Dead Girls Talking

by Megan Cooley Peterson

Genres: YA Social Themes; YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA Horror

Synopsis

The town of Wolf Ridge calls him The Smiley Face Killer. Bettina Holland calls him her father.

Everyone knows Bettina’s father was the one who murdered her mother a decade ago. It’s the subject of podcasts, murder tours, and even a highly anticipated docuseries. But after growing up grappling with what that means, a string of copycat murders forces Bett to answer a harder question: What if he didn’t?

Old-money Bett must team up with the only person willing to investigate alongside her: bookish goth girl Eugenia, the mortician’s daughter, who everyone says puts the makeup on corpses. Can this “true crime princess” unmask a murderer who’s much closer to home than she ever imagined? 

Gritty, gripping, and propulsive from page one, Dead Girls Talking is a ride for readers who love to see girls get their hands dirty as they claw their way to the truth. Peterson’s knife-sharp thriller cuts deep, with a wicked sense of humor, a wire-taut atmosphere, and a deadly serious approach to bigger issues of justice and female anger.

"Engrossing. This is a book you won't want to put down."—Crystal J. Bell, author of The Lamplighter

 

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Release date: June 18, 2024

Publisher: Holiday House

Print pages: 288

Sample

“SMILEY FACE KILLER” SENTENCED TO LIFE

WILMINGTON, N.C.—Convicted murderer Trapper McGrath has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Justice has been served today,” said prosecutor Jack Ledbetter outside the courthouse. “I hope Prudence’s family can finally find some peace.”

McGrath, 28, was convicted for the June 2009 murder of his wife, Prudence McGrath, 23. The couple’s 6-year-old child was at home at the time of the killing and made the grisly discovery.

Dubbed the “Smiley Face Killer,” McGrath fatally stabbed his wife three times in the chest. After killing her, McGrath carved her mouth into a permanent smile, earning him his moniker.

Several key pieces of evidence convinced the jury, including a threatening note the defendant wrote to his wife. McGrath’s fingerprints were found on the murder weapon, which had been dumped in some bushes near the family’s home, and his clothing contained traces of the victim’s blood.

“This sentence can’t bring our daughter back,” said Wells Walker Holland, the victim’s father. “But I can rest easier knowing this animal will spend the rest of his life behind bars.”

CHAPTER 1

It’s been nearly six months since I visited my father in prison.

Six months since I heard the clanking metal.

Six months since I smelled the stale desperation mixed with cheap deodorant.

Every six months—no more, no less. Two court-ordered visits a year.

I was with my mother the day he killed her, and my testimony helped convict him. I had a memory of him from that day—of the shape of him, moving down the hallway to their bedroom. I never saw her alive again after that. Only her broken body, eyes unblinking, jagged slashes on either side of her mouth.

The media quickly named my father the Smiley Face Killer.

A judge granted him visitation rights in the custody agreement between him and my grandparents—even though he’s in prison for life—which is beyond messed up if you ask me. But no one asks me anything.

I never want to see him again, and I have a plan to make that happen. I stuff my letter into an envelope, address it, and add a stamp. With any luck, he’ll relinquish those rights, and I won’t see or think about him for the rest of my life. He usually spends our visits rehashing his tired claim of innocence anyway; he says he was with my grandfather the morning of Mom’s murder, but Granddad was at work, and that alibi fell apart in court. It’s total fucking nonsense. He needs to get a new lie.

I’ve got one year of high school left. I don’t want to waste it on him. I can’t.

“You wrote it?”

Grams steps onto the veranda. Behind her, the windows are as tall as the porch roof; Grams said when she was young they’d open them all for the breeze. I can’t imagine this place without central air. It’s so big—a true mansion. Huge Greek columns run up to the second story, where my grandparents’ balcony faces the front yard.

I hold up the letter. “I just want it to be over, Grams. I need it to be over.”

The peach sky illuminates the golden tendrils that have broken free from her chignon and frame her face. Thunder booms in the distance, but on the veranda of Magnolia House, our family’s ancestral home, it’s a calm spring evening. This is the same porch my mother used to ride her pink tricycle on; I saw it in a photograph once.

