Allison explained the whole thing to the cat as she changed, and Clementine, tail twitching unhappily, watched her from her perch in the middle of the bed.
“You know, we don’t have to wait until we’re married.” Tone suggestive, Greg appeared in the doorway to give her a long, lustful look as she stood there in her black slacks and pale peach bra, ready to pull on the zebra-print top she loved because the vertical stripes were slimming. Still a little self-conscious about her less-than-tiny waist and slightly fleshy rib cage, she tugged the top on over her head before replying.
“Yes, we do.” Resurfacing, she ran smoothing hands over her chin-length auburn hair. It was cut a little longer in front than in back in a layered style designed to slim her face, not that it seemed to work, particularly. “Now that you’ve put the idea in my head, I like the thought of waiting for my wedding night.”
“Next time I start talking, remind me to shut up.” With a wry smile, he headed toward her as she stepped into her black peep-toes, his eyes on the small, packed carry-on that waited near her feet. Her laptop case was perched on top of it. Her purse lay near Clementine on the bed. His glance took in all those things before returning to her.
“You all packed? That was quick.”
“It was quick because I never unpacked,” she confessed. “I had my clothes cleaned at the hotel before we left.”
“Smart.” He pulled her close. Allison slid her arms around his neck, in the process taking just a second to admire the sparkle of her new ring as it caught the light from the lamp beside her bed. Instead of kissing her, as she expected, he cupped her chin, tilting her face up to his, seeming to study it. She smiled into his eyes. His fingers moved caressingly along her jaw, warm as they stroked her skin. “Got your cell phone?”
“In my purse.”
“Called everybody you need to call?”
“Everybody important.”
“Fantastic,” he said and returned her smile. His other hand slid up her back to curve around her nape.
Allison was just registering that there was something off about his expression, something wrong about the sudden, intent gleam in his eyes, when his fingers delved beneath her hair to settle on the back of her head, his hand firm and strong as it conformed to the shape of her skull, gripping rather than caressing her now. Just like the hand holding her chin was gripping it now. In a purposeful way, as if he meant to …
Something primeval inside her kicked into gear and sent a warning jolt of adrenaline surging through her veins. A cold, prickly sensation raced over the surface of her skin.
Together they screamed, Danger.
Her eyes widened. Her lips parted. Her pulse jumped. Instinctively she started to stiffen, to pull away from him.
“Wha …?” she began, but before she could finish, before she could get out so much as the rest of the word what, as in “what in the world are you doing?” which is what she meant to ask him, before her brain could even finish directing her muscles to escape from his hold—it was too late.
His lips thinned. His eyes gleamed hard as glass. His hands tightened brutally, then made a short, sharp movement that twisted her neck violently to the left. There was a crack, loud as a brittle twig being snapped in two.
Her eyes still wide, her head at an unnatural angle now, her breathing cut off as her trachea crushed, blinded and deafened by the explosion of pure agony that rocketed toward her brain, Allison registered a jumble of thoughts, a thousand sensations, a lifetime of memories, a final burst of horror, in an instant.
Then she died.
CHAPTER TWO
From her position under the bed, Lucy Peel heard the snap of Allison’s neck breaking without knowing what it was. Wedged in beside her, her best friend, Jaden Miller, grabbed hold of her hand. Already sweating, already tense, the fifteen-year-old girls were suddenly so petrified that they could barely breathe as they watched the shuffle of feet around the queen-sized bed and listened in vain for the resumption of the conversation that had just ended with that brittle crack.
Lucy looked at Jaden. What the hell? she mouthed.
Jaden gave a tiny, clueless shrug.
Their worst fear, besides discovery of course, was that the adults they were hiding from would decide to do the nasty on the mattress some three feet above their heads. That would just be gross, as they had communicated to each other in an eye-rolling exchange of glances when the guy had joined Miss Howard in her bedroom.
Now the girls lay facedown, their bodies pressed tight to the hardwood floor, trying not to inhale the amalgam of cat hair and dust and who knew what else floated around them as they waited in a state of silent anxiety for whatever would happen next. One sneeze, even a sniffle maybe, and they would be caught. Ten to one, the police would be called. Miss Howard would call them for sure—she was a lawyer who came in free to help out the Shelter House administrators. No way was she going to keep her mouth shut about two runaways who’d broken into her house and lived in it for four days. Especially since, besides eating everything they’d been able to find, they’d helped themselves to some cash they’d discovered in a kitchen drawer, pawned some jewelry and an iPod, and sold an old fur coat they’d found tucked away at the back of a closet, telling the consignment shop owner it had been left to Lucy by her recently deceased grandmother. All of that had netted approximately two hundred dollars, plus they’d grabbed eighty-seven dollars from the petty cash drawer at Shelter House when they’d decided to run, which Lucy was pretty sure put them in the felony category. They’d be arrested for sure, and then they’d be fed to the system one more time, only this time the chances for escape would be greatly reduced. It was unlikely they’d end up at Shelter House again, which was the only good thing about it. Shelter House was mostly for status offenders, like habitual truants, or the most minor of criminal transgressors. The key was that the female inmates, who ranged in age from fourteen to seventeen, had to have no stable home to return to once juvenile court spit them out. Lucy was in for shoplifting; Jaden, for being one of a gang of kids who’d stolen a car. For both, Shelter House had been a haven for about the first twelve hours. After that, after darkness had fallen, it had turned into a nightmare.
