time. I’m tired and dirty and smelly, and I feel like the whole world is against me—and if you’ve never felt that way, believe me, it’s hard to keep going. This is the closest I’ve gotten to Nemesis, but I need help. The person who wrote that blog has no reason to talk to me, but they may talk to you. So here’s the deal. You can call the police and I’ll be arrested. As soon as Nemesis hears about it, she’ll be gone … off to some new place and new identity, and sooner or later she’ll kill more kids. Or you can trust me and help me stop her once and for all. It’s up to you.”

He gestured back into the house. “There’s the phone.” Then he sat down on the front step under the portico. “Either way, I’ll be here.”

I closed the front door and locked it. By the time I’d gotten back to my room upstairs, I’d made my decision.

Rain splattered on the Audi’s windshield. The address was a street I’d never heard of, in a part of town I’d never known anyone to live. A few blocks of old, two-story wood and brick buildings housing a car-repair and body shop, a plumbing-supply store, a small industrial dry cleaner. On the second floors of some of the buildings were apartments. Rainwater dripped from the roofs and awnings. The address was a store that sold and fixed vacuum cleaners. Above it was an apartment. I parked across the street.

“Want me to come with you?” Ethan asked.

“No, I’m afraid it will freak her out.”

I left the car and crossed the street in the rain. The paint on the small brown wooden door beside the vacuum-cleaner store was peeling. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and went in. On the wall of the dark vestibule inside were two metal mailboxes. One said BRESLISS.

I climbed the narrow creaky wooden stairs. The steps were so old they dipped in the middle. On the second-floor landing were some children’s bicycles, a stroller, and two doors. I knocked on the one marked BRESLISS.

“Who’s there?” a woman shouted from inside.

“My name is Madison Archer,” I said to the door. “Is Maura there?”

“What do you want?”

“I’m a friend of hers.”

I could hear muttering on the other side of the door. Then the woman said, “That’s a first. Go get your sister. Someone’s here for her.”

I heard banging and yelling, and then the soft slither of footsteps. “Who is it?” Maura asked.

“It’s Madison.”

Silence. The door didn’t open.

“Maura?” I said. There was no answer. “Maura, I know what’s going on. I remember what you told me that day in the hall and I read your blog.”

“Your what?” the woman inside asked. Obviously she’d been listening.

The door opened just enough for Maura to squeeze out. As if she didn’t want me to see inside. I caught a glimpse of the woman. Small, like Maura, with a hard, deeply lined face.

Maura pulled the door closed behind her and then led me back down the stairs. We stood in the small, dark vestibule. “How did you find my blog?” she asked.

“A friend helped me,” I said. “You don’t know who he is, and he doesn’t know who you are, but I can promise you that neither he nor I will ever tell anyone. I swear, and I trust him. You can trust him. But there’s one thing we need to know, Maura. We need to know where she is.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?” I asked nervously as I drove.

“If you’re asking if I’m scared, the answer is totally,” Ethan replied. “But what choice do I have?”

“Can’t we just go to the police?”

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.