She ignored his sarcasm and he let out a sigh. “I’m the n-night manager at a store.”
“What do they think happened to me?” she whispered.
“That some s-stranger nabbed you.” He made a small sound that might have been a humorless laugh. “It’s n-never the stranger, though, is it? It’s always s-someone you know, s-someone you should trust that h-hurts you the worst. Isn’t that t-true, Josie?”
There was something strange in his voice that made a chill go down her spine. Was he talking about her? How her rejection had hurt him? It was all she could think of. The only reason that could explain this. “That’s what the statistics say,” she said softly. “It’s usually someone the victim knows.”
He laughed, a real one, though she heard meanness in it. “Is that what you are? A v-victim?” He reached over and used his fist to pound on the wound on her thigh. She cried out in pain, drawing her leg up.
“Both,” she said on a strangled breath. “I’m both. Aren’t we all?” Tears streaked down her cheeks, though she tried to hold them back. “Sometimes the victim, sometimes the perpetrator? None of us are one or the other. We’re all both to different degrees.”
She bent her head and used her knee to wipe her nose, her tears drying. She’d been thinking about that a lot lately, considering her life, her choices, the reasons behind them. Thinking about her past and how it affected her present. Maybe any self-reflection was pointless considering she’d most likely die in that warehouse room, but what else did she have to do? She was constantly terrified, alone, all her raw emotions right at the surface. She wasn’t sure she could stop her mind from spinning if she tried. She’d had no choice but to look at her feelings, and all the time in the world to examine each and every one.
“T-tell me, Josie, tell me about the b-bad things you’ve done,” he said after a minute.
She turned her head, swallowed, unsure what he wanted to hear. He’d told her he knew everything about her . . . He didn’t look back at her, his masked face pointed forward, staring at the wall in front of them.
She let out a breath, her shoulders drooping as she looked away. “I had an affair with a married man.”
“I already knew that. You’re a whore. It’s w-what whores do.”
Was she a whore? Obviously not using the classic definition, but that’s not what Marshall meant anyway. He meant that she was promiscuous. She flaunted herself. She made men want her, and then she rejected them, or used them for her own selfish purposes. She knew that’s what he thought of her, and those thoughts were exacerbated by whatever madness ruled his mind. Because he had to be mentally ill. No sane human chained another person to a cement wall and raped them repeatedly. No one sane carved words into another person’s flesh. No one sane killed another person or left them to die, and somehow Josie knew that’s where this was all heading for her. “I’m not a whore,” she said calmly. “I loved him.” I thought I still did, only I haven’t thought of him much since I’ve been down here, and that’s probably very telling.
Marshall laughed. “You loved him? He wasn’t yours to love. Other people must have loved him too. They probably waited for him to come home, but he didn’t. Because he was busy fucking you.” He spoke quickly, fluidly, anger lacing his tone and making his voice deeper.
“I know,” she said, and her voice was small. But not as small as she felt. “I know, because I’ve been the one waiting too. My father cheated on my mother repeatedly. They fought, he’d leave, and then she’d take out her rage and helplessness on me. I know about that part too.” She wondered why she was telling him this, and why he was listening. Would it make any difference if he knew something about her? The times she’d hurt like maybe he had hurt? Would it make her human in his eyes? Make him decide to spare her life? She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare hope, but even so, the things she was saying needed to be said. Not for him as much as for her. She needed to voice these truths, express her contrition, because if she was going to die, she wanted to do it with a partially cleansed soul. It was the only thing she had left for which she was in control.
“So you did it to someone else to g-get back at your father? Your mother?” He sounded genuinely interested.
“No,” she said, turning her head toward him. “No.” She stared forward again, considering. She’d met Vaughn Merrick—Professor Vaughn Merrick—in her English class. She’d fallen for his striking looks and his boyish smile, the way he held his cla
ss spellbound with his passion as he quoted Shakespeare and Hemingway, Austen and Dickens. She’d been leaving in the rain after class one day when he’d offered her a ride. There was an old-school Police song with lyrics about that, wasn’t there? God, she was such a cliché. He’d driven her home, turned his usual flirtation up a notch, and she’d invited him in. He’d made love to her all afternoon as the rain pounded outside her windows. Later, they’d lain in bed together, their legs entwined as he’d quoted poetry to her. It was the most romantic and sensual thing she’d ever experienced. A month later, she found out he was married as she stood frozen in an art gallery watching him with his wife, hands clasped, the wedding ring he didn’t wear to class glinting on his finger. There were two pre-teen girls next to them, giggling softly at whatever he’d bent to whisper in their ears, gazing at him adoringly. The perfect family.