She sighs and looks out across the lawn. “Are you sure? He is your father, after all.”

“Like I could ever

forget.”

I hand the letter to Grams, and she turns it over in her jeweled hands. “You’re right. Enough is enough. You have a life to live, a future to plan, and that man doesn’t deserve any part of it. Not after what he did.” Her voice catches, same as it always does when she talks about what happened. She had twenty-three years with my mother before my father decided to play God. Twenty-three years, but all she can think about is that single day. It’s all I can seem to think about too. And I’m so tired of it.

I stand and hug her, the only real mother I’ve ever known.

She holds me tighter. “I love you to the moon,” she whispers.

“And back again.” I squeeze my eyes shut. Squeeze out the fear and doubt. I am safe here, in this house, in this life they have given me...as long as we all stick to our parts.

Grams steps back. “Should I mail this for you? I can post it in the morning after my yoga class.” She’s always been delicate with me. Watchful. Overprotective, even. We have to be careful in raising Bettina, I heard her tell my grandfather once (before the maid caught me eavesdropping). I think they’re worried I’m going to run away with some older guy, get knocked up, and get myself killed—just like my mother did.

“No, I want to do it myself.”

“You’re going now?” she asks, wringing her hands. “I could get Cook to make us some strawberry lemonades. We’ll enjoy the sunset.”

“Now. No time like the present.” I slip on my jean jacket. It belonged to my mother; I found it in the attic a few weeks ago. An aughts original. “Let’s have the lemonades for breakfast.”

“You’re going by yourself? I’ll send Hank along.” Hank is our driver, and he does other odds and ends at the house, too. Painting, light yard work, chasing away journalists. (I once wondered if Grams and Hank were sweet on each other, until she introduced me to his husband at our Christmas party.)

“I’ll be all right, I

promise.”

“At least drive there. It’s getting dark.” My grandmother hates the darkness. She usually won’t go out after sunset.

“I’d like to walk. Don’t worry, I’ll come straight home.”

“Please be careful, Bettina.”

I kiss her cheek and set off down Magnolia Street (my great-great-grandparents were so rich, the town named the street after our house). Eventually, I reach shops and cafés and the video store I keep waiting to go out of business but never does. And there it is: the freestanding mailbox outside the movie theater. The original Star Wars is playing, same as it does every spring, and I think maybe I should buy a ticket and forget everything for a while.

Trapper McGrath

Bertie Correctional Institution

Windsor, North Carolina

I close my eyes, take deep breaths, and wait for the sidewalk to stop swimming circles around my feet.

Twenty visits in ten years, two hours per visit. I’ve looked my father in the eyes for a total of forty hours since the trial ended. So why does mailing him a letter make me so nervous?

“This is dumb,” I mutter, and I drop the letter inside. Let the mailbox door snap closed. Try to ignore how much it sounds like the clanking of those bars.

He can rot in that place. He’s not taking me with him.

I will sweep him away into the current of my past. Put an end to it. A fresh start for me—and, in a way, for the mother I never really knew. Because I can’t keep being the girl whose father killed her mother. It makes me want to claw out of my skin.

The flashing lights of the theater’s marquee paint the sidewalk in baby spotlights,

and I dig through my purse for some cash. A dark theater, a cold Coke, and total anonymity. I can be anyone when I’m here. I can be normal.

“One, please,” I tell the attendant, who sighs, puts down her glittering green phone, and rings up the ticket. My phone lights up with a text from Xavier.

Xavier: Train in 10. Meet me on the tracks.

“That’ll be eight fifty,” the girl says.

My heart pounds, and my palms grow slick. Grams is likely drinking bourbon on the veranda, watching the long driveway, the changing shadows, tensing each time she thinks she sees me. I should go home, play a game of cribbage with her, and finish my poem for English class.

“You want that ticket or what?” the girl asks.

“I changed my mind,” I say, and she rolls her eyes. “George Lucas ruined it anyway with all his bullshit edits.”

She finally looks at me for the first time and frowns. “Wait...aren’t you, like, that girl from the news?”

