Look What You Made Me Do

by Elaine Murphy

Genres: Crime Fiction; Domestic Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A gripping thriller about a woman who must help cover the tracks of her serial killer sister -- only to discover her sibling isn't the only serial killer in town . . . and they're both next on his kill list.

 

Carrie wants a normal life.

Carrie Lawrence doesn’t need a happily ever after. She’ll just settle for “after.” After a decade of helping her sister hide her victims. After a lifetime of lies. She just wants to be safe, boring, and not trekking through the woods at night with a dead body wrapped in a carpet. 

Becca wants to get away with murder.

Becca Lawrence doesn’t believe in happily ever after because she’s already happy. She’s gotten away with murder for a decade and has blackmailed her sister into helping her hide the evidence—what more could a girl want? 

But first they have to stop a serial killer.

When thirteen bodies are discovered in their small town, people are shocked. But not as shocked as Carrie, who thought she knew all the details of Becca’s sordid pastime. When Becca swears she’s not behind the grisly new crimes, they realize the town has a second serial killer who has the sisters in his sights, and what he wants is . . . Carrie.

Release date: July 13, 2021

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1

I’ve been expecting the call, but when my phone rings, the sound is still too sharp, more alarm than alert. The personalized ringtone grinds the world to a halt, turning my knees to gel and my stomach to mush. I should be safe in the produce section of a grocery store, but I’ve never been safe anywhere. The sound trills from my pocket, the coat vibrating against my hip, and like any awful thing, it feels like a shock, an offense. An unfairness.

Another ring and I look around guiltily, a lemon clutched in my left hand, but the other shoppers ignore me, preoccupied with getting their groceries and getting home, away from the October cold. I consider letting the call go to voicemail, but I know she’ll just call back. She’s been getting antsy lately, and after a decade of experience, I know the signs. There’s no way to escape it. To escape her. There never has been.

I pull the phone from my pocket to see Becca’s name transposed over a picture we took three years ago. She’s standing in front of a mailbox painted to resemble a cartoon castle, with brightly colored turrets and arched windows. Her arms are folded like a sentry, eyes glaring, daring anyone to approach. As soon as the camera clicked, she’d doubled over laughing, like any goofy, fun older sister. The one I’d always wanted.

I answer the call, losing sight of the picture. “Hey.”

“It’s me,” she says. “I need help. I’m moving furniture.”

I knew what she was going to say, of course, but my knees weaken further, like they do when we go to amusement parks and she insists I get on the roller coaster even though she knows I hate roller coasters. You’re thirty, Carrie, she says. Suck it up. Little kids are doing it—what’s your problem? You can’t be afraid of everything.

I’m twenty-eight, I correct her every time. You’re thirty. But every time, I get on the roller coaster. And my head spins and my stomach lurches and I feel sick and hot for the rest of the day, and the trip to the amusement park ends as they all do—with Becca being amused.

I want to say no now, too. I want to tell her it’s my one-year anniversary dinner with Graham and I’m making dinner, but I don’t. I don’t tell her because she already knows, which is probably why she picked this date to “move furniture,” and we both know I’ll cancel my plans. It’s not like I have a choice.

“I’m at the grocery store,” I say, for the sake of it, staring at the lemon in my hand.

“So?”

“So it’s my anniversary. I’m making—”

“Don’t say lemon spaghetti,” she snaps. Even when Becca needs you, she can’t be nice, not really. It’s not in her genetic makeup to be kind. We share 50 percent of our DNA, but we could be complete strangers for how unalike we are. She’s blond; I’m brunette. She has blue eyes; mine are brown. She’s a murderer; I’m not.

“It’s Graham’s favorite.” I’m not actually the biggest fan of lemon spaghetti either, but Graham is pretty much perfect apart from this one thing, so I can live with it. I grew up with Becca, after all. I’ve dealt with worse.

“Tell him to choose something else.”

“I—”

“And choose another night, too,” she says. “I need help. Moving—”

“Furniture,” I say. “I know.”

“Kilduff Park. West entrance. Hurry up.”

She disconnects before I can say anything else, and I stand in the produce section and stare between the phone and the basket in my hand, as though weighing my options. As though I have options.

I text Graham a lame apology. Work emergency. So sorry.

