After I have swept every drawer and the closet, the last place I’m supposed to look, according to all the movies about prison I’ve ever seen, is underneath the mattress.
I pull back the cover and sheets on Arnold’s neat bed and pull the pillow from its case, finding nothing. Finally, I lift the mattress, and my eyes land on the notebook I gave him a few weeks ago. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands. This doesn’t look like it contains any paraphernalia, but I’m curious as to what this thing might contain since Arnold refuses to allow me to see it.
It’s an invasion of privacy, but I open it up and flipped through it. There are a lot of weird scribbles—drawings of flowers and prom dresses—and it seems to have several journal entries. That doesn’t surprise me at all. I shouldn’t have expected it to be filled with anything other than the one incident that I know he’s obsessed with.
Just as I’m about to close it, a name catches my eye, and I quickly flick the page back to make sure I really just saw what I thought I did. There, amongst the intelligible scribbles, is a heart with the words Arnie plus Annie scratched across the middle of it.
It could be a coincidence. I mean, how is it possible that one of my clients, other than Tyke, would even know about my sister. Annie is a common name, right?
I go back to the first page and begin scanning the pages with a more careful eye. Sentence after sentence, line after line, the same name appears. Annie . . . Annie . . . Annie.
“When Annie turned me down for Junior Prom at Walter Payton . . .”
“I watched Annie from afar, but she didn’t know. She didn’t suspect. One day, I wanted to make her love me. Annie should’ve been mine.”
I gasp and cover my mouth with my hand. Goose bumps erupt all over my body and a chill runs down my spine as I stare at the thoughts of a clearly unwell man, but what shocks me even more and confirms my worst fear is that he lists the high school that Annie and I attended.
“Oh, my God.” I remember him. Arnold is Arnie, from our high school. I remember when he asked my sister to prom, and I laughed at him while my sweet sister let him down easy. It was cruel of me to do that, but we were seventeen and I couldn’t believe a four-eyed geek like Arnie thought he had a snowball’s chance in hell with Annie.
I race through the book where each page chronicles Arnie following my sister to college and then on to adult life.
“I was supposed to be on that flight with her, but the idiot cab driver made me late by taking a route that lead to a traffic jam. I’ll never forgive myself for not dying with her. We were meant to be together forever, dead in eternal bliss. The feelings I had toward Annie didn’t go away. I had to find a way to continue my obsession. Lucky for me she had an identical twin sister. It felt too good to watch Frannie the way I did Annie. I could pretend she was my Annie. If I couldn’t have Annie, I would have her substitute.”
I swallow hard as things begin to click and fall into place. If Arnie went from following my sister to following me, he could’ve been lurking around that frat party and taken that picture of me that the blackmailer sent. That was shortly after Annie died, so it would fit with the timeline.
“My parents found out about my obsession. They found my scrapbook where I created pictures of mine and Frannie’s wedding. I thought it was beautiful. My mother thought it was disgusting. They wanted to send me away—lock me up where I couldn’t follow Frannie anymore, but I couldn’t have that. My parents cut me off—took my trust away, but that won’t stop me. I’ll find ways to get money. No one will take my Frannie away from me. No one. I’ll kill anyone who tries. So, I ran away. Changed my name and followed her to the rehab center I knew she got a job at. This is the perfect place for me to get close to her.”
My heart thunders in my chest. If this hadn’t been discovered, how far would Arnie have gone? Would he have hurt me? Would he have hurt Tyke?
“You okay in here?” Timothy’s deep voice causes me to jump.
I place my hand over my chest as I turn around to face him. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says, stepping farther into the room. “Did you find something?”
I nod and hold out the notebook to Timothy with a shaky hand. “You could say that.”
Timothy’s brow creases as he takes the book and tucks the clipboard under his arm. His eyes scan through the last entry that I read and his head snaps back up to meet my stare. “Has he hurt you?”
I shake my head. “No, but . . .”
I hesitate. If I tell Timothy about the things Arnold has been emailing me then I’ll be fired before I have the chance to quit. Timothy is too straitlaced to keep this secret for me.
“But what?” he probes.
I might as well lay it all out. It’s better coming from me than from Arnold. God knows what he’s capable of, or what he’ll do when he discovers that I know exactly who he is and what he’s been up to.
“I believe Arnold has been emailing me—blackmailing me with pictures and videos.” I pull my phone out of my back pocket and pull up the picture of me with Tyke. “He sent me this after catching us in the woods.”
Timothy squints as studies the thumbnail on the screen. “Are you saying you’ve been having an inappropriate relationship with a client?”
I pull the phone back and stuff it into my pocket. “It’s wrong—unethical and completely against the Hippocratic Oath, I know, which is why I was just in the middle of writing my letter of resignation. I knew this was going to come out because someone filmed us, but I was hoping by quitting it would all go away. I tried to stop it from happening.”