The Little Girl in the Window: A Psychological Thriller Read online

  The Little Girl in the Window

  A Psychological Thriller

  C.G. Twiles

  Copyright © 2021 by C.G. Twiles

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by JS Designs Cover Art

  Visit CGTwiles.com for more information about the author and her books.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  12 Years Ago

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Now

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  One Week Later

  Chapter 46

  More Thrillers by C.G. Twiles

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  12 Years Ago

  The summer she was fourteen years old, she fell in love.

  And she killed two people.

  In mid-June, about a week after her freshman school year ended, Romy Renskler was trying to shrink inconspicuously into the farthest, shadiest corner of the Glass Town Country Club pool area when the lifeguard casually loped his way over to her.

  Heath Asher.

  He was eighteen years old, gloriously tanned, with a lanky, muscular body slipped inside neon-orange lifeguard shorts, and mussed, dark chestnut hair that grew longer and blonder as the endless (to a fourteen-year-old girl) summer wore on.

  Seeing him approach, Romy froze with apprehension, as she was certain he was about to kick her out. The Glass Town Country Club pool was members only. But she’d found a spot in the metal fence where two bars were kinked out just enough that the resulting space could accommodate her scrawny body.

  As Heath Asher closed in, something about his expression set her marginally at ease—it didn’t seem like a get the hell out look.

  “Whatcha writing?” he asked.

  Romy wasn’t writing, she was drawing. Warily, she held out her sketchbook, showing him her pencil sketch of a winged dragon with a young girl riding on its back, hoping this would act as a talisman that would ward off being booted out of the pool. But perhaps it would do the opposite. Depended on if he liked dragons, she supposed.

  “That’s awesome.” He flipped his sunglasses to his head and looked down at her as if she’d only then truly appeared.

  He had magnificent eyes that were a dark, soulful blue—indigo. The bridge of his nose had an infinitesimal thickness to it, which saved him from being “too pretty.”

  Of course, she’d seen him before.

  Romy’s freshman year at Glass Town High had just come to an uneventful close, and Heath had been a senior during that time. Freshmen and seniors generally only crossed paths in the hallways. But Romy was aware of him because she’d heard girls her age tittering hormonally as he slouched by them, usually in distressed jeans and a dark hoodie. Heaaaathhh Asssshhuurrrr. Hessogurguss.

  “You’re super talented,” he said, handing the sketchbook back.

  Romy smiled and reflexively covered her mouth with one hand because she had a slightly outward-turned incisor that embarrassed her.

  The only people who’d ever told her she was talented were her grandmother and her art teacher, Mr. Sands. To have someone like Heath Asher tell her this was a revelation because she knew he wouldn’t say it unless it was true—he had no reason to otherwise.

  She felt her cheeks burning and hoped if he noticed, he’d attribute it to the blazing sun—the sun she wasn’t in. She considered taking off her five-dollar plastic sunglasses so he could see her eyes. They were toffee-colored and fringed with sparse but long lashes, and she’d begun using mascara. She thought her eyes were her nicest feature.

  But she worried the look in them would blast out everything she was feeling. Her feelings weren’t anything she could articulate even in her mind but she knew they were powerful and potentially very humiliating.

  “Miss Talent,” he said, in a way that wasn’t sarcastic. “That’s what I’ll call you, but what’s your name?”

  “Romy.”

  “Like that movie, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion?”

  “No, like Romy-some-French-actress, engaged to a guy my mom was obsessed with. A French actor, supposed to be the most handsome man in the world. I looked him up. He’s not bad.”

  She couldn’t believe she was speaking so much but his demeanor was nonjudgmental and encouraging. He stared blankly at her for a moment, then a slow-burn smile spread across his face.

  “So, Romy, are you a member here?” He asked in a way that made it clear he already knew she wasn’t.

  “No. I live up the hill.” She hoped her proximity to the pool would somehow grant her membership privileges. “I just moved here from the south side and didn’t know it was private, and, um…”

  She trailed off, rubbing one bony knee and fidgeting, feeling abysmally awkward in her black and red one-piece bathing suit that was frayed along the pelvis’ hem.

  “How are you getting in?”

  She shamefully pointed to the space in the bars, partly hidden by tree branches.

  “Ohh. You must be skinny to get through there.”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I can leave.” She made a half-hearted grab for her sketch bag.

  “No, it’s okay. As long as you stay out here, no one should notice. But don’t use the changing rooms. And don’t cause trouble.”

