Inara
I riselike a ghost from Rex’s bed. He’s still there, I think, tangled in the sheets, asleep. Or maybe he’s gone, and I’ve only imagined that he still slumbers.
In bare feet and a silk robe, I walk the halls of the Roy’s great house. Somehow, I know exactly where I’m going. There are other ghosts in the walls, laughing, murmuring, dancing to the sweet song of violins. Over a hundred years of the history of lives lived and now long gone. I move quickly to avoid them all.
But something stops me. In a long corridor of locked doors, one door is left ajar.
I enter and find a child’s bedroom, complete with a set of toys. There’s no dust or cobwebs, and the air is heavy, undisturbed, but the bed is fresh as if it had been made this morning.
Maybe it was.
The windows overlook the gardens. I can imagine the little boy standing here, a shock of raven-black hair. He completes the puzzles his mother bought for him and sets up the city of blocks. The tiny buildings are replicas of ones in New Rome. There’s the park and Hotel Magnifique with the lion statues and the white Corinthian columns. Above it all, the skyscraper with a sign declaring it belongs to Roy Enterprises.
A little boy pretending he’s king of the city.
On impulse, I open a drawer, half expecting to find children’s clothes. Instead, there’s a wooden box with a golden lion’s head on the top.
I shouldn’t continue, but I can’t stop myself. The box opens to a bundle of papers and notebooks. The top one is a leather-bound journal, again bearing the golden lion’s head of the Roy crest.
I open the journal. The first page has a name scrawled in the top right corner. Rex Roy.
The next page reads, “Yesterday was the memorial for Mother and Father. Hamish made me go. The adults all wore black and whispered, but none of them looked really sad. They saw me and said “poor boy” behind their hands. One man told me I was brave. I told him the coffins were empty, so this ceremony meant nothing. He patted my shoulder and said my parents had done great things for the city. He meant their money. I suppose no one’s really sad because there’s still money for the city.
Hamish took me home and gave me this journal. He said to keep a record of my thoughts. I’m here at the crypt where my parents’ bodies actually are. I keep dreaming that they’re not dead, only sleeping. I brought a blanket to sleep here in case they do wake up. It’ll be scary for them to be in darkness, calling for help. I’ll be here to free them, just in case.”
I close the journal and set it down so I can lift out a bundle of pages. As I do, one flutters free. It’s a newspaper article, printed on paper so thin I can see through it.
I don’t need to read the headline. I recognize the article and the shape of the words.
“Death Comes to Small Town. Horror haunts Elirya.” The picture is as familiar to me as my name. It’s a fenced front yard, the tree with the red swing my dad hung for my brothers, three brick stairs, and a stoop. The front of my family home. And in the foreground, close enough you can see the tear tracks on her little face, is a little girl.
The little girl is me. I trace the outline of my tangled hair. The photographer had been lurking in my hometown for weeks, interviewing locals, trying to capture the sense of horror.
He knew the killer would strike again. He’d gotten wind of the crimes before the cops arrived and had come and snapped this picture. He must have been right up in my face.
I don’t remember him. I don’t remember anything about that morning. Only the night the terror came and took my family away.
The bundle falls from my hands, scattering pages. I fall to my knees among them.
I’m on the floor, surrounded by scraps of faded paper. Articles torn from a newspaper so long ago.
I’m not dreaming anymore.
I’m in Rex’s childhood bedroom. Who else’s could it be? And here is proof of how long he’s been hunting me. Article after article about my family’s death and the man who took their lives.
After the awful night when he came for my family, the Bondage Killer had been at the height of his horrible reign. The newspapers moved on from the victims quickly and focused more on the man who seemed to be one step ahead of the cops. He’d taunted them, sending them letters about how he chose his victims. He told them what he’d planned to do next and killed six more people before they pinned him down in an abandoned warehouse where he had been hiding out.
I sift through the papers. After that initial article, the newspaper editors suppressed all pictures of me and censored my name. It was too little, too late. The first one had done enough damage. The photographer won an award for the photo, if I remember correctly. A child’s pain and trauma served up for all to see.
Enara.They spelled my name wrong and never printed a correction, either. My mentor, Lacy Collins, had kept these articles in a murder book. She never wanted me to see it, but I dug it out and paged through it one day when she was at work. That’s why the headlines are burned into my brain.
I read everything I could about the Bondage Killer, trying to understand why he would snuff out so many lives. Why he spared me. Profiling him for my own purposes after all these years.
It seems Rex had been doing this, too. A journal flaps open. This one has the same boyish scrawl, grown neater. Rex, the boy, growing older. The pages have clippings glued to them. Pages on pages of the Bondage Killer’s letters to the police and press. In the margins, Rex wrote notes.Decompensating,Rex marks beside one rambling manifesto.Only six days after the last kill. He’s unraveling.
The final page has another copy of the article with my home and face. Rex has circled my face with a pen. “Who is she?” and underneath, in bold letters: SHE’S LIKE ME.
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