CHAPTER 2
Lisa Milner’s version of Pine Cottage was a sorority house in Indiana. One long-ago February night, a man named Stephen Leibman knocked on the front door. He was a college drop-out who lived with his dad. Portly. Had a face as jiggly and jaundiced as chicken fat.
The sorority sister who answered the door found him on the front steps holding a hunting knife. One minute later, she was dead.
Leibman dragged the body inside, locked all the doors and cut the lights and phone line. What followed was roughly an hour of carnage that brought an end to nine young women.
Lisa Milner had come close to making it an even ten.
During the slaughter, she took refuge in the bedroom of a sorority sister, cowering alone inside a closet, hugging clothes that weren’t hers and praying the madman wouldn’t find her.
Eventually, he did.
Lisa laid eyes on Stephen Leibman when he ripped open the closet door. She saw first the knife, then his face, both dripping blood. After a stab to the shoulder, she managed to knee him in the groin and flee the room. She had reached the first floor and was making her way to the front door when Leibman caught up to her, knife jabbing.
She took four stab wounds to her chest and stomach, plus a five-inch slice down the arm she had raised to defend herself. One more thrust of the blade would have finished her off. But Lisa, screaming in pain and dizzy from blood loss, somehow grabbed Leibman’s ankle. He fell. The knife skittered. Lisa grabbed it and shoved it hilt-deep into his gut. Stephen Leibman bled out lying next to her on the floor.
Details. They flow freely when they’re not yours.
I was seven when it happened. It’s my first memory of actually noticing something on the news. I couldn’t help it. Not with my mother standing before the console television, a hand over her mouth, repeating the same two words. Sweet Jesus. Sweet Jesus.
What I saw on that TV scared and confused and upset me. The weeping bystanders. The convoy of tarp-covered stretchers slipping beneath yellow tape criss-crossing the door. The splash of blood bright against the Indiana snow. It was the moment I realized that bad things could happen, that evil existed in the world.
When I began to cry, my father scooped me up and carried me into the kitchen. As my tears dried to salt, he placed a menagerie of bowls on the counter and filled them with flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. He gave me a spoon and let me mix them all together. My first baking lesson.
There’s such a thing as too much sweetness, Quincy, he told me. All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.
Now the only taste in my mouth is a dry sourness. I dump more sugar into my tea and drain the cup. It doesn’t help. The sugar rush only counteracts the Xanax, which is finally starting to work its magic. They clash deep inside me, making me antsy.
“When did it happen?” I ask Coop once my initial shock reduces to a simmering sense of disbelief. “How did it happen?”
“Last night. Muncie PD discovered her body around midnight. She had killed herself.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
I say it loud enough to get the attention of my au pair lookalike seated a table away. She glances up from her iPhone, head tilted like a cocker spaniel’s.
“Suicide?” I say, the word bitter on my tongue. “I thought she was happy. I mean, she seemed happy.”
Lisa’s voice is still in my head.
You can’t change what’s happened, Quincy. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.
“They’re waiting on the tox report to see if she had been drinking or was on drugs,” Coop says.
“So this could have been an accident?”
“It was no accident. Her wrists were slit.”
My heart stops for a moment. I’m conscious of the empty pause where a pulse should be. Sadness pours into the void, filling me so quickly I start to feel dizzy.
“I want details,” I say.
“You don’t,” Coop says. “It won’t change anything.”
“It’s information. That’s better than nothing.”
Coop stares into his coffee, as if examining his bright eyes in the muddy reflection. Eventually, he says, “Here’s what I know: Lisa called 911 at quarter to midnight, apparently with second thoughts.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She hung up immediately. Dispatch traced the call and sent a pair of blues to her house. The door was unlocked, so they let themselves in. That’s when they found her. She was in the bathtub. Her phone was in the water with her. Probably slipped from her hands.”
Coop looks out the window. He’s tired, I can tell. And no doubt worried I might one day try something similar. But that thought never occurred to me, even when I was back in the hospital being fed through a tube. I reach across the table, aiming for his hands. He pulls them away before I can grasp them.
“When did you hear about it?” I ask.