It’s a believable lie. He knows what my job is like because we met at work. Weston Stationery is a small, business-casual office at the edge of an industrial park, and while a job designing and marketing novelty office supplies might not sound exciting, I like it. Right now I’m even up for a promotion, which is exciting. It’s down to me and another girl named Angelica, though she’s not at all angelic. Which, in our office, mostly means she puts her recyclables in the trash and takes too long to sign birthday cards and got a tattoo on her ankle of a polka-dot binder clip to suck up to our boss. When I talk to Graham about the promotion, he tells me I have it in the bag because I’m the best person for the job. When I talk about it to Becca, she yawns.

Graham replies to my text right away. He’s disappointed, but of course he understands. He’ll order take- out. Come over later?

I’ll try.

I won’t try. Not after this. I can’t.

I empty my basket, reluctantly returning my fresh pasta to the deli counter and the French loaf to the bakery, exchanging the warmth of the store and my boyfriend for a dark park four days before Halloween to help my sister move furniture.

*  *  *

The first time Becca killed somebody, she was seventeen. I was fifteen, a sophomore in high school, and only vaguely aware of a cheerleader named Missy Vanscheer. Missy and Becca were on the cheerleading team together but didn’t get along so I only heard Missy’s name when it was followed by something like “skank” or “bee-otch.” I thought nothing of it when I heard whispers that Missy was missing. First, she skipped cheer practice, and the next day she wasn’t at school. Then her parents reported her missing, and that’s when it became real.

That’s also when the rumor started that Missy was pregnant, and the father was an older man and they’d run away together. Her friends swore she’d never mentioned a boyfriend, certainly not an older guy, and nobody knew she was pregnant. But the rumor persisted, and though the police investigated, they never found any mentions of a boyfriend in her social media pages, her phone, or her diary.

They never found Missy either.

It was two years later, the day after my high school graduation and a week before my eighteenth birthday, that I learned the truth. Becca called me, panicked and near tears, totally out of character for my sister. When people described Becca, they used terms like beautiful, aloof, and manipulative. Hearing her say she needed me eroded a lifetime of lessons to the contrary and had me reaching for a pencil, asking her for the address.

“Don’t write it down!” she’d shrieked, as though she could see my notepad. “Don’t write it down,” she repeated, more calmly. “Don’t use GPS. Don’t even bring your phone. Just remember it.”

It was only when I got to the abandoned hiking trail that I learned why.

Becca leaned against the hood of her car, smoking a cigarette, looking like the Queen Bee in every high school movie with her tight jeans and T-shirt, her blond hair in a high, shiny ponytail. Not even the towering trees and mountains could compete with her beauty.

I parked my dented little Volvo, the car I’d worked overtime at the diner to pay for, saving up my measly tips and depositing them at the bank on my way home. For months, I’d been collecting them in an envelope in my underwear drawer, until one day I went to get the money and all that remained was a five-dollar bill. Becca swore she hadn’t taken it, my $1,287, but I knew she had. I went to the bank and opened an account, and Becca came home from the mall with a new wardrobe. My parents knew but were too wary of her to do anything, which probably had a lot to do with how we came to be at the hiking trail.

“It’s about time.” She tossed her burning cigarette on the ground, heedless of the nearby trash can and dry leaves that littered the area.

“Um…” I looked around. We were alone. The air was clean and warm, scented with dirt and pine, but there was something else there, too. An undercurrent that made me more uncomfortable than normal.

“What are you wearing?” Becca groaned at my jeans and T-shirt, Cookie Monster printed on the front, gobbling a cookie.

I resisted the urge to tug at the hem of my shirt, the fabric clinging to my muffin top just a little too tightly. If I drew her attention there, she’d make a snide comment about my weight, the extra ten pounds everyone swore was baby fat until I was too old for the excuse.

“Just…clothes.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, come on.”

But when I started for the mouth of the trail, ready to follow even without knowing the destination, Becca didn’t budge.

“What?” I asked, staring back at her.

She sighed, her glossy lips turning down in a pout. “We have to get something.”

I glanced around again. Apart from the ignored trash can and a wooden sign with a map of the trail dangling by a single rusty nail, there was nothing to “get.”

“Where is it?”

Her pout deepened, as though my question disappointed her, and Becca yanked open the back door of her car—my parents bought it for her as a graduation gift—to retrieve a yellow bag with a garden store logo stamped on the side. She dumped out two pairs of garden gloves printed with bright-purple flowers, still held together with the tags. While I was surprised to see the gloves, I was more surprised to see the bag. Becca didn’t normally “pay” for things. She just took what she wanted, and always got away with it. I shoplifted a pack of gum when I was twelve, got caught seconds later, and had my picture posted on the wall of shame at the front of the store for a year. My parents were very disappointed.

