Now that it’s dark and she’s started to worry, she sees all the goodhe’s done. Raising their children, making sure the oil is always changed in all the cars on time, giving her a good-natured smile as he falls into an exhausted heap on the couch beside her in the evenings.
Please just come home, she is typing out, and then whispering, and then praying the words.
I stand at the edge of the hiking trail for several minutes, listening for any sign of life.
There is nothing, not even a breeze.
3
If not for my sisters and the tragic circumstances of our upbringing, I would be living an empty life and bound for heartbreak.
It started when we were nineteen.
Iris called me, frantic, in the middle of the night. She had her own apartment above a laundromat in downtown Clovis. She was so proud of that place—all five hundred square feet of it. She kept it tidy and burned incense at all hours to hide the smell from the dumpster in the alley outside her bedroom window. At night, there was the persistent throb of the bar across the street, the music loud enough to rattle the porcelain angel figurines on the shelves. They’d come with the place, and Iris had decided they made her living room look homey—a word she’d never used before, because we’d never had a home.
“Just come,” she’d sobbed, and then hung up. All my calls wentstraight to voicemail. I sped the whole way over there, sure that someone had just climbed up the fire escape to murder her. But what I found was a different sort of violence.
Blood, deep and dark, pooled on her thrift store rug and splattered across the angel figurines.
She’d been sleeping with her old high school guidance counselor—a forty-something married father of two. He strung her along for months, promising to leave his wife. He broke her heart a hundred times, and then Iris plunged a kebab skewer through his.
“You watch all of those crime shows,” Moody said, emerging from the kitchen with a bottle of bleach she’d found under the sink. “Help us make this go away.”
We moved with a practical calm, the three of us, and when it was through, Iris’s ill-fated lover was resting in six garbage bags, wound tightly with duct tape. If it were only one of us, or even two, I’m sure we would have been caught. We would have missed a detail. But we were a perfect team, the three of us.
After a lifetime of being torn apart, we were finally together, finally able to help one another in all the ways we never could when we were being jostled helplessly by the foster system. All those years of loneliness, of wanting, of being kept apart, had brought us to this desperate moment. Knee-deep in the water of the San Joaquin River in the velvet black night, we weighted the pieces of the man with rocks, and a promise started to form. In the coming days, it slowly became obvious what we needed to do.
We wouldn’t deprive ourselves of love, but our hearts would be weapons. We would love the men we found completely and without inhibition, put a lifetime into our brief time together. Live out every fantasy we desired. And then we would kill them.
There would never be another lover to break one of us. We would break all of them first.
—
WHEN I STEP OUTSIDEin the morning, I’m officially Jade Johnson.
My sisters are making themselves scarce in our one-bedroom condo. The shades are drawn, the TV playing in the living room at all hours, so nobody will think it strange if they hear multiple voices talking when Jade Johnson lives there alone.
Last time, in Texas, we were twins. Iris was the one stalking her mark, lurking in all the corners of his life and waiting for the kill, while Moody and I took turns being her twin.
This time, it’s all me.
My first Arizona morning is bold and audacious, a bright halo of gold ringed by shades and shades of blue. It stares me down like a wicked unblinking eye. It knows who I am and what I’m here for, and the sky will keep my secret, but it wants me to know nonetheless that it sees.
I won’t be here for long. I’ve just got a boy to hunt. That’s all.
“Hey, stranger.” A voice jolts me just as I’ve touched the handle of the car door. I look up and see a woman about my age standing on the balcony of the condo next to mine. A trail of smoke coils around her. She stretches her arms out, tapping the ashes from her cigarette so they flutter away. “You must be the quietest neighbor we’ve ever had. Didn’t even know anyone had moved in until I saw you come out.”
Had she been standing there this whole time? I didn’t hear her. I’d looked but hadn’t seen anyone when I came outside.
She watches me like she’s never seen another soul before and I’m the most riveting thing on the planet. Her elbow rests on the railing,her skin catching a scrap of gold as sunlight stretches around the condo complex. I can see how she eluded me. There’s a small privacy wall beside her front door, just wide enough to hide her slender form by a hair.
“Hi,” I say, flashing all my teeth when I wave. She’s going to be a problem if I don’t address it; I know this is the truth because she’s a planner. She didn’t light that cigarette until after I’d walked right past her because she knew I’d smell it.
Over the years, my neighbors have been all the seven sins. But whatever their shortcomings, I always knew when they were around.
“Sorry about the ashes everywhere,” she says, and takes a slow drag. The smoke tumbles out clumsily around her words. “The last neighbor complained. I’m trying to quit, but, you know.”
She isn’t trying to quit. That’s a thing that people say whenever their habits are out in the open. It’s a test, whether or not she realizes it, to gauge if she can trust me, or whether I’m going to give her shit about the thing she loves. And she must love it, if she’s doing it at seven o’clock in the morning on a Sunday when she could be sleeping instead.
