Page 110 of The Lake of Lost Girls

“They wouldn’t listen. This is their fault. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice,” she moaned sadly.

She took her anger out on the ones who deserved it least. Every single day since she killed those girls, I wished she had killed me instead.

“I know,” I said softly, finally grabbing hold of my daughter again and pulling her close, rubbing her back like I had done when she was little.

She had called me each time to help her. Of course I helped her. I would always be there for her. It was as if she were in an altered state and it was only when the bodies were cooling on the ground at her feet that she would wake up in a panic.

I had wanted to go to the police.

My guilt and desire to protect my girl at all costs kept me quiet.

But this had to stop.

It had to stop now.

“She couldn’t stop herself, so I had to step in. It’s what a father should do.”

There was a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

“No.” Ryan’s voice was far away. “You’re lying.”

“I wish I was.” Dad looked devastated, yet relieved to finally share the truth. “I wish I could tell you something different.” Dad looked shattered. He was broken into a hundred pieces.

“She k-killed them?” I finally asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “All of them?”

Dad let out a horrible sob as he grabbed me. “She was a good person, Lindsey. Don’t think badly of her,please.”

My knees buckled and my father held onto me before I could collapse. I felt numb. Hollowed out. I was trembling all over.

How could this be the truth that I had been searching for all these years? My loving older sister, who had been missing for twenty-four years, was a killer.

And my father …

I pushed my dad away, his arms falling to his sides. I didn’t want him near me. It felt wrong.Hefelt wrong. I stared at him, my eyes beseeching and then he continued. Though it was obvious now where this sordid story was going.

“I didn’t want to,” Dad moaned. “It was the last thing I wanted to do. But she gave me no choice.”

Oh god …

Then the whole picture began to emerge.

Ben Fadley April 23, 1999

I rubbed her back. I felt her bunch up my shirt in her unforgiving fists.

“This is all your fault, Daddy. It has always been your fault.” Her words were horrible yet, in that moment, she sounded like my little girl again. When I was only her Daddy, the person she loved most.

And she was going to spend the rest of my life making me pay. She didn’t even mean to do the things she did. I knew that.

Jess wasn’t a wicked person with evil in her heart.

She was hurting. She was full of so much pain that she didn’t know how to handle it other than to hurt others.

Those she felt were to blame for the mess her life had become.

She couldn’t stand the thought of a family being torn apart. She blamed me. She blamed them. She blamed everyone but herself.

“Take it out on me,” I implored her that first time after coming to the college late at night. I had parked my car in the library parking lot and found my daughter in shock, her skin white and her lips colorless, with a dead girl at her feet. I had bundled the body into the trunk of my car and driven us out to the place that had once been the site of so many wonderful memories together.

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