I accepted a pair of gloves and copied Becca, snapping them apart and pulling them on, though there was almost certainly no garden in the vicinity. With one more heavily exaggerated sigh, like this was the most tedious day of her whole life, Becca reached in through the open driver’s-side window and pressed a button to pop the trunk. The lid lifted slowly, and even from my position in front of the car, my heart started to pound, and nausea roiled in my gut.

I’d never seen inside Becca’s trunk before. It had never occurred to me to check; there was no reason. But in that moment, I knew I definitely did not want to know what was in there.

“Well, come on,” she said, like I was the problem.

I didn’t budge. “What is it?”

“Come on.”

“What is it?” My voice rose an octave, and Becca finally looked at me, really looked at me, and a little furrow appeared between her perfectly arched brows. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, her cheek twitching while she chewed on it. She always chewed on the inside of her cheek, was always spitting blood. Her blue eyes grew shiny with tears.

“Something bad happened,” she whispered.

My feet propelled me forward automatically, the need to help, to fix, so ingrained I didn’t even have to think about it.

“What?” I was also whispering, though there was no one around to hear. The trail had been deemed unsafe years ago after three hikers fell to their deaths, and no one came out here anymore since Brampton boasted plenty of other, less deadly, trails to enjoy.

Becca’s wet eyes flickered to the trunk, and again my feet moved, one step, then two, until I could just see the edge of the black carpet lining. I couldn’t see anything more than that, but the smell I’d noticed earlier, the one that felt out of place in the clean, bright forest, was stronger.

I inched forward and saw a foot. A human foot. In an orange-and-white canvas sneaker, laces neatly tied, a pale ankle peeking out beneath the hem of a pair of black pants.

I recognized the sneaker as Shanna’s before I recognized her face, covered in crusted blood and bruises, lips and eyes swollen shut, dark hair matted and stuck to torn flesh. She was the person in a movie who’d been hit by a bus and barely survived, so brutally damaged it was almost impossible to believe. Except the way she was folded into the space, limbs at weird, crumpled angles, her neck clearly askew, made it all too believable that my sister had a dead girl in her trunk.

More specifically, she had her dead co-worker in her trunk. I recognized Shanna because we’d gone to school together. She’d been in Becca’s class, two years ahead of me, but that hadn’t stopped her from flirting with my tenth-grade crush. I’d been obvious and awkward, and the whole school knew my feelings, though I’d have rather died than admit them. Shanna invited him to the winter dance and he happily accepted, and I wore mourning black for a week and cried myself to sleep for two. When the tires on Shanna’s car were slashed the night of the dance, I’d even gotten a visit from the police, but I’d been home with my parents and had an embarrassingly ironclad alibi. I’d endured a month of taunts of “loser” and “psycho” in the hallways until eventually the school moved onto a new teenage scandal, Shanna graduated, and I never thought of her again. Until now.

I gagged, the combination of the sight and the smell and the knowledge more than I was ever going to be ready for. I lurched toward the tree line, fingers gripping the nearest trunk for balance, and dragged in breath after breath, nose running, mind reeling, trying to understand.

I had a lot of questions, but somehow, deep inside, I knew that the most basic, essential answer was this: Becca had killed somebody.

I don’t know how much time passed before I mustered the nerve to face my sister. She’d lit another cigarette and was pacing the length of the car, lifting an irritated brow when I finally looked at her.

“Are you ready now?”

“Ready for what?”

“To help me move…” She gestured toward the trunk. Toward Shanna’s broken body. “It.”

“That’s Shanna!”

“Obviously,” Becca snapped, then glanced into the trunk and pursed her lips with distaste. “Anyway. Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

She jerked her chin toward the mouth of the trail, already darker and more ominous than it had been minutes earlier. “Up there.”

“Why?”

“Well, she can’t stay here, can she?”

“She—but—you—I—” My stomach attempted another escape through my mouth, but I swallowed it down, eyes watering at the effort. “What happened?”

Becca heaved a petulant sigh. “We had a misunderstanding.”

Though I wanted to look anywhere but, I found myself looking at the dead girl—at Shanna—again. It was almost impossible to catalog the magnitude of her injuries, the sheer scope of the damage. And looking at Becca, tall, beautiful, and unscathed, told me she didn’t do this. At least, not with her hands.

