I Know What You Did Last Summer

by Lois Duncan

  “I don’t understand,” Mr. Cox said, frowning. “He hasn’t seen anybody but us since the accident. Whom could he have lied to? And about what? You’d better let me talk to him.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said firmly, “but he’s making a phone call and he was very definite about wanting to make it in private.”

  The telephone began to ring in Helen’s apartment. It rang twelve times before it stopped.

  The man in the low-seated lavender chair sat quietly until it had finished. Then he flexed his strong hands and laid them flat on his knees. There was a smear of yellow paint across the back of one of them.

  He had come in easily, for the door to the balcony had not been locked. Now there was nothing for him to do except wait.

  CHAPTER 17

  Helen could hear the telephone ringing as she climbed the steps and hurried along the terrace toward her apartment. She had stayed at the pool much longer than she had intended.

  Collie’s abrupt departure had been noted not only by the schoolteachers, but also by everyone else within earshot. So, swallowing her anger, Helen had swum back and forth a while longer and then climbed out of the water to join the progressively larger crowd of young people who were gathered around the pool to enjoy a period of after-work relaxation. She had accepted a beer, something she seldom indulged in, from the lawyer in Apartment 107, and had laughed and chatted with such vivacity that she was soon surrounded by a circle of masculine admirers. Even after the schoolteachers had given up and gone to their apartments for dinner, Helen had remained, sipping and talking and watching the evening settle.

  When the gaslights around the pool went on, she glanced across at the lawyer’s watch.

  “I’ve got to get changed,” she said, “and get down to the studio.”

  “Why change?” the lawyer asked jovially. “You’d be a hit as is!”

  But Helen had gotten to her feet, laughing, tossed the empty beer can into his lap, and circled the pool to mount the stairs. She could hear the muffled sound of the phone when she reached the second balcony, and she quickened her footsteps. The apartment door was unlocked, so this did not detain her. Nevertheless, the moment her hand touched the receiver, the phone stopped ringing.

  “It’s making a habit of that lately,” Helen said aloud. “Well, maybe whoever it is will phone back. Or maybe it was Elsa and I’m lucky to have missed her.”

  “Do you usually leave your apartment open?” a voice asked her.

  The voice, so unexpected, was like a cold hand on her neck. Helen whirled in panic and then, with a gasp of relief, felt all the defense drain out of her as she saw the man in the purple arm chair.

  “Oh Collie! You scared me to death. What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.” He had changed out of his trunks and was neatly dressed in a polo shirt and trousers. His hair, still wet from the pool, was slicked down across his forehead. “You took your time about coming up. I thought maybe something had happened to you.”

  “I was having a good time down there,” Helen said defiantly. She crossed the room and turned on the light at the far end of the sofa. “I thought you said you had a date tonight. Did you decide not to keep it?”

  “There’s plenty of time for that,” Collie said. “My date’s not till eight. I thought maybe I’d better explain to you what I’m going to do on my date and who it’s with.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Helen told him. “I don’t have any strings attached to you. You’re free to date anybody you want to.”

  “True,” Collie said. He got to his feet and pulled his chair around so that it blocked the doorway. “Sit down, Helen. Over there on the sofa. Now, about my date—”

  “I told you,” Helen said, “that it doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t interrupt. I know what you told me. The thing is that I’m going to do something interesting to my date tonight. I’m going to kill her.”

  “You-you’re going to do what?” She knew that she could not have heard him correctly, but the words had been so clear. She stared at him blankly. “You’re making a joke, and I don’t think it’s funny.”

  “It’s not funny at all.” Collie’s face was set and expressionless. “Killing people is never funny, whether you do it with a gun or a grenade or a bomb or with your bare hands. If you run somebody down with a car, a little kid on a bike going home to his mother, that’s not funny, either. Not for the kid. Not for his family.”

  “B-but, how did you know? Who told you about that?” The question caught on her tongue and threatened to strangle her.

  “Nobody told me. I had to do a lot of searching to find it out. They didn’t tell me when Danny was killed. They couldn’t reach me with the news. I was in Iraq, waiting to be flown back here to a hospital. By the time I got the message it was all over—the funeral—everything. I never got home for it.”

  “Who are you?” Helen whispered. “Who the hell are you?”

  “You know that. I’m Collingsworth Wilson. My mother is married to a man named Michael Gregg. Danny Gregg was my half brother.”

  “Your half brother!” Helen repeated shakily. “Oh, my god!” Collie did not seem to hear her: His eyes were dark with remembering.

  “All I could learn when I finally did get home was what my folks could tell me. They said it was a hit-and-run, and the person who called the police had sounded like a teenager. He had said, ‘We hit him,’ so there was more than one person in the car. There were a lot of people at the funeral, my stepdad said. He showed me all the cards and the sympathy letters. He said there was a whole raft of yellow roses that came without a card. They were delivered from People’s Flower Shoppe.”

  “I went down to People’s and talked to the saleswoman. She remembered the roses. She said they’d stuck in her mind because it was so odd to see a young girl come in and spend so much money for flowers and then not put a name on the card. The girl had red hair and was wearing a silver cheerleading megaphone on a chain around her neck.”

