Page 92 of Girl, Fractured
‘I say yes, but it’s your case.’
‘No, I’m just the consultant.’
‘Come on.This has been your case from the beginning.’
‘You’re right.This is all mine.’
Ripley reached into the pit, grabbed Nathan Taylor by his shirt and gracelessly hauled him back onto the sand.He coughed up a stream, then opened his eyes.
In that moment, time compressed.The Nathan Taylor before her fractured into dual images: the man bleeding onto Paradise Point Beach in 2024, and the ten-year-old boy clutching a purple paperback in 1998, asking if drowning hurt.
Two iterations of the same person, separated by twenty-six years of rage, obsession, and misdirected grief.
A terrible clarity washed over Ripley.The procedural calculus she’d performed thousands of times in her career suddenly yielded a result she couldn’t compartmentalize:
Shehad created this monster.
She’d stood on this same stretch of beach and made a decision that altered the trajectory of a ten-year-old boy’s life.One sentence, constructed with good intentions, had metastasized into three deaths.
‘Yes, I did lie to you.Your dad died in agony.’Ripley let him go.‘But I know, with absolute certainty, that his last thoughts were about you.I’m sorry.’
Then Sarah’s incessant screeches interrupted.‘Is he breathing?Make sure he’s okay!He’s a human being.You can’t just-’
The words detonated something primal.A neural circuit-breaker tripped and flooded her system with one final surge of adrenaline.Ripley grabbed her shovel, spun and slammed the flat of the head into Sarah’s forehead before either Ella or rational thought could intervene.
Sarah folded at the middle, all oxygen evacuated from her lungs.She crumpled onto the sand.
‘Jesus, Mia,’ Ella said.
Ripley surveyed the scene.Nathan’s broken form, Sarah’s gasping figure, Ella’s concerned stance.A portrait of justice and vengeance, indistinguishable in the moonlight.The shovel in her hands felt suddenly foreign, as if it belonged to another woman from another life.She spun, and with her last ounce of might, hauled the shovel into the Atlantic Ocean.
Her knees gave way then, not from weakness but from a profound surrender.The sand received her weight as it had received so many others; killers and victims, liars and truth-tellers, all equal before the tide’s judgment.
In the distance, sirens wailed.
Game over.
CHAPTER FORTY
Ella’s first thought was that she shouldn’t have bothered coming, because Ripley seemed to have the whole thing under control.
But if she hadn’t have arrived, she’d have missed her partner caving in Sarah Webb’s head, and that spectacle was better than a lottery win.Ella had no idea how she’d explain it to the higher-ups, but she’d find a way.
Now, they were sitting on the sand while the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office cleaned up.Nathan Taylor – or Robert Lawrence – was still alive.Sarah Webb was also very much alive.Both had been taken to separate cruisers.
‘How’d you find out?’Ripley asked.
‘Thomas Webb had written a book and pitched it to Scarecrow Press – Nathan’s publishing house.That’s why he’d stolen Thomas’s computer, so we wouldn’t find the email history.’
‘And that brought you here?’
‘No.I went to Nathan’s apartment and found something on his bookshelf.A Goosebumps book.With a purple cover and a scarecrow on the front.’
Ripley made an unrecognizable sound.A laugh that aimed for bemusement but stopped at disbelief.‘He still had that?’
‘Yeah.That’s what tipped me off about his identity.He changed his name a few years ago.Not sure why.’
‘Didn’t change his trauma though.’
