Thank you to The Lemonade Stand for the recommendation!
Two chapters posted at once: Suspect list and consolidated timeline in the previous chapter.
Confession: I added a few lines to the end of the chapter that I posted last week (where Bella expresses her concerns about her hotel room) a few hours after it was posted to try and explain Bella's behavior a bit more. My apologies if you'd already read it but, as it was pointed out to me, it was weak. I hope you think it's improved.
Meyer owns all.
Chapter 9
'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.' – Oscar Wilde
BPOV
Last time in Gothic, our heroine was caught off guard by a most unexpected invitation to join a certain gentleman in his bed…
"I'm probably a biter too," I cautioned Edward.
"I'm sure that won't be a problem."
"I don't like sharing blankets."
"We can get the blankets from your bed and bring them back here."
I gaped at him. But the absurdity of the situation was simply too much. I shook my head as though it would help to dispel my confusion. It didn't. So I decided to act as though it were all in jest. I laughed shakily. "Very funny. I'm sorry for waking you up. Or disturbing you. Or whatever." And dropping my head to hide my face, I scurried back to my room.
A few minutes later, I heard knocking on my door. It was Edward.
"What are you doing?" he asked, glancing at my bed, which was covered with papers and books, my laptop open and glowing on the nightstand. He'd thrown on a t-shirt.
"Just some research," I told him.
"You brought all of these books with you?"
"I didn't know which one I would feel like reading when I got here. What did you think was taking up all of that room in my bag?"
He shrugged. "Make-up."
I gazed at Edward dubiously. Make-up? Me?
"Aren't you tired?" he asked.
"Not really," I lied.
"Well, if you're going to be staying up anyway, why don't we go back to my room and discuss the case?"
"Now?"
"Might as well. Unless you really need to get this done." Edward waved a hand at the pile on my bed.
It seemed like a set-up to me, but I was too tired and uneasy—my nerves still very much on edge in that very red room with its reputation for ghostly inhabitants, even if I didn't believe in them—and nothing but violent and disturbing prose to distract me, not the sort of stuff to calm a troubled soul, especially when read by the meager light of a cell phone. And if Edward really did have something worth talking about then we might as well get it out of the way, since there was no chance that I would be going to sleep any time soon.
Edward started gathering up the books and dropping them on the bureau as I powered down the laptop.
"You don't have to do that," I told him.
"No problem," he said, pulling the red comforter off of the bed.
"What are you doing?"
"Don't want you to be cold."
My old self would have been more suspicious. Had I been in my right mind, I would have refused. The Edward Cullen who, on more than one occasion, had chanted Lesbo as I'd passed in the cafeteria and had been used to saying so many other mocking things to me would only have had nefarious reasons for an invitation like this.
But I didn't have time to think very carefully about any of that as I stood there watching Edward carry my blanket away. It wasn't until the next day, in the full light of morning, that I realized the complete absurdity of my behavior at this juncture, and the realization made me want to drown myself in the shower. At the time of his invitation, however, as I cast uneasy glances into the shadowy corners of that darkened room—plagued, as it supposedly was, by so many ghosts—I wasn't myself. Blame it on the pressure of circumstances. The utter strangeness of the situation. I didn't quite understand what was happening, so I did what I always did in such situations, and kept my mouth shut while waiting to see what would happen next.
Edward led the way back to his room, pushed his own blue comforter out of the way, and dropped mine on the other side of the bed.
"You want me in your bed?" I asked stupidly, gazing at the lone chair in the room, a delicate wicker assembly that looked like it would crumple under my weight. There was a chair in my room. But it was just as fragile.
"No reason not to be comfortable."
I stood there for a minute, knowing that I should really just go back to my room, where I would spend the rest of the night huddled in bed with my cell phone and laptop.
I looked down at my phone, checking the battery. Ten percent.
I would be like the little match girl.
And when the light died…
"I don't believe in ghosts," I reminded him as I perched carefully on the edge of his bed.
"I remember," Edward said, handing me one of his pillows.
"If you had my mother, you would understand," I explained, feeling like some sort of defense was in order. I wrapped myself in the red blanket and sat against the headboard, trying to take up as little room as possible, huddling close to the edge of the mattress. I felt the bed dip as Edward settled in, lying down, I noticed, not sitting up like me. Didn't he want to discuss the case?
