Page 46 of The Girl on Hallow's Eve

Her voice is deliberate and controlled as she gives brutal, gut-wrenching details of every bit of horror she saw. She tells me how she tried to find a way out of the locked mall, how she tried to get the other people there to stay away from the last place where she saw the man. But it was that dissuasion that only seemed to fascinate them and they flocked right into the arms of the killer. It was because of her that they were standing there when the man pulled out the gun.

“No. It’s not your fault,” I tell her. “You can’t take on the blame for the actions of other people. You didn’t tell them to go there. You didn’t try to entice them. You didn’t lead them there. You tried hard to make them understand the danger they were facing and they decided to take it as a joke. They chose to go down to that area to see for themselves what was happening. I’m not placing blame on them, either. They didn’t deserve what happened to them. But it was their choice to go down there rather than staying away. They did that for themselves. You can’t carry it with you.”

It’s much the same conversation that I had with Amy at the news station, but at the same time so different. Amy felt guilt for not being there with the people she worked with when they were killed. She felt guilty for coming up with the idea for the segment and being the reason they were there to begin with. She felt guilty for not dying alongside them.

Mindy felt guilty for getting the opposite reaction than what she wanted, and for feeling like she’d inadvertently caused people to walk right into his web.

My heart clenches as she talks about running through the mall barefoot, slipping in blood, wanting to scream but not wanting to lure anyone out of their hiding spots. She tells me about trying every door she could find and being stunned when the gray doors near the movie theater opened up. Going into the big dark storage space was intimidating, but she preferred it to anywhere else in the mall at that moment. It was dark without flashing lights and quiet with only barely audible music, insulated from the sound by one of the movie theater walls.

She ended up in the tunnels and remembered hearing that they led through the mall. She thought she could find her way out. Instead, she found him. Mercifully, she doesn’t remember much from the attack itself. Only that it was long and intense.

“I can’t believe I’m alive,” she says when she finishes.

“I can. You’re strong.So much stronger than I think you’ve ever let yourself think you are. And the thing is, you weren’t just in there fighting for yourself. That makes you even stronger.”

“I don’t feel very strong when I think about Glo not being here anymore. What am I going to do without her? I’ve always had her there to make me feel strong,” Mindy says.

“Have you ever thought that maybe she was always there because you made her feel strong?” I ask.

Tears well in her eyes and now she takes that deep breath, letting it out slowly so it shudders from her lungs.

“Maybe.”

I smile at her.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I ask.

She looks off into the distance like she’s thinking for a second, then her eyes snap back to me.

“He knew me.”

This makes my heart rate pick up for a second.

“He knew you? What do you mean?” I ask.

“He said my name. When I was hiding in that store right before I went toward the tunnels. It was the only time I heard him say anything the whole night. He asked where I was and then he called out my name. It scared me, but now that I’m saying that out loud, there were people saying my name all night. If he was there when Gloria and I first went into Eileen’s, he would have heard her talking to me. He would have heard the other kids saying my name. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” she says.

“Right now I don’t want you to think about what it could or couldn’t mean. Okay? That’s my job. I’m going to figure that out. Just think about telling me everything you can remember. What about his voice? Did you recognize it?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t say that I recognized it. But it sounded familiar. Not so much that I would say I would know who it was if I heard it again, but something that’s in the back of my mind somewhere.”

She looks uncertain and afraid, so I smile at her.

“Hey,” I say. “I brought something for you. I don’t know if the doctors will let you have it. So maybe just eat it really fast before they tell you no.”

She laughs and I reach into the bag at my feet to take out a small plastic tub of cotton candy. It’s a vibrant purple color and the label printed on the front of the container says it’s grape flavored. I hold it out to her and she grins.

“I love cotton candy,” she says. “How did you know?”

“I heard about your young entrepreneur project.”

She nods. “That was a fun program.” She pops the top on the container and uses two fingers to pull out a piece of the candy fluff. “But I guess a truck serving exotic flavors of cotton candy doesn’t exactly have the strongest marketability.”

We giggle together and she offers Sam and me bits of her candy. The flavor is powerful when I put the piece on my tongue.

“Wow. That is definitely grape,” I say.

“Or at least it thinks it’s going as grape for Halloween,” Sam offers.

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