A crime-solving psychologist finds herself locked in a battle of wits when a murderer strikes too close to home. An addictive suspense thriller for fans of You.
THE DEAD DON’T LIE
CHAPTER 1
Gauzy sun slithered through the early fog and cast murky shadows along either side of the path. Each pulsing thud of Lindsay’s sneakers sent the brittle leaves crackling, the twigs snapping like tiny bones, the sparse grass wetting her sneakers with dew. It was eerie, she decided, like walking over your own grave. But Lindsay didn’t mind. The high-pitched screech of birdsong and the prickling flesh along her back only urged her to run faster over the rutted dirt.
She wiped sweat from her already dripping brow. Three weeks until school was out for good—three weeks until graduation and summer. In Fernborn, Indiana, the city to her west, and the neighboring town of Tysdale to her east, that meant state fairs and trips to the lake. Scary stories around a campfire.
And Jeff. Possibly without his shirt. But for now… she had this.
The fork in the road approached like a mirage, first shimmering lazily, then vanishing when her focus wavered. Straight ahead, dappled sunlight filtered through the canopy and cut the darkness with hazy gold. That was the way others would go—the only path so far as most knew. But she wasn’t “most.” Heavy moss cloaked the entrance of the second path, the low-hanging branches so dense with wild kadzu that she could not see any glint of daylight beneath. The contrast was so stark that Lindsay hesitated, her feet still pounding the earth, her breath panting from her lips. Then she tightened her ponytail and hooked a right, ducking beneath the slippery vines and into the dark.
The path here was choked with weeds and spiky sweet gum pods—more brittle crackling, more snapping bones, the damp scent of rotting underbrush in her nose. Lindsay gritted her teeth. Unless she wanted to run back and forth over the same path, she had no choice but to take the trail that wound over the steeper hills closer to Fernborn. This last cross-country meet was supposed to be a doozy, and better runners than her had wound up puking on the curb. If she trained hard enough through these unmanned briars, the hilly—but weed-free—track of the actual race should be a cakewalk.
The fog condensed as she made her way along, the darkness more insistent. Fingers of chill crawled along Lindsay’s spine like witches’ nails, but she ignored the prickling and pushed on. She was not some character in a horror novel, some vulnerable girl who’d be easy pickings for a machete-wielding serial killer. She was Lindsay “Dash” Harris, soon-to-be winner of the Indiana cross-country—again—and a kickboxer on the weekends. Besides, what kind of serial killer would be roaming the woods at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning? That was not how killers worked. A dark city alley, a van on a long, lonely road, a strange man at a college bar, the Supreme Court—those were the real threats. But out here? Not nearly enough victims passing through for anyone intent on harm. This was a place for high school students skipping first period so they didn’t have to skip the movies with their boyfriends later. What was she going to use trigonometry for, anyway?
But as the trail veered left, Lindsay squinted at the path ahead, her feet throbbing in time to her heart, her back sticky with sweat. She blinked away salt, her eyes stinging. What the heck was that?
Lindsay slowed as she finished rounding the gentle curve, then resorted to jogging in place. Not a killer, not a human at all, though that didn’t make it any less intrusive—she could have kneed a strange man in the balls and been on her way. This was not so simple. A wall of greenery stood before her, the massive trunk taller than she was and barely visible between the thick foliage. Branches waved like kicking legs, each with enough leafy boughs to block the sun. From the black gouge along the trunk far down to her right, the giant oak had been struck by lightning and collapsed. Quitter.
Lindsay glanced back the way she’d come, debating. She could turn around and head back to the main path, then follow it around to her car. But she hadn’t won a bookcase full of trophies for taking the easy way out.
Decision made, she approached the tree. She could not climb through—the branches were so thick, so haphazard and mean, that she wouldn’t make it to the other side without getting wickedly gouged. To her right, the trunk reached who knew how far, the roots surely a minefield. And she was already in the upper boughs. Certainly those leftward shadows led to the top of the tree, and the damaged earth where the oak had fallen carved out a passable aisle.
Lindsay headed that way. She’d go around, pick up the path on the other side, and loop her way back to the fork when the time came; she knew where to cut through. Plus, she’d have a story to tell her coach, though she’d leave out the part about skipping school.
Her thighs burned as she jogged over the uneven ground, jumping the occasional extra-long branch and skirting dewberry and thistle. Above her, the canopy cleared, admitting the filtered dawn—the oak had taken some of the smaller saplings with it when it collapsed. The musk of mud and the wet heat of endurance filled her nose. It smelled like success.