I wondered if he thought that I was as foolish as I felt. It doesn't matter, I tried to tell myself. He already thinks you're an idiot. But I thought that there had to be some way to salvage the situation. "She-said-that-a-ghost-picked-me-up-out-of-my-crib-once-and-dropped-me-on-the-floor," I confessed quickly.
"What?"
"She said that a ghost picked me up out of my crib and dropped me on the floor. It just happened the one time though."
Edward didn't reply. I had probably made it even worst.
I decided that more explanation was needed. "But another time, a ghost threatened to kill me."
"Threatened to kill you?"
"In a dream. My mother had a dream about a little girl who'd disappeared from the apartment where we were living, and the girl's father told my mother that he was going to kill me, because he was afraid that his daughter was going to come home and see me and think that he'd replaced her. So we moved."
"What the fuck?" I could feel Edward shifting on the bed next to me.
"I don't believe in ghosts though."
"How old were you when she told you that crap?"
"I don't know. I remember that I was four when we moved out of that apartment. Um, I'm sure that I knew before we moved, because I remember looking out the window and wondering if the girl's father had also stood there looking for his daughter. And then—" I stopped. I remembered frightening myself with the notion of the girl's father pushing me out of the window. I had run away and hid behind the couch. "She must have told me about the crib when I was older." I remembered whole weeks when I didn't sleep more than a few hours. Being left alone while my mother was at work or on a date, my eyes darting around the living room as I sat huddled on the couch where I slept, every light in the place on and the tv blaring. Never feeling safe, not even in the middle of the day, but afraid to go outside as well, where I might at least play with kids my age, because Renee had said that there were pedophiles in the parks and that the parents of all of my classmates were probably pedophiles too, so I shouldn't play with my classmates either, not even at school, since they might try to do something inappropriate to me, just like their parents.
Not being one to shirk her responsibilities, Renee would describe for me in lurid detail exactly what a pedophile was and how they liked to hurt little girls.
Alice had been my first real friend and I didn't meet her until I was fourteen, when my mother married Phil and sent me to Forks.
"What kind of mother says that kind of shit to their kid?" Edward asked.
"She said that she could protect me," I explained, thinking to myself that this promise of hers wasn't much good when she left me alone most of the time.
Realizing that what I'd said didn't make sense, I went on. "With her personal power or spiritual energy or something, but she said that I didn't have enough, personal power that is, so I needed her, which I know is bullshit. But I was a stupid kid. She would make me go with her to all of her theosophy or whatever meetings, and they would tell us to put our hands over our heads and feel the energy rushing around, and I never felt anything, so I thought that there was something wrong with me. I remember, one of the spiritualists once started yelling at someone in the group. She was telling him to get out. I realized later that he must have been making fun of her or something, but I thought she was yelling at me, because she could tell that there wasn't any energy around me and that I was empty."
"A bunch of crackpots were making bullshit up and you thought that there was something wrong with you?"
I felt like I was being unfair. "I don't know. Maybe it works for some people and not others. I've got an open mind. I don't believe in ghosts because I've never seen one. But I don't want to see one either. Does that make sense? It's kind of cowardly isn't it?"
"There's no such thing as ghosts, so no, it's not cowardly."
"I think you're biased. Blinded by science."
"Yeah, the scientific method is all about ignoring results."
It was clear by now that Edward had no intention of discussing Tanya. I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing in that bed next to him, but I didn't have the energy to ponder that just then.
I rested my head against the headboard and closed my eyes, pretending for a moment that sitting in a very red blanket in a very blue room in a creepy bed and breakfast next to Edward Cullen wasn't in the least bit out of the ordinary.
"Maybe we should just go to sleep," Edward suggested. "Discuss the case tomorrow."
I started to get up.
"I didn't mean that you should leave," Edward said, reaching out a hand to arrest my movement. "I'm not that tired, you know. We can discuss the case."
"That's stupid," I said, leaning back against the headboard and ignoring the fact that he didn't want me to go back to my room. "You've been up for more than twenty-four hours. It doesn't make sense that doctors, of all people, do that kind of stuff."