“A couple hours ago. Got a call from an acquaintance with the Indiana State Police. We keep in touch.”
I don’t need to ask Coop how he knows a trooper in Indiana. Massacre survivors aren’t the only ones who need support systems.
“She thought it’d be good to warn you,” he says. “For when word gets out.”
The press. Of course. I like to picture them as ravenous vultures, slick innards dripping from their beaks.
“I’m not going to talk to them.”
This again gets the attention of the au pair, who looks up, eyes narrowed. I stare her down until she sets her iPhone on the table and pretends to fuss with the toddler in her care.
“You don’t have to,” Coop says. “But at the very least you should consider releasing a statement of condolence. Those tabloid guys are going to hunt you down like dogs. Might as well toss them a bone before they get the chance.”
“Why do I need to say anything?”
“You know why,” Coop says.
“Why can’t Samantha do it?”
“Because she’s still off the grid. I doubt she’s going to pop out of hiding after all these years.”
“Lucky girl.”
“That just leaves you,” Coop says. “That’s why I wanted to come and tell you the news in person. Now, I know I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to, but it’s not a bad idea to start being friendly with the press. With Lisa dead and Samantha gone, you’re all they’ve got.”
I reach into my purse and grab my phone. It’s been quiet. No new calls. No new texts. Nothing but a few dozen work-related emails I didn’t have time to read this morning. I shut off the phone—a temporary fix. The press will sniff me out anyway. Coop is right about that. They won’t be able to resist trying to get a quote from the only accessible Final Girl.
We are, after all, their creation.
Final Girl is technically film terminology, used to describe the last woman standing at the end of a horror movie. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Even before Pine Cottage, I never liked to watch scary movies because of the fake blood, the rubber knives, the characters who made decisions so stupid I guiltily thought they deserved to die.
Only what happened to us wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Our lives. The blood wasn’t fake. The knives were steel and nightmare-sharp. And those who died definitely didn’t deserve it.
But somehow we screamed louder, ran faster, fought harder. We survived.
I don’t know where the nickname was first used to describe Lisa Milner. A newspaper in the Midwest, probably. Close to where she lived. Some reporter there tried to get creative about the sorority house killings and the nickname was the end result. It only spread because it was casually morbid enough for the Internet to pick up. All those nascent clickbait websites starving for attention jumped all over it. Not wanting to miss a trend, print outlets followed. Tabloids first, then newspapers and, finally, magazines.
Within days, the transformation was complete. Lisa Milner was no longer simply a massacre survivor. She was a straight-from-a-horror-flick Final Girl.
It happened again with Samantha Boyd four years later and then with me eight years after that. While there were other multiple homicides during those years, none quite got the nation’s attention like ours. We were, for whatever reason, the lucky ones who survived when no one else had. Pretty girls covered in blood. As such, we were each in turn treated like something rare and exotic. A beautiful bird that spreads its bright wings only once a decade. Or that flower that stinks like rotting meat whenever it deigns to bloom.
The attention showered upon me in the months after Pine Cottage veered from kind to bizarre. Sometimes it was a combination of both, such as the letter I received from a childless couple offering to pay my college tuition. I wrote them back, turning down their generous offer. I never heard from them again.
Other correspondence was more disturbing. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard from lonely Goth boys or prison inmates saying they want to date me, marry me, cradle me in their tattooed arms. An auto mechanic from Nevada once volunteered to chain me up in his basement to protect me from further harm. He was startling in his sincerity, as if he truly thought holding me captive was the most benevolent of good deeds.
Then there was the letter claiming I needed to be finished off, that it was my destiny to be butchered. It wasn’t signed. There was no return address. I gave it to Coop. Just in case.
I start to feel jittery. It’s the sugar and the Xanax, zipping through my body like the latest club drug. Coop senses my change in mood and says, “I know this is a lot to handle.”
I nod.
“You want to get out of here?”
I nod again.
“Then let’s go.”
As I stand, the au pair again pretends to busy herself with the toddler, refusing to look my way. Maybe she recognizes me and it makes her uncomfortable. It’s happened before.
