The Girl I Used to Be (21 page)

I start to laugh. I'm alive. I'm still alive.

The mama deer looks over my shoulder at something behind me. Her ears flick forward.

“Well, hello there,” a man says.

His voice is a kick to the gut. I turn around. It's Stephen Spaulding. Half his hair is gone. Burned off. And that side of his face is red and black from a terrible burn that's closed one eye. But he's still got his gun, and now he aims it at me, steadying it with his other hand.

Get back under.
I fall more than dive back into the stream. Bullets stitch the water. One of my foster families liked to watch
MythBusters
, and thanks to that show I know bullets can't go very far in water. The problem is, I can't remember the exact distance. Eighteen inches? Two feet? Whatever it is, I need to stay lower than that.

I want to swim away, but with my cuffed hands, about the best I can do is pull myself forward underwater, grabbing at stones, most of which are yanked free from the muck. If I get to my feet, or even raise my head to breathe, he'll shoot me. If he gets impatient, he can just wade into the creek, pull me up like some huge fish, and put the nose of his gun against my head.

But I can't stay under the surface forever. Once more, I'm forced to raise my head to breathe. This time, I keep moving away from him, even though it means I have my back to him. With the water fighting me at every step, I try to zigzag, hoping he won't be able to aim.

I suck in a panting breath, ready to dive back under. A terrible groaning sound fills the air. It's like no sound I've ever heard. I turn. It's the deer. The mama deer. I can see the neat dark hole in her throat. He's shot her.

“No!” I scream for the first time. I reach out as if to put my hand over the hole, as if I can stop the blood, as red and shiny as paint, that begins to fountain out, but she's thrashing, going down. Her fawn watches, skittering back and forth.

“Olivia!”

At the sound of Duncan's shout, I turn. But I can't see him, just Stephen and the blackened landscape.

“Here!” I scream, my voice cracking from the smoke. “I'm over here! In the stream.”

Stephen's distracted now, his gun swinging between me and the direction from which Duncan's voice came. Above him, a tree now reduced to a blackened skeleton still has one huge limb burning.

“Duncan, be careful!” I shout. I'm moving downstream, trying to put more distance between me and Stephen as well as get closer to Duncan. “Stephen's here, and he's got a gun!”

The landscape is as black as a nightmare. When Duncan appears, he's the only splash of color in it. He's running flat out, a rifle in both hands.

Stephen raises his own gun.

“Watch out!” I scream at Duncan. “He's—”

My warning is cut short by a shot.

Red blooms on Duncan's chest. He falls so hard he somersaults forward, a broken boy, and then lies unmoving in an awkward sprawl. My scream is caught in my throat.

Stephen Spaulding turns toward me, ready to complete his circle of death. The circle that has been drawn around nearly everyone I love: my father, my mother, Nora, and Duncan. And now he will add me.

Above him, that one remaining limb begins to creak as the fire eats through it. Starts to move. But Stephen only has eyes and ears for me. As fast as I can, I move to my left. He matches me step for step as he steadies his hand.

I stare straight into the round, empty eye of the gun.

Just as the limb snaps off, still on fire, and crashes into him.

 

CHAPTER 45

I'M READY

I'm on my back, my arms and legs tied up, unable to move. Stephen Spaulding stands over me, his gun aimed at my chest, a dead smile on his face. I buck and scream, but I can't get away. Fire licks at my face. When I focus on him again, he's holding a knife. Behind him lie the bloody bodies of my parents, of Nora and Duncan. I start to howl.

“Easy, easy! Olivia, you're okay.”

With a start, I open my eyes. I'm lying on a white bed. A middle-aged woman is leaning over me, her hand on my shoulder. She wears a badge on her black short-sleeved shirt, which has gold crosses on the collar points. A man stands behind her. He's dressed in a suit, with a badge on his belt. They're cops.

Just like Stephen Spaulding.

I shriek and try to push her away. But I only raise my arms a few inches before they stop with a jerk. Padded straps encircle my wrists and ankles. Panic squeezes me tight. How long until Stephen comes in and finishes what he started? My eyes dart around the room. Besides the two cops, there's only a table heaped with cards and stuffed animals, balloons and bouquets. No sign of him. Yet.