"It's not that bad."
"Blurred vision. Dizzy spells. Slurring. Nausea."
"Says the voice of experience."
"I had trouble sleeping when I was a kid."
Edward snorted. "I'm not surprised, with a mother like that."
I hummed.
"Do you see her anymore?" he asked.
"No. Not since right after Tanya died."
"What happened?"
"We had a fight."
"So you had a fucked up childhood. But you got over it and now you study horror. Makes sense. You deal with the shit your mom pulled by studying horror and Jack the Ripper."
"I don't study Jack the Ripper." I looked over at Edward, even though I couldn't see him very well in the dark. "And anyhow, what's with the psychoanalysis?"
A flash of lightening showed me that Edward was turned on his side, facing me. "Just calling it how I see it." Another flash of lightening cast a glow across his features. His eyes were on me.
"I don't psychoanalyze you," I warned him, "so you don't psychoanalyze me."
"Go ahead," he encouraged. "Psychoanalyze me."
I shook my head. "It would be too easy."
"Shall I?" he asked.
"Be my guest," I told him.
Edward rattled off his self-diagnosis: "Unresolved guilt complex and borderline obsessive compulsive personality with a healthy dose of masochism. Driven to work grueling hours at a job he hates to punish himself for the crimes of his youth."
"You forgot narcissism," I corrected him.
"I'm not a narcissist."
"You are. And you have sadly provincial tastes in music. That must reflect a psychosis of some sort. Extreme narrow-mindedness or something."
"How am I a narcissist?"
"You've turned Tanya's death into something that's all about you."
"It is about me."
"You're not the one who died," I reminded him.
"You agree with everyone else? You think that I should just get over it? Forget that someone tried to set me up?"
"I think that when we don't make any progress, and I tell you it's over, that you should give up."
He was silent for a moment. "I'm just supposed to hand the decision over to you?"
"Yep."
I could tell that he was shaking his head.
I explained. "I'm not going to say that Tanya wouldn't want you to give up your life for her. She was a selfish bitch and she would have wanted just that. No, she didn't deserve to die." Despite what Eric said. "But sometimes stuff just happens. You put a lid on it and lock it down."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that. There are rules. You need to function." It occurred to me that Edward was just as fucked up as Eric. Not letting go of the past.
"I function."
"You planning on having that family? You plan on getting that private practice? Because last I checked, you wanted those things. So if you aren't working on getting them, then no, you're not functioning. Because your definition of functioning isn't what you've got."
I slid down on the bed a few inches, not quite lying down.
It occurred to me that, for all I knew, Edward was working on getting that family. He could very well have a steady girlfriend and I wouldn't even know it.
Several minutes passed before he spoke again. "What about you? Are you functioning?" he asked me.
"Absolutely," I told him. "I've got everything I want." And I told myself that it was true.
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I did not sleep well in that bed next to Edward. How could I?
How could I sleep at all, that is? How could I let myself even sit there next to him?
I told myself that it was just to see what would happen, as though I was an anthropologist watching a chimpanzee in the wild, covertly observing Edward as he settled in for the night. The ape-man tucks himself in, succumbing to that evolutionary instinct that has kept hominids safe from the nighttime terrors all these millions of years. Didn't he know that he was tucking himself into bed right next to one of his sworn enemies? Was he really so arrogant that he didn't realize the risk he was running?
I scoffed at my idiocy. What risk was he really running? What could I possibly do to him?
And what was I afraid that he would do to me?
Were this some nonsensical teenage farce, Edward would have arranged for the lights to go out, so that he could carry out an attempted seduction (attempted, because of course I would not give in!), all of it captured on a hidden video camera (no doubt my resistance would provide for as much hilarity as his feigned endearments). Such intrigues, of course, were entirely out of the question.
Perhaps I ought to have been the animal under study in this situation. Slave to irrational fears. The fear of Edward Cullen, on the one hand, and the fear of my mother's ghost stories, on the other hand. What a child!
Why did I read all those ghost stories if not to try and overcome my mother's influence? So why not try to harden myself to Edward, and face my fear there too?
I let myself slide down the bed an inch.
Why had Edward invited me to his room? To his bed? It was a fucking slumber party, for crying out loud, hardly the work of a fiend. It was something Seth would do, but Seth was Seth.
