“Get out, Tessie.” He slapped me. “Close the door.”
I did.
I don’t know how many days passed. Eventually, he took me in to see her again. She wasn’t screaming anymore. I wasn’t sure when she’d stopped. They all did eventually though. They learned—just like I had—that it’s for the best to keep him happy. If you keep Edward happy, it’s better.
“Do you see how good she is, Tess?” Edward pointed at her.
“Yes, Edward.”
I sat on the toilet lid. The girl was silent now. I thought about telling her that she could rest. He was calm now. Soon, she’d get to leave. She could go home now that Edward was calm.
“You need to be good.” He motioned at the girl in the tub. “She’s good now.” He looked at her. “Aren’t you?”
Mutely, she stared at him.
“If you were good enough, I wouldn’t have needed her,” Edward reminded me.
“I want to be good.”
“But you weren’t, and she had to bleed because of it. You did this, Tessie. You made me need to hurt her.” He walked away, leaving us in there.
The girl looked at me. “Help me. Please?”
“You’ll get to go home soon,” I promised her.
She laughed. It was a strange choking sound. “Help me.”
“I can give you a blanket. Or a sandwich. If Edward says . . .”
“Help me,” she repeated, louder this time.
And Edward was back.
She watched him, cringing back into the tub.
“We need to let her sleep now, Tess. She’s tired.” He held out his hand to me. There was blood on it, but there was often blood on Edward when he was in these moods.
I took his hand. “Yes, Edward.”
He led me to our bed. “You need to be a good wife, Tessie.”
“Yes, Edward.”
“Do you want me to have to bring home other girls?” he sat on the bed next to me. When he was like this, when he was gentle, I could almost forget about the other things. I wanted to forget.
I shook my head. “She doesn’t want to be here.” I swallowed. “I want to be good enough.”
“You can sleep.” Edward smiled. “I’ll take her home tonight.”
23
Juliana
Getting off the plane in New Orleans feels like a letdown. An anonymous airport. Another Southern city. I want this to feel significant, but it feels like any other trip I’ve taken. I want today to feel like the start of the end, the solution to finding the Creeper, the stop of the deaths. It doesn’t. It feels like any other day. Worse perhaps. I’ve spent years with these girls on my table because of him. Sometimes I think I know them better than I know people in my daily life. The possibility of finding one of them alive rather than dead seems impossible.
I feel uncertain. Andrew has left me unsettled, and right now, I don’t feel like I know Teresa Morris at all. The woman in those photographs shares little with the one that her mother spent hours talking about in interviews.
It doesn’t take a second glance to know she’s experienced things that haunt her. Confirming that isn’t surprising. I’ve seen the scars on the bodies of the Creeper’s victims. I’ve had nightmares simply from seeing the M.E. reports. If she was with him—and the tattoo she shares with them says she was—then how is she here? Is he here? Something about her is different.
I don’t know how to find her or what to say when I do.
I grab my bag and head out to the taxi stand outside the airport. The air has a familiar heaviness, a humid weightiness akin to the heart of a Carolina summer. It holds scents captive in the air in a way that makes everything linger: an older woman with too much perfume, a man who has been traveling too long, his clothes tainted with sweat and gin, the exhaust of a car in need of a tune-up. The scents twist together as they tend to do in thick Southern air. I don’t know if it’s the sensory overload or my rattled nerves that has my stomach in distress. Either way, I feel queasy as I slip into a taxi.
The ride toward the far eastern border of the French Quarter isn’t long enough for me to figure out answers I couldn’t come up with on my flight here or the hours before that when I paced the RDU airport waiting for the flight. There is no polite way to walk up to a woman and ask if she’s been tortured by a killer. There is no kind way to ask if she knows her mother is dead. There are no right words to say to someone who has been victimized.
Maybe I can get Teresa to come with me to talk to the police.
I send a quick text to Uncle Micky: “In New Orleans.” And then I send a slightly longer one to Henry: “In New Orleans. Safe. Following a lead.”
If I let myself think on it, I will have to ask why I can tell Henry but not Andrew—or why I didn’t tell Henry before I boarded a plane. I file those thoughts away for another time, one when I’m not in a strange city seeking a woman I’d presumed dead.
Teresa is here. That means she’s not his captive. It also means there is another Ana, another Courtney, another Maria out there somewhere. The killer has a woman either as a captive or picked to be his victim. Men like him don’t stop until they’re dead or caught.
I stare out the window of the taxi as the driver takes me into the French Quarter. I need something in my mind’s eye that isn’t filled with the faces of his victims, of shallow graves, or letters from a killer.
“How do I find Jackson Square?” I ask the driver.
I see his grin in the rear-view mirror. “First time here?”
I nod.
“You can’t miss it, darlin.” He’s gentle, but he has the sort of laughter riding in his tone that tells me that my question was ridiculous. “Right smack in the middle of everything in the French Quarter.”
He looks at me again, and I apparently look like a country mouse in the city because he asks, “Are you meeting friends here?”
“I’m here looking for someone,” I tell him, feeling foolish at the thought that I ought to explain myself to a random taxi driver, but he has the look of someone’s grandfather. I have a flash of the Southern gender rules that I usually find tedious as I add, “I’m not here to drink or party.”
He nods.
“There’s this woman. She disappeared, and she was here. There’s a picture of her here in your city.” I find the picture on my phone and lean forward, showing him. “She’s lost, and . . . I need to find her.”
It sounds impossible saying it aloud. I’m trying to find one woman in the entire city. She might not even live here. She might have been passing through. In some ways I’m no closer to finding Teresa than I was before.
“A lot of people get lost here,” he tells me. “Not so many get found.”
Without meeting her, I already know that Teresa is the sort of lost that might not be able to stay found, but I need her to surface enough that I can figure out how to stop the Creeper.
The little apartment I’m renting on Esplanade—one of the ubiquitous short-term rentals in the city—isn’t what I’d call nice or even comfortable. The walls have the sort of stains that say the owners aren’t even trying to hide the damage. It’s filthy in the way of old forgotten houses, dirt layered to the point of creating raised marks on the wooden floor, and water stains on the ceiling. Last minute options aren’t great. It was either a rental with a kitchen or a room in a soulless hotel. I like having a kitchen.