The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XI:
Better Watch Out!
The good thing about interview rooms is they always sit you facing the door. The bad thing about interview rooms is they’re always full of cops. The bald hipster detective with a neck tattoo peeking over his collar sits across from me, bulging out of his Men’s Wearhouse suit, hands clasped on top of an open manila file. A lady cop sits next to him in a navy polo shirt, arms folded, leaning back in her chair, radiating contempt. Everyone else is in the other room, watching on the camera that hangs from the ceiling. I assume Garrett’s in there, probably eating popcorn.
“When did you first have sex with Santa Claus?” Men’s Wearhouse asks.
I’m so surprised I almost open my mouth to answer. Are these Garrett’s “shocking revelations”?
“Let me repeat for the hard of hearing,” Men’s Wearhouse says. “Can you tell us the date of your first sexual encounter with the Santa Claus Killer.”
I need to know what the hell they’re talking about, but no one ever regretted not talking to the cops.
“Lawyer,” I say.
“Did you have sex with the Santa Claus Killer before or after he tried to kill you?” he says.
“Tried to kill you twice,” Lady Cop amends.
“The second time wasn’t him,” Men’s Wearhouse corrects her. “It was his brother.”
The wall is a nice color. Sort of a pale yellow. I wish I could rest my eyes on it forever.
“Lawyer,” I repeat.
“Do you recognize the man in this photograph?”
Men’s Wearhouse slides an eight-by-ten glossy across the table. Ricky wanted to be an actor, and his headshots wound up in his file. There he is, three-quarters angle, giving me a sly smile from the tabletop. Casting directors probably thought he was charming, full of devil-may-care attitude, but all I can see is the crazy.
“Lawyer,” I repeat.
I focus on Men’s Wearhouse’s neck tattoo. It looks like a woman’s name. Lucille? Shanelle? Janelle?
Lady Cop makes an impatient sound, pushing air out between her teeth.
“What about this man?” Men’s Wearhouse says, peeling up Ricky’s eight-by-ten and putting down a mug shot of Billy.
Billy didn’t take care of himself the way Ricky did. He lived rough, had his nose broken playing football, but he’s got the same soap-opera-actor looks, although it’s hard to tell from the picture. They beat him up before taking his mug shot. I’m not too sad about that.
“Lawyer,” I repeat.
“The public defender’s office is swamped,” Lady Cop says. “We conveyed your request and they hope to have someone down here by the end of the day.”
“Or tomorrow,” Men’s Wearhouse says.
“I’ll wait,” I say, trying to keep my lungs from cramping shut.
Men’s Wearhouse and Lady Cop stand up and walk out of the room. They leave the photos of Ricky and Billy Walker looking up at me from the table.
The camera’s still watching so I can’t scream, or cry, or bang my head on the table, or do a single thing I want. It takes all my willpower. Is this what’s getting spread everywhere about me? I had sex with Ricky Walker? I can’t even think that sentence without my stomach feeling grease-slicked and slimy.
I focus on taking deep, full breaths. I don’t look at the photos. I rest my eyes on the wall. After a long time the door opens and Garrett comes in alone, carrying a thin manila folder, wearing his parade float of a cowboy hat, and his shitty, patronizing smile.
“Nobody here but us chickens,” he says, putting the manila folder on the table.
As usual, the room’s not big enough for me, and him, and his cologne.
“I notice you didn’t really have much in the way of conversation for Los Angeles’s finest,” he drawls. He pronounces it “Los Ang-guh-lees.” “So I convinced those boys to give us some alone time. You and me are old friends, so let’s bypass the pleasant banter, detour around the chitchat, wave a fond farewell to the ‘how’s the weather, preacher’ part of the program, and get down to brass tacks. How’s that sound to you?”
He looks into my eyes. It’s like having a flashlight shine in my face, but I won’t look away.
“I don’t like liars, Lynney. But I’m giving you a chance to do the Christian thing and come clean.”
He’s so smug and arrogant that I forget myself.
“About what?” I ask.
“She speaks!” he says, making a big production of opening the folder so I can’t see its contents. “Hallelujah.”
The photos he pulls out don’t bother me. I watched the real thing happen. But the way that one second I’m listening to him strut and preen, and the next the table is covered in glossy shots of my dead family, it draws a hot iron band around my chest. Now I know my lawyer isn’t coming.
