by Bush, Nancy
Stefan felt his blood pressure rise. His mother had been on him all week. He’d told her he’d reported the theft of his van, but though she’d believed him in the beginning, she didn’t anymore. Being stuck together in the house had eroded communication between them. Gone was the Verna who fawned over him. In her place was this other Verna, the one who’d blighted his childhood with mercurial moods that zipped from zero to sixty in one second, his mother changing from sickly sweet over-attention to a fulminating rage so fast it damn near made him dizzy.
“Leave it alone!” he demanded.
“This man took your van. They need to find him AND your van! I can’t believe you’re so complacent!”
“I’m not complacent. You think I want to keep riding in the car with you?”
“You should have told that detective who called. Pelligree.”
“I’m seeing him tomorrow, okay? I told him I would.” Stefan was already trying to think of ways out of that. He couldn’t talk to the police again. They were too knowing. Too searching. And the media was just as bad, but he didn’t have to talk to them if he didn’t want to.
“I’m calling September tonight,” Verna said with conviction. “They all still think you walked to school that morning. Let’s give her the facts.”
“I did walk to school,” he said, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. Of course the reason the van was missing was because the bitch had taken it. He’d told Verna that someone must have stolen the van from the driveway at the same time he was being tied up, but that was way too much of a coincidence for her to believe. Over the last few days she’d gone from wanting to believe him to being annoyed and bullying. She just wouldn’t leave him alone. But no matter how much she nagged he’d stuck with the lie rather than admit that he’d been taken at the mall and driven to the school.
He just wanted it all to go away.
And goddamn it, he wanted his van back, but not from the police. He didn’t want them searching through it, maybe finding something he didn’t want them to discover. What if the bitch who’d drugged him had planted some evidence inside? God. She would. She’d made him write those words. Who knew what else she was capable of?
“You can’t call September,” Stefan said.
“She’s a member of the family,” Verna snapped out. “I could call August, if you prefer.”
Stefan didn’t like September much, but he distrusted Auggie and March and all the rest of the Raffertys even more. They all had those blue eyes that looked so much alike and stared at him in silent judgment. He’d felt their disdain. He knew how much they detested him, and he detested them right back.
“The Raffertys aren’t family,” he muttered between his teeth.
“Oh, yes they are. And they can help you.”
She swept up her cell phone from where she’d left it on the kitchen counter. He watched as she placed the call and put the cell to her ear.
Then he leapt forward and yanked it away from her, shutting it down.
“Stefan!” She was shocked and dismayed, her mouth opening like a fish.
“Just fucking leave me alone!”
With that he grabbed her keys off the table and slammed outside, breaking into a run for her car.
By six forty-five Fun Night was going strong. Lucky had gotten back in her car, half afraid to go into the school. She’d cracked her window and had listened to the faint blur of noise from within the school walls. Pulling out the binoculars, she’d lifted them to her eyes only occasionally, afraid someone would spy her. She could see the guard near the door and the table that was set up just inside with several women manning it, selling strings of tickets to . . . what, she wasn’t sure. Games? Food? Prizes? Maybe all of the above.
Headlights washed over her car as another vehicle suddenly entered the lot. She barely had time to drop the binoculars, and feeling exposed, she got out of the Sentra again, pretending she’d just arrived. The car, a black Volvo sedan, circled around the lot, looking for a spot.
Her breath caught when he pulled up behind her as she pretended to be locking the car in preparation for going inside. She’d pulled on her black raincoat and the hood covered her head and obscured the sides of her face.
“Are you leaving?” the man behind the wheel asked hopefully.
“Sorry.” She remote locked the car until it beeped at her.
He lifted a hand and moved on, but Lucky didn’t think she could risk getting back in her car one more time, so she walked on leaden feet toward the school. As she approached, the hairs on her arms lifted. He’s here, she thought. In the school.