Edward's motives were entirely inscrutable. So I watched his patch of darkness wearily, as if mere observation would prove fruitful. But I was too tired and his behavior was too strange for me to explain. The situation was too surreal.
Perhaps I am already asleep, I thought. And all of this is a dream.
To be sure, I felt myself begin to drift in and out of consciousness.
Every so often, I would jolt awake, afraid that I'd shifted a fraction of an inch towards Edward or that he'd shifted a fraction of an inch towards me or that I'd committed some other egregious act like talking in my sleep, which I had never done before as far as I knew.
My sleep was far from restful.
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Jerking awake to find that my dying cell read six thirty a.m., I determined that the time had come to make a graceful exit.
At some point during the night, the power had come back on and a light was shining dimly through several layers of blue beads and taffeta from a lamp on Edward's side of the bed. It was just enough to see by as I carefully rose and tried to tip toe out of the room.
"I like your pajamas," I heard a snicker behind me.
So much for a smooth exit. Glancing over my shoulder, I chastised him. "And I'd say that I like yours—oh, but you're not wearing any, are you?"
"I think that you like them just fine," Edward replied, throwing his very blue blanket to the side and patting his abs, his t-shirt having risen up, not that I was looking closely enough to observe the general state of his stomach. Or his chest. Or arms. Or…anything else for that matter.
"Ha!" I snapped, turning quickly away.
"You may say ha! but I see you the way you look at me."
I let the sound of the door closing behind me serve as my response. Eric would have been so disappointed.
I saved the berating for my shower. What the fuck did you do? I asked myself, scrubbing my skin a bit more furiously than was probably needed.
Just because I'd no desire to rehash the past didn't mean that I couldn't recall the feelings of isolation and melancholy, the outright despair, that Edward Cullen's past behavior had once helped to evoke.
I pushed away the actual details of what had happened ten years ago, but the sense of dread remained. Did it matter exactly how he'd phrased this or that statement of ridicule once upon a time? No. Banal put-downs. It wasn't interesting. Understanding human psychology wasn't like a murder mystery. People were irrational. Memories could be faked. So only emotions mattered, not details.
The last time someone had tried to bring it up with me—when I'd gone to Alice's group to show my support—I'd walked out in a huff of anger. What good would it do to talk about how much he and everyone else had once hurt me? And anyhow, he hadn't been entirely wrong in his assessment of me either. Everything he'd said back then had been true. It was much better to come to terms with the truth, with the fact that I was utterly unfit for society, than to try and force myself into a mold that I'd never fit.
So I'd walked out of Alice's group. I'd told myself that only Freudians and people who watched too much reality television thought that it was worth plumbing the details of one's past anguish, and really it was just for their own twisted amusement, because dwelling on it certainly did nothing to help a person in the here and now. It just encouraged the repetition of old cycles of depression. My own historical analyses certainly never strayed towards the psychoanalytical. I shied away from biographies—the notion that anyone could ever pretend to truly know another person. I preferred to diagnose my subjects en masse. I certainly would never be caught trying to explain Victorian sadomasochism with premature weaning or other mundane childhood traumas, for once the door to that had been thrown open, there would be no end to it. After all, when trying to explain the antisocial behavior of a grown woman, why stop with the broken heart she suffered as a teenaged girl when there were also the questions of what cereal she'd had for breakfast that morning and the age at which she'd been potty-trained? As a historian I could hardly deny that memory mattered, but the desire to reminisce ought not be indulged too much, lest one descend into the maudlin naval-gazing narcissism of a Proust.
And why did everyone think that repression was such a bad thing? It served a purpose. It helped one carry on when there was no logical reason for doing so.
In any case, it only counted as repression if I let it dictate my present, right? And I wasn't letting it dictate the present, was I?
I had slept in Edward Cullen's motherfucking bed!
I would simply have to repress the memory of that too. There was no other choice.
Having made my decision, I resolutely steeled my jaw and finished my shower.
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Mr. Crowley apologized for the loss of electricity and hoped that we had not been inconvenienced. Edward laughed and said that the inn ought to offer a loss of electricity as standard service. I deemed it best to say nothing.