“Yeah, they always get me the same way, too,” he says, smoothing down his mustache with his fingertips, watching me from beneath the brim of his hat. He pulls out the picture of my father’s corpse and puts it on top. “I respected the hell out of that man.”
He leans over the table, the brim of his hat bonking me in the forehead. He speaks low and slow.
“How long were you having carnal relations with Ricky Walker?” he asks.
The words don’t make any sense.
“You know I didn’t” comes out in a whisper.
“Billy says different.” He smiles. “The boy has found Jesus and cannot tell a lie.”
“My dad said you couldn’t even direct traffic at a Bulldogs game without someone holding your hand,” I say, making myself look him in the eyes. “Whose idea was this?”
He flashes me a thin smile that shows a slice of his teeth.
“So you’re saying you didn’t fuck Ricky Walker for six months before the killings? Your statement is that you didn’t ask him to murder your parents? You’re saying that you didn’t tell him you hated your father? You didn’t convince that poor psychotic boy to murder your folks? That’s the problem with psychos, Lynney, you can lead ’em to water but you just can’t make ’em kill the people you want. They tend to go hog-wild.”
Suddenly I have an idea of what else is inside that folder and I can’t hold on to the real world anymore, and I’m tumbling into this fucked-up, through-the-looking-glass horror show where everyone else is already waiting for me.
“That’s not true,” I say, but it sounds small.
“No one likes a cop killer, Lynnette.” He smiles. “Especially cops.”
“I didn’t . . .” I begin.
“Aw, of course not,” he says, cutting me off. He’s trying to get me worked up. He’s succeeding. “You’re only an accessory. It’s not just Billy’s word, either. Because it doesn’t matter how much Jesus a convicted serial killer has in his heart, most judges don’t give that shit for credibility.”
I see them all: Mom, Dad, Gillian, Tommy. I close my eyes.
“How did you think it was going to go?” he asks. “Was Ricky going to kill your boyfriend and your parents for you?”
I remember Tommy trying to protect me, Tommy not staying down, Tommy getting up over and over again no matter how bad Ricky hurt him.
I hear the manila folder open. A plastic evidence bag crinkles. He reads in a sickening falsetto.
“Dear Ricky, don’t put your return address on your letter. My daddy is the chief of police and if he knew you were writing to me—”
That’s when I go over the table.
They were waiting for me right outside the door. Men’s Warehouse leads the charge and they pour into the room, forcing me down, crushing my rib cage against the table. They shackle me and drag me out of the room.
They haven’t been wasting their time. One whole wall of the cell they throw me into is plexiglass. On the other side of the glass they’ve made a little display for me: an artificial Christmas tree, all set up with twinkling lights and everything.
Lady Cop taps on the window. She’s wearing a Santa Claus hat and a big white beard.
I start screaming, and she just stands on the other side with all the other cops and laughs and laughs and laughs.
—
The cell where I’m going to die is smaller than Michelle’s hospice room. It’s brightly lit and they watch me through the plexiglass wall in case I try to kill myself before they can arrange to have me killed. The plexiglass is unbreakable. I know this because I already tried to break it. The walls are light pink cinder block, the floor is concrete. There is a slab sticking out from the wall where I can lie down. Behind the slab is a stainless-steel pedestal with a sink on top and a steel toilet on the other side. If I crouch over the toilet and bend down until my chest is on my knees I gain some small measure of privacy. They give me a roll of toilet paper but take away my shoelaces.
I don’t hate Heather for calling Garrett anymore because I’m saving up all my hatred for myself. If all these cops weren’t watching me, I’d have killed myself by now. I’ve got no shoelaces but I’m resourceful. I’d bite off my tongue and choke to death on my own blood if I knew they wouldn’t be in here before I bled out.
It’s cold. I fall asleep on the slab. There’s no blanket. At one point, I wake up and a bunch of cops are watching me and singing Christmas carols. They’ve taped a Santa Claus decoration to the window so I can see his face, all red and jolly. They want me to give them a reaction. I can’t help it. I give them one.
I wait for Marilyn to show up with a lawyer. I wait for Julia to arrive with the public defender. I wait for Dani, for Dr. Carol, for someone to save me from myself. Then I remember that Julia is in the hospital. Dani is in custody. And Marilyn and Heather and Dr. Carol probably hate me because they think I’ve committed the one sin we can’t forgive: lying down with your monster. They all think I’m another Chrissy Mercer.
