The noise of the river fills Laura’s ears. Her muscles strain as she tries to kick and claw at Tony, but he’s bigger and stronger—that goes without saying. What’s worse is the strange energy he exudes that seems to fill his scrawny limbs with a near-supernatural strength. He pins her down. His eyes are completely wild.
Nobody is going to miss me, Laura thinks. The thought comes out of nowhere and feels oddly calming. She pictures it with uncanny lucidity: the sun dipping toward the horizon, spilling magical colors she’ll never see over the riverbank that’s now empty and quiet. The clouds creep in from the direction of the city and cover the night sky, lashing the riverbank with rain that washes away the last traces of the struggle, smoothing the deep tracks her kicking heels left in the dirt, peeling off the layers of disturbed fallen leaves. Somewhere far away, she can’t even tell in which direction, her mother will turn on the lights in the darkening mobile home, grab yet another beer from the fridge, and idly wonder what the hell Laura is up to this time. At some point she’ll call somebody, but it won’t change anything because it’ll be too late. The wild, animalistic creature choking the life out of her will have reverted back to Tony Bergmann, and no one in their right mind will dare accuse him of anything. Laura O’Malley will have run away. Just like that other woman once did. In another ten years, they’ll be telling wild tales about her by the bonfire while her bones rot in some shallow grave not too far away in these very woods.
Then, inexplicably, his grip around her neck loosens. Not enough for her to breathe freely, but just enough for her to breathe. “Tony,” she chokes out.
His face looms over her, chalky, his mouth hanging open. She realizes with shock and dismay that tears are running wet tracks down his cheeks.
“Tony,” she pleads again. “Let me go, Tony, please.”
His face contorts in a grimace. A string of snot runs from his right nostril onto his lip. He looks as pathetic as he is terrifying, she thinks. His voice, when he speaks, can’t maintain a timbre; it cracks, going from growl to high-pitched animalistic whine and back. “I can’t!”
“Let me go, Tony!”
“I can’t! She needs a sacrifice! Animals won’t do. She needs it, then she’ll leave me alone. She’ll leave us all alone.”
“Please don’t kill me,” Laura begs. He’s mad, she realizes that now, he’s completely mad, and trying to reason with him is useless.
He raises his hand and slugs her across the face. The pain is a shock, even though she thought nothing could possibly shock her.
“Shut up!” he yelps. “Shut up, shut up! This is hard enough already!”
She regains the ability to speak, just barely. “Then let me go! Nobody has to die!”
Suddenly, he goes motionless. He’s still straddling her, his weight effectively pinning her to the ground, but his grip on her neck loosens. Air rushes into her lungs. She’s never felt such relief.
But Tony only throws his head back and laughs. The sound is manic, barely human, completely demented. It makes her blood run colder than the just-thawed river many feet below.
“Somebody,” he says at last. She thinks for a moment that some semblance of sanity has returned to his eyes. “Somebody has to die, or it’ll never be over.”
His hands wrap around her neck again. He doesn’t notice that she’d managed to free her arm.
Laura frantically feels around the wet earth within her reach. For a moment, she’s convinced it was all pointless. There’s nothing to reach for. Her hand grasps only soggy fallen leaves and dirt that squelches between her fingers. She claws at the earth in utter despair when her fingernails hit something.
This little rock, the size of an apple, will have to do. It’s all she’s got. She grips it tightly with her numb fingers and raises her arm, concentrating all the strength she has left in this one movement on which she’s certain her life depends.
She brings it down on the side of Tony’s face.
It startles him. His head snaps to the side. Laura kicks out, bucks, and he rolls off her.
Fighting dizziness as oxygen finally reaches her lungs, Laura gets up to a crouch. Tony rolls in the dirt, clutching the side of his face. Laura thinks she sees blood seeping through his fingers but she can’t be sure, and she can’t afford to linger and find out. Before he can get ahold of himself, before he can regain the upper hand for good, she brings the stone down on his head. Again and again and again.
She doesn’t look where she’s hitting him. The stone meets hard resistance, the bones of his skull, she assumes, and she keeps hitting until she hears a sickening crack. It seems to travel through her hand and up her arm, momentarily paralyzing her.
Then she stumbles back, away from her fallen enemy.
Silence descends on the riverbank, full of only the white noise of the water and Laura’s frenzied breathing. Even the birds have stopped singing.
Laura attempts to get back on her feet, an attempt doomed to failure. Her head spins too much. She’s still clutching the rock for dear life—she doesn’t think she could get her hand to unclench and release it even if she tried. But she sees now that Tony isn’t getting up again. His face is bloodied. There’s a mess of blood and flaps of skin and what she believes to be bone, a sight that makes her retch and heave except there’s nothing to throw up.
Once she gets herself under control again, she looks at him only to realize he hasn’t moved at all. She tries to see whether his chest is rising and falling but her vision swims and keeps going blurry.
And anyway, does it matter at this point?
She’d bashed Tony Bergmann’s brains out. She, Laura O’Malley, just smashed Tony Bergmann’s skull with a rock. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how it looks. Or to figure out what happens next.
Finally emerging from her stupor, she has the presence of mind to hurl the rock into the river below. She doesn’t even hear it splash as the murky water swallows it up without a trace.
Her gaze pivots back to Tony. His jaw hangs slack, and she becomes fixated on it to avoid looking at the rest.
Now what?
The more she tries to think, the harder it becomes to keep her thoughts straight. Her first instinct is to run, to just get the hell out of here. By the time someone finds the body, she’ll be far away.
Except she’ll never get far enough away, and she knows it.
As her thoughts come to a standstill, something else kicks in, some kind of survival instinct. She grabs Tony’s ankles and drags the body down the riverbank. She thought he’d be heavier and is shocked at how easy this is. It seems impossible that just moments ago, this was her ferocious attacker. He looks like any other teenager. Except for the hole in his skull, that is.
He slides easily along the muddy bank until he’s close enough to the edge for Laura to push him over with ease. He rolls down the slope until he sinks gently into the river. Only the top of his head and his shoulders are now visible through the current.
He slipped, Laura tells herself, he fell in, and he drowned. That’s what everyone will think.
She takes care to erase any traces of the struggle to the best of her ability. She makes sure she left nothing behind. Everything seems to be in order.
When she puts her hand in her pocket, she’s a little shocked to discover the tangle of jewelry still at the bottom, proof that all of this hadn’t been a fevered dream.
TWENTY
2017