We ate at the bed and breakfast, Mr. Crowley serving biscuits and porridge on aged dishes that I eyed skeptically.
"Who's Ib nal-deen?" Edward asked, sipping his coffee from a ridiculously dainty tea cup.
"Who?"
"Ib nal-deen?"
I had no idea. Ib nal-deen. Ib nal-deen. "Do you mean Ibn al-Nadim?"
Edward shrugged. "Sounds right. Who's that?"
"Ninth century Arab book collector. Why?"
"You kept saying his name last night."
"What?" I could feel my cheeks flaming.
"You kept mumbling his name in your sleep." Edward was studying me carefully.
"I did not."
"You did." Edward started grinning. "Do you have a crush on a ninth century book collector?"
"Of course not." It was preposterous. I pressed my hands against my cheeks, trying to cool the skin. "We don't even know what he really looked like."
"You do. You have a crush on a guy who's been dead for twelve hundred years!"
"Shut up." You sleep with a guy one time—by accident!—and he thinks that you're best friends.
"How does something like that even work? I mean, there's virtual sex but this has got to be pushing the limit."
"He loved books," I said, feeling that this was explanation enough. "Loved them." I sighed. "You could rent a book stall and spend all night with the books by yourself. Utterly alone, to read at your leisure." My shoulders rose in an involuntary shiver of excitement.
"Wow. You really take your books seriously." Edward leaned towards me in a conspiratorial fashion. "Do you think about him when you—"
"I don't care to discuss this topic any further," I interrupted primly, patting the lace napkin against my lips.
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Edward took the wheel of the Porsche when we left the bed and breakfast. He drove through the center of town, and turned down the street for Bella Italia, glancing at the clock as we passed. "The police timed it a couple of times. And I've timed it myself. It's just a twenty minute drive. Fifteen if you aren't being careful."
I didn't have to ask to know that he was referring to the time it took to get from Bella Italia to the cabin where they'd found Tanya's body.
The scenery we passed had an almost surreal quality. It was one of those crisp autumn days when the sunlight sparkles through the leaves, setting them on fire with shades of crimson and mahogany. Port Angeles prided itself on being a rustic tourist town, and I thought that it looked its best during this time of year, with the quaint old-fashioned shop fronts and dignified architecture lending an antiquated feel.
The picturesque streets soon gave way to tree-lined sidewalks, and then there was just the open road between two red-gold walls of trees.
After a while, the road narrowed to no more than a gravel path, so covered in leaves that it would have been easy to think that the road had actually dead-ended. But Edward kept going, the Porsche shimmying over the loose gravel under the carpet of leaves as the trees on either side crept closer and closer. By the time that the cabin appeared, branches were scratching at either side of the vehicle.
Edward stopped the car in the small clearing in front of a cabin of ramshackle construction. It was a poor man's Queen Anne. The decadence of accretions born of necessity and want rather than excessive wealth. A timeworn well stood to one side of the clearing with a broken cap over the top, and a dilapidated fence wall could be seen through the stand of trees on the other side.
I stared at the tiny cabin. "Why hasn't someone torn it down?" I asked.
"It's actually a historic landmark. Or someone's trying to turn it into one. They're trying to turn this whole area into a park, but that got held up ten years ago and it's been in limbo ever since. The Denalis want it demolished."
"Who owns it now?"
"The city of Port Angeles. They don't want anything to do with it but they don't want the responsibility for destroying a landmark either. They're trying to get the state to take it over."
I watched the wind stir the trees through the window of the car.
I didn't want to get out.
"We can just turn around and go back," Edward offered.
"No." I reached for the door handle. "I'm fine."
I got out of the Porsche and slowly approached the cabin, my arms crossed in front of my chest in a gesture that I knew showed my discomfort, my eyes scanning the two broken windows in the front of the cabin and the trees lining the clearing.
This stretch of woods was just so far out of the way. Did the remains of other cabins stand in the surrounding woods? Or had this cabin always been sitting in the hinterland, the inhabitants shunned by society or, if not shunned, nevertheless wanting nothing to do with it?
I had never been very social. I hated crowds and easily tired of company. It was no accident that I fit in so poorly when I moved to Forks. Were it not for the carefully crafted rules that I now used to govern my social interaction, I might be totally isolated.
