Instead she keeps seeing Luke.
She sees the hurt in his eyes before he steeled himself with anger and stormed out the door. Then she remembers his parting shot, his accusation that she was caving in to Dylan’s plans and not resisting them, and her anger shoots through the veins of her guilt like ice. Then, as sleep starts to tug at her again, the thaw begins, and the process repeats itself.
Hurt, rage, thaw. Hurt, rage, thaw.
Marty’s right. Luke doesn’t know her well enough to see inside her mind, to peek into her soul. If he’s right—even if this new plan means she’s giving in to Dylan’s deceit—he’s not the one to make that call.
Enough of this debate.
She swings her feet to the floor, pads into the kitchen, and makes short work of the sandwich Marty saved for her. He’s sawing logs in his bedroom, which can mean only one thing. A peek out the nearest window confirms it. Two of Marty’s buddies are standing watch. Sitting watch is more like it. They’re in a dark pickup truck in the driveway. Beneath the cloudless, star-filled sky, with the town twinkling below, they look like a moody California postcard.
She pulls some sodas from the fridge, drops them in a recyclable grocery bag she finds under the sink—two diet, two regular, just in case either guy’s watching his sugar intake.
When she knocks on the roof of the car, they both jump.
She’s surprised to find them awake and talking. The dashboard clock says it’s almost 2:00 a.m. After she shows them what’s in the bag, they step from the truck, introduce themselves with wide-eyed looks and tentative handshakes, taking the sodas like they’re unexpected offerings from a queen.
The wiry, balding one’s named Dale. He’s got dense tattoos peeking out from the sleeves of his AC/DC T-shirt. His partner, for the night at least, is named Lonnie. He’s older, but at first he doesn’t look it because he sports a mane of gray hair that’s not quite as healthy and full as Marty’s, but almost. The guy smells so strongly of cigarettes, Charlotte feels like she just took a puff of one. She knows a bunch of Marty’s crew, but these guys are newbies. She’s not sure if that means they’re newly sober or just new to the area. The thought that Marty might feel compelled to enlist the aid of AA members who are closer to their checkered pasts than he is makes her stomach knot.
For a while they just talk in the darkness. They sip their sodas hesitantly, give her looks both wary and curious that would probably make her uncomfortable in broad daylight. It’s empty chitchat, for the most part. About their lives. Where they lived before Altamira (Dale, Saint Louis; Lonnie, San Diego, Indio, and West Covina). For the most part, they don’t touch on the big stuff. The heavy stuff. Like whether or not they’re sober, and if they are, for how long. But the talk, idle as it is, soothes her, and the deference they show her doesn’t feel half-bad, either.
By the time she’s bid them good night and is heading back to the trailer, she’s thinking about how many conversations she’s had just like that her entire life. Conversations with folks who already know her story but are trying not to let it show. She always tries to do her best during those talks; meaning she tries not to twitch or say anything neurotic, or psychotic, or even forlorn. She always tries to look, for lack of a better word, healthy. Well. And even with everything that’s going on now, she reverted right back to form with Dale and Lonnie. Big smiles, safe, polite questions. Some of it fueled by genuine curiosity, most of it driven by a desire to appear stable and sane in the eyes of two men she doesn’t know.
Good luck with your treatment, Burning Girl.
The second she steps back inside, Luke’s words slap her across the face. Maybe because she’s standing in roughly the same place she was when he spoke them.
There’s a rustling off to her left. Blinking back sleep and holding one of the biggest guns she’s ever seen, Marty emerges from the bedroom, hiking up his jeans with his non-gun hand.
“You OK?” he grumbles.
“Fine. Just bringing the guys some sodas.”
Marty nods, gives her a thumbs-up. Draws his bedroom door gently shut behind him, leaving her once again with other men’s voices ringing in her head.
First Dylan. Now Luke.
Well, if she’s being technical about it, first Luke, then Dylan, then a second version of Luke, who claimed to be better than the first Luke. But in the end, they’re both men who barged their way into her head, insisting they know her better than she knows herself. Trying, she suspects, to bend her behavior to suit their own fears. She knows what makes Luke tick, or at least she’s pretty sure. For now Dylan remains a mystery, and she’s afraid if she learns too much, she’ll start making excuses for the bastard. Because sometimes that’s easier than admitting you’ve been betrayed.
There’s only one way to keep the voices of both men from hijacking her every other thought. She has to make sure her own voice is louder. In her mind, at least. And she can think of only one way to do that right now.
In a corner of the living room, there’s a compact desk Marty’s turned into an office area. It’s just a square piece of wood attached to the wall that folds up almost like a Murphy bed. Underneath it are some file boxes he’s pushed into a crazy arrangement that must give his legs some room to move. It’s more than enough for her. In the desk drawer she looks for some paper. She’s pleasantly surprised to find a couple of Mead college-ruled notebooks, one of which is completely blank.
When she opens the cover to the first blank page, the impetus to turn her thoughts into ink gets lodged somewhere just above her wrist.
The reason she’s never kept a journal is because she grew up terrified her father would find it and publish it somehow. By the time she moved in with Luanne, this fear had spoiled the act forever. Privacy, she was convinced, existed only inside her head. Diaries were for normal girls.
But now her need to tell her own story is stronger than it’s ever been. Maybe because Luke tried to force his own definition of that story on her, and Dylan’s trying to bend it to an ending he’s designed.
The memories overwhelm her now.
Where does she begin?
Maybe with the road trip she took after she won the settlement from her father.
It wasn’t exactly a restful vacation. After the victory, and after she’d staked out a little town in Arizona as her new home, she’d driven to the grave sites of every Banning victim who’d died on the farm while she was there, including her own mother.
If she couldn’t find out what the victim’s favorite flower was, she brought them white roses, and she sat with each of them for a good, long while, as if her new name, her new identity, gave her the space and the quiet to grieve them the way they deserved. They were all from the South, either tourists who’d unwittingly wandered into the Bannings’ hunting ground in the Chattahoochee National Forest or, like her mother, were on their way to visit family in a nearby city or town like Atlanta, Chattanooga, or Asheville.
She started in New Orleans, with Cassie Murdoch and Jane Blaire, best friends buried together in one of those aboveground tombs so popular in the city. Cassie loved yellow roses; Jane was a big fan of peonies. She left them a little vase of each.
Then she headed due east, to Pensacola and the grave of Jennifer Albright, a flight attendant from Augusta, Georgia. If the Dateline special was to be believed, the fiancé Jennifer left behind ended up being a wonderful father to her two kids from her first marriage, but he didn’t respond to any of Charlotte’s e-mails about Jennifer’s favorite flower, so she got white roses. She shouldn’t have been surprised by his silence. The families of the victims had always resented her father for the Savage Woods films. She’d hoped the lawsuit she’d won against him might change their opinion of her, but maybe they just saw it as her own grab for profits, and not an attempt to break free and build her own life.
Next stop, Knoxville, Tennessee, and the grave of Emily Connolly, a CPA who’d decided to take the scenic route to Gainesville, Georgia, for her first meeting with a man she’d been chatting with online. When she never showed up, the man she was scheduled to meet, Zach Pike, remained a suspect in her disappearance up until her body was unearthed on the Bannings’ farm. Charlotte and Zach had traded e-mails over the years—no surprise, given that in her own way she was also wrongly accused, by Hollywood, if not law enforcement—and that’s how she knew Emily liked tulips.