From which they had escaped. Five days ago. After spending a first scary night on the streets, Lucy, the more enterprising of the two, had gotten the bright idea of breaking into Miss Howard’s house, which she’d known had been empty because they’d accompanied Mrs. DeLong on a visit to the cat, which Mrs. DeLong had stopped to check on when they’d gone to the clinic, where she had been taking both girls for court-ordered medical exams. Getting in had been simple: they’d broken one of the tiny, mullioned panes in a rear basement window, then Lucy had stuck her hand in to unlock the window itself. Jaden the bone-rack had managed to squeeze in between the security bars, wriggle through the window, and shut off the security code, which was ridiculously easy to remember, 4-3-2-1: Mrs. DeLong had asked Lucy to type it in before. They had subsequently found the spare house key amongst others on a ring that hung beside the back door, and they had been sleeping there, carefully waiting to enter at least an hour or so after dark, in case of nosy neighbors. Since Mrs. DeLong had said Miss Howard would be gone a week, they hadn’t expected her back until Sunday. They had just come in from attending a free concert in Franklin Square to discover the suitcase in the bedroom. What it had meant had registered about the same time they’d heard the front door open. With no escape route available, they’d dived under the bed. Where they were now trapped.
Lucy was just thinking, Maybe they’ll go outside for something, and we can—when something big fell, just smacked right down on the floor beside the bed, crash. The whole room rattled and shook. The floor jolted. The bed jumped, just like the startled girls beneath it. The edge of the floral bedspread fluttered up from all the movement; maybe four inches above the floor. Through the gap Lucy could see—Miss Howard. Miss Howard lying sprawled on her stomach on the floor. It was she who had fallen. The wind mu
st have been knocked out of her, because she lay perfectly still, making no move whatsoever to get up.
Lucy’s eyes widened in horror. Her heart started hammering in her chest.
Jaden gasped, an involuntary, quickly stifled inhalation that nevertheless made Lucy’s stomach knot with fear. Not that the small sound mattered. Miss Howard had definitely seen them. Her eyes were wide open, and she was looking straight at them. As soon as she got her breath back, she’d be ordering them out from under the bed. Then the shit would hit the fan for real.
Lucy tensed, waiting for it. Jaden squeezed her hand so hard that Lucy would have yelped if she hadn’t been stricken absolutely dumb.
Clementine the cat shot under the bed, saw them, and did her cat freak-out thing, where all her fur puffed out like she was being electrocuted. Changing course with a skitter of claws on hardwood, she headed for the wall at the head of the bed, where she crouched in the gloom beside the bed’s left front leg, her yellow eyes glittering with alarm.
Miss Howard was so close that Lucy noticed for the first time that her eyes were blue. She was bone white, her lips were parted, and she had kind of a surprised expression on her face. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t moving: she was so astonished to discover Lucy and Jaden under her bed. Whatever, there was no way she didn’t see them. She wasn’t more than three feet away.
“Fat bitch,” the man said. The words were distinct, although he was out of sight. There was hard contempt in his tone. Since as far as he knew Miss Howard was the only other person in the house, he had to be talking to her. A couple of minutes ago, they’d been so lovey-dovey it had been disgusting. Now he was openly disrespecting Miss Howard, a tough woman who Lucy wouldn’t have thought was the type to take that kind of thing. But Miss Howard didn’t protest, didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Didn’t so much as blink.
What’s up with that?
Had he hit her? Was that why she was on the floor? Was she, like, maybe paralyzed with fear?
Lucy’s insides began to tighten up.
The man’s shoes, shiny black lace-ups with gray suit pants breaking across the instep, stepped into view, moved around for a moment, then disappeared again. Lucy could hear him walking away. Miss Howard still didn’t move, still stared fixedly at them.
Maybe she didn’t want to give them away?
But her eyes looked funny now. Kind of really blank and—glazed.
A scarlet thread—blood, it was blood—began to unspool from the corner of her mouth. Ropey with saliva, it stretched toward the floor. Lucy watched, transfixed.
She’s dead.
The fact hit Lucy like a two-by-four.
He killed her.
Panic sent her pulse racing, made her heart buck and skitter like a spooked horse. She stared at Miss Howard, who stared unseeingly back.
Murdered. Murdered. Oh, Mother Mary, she just got murdered. Then, slowly, the rest of the equation occurred to her. And we’re stuck in here with the man who did it. We’re witnesses. Oh, my God …
The horror of it sent cold chills up her spine.
Beside her, she felt Jaden make a sudden, restive movement. The hand wrapped around hers squeezed so hard that it was enough to practically break her fingers. Mortally terrified that her more impulsive friend would scream or scramble out from under the bed or do something else that might bring Miss Howard’s killer down upon them as soon as she figured out what Lucy now knew, Lucy whipped her head around to scowl at Jaden.
