As Good as Dead Page 6
“Heads?” Pip cut her off. “Exactly.”
“Oh, Pip.” Her mom eyed her with concern, that eyebrow slipping up her forehead again. “They aren’t connected. I’m sure it’s just something from my tires, or maybe the mail carrier’s truck.” She studied them again. “And if someone did draw those, it’s probably just the Yardleys’ kids. That middle one seems a bit, well, you know.” She pulled a face.
It made sense, what her mom was saying. It was just a cat, of course, just tire treads or a kid’s innocent doodle. Why had her mind jumped so far ahead, thinking they must be connected? She felt the creep of shame under her skin, that she’d even considered the idea someone had left them both here. Even more shameful, that they’d left them just for her. Why would she think that? Because she was scared of everything now, the other side of her brain answered. She had a fight-or-flight heart, felt danger pressing in on her when there was none, could hear gunshots in any sound if she wanted to, scared of the night but not of the dark, even scared to look down at her own hands. Broken.
“Are you OK, sweetie?” Her mom had abandoned the chalk figures, studying her face instead. “Did you get enough sleep last night?”
Almost none. “Yes. Plenty,” Pip said.
“You look pale, is all.” The eyebrow stretched even higher.
“I’m always pale.”
“Lost a bit of weight too.”
“Mom—”
“I’m just saying, sweetie. Here.” She slotted her arm through Pip’s, leading her back toward the house. “I’ll get back to dinner and I’ll even make tiramisu for dessert. Your favorite.”
“But it’s a Tuesday?”
“So?” Her mom smiled. “My little girl’s going off to college in a few weeks, let me spoil her while I still have her.”
Pip gave her mom’s arm a squeeze back. “Thanks.”
“I’ll deal with that pigeon in a minute, you don’t need to worry about it,” she said, shutting the front door behind them.
“I’m not worried about the pigeon,” Pip said, though her mom had already moved away, back to the kitchen. Pip listened to her clattering around in there, tutting about these industrial-strength onions. “I’m not worried about the pigeon,” Pip said again quietly, just to herself. She was worried about who might have left it there. And then worried that she’d thought that at all.
She turned to the stairs, walking up to see Josh perched on the top step, chin between his hands.
“What pigeon?” he asked as Pip rested her hand on his head, navigating around him.
“Seriously,” she muttered, “maybe I should let you borrow these more often.” She tapped the headphones cradled around her neck. “Glue them to your head.”
Pip went into her room, leaning against the door to close it behind her. She freed her arm from the Velcro phone holder and let it drop to the floor. She peeled her top off, the material clinging to her sweat-sticky skin, getting tangled around the headphones. They came off together, now in a heap on her carpet. Yeah, she should definitely shower before dinner. And…she glanced at the second drawer down in her desk. Maybe just take one, to calm her down and settle her spiking heart, keep the blood off her hands and her mind off of headless things. Her mom was starting to suspect something was wrong; Pip needed to be good at dinner. Just like her old self.
A cat and tire marks. Those made sense, perfect sense. What was wrong with her? Why did she need it to be something bad, like she was looking for trouble? She held a breath. Just one more case. Save Jane Doe and save yourself. That’s all it would take, and she wouldn’t be like this anymore: misplaced inside her own head. She had a plan. Just stick to the plan.
Pip quickly checked her phone. A text from Ravi: Would it be weird to have chicken nuggets ON TOP of pizza?
And an email from Roger Turner: Hi Pip. Should we have a chat sometime this week, now you’ve had a chance to think about the offer from the mediation? Best wishes, Roger Turner.
Pip exhaled. She felt sorry for Roger, but her answer was the same. Over her dead body. What was the most professional way of saying that?
She was about to open the email when a new notification slotted in beneath. Another message had come through the form on her website, to AGGGTMpodcast@gmail.com. The preview read: Who will look for you…and Pip knew exactly what the full text would say. Yet again.
She opened up the message from anon to delete it. Maybe she could set up some kind of blocker that would send them straight to spam? The message opened and Pip’s thumb hovered over the trash icon.
Her eyes stopped her just in time, catching on one word.
She blinked.
Read the message in full.
Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
Ps. remember to always kill two birds with one stone.
The phone slipped from her hands.
The soft thud of her phone falling to the carpet was the shot of a gun, aiming through her chest. Echoing five times, until her heart captured the sound and carried it on.
She stood there for a moment, numb to everything except the violence erupting beneath her skin. Great thunderclaps of gunshots and cracking bones, the sucking sound of blood between her fingers, and a scream: hers. The words rupturing at the edges as they threw themselves around her head: Charlie, please don’t do this. I’m begging you!