  “Julie,” Helen murmured. She knew that she should be running, screaming, doing something, but she was too numb for movement. Her throat muscles did not work. Her mouth formed the name, “Julie.”

  “It took me a while to find her. First I went around to the different high schools during the basketball games, but there weren’t any cheerleaders who were redheads. Then I started asking about last year’s cheerleaders. I got talking with some of the guys in the bleachers at halftime, and pretty soon one of them mentioned this cute girl with red hair who had dropped off the squad. Just wasn’t interested any longer—she had gone intellectual and dropped out of everything. Wasn’t even dating.”

  “But you couldn’t have known,” Helen said. “You couldn’t have been sure.”

  “I wasn’t at first, but it gave me an idea. I decided to send her a note through the mail, something that would shake her up if she was the right person but wouldn’t mean a thing to her if she wasn’t. She reacted, all right. That very afternoon she was over here like a shot, and so was your friend, Barry. That’s how I learned about you, and I followed Barry when he left that night. I watched him walk into the frat house. I learned where he lived that way.”

  “And that’s when you moved into Four Seasons?” Helen’s shock was fading and she was beginning to come alive again. Her eyes shifted slightly, judging the distance from the sofa to the door. Collie’s chair sat directly in the path. The window was closed. If she could reach it and yank it open and scream—

  “You’ll never make it,” Collie said, reading her thoughts. “I’m closer than you are, and you’d never have time to pull it open. Don’t you want to hear the rest?”

  “No,” Helen said with mounting terror. “I don’t.”

  “Well, you’re going to, so you’d better relax and listen. Yes, I moved in here at Four Seasons, and I met you, and you filled me in on Barry. You said you’d gone with him all last year, so I knew he had to have been the one with you that night. I gav
e him a test too. I phoned him and gave him a story about having some pictures of the accident. He said he’d meet me out on the athletic field to look at them.”

  “And you shot him? You?”

  “Right.”

  “But, why?” Helen asked in horror. “Why would you do such a thing? I can understand how you would feel about your brother and how you’d want to see us punished. But couldn’t you just have gone to the police?”

  “How would I have proved it?” Collie asked her.

  “You wouldn’t have had to. Just being accused would have been enough. We would have confessed.”

  “And what do you think would have happened to you once you did? You’d have been fined, perhaps. Whoever was driving would have had his license revoked. Maybe the driver would have spent a little time in jail with his sentence reduced by half for good behavior. The law is easy on minors. Whatever happened, it wouldn’t have been enough. Look at it through somebody else’s eyes for a change. Look at it through my eyes.”

  I don’t want to see anything through his eyes, Helen thought in terror. I don’t even want to look at his eyes. There’s something wrong with them. They’re getting darker! All the time he’s been talking, they’ve been getting darker and darker. How could I ever have thought he had nice eyes?

  “Listen, Helen,” Collie continued in his low, matter-of-fact voice, which was somehow more dreadful than a voice with emotion. “I cracked up over in Iraq; did I tell you that? Not just me but plenty of other guys too. There’s something about seeing people blown to pieces that kind of gets to you. So, I come home from Iraq, and what do I find? My kid brother dead. My mother in a loony bin in Las Lunas. My stepdad down there with her. My sister Meg living all by herself in the house in the mountains, worrying herself sick about everybody. Our whole family is wrecked, and what about you four, the ones responsible? One of you has a plush job in TV. One is a college football hero. One’s off lolling on California beaches, and one’s just been accepted at Smith. All your lives are going along just great.”

  “So, you decided to kill us.” Helen spoke the words, but she could not bring herself to believe them.

  This is Collie, she thought. The guy who lives two apartments over and has a slight crush on me. This is the kind person who came to pick me up at the studio the night Barry was shot. He drove me to the hospital and waited there with me until there was news. Why did he do that? Why was he so good to me?

  “I took you to St. Joseph’s,” Collie said in answer to the unspoken question, “because it was the only way I had of learning what had happened to the bastard. It was dark out there on the field, and he jumped when the flashlight went on. I wasn’t sure where I hit him. I meant to do the job right, but the way it turned out, this might be even better. For a guy like Barry, life in a wheelchair could be worse than no life at all.”

  Helen’s cell phone, which was on a side table plugged into a charger, rang sharply. The sound was sudden, jabbing through the tension in the room like a needle, causing Collie to jerk upright in his chair and shift his eyes for an instant away from Helen’s face.

  In that instant, she moved. As the cord of terror that had been holding her in place was suddenly broken, Helen was on her feet, bolting across the room. She did not try to reach the door or the window. Instead she whirled and ran in the opposite direction, through the bedroom, into the bathroom.

  Slamming the door behind her, she punched the lock just seconds before the bulk of Collie’s weight struck the door.

  The knob rattled angrily. Frantically, Helen glanced around for something to arm herself with. All around her, flimsy, feminine objects mocked her—a makeup kit, a plastic hairbrush,a rack of fluffy bath towels, a small bottle of bubble bath.

  The bathroom window was small and high, plated over with a permanent sheet of translucent glass.