“Shh, shh, you're okay, Olivia,” the woman says. She pats the air with empty hands.

“Where's Duncan?” My heart constricts. Is he even alive? I remember hearing the shot, seeing him fall.

“He's down the hall. He just got out of surgery, so we haven't had a chance to talk to him yet.”

“So we're both under arrest?”

“Arrest?” She gives me a reassuring smile as she shakes her head. “No, Olivia, this is a hospital. I'm Chaplain Steves, and this is Detective Elemon.” The man nods. “We're with the Medford police.”

I raise my hands until the restraints catch them. “But if I'm not in trouble, why am I tied up?”

“The nurses did that,” Chaplain Steves says. “They said you kept pulling out your IV lines and running down the hall, screaming. They had to restrain you to keep you from hurting yourself.”

I hadn't noticed them until now, but slender plastic tubes run from IV bags dangling from a silver pole and then disappear under a bandage on the back of my left hand. “What's wrong with me?” My hands and arms are peppered with dozens of tiny red burns and larger yellow blisters.

“According to your doctors, you're actually doing surprisingly well, considering you just survived a forest fire. You've got some first-degree burns and a few second-degree.” She touches her own short, straight hair. “And I'm afraid a lot of your hair got burned off. But the doctors were mostly worried about smoke inhalation. They want to make sure your lungs don't suddenly start filling up with fluid. They said when that happens, there's not much time to reverse it. That's why you're here in the hospital.” She gives me a half smile. “Since you weren't exactly cooperating, they gave you something to sedate you.”

I can still feel the drugs in my system, making my thoughts sluggish, blurring the line between past and present, reality and nightmare.

“What about Duncan?” The horror of what I saw runs through me again. “Stephen shot him!”

“I'm not a doctor, but it sounds like he'll be okay. He has a through-and-through wound on his shoulder, and some burns from falling after he was shot.”

I sag back on the bed in relief.

“And if you're wondering where Chief”—she corrects herself—“I mean, Mr. Spaulding is, he's in a burn unit at a different hospital. We don't know if he'll make it. The firefighters spotted the two cars and went searching for you. It was his shooting at you and Duncan that helped them find you.”

Detective Elemon speaks for the first time. “The reason we're here, Olivia, is that Spaulding told the doctor on the chopper that he was guilty of three murders. And at that point, he knew that both you and Duncan were alive, so he couldn't have meant either of you.” He presses his lips together and gives his head a little shake, as if he still can't believe it. “He passed out before he could say anything more. But that's one of the reasons we want to talk to you.”

I reflexively raise one hand toward my neck, where Nora's necklace should be, but the restraints won't even allow that much movement. “One of the people he killed was Nora. Nora Murdoch. I think he put a pillow over her face.” Tears prick my eyes as her loss hits me again. When I blink, they run down my cheeks, and I can't even wipe them away. But for once, I don't care that people know what I'm feeling.

The chaplain's eyes widen. “Nora Murdoch? Are you sure? I heard she died, but they thought she had a heart attack.”

“No. He killed her because she knew who I really was.”

“Who you really are?” Detective Elemon echoes, looking puzzled. “Aren't you Olivia Reinhart?”

I take a deep breath. “My real name is Ariel Benson. And my parents are the other two people Stephen Spaulding killed.”

 

CHAPTER 46

FOUR WEEKS LATER

A REAL FAMILY

“I need one more piece of tape.” I measure with my eyes. “About ten inches long.”

Duncan tears off a strip of blue painter's tape. On my knees, I wrap it along the baseboard around the corner from the hall to the living room. We're getting ready to paint the walls, but the exact same color they used to be. I brought a chip of paint into Home Depot, and they were able to match the color.

I'm living up to my end of the deal with Richard Lee. Maybe I could hire a lawyer and try to get official ownership of the house before I turn eighteen, but I figure the total cost would be far more than the 7 percent I'm paying Lee Realty.

The new paint will cover up the squares where pictures used to hang. But I plan to leave a small part of the wall untouched: the faint pencil marks my grandma made when she measured my height.