When I pass, two steps behind Coop, I snatch her iPhone off the table without her noticing.
It’s slipped deep into my pocket before I’m out the door.
Coop walks me home, his body positioned slightly in front of mine, like a Secret Service agent. Both of us scan the sidewalk for members of the press. None appear.
When we reach my building, Coop stops just shy of the maroon awning that shields the front door. The building is pre-war, elegant and spacious. My neighbors consist of blue-haired society ladies and fashionable gay gentlemen of a certain age. Every time Coop sees it, I’m sure he wonders how a baking blogger and a public defender can afford to rent an apartment on the Upper West Side.
The truth is, we can’t. Not on Jeff’s salary, which is laughably small, and certainly not on the money my website takes in.
The apartment is in my name. I own it. The funds came from a phalanx of lawsuits filed after Pine Cottage. Led by Janelle’s stepfather, the victims’ parents sued anyone and everyone possible. The mental hospital that allowed Him to escape. His doctors. The pharmaceutical companies responsible for the many antidepressants and antipsychotics that had clashed in His brain. Even the manufacturer of the hospital door with the malfunctioning lock through which He had escaped.
All of them settled out of court. They knew a few million dollars was worth avoiding the bad PR they’d get from going up against a bunch of grieving families. Even a settlement wasn’t enough to spare some of them. One of the antipsychotics was eventually pulled from the market. The mental hospital, Blackthorn Psychiatric, closed its faulty doors within a year.
The only people who couldn’t shell out were His parents, who had gone broke paying for His treatment. Fine by me. I had no desire to punish that dazed and moist-eyed couple for His sins. Besides, my share of the other settlements was more than enough. An accountant friend of my father helped me invest most of it while stocks were still cheap. I bought the apartment after college, just as the housing market was recovering from its colossal pop. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen with a breakfast nook that’s become my makeshift studio. I got it for a song.
“Do you want to come up?” I ask Coop. “You’ve never seen the place.”
“Maybe some other time.”
Another thing he always says but never means.
“I suppose you need to go,” I say.
“It’s a long drive home. You going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Once the shock wears off.”
“Call or text if you need anything.”
That one he definitely means. Coop’s been willing to drop everything to see me ever since the morning after Pine Cottage. The morning I, in the throes of pain and grief, had wailed, I want the officer! Please let me see him! He was there within half an hour.
Ten years later, he’s still here, giving me a farewell nod. Once I return the gesture, Coop shields his baby blues with a pair of Ray-Bans and walks away, eventually disappearing among the other pedestrians.
Inside the apartment, I head straight for the kitchen and take a second Xanax. The grape soda that follows is a rush of sweetness that, coupled with the sugar from the tea, makes my teeth ache.
Yet I keep on drinking, taking several gentle sips as I pull the stolen iPhone from my pocket. A brief examination of the phone tells me that its former owner’s name is Kim and that she doesn’t use any of its security features. I can see every call, web search and text, including a recent one from a squarejaw named Zach.
Up for a little fun tonight?
For kicks, I text him back. Sure
The phone beeps in my hand. Another text from Zach. He’s sent a picture of his dick.
Charming.
I switch off the phone. A precaution. Kim and I may look similar, but our ringtones differ wildly. Then I turn the phone over, staring at the silvery back that’s smudged with fingerprints. I wipe it clean until I can see my reflection, as distorted as if I were looking into a funhouse mirror.
This will do.
I finger the gold chain that’s always around my neck. Hanging from it is a small key, which opens the only kitchen drawer kept locked at all times. Jeff assumes it’s for important website paperwork. I let him believe that.
Inside the drawer is a jangling menagerie of glinting metal. A shiny tube of lipstick and a chunky gold bracelet. Several spoons. A silver compact plucked from the nurse’s station when I left the hospital following Pine Cottage. I used it to stare at my reflection during the long drive home, making sure I was actually still there. Now I study the warped reflections looking back at me and feel that same sense of reassurance.
Yes, I still exist.
I deposit the iPhone with the other objects, close and lock the drawer, then put the key back around my neck.
It’s my secret, warm against my breastbone.