I can feel it out there. I’m on the news again. What they imagine I did. The slut who slept with the killer. My high school picture and Ricky’s mug shot, our faces pasted next to each other like a couple at prom, bouncing all over cable news as a single image.
I look up and see Garrett standing next to the Christmas tree. When he sees me watching, he flips me the bird.
It’s funny, but he’s the only man I’ve ever loved.
Christmas Eve, 1988, American Fork, Utah. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses is everywhere, but I prefer “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley because I’m a cheerleader, and I’m happy all the time, and I’m in love. Tommy Burkhardt looks just like Jordan Knight and my mom calls us Charles and Diana because she thinks he treats me like a princess. Even though we’ve only been dating for six weeks, it’s six weeks that started in mid-November and takes me right through Christmas, and I know he’s going to get me an awesome Christmas present.
My parents would probably have gotten a divorce if my dad didn’t care so much about appearances. He’s the chief of police of a small town and he’s invested in that Norman Rockwell thing, so he hides at the office while Mom plays happy homemaker and makes everything as perfect as possible all the time. It drives us all crazy. They’re doing the best they can, but Gillian and I both know something’s got to give.
She’s eleven, and we’ve talked about what’s going to happen when Mom and Dad get divorced and we’ve decided weekends with Dad, weekdays with Mom, and we’re not splitting up. Sisters stick together. Both of us hope it’ll happen soon because right now we’re walking on eggshells.
Christmas Eve comes, and Dad won dinner for two at that Italian place downtown, and he read in a magazine that they should try to have some together time, so he comes to Gillian and me all serious and asks for our blessing. The restaurant is where they had their first date, and he’s so nervous his hands are sweating, and of course we say yes, and as he’s leaving for their dinner he asks me to make sure his tie is straight and then he says, “Wish me luck,” and suddenly he’s not my dad at all, he’s a guy going on a date, and I melt inside and actually pray they figure it out, kneeling beside my bed with my hands folded and everything.
I loved Christmas. I loved the nonstop Tabernacle Choir Christmas carols playing at the mall; I loved the animated movies about elf dentists and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV; I loved Mom going into baking overdrive so the house always smelled like hot sugar and warm butter; I loved wrapping presents. It made me feel like peace on Earth was possible. It made me feel like a fancy dinner could solve Mom and Dad’s marriage.
Tommy called to say he’s bringing me my present, and I sent Gillian upstairs.
“Watch TV in Mom and Dad’s room,” I said. “Do not come downstairs.”
“You’ve got a date,” she said, and I hate her for being annoying and love her for being a kid.
I opened the door for Tommy and I’m totally blown away by how good-looking he is. I’m not bad, but I never thought I’d do this well, especially since Shasheena Grotepas had her eye on him. We made out for a while, and then he gave me my present: a Christmas tree pin with ruby and emerald decorations.
Twenty-two years later I know they’re fake stones, but we were on the pool table in the rec room and I had my shirt off and he set it on the curve of my breast and I remember how the gold glowed against my skin and, like I said, I loved Christmas more than anything.
Mom and Dad weren’t due back until eleven p.m., and it was only eight p.m., so even if they fought I figured we had at least two hours, and so I decided this would be the night we went all the way. Things got hot and heavy on that pool table, but I planned to move to the sofa upstairs. It was super-soft and had a ton of afghans so we could make a nest and take our time.
Then the doorbell rang.
“Is that your folks?” Tommy asked, sitting bolt upright.
“They have keys,” I said.
I pulled his face back to mine. Sweat ran down my chest and pooled between my breasts. Dad always turned the heat up too high in the house. He hated the cold.
The doorbell rang again.
With a groan I rolled out from under Tommy, grabbed his hockey jersey, and pinned my Christmas brooch to the collar.
“Hurry back,” he said as I pulled on my stirrup pants and started up the stairs.
Those were his last words to me.
I was sixteen, and kind of stupid, and we knew everyone in American Fork, so I just opened the door without looking out the window.
No one was there. It was freezing cold, but I stood for a minute, breathing in the woodsmoke from the neighbors’ chimneys, with my boyfriend in the basement, his gift on my collarbone, thinking I was hot stuff, imagining I had the whole world on a string.
Then Santa Claus came around the corner carrying an axe.
At first, I didn’t recognize Ricky Walker. All I saw was the Santa Claus suit and I thought it was someone on the hockey team playing a joke. I didn’t think it was funny so I slammed the door in his face and turned the thumb lock.
