February 6, 2004
Nikki reaches for my hand and I look down at her, staring
into her eyes. Somehow, even after I shoved her over the
balcony, she managed to grab the railing. Now she’s hanging on for dear life, thirteen stories high, with Los Angeles and her fate below her.
Tears, maybe from the cool night air or maybe because
she knows I’m not going to help her, stream down her
cheeks. Little silver bullets racing to her jawline in the
moonlight.
“Please!” She reaches towards me as far as she can.
She doesn’t want to die.
But she needs to.
I pull my hand back, out of her reach, and then I begin to
peel her !ngers from the balcony railing, one by one.
“No!” Nikki cries out into the night. The sound echoes across the building and the street below. “Please, don’t do
this!” This time, it’s a quiet, desperate, last-ditch effort.
She reaches for the balcony railing with her other hand
and I slap it away hard. Two fingers from her left hand are all that’s separating her from certain death.
I peel them back.
She screams as she falls, eyes locked with mine until
she’s too far away. The sound of her cry feels like it might go on forever.
And then it stops suddenly as her body crashes into the
sidewalk below, her pink brain matter splattered around her
head like a Jackson Pollock. Blood pumps from her open
skull, and I watch as it begins to trail down the sidewalk,
racing for the gutter.
1
VICTORIA
August 2023
One wrong move and the whole world will know what I did.
My hands are clammy and damp with nerves as I pour
another glass of wine for my guest. She smiles and accepts it gratefully, then continues talking. I listen and smile,
pretending my heart isn’t racing in my chest, fight or flight
being debated by my nervous system right this second.
I have made a grave mistake in inviting her here.
I feel like I’m at the end of a wind tunnel. Like her words
are echoing o# the curved sides and have been mangled on their way to my ears. I struggle to keep up with the conversation but try to nod and smile and hit my marks.
My friend Joey helps with that, entertaining our guest at
all the right moments. She looks over at me, her eyes
checking on me. I give her a smile, too, trying to convince her that I’m fine. But Joey knows me better than that.
It’s then that I feel her eyes on me. Allie. The woman I
only met this afternoon. I realize she’s said something that I
should have responded to, and try to dial back in quickly to
the present having been drowning in the past a moment ago.
“Thank you so much for letting me come,” Allie says.
There’s an unsettling sharpness in her tone, like the re!ec‐
tive edge of a blade.
She’s here to do an interview with me about the wolf
rescue that I run. It’s something I never would have agreed to had the financial situation not been dire. In thirty days, as of this afternoon, I will lose this place. That’s when the foreclosure will happen. The wolves and wolf-dogs that have received special needs treatment and care here at the
London Wolf Rescue will be displaced, likely without
adequate new homes to go to. Not only that, but my only
employee and most trusted friend, Joey, will also be
displaced. And last but not least, I’ll also be out of a job and
out of a home.
I have no choice but to go ahead.
“You’re so welcome,” I say. I smile as warmly as I can,
going on autopilot. It’s such a familiar thing. I used to do this all the time back in LA. I would smile at record label executives when I was really dying inside. I left that all behind twenty years ago and have tried not to look back.
I’ve tried not to give anyone else a reason to look too far
back, either.
I struggle to say much else, letting Joey take the reins of
the conversation. I drift in and out, wondering how big of a
mistake this is. Wondering what Allie might find out.
Worrying that everyone will finally know the truth
about me.
Joey gets up to put another log in the fireplace here on
the patio. She pokes around at it, tending to it the same way a dad might during a campout. For a moment, I remember my own dad, long before he and my mom were on the road with me. It’s a comforting memory. Something belonging to a different time. Before everything went to hell.
And maybe it’s just because I feel panicked right now.
My mind is trying to seize on some sort of comfort. Or at
least something that might look like comfort on the surface.
Right now I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel comfortable again.
Joey sits down and I wriggle around in my seat, trying to
ease my restlessness.
Allie turns her attention to me.
“This is an amazing place you’ve built out here,” she
says, orange firelight casting her face in warm hues. The sun is finally down and the moon is out. A wolf howls in the
enclosure closest to the barn.
