Page 12 of These Cold Strangers

He glances back at me, and in that moment, I see Julia moving in the shadows. She leaps to her feet and shoves him my way. He crashes into me, lands hard on his knees. My shoulder hits the wall, and pain shoots through my body. But I see an opportunity. As he scrambles to his feet, I whip my chained arm around his neck and pull.

“Get his legs,” I shout to Julia, who stretches out her arms and manages to grab Todd by the ankles. We have him down, and I jerk hard on the chain. I hear him gag. I want to see his face. I want to watch the light go out of his eyes. But I am behind him. All I see is darkness. All I smell is fear. All I hear is his choking.

Stop him. Hurt him.

He heaves and bucks, and I pull tighter. He groans out something, and his body starts to relax. I do not.

I don’t know how long we stay there, the three of us locked in this unholy embrace.

Julia finally says, “I think he’s dead.”

“Don’t let go. We can’t take any chances.” God, I’m woozy. I hurt. My heart, yes, but my shoulder, where I hit the wall, and my wrist, from pulling the chain.

I don’t loosen the chain until he loses his grip on his bodily functions. Then I know he is truly dead. The drug overwhelms me, and I am gone.

I crawl, synapse by synapse, from oblivion. I am lying under Todd’s body. The chain is still wrapped around his neck. My arms are numb. Julia is yelling rapid fire, panicked staccato interrogatories: “Addie, are you okay? Addie, are you alive? Wake up, Addie. Please wake up!”

I open my eyes and see the gloom has retreated. It must be daylight outside. Though the windows are boarded up, small cracks of light give me hope. There is a world out there—a life. We only need to free ourselves.

“I’m here,” I manage, and Julia sobs in relief.

“Oh God, thank you. Thank you, God.”

“Don’t thank him just yet,” I croak. My mouth is so dry. “We have to get out of here.”

“The brackets are bolted into the concrete. I’ve been trying, but I can’t get free.”

I unwrap the chain from Todd’s neck—his face is grotesque and swollen in the dimness, and I feel nothing butjoy at the sight. I turn to the wall, brace my feet, wrap my hands around my chain and lean back. The iron grows taut, but the bolt doesn’t move. I’m weak, too, from the drugs, from the fight, from this intense pain. I’m pretty sure my shoulder is broken, and my wrist will never be the same.

I hear a small chime.

“What is that?”

It comes again. And again.

It is coming from the broken body next to me.

I crawl over his chest and can just barely reach his front pocket. The phone is covered in his muck, and the battery is almost gone, but his alarm is going off. I turn it off, wipe the phone against my chest, and see the option for Face ID or passcode. No luck there. But bless the tech giants; they’ve given us another way. I press the two buttons that activate an emergency call. The phone counts down, and then I hear the magic words in the gentle, dulcet tones of a southern Virginia accent, a terrible echo from my past. The very world I’ve done all I can to escape.

“Nine one one. What is your emergency?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

An interesting word, hero. When I was a child, I was taught that heroes wore uniforms. They were a safe place, always. If you were lost. If you needed help. People—strangers—who will die for your freedom. As I grew older, I realized they aren’t the only ones. A young mother who works three jobs so her children will have shelter. The widowed father who learns to braid his daughter’s hair. The women who survive abuse at the hands of a predator. Heroes come in many guises. It feels quite strange to see my name now associated with the term.

I finish typing and lean back in my chair. The cat wanders across my desk, looking for a treat. Things are normal, yet they will never be normal again.

Todd Preis killed eight women over the course of a decade. Julia would have been his ninth victim, and I would have been number ten. If he’d succeeded, we would have been found like the others. Their remains were scattered across the property. How his parents didn’t know is remarkable. Or maybe they did, though that thought is disturbing. There were several bodies under the same deck where he and I sat and caught up, drank wine together, flirted. It turns outmy sainted hero was a prolific serial killer who got his start before he enlisted my boyfriend to murder my family. A true psychopath, wandering through the world, shoulder to shoulder with people who would recoil in fear if they had any idea of the death that followed in his wake. Who knows how long he would have continued his reign of terror if I hadn’t recognized him in that video? If I hadn’t come back. If I hadn’t found an inner strength. If Julia hadn’t moved the way she had?

Julia has been reunited with her family. We talked once when the first article appeared—her attribution was vital to my credibility and to the benign but necessary police inquiries—but no more. Neither of us wants to revisit her pain. Simone and I, on the other hand, have begun a dutiful correspondence. I sent her back her jeans. She laughed and said they’d never fit her properly anyway and she was donating them to the consignment shop where one of the college girls would surely drool over the vintage find.

And in utterly surreal news, my editor called this morning to tell me the series of stories I’ve done for the paper is already being whispered about in the Pulitzer circles. The long list is almost a certainty.

I am thrilled, of course. But it is strange to go from a nobody to a somebody, with a regular paycheck, an enthusiastic boss, and literary agents knocking at my door. I am doing my best to cope with the sudden fame. This, too, shall pass. Somewhere down the road, a book will be written about how a stranger had to die to save a woman from her own death. A documentary or fictionalized show will be made. People will remember the fallen again, for a time.

And then we will disappear back into the fabric of society, for something worse will come along to capture our attention. That’s how this cycle of infamy works.

But there has been no ebb for me. I haven’t been able to let Todd Preis go.

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