He looked her up and down and she leaned forward and put her elbows on the table, squeezing her breasts up with her arms. Tad nodded approvingly.
“You’re pretty hot, babe,” he said.
It was the second time he’d called her that, and Miranda had an odd feeling that it was because he’d forgotten her name. But that was ridiculous. They had talked on the phone, hadn’t they?
“So you liked the first Rambo movie?” she asked.
“Yeah, Sylvester Stallone is awesome. His arms are huge in this one—did you see the poster? I wonder how much he lifts.”
Miranda didn’t bother pointing out that the poster he referred to was actually a painting. Besides, she’d seen other Stallone movies and knew his arms were pretty big.
Tad curled his own skinny bicep. “I got a set of free weights for my birthday. I’m going to get massive before the school year starts.”
“Do you play sports?” Miranda asked, thinking he wanted to try out for football or something. Why else would he want to build big muscles?
“Nah, sports are for jocks,” Tad said. “I just want to be big so that everyone will know they can’t mess with me.”
She didn’t think really huge guys were attractive, but the important thing was what Tad liked, not her. Every article she’d read about catching a boyfriend had mentioned being interested and attentive—to ask questions that kept him talking and not spend too much time talking about herself.
And Miranda had done everything exactly right. She’d avoided eating in front of him. She kept the conversation on him and let him dictate where they went and what they did. She’d let him feel her up.
All of Miranda’s plans were falling into place. Her virginity would be gone in three weeks, tops. Of course she wouldn’t let him bang her on the first date. She had to string him along.
On the first day of freshman year she’d be riding shotgun in Tad’s Camaro and Lauren would be sweaty from riding her bike to school like a little kid.
Then those three bitches had sat down across the food court from them. Miranda had noticed them buying food at the McDonald’s a few rows behind Tad’s seat. She’d noticed because all three wore tight jeans and tight neon-colored tank tops, although each one had a different color. They looked like they just came out of a Life Savers roll, Miranda thought.
Every one had teased bangs and a scarf in her hair like Madonna, and their wrists were covered in plastic bracelets.
Miranda noticed that their breasts were barely contained by the tank tops, and she thought maybe her plan of wearing the button-down shirt had been too subtle. Her thought was that Tad would look at it and want to unbutton the buttons, but maybe she should have put the merchandise on display, as it were. Possibly she could slip into the bathroom before the movie and unbutton the top two buttons.
Then one of the neon Life Saver bitches had caught sight of them and waved and called, “Hey, Tad!” and she was pretty far away across the food court, so everyone turned to look and saw her boobs practically hanging out of her pink top.
Including Tad, who waved and jumped up to go talk to them without saying a word to Miranda.
Now it had been at least ten minutes since Tad went over there, and Miranda wondered when he would come back. He’d sat down at the table with the other three girls and seemed mesmerized by the jiggling of the pink girl’s chest. If he didn’t come back soon they would miss the movie and all of Miranda’s plans would be for nothing.
She dabbed one of the French fries in ketchup and put it in her mouth without thinking. Then another, and another, until she realized half the container had gone into her little piggy belly.
At least Tad didn’t see me, she thought, hastily wiping her lips and fingers with a napkin.
She sighed and checked her watch. Maybe she should just call her mom and ask her to come and pick her up. No, she decided, reconsidering. Janice (Miranda always called her “Janice” in her mind, though she didn’t quite have the guts to do so to her face) would be on her second or third highball by now, and she’d probably wipe out in a flaming explosion between their house and the mall.
And Dad would give her a lecture about the evil that boys do, not knowing that Miranda knew all about that evil and wanted it inflicted on her as soon as possible.
“Hey, you look like you lost your best friend,” a male voice said, and then He slid into the seat across from Miranda.
She looked up in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
He held up a bag from the Gap. “New pants. Speaking of best friends, where’s Lauren?”
Of course He would ask about Lauren. Miranda shrugged. “At home, I guess. I came here with . . . someone else.”
She was unable to keep her eyes from sliding left, in the direction of Tad and the Neon Bitches.
“Ah,” He said, following her gaze. “You can do better than him, a pretty girl like you.”
Miranda sat up straighter. She’d never noticed before how He had such nice eyes. And he was older than Tad—an actual adult.
“Tell you what—let me give you a ride home,” He said. “Maybe he’ll show up tomorrow with flowers if you leave him here.”
Miranda smiled. A ride home. Twenty minutes in the car to convince Him that she was just as grown-up as He was. It shouldn’t be too hard. He’d already said she was pretty.
12
Thursday
Lauren didn’t expect to hear from Miranda the next day at all. She assumed her friend would be so irritated at Lauren for ditching her at the Dream Machine that Miranda wouldn’t call for at least a week. So she was surprised when the phone rang right after breakfast and Miranda’s voice said, “Meet me by the old ghost tree.”
“I can’t,” Lauren said, which was true. “Mom went shopping in Silver Lake and I’m watching David.”