Could I ever live alone in a cabin like this? A century and a half ago, when urban development was even more remote, with no one around for miles and only a horse, if I could afford one, to cover the distance?
I thought back to the Mountains of Madness—not high school, when I was surrounded by people and only wanted to be alone—no, I thought back to those first two years of college when I was the one shunning everyone else, speaking to almost no one and keeping to myself. I remembered staying up all night to read and falling asleep in class. I remembered jagged shards like dreams skittering in the light and the gaps in between. If Alice hadn't come back to the west coast, who knows what would have happened to me? Had she not been crazier—yes, crazier—than me, who is to say that I wouldn't have broken completely? But she needed me to take care of her.
A movement behind me startled me, and I scuttled to the side. I hadn't noticed Edward drawing up alongside.
"The door's padlocked," he said. "But we should be able to see through the windows."
I followed him up to the nearest corner of the cabin, where a single worn shutter hung from a hinge. Edward peered through a pane of the glass, then stepped aside to let me do the same.
Not thinking about the ramifications of what I was doing, I leaned towards the dirty glass and looked. I expected to see the same image that I'd seen captured on the crime scene photos, but I hadn't the benefit of the fluorescent light bulbs that they'd used to take those photos or a clear view. At least, I thought that I should be able to see the stain on the floor where her blood had pooled. Maybe there was still a stain, and I just couldn't see it in the murky light, but it seemed wrong somehow that I couldn't see it, like everyone was somehow mistaken and this wasn't really the place where a teenage girl had died, because how could something so awful have happened without leaving any traces behind?
We went around to all of the windows. Two in the front, one on each side, and none in the back. It was a single room cabin. Plain and unfurnished. Repairs made to the siding and the roof in mismatched timbers and styles.
I wondered when the cabin had last been occupied, but didn't want to ask. Then I decided that I was being foolish and asked anyhow, my voice grating in the chill air. The kind of air that I usually loved.
"1967," Edward said. "It was abandoned and the city foreclosed."
"There must be parties here," I observed. What an awful thing to say. "I mean, kids must like to come here. Or they used to, didn't they?"
Edward nodded. "I even came here with Tanya once. The padlock was a joke back then. It got broken so many times that they stopped replacing it after a while."
The padlocked looked fine now. Had the teenagers stopped coming?
If anything, I would have thought that the gruesome aura of death and murder would have drawn them in.
Were the youth of Forks and Port Angeles actually capable of showing some respect?
Then what was I doing here? Playing the part of a ghoul.
Scanning the trees again, I imagined teenagers cavorting around the trunks, flashlights illuminating their flesh as they spun around in the night to some wild chant.
If I hadn't known about Tanya, if I hadn't known what happened to her in this cabin, would I still have felt so very uncomfortable standing there?
I didn't believe in ghosts. It was nonsense to think that I would have noticed anything untoward about that stretch of trees. Otherwise, the whole world would be haunted with everyone who's ever come and gone.
And yet. And yet.
I hated it—I hated it there I hated the trees I hated the cabin I hated the arch over the well and the broken cap I hated the wind I could hear rustling in the dried leaves I hated the flash of sunlight on the exposed window panes I hated the cobwebs I spied through the glass I hated the damp smell of the air. I hated it all. I just hated.
I followed Edward back to the Porsche, and he carefully turned it around before proceeding down the tree-lined avenue. I watched the cabin disappear from sight in the side-view mirror, then kept watching, as if I was worried about something following us.
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We had lunch at a small café a few blocks from Bella Italia. The café was almost empty and we sat by the window.
"I shouldn't have insisted you see it," Edward apologized.
I shrugged. "It was just a cabin." I didn't want to talk about it. Couldn't we just sit in silence? Fuck the rules of etiquette. I just wanted quiet. The kind of quiet that I only got to enjoy when I was alone. Couldn't we just have that?
"So what looks good to you?" Edward asked, trying to cheer me up I could tell.
I put down the menu. "Soup."
"I'll bet the soup is good here. Maybe I'll try that too."
I shook my head.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," I told him.
"You're upset."
"I should be upset. If I wasn't upset, that would mean that there's something wrong with me."
