Shadow Creek

by Joy Fielding

“Tell us what happened,” Gary said as the others drew closer.

  Hayden obliged, telling them of Brianne’s attempts to reach Tyler when they were out for their walk. “The connection was bad and she wasn’t sure if she’d gotten through to him. But I overheard her tell him to meet her at the camp’s entrance at midnight. I didn’t want her going out there alone—she doesn’t have the best sense of direction—so I followed her. I know I should have said something to you,” he told his father.

  “What happened then?” Val asked. There was no point in discussing what could have or should have been. All that was important was what had actually taken place.

  “He was really late, and I almost had her convinced to come back to the camp when he finally showed up. He’d obviously been drinking …”

  “Oh, God.”

  “We got into an argument, and that’s when he hit me.”

  “He hit you?”

  “Next thing I knew, I was waking up by the side of the road.”

  “And Brianne?”

  “Gone.”

  “They left you out there alone?” Jennifer asked.

  “Oh, God,” Val said to both father and son. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Wait. She’s not back yet?” Hayden asked, the full reality of the situation starting to sink in.

  “No. She didn’t say anything to you at all about where they might be going?”

  Hayden shook his head, gingerly at first, and then with more conviction. “I don’t think they really had a plan.”

  “They probably found a place to park,” Melissa said, “and then it started thundering and lightning, and they decided they’d better stay put and wait it out.”

  “The storm stopped an hour ago,” Val reminded her.

  “Maybe common sense prevailed and they’re waiting till the moron sobers up before driving back,” James offered.

  “Common sense was never Brianne’s strong suit,” Val said. “Oh, God. What if they were in an accident? What if …?”

  “Let’s not speculate,” Gary advised.

  “But what if …?” What if … what if … what if?

  “It’s okay,” Jennifer said, taking Val in her arms and holding her until she stopped shaking. “She’s okay, Val. Brianne’s a tough cookie. She’s your daughter, isn’t she? Wherever she is, whatever’s happened, she’s going to be fine.”

  “SHOULDN’T WE HAVE found the road by now?” Brianne asked, pushing another branch away from her face as she half hopped, half limped after Tyler.

  “We’ve only been walking for ten minutes,” Tyler reminded her.

  Even with his back to her, she could read the expression on his face. And it wasn’t pretty. He was fed up, and to be honest, she couldn’t blame him. She was being a pain in the ass, and she knew it. The sound of her voice had become as irritating to her own ears as it undoubtedly was to his. But damn it, she was wet, she was cold, she was in considerable pain. And it was all his fault.

  No, not just his fault, she amended immediately. Don’t forget that this whole thing was your brilliant idea. And remember—nobody forced you to get into his car. How could she have allowed him to drive off, leaving Hayden unconscious by the side of the road? Please let him be all right, she prayed silently. Please let him have woken up and made his way back to the camp. Damn the consequences. All that mattered was that Hayden was okay. That they would all be okay.

  “Surely we’ve gone a mile by now,” she said after several more minutes.

  “Are you kidding me? Maybe a quarter of a mile at best.”

  “What? Are you joking?”

  “Believe me, I’m in no mood for jokes.”

  “We’re not even halfway?”

  “That’s right.”

  “At this rate, we won’t get there till morning.”

  “Maybe if you tried walking faster …”

  “Maybe if you tried carrying me again …”

  He glared at her over his shoulder.

  “What? You think I’m too heavy?”

  “Under the circumstances, Tinker Bell would be too heavy.”

  “You’re saying you think I’m too fat?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you talk too much.”

  “Well, you drink too much,” Brianne countered immediately.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I sobered up a long time ago.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t notice.”

  Tyler stopped, spun toward her. “You think you could give me a break? For just a couple of minutes? That’s all I’m asking. It’s not like I’m asking for a little gratitude or anything.”

  “Gratitude? You expect me to be grateful? For what, exactly?”

  “For coming back, for starters. I didn’t have to, you know.”

  “So why did you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because I’m a dickhead. I believe that was the expression you used.” He resumed walking.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said quietly, not moving.

  He stopped again, turned back toward her. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did I actually hear you apologize?”

  “Only for calling you a dickhead.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not for anything else.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Everything else was your fault.”

  “Of course,” he said again, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Anyway, no biggie. What is it they say? ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ ”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Brianne said. “Words do hurt. Sometimes even worse than sticks and stones.”

  “Well, I’ve been called a lot worse things than dickhead.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  He laughed. “Oh, no. No way I’m giving you any more ammunition. Come on.” He reached for her hand.