If she got close enough, brushed against him, she would know who he was for certain, though she preferred to keep her distance until she was ready to make her move. Sometimes, she got too close too early. If that happened and he noticed her too much, she played off the feeling as if it were a mutual attraction, something they both felt. She would stare at her mark with wide, eager eyes, trying to seem more childlike and naive, attempting to tap into their sick desire. She was way too old for them, but she sure would catch their attention. That generally allowed enough time for her to put a plan into action.
But at the school? How was this going to work?
The women selling tickets looked up at her with big smiles as she entered the school. “Hello, there,” one said. “How many tickets do you want? Twenty dollars worth?”
“Sure,” Lucky said. Beside the table was a poster on an easel that depicted a big red thermometer with lines where numerical amounts were listed. The bulb at the bottom was full, but the neck of the thermometer was still empty, stopping short of the ten-thousand-dollar mark.
“Our goal is twenty-five thousand before the end of the year,” the other woman said as the first one took Lucky’s twenty-dollar bill and handed her a string of tickets. “This and the spring auction are our biggest fund-raisers.”
“Be sure and go to the cakewalk,” the first woman urged. “One of our families owns Laurelton Bakery and all the cakes come from there.”
“It’s one of our most popular attractions,” the other one chimed in.
“Cakewalk,” Lucky repeated, mystified.
“Just go straight on down to the end of the hall and turn right. It’s in the west wing.”
Lucky did as she was told. She felt naked and exposed in the sea of parents and children clogging the hallway. The parents were talking in clumps, and the kids were running from room to room, being constantly told to slow down.
Her whole being was alert. The sensation that had lifted the hairs on her arm hadn’t dissipated, but neither had it increased.
Pop rock music emanated from the room where the cakewalk was held. Lucky paused in the doorway and watched adults and children moving in a circle, stepping from one numbered, plastic footprint stuck on the floor to another. Other people stood by in a line, waiting their turn apparently. Suddenly the music stopped and everyone jumped on a footprint and expectantly looked at the man in front.
“Okay,” he yelled. He had fine wisps of hair covering a mostly bald head and he wore a huge smile. Reaching into a deep, cylindrical metal jar, he pulled out a ping-pong ball with a number on it. “Seventeen,” he cried, and a little girl with pigtails started jumping up and down and shrieking, “It’s me! It’s me!”
“Well, go on and pick somethin’ out,” he said to her.
The girl ran forward, abandoning the number seventeen footprint, and raced to a long table where an array of cakes stood by. “That one!” the girl cried, pointing to a cake in the shape of a jack-o’-lantern with a candy corn mouth and black gumdrop eyes.
“Good choice,” a woman said, from behind the table. She quickly boxed up the cake and handed it to the child. “Better take this to Mom or Dad,” she said. As soon as the child was gone, she pulled out another box from a stack against the back wall, set it on the table and pulled out a cake from inside, placing it in the space left by the jack-o’-lantern one. This one was a square sheet cake with a skull
on it in black icing.
“I want that one!” a boy declared, as the people who’d been walking in the circle departed and the people waiting in line took their places.
On their way out, the people who hadn’t won were each handed a small plastic toy, apparently as a consolation prize. Lucky moved forward with the next round, intending to sit out the game, but another young girl said, “Get on your number or they won’t do it!”
She opened her mouth to protest and felt heads swiveling her way. Feeling like she was having an out of body experience, she walked around the circle as the up-tempo music played. Suddenly the music cut out. She looked down and was standing on number twenty-six.
She watched the man in front plunge his arm into the metal cylinder and wondered if she could just leave her footprint.
“Number twenty-five!” he yelled.
The woman in front of Lucky let out a shriek of delight and danced her way to the table, picking up a cake with pink and lavender flowers, while Lucky felt her jumping pulse slowly return to normal. This was too much of an attention-getter.
