First Crush

by Ashley Ludwig

  Questions circled but she bit them back. How did a family with no faith in God, or eternity, comfort each other? She prayed for the right words for him to hear … then spoke her heart.

  “Your sister’s at peace now, you know that.”

  “Yeah.” His hands trembled. The look on his face showed he wasn’t sure.

  Natalie stood in silence while he collected himself.

  The back door opened with a creak before it slammed shut and someone stomped across the porch.

  Nick took over washing the dishes. Grabbing a towel, Natalie stood by his side to dry.

  Outside, Nick’s father paced the yard, adding fresh pipe tobacco to the breeze. Nick’s mother appeared with another stack of dishes. Standing up on tiptoe, she pressed a kiss to her son’s cheek and then looked to Natalie with tired, hazel-brown eyes. “I’m sorry you had to see us this way.”

  “No, don’t be. I’m sorry, Mrs. Hardaway. I didn’t know.”

  Violet patted the knot of her silvered hair and smiled through a trickle of tears. “We … we didn’t get to say goodbye. Never found out why. Why our sweet Rebecca—” Her voice broke at her daughter’s name, and she pressed her face tight into Nick’s shoulder.

  Natalie felt like an awkward spectator to the private moment. Nick folded his mother into his strong embrace and ducked his chin to her head like he’d just put her in his pocket and hide her from the pain.

  On the wall, the cuckoo clock tick-tocked its way toward nine. Violet pressed away a sob with the heel of her hand, collected herself, and poured two glasses of rich red wine. “I’d better go see if your father’s all right.”

  Nick met his mother’s sandy-brown gaze, her bittersweet smile mirroring his own.

  “I’ll leave you two to happier conversations.” She stepped outside, and after a moment, two rocking chairs creaked in tune with the crickets.

  “Let’s just get it out in the open.” Dalton stomped into the kitchen, dragged out a chair, and sat backwards on it.

  “Don’t, Dalt.” Nick drummed his fingers on the counter, glared as if that would stop his brother’s inquisition. “Not now.”

  “She’s got blonde curly hair, Nick.” Dalton inspected Natalie like she was on the sale rack.

  Clutching her arms, Natalie turned to Nick. “What?”

  “I know,” Nick said to Dalton, ignoring her.

  Fear prickled on the back of her neck as they talked around her like she wasn’t there. Like she was a ghost.

  Dalton picked up a salt shaker, inspected its glossy surface before he glanced up. “She’s got green eyes.”

  “Yeah?” Nick’s tone was a warning shot as the brothers stared each other down.

  Dalton’s voice went cop-serious. “Those slashed tires were a message.”

  He continued as Natalie looked from brother to brother, damp towel clutched like a wilted shield in front of her.

  “What my brother isn’t telling you is that there’s a pattern.” Dalton wagged the shaker in her direction as he spoke. “Rebecca was only part of it. There’s another unidentified body in the morgue right now.”

  “That makes …”

  “Seven,” Dalton said, pausing for a moment. “Seven bodies that we know of, all women, all between eighteen and thirty years old. All blondes. What we’ve got is a real, bona fide serial killer in our quiet little town. Not that the newspapers will say anything about it. It’d be bad for business.”

  Natalie blinked slowly, the moment playing out like a movie reel in her head, reminding her of the true crime dramas Aaron enjoyed. She clutched the counter for something solid to hang on to.

  “The latest victim was found in a shallow grave by the lake a few weeks ago. I’m still waiting for the medical examiner, but it looks like the same MO.”

  She looked from Nick to Dalton, who helped translate the cop-speak.

  “Modus operandi. All serials have specific habits, ways of doing things. Becky was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  “It was mine.” Nick dried a cup, set it in the rack but didn’t look up. “I wasn’t—she was just fifteen. I was supposed to pick her up after practice.” Nick’s jaw muscle jumped again. He was stuck in his guilt. “She was late, but I figured she’d just walked home…”

  “He was watching her, you know that, Bro. If not that afternoon, he would’ve taken her some other time.” Dalton’s agony was evident in his voice and in the way his hands clutched at the chair slats like prison bars. He pushed the salt and pepper together with a clack. “Before Rebecca, it was a girl named Heidi Summers. A few years later, Leslie Thomas. There are four others we know about, some more we only suspect.”