The cream walls of her room peeled away, revealing burning and blackened timbers, collapsing in on themselves. The abandoned farmhouse resurrected in her bedroom, filling her lungs with smoke. Pip closed her eyes and told herself she was here and now, she wasn’t there and then. But she couldn’t do it, not alone. She needed help.
She staggered through the fire, arm up to shield her eyes. To her desk, fingers fumbling, finding the second drawer on the right. She pulled it out, completely, tipped the drawer out on the burning floor. Red string unraveled from her, papers fluttered, pins scattered, tangling in white headphone wires. The cardboard bottom that hid her secrets flipped away, and out came the six burner phones, falling out of their carefully structured order. Last out was the small clear bag.
Pip ripped it open with shaking fingers. How were there so few left already? She tipped out one pill and swallowed it dry, her eyes watering as it scraped her throat.
She was here and now. Not then and there. Here and now.
It wasn’t blood, it was just sweat. See? Wipe it on your leggings and see.
Not then and there.
Here and now.
But was here and now any better? She stared at her phone, abandoned on the floor over there. Kill two birds with one stone. Two dead pigeons on the driveway, one with dead all-seeing eyes, and one with none. That wasn’t a coincidence, was it? Maybe it wasn’t a cat, maybe someone really had put them there, along with those chalk figures drawing closer and closer. The same someone who was desperate for Pip to answer that one question: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Someone who knew where she lived. A stalker?
She’d been looking out for trouble, and so it had found her.
No, no, stop. She was doing it again, taking things too far, seeking danger where maybe there was none. Kill two birds with one stone. It was a very common phrase. And she’d been receiving that question from anon for a long time, and nothing had happened to her so far, had it? She was here, she hadn’t disappeared.
She crawled along the floor and turned her phone over, the device recognizing her face and unlocking. Pip swiped into her emails, clicking into the search bar. She typed in “Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? + anon.”
Seven emails, eight including the one she just got, all from different accounts, all asking her that same question. Pip scrolled up. She’d received the first one on May 8, the messages starting out further apart, getting closer and closer together, only four days betwe
en the final two. May 8? Pip shook her head; that didn’t seem right. She remembered getting the first one earlier than that, around the time Jamie Reynolds had disappeared and she’d been the one looking for him. That’s why the question had stuck out to her.
Oh wait. It might have been on Twitter. She pressed the blue icon to open the app, tapping into the advanced search options. She typed in the question again, in the field for this exact phrase, and her podcast handle in the to these accounts section.
She pressed search, her eyes spooling along with the loading circle.
The page filled with results: nine separate tweets sent to her, asking her that exact question. The most recent from just seven minutes ago, with the same P.S. as the email. And at the bottom of the page was the very first time: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Sent on Sunday, the twenty-sixth of April, in response to Pip’s tweet announcing the second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: The Disappearance of Jamie Reynolds. That was it. The beginning. More than three months ago.
That felt so long ago now. Jamie had been missing for only one day. Stanley Forbes was walking around, alive, without six holes in him; Pip had spoken to him that very day. Charlie Green was just her new neighbor. There’d been no blood on her hands, and sleep didn’t always come easy, but it had come nonetheless. Max was on trial and Pip had believed, down into the very deepest part of who she was, that he would face justice for what he’d done. So many beginnings on that bright April morning, beginnings that had led her here. The first steps along a path that had turned on her, twisting around itself until it only led down. But had something else begun on that exact day, too? Something that had been growing for three months and was only now rearing its head?
Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
Pip pushed to her feet, back in her room now, the abandoned farmhouse locked away at the back of her mind. She fell onto her bed. The question, the chalk figures, the two dead birds. Could they be connected? Could this be about her? It was tenuous at best, but had there been anything else? Anything she’d thought strange at the time, but her mind had abandoned it to chance? Oh…There had been that letter several weeks ago. Well, not even a letter. It had been just an envelope, Pippa Fitz-Amobi scribbled on the front in scratchy black ink. She remembered thinking there was no address, no stamp, so someone must have pushed it through the front door. But when she’d opened it—Dad standing beside her, asking whether it was “old-fashioned nudes from Ravi”—there’d been nothing inside at all. Empty. She’d put it in the recycling bin and never thought about it again. The mystery letter had been forgotten as soon as another letter had arrived with her name on it: the letter of demand from Max Hastings and his lawyer. Was it possible that envelope had been connected to all this?