  To Brianne’s surprise, she took it, and they proceeded at a snail’s pace for another five minutes. “Are we there yet?” she asked, hoping to sound wistful, maybe even endearing. But what came out was more petulant than playful.

  “Probably about halfway.”

  Brianne let go of Tyler’s hand, sinking to the ground in defeat.

  “What the hell are you doing now?”

  “I can’t go any farther. My ankle …”

  “It hurts, I know. But you’ve got to at least try, Brianne.”

  “I’ve been trying. I am trying.”

  Tyler shook his head, any hint of a smile long gone. “Yeah. You’re trying, all right.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. Look. Can we just give it one more go?”

  “No. I can’t walk. There’s no way I can manage another half a mile.”

  “So, what are you suggesting? That we just stay here and hope somebody stumbles across us?”

  “No,” Brianne said. What was she suggesting? Did she think her mother was going to magically find and rescue her?

  “Then what? There aren’t a lot of alternatives here, Brianne. Either you get up or I go on alone.”

  There followed a moment of silence. Then, “I can’t get up. I just can’t.”

  Tyler sank down to the wet ground beside her. “Okay, listen. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea if I go on alone. I should be able to reach the road pretty fast from here on my own.”

  “Assuming you don’t get lost,” Brianne interrupted.

  “Assuming I don’t get lost,” Tyler repeated. “Thank you for that vote of confidence, by the way.”

  “Any time.”

  “Anyway, hopefully somebody lives in that cottage and I won’t scare them half to death by waking them up in the middle of the night …”

  “And you’ll tell them what happened …”

  “And they’ll call the authorities …”

  “And then you’ll com
e back for me.”

  “And then we’ll come back for you,” Tyler repeated.

  “What if there’s nobody home?”

  “Then I’ll break in, use the phone, get help …”

  “What if you can’t break in? What if there is no phone?”

  “What if I run into the big bad wolf?” Tyler joked in response.

  “This isn’t funny, Tyler.”

  “Look. What’s the worst that can happen? Nobody will be home; I won’t be able to break in; I’ll break in and they won’t have a phone. Worst-case scenario: I’ll have hiked there for nothing. So I turn around and come back.”

  “You promise? You won’t just leave me here?”

  “If I was going to do that, I wouldn’t have come back the first time.”

  “Why did you? I’ve been such a bitch.”

  “I kind of had it coming, I guess.”

  “Yeah, you definitely had it coming.”

  He laughed. “I think I should quit while I’m ahead.” He pushed himself up to his full height.

  Immediately Brianne started having second thoughts. “I don’t know. Maybe you should just stay here with me.”

  “It’s your call,” he told her. “But I can be there and back in less than half an hour.”

  “That fast?”

  “Okay, maybe an hour, tops.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? As in …?”

  “Okay, as in, okay, go before I change my mind.”

  “Okay,” he repeated, pushing himself back to his feet. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Hurry,” she called after him, dismayed to realize she’d lost sight of him already. “Shit.” I shouldn’t have let him leave, she thought. “Tyler!” she called out. “Tyler, I changed my mind! Come back!”

  But if he heard her, he gave no sign. Nor did he come back.

  “Shit,” Brianne said again, sitting absolutely still for what felt like an eternity but was probably closer to five minutes. Finally, exhausted by both the hour and her ordeal, she lay down, curling into a tight fetal ball and closing her eyes against the night, pretending she was wrapped in the safety of her mother’s warm arms, and listening to the leftover drops of rain as they fell from the leaves rustling nearby.

  Minutes later, her hand curling around a clump of wet earth, she fell asleep.

  TWENTY-TWO

  NIKKI WAS LYING IN bed, eyes closed but wide awake, reliving the night’s events and listening to Kenny singing in the shower, when she heard the tapping at her window. At first, she dismissed the noise as the last dying remnants of the storm, helpless branches being buffeted by hostile winds and scratching at the glass in a doomed effort to find shelter. No shelter here, she thought, and smiled, luxuriating in the memory of the final, frantic efforts of their latest victims. Except in those cases, they’d been trying desperately to get out, not in. Still, the results had been the same. There’d been no escape. There’d been no mercy.

  Nikki loved going over the details of each kill. They made her feel closer to Kenny, bound him to her forever. She loved reliving the strict sequence of events, careful not to leave anything out: the initial setup, or “meet-and-greet,” as Kenny liked to call it; the pleasant, innocuous conversation that invariably followed; the slight wariness that began to creep into those conversations as they progressed, the wariness gradually giving way to fear, the fear melting into terror, as cruel reality replaced fairy tale and knives made short shrift of happily ever after.

