Look What You Made Me Do Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Elaine Murphy

  Cover design by Elizabeth Connor. Cover photo © Jane Morley/Trevillion Images. Compositing and retouching by Scott Nobles.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: July 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Murphy, Elaine, 1981–.

  Title: Look what you made me do / Elaine Murphy.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Grand Central Publishing,

  2021. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021006852 | ISBN 9781538704158 (trade paperback) | ISBN

  9781538704165 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.M86744 L66 2021 | DDC 813/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006852

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-0415-8 (trade paperback); 978-1-5387-0416-5 (ebook)

  E3-20210428-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  For my parents

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  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.