CHAPTER 18

By the time the grease-spattered kitchen clock had wound its slim hands around to point to ten o’clock, my mind had wandered back and forth over the same territory so many times that I no longer had to think. There were well-worn grooves in my memory, paths I could walk blindly and automatically, making effortless leaps over the gaps and landing firm-footed on the other side. There was the dead girl, her eyes open, laughing and alive while a pair of narrow eyes traced with want over the curves of her body. There she was again, tangled hair and skin like rice paper, her eyes glazed milky by death, the awkward pile of her broken limbs blocked out by his bulky shadow.

She had died just as I went to sleep that night, had closed her eyes in tandem with mine.

In a way, we had been twins. I had closed my eyes on the vision of James, sitting in the cab of the truck, driving away in the wordless aftermath of breaking my heart. She had closed her eyes on the tall shadow of a killer, a hulking behemoth in long, heavy shoes, passing silently over her broken body and stepping away into the brush.

Together, I imagined, we had stared into the dark and wondered how everything could go to hell so terribly, irreversibly fast.

And then, she had died. And left me to face this trespasser—the one who had arrived on a cross-country flight, who lived in a dead woman’s house, who settled like slow poison over the town—alone.

In the dining room, the last two customers were plodding their way through the final bites of a meal. In the low light, turned down to a dim glow for the benefit of the barflies, they were two shadows punctuated by the white dab of a napkin, the slow silver arc of a fork.

“Ugh, could they be any creepier?”

Lindsay had appeared behind me, her hand cocked irritatedly on her hip. She pointed across the room. There was a group of men at the bar. The group, the one from Silver Lake, who’d been arrested with such fanfare and who’d been quietly let out of jail by sundown, when the man they had beaten declined to press charges. We could only guess what the cost of his silence had been.

One of the men was watching me, his small eyes gleaming like deep-set, polished steel, his pebbly teeth set in something like a smile. He leaned in close to the man next to him, muttered something. Both of them turned to look at me.

I stared back, wondering why the one with the pebbly teeth looked so familiar, then realizing that I’d seen him just hours before. He had been in the parking lot as I fled from Craig; I’d bolted past him, too scared and running too hard to think about how close he’d been standing.

Close enough to hear raised voices from the alley.

Close enough to be staring at me now, with the smug self-assurance of a man who thought he knew a secret.

“I can’t believe Tom lets them hang out in here,” she sniffed. “After what they did. That’s probably why Craig hasn’t come tonight. He hates those assholes just as much as I do.”

“Is he supposed to be here?” I asked cautiously.

She sighed. “I don’t know. I guess . . . Tom kinda asked him not to come around. Said he was bad for business.”

I nodded.

“But he’s not really so bad,” she said, her voice almost pleading.

“Lindsay . . .”

“He just acts like a jerk ’cause he likes the attention.”

Maybe, I thought. Or maybe he liked the idea of her. A woman, helpless and forced to her knees in the dirt, pinned to the ground by a man who took what he wanted and then took more, took everything.

This was what happened to girls who make plans.

“Lindsay, I think there’s something you should know.”

She looked at me, her expression a mix of confusion and suspicion. Across the room, the men at the bar were listening to our conversation with too much interest.

“Come here,” I said.

I grabbed her hand, dragging her back through the kitchen and out the door. As we stepped into the dark, gooseflesh broke out on my skin. The air was clammy—damp, heavy with the scent of earth and the threat of a storm.

“Wow!” Lindsay was saying, twirling in the orange glow of the streetlight so that her hair flew out behind her and her dress ballooned with caught air. She spread her arms wide. “I think a storm’s coming! Doesn’t it feel like it?”

“Listen.” I leaned back against the side of the building, feeling the rough ridge of brick on my back. It grabbed eagerly at the thin cotton of my shirt. A breeze had sprung up from the west, lifting the hem of Lindsay’s dress and winding its soft fingers into my hair, playing coyly with the tendrils that lay loose and damp against my neck.

It was going to rain.

Lindsay peered into the dark, her eyes suddenly lit with friendly focus.

I smiled back at her, then realized that her gaze had settled behind me. I turned.

Someone was standing in the shadows between the trees.

Someone tall and broad-shouldered, wearing heavy boots.

Somewhere far away, a door banged. The sour smell of old beer wafted into the night. There was a shout, and then another. The katydids sang louder.

And under the trees, in the sick orange glow of the streetlight, Craig Mitchell stepped forward and smiled.