“Lame.” Miranda huffed out an annoyed breath. “After lunch?”
“Probably,” Lauren said, although she didn’t particularly want to meet Miranda. She had no desire to get dragged off to the arcade again. “She should be back by then. Listen, we’re not going to the Dream Machine, are we?”
“God, no,” Miranda said. “Why would we hang out in a place like that with a bunch of kids?”
Lauren frowned at the phone. “But yesterday . . .”
“Yesterday I realized there’s no reason for me to waste my time on a child like Tad,” Miranda said loftily.
But you’re a child, Lauren thought, though she didn’t say so. Fifteen wasn’t very grown-up, and Lauren could admit that to herself even if she would die before saying such a thing to her mother.
“I’ll meet you at one,” Miranda said, and hung up.
Lauren put the phone back in the cradle and stared at it, like Miranda could see her glaring. “What if I don’t want to go?”
The only possible explanation for Miranda’s sudden disdain of the Dream Machine was that Things Had Not Worked Out with Tad. Which meant Miranda had shifted her attention elsewhere. Which meant that she wanted Lauren to listen to rapturous descriptions of the virtues of Miranda’s new target, and Lauren didn’t want to.
She reached for the phone. “I’ll call her back and tell her I don’t want to go.”
But her hand stopped before she even picked up the receiver. If she called Miranda back and said she didn’t want to meet, then Miranda would want to know why, and if Lauren said why they’d probably get into a fight and Lauren had a feeling that any fight they had would mean the end of Miranda and Lauren. No more meeting at the ghost tree, no more best friends forever.
Though best friends forever doesn’t seem very likely anymore, does it?
Lauren had thought—and she was a little ashamed of this—that they would just sort of drift away from each other when the school year started. There would be more kids to meet in high school, because Smiths Hollow was large enough to hav
e three elementary schools (two public ones and a private Catholic school, though not many kids went there) and all those schools fed into the high school.
Miranda would have her own interests, which seemed to involve older boys and cars, and Lauren would have her own interests, and they would both float into their respective streams with no hurt feelings.
Telling Miranda she didn’t want to meet up—that would lead to actual conflict. And Lauren didn’t know if she wanted actual conflict. It made her a little ashamed, to realize she was such a coward that she couldn’t even stand up for herself to a girl she’d known since she was small.
But then that was part of what bothered Lauren about Miranda lately, anyway—that she made plans and assumed Lauren would go along with them, that she didn’t listen to Lauren’s (admittedly feeble) protests. If Lauren actually tried to assert herself, Miranda would melt into the ground.
Like the Wicked Witch of the West in the old movie.
She could see Miranda being swallowed up, her fancy Jordache jeans and cheerleader-high ponytail disappearing while her voice feebly croaked, “I’m melting, I’m melting.”
Swallowed up by darkness, Lauren thought, and then wondered where the thought had come from. She shivered, because it was full of malice, and she didn’t think that malice was her own.
There’s someone out in the woods.
In her woods, the woods that had always welcomed and comforted her. Someone had left a bloody handprint on her bike. Someone had killed two girls and left their pieces in Mrs. Schneider’s backyard.
There was a lot of blood.
That was what David had said. Lauren was certain that their mom wouldn’t have allowed David to investigate, and she’d scrupulously avoided talking about the incident in front of him. Mom had only mentioned it to Lauren in an undertone after dinner, adding, “I don’t know any details, Lauren. I just know that the kids in the neighborhood will talk and I wanted you to be aware of the situation.”
That “situation” had been the reason why Officer Hendricks drove by their house in the squad car yesterday, and probably even why he hadn’t noticed Lauren standing in the driveway.
There would have been nothing left of those girls but bits, and that would make anybody freak out.
She had been trying hard not to freak out herself, because the very fact that the dead girls existed somewhere outside the vision she had yesterday was something she was trying hard not to acknowledge. Did it mean she was psychic or something?
And what had she really seen? A monster? Or a man?
The memory had faded almost immediately after, leaving something like a weak afterimage, but it sort of looked like both. Like a man with a monster inside him, and monster claws. Or maybe it was a monster with a man inside him, and human hands.
All she knew for sure was that she couldn’t talk to anybody about it. Miranda would scoff—if she let Lauren get a word in edgewise, that was—and her mother would probably make an appointment with a psychiatrist (all the while complaining about the extra expense).
“Except David knew about it,” Lauren said.
“I knew about it?” David asked.
Lauren jumped and spun around, clutching her chest melodramatically. “Jeez, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
David stood in the kitchen doorway holding his G.I. Joe figure. “Only old people have heart attacks.”
“Nuh-uh. Anybody can have a heart attack. Except little kids like you,” she amended. She didn’t want David to start worrying about having a heart attack.
“What did I know about?” he asked.
Lauren stared at him blankly for a second, and then she remembered. “Oh. That.”
She didn’t know if she ought to talk about it with David. Mom might get annoyed, especially since she’d made such a point of not discussing it until David had gone to bed the night before.