All those old feelings of intense rejection had slammed into Josie. She was an outsider. Again. It felt horribly, heartbreakingly . . . familiar. An insidious association between pain and love that she didn’t know how to untwist.
Josie had confronted him later. He and his wife were on the rocks, he’d said, but didn’t they all? When she’d pointed out that it didn’t look that way at the gallery, he said it was where she worked, and they had to pretend for her co-workers. His wife wasn’t ready or willing to deal with the gossip that surrounded a separation. And they hadn’t yet told their daughters. He’d said that the only time he felt like he was truly himself was when he was with Josie. She had given him hope that true love—the kind the poets wrote about—was possible. If his story had been a novel, the reviews would say it had plot holes ten feet deep, but she’d chosen not to explore them, not to listen to her gut. She’d chosen to suspend disbelief and learned the hard way that suspended disbelief has no place in real life.
Suspended disbelief in real life is called willing stupidity.
She’d kept seeing him for another six months before she’d been unable to lie to herself any longer. Regardless, even after it’d ended, she still thought of him, still missed him, her heart still flipped and that old familiar neediness filled her chest when she saw him across campus, walking with some other pretty student. She still longed for the way he’d made her feel. She thought of what Marshall had asked her a moment before. Did she keep seeing Vaughn after she knew he was married—with two daughters nonetheless—because she was trying to get back at her father? “I wasn’t trying to get back at anyone. It’s like . . . I recreated the situation with my father unconsciously. The feelings were the same. Are the same. I craved the rejection as much as the acceptance. I wanted to hurt myself.”
“Why?” he barked. He seemed upset in some way she couldn’t discern, and she wondered if she was going too far here. Wondered if she’d accidentally say something that, instead of cultivating empathy, would create anger, cause him to revile her more than he did. But it was all she had. The truth of her life as she was finally beginning to see it. She felt a sudden kinship with her captor—that Stockholm Syndrome rising up. It was a . . . familiarity that went beyond words or understanding. She tried to move closer to him but her chains pulled her tight, trapping her where she was.
“I didn’t set out to hurt myself intentionally, but seeing it now, yeah. Yeah, I did. Somewhere deep down.” She paused. “Maybe we’re all just going through the motions, trying to rework the stories that ended so badly in our early years. Trying so desperately to play a different role in the tragedies of our lives, yet using the same flawed script. Do you ever think that, Mar—” She realized her mistake and cleared her throat. He didn’t appear to notice. He didn’t react at all. “Do you ever think that?”
“What about the other p-players? What about them?”
Josie sighed. “You can’t change them.”
“No,” he murmured. He turned his head, his hazel eyes catching the light for a moment. She saw that he had a ring of dark brown surrounding the lighter hazel. She’d never seen eyes like his before. “But you c-can make them suffer.” He smiled then, she could tell by the movement of his mask. A deep chill went down her spine as he stood and left.
CHAPTER TEN
Josie peeked out her curtain, watching as the patrol car drove slowly past her house, the window rolled down, the officer peering at her property. Officer Horton. He’d come to the house earlier and introduced himself, given her his card with his cell number so she could call him if she had any reason to. Assured her he’d be at her service within a few minutes.
It was comforting, she had to admit. And surreal. Her mind was still reeling from Detective Copeland’s visit and as she stood there, going over what he’d told her once again, she wondered what the likelihood was that the case of the girl they’d found dead had anything to do with her. More likely it had to do with the man who’d abducted her, right? Someone was mimicking him for reasons unknown. Finding new victims and using Marshall Landish’s MO. She dropped the curtain, turning away and walking to her desk. She sat, opening one of the file folders in front of her. Marshall Landish’s photo greeted her as she knew it would, his grainy, black and white features staring at her from the employee photo of the grocery store where he’d once worked. She picked it up, her stomach tightening with anxiety. She made herself look at it, her eyes moving over the features of the man who’d caused her so much trauma. The father of her baby boy. A deranged and evil man, who’d believed his actions were some sort of twisted right.
Just as always, though, she had trouble meshing the face of the man in the photo with the man under the ski mask who’d raped, terrorized, and starved her. She couldn’t stop picturing him in her mind as that faceless monster who’d first attacked her in her bed in the middle of the night. Her counselor had printed out the picture in the file for her after Josie had asked. Josie had wanted to . . . picture him as he was, not as he’d chosen to appear to her. Faceless. She’d sought to humanize him so her panic abated. He wasn’t some supernatural devil she had to fear. He was just a man. And he was dead. Gone forever.