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I continued reading the book. I had to say, Manson wasn’t all insane. I mean, he was mostly insane, but all of his thinking made sense, in a weirdly consistent sort of way.

Pain's not bad, it's good. It teaches you things. I understand that.

Creepy. I understood why Rien had this in his library.

Living is what scares me. Dying is easy.

And killing is even easier, apparently. I flipped forward again to a random page.

Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that's who you'll see, do you understand that? If you see me as your brother, that's what I'll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free. I am just a mirror.

I paused there. Was that how Rien saw himself? When he killed people, was he doing it out of hate, or out of something else? From what I’d read so far, Manson didn’t think that killing was bad, because dying wasn’t bad. Which made sense, in a crazy-ass serial killer way. There wasn’t any right or wrong in his world.

Then I hit one of the last pages. He was talking about Hollywood. I pulled the book closer.

I lived in Hollywood and I had all that, the Rolls Royce and the Ferrari and the pad in Beverly Hills. I had the surf board and the Beach Boys and the bishkis and the Neil Diamond and the ramskam and the Jimmy shriffen and the Elvis Presley's best of bestlies and all them guys. The Dean and Martins and the Nancy Sinatras and the goffs and sofrins, "Will you do it to me? I hear you do it good honey" and all that kind of "Will you come up to my house later?" So I went through all that and I seen that was a bigger prison than the one I just got out of and I really didn't care to go back in prison. See, prison doesn't begin and end at the gate. Prison is in the mind. It's locked in one world that's dead and dying, or it's open to a world that's free and alive.

My mouth dropped open. I don’t know how many times Rien had read this book, or if he even knew what was in it, but the words struck me with the force of a slap on the face. Was that what he thought I wanted as an actress? I didn’t want that. I didn’t care about fame and fortune or any of those things.

No, that was what Rien had already. The sexy car, the luxurious penthouse. He had the Hollywood dream, and all it took to get there was killing people. He took fake people living fake lives and killed them. Because, after all, death wasn’t bad. Living a lie was the worst sin of all.

So Manson said. And he repeated his words.Prison was in the mind.And Hollywood was a bigger prison than any jailhouse. I thought I understood. Or at least, I began to understand. I don’t know if I really could ever understand Rien.

He’d told me to think about what I wanted.

What did I want?

I couldn’t read this anymore. I set the book down on the couch and stood up. I stretched. I rolled my neck.

And I had nothing else to do.

“Prison is in the mind, Sara,” I said out loud. “I can go anywhere.” Just like in the Reading Rainbow song. I hummed it as I looked through the bookshelves. There must be something that could take my mind off of serial killers.

There were a ton of medical books on the shelves.Clinical Anesthesia. A Manual of Surgical Procedures. Respiratory Physiology: The Essentials.Even the titles made my head spin. I turned to look at what else he had. Old histories. Books in French and Greek. I sighed as I ran my fingers down the shelf.

“Not too much of a fiction guy, huh?” I murmured. But then, it made sense. Rien seemed to hate anything fake. He didn’t want to live in a pretend world.

Good for him. It would make my days a lot more boring, though, if I didn’t have anything to read.

The rest of his library was similar, but as I moved onto the back bookshelf that led to the operating room, things got a little better. There were some books on ancient children’s fables that looked promising. And then a bunch of philosophy. I didn’t really care for the heavy stuff, and my fingers brushed past Locke and Kant and Hume. But then I saw a title that looked familiar.

Man’s Search for Meaning.

My mom had gotten a copy of that book from the library. I remember because I was thirteen, and we had just gotten evicted from our new place. The women’s shelter we stayed at was across from the public library, and she’d brought it home to read. She’d fallen asleep and I remember picking the book up off of the floor.

It was about the Holocaust, and how this guy had survived through years in a concentration camp. I didn’t understand it all when I was thirteen, but I understood why she had gotten it. It talked about how no matter how bad things got, you could still find meaning in life.

Well, things had gotten pretty bad for me, stuck in the library of a killer.

I reached out for the book, and as I slid it out from the shelf I heard a click. I jumped back as the wall began to move.

The bookcase spun open.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rien

I picked up the cupcake for Sara–I decided on red velvet, with cream cheese frosting–and called up the forensics lab as I walked back home. I asked for Jake.

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