I pretend not to hear her and take off down Market Street and around onto Carter, following the smell from the soy-oil factory. Plumes of black rise from its dirty smokestacks. The farther I go, the more cramped the houses become, almost touching each other. Beyond them, at the edge of Wolf Ridge, the Smoky Mountains heave up, peaks blanketed in pines. Electrified fences close off the quartz mines in the foothills.

My grandparents love living so close to the mountains, but they make me feel caged in. Trapped.

Xavier steps out from a boxy gray house on the corner and lights a cigarette. “Hey, Bett,” he says. I lick my lips as I watch him take that first drag. His mouth curls around the cigarette, then blows

a smoke ring. He joins me on the sidewalk and offers me a drag. I take it, flick my overprocessed blond hair behind my shoulders, and inhale.

“You’re lucky I was already downtown,” I say offhandedly, giving him back the cigarette.

“Or what? You wouldn’t have come?” He smirks and walks faster. I hurry to catch up, and my long black skirt tangles with my feet. I manage to sort myself out, but Xavier keeps moving. He is always in motion, more blur than boy. “Come on, Miss Bettina,” he says in an exaggerated southern drawl, not looking back. “I ain’t got all day.”

I started talking to Xavier Hart in detention after Christmas break, when I was in for being tardy three days in one week. He sat in the back and painted his fingernails blue. He caught me staring and tossed me the bottle. I wore that polish until it chipped completely away. Rumors follow him through the halls like flies: that he was kicked out of his last school for keeping a knife in his locker. That he drove drunk and killed his older brother. That his entire back is covered in a pentacle tattoo. (It’s not. Sadly.)

Smoke trails behind Xavier as he rounds the corner. The soybean plant looms to our left, blotting out the setting sun. Ahead, the train tracks lace the ground.

He checks his phone and then stares down the tracks. “A couple minutes, tops. Come on.”

We head east, away from the plant, his house, the stray dog eating a bag of garbage someone dropped in the middle of the street. If my grandfather knew what part of town I was in, he would have a stroke.

Xavier stomps out his cigarette and puts his phone into his jeans pocket. Then he hops onto the tracks, his feet balanced on a rail, and picks a dandelion. He doesn’t look at me or invite me to join him.

“I’ll play, since you insist,” I say sarcastically as I stand next to him.

“Can you feel it?” He catches me staring at him and holds my gaze in his.

I forget to breathe, and I have to restrain myself from leaning into him. Then his eyes close and he turns away, and I remember the rules. I close my own, the heat and the pulsing buzz of the cicadas intensifying.

I can feel it: a vibration coming up through my feet. Weak at first but strengthening.

The train’s whistle pierces my courage, and my eyes fly open. Xavier looks asleep, but his lids twitch. I stare at the light from the train engine, half a mile away, real-but-not-real at the same time.

I always leap off first. But not tonight.

The train hurtles toward us, whistle going crazy. I swear I can hear someone yelling. I blink, blink again, and it’s almost here.

Xavier’s arm brushes mine. “We better move!” he shouts.

I grab his wrist. “Why? You scared?” My mouth is so dry I can barely get out the words. The horn blasts, and the heat of the approaching engine practically singes my skin.

Nothing is real now: not the looming black shape growing larger by the second, not Xavier’s wide eyes, not even the laugh bubbling up through my throat.

“Shit!” Xavier wraps an arm around me and heaves us to the side. He lands on top of me in the gravel. The train whips by, hot air billowing against us, metal on metal, violence.

“You’re crazy!” he says, pushing himself off me.

I take deep breaths and raise my head to see the last train car flash past us. I am insignificant, a blip. It makes me feel better, somehow. Like maybe my problems are insignificant too.

Xavier shows me his back as the train rounds a corner.

“Are you mad?” I ask. This isn’t our normal routine. The power

 balance is all off. My skin tingles.

He turns and leans over me. “Come on.”

He takes my hand, pulling me up, across the tracks, and to the other side of a weeping willow tree. The wild grasses grow tall here, and no one sees us. Or maybe they do. That’s part of the thrill, I guess. There’s no one around, but there are eyes everywhere in this hick town.

