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Back Never Look Back
Chapters (51)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-One
  24. Twenty-Two
  25. Twenty-Three
  26. Twenty-Four
  27. Twenty-Five
  28. Twenty-Six
  29. Twenty-Seven
  30. Twenty-Eight
  31. Twenty-Nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-One
  34. Thirty-Two
  35. Thirty-Three
  36. Thirty-Four
  37. Thirty-Five
  38. Thirty-Six
  39. Thirty-Seven
  40. Thirty-Eight
  41. Thirty-Nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-One
  44. Forty-Two
  45. Forty-Three
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
  48. About the Author
  49. About the Book
  50. Also by Alison Gaylin
  51. About the Publisher

Elizabeth keeps a deck of tarot cards in her purse, and she read mine. I got Death, which Elizabeth says is not a bad card at all. In the Aquarian tarot deck, she said, the Death card means rebirth. A new beginning.

Elizabeth is going to Hollywood. She doesn’t want to be an actress, though. She wants to be one of those people who take still photos on movie sets. After about an hour of talking, we went to her room, and she let me try on some of her clothes and we did a photo shoot. I brought over some of Ed Hart’s props with me—a whip, a fake gun, some phony-looking handcuffs. I didn’t tell her where I’d gotten them, and she didn’t ask. She took some Polaroids of me, and then I took a great one of her—posing with the fake gun like Sergeant Pepper Anderson from Police Woman. (She insisted on making the “I love you” with the other hand, though, because like I told you, she’s a hippie.)

Elizabeth says she grew up in a commune in the desert. They raised llamas and chickens there. They made all their own clothes, and if anyone there used violence on each other, they got shut in the fruit cellar overnight. Elizabeth left, she says, because it was boring. No one to talk to except her brothers—she was the only girl—and she wasn’t allowed to smoke cigarettes or wear makeup and she had to read the Bible from cover to cover. I understand what Elizabeth was saying, but except for all those boys, it sounds like a perfect life to me. The Gideon compound, the commune is called. Just like the name on the cover of that motel Bible I read, back in West Covina, before I’d ever killed a man. It has to be some kind of sign.

Thirty

Robin

Just three days earlier, Santa Rosa High School’s golden couple had been crowned king and queen of the prom. Now, the lifeless bodies of Carrie Masters and Brian Griggs lay handcuffed together in a vacant lot, both shot in the back of the head execution style. In one of life’s cruelest ironies, the bleak, overgrown plot of land was just eight miles away from the school where Brian and Carrie had fallen in love, most likely oblivious to a quiet, sullen freshman by the name of April Cooper.