Page 86 of Girl, Fractured

‘That boy, Nathan, had one of those books in his hand.You remember Goosebumps?Those scary stories for kids.I remember it like it was yesterday.Purple cover, evil scarecrow on the front, bookmark sticking out of the middle.’

A wave of pins-and-needles sensation washed from her scalp down her spine.Every nerve ending in Ella’s body fired at once.For three seconds, her heart forgot to beat, then made up for it by slamming against her ribs like an avalanche of pumping blood.

The analytical part of her brain snapped awake, even as her body remained locked in the physiological storm of revelation.The connections formed with horrific clarity.

Nathan Taylor.The boy on the beach.The child clutching his horror novel while Ripley explained that his father would never come home.The victim who’d had to ask if drowning hurt.

That same book was in her hands.

Goosebumps.

The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight.

Now, it made sense.

In Sarah Webb’s car a few nights ago, Ripley had said:‘I doubt that kid ever recovered.’

Ripley had been right all along.Damningly, infuriatingly right.The snakes would get you.Sarah Webb wasn’t to be trusted – and that poor kidhadn’trecovered.

Because Robert Lawrence and Nathan Taylor were the same person.

Ella threw the book back on the shelf and frantically made for the exit.Her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as she vaulted back over the railing.Her muscles felt electric, supercharged.

This wasn’t over, because she knew exactly where Sarah Webb and Nathan Taylor were going to be tonight.

Together, they were trying to write the ultimate true crime story, and if Nathan Taylor was the mastermind behind all of this, his story could only end in one place.

Hold on, Mia.I’m coming.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Nathan, as he still referred to himself in his internal monologue, loved the beach at night, but the sand hadn’t felt the same since that day.

It had started 26 years ago this month, when he was ten years old and the world still made sense.He’d stood beneath this very rock while police and onlookers gawped at a hole twenty feet away, a hole that seemed too small to fit a human being.The officials had spoken a little too loudly, probably thinking that a child couldn’t understand the terms they were using.

But Nathan had heard everything.Asphyxiation.Restraints.Ligature marks.His dad had been in that hole, and Nathan had fit the pieces together in his head.Someone had tied his dad’s hands together, dug a hole, and thrown him in there.

It was funny.His dad had once told him, ‘Nathan, the tide doesn’t disappear.It just goes away for a while, then comes back.’

But people didn’t.Once they were gone, they didn’t come back.

Then the woman detective had come over to him and given him some spiel.She’d crouched down and asked him who he was, but she already knew.He’d asked if it had hurt his dad, and she’d lied.Gave him some rubbish about his dad being dead before the water came.

He’d researched it since then.Extensively.Drowning while buried alive in sand as the tide rose was perhaps one of the most terrifying deaths imaginable.The weight of wet sand compressing the chest.The inability to expand the lungs as water covers the nose and mouth.The desperate struggle to raise the head those few crucial inches that might buy another breath.The knowledge that help isn’t coming.

Years later, he’d found out that that woman was Agent Mia Ripley.He’d always held a resentment towards her for that moment – and because she’d failed to find the real killer.

Everyone had insisted it would get better with time.The school counselor, his parade of therapists, the grief support group leader with her empty platitudes.They had been partly right.The edges did smooth somewhat.He stopped waking up screaming.Stopped flinching at the sound of waves.Eventually, he even returned to beaches, though never this one.Not until now, when the circle demanded completion.

What they hadn’t warned him about was the memory loss.The human brain, miraculous as it was, began discarding details of his father.The exact timbre of his laugh.The way he folded the morning newspaper.His opinions on baseball and whether aliens existed.These memories pixelated, corrupted, and ultimately vanished.

By eighteen, Nathan had lost his father twice.Once to the Sandman Killer, and once to his own neurological processes.

The only thing he still had of his father’s was the book he’d gifted him for his tenth birthday.The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight.He’d been halfway through the book when his dad had died, and Nathan had closed the book and never finished it.Could never bring himself to.And that little detail had influenced the rest of his life.

Books had become his safety and his sanctuary, and over the years, he’d developed an obsession for the storytelling process.Everything had to be perfect – and nothing irked him more than an unfinished tale.That was why – when he’d seen Agent Mia Ripley by chance outside Thomas Webb’s house – he knew how this story had to end.

And indeed, books had brought some normalcy to his life, at least until the true crime boom brought a million vultures to his door.Podcasters and authors and low-budget filmmakers.They all wanted his story, and he knew that they just wanted to milk him for content.

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