  The rattling of the knob stopped abruptly. The only sound now was the continued ring of the phone in the front room. Then that stopped also.

  “Collie?” Helen said nervously.

  There was no answer other than a heavy silence.

  Less than two hours ago Ray had informed her that the attack on Barry had been simple robbery. How could Barry have lied to them that way, lulling them into a false sense of security? Or was it Ray who had been lying?

  “It couldn’t have been Ray,” Julie had said on that day—was it really only a week ago when she had brought the note that Collie had sent her over to this very apartment? “I know Ray better than either of you, and he just wouldn’t do this.”

  “I don’t think so either,” Helen had agreed.

  And now, in this new set of circumstances, she had to admit the same thing, silently, to herself, as she stood trembling behind the ominous silence of the locked door. Ray would not have tricked her. Ray would not have lied.

  Ray had been repeating exactly what Barry had told him. “It was Barry,” she said softly. “It was Barry who didn’t tell the truth.”

  A hundred pictures of Barry flashed through her mind: Barry of the loving words and the cocky grin, of the flaring temper and the heavenly kisses. Barry who was going to marry her—or was he? Who adored her—or did he? Who had never looked at another girl—or had he? Ever since that day when he had drawn up behind her in that little red sports car and asked, “Do you want a ride?”

  He lied, Helen thought. He lied to Ray about the shooting!

  Why, she did not know, nor did it matter. Whether from anger over some imagined affront, from bitterness over hisown injury, from perversity, from fear that Ray might break the pact and go to the police with the story of the accident, Barry had lied. And with this lie he had shown how little their safety meant to him—Ray’s, Julie’s, and Helen’s.

  “He loved me,” Helen whispered, but even to her own ears the words were weak and meaningless. That was a lie too.

  “Collie?” She spoke aloud. “Collie, are you out there?” There was nothing but silence on the far side of the door.

  What was he doing? she asked herself. Standing there, waiting? Or was he back in the purple chair, sitting quietly, hoping that she would assume he had gone away, that she would open the door and step tentatively out? Could he possibly think she was that much of a fool?

  If he wants me, Helen thought, why doesn’t he force the door? He’s strong enough. Of course, that would make a lot of noise, the kind of noise that carries. The whole apartment would shake. People would come running up here to see what was happening.

  Screams would get her nowhere. The Four Seasons Apartments were virtually soundproof. Stereos could blare, televisions blast, wild parties churn until all hours of the night without disturbing the slumbering neighbors. But the sound of a door being beaten in—surely that sort of sound would make itself heard.

  From the other side of the door there came a click. A faint, scraping sound of metal against metal.

  What in the world—?

  The noise came again. Faint. Purposeful.

  Helen’s eyes flew upward to the top of the door, and she felt her breath stop. The metal plate was moving.

  “My god,” she breathed, “he’s taking off the hinges!”

  I can’t just stand here and wait for him to do it, she thought. I have to do something—anything….

  Frantically, she yanked open the medicine cabinet over the sink and saw a heavy, glass bottle of perfume. Snatching it from the shelf, she stepped onto the closed toilet lid and then onto the top of the tank.

  She lifted the bottle high and brought it down with all her strength against the pane of the window. Again and again she struck, smashing away the jagged glass.

  There was no time to feel the pain, no time to consider the consequences as she thrust her head and shoulders through the narrow opening.

  “Help!” she cried. “Somebody help me! Help me!”

  Voices floated up from the pool area at the side of the building—laughter, the twang of a guitar. The lawn below her lay empty. The glow of the gaslights was broke
n by pockets of darkness.

  “Help!” Helen screamed.

  And then, because it was the only thing left to do, she wriggled forward through the frame of the window and let herself fall.

  CHAPTER 18

  “I wish you’d reconsider and stay home tonight.” Mrs. James regarded her daughter worriedly. “It sounds silly, I know, but I have this feeling….”

  “Oh, Mom! You and your feelings!” Julie spoke the words laughingly, but she could not completely obliterate the twist of uneasiness that stirred within her. There was something oddly disturbing about her mother’s premonitions. Many times, it was true, they turned out not to mean a thing, but there had been other times also. It was hard to forget the phone call that had seemed so ridiculous, but had sent her home to find a smoke-filled kitchen.

  “I’m just going out for a couple of hours,” she said now, reassuringly. “It’s just to a movie with Bud.”

  “I wish you’d call it off.”

  “Mom, I can’t reach him. He’s just moved into an apartment. The phone hasn’t been installed yet and I don’t have his cell number.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he lives in Four Seasons?” Mrs. James persisted. “You could call there and leave a message for him at the office. Or you could phone Helen Rivers and ask her to run over to his apartment and tell him. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind doing it. Everybody in those big complexes seems to know everybody else.”

  “It’s probably too late. He’s sure to have left by now.” To humor her mother, Julie got up and went over to the telephone.She lifted the receiver, listened a moment, and set itdown again. “I can’t call anyway. There’s trouble with the line again. There isn’t even a dial tone. And I left my cell in Ray’s car.”

  The framed mirror over the telephone table gave her face back to her, pinched and odd-looking under the flame of red hair. She raised her hand and pushed the hair back from her forehead.