  He stared down at her until it sunk in that he was joking and she could feel her cheeks start to warm again.

  “I won’t,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Better not. See ya, Miss Talent.”

  He loped off back to his lifeguard station, swinging up to the top perch in one fluid motion, like a jungle animal.

  She spent the rest of the summer staring at him from behind her sunglasses, hyperattuned to his every movement. Sometimes he did nothing but twirl the lanyard of his whistle around and around his finger as he surveilled his charges, the people he would have to save from drowning.

  Every gesture—an elbow on a knee, chin in a palm, a wipe of his forehead, a wave to someone he knew—captivated her. There was a hint of danger to his lazy movements, like a snake coiled in the grass.

  She anticipated those minutes he would come over and speak with her, which he always did, usually in the early afternoon, after his lunch break.

  “Maybe one day I can write a book, an
d you can illustrate it,” he said, in a way that made her think he was serious, not teasing her.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be prelaw.” He shrugged his tanned, sinewy shoulders. “But I’d rather write books.”

  “You definitely should.” She had no idea whether he had the capacity to write books but wanted to encourage him nonetheless. “Prelaw” sounded boring and she felt sorry for him, doomed to that kind of bone-dry life.

  Their chats only lasted five, maybe ten, occasionally fifteen minutes, over too fast. She thought about secretly recording them so she could replay them at her leisure but couldn’t figure out how to set up a microcassette recorder and get it working before he came over to her. She did not yet have a cell phone and all its accompanying apps. She’d been promised one for her fifteenth birthday, which wasn’t for another four months.

  One day, he brought over a notebook with a story he was writing. He left the pages with her and she consumed them as if they contained the answers to the universe’s grandest mysteries—and in a way they did, because this summer, her universe consisted of only drawing, her grandmother, her pool life, and Heath Asher.

  Several months ago, her parents had decided to sell their company. It produced a face goop (Steffie’s Fountain of Youth) that was inexplicably popular, millions of women believing it kept them eternally young. Then they retired on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

  Romy didn’t want to go with them. In particular, she didn’t want to leave her art teacher, Mr. Sands. He was mentoring her for admission to one of the better art schools—hopefully, The Rhode Island School of Design. (She did not get in but did get into The New School, in Manhattan.) She’d met him when, in junior high, she’d taken a high school level art class for extra credit.

  Additionally, Romy couldn’t move so far away from her grandmother, Nana. She wondered how her mother could do it. Nana, whose real name was Ella, was in her seventies now. She wouldn’t be around forever.

  So, after some legalities which Romy barely understood but that involved a lawyer and giving Nana temporary guardianship, her parents had moved, with the understanding that Romy could always change her mind.

  She tried not to think too much about what—deep down—this all meant. That she and her parents simply didn’t care that much about each other. Or at least not enough to want to live together.

  When she saw families on TV who ate each other up, she felt a vague shame about her situation. But she would grow up to feel she had a reservoir of resilience that people her age who’d had hovering parents—always anxious to safeguard their children from any and all discomfort—didn’t have. And that reservoir would come in handy.

  Romy read Heath’s story. It was about a young boy who woke up one morning with the power to control the weather.

  She could tell Heath wasn’t what anyone would call a profoundly talented writer. But he wasn’t terrible. The sentences were constructed properly. The characters, if not compelling, at least made a degree of impact. She didn’t get the feeling he would ever be a famous writer but his musings weren’t atrocious either.

  He also had nice handwriting for a boy, and she was surprised he handwrote.

  “Well?” he asked, returning an hour or so later, during the adults-only swim.

  “It’s not bad,” she said. “The lead guy is fun but I don’t really like the girl. She’s too…”

  “Girly?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Even that young, she was incapable of the kind of fakery that stroking his ego would have required. Intuition told her he didn’t want that anyway—didn’t want her to act like those depraved girls at school who fell into swoons if he glanced in their direction.

  “You should keep going,” she said. “I’m curious about what happens. Especially with the tornado.”

  “Are you really?” he asked, sounding dubious.

  “Well, I mean, not dying. But curious.”

  “Where are you on the curious scale? From one to ten.”

  “Um. Six and a half.”

  “Okay then,” he laughed. “Thanks for being honest. I know I have a lot of work to do. I read Tolkien and it’s like, who am I kidding?”

