Page 43 of Her Wicked Knights
I have questions, but I can't think of how to ask them. Nothing makes sense.
I just saw Mrs. Clark earlier... it couldn't have been more than four hours ago. She said Jenny was supposed to meet her for dinner before. There's no way she went from missing to dead just like that, is there? Of course, somewhere inside me, I know that of course it could work like that. She was missing because she was dead. She didn't go to dinner with her mother, because somebody killed her. Not an accident, because she was murdered. That's what homicide means.
"I don't understand. Everybody likes Jenny. She's nice and funny and she leant me a hair tie once..."
"Maybe we should sit down?" Hadley suggests, but I don't really understand what she says. I also don't really care.
"Everyone I've spoken to has had nothing but good things to say about her." Dad agrees. "I don't understand what happened, but we're going to get to the bottom of it. I'm going to find whoever did this. But I…" His voice breaks off and mom rushes to hold him again, easing away a moment later when he raises his head. They work so effortlessly together, like they can read each other's minds. "I'm going back out now, but I just needed to see you."
That, after all the rest of it, is what breaks me. Dad needed to rush home to see me, in the middle of an investigation. Because Jenny was just a teenager who was quiet but well-liked. She was smart and pretty and just living her life, just like me. And now she's gone, and my dad is here, because all he could think about when he looked at her was that it could have been anyone. It could have been me.
I rush at him, burying my face in his chest like that might keep the tears from coming. It feels wrong, to cry for Jenny when I barely knew her. It feels like maybe I'm too dramatic, like I should hold it together because if it feels like this for me, imagine how awful Mrs. Clark must feel. Imagine how her world just splintered into five million pieces that scattered in the wind,and she'll never be able to recover them all to try and piece everything back together.
Jenny was a child. We're all children, despite how much we play at being grown up on the weekends or holidays with drinking and sex. Only a monster kills children, and I don't know what that means for the rest of us. Is Serenity Hollow no longer safe? Is there a serial killer, or did someone have a reason to go after her specifically?
"It's okay." Dad promises. "I'm going to catch whoever is responsible and bring them to justice. I'll make sure they pay for what they did to her."
What they did to her.
The words send a chill through me as I wonder what exactly that was. It could be something as detached as a bullet to the back of the skull. It could also mean so much more. I pull away from dad to ask, "How was she killed?"
"Medical examiner will have to determine that." He frowns. "But I can tell you, it was no accident. It was cruel, what they did to her."
"They?"
Dad grimaces a little at the fact I picked up on that word. "We don't know, Mars. I'm not ruling out anything as far as gender of the killer, or how many there were."
"Dad..."
I don't have anything to say, and he recognizes as much. "I know, Marley."
That's all he can say. It's all I can say. There aren't any words for something like this, because something like this has never happened here. And the fact that it did is only made more disturbing by the fact that it happened to someone with seemingly no motive attached.
He just presses a kiss to the top of my head, wraps Hadley in his arms again for a minute, and then plants one on mom'sforehead. Then he takes the coffee I didn't even see mom make for him, tells us he loves us, and walks out the door.
A second after he does, I hear the chime of the alarm system, telling us that he armed it from his phone.
I guess that answers whether we should be worried.
23
Rev
Goingbacktoschoolas seniors with one of our classmates dead has been weird, to say the least. You don't think much about how death affects people until you have to live with it, and then you realize those people you didn't even realize knew one another were connected like strands of silk in a spider's web.
Tripp took it hard and turned even broodier than he was before. It feels like there's an ocean between us, despite the fact that my brain returns to that night multiple times a day, thinking about what Whit asked me. "Would you share?"
Sharing Marley with Tripp would be a fucking privilege. A dream. A pipe dream, of course, because that's not going to happen. But it wouldn't be because of me. If there was a chance to have either of them, I'd take it, regardless of how fucked it may seem. A chance to have both of them? It doesn't matter what it is, I'd do it, and I wouldn't even feel bad about it.
I didn't expect Marley to take it as hard as she did. I don't know if she just feels close to the case because her dad is investigating it, or if it just has to do with her empathy. She feels everything, for better or worse. She burst into tears on thefirst day of school, when she saw the memorial her friends were crying over at her locker. I don't blame her. It feels surreal, and when we gathered into the church for her funeral service, I had a hard time comprehending that she was, indeed, dead. She looked like she could be sleeping, though she was definitely paler than I remember her being the last time I saw her.
Rumors have flown around since that night, that her body was mangled, that she was hacked into pieces, that she was assaulted. The truth is that none of us know what happened, and all we have is what has been told to us by police: there were no signs of a sexual motive, she'd been found with her purse nearby and all of her cash and cards seemed to be in place, and the manner of death isn't being disclosed. Whatever it was that killed her didn't have any effect on her face, and the casket only left her head revealed, so no one can really speculate. I do imagine she wasn't hacked to pieces under the casket lid, though technically, I guess she could have been.
It's been a tough couple of weeks, and there haven't been any answers. Thankfully, with homecoming approaching, things are starting to settle a little, even if they're settling awkwardly. I don't want anybody to forget about Jenny, but I do want everyone to heal, to remember that we're all still alive. Despite rumors of serial killers, there haven't been any more deaths around here, which has set about half the town at ease. The other half is waiting for the other shoe to drop. That's why I'm here tonight, on unofficial Marley duty. Jake's got to go to his cousin's wedding in New Hampshire this weekend, which he told us all about no less than a dozen times, and Audrey is going to visit her aunt ... something, somewhere. She also told us no less than a dozen times, but I think she told me her aunt was named Mildred, and then Mary. I quit listening after that.
She was supposed to be with her mom tonight. They had a whole day planned, but then Hector asked Marley to work, andher mom apparently was grateful at the idea of spending some time alone with her husband. Marley told me as much with a sour look on her face, like the thought of what they were going to do alone grossed her out. She doesn't realize she's lucky to have parents who are still very much in love after all these years.
"I'm just saying," Marley says, turning back to me after depositing a bowl of salad in front of a woman down the counter, as if we weren't interrupted ten minutes ago in this conversation. "I don't really want a repeat of last year, where we all... paired off. It felt... sad. I want to make sure we all spend time together at homecoming this year. It's the last one we've got."
