Oddly, Mandy thought about Elton John. She didn’t want to, but there he was in her head.
When she was a little girl, only six years old, her parents brought her with them to an Elton John concert in the city. She remembered being hoisted onto her father’s shoulders and looking out over a sea of shadows, dappled with flickering flames. Fans held lighters in the air, tiny bits of light, like stars, in the dark arena. Her dad bounced her with excitement, and she was entranced by the tiny sky rolling out before her. When she looked down, she saw her mother’s face bathed in the dancing flame of a lighter. Then, Elton John was there, pounding on piano keys.
She remembered little else about the concert, but she remembered the thrill and the good feeling and her mother glowing with warm light. There was no thrill for Mandy tonight, standing in the park. But there was her mother, face awash in candlelight.
“So many people,” Mrs. Collins said, tipping her candle to let wax drip into the paper collar, protecting her hand. “Are Drew and Laurel coming?”
“Supposed to.”
“Their parents were probably driving them in, and I can’t imagine parking being easy. It looks like the entire town is here.”
Just as her mother finished speaking, Laurel appeared at the edge of the crowd. Barely a foot behind her, hovering like her shadow, was Laurel’s father, his face stern and dangerous looking. He searched the crowd anxiously, eyes darting from side to side.
“Girl, get this damned bodyguard off my back,” Laurel whispered in Mandy’s ear while they hugged.
Mandy laughed and squeezed tight before stepping away. “Can’t help you with that.”
“He’s been on me like a rash since I got home from school. He took the rest of the week off. God, even we have to go to school Friday.”
“He’s worried about you.”
“Ya think?” Laurel looked around and said hi to Mandy’s mother. She waved at her own father, who stood less than four feet away, mocking his concern playfully. “Where’s the Drew?”
“Don’t know. She was pretty weirded about being out past dark.”
“Figures. She thinks the shadows have teeth. Dale and his posse are over by the benches.”
“So?” Mandy asked sharply.
“Just sayin’.”
“Well, don’t. That’s the last thing I need tonight.”
At the front of the crowd a whine of feedback sounded. Mandy looked up to see Mr. Bennington pulling away from the microphone. He looked around confused for a moment, then leaned forward to speak.
“Here we go,” Laurel said, looping her arm around Mandy’s.
By the time Mr. Bennington thanked everyone and shared a few words about his daughter, and Nicki’s brother, Stan, made an impassioned plea for justice, Mandy was tired and cold. She had shed a lot of tears that day. She just wanted to sleep and maybe even forget, though she knew that wasn’t going to happen.
Drew showed up with her father just as the formal presentation ended.
“Dad didn’t want to come,” Drew said. “I mean, I didn’t want to come, but I knew I had to, you know, for Nicki.”
The three walked a bit farther away from their parents to the back edge of the fountain. Laurel’s father gave them a hard glare, looked at the grassy field behind them, and then returned his attention to the platform, where Nicolette’s aunt walked up to the microphone.
“So, y’all have to come over tomorrow,” Laurel said, once she was certain her father couldn’t hear them. “I’m in lockdown, and I’ll go full-on Mariah if I have to sit around there by myself with Daddy pacing outside my door.”
“Okay,” Mandy said, not sure if her parents had plans to work the next day or not.
“Totally,” Drew said. “I’m not staying at my place by myself, and my dad is acting like it’s no big deal.”
“Cool,” Laurel said. “Somebody bring DVDs. Something funny. We’ve got enough drama these days. Nothing with David Spade, though. I hate that guy.”
“Who doesn’t?” Mandy asked.
They stood quietly for a few moments as Nicolette’s aunt finished a poem about clocks stopping. Mandy checked her mom, who was looking at the stage, so she only saw her back. Laurel’s dad looked at them again, and Drew’s dad checked his watch before doing a quick survey of the crowd.
“What do you think Nicki wanted to do after high school?” Drew asked, suddenly.
Both Mandy and Laurel looked at her like she’d just sprouted warts and a tail.