  “All found in the same area?” Natalie fell into a chair across from Dalton. Nick joined them at the table.

  “The victims have vanished from all over town, but they always end up in the same place. Here. I’ll show you. This is the first, found right over the hill by the dam. Exposure, they said.” He took a pepper shaker and set it by the lace doily in the center of the table. “The second was found a year later. Same deal. Another young, healthy woman lost within a stone’s throw of civilization.

  “Then, VICs three, four, and five.” Dalton spread out the saltshaker, a water glass, and a fork as stand-in victims. He drew an outline of the lake on the table with a finger. “Same thing, same basic area, always around the lake. Always a year apart. Except for the latest VIC. This one’s different. Crime scene’s much older than we thought.”

  “He doesn’t usually bury them,” Nick added.

  “She’s still at the medical examiner. We’ll know more soon.”

  “But,” Natalie ventured, “if the police know he’s still at large, why don’t they—”

  Dalton went to the fridge and cracked open a beer.

  “No evidence.” Nick stood, protective, behind Natalie’s chair. “Not everyone sees the pattern. Sometimes he skips a year.”

  “It’s always around August,” Dalton argued. Chair legs scraped against tile as he sat back down. He pointed at Nick with his beer bottle. “Nick doesn’t buy my theory.”

  “Hardly anyone does. Dude, if you don’t give it up, you’re not gonna have that detective spot much longer.”

  Natalie shifted her attention from Dalton to Nick. Alike in stature, but not coloring, Dalton was olive-toned, dark-haired, and ebony-eyed like their father, while Nick leaned more toward golden hair and sun-touched skin. Now, she saw his little sister in him, with her wavy, blonde curls.

  Like me. Natalie’s heart pumped with adrenaline. She cleared her throat. “So you think I fit this pattern?”

  Dalton nodded while Nick inspected his shoes.

  “And you had no intention of leaving me alone and letting me go on my merry way, I’m guessing?”

  Meeting her icicle stare, Nick shook his head. Her blood iced as she watched Dalton drain his bottle and set it to the table with a clack as glass kissed wood. A cool, westerly breeze lifted the lace curtains and filled the house with scents of blooming lavender from the small field outside.

  At last, the pieces clicked together in her mind. “The parking garage, the slashed tires … You think that was him?”

  Was that why Nick stuck by her side? Why he hadn’t taken her back for her car? Anger grew, hot and fierce, in her belly as she turned back to Nick, voice hard with accusation. “Everything you did with me today? It was just some elaborate set up.”

  “You’re the best lead we’ve had in five years, Natalie. I pulled the lot’s surveillance tapes today, the parking garage, too. But he’s smart. He kept his back to the cameras. He’s of normal height, normal build, and with his face obscured—he could be anybody.” Dalton’s rich baritone went deadly. “Chances are? You saw the man who took Rebecca. And the others.”

  “So you think I’m a target, too?”

  “Potentially, yes.”

  “And you need someone like me—”

  “Not someone like you. I need y
ou.”

  “No.” Nick crossed his arms into a tight armor. “Absolutely not.”

  “It’d be perfect.” Dalton palmed the table’s wood grain. “He’d never know we were playing him.”

  “Natalie isn’t a chess piece,” Nick growled.

  “I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions. If what you’re saying is true, he could keep after me, follow me, here or down to San Diego.”

  Dalton nodded.

  She rubbed the phantom spot where her name badge was pinned the night he’d spoken to her in the parking garage. “He knows who I am. Where I work.”

  “You could hide, change your hair—” Nick started, but she shook her head.

  She had already cast thoughts down that road, and she didn’t like where they led. Could she live a life always looking over her shoulder?

  Nick looked pained; Dalton hopeful. She’d already made up her mind. She wouldn’t live in fear and she wouldn’t let either brother dictate what happened next.

