Carrie is up late the next morning. It takes time for her to link up the long daisy chain of her memories until she gets to the present. When she arrives at the end, she remembers the fight with her father, and why she has the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She thinks he must be out walking the dog, which is why he didn’t wake her. She could have set her own alarm, but a couple of nights in her parents’ house and she’s fallen back into old habits, acting like a kid again.

She showers and dresses, ready to get back to work, and to hell with her dad and his objections. She never let them stop her before. She plans to talk her way into the police station, look at the records, see if there have been any other missing people.

There’s no coffee in the kitchen, which adds to her foul mood. Her mother is still asleep in her bedroom — her hours are all over the place, another symptom of her ongoing degeneration — but her father is nowhere to be seen.

She notices Pearl, curled in a ball on her doggie bed. But her dad’s keys are not on the counter where he keeps them. Carrie checks her phone. It’s 7:34 a.m. He’s been out all night. Impossible. Her dad never stays out all night.

Carrie is about to call him when someone knocks on the front door.

She opens it, and Carl Stuckey stands there, mouth open, eyes red. He can’t bring himself to say it.

He doesn’t have to.

Her mother steps tentatively into the living room behind Carrie, still in her nightgown. She’s asking who’s at the door, even though she can see Carl perfectly. She needs to be told.

Carrie knows that’s the first thing she has to do.

She knows other things, too. She knows that this was done to her deliberately, that it is not a coincidence, that her presence here has ended her father’s life.

She ought to be moving. She ought to find her father’s backup weapon in the gun safe — he has never changed the combination — and she ought to strap it on and start looking for the killer, looking for vengeance. She knows that’s how her story ought to go.

But right now, none of it seems to matter, because she doesn’t know how she will do the first thing. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother.

She knows this is what they wanted. Whoever did this, they did it to stop her. But it doesn’t help.

The girl detective, for all the times she has been tied up and threatened and punched and shot at, has never actually felt like a victim until this moment.

17

Normal Is Whatever You Grow Up With