“Shit!” Margot calls down from the top of the steps. “It’s him.”
Forty-Seven
Elsie grabs theshears from the floor and cuts the cable ties. Enid’s wrists are raw and weeping where the plastic has gnawed into her skin.
The car’s engine roars closer.
“We need to get out of here,” Elsie cries frantically. “You’re going to have to help me get her up, Bev.”
“Hurry!” Margot screams down from the top of the stairs.
“Margot, get out of here!” Elsie yells. “Leave the back door open for us.”
There’s silence as Margot hesitates. Then they hear barking, footsteps moving through the house, pausing briefly before there’s the sound of the back door opening.
The engine noise has come to a stop, and Beverley prays not to hear the car door slamming, the key in the front door.
She and Elsie take Enid under the arms, holding her weight on their shoulders. She is frail, and it takes a while for them to lift her andget her to the bottom of the steps, but they have to hurry. Roger will be in the house soon.
“I can do it.” It’s the first thing Enid has said, and her voice is hoarse but determined.
Elsie goes ahead, telling Enid to rest her hands on her shoulders. Beverley follows behind, wincing with each step as they slowly make their way up to the first floor of the house.
Beverley watches as Elsie reaches the top of the stairs, then turns and holds out her hands for Enid. Beverley’s feet are wet, she realizes, glancing down to find them slippery with blood. Everything is losing its edges. She wonders for a woozy moment if she might fall backward, but she looks ahead, forces her focus to sharpen, commands her muscles to move.
Then she slumps. She cannot help it. It’s as if the bones in her legs have crumbled to powder. Every ounce of strength has abandoned her. Her vision swarms with red. At the top of the stairs, through the haze, she sees Elsie call out to Margot. Then she conducts Enid toward the back of the house, yelling at her to run.
Elsie returns to the top of the stairs, silhouetted by the sunlight spilling into the house, frantically holding out an arm, beckoning for Beverley to move—screamingat her to move—up the stairs. But Beverley cannot shift a centimeter. The whining in her ears blares more loudly, reaching a hypersonic pitch. She feels her heart—feelsit—pulsate, slower, slower. Her vision is ringed now with black. She moves her head up slowly. She can see Elsie, still screaming at her, still holding out her arms, but she cannot hear her. She cannot hear anything but the strange, discordant whining.
Elsie’s head whips around then. Beverley can see the fear in her posture, her hands raised in defense. She sees another figure appear at the top of the stairs, sees it raise an arm and land a blow directly on Elsie’s skull. She sees the eyes roll back in her friend’s head as shetumbles backward, out of sight. Then Roger turns and fixes his sights on her.
Beverley tries to scream, tries to beg him to leave her alone, to tell him that she knows who he is, what he is. No sound comes out but the wet mewling of a kitten. Roger is descending the steps, drawing closer. She has never seen him like this, never seen him so cold, so reptilian.
She imagines what the girls—what Cheryl, Emily, Diane, Sarah and Kate—must have felt when they realized what was happening to them.
Roger says nothing. He simply bends and seizes Beverley’s arm, hurling her body clean off the step. As she tumbles backward, seconds seem to pass, drawn out by the motion of falling, until the crash. Her body lies limp, functionless on the cold basement floor.
Forty-Eight
When Beverley comesto, eyes blinking groggily, she realizes she is being dragged somewhere by her feet. Her arms are trailing behind her head. She opens her mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. She tries to kick her legs, to thrash her arms, but it is as if she is no longer the owner of her body, she no longer has a say in her skin or her organs.Heis in control of her flesh. He can do what he wants with her. He always could.
He will kill her. She is sure of that. She just does not yet know how.
She hopes that Margot came back for Elsie, that they got Enid out, that they are safe somewhere far away from here.
She knows she has only minutes left in this body, only minutes more of this hell.
Her children flash into her mind: Benjamin and Audrey chasing each other around the pool; Benjamin grabbing his tiny feet, his gorgeous little toes, on his changing table; Audrey dancing so unselfconsciously while Beverley sits, grinning, on the sofa. She smells her mother’s perfume, feels the soft crepiness of Alice’s skin, sees the lightslanting in through the church window onto Henry’s face on their wedding day.
She didn’t think it would end like this—with her becoming a victim herself—but she supposes, through the final fogs of her life’s breath, that there is some poetic justice to it.
Through warped swells and pulses of sound, she can hear Roger muttering something.
She strains her ears, although part of her wants to give up, wants to close her eyes and let the calm roll in.
But she should know what he says before he kills her. She owes it to the girls to hear those words.
She catches only partly formed scraps of sentences as Roger hauls her toward a pile of boxes, then bends to lift the top half of her body into a seated position. He wants her to watch what he is about to do.