“What?” Drew asked. “We know who she was, but we don’t know who she would have been. That’s what was lost. I mean, did she want to go to college? Did she want to be a mother? She could have formed a rock group or become president. She could have become anything she wanted. I can’t stop thinking about that.”
“A vet,” Laurel said. “We talked about it once, and she wanted to be a vet. She loved animals. She didn’t have a question in her mind about it. Nicki would have been a veterinarian.”
“She’s going to miss so much,” Drew said, welling up with tears.
“Yeah, she is, but you don’t have to make it sound like it’s her fault,” Mandy said. “Jeez, Drew, grow some tact.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Whatever,” Laurel said.
“But, I mean, what if she did do something? I mean, something like this doesn’t just happen, right? I’m not saying she did anything wrong, just did something. Maybe she broke up with the guy or made fun of him. She was always making fun of people. Maybe she was teasing him, leading him on. I don’t know, something.”
“I have never wanted to call someone ‘bitch’ so much in my life,” Laurel said.
“Calm down, L,” Mandy said. “She’s just trying to make sense of this.”
“There is no sense in this,” Laurel said, growing angrier. “This is life, not some fairy tale. Psychos aren’t interested in morality plays. They hunt and they slice and it’s usually the innocent that take the blade. So put all of your Brothers Grimm she-had-it-comin’ crap away. The only thing Nicki did was not plant a boot in this guy’s sac and run fast enough to get away from him. And if you think being all innocent and sweet is gonna protect you from anything, then take a good look around, because the next one of these is yours.”
Mandy looked on, astonished. Drew burst into tears, her hands covering her face, shoulders trembling.
“Think you could be a little more Simon?” Mandy asked.
Laurel folded her arms across her chest in defiance. Mandy looked at Drew, who kept her face buried in her hands, and shook her head.
“Great,” Mandy said. She walked over and pulled Drew into a hug. Her friend sobbed harder and pushed in tight to her side.
Then Mandy’s cell phone vibrated in her jacket pocket, and she had to pull away. She looked at the device, saw that she had a text message, considered ignoring it, but was eager for a distraction. Right now, anything was better than dealing with the drama. She opened the phone and retrieved the message.
When she saw the letters printed across the tiny screen, they confused her. She squinted as if the act might bring clarity, but there were only two letters, repeated over and over. They were perfectly clear, but they made no sense. Unless someone had a very sick sense of humor. A profound chill, so strong that it made her tremble, ran over her neck as she read:
Hahahahahahahaha.
4
“I still think Dale sent that text,” Laurel said, curling her legs under her on the overstuffed chair in her bedroom. She dropped the remote in her lap and reached for the glass of tea she’d set on the windowsill.
“Why would he?” Drew asked from her place on the bed.
The two had forged a functioning truce since Nicki’s vigil the night before. Mandy imagined it was more a result of Drew’s fear of being left home alone than any real forgiveness, but it was a start. Now the three of them sat in Laurel’s bedroom. An Ashton Kutcher DVD was paused on the television screen.
“To fre
ak her out,” Laurel said. “He gets her all scared with this whack job running around, and she comes running back to his big strong arms.”
“Oh,” Drew said, as if that made perfect sense.
“It’s not Dale,” Mandy said. “He’s not into subtle. Last night he left three voice messages on my cell. Besides, even if he were able to think of a scheme like that, which I’m finding highly doubtful, I don’t think he’s sick enough to do it. I mean, the message was basically laughing at Nicki’s death, unless I’m totally missing something. He may be an ass, but I don’t think he’s that deep down cruel.”
“He let you catch him sniffing around the chat easy enough.”
That was true. Maybe Dale was sick, like really twisted. It happened all the time. The guys that seemed to be so together were often just good at hiding something foul and dark. And someone like Dale, a privileged brat who apparently had no morals, could certainly work up that kind of nastiness. No, she thought. You’re just angry at him. Dale wasn’t a freak. He was a guy—just a big, stupid guy. He wasn’t evil.
