Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

Part of Aleta’s favorite red hoodie turned up in some bramble outside of the city. It was cut, shredded, and stained. Animals had been gnawing and tearing at it, pulling it apart thread by thread by thread with their canines and incisors and grinding molars.

From what they recovered of Aleta’s body, she had also been gnawed and ripped, but the animals pulling her apart had been a different sort.

Angry Marie made a decision, then, and the impact of that decision would way heavy in her soul for the rest of her life. But seeing as her soul was pretty much tattered beyond recognition anyway, it didn’t seem like that much of a leap.

She combed her hair that day, but that was because Marie was a neat and cleanly sort of woman. This was for herself, not for anybody else. She didn’t blacken her lashes. She didn’t outline her mouth. She hoped her frown lines were frownier than ever. And Marie hopped on the bus.

The ride went on for hours, but it still wasn’t long enough. On the final leg of the journey, she found herself glancing longingly at the countryside, at the other passengers, at anything that she could think about wistfully. She did not want to be where she was going to be. She didn’t want to see the original monster.

Marie carried a tiny scrap of red hoodie that the police said she could have. It was cut out of the original and hemmed neatly around the edges. No fraying. No sawing of blood and bone and fabric and darling little girls.

She kept this little red square of riding hood in her purse, and found her fingers testing the fabric time and time again.

She could do this.

More importantly, she would do this.

It had been years since she had walked through these doors. She gave her name, provided her ID. She was patted and searched and opened her purse. She was instructed and given the same recitation of rules that she remembered from forever ago.

She sat down on one side of a big plastic barrier. The chair was uncomfortable and the yellow paint of the room was embarrassing in its eagerness to be cheerful.

A thin man in scrubs, his arms poking from the sleeves, shuffled over to her. He picked up his oversized corded phone and waited for Marie to do the same to hers.

She swallowed, then held the receiver to her ear.

“Darlin’,” he said. “So good to see you.”

“I need to ask you a question, Lowell.”

Her ex-husband snorted. “That’s it? You need to ask me a question? After all of these years?”

“It’s an important one.”

Her voice was even. Level and professional. He didn’t hear her shrieking inside. Didn’t hear the way her heart bang bang banged against her ribs, didn’t see her skin physically retracting away from his presence.

“It about the girl?”

The girl. The girl.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know her name.”

Lowell stretched, sounding weary and tired. An old man. “Don’t act like this, Marie.”

The voice of a husband fed up with his wife’s shenanigans. A hard-working soul used to going home and being unappreciated. Nagged at, even! Such disrespect!

“Did you hear? What happened?”

Marie’s voice cracked. She was Broken Marie. She tried to keep her lips from trembling, but she felt them turn down at the corners. They quivered. Such betrayal, those lips of hers, but she couldn’t stop the tremors.

Lowell let the act go. It slipped through his fingers and from his skin like a soul. He tipped his head to the side, watching her quietly, and the pretense was gone.

“I’m sorry, love. I’d never wish anything like that on you. Or her.”

He meant it. His sincerity felt uncomfortable and painful, like biting on the prongs of a fork. Marie studied her fingernails. How worn they were. How she had started biting them after so many years.

“Thank you,” she said, and the terseness of it, that same glancing blow of sincerity, that was her gift to him. The most she could give, the most she had ever given. She thought she heard his heart beat loud for a second, strong, and remembered how she had loved him once until she discovered that his heart was as hollow as his bird bones.

“I came to ask you why,” she said, and was proud to hear her voice loud and clear. “Why would somebody do this to her?”

“Listen, baby, I’m a lover, not a . . . ”

“Don’t you dare,” she whispered, and Lowell cut off in mid word. He stared at his ex-wife, whose face had changed and elongated as she snarled, her nose nearly touching the thick plastic between them.

“Don’t you dare. You tell me. You tell me right now, because I am going to hunt that monster down and I’m going to kill him. I’ll skin him alive. I’ll beat him with every heavy object I can find until his bones are shards held together by a bag of skin. And then I’m going to really make him suffer. So you tell me. You were the original Wolf, the original monster. You tell me what he saw in her and why he chose my little girl. You owe me this much, you filthy piece of human trash. Help me now or I swear to you . . . ”

She didn’t have to finish. The shining radiance of her countenance did it for her.

“You’re crazy enough to do this,” he said. There was wonder and something that almost tasted like pride in his voice.

“I put you behind bars. He won’t be so lucky.”

Lowell grinned, and again she could see the happy beginning of the relationship years before she realized he had bedded both mother and daughter on the same night.

“I believe you. And she deserves it. She’s a good girl. None of this is her fault. Or yours.”

She looked away again. Lowell tapped on the glass.

“It isn’t, Marie. Guys like us? As much as I’d like to deny it, we’re no good. Straight wicked since the day we were born. Some part of us is all twisted up, and not even the loving of a good woman such as yourself can fix it.”

He was telling the truth. She could see it. See how much it took out of him, how hard it was to say. She almost wanted to put her hand on the glass, to have him do the same, but she still hated him so incredibly much.

“That’s what ya gotta know,” he continued. “It ain’t you, but we’ll swear up and down that it is. You made us do it. Your baby girl enticed us. You were cold. She was young and her body was hot. It’s how we get things done, you understand. How we live with ourselves. Because if you or she didn’t drive us to it, then what does it mean? It means we’re monsters. It means we’re sick, dirty old men who prey on lovely young girls. And nobody wants to be that. Nobody. I don’t care how rotten you are, what you’ve done. Nobody wants to be that low.”

This time he put his hand against the glass. She didn’t raise hers to his, and he nodded to her.

“I’ll tell you everything I know. How I felt about her. How this guy maybe felt about her. Everything about creeps like me. I hope you bring him down, Marie. She was a real good girl. You’d better get him. And if somehow he manages to live through you, put him in here with me. The guys here don’t like baby killers. I get reamed every day and all I did was mess with a little girl. Someone actually kills one? He won’t last long.”

He talked. He talked. Marie nodded and took notes and swallowed the bile back down and nodded some more. Her stomach hurt and her eyes burned. Her throat felt too big, too tight, like there wasn’t enough air. And there wasn’t because she kept breathing it in with every gasp, with every painful expansion of her greedy lungs, that tried to hold onto the air that was sucked from the room while he went on and on about his sweet Aleta. The opportunities he took when she wasn’t looking. The way his eyes roved around the room until they fell on her. She was a light. Dappled sunshine in a storm. Something bright and pure to treasure and corrupt and own forever.

“But this guy,” he said, and his face grew tight, “he isn’t about love at all. He’s about hurt and depravity and degradation. Is he a pedophile straight up? I don’t know. Does he like to terrify and torture? I think so. Get him, Marie.” His glowed in a strange way, matching the tiny swatch of red fabric in Marie’s purse. She slipped her fingers and crumpled them around it.

“Get him.”

“I will,” she said, and they were united, she and this monster. They had one purpose.

She would find him, this murderer. She would bring down The Wolf. The Original Monster had showed her how.