She filed out with the rest of the losers, a little rattled. If she’d won it would have been a disaster. This was what came from walking in unprepared. She needed to go back outside and hope she could pick up her quarry’s trail from the safety of her car. She was picking up her consolation prize, a little green alien, when she heard, “Hello, Mrs. Trent.”
Sucking in a breath, she turned to see Dave DeForest. He was smiling at her, but there was a tightness to it that worried her until she saw that a woman was clinging to his arm. Ah, the wife had made it after all.
“Hi,” Lucky said.
“How do you like Fun Night so far?” he asked as his wife’s grip tightened.
Lucky almost felt sorry for her. “It’s—fun.” She felt her own smile freeze. She’d never been good at this kind of thing.
But DeForest didn’t seem to notice. “PTA got rid of it, for a while. Kept the jog-a-thon, and the wrapping paper sale, you know, and of course, the silent auction.”
“Mmmm,” Lucky said.
“Fun Night’s a lot of work, and everyone thought the kids would want to just stay home and play video games, that kind of thing. But it’s turned out to be really popular.”
His wife was practically digging her nails into her husband’s arm. “After what happened this week, we really needed to come together,” she said, her eyes sharply cataloguing everything about Lucky. This was no good.
“That’s why we have the guard,” DeForest told her, his jaw tightening a bit.
“Good,” Lucky said, for lack of anything else to say.
The wife asked, “You have a boy, or a girl?”
“Patti, don’t grill Mrs. Trent.”
“I wasn’t,” she protested, but Lucky smiled and moved through the doorway into the hallway again.
Trying to pick up on the man’s aura, she wandered the halls for another half hour, peeking into the rooms but staying well out of them. She watched kids shoot suction-cup darts at a bull’s-eye, and drop a fishing line over a curtain that adults were clearly behind, slipping toys they’d caught onto the plastic hook at the end.
She couldn’t get a trace of his scent, so she headed back toward the front door and stepped outside, afraid she’d taken a big chance for no good reason.
Pushing through the door, the odor hit her like a choking wave.
She looked up sharply. Across the lot, a man was just climbing into a black sedan. Lucky moved behind one of the posts that held up the portico over the front door, just in case there was any chance he might notice her and remember her later.
As he turned from the lot, she bent her head and walked rapidly to her car. He was in a black Lexus. And damn. He was moving fast.
She ran the last few yards. Jumped in the Nissan. Stuck the key in the ignition, fumbling a bit, swearing. Then she was after him. Pulling out to the street in the direction he’d taken, driving as fast as she dared within the speed limit.
At a cross street she glanced left, then right. She saw taillights far ahead. Had to be him. Driving carefully, but racing like a madwoman inside, she took off after him.
But when she got there, the taillights were wrong. Not the Lexus.
“Shit!”
She gazed frantically around. Ahead of the car she was following were familiar taillights. The Lexus! Chafing, she tried to figure out how to get around the loser driving like a turtle. Damn, damn, damn! She couldn’t lose him. She didn’t want to ever go back to Twin Oaks again. She’d overplayed that hand. She needed to find him now!
And then, achingly slowly, the car in front of her took a left-hand turn and she hit the gas, watching the speedometer needle rise five miles above the speed limit. Even that was dangerous, but she had to risk it. Had to.
The Lexus wasn’t waiting around. Her nerves were screaming as she followed after him, not closing the gap, but not falling behind. When he hit the freeway she was ten car lengths behind him and she breathed a little easier.
Where are you going, fucker?
A police siren suddenly wailed behind her. Her heart leapt to her throat. Oh, God! Oh, God. She was going to have to run for it. She couldn’t be stopped. Not with the guns. Not with sweet dreams.
The lights flipped on behind her. A swirl of red and blue.
“Shit!” Lucky thought she might faint. No. Nope. Couldn’t do that. Had to draw from her courage, rely on adrenaline, recognize that this could be her last hurrah.
Mouth dry, she touched her toe to the accelerator.
Woo-woo-woo-woo! The police car suddenly zoomed around her in a flash of color, its siren blaring.