I held her stare as I passed, walking around to the front of the car where she’d been standing so casually when I arrived, the paint gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. I glared at the shiny silver bumper and it winked back at me, like we were in on a secret. The secret being, I belatedly realized, that it was brand new because the other one had been used to kill somebody earlier that day.

“Did you—”

“Yes,” Becca said tersely. “I accidentally hit her with my car.”

My stomach lurched. “What was the misunderstanding?”

“C’mon,” she muttered, gripping Shanna’s ankles and yanking them over the lip of the trunk, things cracking and popping as the locked joints tried to straighten.

“What was the misunderstanding?” I repeated.

Becca paused, holding a dead girl’s feet, and stared me down. Tried to, anyway. When I didn’t relent, she huffed. “She said she saw me taking money from the till, and she misunderstood. Then she misunderstood how fast I was driving and stepped in front of my car.”

“You—” I’d once hit a parked car, not hard enough to leave a mark, and was shaken for days.

“Accidentally,” she added, as an afterthought. Or a reminder. “Now let’s go.”

When I still didn’t move, she scuffed her foot in the dirt and released Shanna’s ankles. They dropped against the edge of the car with an empty thud.

“Carrie,” Becca said, fingers curling into her palms, “please.” I could see her chewing on her cheek again, the inside of her bottom lip stained crimson, like she’d eaten a cherry Popsicle. She drew in a breath through her nose, nostrils flaring, and blinked rapidly, tears clinging to the ends of her lashes. “She was so horrible to me. She lied to our co-workers about me, to our boss. She knows how much I love this job, and she wanted—she wanted to destroy me.” A single fat tear rolled down her cheek, glinting in the sunlight like a diamond. “And if anyone finds out about this, they’ll think I did it on purpose, and I’ll—I’ll—” She gulped dramatically. “I could go to jail.”

Becca worked at the jewelry store at the mall, fancy enough that not everybody could afford to shop there but not so fancy that they had guards. She got minimum wage and earned commission and regularly bitched about neither being enough, though her looks helped her sell far more earrings and necklaces than the next-best salesperson. She didn’t love her job, but it paid the bills. Becca’s dream was to marry rich and spend the rest of her life sunbathing and bossing around the help. And while she’d dated plenty of wealthy men in her twenty years, none had been reckless enough to pop the question.

“Carrie?” she said softly. “Please? Let’s go, okay?” She picked up Shanna’s ankles and nodded at her battered head.

But I balked. “I’m not touching her head,” I said. I looked away from the pulpy, mottled skin, down over Shanna’s chest, covered in the white button-up shirt they wore at the store, the collar smudged with dried blood, a smear of dirt on one side. Her pants were torn at the knee on the same side but were otherwise intact. Somehow her face had sustained the brunt of the impact, managing to hit a bumper no taller than knee-high.

Becca sighed. “God. You’re so dramatic. You take her feet then, you baby.”

She shouldered me out of the way as she stuck her hands under Shanna and into her armpits, heaving her torso out of the trunk. Shanna’s neck stayed askew, her ruined face tilted sharply to the side, like she was sleeping uncomfortably.

Becca was barely perturbed. In fact, she was more irritated by my reluctance than Shanna’s dead-ness. She gave me the imperious look she’d given me a million times in my life, and even though my throat tightened and my gag reflex was on high alert, I felt my fingers wrapping around Shanna’s shins, careful to touch only the fabric, not her skin, and lift.

She was stiff. Her limbs remained bent and twisted, but she didn’t droop or sag, and even through the fabric, I could feel how cold she was. How not-recently-dead she was.

“When did this happen?” I asked, already breathing hard as we trudged toward the mouth of the trail. What we were going to do if we happened upon a stray hiker, I didn’t know.

“When I called you,” Becca said. I watched her face, but it remained neutral. If anything, she looked merely determined, and we shifted so we walked on opposite sides of the overgrown path, shuffling our feet in time.

“Half an hour ago?”

“About that.”

“Where—”

“Jesus, Carrie. I don’t want to relive it.” She said it as though she were the one having the worst afternoon of her life.

“Well, aren’t people going to wonder—” I began, stopping when she gave me a warning look. There wasn’t a soul in town who didn’t know that look. I’m pretty sure birds have fallen out of the sky after that look.

“Of course they’re going to wonder,” she said, like she was speaking to a toddler. “And they’ll just have to wonder because they’re never going to find her, are they?”