Shut up, she mouthed fiercely. Don’t you dare make a sound. Don’t you dare move.
Jaden stared back at her. Her expression was so deer-in-the-headlights terrified that Lucy was pretty sure Jaden got it. Jaden was kind of tall, maybe five-nine or so, but rail-thin, so thin that her brown eyes looked huge at the best of times and her bones seemed to poke through her sallow skin. Lucy privately thought she had anorexia, but Jaden denied it, and nobody else—none of the teachers, none of the counselors—ever seemed to pick up on it, so Lucy just left it alone. Jaden was all Goth, with short, spiky hair she’d dyed the deepest, deadest black, lots of dark eyeliner, black lipstick, and a silver stud piercing her right nostril. She wore black jeans and a black tee with a red rose pierced by a dagger in the center of it and black sneakers. Lucy wasn’t Goth. She wasn’t anything, really. She was a couple of inches shorter than Jaden and muscular enough to be athletic looking, even though the only sport she’d ever played had been kickball when she was in second grade. Her hair was carrot orange and frizzy curly, hideous really, which was why she always wore it scraped back into a ponytail. She had naturally very white skin, which was currently kind of dingy looking from self-tanner, eyebrows and eyelashes that were so pale that if she didn’t use makeup (which she did, religiously) you couldn’t even see them, and light blue eyes. Some people said she was pretty, but if she was honest it was usually boys trying to get into her pants, and she wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t know they said that to all the girls whose pants they wanted to get into. She wore black lace-up combat boots and ripped denim shorts and a pair of ratty tank tops, one black, one army green, which left a lot of skin on display and had to be at least part of the reason she was freezing. Another reason was the air-conditioning vent, which was blasting away under the bed. The third, and probably most important, reason was the dead body that had just dropped in front of her eyes.
We’ve got to get out of here, Jaden mouthed at her, panic apparent in her face, which was when Lucy was for-sure positive Jaden knew Miss Howard was dead.
Don’t move, Lucy said again, urgently. Then, Shh.
A squeaky sound—screech, screech, screech—sent every tiny hair on Lucy’s body catapulting upright. Even as her head whipped around so that she could see out from under the bed again, she and Jaden surged closer together until they were practically on top of each other, taking up as little space as possible, trying to huddle in the very center of the floor beneath the shelter of the bed. God forbid any part of them should show.
If he finds us … Lucy went dizzy just thinking about it. He would kill them. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out.
Lucy could feel Jaden trembling against her. Other than that, which Jaden clearly couldn’t help, they both went as still as poor Miss Howard. The only difference was that Lucy could feel her own heart beating wildly, while Miss Howard’s heart would never beat again.
Gorge rose in her throat. She thought she might be going to vomit and swallowed hard to head it off.
Screech, screech. Screech, screech.
The guy pushed something into view. Something blue, with black plastic wheels that Lucy could see just the bottom few inches of beneath the bedspread. As it got closer she identified it: a garbage can, one of the big ones people in the neighborhood were supposed to lug out to the curb each week.
The garbage can stopped near the foot of the bed.
His shoes moved into her line of vision, walking around the garbage can, stopping. He stood between the bed and Miss Howard now, so close that Lucy could have reached out and touched his shoes. Instead, heart thudding, she pressed back against Jaden, who was trembling like crazy. Then all of a sudden she could see his hands. Blinking in surprise, she realized that he must have bent over. His hands were big, with short, thick fingers like sausage links, and strong looking. Holding her breath, she watched as they grabbed Miss Howard’s unresisting hand, stripped the ginormous diamond ring from her finger. Miss Howard’s hand hit the floor again with a thunk, and then his hands came into view once more, taking hold of Miss Howard’s waist, sinking into the stripey shirt she was wearing and the flesh beneath like he was working to get a really good grip on her. There was a scar near his little finger on the hand closest to her, his right hand. It was silvery white and round, like maybe a small animal had bitten him there a long time ago. He had on a white dress shirt that just showed beneath the sleeves of his gray coat.
A suit. He’s wearing a suit.
Grunting, muttering under his breath, he picke
d Miss Howard up.
It was horrible to watch. He picked her up by the waist, so that her head and hands and feet still dangled within view, limp as a rag doll’s. Her hair flopped forward to conceal most of her face, but Lucy could still see one empty blue eye—and the long, ropey string of blood that continued to spill from her mouth to the floor. It elongated as he lifted her, until finally, at last, it broke.
Then Miss Howard was gone, completely disappeared from sight, except for the small puddle of blood and saliva where her mouth had been. A loud thump made both girls start. The garbage can shook, which Lucy took to mean that Miss Howard had been dumped inside.
He was disposing of the body. The garbage can would be perfect. Miss Howard, limp in the earliest stage of death, would be easy to stuff inside. Then he would use bleach to clean up the blood …
Oh, God, she had watched too much CSI. Only this wasn’t TV. This was real. A real murder, a real murderer.
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