  “What can I do to help?”

  Chapter 12

  He was blessed with ordinary looks, forgettable features.

  When he arrived at the hotel’s back entrance, it was simple to find and change into a guest services uniform that fit well enough. Tugging at the rough collar, he left the locker room. A gathering of workers in the breakroom cheered and sighed over a soccer game.

  “Goal!”

  No one questioned him when he took a turndown cart and scanned through the clipboard listing patrons’ names and room numbers. The blessing of an industry ripe with turnover, he gathered.

  A dark-haired woman waved him over and offered him a tray of cornhusk-wrapped tamales.

  “Gracias.” Keeping his chin tucked low, he selected one and went on his way with the squeaky cart.

  Punching the button for the third floor on the service elevator, he unwrapped and tasted the offering. Sweet cornmeal mingled with salty shredded beef, and he finished it in three bites.

  Master key card tucked in his pocket, he pushed the housekeeping cart out of the elevator, left front wheel wobbling as he went.

  The hallway angled to a vanishing point with bright sconces edging every door along both sides of the corridor. He pushed his way down the ornate carpet, watching room numbers ascend to 333. Her room.

  All he had to do was reach her door unseen. If she was there, he’d attend to business, but if she wasn’t … The time had come to plant the seeds of her terror.

  The season was right, with hot August days giving way to cool, misty nights. The time for the harvest was at hand.

  And yet it dug at him, ate at his insides. Nothing would ever be like the sweet agony of his first.

  This girl, Natalie, was a gift sent across his path when he least expected it. Just when he thought it was all over. Her arrival offered him the chance to begin again.

  She was as ripe and ready as the fruit on the vines at the estate. Not withered, old, or incapacitated like the old woman who would die with or without his intervention.

  No.

  His attentions had shifted, and now he could barely move, barely breathe, without thinking of ending her life. How he would help her over to the other side.

  Gooseflesh rippled under the sleeves of his stolen gray uniform. He’d only glimpsed heaven that first time. For years he’d tried to rekindle that joy, that glimpse of paradise, but instead he’d found only dark, horrible nothingness.

  None of the others were like Amanda. Their deaths weren’t a beautiful release, but a slow, circling nightmare. Each year, with every death, he failed, and the darkness came closer.

  Demons lurked in every shadow along with the souls he’d set free. But they were the wrong souls.

  One more would make it right. Natalie would balance the scales and see that justice was finally done.

  He kept walking, aimed at his target. The empty hallway echoed with his approach as he puzzled over the relationship between Mrs. Valence and Natalie Turner. Too many questions. Too many possibilities.

  He’d scanned the lot for her vehicle, but it had not returned. She was probably still with the man in the truck, the one who’d taken her out to the Valence estate.

  Fingers numbing on the cart’s handle, he imagined Natalie’s elegant throat in his grasp. Pulse rushing in his ears, he pictured her heart-shaped face, her vibrant eyes that would cloud over with the wonder of heaven’s gates as breath failed her, just like Amanda.

  Or would hell come for her too?

  He stopped in front of Natalie’s room, soap and mouthwash bottles rattling in the cart. No. Not this time. This time would be different.

  He swiped the master key and stepped inside.

  An overnight case gaped open on a small couch. He ran his hands over the neatly folded clothes. A T-shirt, jeans, tennis shoes. He removed the oversized men’s Go Army shirt, inhaled the fabric. Fresh laundry soap and perfume. What she wore when she was alone, vulnerable, and what she’d die wearing, he decided. Folded, he returned the shirt to the case the way he’d found it.

  On the night table, the Gideon’s Bible lay open to John 3. With a scowl, he knocked it back into the drawer. He noticed a complimentary notepad, blank, but noticeably dented where a pencil had written on a now-missing page. He picked the pad of paper up and angled it to the light to see what she’d written.

  He couldn’t make it out. He sat down and swept a pencil over the dents, back and forth, feather light, until the page revealed its secrets.

  An address on Front Street. The name Fife toyed with his mind until he remembered the lawyer who’d visited the old woman.

