I recount my day in fine detail, leaving nothing out. Lawyers love specifics, but I wonder what case she’s building as her puzzled eyes stare through me as she listens.
“This was under your wiper,” she confirms.
I nod.
“Then maybe it’s not related to that night? Maybe your stalker just wanted you to go home?”
“Reaching. They already said they knew my secret, Allison. How many secrets do you think I have?”
She shrugs. “For the sake of my sanity, I was hoping your real name is Jim, and you moonlight as Greer for fun.”
“Not funny.”
“Fuck. How does someone know?”
I shrug. “The only people on that road were me, you, and the…” I swallow. “Him.”
“He was dead, G. I felt for a pulse. I tried so damned hard to find one, hoping he wasn’t—” She turns away.
In the following weeks, we watched the news, scoured the papers, and called local hospitals. We found nothing.
It had us believing for a while that we didn’t kill him.
But not every little thing gets reported. Now that I’m older, I know that. Details of the hit-and-run might’ve been hidden for some reason. Maybe the family didn’t want their business aired.
“What are we going to do?” I ask her.
“We’re going to play it cool and not spiral. We don’t know who this nut job is, nor what they think they know. I’ve got my contact in the department looking into your reports, and we keep on the straight and narrow while he does so.”
I lean back on her door, letting my head hit it with a thud. “This is karma coming to bite us in the ass. You know that, right?”
“G. Be realistic. This is probably someone who saw you at the library, got fixated on you, and is now being a psycho and stalking you. Look at you. I’d stalk you.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m going home.”
“Just stay here,” she pleads.
I snatch the note back from her as I turn and grab the door handle.“No. Because wherever I go, they’ll find me. If this is localized to me, I won’t drag you into any more bullshit.”
“Hey,” she says, turning me back towards her. “Your bullshit is my bullshit. Do you understand me? You’re not by yourself with this.”
She thinks this person is stalking me because of my looks, but she’s brushed it off a bit too nonchalantly for my liking, telling meI amby myself. I don’t argue with her.
I kiss her on the cheek and tell her goodnight as I get back in my car and let my head fall back onto the headrest, taking a steadying breath before heading home.
When I straighten and shift my car into drive, something in front of my gauges catches my eye. I turn on the overhead light and see another note plastered against the plastic housing.
Drive.
Penny Brown is a petite sprite of a girl with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes. Her glasses are black-rimmed, and they sit on the end of her nose as she leans over my desk to look at the archived newspaper articles I found on the Oakland Nightstalker.
“So, they were always found in the woods?” she asks.
“It would seem so.”
When the killings were going on, I was Penny’s age. Ripe for the picking, too, because the Oakland Nightstalker always kills college-aged kids, butchering them and leaving them on display in one wooded area or another. He’s not picky.
Or wasn’t.