And now she was thinking maybe there’d been something else before that. The day of Stanley Forbes’s funeral. When the ceremony was over and Pip returned to her car, she’d found a small bouquet of roses tucked inside the driver’s-side mirror. Except every flower head had been picked off, red petals strewn over the gravel below. A bouquet of thorns and stems. At the time, Pip thought it must have been one of the protesters at the funeral, who hadn’t disbanded until the police were called. But maybe it wasn’t any of the protestors, not Ant’s dad or Mary Scythe or Leslie from the Stop & Shop. Maybe it had been a gift, from the same person who wanted to know who would look for her when she disappeared.
If it was—if these incidents were connected—then this had been going on for weeks. Months, even. And she hadn’t realized. But maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe she was reading too much into everything now, all because of that second dead bird. Pip didn’t trust herself and she didn’t trust her fear.
Only one thing was clear: if these all were from the same person—from dead flowers to dead pigeons—then it was escalating. Both in severity but also occurrence. Pip needed to track it somehow, collect all the data points and see if there were any connections, if she really did have a stalker or if she was finally losing it. A spreadsheet, she thought, imagining the smirk on Ravi’s face. But it would help to see it all neatly laid out, help her work out if this was real or only real in the dark place at the back of her head, and if it was real, where it all might lead, what the endgame was.
Pip made her way across the room to her desk, stepping over the tipped-out contents of the drawer; she would tidy that up later. She pulled her laptop open, double-clicked on Google Chrome, and pulled up a blank tab. She typed “stalker” into the search bar and pressed enter, scrolling down the list of results. Report a stalker on a government website, a Wikipedia page, a site about types of stalkers, Inside the Mind of a Stalker, psychology sites, and crime statistics. Pip clicked on the first result and started to read through it all, turning to a fresh page in her notebook.
She wrote: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Underlined it three times. She couldn’t help but feel the quiet rage embedded in that sinister question. She did think about disappearing sometimes, running away and leaving Pip behind. Or disappearing inside her own head, in those rare moments when her mind was quiet, an absence she could just float in, free. But what did “disappear” mean, really, when it came down to it? Define “disappear.”
Sometimes people came back from being disappeared. Jamie Reynolds was one example, and Isla Jordan, the young woman Elliot Ward had kept for five years thinking she was someone else. They had un-disappeared. But then Pip’s mind went back to the beginning, back to Andie Bell, to Sal Singh, to the victims of Scott “the Monster of Rochester” Brunswick, to Jane Doe, to every true crime podcast and documentary she’d ever lost herself in. And in most cases, “disappear” meant “dead.”
“Pip, dinner!”
“Coming!”
File Name:
Potential Stalker Incidents.xlsx
Date: 04/26/2020
Days Since Last Incident: n/a
Type: Online
Incident: Tweet: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
Severity Scale (1-10): 1
Date: 05/08/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 12
Type: Online
Incident: Email and Tweet: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 2
Date: 05/17/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 9
Type: Offline
Incident: Dead flowers left on car
Severity Scale (1-10): 4
Date: 05/31/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 14
Type: Online
Incident: Email: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 1
Date: 06/11/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 11
Type: Online
Incident: Tweet: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 1
Date: 06/21/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 10
Type: Online
Incident: Tweet: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 1
Date: 06/30/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 9
Type: Offline
Incident: Empty envelope posted through door. Addressed to me.
Severity Scale (1-10): 4
Date: 07/08/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 8
Type: Online
Incident: Email: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 1
Date: 07/15/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 7
Type: Online
Incident: Email and Tweet: (same qu
estion)
Severity Scale (1-10): 2
Date: 07/22/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 7
Type: Online
Incident: Email and Tweet: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 2
Date: 07/27/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 5
Type: Offline
Incident: Dead pigeon left on driveway (with head)
Severity Scale (1-10): 7
Date: 07/27/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 0
Type: Online
Incident: Email and Tweet: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 3
Date: 07/31/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 4
Type: Online
Incident: Email and Tweet: (same question)
Severity Scale (1-10): 2
Date: 08/02/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 2
Type: Offline
Incident: 5 chalk figures drawn at foot of driveway (headless figures?)
Severity Scale (1-10): 5
Date: 08/04/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 2
Type: Offline
Incident: 5 chalk figures farther up the driveway, closer to the house
Severity Scale (1-10): 6
Date: 08/04/2020
Days Since Last Incident: 0
Type: Offline
Incident: Dead pigeon left on driveway (without head)