"I just thought that if you saw it, maybe you would realize why it's so important. Be just as invested as I am."
I didn't say anything.
"I've been there so many times," Edward confessed. "I've forgotten how unnerving it can be."
It made sense. He wanted to shock me into caring. Strip away the cavalier disregard with which I'd been treating Tanya's death.
"Please talk to me," he pleaded.
"There's nothing to say," I replied.
"Yell at me or something. Don't just sit there staring out the window."
"Why would I be angry? It's not your fault. What happened was terrible."
"Still, having to see it up close isn't easy," Edward conceded.
"I should see it up close. I should see it first-hand. Don't you think if people weren't so insulated, that they would do more to stop things like that from happening?" I watched people milling on the sidewalk through the window. Cars crawling down the thoroughfare.
"I think people will keep doing awful things to each other no matter what."
"Then what's the point?"
"I don't know."
At least he didn't bother lying.
I continued. "And what about people who watch horror movies for entertainment? Who think murder mysteries are fun? What do you do with all of us?"
"Do you really think it's just entertainment?"
"I think—" I paused. "I think that I watch horror movies because it's comforting. There's a kind of comfort to the misery. I think, This is as bad as it can be. But that's not true. It can be worse. It can be real."
"You're not a serial killer."
"How do you know? Don't I get off on the same things? Maybe it's all just sublimation so that I don't go Lizzy Borden. Isn't that what you all thought? That I was crazy and weird? Well, I am. So I don't eat animals because I could never kill one myself, but if someone tried to hurt me, I'd fight back. And I read stories about monsters that don't exist while the monsters that do exist are left to roam the streets. It could be me. I could go nuts—"
"Stop it. I don't think that you could ever hurt someone."
I laughed. "You don't know anything about me."
"I know that even though you hated me, you saved me—" Edward said, not letting me cut him off. "That's exactly what you did, you saved me. And even though you should still hate me, you've agreed to do this with me."
"I don't have any friends," I argued.
"You have Alice. And I've heard her talk about other friends you have."
"They put up with me."
"I'm sure they have a very good reason."
"I barely function—"
"Last night you said that you function very well."
"I said that I function. I didn't say that I function very well."
"You're a celebrated teacher and author."
I laughed again. "I'm an adjunct professor whose position could get cut at any minute and my book sold about ten copies."
"Eleven. I bought one the other day."
I was dumbfounded. "I wish you hadn't. It's not very good." I felt uncomfortable, imagining him reading my words and judging what I'd written. "Why would you do something like that?"
"I want to know what you're interested in. I haven't finished it yet. But the introduction, well the beginning of the introduction was very enlightening. I feel much better informed about the Reformation now."
"It's not really about the Reformation."
"I distinctly recall reading something about the Reformation. And you know, you're free to return the favor. Come down to the hospital and observe me any time."
"I don't really think they like people doing that."
"Sure they do," Edward shrugged.
"No. That's okay."
"Well, if you ever change your mind, let me know."
The atmosphere between us had lightened significantly, and the waitress, who'd decided just to linger in the background when she noticed the intensity of our discussion, came up to take our orders.
-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-
Edward stayed in the Porsche while I went into Bella Italia. Chelsea Giampetroni, the waitress who had witnessed Tanya getting into the Volvo, was now working as the manager. I didn't think that I had much of a shot getting her to talk to me, but I was going to try nevertheless.
I didn't bother trying to hide my reason for wanting to talk to her. I asked for her by name and waited at the hostess' stand. When she walked up, I handed her a piece of paper with my name and cell number and started talking. "I can understand if you don't want to speak to me," I said. "But I was her friend. I know it's been a long time and I'm still not over it. I just want to know what happened."
"This is my place of business," she snapped, crumpling the paper up.
"I didn't know how else to find you."
She studied me for a minute. "You been out to the cabin?" she asked.
I drew away, feeling sick again. Maybe I shouldn't have come after all. I remembered how her brother, Demetri, liked to beat up his girlfriends. I could only imagine his sister having similarly violent hobbies.
"Five minutes," she told me. "Outside by the dumpster."