“Don’t be mad,” I say, trying to come off flippant. My heart pounds, and I wonder if he’s going to walk away from me. Instead, he backs me into the tree and presses his body into mine. Daylight couldn’t pass between us.

“You think I’m mad?” he asks. His pupils are huge, turning his blue eyes black. He licks his lips and looks at my mouth.

I can’t speak.

He reaches for the bottom of my skirt, pulls it up until his hand finds the skin of my thigh. He stares at me as he trails his fingers up my leg, slips a finger under my panties. I swallow, and Xavier smiles.

I slam my mouth into his. The pressure is building—louder than that train, louder than the clanking of those bars.

This is like coming alive.

He lowers me to the ground, the feel of him on top of me a comfort, a weight keeping me from blowing away. I think of the train, how it was here and then it wasn’t, how if we’d stood there three seconds longer, police and flashing lights and my sobbing grandmother would be here now. Instead of us. Instead of this.

Xavier leaves a trail of kisses down my neck, and I reach for the button on his jeans. “Are you sure?” he pants. He pushes up my shirt, squeezes the fat on my hips, and part of me wants to cover myself back up.

“Yes,” I whisper, wondering

 if he heard me.

His eyes meet mine, a silent agreement passes, and he unzips.

Then it’s happening. His eyes are on mine, still, black, intense. I look away, stare at a half-drunk bottle of Mountain Dew someone left in the dirt. It’s swarming with ants.

Xavier puts his cheek up next to mine. “You’re amazing,” he breathes.

I hold on to his back, touch his impossibly soft hair, bite my lip from the pain. He puts a sloppy kiss on the corner of my mouth, shudders, and then rolls off me. I pull up my panties and rearrange my shirt to hide my stomach. He lies on his back, eyes half closed.

I want so badly to stroke his hair, to curl up in the crook of his arm, but I don’t dare. So I sit there, picking at my cuticles, my bones vibrating with the need to say something, to touch him, to ask him if he wants to go catch the next showing of Star Wars with me.

His phone chirps, and he sits up, resumes his aura of nonchalance. “It’s the guys,” he says, like it’s not a big deal, like there isn’t a pile of him in the dirt next to us. “There’s a party at the cemetery coming up.”

I wait for an invitation, but he keeps scrolling through his phone.

“Enjoy your stale beer,” I say, “and your hangover at school.”

He ignores that and points his phone’s screen at me. “Someone just texted me this.” It’s a news article about the ten-year anniversary of Trapper’s conviction. I don’t share his last name anymore; my grandparents changed it to Holland, hoping people would forget about my father and his connection to me. But the murder colors this town, kept alive with gossip and whispers and conspiracies. It has legs, and I haven’t figured out a way to take it out at the knees.

“I don’t live in the past.” I stand abruptly. “I’d rather live now.”

I quickly walk away,

severing whatever connection there was between us, not giving him time to ask me to stay or to pretend he’s not fishing for details about my mom.

And maybe he’s not. He’s never once mentioned it until tonight. Still, I’m not willing to be an object of curiosity for anyone, not even him. I have to be careful who I’m friends with. One mention of my mom’s death, and it’s over—I cut them out.

Probably explains why I’m on my own a lot.

But then, if you never get close to anyone, you can’t lose them. And everyone leaves in the end. Either by choice or by fate.

The girl is gone from the box office as I pass by the movie theater. A guy sits in her place, selling tickets to a group of junior-high girls dressed in jean shorts and high-tops. They wear purses, but awkwardly, not quite used to the accessory. Giggling at something the guy says, they collect their tickets and go inside. I remember when I had friends like that.

Grams is still on the veranda when I get home. I’m about halfway up the drive when she stands, picks up a glass, and goes inside, the door soundless as it closes her off from me.

I’m late.

At least she leaves the light on.

After that, I don’t want to go inside. Instead, I head toward the one place someone will listen without judgment: the cemetery.