  He tore off the page and shoved it into his pocket for later review. He still had work to do here. He had to find out who she was, what made her tick, where she fit into the spider’s web of his mission.

  He took inventory. A white work blouse and black pants hung in the closet above a set of black heels. In the bathroom, white fluorescents flickered to life as he inspected the orderly display of her toothbrush, floss, hairbrush, and other toiletries. With a snap, he opened and inhaled her perfume. Chanel No. 5’s flowery scent left him heady as he capped it shut.

  Her makeup lay neatly in its case. He scrolled open a tube of ruby lipstick, glanced at the mirror, and smiled as a message formulated in his mind.

  Natalie could return at any moment. She could find him here and step into a game she didn’t even realize she was playing. It was time to let her know the rules.

  Mouth twisted in a grin, he scrawled a blood-red message on the mirror.

  When she returned, she’d have her first real taste of fear.

  He closed his eyes and imagined the sharp sting of panic she would experience when she read it. When she finally understood he was watching.

  Natalie exited the auto shop and headed toward her finished yellow car and its four new shoes. All bravado from earlier dissipated on the cool night breeze; no sign of either Hardaway brother, anywhere, that she could see. Hurrying through the parking lot, the neon lights and lampposts staved off the darkness.

  The night air went chilly. Where was that sweater she’d left in the trunk? Natalie dug through random junk and was just pulling on the sorority sweatshirt when Nick’s truck idled to a stop in the adjacent space.

  “You came.”

  “Of course. All fixed?”

  “Sure is.” Keeping her tone light, she sauntered over to where he toe-tapped one of the new tires.

  She tucked her receipt in her purse. At her back, the steady sound of the tire gun echoed from the car racks.

  “I don’t like it.” Nick stepped back while she opened the driver’s door.

  He glanced over her shoulder to where she guessed Dalton waited in an unmarked police car. “I’m not a big fan of my brother shadowing you.”

  “It’s not for you to like.” Natalie tossed her purse to the passenger seat. “Maybe the tires were a warning, or maybe they were just a high school prank. I can’t live in fear, Nick.”

&n
bsp; “You should just leave.”

  “You know I can’t do that.” A smile trembled to her lips. She hoped her voice sounded more confident than she felt. “I have to stay close by Mrs. Valence. No one should die alone.”

  “But—”

  She held up a hand. “This way, I get to do what I need to do, and you guys…” She lifted and then dropped her shoulders. “Maybe it’ll help. I’m not bait, exactly, I’m just creating opportunity.”

  Incoming fog wove tendrils across the deep purple sky, and her chills went more than skin-deep. Nick’s attention swiveled to the sound of a bell clanging as a man exited the tire shop.

  “Ball cap,” he growled.

  Ice-cold fear daggered her palms as tingling panic rushed up from her toes. Already?

  Keeping her expression neutral, she cast a quick glance to the man exiting the store. “He’s too short,” she said, shaking her head. “Too round in the middle.”

  Nick scowled at the man all the same, fully immersed in the role of her protector. His grief fit him like blinders, and perhaps Dalton’s did as well. It painted everything they saw with potential dangers. Natalie was both warmed and frozen by what they’d agreed to. Yes, they could help each other, but at what cost?

  “Visiting hour’s almost over. You go on back to the hotel. I’ll swing by the hospital and say good night to Mrs. Valence. I—” She swallowed the bittersweet notion. “I want her to know I’m staying to help.”

  “I get it. Let me see if Dalton can go with you.” He shot a quick text to his brother and immediately received a response. “He won’t be far behind.”

  Nick reached through his truck window. “Here.” He presented her with the water-capsuled rosebud.

  “Thanks.”

  Nick looked so vulnerable and wounded that she stood on tiptoe and pecked his stubbled cheek on sheer impulse before hopping inside her little vehicle.

  With a prayer for the car to start, she turned the key. The V-Dub chugged to life without its normal whirls or whines.

  “First try!”

  “I may have mentioned they should check the engine over,” Nick admitted.