Killing Britney (16 page)
thirty-seven
THE MADISON CAPITAL TIMES
F
EBRUARY
20
Early yesterday afternoon, a prime suspect in the recent string of grisly murders that have been tormenting the populace of Madison was taken into custody by the Madison Police Department. Robert Plumley, 18, of Madison, was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Mr. Edward Johnson and his daughter, Britney Johnson.
Detective Tara Russell of the MPD has told the
Capital Times
that within the next few days Mr. Plumley is expected to be charged with two additional murders, those of Karl and Melissa Brown.
In a statement delivered late this morning, she said, “We believe these deaths all to be connected. Mr. Plumley is a deranged individual. Under the delusion that he was protecting Ms. Johnson, he slaughtered her and everyone close to her. We can only be thankful that we apprehended him when we did, before he could cause any more mayhem.”
When asked if these murders were related to the death of La Follette High School hockey star Ricky Piekowski, Detective Russell said, “We have evidence indicating that the late Karl Brown was responsible for [Mr. Piekowski’s] death. What we now think is that in his obsessive fixation on Britney Johnson, Plumley believed that she had been the true target of that murder, and this spurred on his paranoid fantasies and eventually led him to carry out the murders.”
thirty-eight
The
clattering of wheels on iron, the constant clickety-click in his ears, the sway and bounce of the train as it made its way eastward, these things all made it difficult for Adam to doze off, despite the fact that his father had sprung for a sleeper compartment.
He lay awake for a long time, his hands locked behind his head, watching the shadows change shape as the reflection of the lights from outside roamed across the pebbled ceiling.
He was glad to be getting away.
And even though he dreaded returning to New Hampshire, he dreaded what might have happened if he’d stayed in Madison more.
On his last evening, he had worked up the courage to enter Britney’s bedroom and collect the things he’d left there on that horrible morning. His socks, curled up in balls underneath the sheet. The underwear that Detective Russell had taunted him with.
He’d picked through the blankets piled sloppily next to the bed and, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, shook them out one at a time. As he flapped an old patchwork quilt, a small glint of metal had fallen to the floor, catching his eye.
It was a ring. Britney’s diamond ring. He remembered her taking it off that night when they’d been together. She’d set it on the bedside table. It must have been knocked off and lost at some point during the night.
As he lay in his bunk unable to sleep, he studied it again. It was modest but beautiful.
What troubled him was that on the inner band, there was an engraving:
For Jan with All My Love—Ed 4/10/1985
Odd. It must have been Britney’s mother’s ring. She’d been lying about having received it from Ricky. Wishful thinking, figured Adam. She’d been so upset about her boyfriend’s death that she’d invented a fantasy, a way to claim him forever.
Finally, when he managed to nod off, he had weird dreams.
He dreamed of Britney. The sense of her. The feeling that she was here with him.
He couldn’t see her, but in his dream, he smelled the vanilla and cinnamon of her perfume. He heard her voice—not the pitched sarcasm of her when she was angry, but the sugary purring way that she had sounded on that night they’d spent cuddled together on her bed.
She was saying, “Should I do it?” and standing above a dark chasm—hundreds of thousands of miles deep.
“No” he responded. “Stay with me. The moon is down there and we want to stay in the sun.”
“But it’s dark here too,” she said. “The better idea is if you jump with me.”
“I don’t want to, though.”
He was sweating. He could see her clearly now.
She flipped the blond hair out of her face and smiled with her eyes.
His stomach spun over itself and he wanted to touch her.
“Let’s do it tomorrow,” he said. “Why don’t you climb up here and curl up with me? Let’s hold each other just this one last time.”
Her smile crept slowly down from her eyes, spread over her whole face, cockeyed, wry, mischievous.
She moved so excruciatingly slowly. As if she were underwater. Her hair hung above her like it was alive. The color faded from it. It wasn’t blond anymore; now it was black.
He opened his arms and embraced her.
Her body was warm next to his, soft, luscious. It felt so real that he couldn’t believe he was dreaming. She didn’t smell like perfume anymore; she smelled musty now.
She whispered in his ear, “Do you like that?”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted, Britney,” he said.
She spun over him, straddled him. Her face had turned hard. Her eyes were black. She was heavy on his chest. The pain he felt where her knee dug into his rib cage was real.
“Don’t call me that,” she said.
She was doing something with her hands behind her back. He couldn’t see what, but suddenly, he was full of fear.
“Call me Jan.”
“But you’re Britney!”
“Haven’t you heard? Britney’s dead.”
