Famous Last Words

Or maybe I’m

I stopped and held the pen away from the paper before I could write the word crazy.

I didn’t think that anymore, so it was time to stop saying it.

Over the following week, we talked to the police endlessly. I explained in as much detail as I could without including any ghosty parts. Luckily, the story still made sense — how I’d started to get a weird feeling about Reed that day. How I found Diana’s workroom and recognized the name of the movie. How Reed and I fought our way to the top of the stairs, and then he slipped in a puddle of his own blood and fell. Everything checked out, and the police didn’t seem suspicious.

Besides, I was a pretty decent teller of half truths at this point in my life.

We were bombarded with requests for interviews and quotes. Some producer friend of Jonathan’s even wanted to buy the movie rights. But Mom took charge and deflected them all. She talked to the lawyers, the media, even Jonathan’s agents. She handled it all like it was second nature to her. Jonathan was pretty impressed.

I, personally, would never have expected anything less.

Reporters dug into Reed’s past and cobbled together a portrait of a serial killer — smooth, confident, charming, but alienated. Bad-tempered, with a record of lashing out in school. The victim of an inferiority complex made worse by the loss of his parents and his time with a grandfather who was described by their neighbors as “mean as a snake.”

It was so strange to try to remember how I felt about Reed back before I learned what he really was.

I could recall the slow gentleness of his ma

When you thought about it that way, I guess you could say Marnie kind of did me a favor.

I’d have to face Reed again at the trial. I can’t say I was in love with the idea, but I wasn’t scared.

It takes a lot to scare me, I’ve discovered.

When I went back to school two weeks later, everyone on campus seemed to regard me like a stolen relic from some ancient tomb — worth catching a glimpse of, but not worth venturing too near.

Marnie practically glowed from all the attention, though from time to time I caught phantomlike flashes of fear in her eyes. She and I were bound by something deep, something I could read in her expression whenever she looked at me. I had saved her life. But I could tell that she didn’t want to talk to me, or be near me, or generally have anything at all to do with me.

Which was fine — I was done judging Marnie. Everyone copes in their own way. Not just with almost being murdered, but with being alive. With having parents who die, or ignore you. Maybe someday she’d learn that the truth, however uncomfortable it may be, is worth looking for.

Or maybe she wouldn’t.

Wyatt stayed by my side every possible moment — before school, during lunch, and after school, when he was allowed to drop me off at the hotel before heading back to another evening of being grounded.

At the end of my first week back, the police finally gave us the all clear to pack up our things. Jonathan hired a professional moving service to take care of it all. By Sunday afternoon, there would be no trace of us left in the grand old mansion.

When I climbed into Wyatt’s car on Friday afternoon, I turned to him. “Can you be late getting home?”

“Not a chance,” he said, then thought for a second and added, “How late?”

“Like twenty minutes?”

He shrugged. “What are they going to do — ground me until I graduate from college?”

“Great,” I said, fastening my seat belt. “Take me to Sunbird Lane, please.”

I have to admit, I kind of loved making that Spluh! expression appear on his face.

Before he could protest, I repeated myself. “Twenty-one-twenty-one Sunbird Lane? Do you need directions?”

He frowned, pulling out onto Crescent Heights and turning right toward the canyon. “Does your mother know you’re going back there?”

The skin on my palms began to prickle. “If I say no, will you still take me?”

“Of course,” he said.

A happy tremor went through me, which was a nice distraction from the anxiety starting to build in my stomach at the thought of being back on the property. Sentimental journal ramblings aside, this was the house where I was tormented and almost psycho-killed by a psycho killer.

I laughed nervously, twisting a lock of hair around my finger.

“What?” Wyatt asked.

“I was just thinking … like, the least creepy thing about this house is that it’s haunted.”

He slowed the car. “Willa, are you sure —”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Please keep driving.”

When we got to the house, there were a few photographers lingering around. But they kept their distance as Wyatt punched the gate code and drove inside.

One of them shouted, “Are you Willa?”

And Wyatt yelled back, “No, she’s Kate Middleton’s cousin Bernadette!”

Stepping into the foyer wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. All the blood was gone, of course. The dining room had been neatly put back together, as if nothing had ever happened in there. There were no huge sheets of plastic or toolboxes full of makeup. No props from the scene that was supposed to end with my death.

I took a long, shuddering breath and stared up at the second floor.

“You all right?” Wyatt asked softly.

“It feels so sad,” I said. “The house feels so lonely.”

“Don’t be lonely,” he said. “I’m here.”

But that wasn’t quite what I meant. I meant that the house herself — of course it was a she — was lonely. Melancholy, like she’d been abandoned.

Don’t worry, I told her in my head. Some weird person is going to buy you and move in and invite tons of people over so they can show off that they live in a house where a serial killer carried out his psycho schemes. Honestly, the person will probably be a jerk, but you won’t know any better. You’re just a house.

You’ll be fine.

We walked in silence up to my room, and my pulse picked up at the sight of my open bathroom door — now there was a room I never needed to set foot into again.

“What exactly are we doing here?” Wyatt asked. He spoke in hushed library tones.

“I’ll explain in a minute,” I said, going into my closet. I reached down, behind the half-empty laundry basket, and pulled out the pink shoe box. I looked at Wyatt. “Fancy a trip to the backyard?”

He shrugged.

We walked past the pool, which was begi

I walked over to where the shovel still stood leaning against the trunk of a lemon tree, a few feet from my initial unsuccessful digging efforts.

It dawned on Wyatt, then, why we were there — to finally follow Leyta Fitzgeorge’s instructions and bury the shoe box.

“I have to do this before we leave,” I said. “This stuff belongs here.”

“What if somebody digs it up?” he asked.

“They won’t,” I said, picking up the shovel and starting to dig. In the shady afternoon, it was much easier. And when I started to get winded, Wyatt took the shovel and dug the rest.