It took him two swings to bust the door wide open and he came in with the cold. That was when I recognized him.
“Ricky?” I asked.
He came at me with his axe, and when I screamed Tommy came upstairs. He tried to protect me, but every time he got in the way, Ricky hit him with his axe. Finally, Tommy’s head was so misshapen that I begged him, “Tommy, stay down!”
Ricky embedded his axe in Tommy’s neck, and then he came for me. I managed to scratch up his face, but he tore off my jersey, lifted me up, and carried me into the living room. My dad had been a big hunter before Gillian was born, and he’d bagged a white-tailed buck with a huge rack of antlers on a trip and mounted its head on the living room wall. That was what Ricky impaled me on.
At first I didn’t understand what hurt so much, and then the antlers were pushing into me so hard I thought they’d tear me in half, and then they were inside me, and I watched them come out my front.
I was a little tiny thing back then, barely ninety-five pounds, and the antlers went in just above my kidneys and came out just below my rib cage. I hung there for ten hours in shock, and the antlers and the weight of my body kept me from bleeding out. I slipped in and out of consciousness as I watched Gillian come downstairs, as my mom and dad came home, as Ricky took care of them all.
When I was six I thought I was Gillian’s mom. They let me make her Jell-O, and get her ready in the mornings, and even give her a bath until I saw No More Tears on the side of her Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. I always tried to be so careful when I washed her baby hair, but then I saw that label and it smelled so good, and the thick yellow shampoo looked like honey, and I poured half the bottle in her eyes because I thought “No More Tears” was a magic formula that meant she’d never cry again. She howled so loud my eardrums rattled, and Mom swooped in and scooped her up and pressed her to the side of her neck and got so angry.
“Lynnette,” she said. “You have to protect your sister.”
I’m sorry, Gilly.
He did things to her body, to their bodies, he performed scenarios, peeled the meat off their bones. At one point Mom and I locked eyes while Ricky was focused on Dad, and Mom saw the tears running down my face. She knew that if Ricky saw me crying he’d realize I was still alive, and so Mom attacked him. She took his attention. She got him to focus entirely on her for a long, long time. She was a good victim. I hope it didn’t hurt. I hope she was drunk.
I’ll never find out if Mom and Dad’s date rekindled their romance. Ricky took the answer to that question away from me forever. And Mom never lived long enough to find out what happened to Charles and Diana.
When the sun came up, Ricky snored inside the bloody nest he’d built out of my family. I couldn’t tell where Tommy’s body ended and my dad’s body began. Gillian was easy to keep track of, though. He’d put her head on the mantelpiece looking at me.
Ricky woke up, shuffled to the kitchen, and pissed in our sink. He was still in the kitchen when the first cop walked into the living room.
“Hello?” Mike Miller called from the broken front door. “Anyone home? Karl? Carol? I’m coming in.”
I wanted to warn him, but I didn’t want to give myself away. He got an axe through the chest. Garrett P. Cannon was the next cop through the door.
“Mike?” Garrett called, walking into the house. “Mike? You better not be stealing Christmas presents from the chief.”
He saw Ricky splitting open Mike’s rib cage with his axe. Ricky stood up and came at him. I heard Garrett drop his gun, cursing, and then he picked it up and fired five times. There was silence, and then Ricky came running back through the living room. I couldn’t tell if he’d been hit because he was already covered in so much blood.
He smashed through the sliding glass doors at the far end of the living room as Garrett came after him, fumbling with his reloader. He seated it and emptied his gun into Ricky’s back and I remember seeing Ricky flip over the railing on our deck, his feet going straight up in the air. They said he landed so hard it split his skull in two.
Garrett just stood there for a minute in all the gunsmoke, looking at the slick of skin and muscle and splintered bone that had been my family and the boy I loved. My brain felt far away, but I managed to wave my left hand in little circles at the wrist until Garrett turned around.
“Holy shit,” he breathed, looking up at me. Then he went outside and emptied the rest of his ammo into Ricky’s corpse. He got on the radio and called in all the backup he could find on Christmas morning.
They shot me up on painkillers before they sawed the antlers off and took me to the hospital. I was unconscious for almost two days. Garrett didn’t leave my side the entire time.
I woke up unable to lie on my back, sore in a way I didn’t think was possible. Even my toenails ached. Garrett brought me news and updates, he brought me flowers, he lied and said I’d been wearing a T-shirt when he found me. Topless unmarried girls making it with their boyfriends in Utah weren’t going to earn much sympathy back then, and Garrett wanted to make sure everyone saw me as the pure and innocent victim in this story.