Her hands were above her head now. Something shimmered in them. It was too dark to tell what it was.
He wanted the dream to end now. It wasn’t turning out the way he’d thought it would. He wanted to wake up, just for a moment, and start again at the point where the dream had turned ugly, to return it to sweetness and keep it there.
Then, with a shudder, he realized he
was
awake. The dream
had
ended and Britney really
was
here, straddling him.
It was too late.
The knife was already sliding into his chest. Blood was oozing out onto his T-shirt, running down onto the sheets below him and soaking through the mattress.
He was never going to wake up again.
thirty-nine
The
sun was shining. The leaves on the trees rustled and swayed. The grass was a vibrant color of green. Cute boys in knee-length shorts were playing hacky sack. It was a beautiful day and Britney was free, far away in Ithaca, New York.
She smiled. She’d dyed her hair jet black and straightened it, cutting the bangs. She was a whole new person.
When she waved at the cutest of the cute boys, the one with the stringy shoulder-length hair, he nodded at her, his eyes twinkling. After the game broke up, he introduced himself. Nick. He was a freshman at Cornell.
She told him her name was Jan.
They talked for a while, then he invited her up to hang out in his dorm room, and she thought he was so cute she couldn’t say no.
“Where are you from?” he said, leaning back on his bed. He was shirtless and tan. “Ithaca’s a pretty small town. I figure I would have seen you around before.”
She was sitting on top of his blond wood desk, and she leaned in toward him. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.
When he nodded, she went on. “You’re never going to believe this, but I’m running for my life.”
Given all she’d accomplished so far, she felt like she could do anything now.
She told him the whole story.
“I know this girl named Britney who killed her mother a few years ago—don’t get me wrong, her mother was crazy. She’d been tormenting her for her entire life. And one day she just couldn’t take it anymore. Their family went on a rafting trip, and she and her boyfriend Karl drowned her.”
“Jesus!” Nick said.
“Everyone thought it was an accident, and that would have been the end of it, but when Karl went to jail on a drug charge, she started dating this jock guy named Ricky.
“If only Ricky had loved her less. If only he hadn’t tried so hard to find the answers to her mother’s death. He should have left things as they were. He should have believed her when she said she didn’t want to know. Then everything would have been fine. But he had to go snooping. He had to follow his suspicions—even though they were leading him toward discovering the horrible secret she’d hidden from him.
“She had to do something before she got caught. Karl was still in love with her, and once he got out of jail, she convinced him to kill Ricky.”
Britney felt like she was falling into a trance, as though the events she was relating had happened to someone else, not her.
She reached over and took Nick’s hand, gazed at his delicate knuckles for a moment before kissing the base of his thumb and letting his hand go again.
“After that, things started to unravel. Karl became insanely jealous. She told him it was over between them, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. She had to kill him. And then she was off, killing any and everyone who came anywhere near discovering the truth about what she’d been doing.
“Since I knew the whole truth about her, she especially wanted to get to me. I barely escaped. We were on a lake, frozen over for the winter, but the weather had turned and the ice was thin. I fell in—or more likely, she pushed me in; we were tussling and it was hard to tell which.
“I had to swim for my life, blindly, following my instincts, heading off randomly, hoping against hope that I would find an opening before I ran out of air. It was terrifying. I still can’t believe I made it. I took off running and I haven’t stopped since.”
She gauged Nick’s response. He was speechless. His eyes were popping out of his head.
“I’m really lucky to have gotten away,” she said.
“That’s just …” he said. “That’s out of control!”
“That’s the thing about this girl, though,” said Britney. “She was completely controlled. She almost never made a mistake. I can only think of one.” She remembered Adam and twisted the ring on her finger.
“What was it?”
Her eyes darted around the room like she was looking for someone in the shadows.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“She might find out.”
The muscles in his neck and shoulders tensed briefly. He was starting to get spooked.
“How would she know?”
“Oh, she’d know. She has a way of finding these things out.”
He jumped from the bed and threw a T-shirt on. “Let’s go,” he said. “We should tell the police about this.”
Britney shouted, “No!” Then turning sweet again, she said, “Why would I want to do that?”
“I don’t know why you haven’t gone to them already…. I mean, if this girl’s still at large—”
The color drained from his face as the truth sank in.
She cocked her head and smiled an ambiguous smile. Her hand trailed up toward an area just above her heart and she ran her finger over the spot where she used to toy with the hockey pin on Ricky’s letter jacket. She wondered if Nick could guess what she was planning to do next.
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