Robbie, who did attend the funeral, told Charlie that maybe she should have gone. That it wasn’t so bad. That the casket was closed, a family friend had sung “Somewhere” from West Side Story, and that the only moment of drama happened graveside as Maddy was lowered into the ground. That’s when Maddy’s grandmother, overcome with grief, tilted her head back and screamed into the blue September sky.
“I think it would have helped you,” he said.
Charlie didn’t want or need that kind of help. Besides, she knew that, in time, she’d be okay. A heart can only grieve for so long. That was what Nana Norma told her a few months after her parents died. Charlie knew it to be true. She still missed her parents. Not a day went by when she didn’t think of them. But her grief, which at the time had felt so heavy she thought she’d be crushed by its weight, had transformed into something easier to bear. She had assumed the same would happen with Maddy.
It didn’t. The pain she felt continued to be as heart-shattering as the day she learned Maddy was dead. And she couldn’t take it anymore. Not the grief. Not the guilt. Not the squinty-eyed looks of pity cast her way during the rare occasions she went to class. Which is why she’s leaving Olyphant. Even though she knows fleeing the scene of her crime won’t make her feel any less guilty, Charlie nevertheless hopes being back home with Nana Norma, lost in a haze of old movies and chocolate chip cookies, will somehow make it easier to deal with.
“Yeah, I thought that was you,” Josh says after Charlie’s brutal assessment of herself. “I read about what happened in the paper. Do you want to, I don’t know, talk about it?”
Charlie turns toward the passenger-side window, now fogged up again. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You’re dropping out of college because of it, so, yeah, I think there is.”
Charlie sniffs. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about.”
“I’m going to anyway,” Josh says. “First, I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a horrible thing that happened. And a horrible thing you went through and are still going through. What was your friend’s name again? Tammy?”
“Maddy,” Charlie says. “Short for Madeline.”
“Right. Just like Charlie is short for Charles.”
Josh gives her a look, pleased with himself for steering them back to an earlier joke. Charlie’s stony expression doesn’t change, and Josh moves on.
“They never caught the guy who did it, right?” he says.
“No.”
Charlie shivers slightly at the acknowledgment that, thanks to her, the man who killed Maddy hasn’t been caught, may never be caught, may spend the rest of his fucking life reveling in how he’d gotten away with murder not once but three times.
That the police know of.
So far.
The idea that the Campus Killer could—and most likely will—strike again prompts another fearful shiver.
“Does it worry you that they never caught him?”
“It makes me angry,” Charlie says.
After the initial shock and grief had worn off, Charlie turned to anger pretty quickly. She spent all those sleepless nights seething over the fact that Maddy was dead and her killer wasn’t and how utterly wrong that was. Sometimes she’d spend all night pacing the room, envisioning B-movie scenarios in which she took her revenge. In these mental movies, the Campus Killer was always the dark, human-shaped blank she’d seen outside the bar, onto which she inflicted every act of violence she could think of.
Shooting. Strangling. Beheading.
One night, the movie in her mind had her stabbing the Campus Killer in the chest and plucking out his heart, which glistened on the tip of her knife, still beating. But when she looked down at the body, it wasn’t a human-shaped blank she saw. It was someone she knew all too well.
Herself.
After that one, Charlie started planning her escape.
“I think I’d be worried,” Josh says. “I mean, he’s still out there. Somewhere. He might have seen you, right? He might know who you are and try to come for you next.”
Charlie shivers again, this one more intense than the others. A shudder. One she feels all the way down to her core. Because Josh is right. The Campus Killer probably did see her. Maybe he even knows who she is. And although Charlie saw him, too, she wouldn’t know it was him even if he was sitting right next to her.
“That’s not why I’m leaving school,” she says.
“So it’s a guilty conscience, then.”
Charlie says nothing, allowing Josh to add, “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“I don’t.”
“But you are. It’s not like it was your fault.”
“I saw him,” Charlie says. “Yet I can’t identify him. Which does make it my fault. Even if I could identify him, there’s still the fact that I abandoned Maddy. If I had stayed with her, none of this would have happened.”
“I don’t blame you for any of that. I’m not judging you. I guess you think others do—”
“I know they do,” Charlie says, thinking about that call with Maddy’s mother, how afterward she’d felt hollow. How she still feels as empty as a football, to quote Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.
“Why? Were people mean to you?”
“No.”
If anything, everyone was suffocatingly kind. All those weepy-eyed girls coming to her door with food and cards and flowers. There were invitations to trade dorm rooms, to go on group outings (“There’s safety in numbers!”), to join a prayer circle. Charlie declined them all. She didn’t want their sympathy. She didn’t deserve it.
“Then maybe you should stop beating yourself up over something you couldn’t control.”
Charlie’s heard it all before, from literally everyone except Maddy’s family. And she’s tired of it. Tired of being told what to feel, that it wasn’t her fault, that she needs to forgive herself. So tired of it all that a lump of anger explodes in her chest like a firecracker—white-hot and shimmering. Fueled by its burn, she whips away from the window and, practically snarling at Josh, yells, “And maybe you should shut the fuck up about something that has nothing to do with you!”
The outburst surprises Josh, who’s so startled he sends the car shuddering off the road for a few jarring seconds. Not surprised is Charlie, who always suspected such an explosion would arrive at some point. She just didn’t think it would be in a car with a man she doesn’t know, her voice booming through the pine-scented interior. Now that it’s happened, she’s left breathless, shaken, and completely ashamed of herself. She slumps back in her seat, suddenly exhausted.