Lindsay smiled. She ran on, and on, and on, letting her heart mellow into a steady ache, her lungs adjusting to the strain, her legs going numb. Euphoria rarely came easy, but once that runner’s high kicked in, it was… well, even better than being with Jeff, and that was really saying somethi—
The earth vanished, her body hurtling through space. The ground smashed into Lindsay’s shin like a freight train covered in broken glass. A loud snap echoed off the trees—another broken branch?
For a moment, she lay on the earth, panting. Stunned. She’d fallen, she knew that. Tripped. The shadow of the oak made the sweat on her face go cold, chilling her to the bone. She tried to force her hands beneath her, tried to push herself up, but she was shaking too badly. She collapsed in the mud, cheek against the ground, grit worming its way into her left nostril.
Then the pain hit.
It ripped through her consciousness, shattering her runner’s high, a white-hot blast of pure agony. Lindsay shrieked, suddenly very aware of her solitude. She was miles from either town—she could scream for days without being heard. Perhaps she had been wrong about that serial killer lurking in the quiet woods. Maybe some murderer had set a trap and would come back for her at nightfall. The thought was delirious and irrational, but she clung to it with everything in her soul, letting it focus her.
The hell he’ll come back to get me. I’m getting out of here!
Lindsay ground her teeth together hard enough to make her roots ache and shoved herself to seated, moaning, then tenderly shifted onto her butt. Her ankle was cocked at a weird angle, the bone not right—definitely not right. Her toes were hot, her shin a blistering fire poker that jabbed clear through her knee. No way she could run now. Her last chance to win, her senior year, and she had thrown it all away for some stupid woodsy adventure.
She snorted the grit from her nostril, gagged, choked back a sob, and blinked at the earth. The dark, cold earth—too dark. Lindsay paused. She gaped at the blackness. The ground… wasn’t there.
Lindsay frowned, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. Was she imagining things, mad with pain? No. The earth near the tree was there, but several of the branches poked down into nothingness. A sweet gum pod, teetering on the edge, slipped away into the chasm. And fell.
And fell.
And fell.
She listened, frozen, waiting for the pod to hit the bottom…
Silence from the hole. Above, birds twittered, laughing at her. Blood pulsed frantically in her ears, dread tightening her chest. Was she sitting on top of the hole, protected only by the sparest tangle of dried vines? One wrong move, and she’d be swallowed up, hidden forever in the bowels of the earth.
Lindsay reached behind her, grabbing the oak’s branches for leverage—for safety—and yanked, her face slick with sweat and tears. She sobbed harder as she pulled herself away from the opening, easing back to stable ground. But the hole. She was still so close to the hole, her calf extending over the void as if begging some underworld creature to reach up and drag her, flailing, into the abyss. She grunted and moved again, her thigh grating against the ground—that wasn’t dirt. Something hard, frigid, even a little damp. Stone?
Lindsay shifted back again, crying out so loudly that the twittering birds took flight with a burst of staccato squawking. Her ankle burned. She hissed another inhale, panting with pain and exertion and terror. She’d calm down, just calm down, and then she’d fashion a cane. She’d limp back to her car. She would not be beaten by a friggin’ hole—she would not be, literally, beaten by nothing.
With a final guttural heave, Lindsay hauled herself fully into the spiked web of branches, the ground beneath her solid. She blinked at the rocks, trying to catch her breath. The cavity in the muddy earth was guarded by a few rotten planks, their jagged splinters stabbing over the hole. The stones beneath were far too uniform to be natural. Eroded, but stacked neatly at a concave angle. A… well?
The burst of focus might have been a distraction, her brain trying to ignore her misery, but Lindsay remained still, branches jabbing at the flesh of her back, staring. The velvet blackness called to her. Though her leg was throbbing, fire shooting from toes to thigh, adrenaline pulsing in jagged bursts through her veins, she couldn’t help but look.
Lindsey slowly shifted onto her good hip, tears coursing down her cheeks, and leaned over, craning her neck, clutching a branch for support. She squinted. At first, the foliage from the downed tree cast murky shadows into the hollow of the well. But as she watched, a shimmering beam of morning pierced the dim, blades of glitter cutting through the darkness at the bottom.
The images came to her in flashes, pulsing in time to the pain in her leg. The world stopped moving. And though she knew no one could hear her, Lindsay screamed again.
This time, she couldn’t stop.