  When he smiled at her again, she felt like one of those girls at school, almost faint. With her being fourteen and him being nearly in college, there was no chance of them dating. But she’d be old enough for him in a year or two, wouldn’t she?

  The mellow yet pleasantly eager tone of his voice, his genuine smile, the way he sought her out in her corner… it all conveyed something that she felt on a molecular level. She was more than a precocious child to him.

  Wasn’t she?

  When she left the pool, filled with his image, she became disoriented inside of the woods and walked straight into a low-hanging tree branch, sending a long scratch along her cheek.

  Chapter Two

  Romy instantly noticed when Heath’s attention shifted to Misty Glass, the town’s prettiest girl. Not only beautiful but from the Glass family, which had founded the town—her ancestors had owned the former tobacco plant that had once employed most of the locals, both men and women.

  Misty was an incoming senior, and Romy hadn’t seen her at the pool much before but suddenly she was there every day with a friend or two.

  Everyone knew she was “going with” Jonathan Dugan, who—as cliché would have it—was a football player, and, as ultra-cliché would have it, was the quarterback. Misty, to her credit, was not a cheerleader.

  When Misty began regularly showing up at the country club pool without Jonathan, Romy realized they must have broken up.

  There she was in all her glory—the girl you can’t look away from. Blue-black hair with sinuous waves to the middle of her back, a nose that could have been the model for Barbie’s, the kind of lips women pay hard-earned cash for, and sky-blue eyes.

  Her curves weren’t the fledgling, striving curves of a typical sixteen-year-old girl, but the ripe curves of a woman in her prime. Put all that in a barely-there white bikini and the magnetic pull around her was palpable.

  Sometimes Romy observed the males—old and young alike—as they watched Misty, in awe at the power she had over the opposite sex. Then Misty turned that power on the one male that Romy was fervently hoping she wouldn’t.

  Day by day over the course of a week, Romy watched as Misty moved her towel with the big sunflower on it closer and closer to Heath’s lifeguard station. Watched as she tilted her face up and talked to him, and how he began looking down at her, at first only responding to her flirtation, then—inevitably, Romy supposed—initiating it.

  He began twisting to peer over his shoulder towards the main building, where people emerged from the changing and showering area.

  He’d sit flinging the cord of his whistle around his finger, waiting for her arrival. She usually got there with her friend shortly after noon.

  By now, Misty would spread her sunflower towel directly under Heath’s station so they could easily interact. When he climbed down to smear suntan lotion on her back, Romy knew they’d become a couple. With his attention fully consumed elsewhere, he stopped coming over to speak with Romy. She’d vanished from his awareness.

  A sore lump of dejection sprouted in her chest and stayed there. She’d forget about the sore lump when she slept, but upon awakening, it was only a few minutes before it swelled up again.

  She was surprised by the physicality of it. She’d heard the term “heartbreak” but didn’t know this was actually what it felt like, as if her heart had been pierced with a spike.

  How unfair life was! Of course, he’d want to be with a girl closer to his own age. Of course, he’d want to be with Misty Glass, with her full breasts and woman’s ass, with her golden-tanned skin, and glossy, wavy blue-black hair.

  Besides, you couldn’t even hate Misty. She smiled constantly. You’d smile too if you were her. No one ever said a bad word about her. She was friendly—even to a nobody like Romy.

  “Hi, R
omy!” she’d chirp if they passed each other in the school’s hallways. She was saying hello because she knew Romy was friends with her next-door neighbor, Gillian Frenetti, whom Misty used to babysit.

  Still. A girl like Misty didn’t have to say hello to a girl like Romy. Hell, the town was named after her family. Not only the town but the high school, the hardware store, the diner, the library, and the cemetery, which was dominated by gravestones carved GLASS. Not to mention all the living and breathing residents with Glass blood in their veins.

  Despite being a member of the town’s unofficial aristocracy, Misty dwelled not in a castle but in a regular-looking, two-story, gray-shingled house at the end of Shane Road. Not Glass Road, but don’t worry, that was only a few streets over. (There was also Glass Hill, Glass Lane, Glass Overlook, and Glass Drive.)

  It made complete and despairing sense that Misty would, after parting ways with Jonathan Dugan for whatever reason, get together with Heath Asher, because Misty was special, and Heath was special. And special people find each other.

  Chapter Three

  That night.

  That night, Romy’s budding conscience knew what she was about to do was wrong. But she was consumed by something she didn’t comprehend.