At first, I wanted to make the house look exactly the way I remembered it from when I was seven. I wanted to buy a blue teapot to set on the corner shelf, to put a TV in the old spot, to find flowered bedspreads like the ones that used to cover the beds. But then I realized I was trying to mimic the taste of a fifty-six-year-old woman. And as great as my grandmother was, that's not who I am. I'm not my grandmother; I'm not my mom; I'm not my dad. I'm me. Parts of them are in me, but I'm my own person.

I did say yes to Nora's kids when they offered me some of her furniture. I've got her coffee table and her gold brocade wingback chair with the carved wooden feet gripping balls. Hundreds came to her funeral, including people who only recognized her from the picture in the newspaper obituary. One was the lady whose dog Nora had mesmerized in the cemetery.

She may have been ready to go, but I wasn't ready to let her. The reality of her death still washes over me like a wave, or like the wildfire as it passed over me. Grief is a strange thing. You can feel it coming, and then it hits and it's all you can do to keep breathing. But eventually it passes, and you pick yourself up and start moving again. Now when I go to the cemetery, I visit Nora's grave, too. She was buried in Odd Fellows, not far from my grandma and my mom.

I've been spending a lot of time with Aunt Carly; her husband, Tim; and Lauren, who's now both my cousin and my friend. Sometimes when we're doing things together, people will ask if we're sisters. Carly floated the idea of my living with them. But even though it's amazing to have a real family again, I'm also used to being independent. So I'm staying here.

“Okay,” I say, “I guess it's time to start putting down the plastic sheeting.”

Duncan uses his good hand to help me to my feet, but instead of reaching for the rolls of plastic, he pulls me into a kiss that tastes like coffee and cinnamon.

Eventually, I step back. “If we keep going like this, the painting is never going to get done.”

He gives me a crooked grin. “Do you have a problem with that?”

For an answer, I kiss him again.

I'm out of my boot, and Duncan's shoulder is healing, although he's going to be left with a wicked scar. Oddly, it looks something like the scar on my palm, only bigger. Both of us are freckled with little pink marks from burns, but the doctor said if we're good about using sunscreen, they should fade. Duncan didn't burn his feet, although he did melt the soles of his shoes running through the freshly burned landscape while trying to get to me. Even though he had brought his dad's hunting rifle, it didn't have any ammunition. His plan, such as it was, had been to scare Stephen with the rifle. It had worked almost too well.

Stephen's still being treated in a burn unit, but he's going to live. The district attorney told us that Stephen plans to plead guilty to all of it: killing my parents and Nora and trying to kill us. It sounds as though he will go to prison for the rest of his life.

Jason Collins has also been arrested, but not for murder. He's been dealing—and using—meth. It turns out that some truckers use it so they can stay awake and drive longer distances.

Duncan's just started back in school. Since I don't want to work at Fred Meyer forever, I'm planning on going to winter term at the community college. He says it's not fair that I can start college before him when I'm two months younger.

When we pull apart, Duncan's finger catches on my button necklace. Detective Elemon found part of it next to Stephen's car, and later Carly drove back to the same spot and picked up every single button she could find and restrung it for me. It's not quite the same, but then nothing ever is, is it?

“I guess we'd better get back to work,” I tell Duncan.

“Okay.” He kisses me on the nose. “Whatever you say, Ariel.”

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Kayla W. for helping me understand what it's like to grow up in foster care; Jake Keller of Multnomah County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue for explaining how to tell if what you've found in the forest is a human bone; Leslie Budewitz, a mystery author with a blog on the law and fiction, for detailing what would happen to the inheritance of a minor in foster care; and Holly Hertel, a Jackson County reference librarian, for describing the library's microfilm offerings.

I'm the luckiest girl in the world because this is my twentieth book with my agent Wendy Schmalz, and my sixth with editor Christy Ottaviano. Other wonderful folks at Henry Holt include April Ward, Jessica Anderson, Christine Ma, Molly Brouillette, Kathryn Little, Lucy Del Priore, Katie Halata, Holly Hunnicutt, Allison Verost, and Angus Killick.