CHAPTER 24

It was you.

He reached for me, his mouth open, his voice saying my name. I jerked away. I was still clutching the cigarette case and driver’s license—her driver’s license, hers, stamped with the face that had stared out at me for months from bulletin boards, drive-through windows, the television screen as it played the evening news. As I fumbled with the catch on my seat belt, my panicked mind slowed just long enough to note that I finally knew the dead girl’s name.

Not the dead girl.

Amelia.

Amelia Anne Richardson, age twenty-two, from a town I’d never heard of in a state I’d never been to.

James was trying to hold me, his bony fingers grasping and gripping at my arms, my sleeves, my face, trying to keep me from running. I lashed out with the hand that held the cigarette case and caught him on the ear, felt the blow ringing down my forearm as his hands flew up in surprise. The seat belt gave way with a click, snapping back with the sing of nylon, and I grabbed frantically at the door handle, and then I was outside. Running. Feet pounding, falling over the uneven ground, falling once and then again while the wind howled and tried to push me back. I cried out in frustration, plunged my hands into the dirt, propelled myself forward. I ran as lightning flashed again overhead, ran as the thunder cracked so loudly that I felt like I was trapped inside a room full of noise, ran as I heard James coming, fast, behind me.

He was still calling my name.

My feet tangled in the whipping grass and I went down again, seeing the glare of the headlights behind me, feeling the tiny zing of small cuts on my bare shins. The rain-starved weeds had turned sharp. They sliced and hissed in the wind, bending angrily toward my face, my neck, the exposed skin on my chest and back.

When I looked up, he was there.

I had forgotten how quick he was, how fast those long, coltish legs could move. I had been a fool to think I could outrun him. In this place, where there was only nothingness for miles, fields and farmland and thick woods, I had nowhere to go. And there was nobody here to help me.

I looked desperately toward the road, hoping for headlights or the sound of a motor. Seeing only darkness, black and empty, the only movement coming from the frantic tossing of the trees.

James shouted again, his voice high and tense, raised angrily over the wind. I struggled to my feet again and he moved toward me.

“Becca, stop running!”

I took one tentative step, then turned back. I stared into his face. He was lit by the headlights, his face bathed in the harsh electric brightness of the high beams, with dark shadows pooling under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks.

He was skeletal.

Monstrous.

This was the boy I’d thought I loved, he was chasing me down, advancing on me now with his face contorted in rage and his fist closed tight and heavy with anger.

I looked into his face and screamed.

My voice was a banshee shriek, high and raw, a sound like shattering glass and squealing tires and fingernails being dragged over slate. Full of anguish and anger. I screamed into the night, while the world howled back around me.

“What did you do, James?”

He stopped moving, his hand still hanging heavily at his side. He stared at me and shook his head, barely, and the light glinted twice in the black pools of his eyes.

“What did you do?” I screamed again. A ragged sob escaped from my lips and I swallowed hard, fighting the urge to break down. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. I was here, with him. Alone, and too slow to outrun him, and too stupid to see his silences and strange anger and absence for what they were, and he was coming closer now, the wind blowing his hair back and his eyes still fixed on my face.

“Becca,” he said, and his voice was like ice as the wind carried it toward me. “Becca, it’s not—”

“It’s her!” I yelled. “That’s her, James! She’s dead, she was fucking murdered, and you’ve been hiding her driver’s license in your car for . . .” I trailed off, realizing how close I’d been to learning the truth, remembering how he had slapped my hand away when I reached for the glove box so many weeks before.

He took another step toward me, and I backed away. “Stay away from me!”

“Becca, just—”

“What did you do? Answer me, goddammit!” I took another step back. He moved forward. I started to sob, no longer able to hold it back, no longer sure there was any reason to. “Oh God, James, what did you do? Did you hurt her? Did you?!”

He stopped, and his eyes narrowed. His hand tensed, his fist closing tighter, the muscles in his forearm jumping and ready to move.

“Tell me!” I screamed again. I took a deep breath, clenching my hands into fists, feeling my pulse pounding in my palms like something small and terrified.

“Did you kill her?”

He didn’t answer, only looked at me, working his jaw while the headlights glared against his cheekbones, his earlobes, the angular jut of his shoulders, and the long lines of his arms and legs. Inside the beam of light, small movements began to appear. A few at first, and then more, thin lines that passed through and fell to the ground with a tiny, soft sound. The field was full of it—the pattering of water, growing stronger, falling in sheets now on the leaves and brush and blades of grass. I felt cold needles on my skin, saw dark marks appearing on the fabric of my shirt as the rain came down.

Poured down.

My hair stuck in soaking tendrils to my face, and the earth below me began to soften, and still James only stood there. Silent. Unmoving. He stood there and stared, until I thought that I should run again—that I had to try—and I turned one foot to find purchase in the muddying ground, and then it came.

A whisper above the sound of the rain.

“Yes,” he said. “I killed her.”