“How would he block his user ID? I mean the text message came through without a handle. Dale couldn’t have figured out how to do that. He can’t even program his cell phone.”
Laurel smiled broadly and put her tea back on the windowsill. “Maybe not, but he also can’t figure out geometry, which is why he has geek-king Matthew do it for him. Are you seeing my ever-so-subtle point?”
“I didn’t even know you could hide your ID like that,” Drew said.
“Well, it happened, which means it can be done.” This from Laurel. “I’m the Goddess of Tech, but they come out with functions and features so fast that even I can’t keep up.”
“So,” Mandy said, “you think Dale had Matt do this for him?”
“I’m just saying it’s one big, obvious, really likely possibility.”
“God, that’s so romantic,” said Drew.
Laurel slowly turned her head toward Drew on the bed, then looked at Mandy. “You are going to let me slap her, right?”
“Well, he’s doing all of this for Mandy,” Drew said. “Just to get her back. I mean he’s obviously thinking about her a lot.”
“Logic fault,” Mandy said. “If he had spent ten seconds thinking about me—the ten he spent writing ‘kewl profile, let me grab your tits’ to that girl online—none of this would be an issue.”
Laurel laughed and clapped her hands. “Girl’s got the right head on this one.”
“I just think it’s cool to have someone missing you that way.”
“And yet so many stalker victims still press charges,” Mandy said. “Look, whatever. It’s over. If it was him, his plan didn’t work. If it wasn’t…”
Mandy didn’t know how to finish that statement. She didn’t have to. As she was speaking, Laurel’s door burst open and her father shoved his head in the room. Drew, naturally, yelped and fanned her face, and Laurel opened her mouth to protest, but her father was already talking.
“Turn on the news,” he said, stomping into the room, heading directly for the television. “They have a picture of the guy. You all need to see this, need to know what to look out for. Why is the screen frozen? Who is this? What’s wrong with this television set?”
Laurel pulled the remote from her lap and hit a button, sending Ashton Kutcher’s face away and replacing him with an episode of Saturday Night Live. “What channel?” she asked.
“Try four.”
Laurel pressed a button. The three girls gathered on the bed for the best view of the screen. A grainy black-and-white picture hung frozen above the anchorman’s shoulder. Then it came to life, showing a hunched man in a black coat pulling someone across what looked like a parking lot. The angle was odd; it seemed to be shot from high up. The man was looking over his shoulder, giving the camera a blurry profile. The person with him yanked hard, trying to escape. He yanked back, and all of them gasped when Nicolette Bennington’s frightened face came into the frame.
“Where’s the volume?” Laurel’s father asked.
Laurel hit a button.
“Again, police are looking for this man in connection with the abduction and murder of Nicolette Bennington.”
“Damn,” Laurel’s dad said angrily. “That didn’t give you a good enough look. If you kids were paying attention and actually took this seriously instead of just watching your little heartthrobs telling fart jokes…”
“Dad! Breathe! We’ll download it off the Web.”
Her father looked at her like she’d just slapped him. Confusion and anger took turns scrunching his features. With no reply, he simply shook his head and walked out of the room.
The best picture they could find, the one that showed the most of the man’s face, filled Laurel’s computer screen less than two minutes later. The image was black-and-white, taken by a security camera concealed in the eaves of the library. It showed the large, stooped man in a long black coat, his hand firmly grasping Nicki’s bicep. He looked feral, like an animal.
“God, Nicki must have been so scared,” Drew said.
Yes, Mandy thought. She was scared herself, and she was only looking at a bad picture of the man. She wasn’t being held by him, dragged into the dark woods at the back of the library where he would…
“He’s like grandpa old,” Laurel said. “Total Crypt Keeper.”