CHAPTER 2

The end of my street butts up against the woods. They’re a shortcut to where my mom lies silently, but I won’t pass through. Not even during the day.

These woods are where Wolf Ridge’s first body was found.

It happened a year before my mom died. Trapper’s suspected previous victim, though they could never tie him to it. No DNA, no fibers, no hair. Her name was Cherry Hobbs, and she worked at a gas station at the edge of town. Some kids found her stabbed to death—just like Mom—in the woods right before Halloween, her body heaped onto a pile of blood-soaked leaves. Poor kids thought she was a prop from the Boy Scouts’ haunted house over on Birch Street.

Everyone said she was a junkie, that she slept around. That’s probably the real reason her case remains unsolved.

So I stick to the roads. They’re empty this time of night—except for curious eyes peering out from behind curtains, the blue light from televisions pulsating behind them. Someone is always watching you in Wolf Ridge. What we lack in culture, we make up for in small-mindedness.

I hold my breath as I pass the Cline house, our town’s only funeral home. It’s an old Victorian, white, with peeling paint. When we were kids, there was this old rhyme we used to say every Halloween:

If you knock

On the undertaker’s door,

He’ll lop off your head,

And then come for more.

He’ll cut out your bones!

And dig out your guts!

Hide you in the basement

With the corpses and rot!

Tonight I make the mistake of looking.

Eugenia Cline, their daughter, sits on the porch, head bent over a book, flashlight pointed at the pages. In Wolf Ridge, women and girls are to be seen as beautiful playthings. Us Holland women never leave home without at least a swipe of lipstick and a hint of mascara. Here, if you refuse to do at least that, you’re nothing.

Eugenia is unmanicured, unpainted, and unfinished. Because of that, she’s always been just a little too far down the popularity food chain for me to say hello to. (Besides, she helps put makeup on the dead bodies for viewing. At least that’s the rumor.)

As if she can read my thoughts, she lifts her head. Her dark, almost whiteless eyes meet mine. She doesn’t smile or wave or nod. Just watches me. A chill ripples up my back, and I look away.

I turn onto Dogwood Lane. The Mount Olivet Cemetery sits at the end of the road, behind a line of magnolia trees and a black wrought iron fence. Some of the graves date back to the founding of the town in the late 1700s. The newer stones are near the back, in neater rows, with potted flowers and even a bench to sit on.

I can find my way to my mom with my eyes closed: just follow the gravel pathway as it winds west, the moonlight turning my skin a grayish blue. (I only ever come at night.) Her stone is the biggest: a marble angel with an ethereal face, her wings encircling a slender gothic headstone. mother, daughter, sister is carved on its pedestal.

I touch the angel’s face, same as always, then sit in the grass before it.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, my voice a scratch. I look behind me, just in case, but only the shadows are watching.

That’s one good thing about dead people—they can’t eavesdrop.

“So.” I clear my throat. “It happened. With this boy Xavier. He seemed nice...but then he asked about Dad.”

I wonder what this conversation would be like in a normal mother-daughter relationship, not one separated by six feet of dirt. Maybe other girls don’t tell their moms when they lose their virginity. But if I had my mom, I’d tell her every ugly thing about me.

I crane my neck up, watching the angel’s face. Sometimes, when it’s really late and I haven’t been sleeping much—or I’ve snuck just a little too much from Granddad’s liquor cabinet—the angel’s face moves. Smiles, or grimaces.

Once a tear slipped out of her eye and dripped onto my forehead. It had just finished raining that night, but no one will ever convince me she wasn’t weeping.

“What do you think I should do?” I ask. “Give him another chance?”

Tonight, the angel's

face remains lifeless.

I pluck a blade of grass and roll it between my fingers, gazing at the headstone again. I don’t know why I keep coming out here, thinking Mom’s going to speak eventually. I stand, shaking my head. “I’ll see you later, Mom,” I say, and head back down the gravel path.

As I’m exiting the cemetery, a bat swoops down in front of me. I scream. (Every so often, we get a bat inside Magnolia House—Grams and I usually shriek and cower under the furniture while Granddad chases it with a tennis racket. ...