“I don’t—” I stumbled over an exposed root, its gnarled fingers looking too much like a hand crawling out of the dirt. “I don’t know. Where are we going?”

“Not far. You didn’t bring your phone, did you?”

“No. Did you?”

“Of course not. Have you ever seen a movie? The police trace your phone, and then you get caught.”

“You thought about that?”

She cocked her head, eyeing me patiently. “I thought about you,” she said, with emphasis. “That’s why I told you not to bring your phone. To help you.”

I might have been weak enough to help Becca, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe her. Or argue with her. “Okay.”

She either bought the lie or decided to accept it, and we walked the next fifteen minutes in silence, our footsteps and my gasping breaths the only sounds as we made the steep climb. I was sweating profusely when we finally stopped at an indiscernible spot on the path, lined by trees on both sides.

“That way,” Becca said, nodding toward the trees at my back.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Where?”

“Just go in. Maybe ten, twenty feet. Watch your step.”

She didn’t give me a choice, just nudged me with Shanna’s stiff body, my sweaty left hand slipping in its glove and sliding up to her knee, hard as a rock beneath my palm. I gagged and recoiled, nearly dropping her corpse, muttering to myself as I regained my footing and backed warily into the woods. It was much cooler in there, and even quieter than the trail, nature absorbing our sounds, obscuring our sins.

“Just a little farther,” Becca said. “Keep an eye out.”

“For what?”

I yelped as the forest abruptly ended and a sheer cliff began. There was no warning. Just a wall of trees, slightly thinner than the rest, and then blue sky and the wide, terrifying expanse of the gully below.

“That.”

Unceremoniously, Becca dropped Shanna, who crashed onto the pine-needle carpet, and I squawked and dropped her, too, debris scattering over my shoes. Even through the garden gloves, my hands left sweaty prints on her pants, and as I bent over and heaved for breath or mercy or anything, sweat dripped off my forehead and onto her leg.

“How did—how did you know this was here?”

Becca shifted, and I backed away instinctively, two steps from the cliff, one arm wrapping around a tree. Her mouth quirked, and she gazed out over the emptiness, her toes right at the edge as she peered down. From my position, I guessed it was about a hundred yards to the bottom, and it didn’t take much to assume that was where Shanna was going. It would explain her battered face far better than Becca’s hit-and-run “misunderstanding.”

Becca shrugged. “I just do. Any last words for Shanna?”

I faltered. “Ah, I—”

She laughed. “Just kidding. Bye, bitch.” Then she crouched down and hoisted Shanna’s body over the edge.

Just like that. One second alive, one second dead, one second gone.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I dropped to my knees and watched, seeing something white bounce off the ridge of the cliff, spiraling into the green growth below, then disappearing from sight.

Slowly, I raised my eyes to Becca’s.

She gazed down at me, her expression open, expectant.

“You shouldn’t have sweated all over her,” she said.

I blinked. “What?”

She pulled off her gardening gloves and shook them out, looking for all the world as though she’d just finished pruning a rosebush. She didn’t have a drop of sweat or dirt on her.

“You shouldn’t have sweated so much,” she repeated. “I gave you gloves so you wouldn’t leave DNA behind, but you just sweated all over her. You’d better hope they never find her body.”

My jaw dropped, like a door easing open, reality easing in. “DNA—” I began, then closed my mouth. I’d been thinking about Becca and Shanna, but nowhere in the scenario had I thought about myself. “But you—your DNA—”

Becca shrugged. “Yeah, but we worked together. I lent her my shirt. It would make sense for my DNA to be on her. But you? You didn’t even know her.”

“They can’t—”

“You probably got hair on her, too. You’re always shedding like a dog. And if they ask people about who had issues with her, someone’s going to remember how you practically stalked her in high school because she dated that loser you liked, then you slashed her tires.”

I pulled myself to my feet, sparing half a second to fret over my frizzy brown curls. “I didn’t slash—”

“Don’t worry, Carrie. I would never tell on you.”

“You’re the one who—”

“And even if they do find her body—if they trace it back to the day she went missing, and if somebody did suspect you, or if you did get arrested, I mean, technically you’re seventeen, right? A minor?”

Her voice rose slightly at the end of each sentence, but they weren’t questions. They weren’t things occurring to her on the spur of the moment. Just like she hadn’t called me immediately after she killed Sha. . .