She had that right. From the side, the man’s nose was rounded like a beak over his thin lips. His chin seemed to point downward, but Mandy thought that might just be a trick of the shadows or maybe a beard that had lost definition in the photograph. The eye she could see was surrounded by puffy flesh. His eyebrows rested on a pronounced ridge. His cheek sank into shadow just above his jaw. Mandy thought about the images of witches she’d seen in elementary school. He reminded her of those, only male, without the hat and broom, and very real.
“Gotta be a drifter,” Laurel announced. “They would have caught him already if he was local. You can’t hide a face like that.”
Though disturbed by the image, Mandy found herself relieved. Nicki’s killer had not been one of them, had not been a friend or acquaintance—she’d never hang out with someone like that—and this knowledge was soothing in its own way. She felt safer.
“At least we know who to look out for,” Drew said. “God, he’s so creepy.”
“Yes, he is,” Laurel agreed. “I think we need some Ashton to wash that freak out of our eyes.”
Mandy left Drew at Laurel’s house, hoping her friends would talk and put last night’s misunderstanding behind them for good. Walking through the cool afternoon air, she felt uneasy. She lived in the same neighborhood as Laurel, only seven blocks away, and though she never once saw anyone creeping through yards, the terrible man from the news followed her home. She kept throwing looks over her shoulder and to the sides, checking the narrow yards that ran beside familiar houses. She carried him in her head, his beak nose, his thin lips. The thought of his fingers made her skin crawl.
Her feet moved faster as she told herself that he had moved on. He couldn’t stay anywhere in town—in the state—without being recognized. His face was all over the news. His face, his nose, his lips, his fingers…
Don’t run, she told herself. Just be cool. There’s no way he’s out here. Don’t freak. Walking up her own driveway, Mandy tingled with anxiety. She didn’t want to be alone in the house. Once inside, she locked the door with trembling fingers, then hurried to the kitchen to test the back door locks as well. Upstairs, checking e-mail, she did not turn on music, but instead listened for any break in the house’s quiet.
Again, she was surprised by how few e-mails waited in her inbox. Half a dozen friends she’d seen at the vigil dropped notes, commenting on the sad event. Dale wrote her two notes, both of which she erased on sight. The ritual of e-mail comforted her. There was spam from an online clothing store where she’d bought a blouse once, an offer to buy Viagra online, and a note from a screen handle she didn’t immediately recog
nize.
Kylenevers
Subject: Me Again
Hey, sorry about yesterday. I know we don’t know each other. Kyle here. I feel kind of bad about IMing you like that. With everything going on with N., I just wanted to chat…don’t know a lot of people and was kind of upset. Going to the vigil last night helped. A really nice ceremony. Were you there? Anyway, sorry. Maybe we can chat some other time. I really did like your profile.;-) C ya.
K
“Not needing a looz for my buddy list,” Mandy said. She closed the e-mail and was navigating the cursor to the delete button when the doorbell rang.
The sound was so unexpected, her heart leaped into her throat. She stood, left the desk, and creeped to the window. Doing her best to look without being seen, she searched the curb, then looked down at her driveway.
“Oh, perfect,” she whispered, seeing Dale’s silver Audi parked on the white concrete.
The doorbell rang again. Mandy considered ignoring it, like she had ignored his phone calls and his e-mails, but told herself she was being childish. This wasn’t the mature way to handle a relationship. Not that being mature was one of Dale’s strong points. Still, she knew that if she didn’t talk to him, he’d keep coming around. Besides, if he was playing stupid jokes, like sending her twisted text messages, she wanted to put a stop to it. Right now.
At the front door, she looked through the window and saw Dale bouncing on his heels nervously. She hated to admit it, but he looked great, wearing a thin black leather jacket over a cream-colored sweater and perfectly faded jeans. His black hair was properly mussed and fixed with product. To her, he looked like a young Keanu Reeves. In fact, that’s what most people thought. Mandy reached up to pat down her hair, then stopped in defiance.
She didn’t care what she looked like, not for Dale. This wasn’t a date!
Mandy opened the door, consciously drawing a frown on her lips. “Dale,” she said dryly, as if already completely bored with the conversation, though her heart beat fast.
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