Lucky gasped in shock and relief. The Lexus suddenly slowed down as if encountering a wall of water. She came up on him fast and had to tromp on the brakes. Damn! She drew back slowly, wondering if he’d noticed her abrupt rush toward him, her heart rate out of control, feeling slightly sick from the backlash of adrenaline.
But he was just as shaken by the police as she’d been, apparently, as the Lexus kept a slow, even pace after that, making it easy to follow him.
When he turned off the freeway onto a main artery into Laurelton, she eased even further back and then made the turn after him. When he slowed for the entrance to Bad Dog Pub, she drove around the corner and pulled to the curb on a side street with a view of the parking lot. She wasn’t sure she should face him just yet. Too dangerous. She definitely needed a little more intel on the guy.
And she needed to go check on Stefan Harmak. Living with his mother was helpful, as it made it harder for him to lead a secret life. And leaving him tied to the pole had gotten him some unwanted notoriety. Still, she didn’t trust him. Once more she kicked herself for not giving him an overdose when she had the chance. In fact, if she found that he’d managed to attack someone in these few days, she would feel completely responsible. She should have killed him. She should have—
Her thoughts shut off as she saw him walking back to the Lexus alone. He hadn’t stayed at the pub long. What was that about? Had he made some kind of connection? It wasn’t the kind of place for a pickup of the nature he was looking for.
Hmm . . .
Keeping way back in his rearview, she followed after him through traffic that grew lighter as he hit a residential neighborhood. When he turned into a long drive with landscaping that obscured the house, she drove on past and zigzagged up and down several streets until she felt secure in parking. She hadn’t had time to change her clothes yet, so she just threw the bulky sweatshirt on over her blouse and grabbed her sneakers, running barefoot as she had no time to put on the shoes, skirting puddles that had formed from a light rain.
There was a brick wall that ran alongside the property, dividing it from the neighbors. On the neighbor’s side, she moved cautiously through wet, cold grass, hugging the brick wall, hoping to God they didn’t have a dog. The bricks changed to chain-link about two-thirds of the way down, and then the neighboring property en
ded at a chain-link section that branched out perpendicularly and encircled their property in a wide rectangle. Beyond the fence lay open field and the house at the end of the long drive that her quarry had turned into. The chain-link was the neighbor’s fence because her target’s property was not fenced past the perimeter of this fence. She could see a ranch style house with a detached garage. The garage door was down; presumably the Lexus was now inside, though there was a station wagon parked outside. A Chevrolet, she thought.
Light filtered from the living room, but she couldn’t see anything from her angle. Quickly, she tossed her sneakers to the ground and squinched her cold feet inside, lacing them up.
Grabbing hold of the fence, she carefully climbed up, glad it wasn’t so high that she couldn’t work her way over. Dropping down, she slipped a little on the wet field grass, catching her sleeve, hearing the sweatshirt tear.
No time to see if she’d left any threads. Carefully, she made her way to the front of the house, staying to one side of the driveway, moving just near enough to see inside the window.
To her surprise she caught her quarry in a warm embrace with a middle-aged woman. She was just pulling back and smiling and talking in an animated way. He was stiffer, his body language hard to read.
Lucky had a moment where she wondered if she’d picked up on the wrong guy. She memorized his features. He was cruising into middle-age himself, she thought. Had a strong jaw and even features and all of his hair. Looked fairly handsome, as far as she could tell.
Then he suddenly looked straight out the window and she held her breath in shock. Nope. This was the right guy. She could feel it. She didn’t know what the hell was going on with his female companion, but her radar never failed her.
From faraway she heard the mournful howl of a coyote and it raised the hair on her arms. When the woman suddenly grabbed his arm and led him away, out of sight, Lucky faded further into the shadows. Carefully, she slid along the shrubbery that lined the drive, ran lightly along the curving blacktop to the street, then slowed to a walk as she worked her way back to the Sentra.