Well, Mom was always annoyed with her anyway.
“How did you know about the girls who were killed in Mrs. Schneider’s backyard?”
David’s head tilted to one side, and his eyes seemed to go to a faraway place. “They weren’t killed there. They were killed in the woods and put in the yard later.”
“Yes, but how do you know that?” Lauren felt her heart beating faster, realized her hands were shaking.
David shrugged. “I heard it.”
“You heard it?” Surely he hadn’t heard the actual murder take place, heard the girls screaming. Mom never let David go into the woods. “Not for real.”
He tapped the side of his head with his G.I. Joe figure. “No. In here.”
Lauren remembered falling to the ground in the woods, rolling in the dirt and clutching her head. She remembered the pain of her vision, the terror of it, and gave David a horrified stare.
“You heard the girls dying?”
He pressed his mouth flat, like he was considering this. “Uh-uh. Just Mrs. Schneider screaming and then I kind of knew why she was doing that, because of the blood.”
Thank the lord for small favors, Lauren thought. It was something her mom always said, and it had never made much sense to her until that moment. She wouldn’t have wished that vision on her worst enemy, much less on her little brother.
But why had he heard it in the first place? Why had she had a vision? Was there something wrong with them—with both of them?
“Did you tell Mom?” Lauren asked.
David nodded. “Yeah.”
“And what happened?”
“She bought me ice cream.”
“Did she say anything about it?”
“About what?” He fiddled with the G.I. Joe figure, clearly losing interest in the conversation.
“About the girls,” Lauren said patiently.
David shook his head. “No, she just asked me what kind of ice cream I wanted.”
Typical, Lauren thought. Their mom probably didn’t want to think that anything was weird or wrong with David, so she would just pretend it didn’t exist.
If Lauren’s vision had occurred in her mother’s vicinity, then Lauren would have gotten yelled at for rolling on the floor and making a fuss. And there definitely would not have been ice cream.
“Can we play checkers?” David asked.
“Sure, bud,” Lauren said, but she wasn’t thinking about board games. She was thinking about the girls in the woods.
Lauren went to the hall closet to take out the checkerboard, David trailing behind her like a pull-along toy. She had to stand on a stepladder to reach the shelf with the games on it. David waited patiently for her to hand the checkers set down to him.
“Want to play Candy Land, too?” she asked. It was easier if he decided while she was already standing on the stepladder.
“Okeh,” David said. “He said they were sweet like candy.”
Lauren had the second game pulled out partway from the pile, but David’s words startled her so much that she yanked it too hard and it fell to the floor. The box burst open and cards and gingerbread men scattered all over the bottom of the closet.
“Lau-ren,” David said, kneeling to pick up the pieces.
“David,” Lauren said, climbing down and crouching next to him. She put her fingers under his chin so he would look up at her. “Who said that?”
“The monster that ate the girls,” David said, calmly stacking the cards back inside the box. “He said they were sweet.”
“I thought you didn’t see what happened to them,” Lauren said.
“I didn’t,” David said. “I just heard that, at the end.”
“At the end? End of what?” Had David actually seen the massacre and just not wanted to tell her so?
His eyes got that faraway look that meant he was thinking hard, or trying to remember. “At the end of the screaming.”
She shouldn’t be pushing h
im on this, she realized. If David’s brain was trying to protect him by letting him forget the details, then she should let it. Lauren ruffled his hair, which was brown and straight and thick, and he jerked his head away.
“Don’t,” he said. It always annoyed him when she did that.
She did it again and he ran out of the closet and into the hall. “Can’t catch me!” he shouted.
“Oh, yes I can!” she said, running after him, but very slowly so he could get away.
You should let him forget, she thought. Even if you can’t.
David’s laughter trailed behind him. Lauren pinned a smile to her face, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what David had said.
He said they were sweet like candy.
Like candy.
The monster.
13
Alex Lopez sat at his desk and forced himself to think of the girls. Specifically, the girls’ heads talking to him.
Because it was a very strange thing. He found that if he didn’t think of that exact moment, didn’t hear their voices and see their mouths moving, his brain would slide away from the memory of the crime scene.
Like it was trying to forget that it ever happened.
Like something was trying to make Alex forget it ever happened.
And when he mentioned the fruitless search that he’d done yesterday for the girls’ car to Van Christie, it had taken the chief a minute to remember what Alex was even talking about.
“Oh, right,” Christie said. “The mayor wants us to keep this as quiet as we can. He’s worried about the summer fair.”
“Of course he is,” Alex said, but low enough that Christie didn’t seem to notice.
Alex liked a lot of things about Smiths Hollow, but Mayor Touhy was not one of them. Most politicians had two faces, but Touhy’s second face was made of sharkskin.
He decided to write down everything he remembered about the girls in the small notebook he carried in his pocket. He wasn’t a detective, so he didn’t carry it to make notes about cases. Mostly he used it to jot down things Sofia wanted him to pick up on the way home.
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