He sat next to me at my first press conference, the one where I leaned over and upchucked all over the table. He told my story for me, and on the interview circuit I sat next to him and smiled, and when they asked me questions I said he was “my hero,” he was “my everything,” he was “my knight in shining armor.” It was true. At the time, the only thing standing between me and screaming insanity was Garrett P. Cannon.
Is it any surprise that I fell in love?
—
For two years I was a happy little idiot who did what she was told. I put it all behind me. I tried not to dwell.
“Why live in the past?” I chirped, smiling bravely.
My foster parents were everything I could have wanted. The next Christmas, they almost convinced me that things were normal. We rented movies, went ice skating, stayed in the house and played marathon games of Monopoly, cooked elaborate meals, anything to keep my mind off Ricky.
The following Christmas I gave Mike and Liz permission to try some Christmas decorations, and was secretly more thrilled than I expected when I saw wrapped presents with my name on them in the living room. I let myself think everything could be normal again. That Mike and Liz were going to help me have an actual life. I didn’t count on Ricky’s little brother, Billy. No one did.
Billy was serving time in a locked psych ward for attacking his next-door neighbor in a fight over what day they put out their garbage cans, and he blamed me for what happened to his big brother. When Christmas rolled around, he decided he just had to let me know how he felt. He got a Santa suit from somewhere and strangled his roommate, then started a shootout in the intake room that killed two people, both of them cops. Of course, when people realized whose brother he was, everyone went on high alert. I was desperate to speak with Garrett, but he was busy telling the press how he had to be careful about gazing into the abyss because it also gazed into him.
But he did take the time to post cops outside my foster family’s house. Four cops, actually, all outside the front door. Which meant that Billy came in the back. Carol was first. Then Mike.
I was too scared to move, too scared to run, and my scars throbbed like fresh wounds for the three hours he kept me in the kitchen. At first he beat me whenever I made a noise. Then he beat me for fun. He used a cast-iron kitty-cat doorstop that Carol loved. The back of my skull was so pulped they had to put a metal plate in. The few times I’ve flown after that I usually set off the metal detector.
I’m pretty sure he would have killed me if one of the cops hadn’t rung the doorbell to use the bathroom. Billy shot him and went out the back. It took them twenty-four hours to find him hiding in a Nativity scene at a Lutheran church. Garrett shot him at exactly 3:14 a.m. on a rainy Christmas morning, then dragged him out bleeding and tossed him in the back seat of his squad car. No full-clip-in-the-back treatment this time. By now, Garrett knew that a live killer made all the difference when it came to book deals.
Once again, Garrett was waiting for me when I came out of surgery, ready to take credit for saving me a second time. Before, I’d worshipped the ground he walked on. It had been puppy love. This time I was eighteen and he wanted more than a puppy for his reward. The first time we had sex was in my hospital room. He was twenty-three years older than me. I didn’t care.
He had a wife and kids, but when he wasn’t at my apartment I’d call his house crying, begging him to come protect me. Garrett told his wife I had “imprinted” on him like a duckling. It was her second marriage. Her first husband had gone to prison for shooting her brother. She wasn’t the kind of woman who asked too many questions.
For two years, Garrett was my everything. He handled all my media requests, looked over all my contracts, went to all my meetings, and I did whatever he wanted. I felt cared for and protected. I didn’t see how much he was getting out of this, too.
Getting me out to L.A. and into the first Slay Bells movie was a big deal for him at the time. The producers needed a gimmick to make people notice their bargain-bin production, and I was dumb enough to believe Garrett when he said it’d be good for me. I never thought to ask how much they’d paid him. At the last minute I had a panic attack, bailed, and drove back to American Fork. He said he didn’t mind that I’d screwed up his deal, but after that he stopped calling me as often, then he stopped coming by entirely, and after a while he forgot about me and I cried myself to sleep every night for a long, long time.
I thought Garrett had left me alone, but eventually I realized I had always been alone. I had done everything they’d told me to do, and it had happened again. No one had been able to keep me safe. No one had watched out for me. I was the only person who could keep me safe. And so I did.
Sometimes an entire year will go by when I believe that’s the whole story. But in my heart I know I deserve to be in prison. In my heart, I know I deserve to be in Hell.
Of course, now that they have the letters, everyone else knows it, too.