“Right on cue!” Allie says with a smirk, turning to face the direction of the sound.
I force a chuckle.
The howl is Nox’s. A wolf that I’ve grown especially
fond of. Joey claims he doesn’t like her. That he’s mine, as
much as a wild animal can belong to someone. There’s something about his howl tonight that sounds particularly
lonesome.
It’s my frame of mind. I take a deep breath, steadying my
hand as I bring my wine glass to my lips. I do it out of nerves.
I really shouldn’t drink too much tonight. The last thing I
need is to say more than I mean to.
Especially to Allie.
“Thank you,” Joey says, trying to be gracious and turning
to me. I offer her a nervous smile. Her eyes linger on me, like she’s reading my face and my body, the energy that’s coming off me. I pray Allie can’t feel it.
Allie laughs after Nox howls.
“That’s a little spooky,” she says, turning back to the two
of us and rubbing her upper arm and glancing into the fire.
“Wolves are a little spooky,” I say, finding my voice in the
moment. I want to add, a little like you.
Allie laughs almost like she knows what I wanted to say,
glancing back at me. I find myself staring at her longer than I mean to. The whole situation is spooky. Every time I’ve
caught myself in the mirror since she’s arrived, I’ve had the
distinct feeling I was seeing a ghost. It makes sense. Allie is
treading circles around sacred ground where my darkest
secrets are buried. I remind myself she’s just here about the
wolf rescue. She’s not concerned with the past.
But with one wrong step, or one thread pulled, the whole
thing will unravel. Everyone will know exactly what
happened. And as bad as things got for me before I left LA,
they’ll get worse. I’m a coward for not facing it.
I inhale deeply, reminding myself to breathe. My heart
still races.
“I suppose they are a little spooky,” Allie adds.
“They’re not so bad,” Joey says. “The wolves all prefer
Victoria to me, though.” She casts a look at me that’s meant
to be good-natured. Meant to make me laugh. I manage a
tense, forced chuckle. “How did you find out about the
rescue?” She now turns her attention on Allie, sharp suspi‐
cion in her eyes.
“Well,” she clears her throat and places her wine glass
back on the table, “I’ve always been a big animal person. I
spent every summer of my childhood at the zoo. I couldn’t
get enough. My parents had a membership there because I
wanted to go so often. As a teenager, I begged for a snake and they finally gave in. It got out one night. I never heard the end of it.”
Her eyes dart between us as she laughs nervously, trying
to gauge whether we !nd the story as charming as she hopes it is. I manage a smile, even though it doesn’t reach my eyes.
“An interest in conservation just naturally followed. I
shared a lot of this with Miss London in the initial email.”
“You don’t have to call me that,” I tell her. “It’s Victoria.”
“Victoria,” she corrects herself. She repeats the name,
like she’s trying it out. It sounds like a curse when she says it.
I smile back at her, feeling like I’m having an out-of-body
experience.
Agreeing to be interviewed seems like a lifetime ago.
She’s a first-year journalism student with a large platform
already, having grown a YouTube channel to over a million
subscribers in the last year, mostly focusing on celebrity
stories. If people see this video on her YouTube channel,
there’s a good chance we’ll be able to promote the fundraiser that’s coming soon. Hopefully, that will equal dollars in our pocket and the ability to keep this place open.
But all of that is only okay if I’m able to walk a tightrope
without any assistance.
The last thing I want to talk about is the past or anything
that might stir up questions about it.
My confidence in Allie is strong. I checked out her
channel and she covers a variety of celebrity stories. But she’s aggressive. Not one to pull punches, I can already tell. One video made me particularly nervous. A true crime exploration of Phil Hartman’s wife. A shocking murder-suicide story. Before my time, but proximal in location and nature. I noticed it got more views than any of the other videos.
I swallow. My mouth is dry, despite the wine I just
drank.
I just have to keep Allie from asking too many questions.
Too many of the wrong questions. The kind that might
prompt a certain answer.
Like this one: what really happened the night Nikki
Stone died?
To which, if I were forced to be honest, I’d have to
answer: I killed her.