I went outside and waited, the chill air on my skin calming my stomach, but the smell coming from the dumpster wasn't as pleasant. The slap of a door against brick alerted me to Chelsea's arrival, and I tensed, ready to flee. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, making no effort to blow the smoke away from me.
"It was a silver Volvo," she started, the speech obviously having been repeated many times. "How do I know it was a Volvo? I wanted that car. That very model. Not that I could afford it with this bullshit economy. How do I know it was silver? It was the same color as the nail polish that I was wearing that day. Didn't notice the license plate. How did I remember the girl? She was a bitch. I was standing outside smoking, just like this, minding my own business, and she comes by sneering at me like the smoke is all up in her face. All these people nowadays trying to legislate where and when I exercise my own right to live the way I choose. The car pulled up to the curb here," she pointed a long fingernail, "and this guy with red hair is driving."
The rote nature of her delivery had lowered my defenses. I felt bold enough to ask a question. "Red hair?"
"I wanted that too. Exactly that color. So hard to get out of a box, you know. I almost yelled for him to wait a minute so that I could get a pic, but he was gone, with the bitch blathering at him about where has he been and he's lucky she's even talking to him after what he put her through."
"Did he say anything?"
"Nah. Not that I could hear. Seemed like he just saw her walking down the street and stopped, pulling over to the wrong side so that she could get in without having to cross."
"Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"
"You're thinking he looked like that other guy who keeps coming around asking me questions and bothering my brother? They said it wasn't him, but whoever it was sure had the same color hair. I made him let me get a pic. But he wouldn't leave me alone. Tried to get me to agree to hypnosis. Like I'm going to do something like that—they'd probably get me clucking like a chicken or convince me that I was abducted by aliens or something. It doesn't matter. I didn't see the guy long enough to even give the cops a sketch. The car was just sitting there less than a minute and the guy had shades on. Big ones. Covered half his face."
It was all so random. If someone wanted to set Edward up, wouldn't they have made sure there was more than one eyewitness?
"Was there anyone else on the street?" I asked.
"I have no idea. I'm telling you what I saw right in front of me at that exact second. I didn't see anyone else."
I couldn't think of any other questions besides Are you lying for your brother? and I didn't have the courage for that. So I thanked her for her time and wondered why Edward thought I would be able to succeed where he, the police and the FBI had already failed.
She was about to go back inside when it occurred to me to ask why she'd changed her mind about talking to me.
"Because you didn't like the look of that cabin," she said. "You're not some gossip-mongering reporter or thrill-seeking freak just hassling me for kicks."
As she went back into the restaurant, it occurred to me that she wasn't as half as intimidating as I'd imagined.
I wondered what it must be like, having a brother who enjoyed hurting women.
Then it struck me, more forcibly than ever before, that Tanya's killer could very well have family in Forks or Port Angeles. I could have seen the killer at the grocery store. At The Lodge. We may have even gone to school together.
AN: Some of my guest reviews are so insightful! And yet I have no way to reply directly :( A guest reviewer pointed out that it seemed strange in the previous chapter that Bella didn't tell Edward about being confronted by Aro (the same issue was raised by another reviewer to whom I was able to reply directly). Did I give that impression? I can't remember if I meant to do so. The run-in with Aro might have been covered by Bella telling Edward all "about the Denalis." But if she didn't tell Edward, I'm sure it's because, like with the anonymous letters and the dead animal, she just doesn't take threats against herself seriously (low self-esteem, anyone?). She's not trying to get Edward to like her, per se, she's just not being actively hostile (though making him listen to Rasputina could be considered an act of violence – I say this as a fan who owns several of their CDs and has seen them in concert, and yes, I coerced a friend who I may or or may not have been secretly angry at to go with me to that concert). There is also the fact that I just might not see something which is obvious to you – which is why I love it when you point these things out!
Rec: Take a Little Trip by KristenLynn
In high school, geeky Edward tutored popular Bella. It ended badly. Four years later, Edward reappears in one of grad student Bella's classes. Both have changed. A lot. Will it be enough? AU/AH,OOC Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance/Drama - Chapters: 16 - Words: 102,946 - Reviews: 672 - Favs: 833 - Follows: 492 - Updated: Jul 21, 2010 - Published: Nov 30, 2009 - Bella, Edward - Complete