  Nikki had never liked fairy tales. The idea of a beautiful princess in a gossamer gown was nothing short of repulsive to her. She’d hated stupid, whiny Cinderella, much preferring her nasty stepsisters; she’d rooted for the Wicked Queen over that insipid Snow White, and loathed Sleeping Beauty, who waited a hundred years for her handsome prince to find and rescue her.

  Nor had she ever had much faith in the Tooth Fairy, the Cookie Monster, or even Santa Claus, despite her parents’ best efforts to convince her they were real. “Look what Santa brought you,” she could still hear her mother squealing with almost manic enthusiasm each Christmas morning, waving the latest Barbie doll in her face. God, she’d hated those ridiculous dolls, with their outlandish outfits and huge plastic breasts. She’d pretended to be enthralled with them for a respectable period of time, then ripped off their designer clothes, hacked off their shiny blond hair, and ultimately pulled their stupid heads off altogether. “Oh, no. Look what happened to poor Barbie,” her mother would inevitably wail, as if the doll’s sorry condition were an act of God.

  Luckily, her mother had an enormous capacity for ignoring the obvious.

  Unlike her grandmother.

  “Maybe you should take her to see someone,” she’d overheard her grandmother whisper to her mother on more than one occasion, the tiresome refrain becoming more and more frequent the older she got. “There’s something not quite right about her.”

  “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing wrong with her,” her mother would protest.

  “I don’t know. That business with the mole …”

  “Can you just forget about that stupid mole already? She was a child, for God’s sake.”

  “And the awful things she made up about your father?”

  “We’ve been through this—how many times? It was an unfortunate misunderstanding. The school fills their head with stuff about good touching and bad touching. She got confused, that’s all.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s not like other children. I can’t put my finger on it. I just know there’s something … missing.”

  “You’re wrong,” her mother said.

  But Nikki knew her grandmother was right. And that she’d have to be increasingly diligent. She learned to study people’s faces to gauge their reactions, and to mimic emotions that were obviously expected from her. Emotions other girls seemed to come by naturally. Emotions she simply didn’t have.

  She pretended to love her parents when what she really felt was indifference; she feigned interest in her playmates when, in fact, they bored her to tears; she made friends easily and discarded them with even greater alacrity, replacing them on a regular basis. What difference did it make? One person was as good as the rest. Everyone was interchangeable.

  And when her grandfather died just days before her thirteenth birthday, and her mother canceled the party Nikki had been looking forward to for weeks, she’d buried her anger at her grandfather’s thoughtlessness and even managed to squeeze out a few impressive tears at his funeral. “She must have loved him very much,” she’d heard a mourner comment. And she’d smiled to herself. Well done, she’d thought.

  Then she’d looked over to where her grandmother was standing, watching her from beside her grandfather’s open casket, and the smile had frozen, then faded, from her face. But the damage was already done. Her grandmother had seen into her soul. She knew the truth.

  There’s something … missing.

  And something was missing, Nikki thought now, turning over in bed. Until Kenny. Then everything had fallen into place.

  Her grandfather had been the first dead person she’d ever seen. She remembered approaching his coffin with a deliberately solemn face, her hands shaking with what a casual observer would no doubt interpret as a mixture of trepidation and grief, but was actually excitement. She’d stared down at his pasty skin, heavily rouged cheeks, and thin lips that had been dusted with an unflattering, somber-colored lipstick, and thought he resembled nothing so much as one of those weird wax statues in Madame Tussaud’s famed museums. His eyes were closed, and she’d had to fight the impulse to reach in and pry them open with her fingers. “Look at me, Grandpa,” she’d wanted to shout, her gaze drifting toward his dark blue suit and unfashionably wide, red-and-navy-striped tie. She was disappointed to discover there was no visible indication of the heart attack that killed him, so she closed her eyes and tried to picture his heart ballooning up to ten times its normal size, then exploding like a hand grenade. She would have liked to see that, s
he thought. Paid money, in fact.

  She’d leaned forward, pretending she was about to kiss him goodbye. Instead her lips slid across the cold gray flesh of his cheek to his ear. “Rot in hell,” she’d whispered, thinking of her ruined birthday party.

  She wondered if she’d still collect any presents from the so-called friends she’d invited, having hinted for weeks about the great new perfume from Juicy Couture and the dark green V-neck sweater she’d seen in the window of Forever 21. Probably all she’d get now were some boring old clothes from the Gap, her mother’s favorite store, and a bunch of useless books from her grandmother. She doubted they’d even bother with a cake this year. Not that she cared about having a cake or disappointing her friends or even turning thirteen. What she enjoyed was being the center of attention, and now her stupid grandfather had gone and stolen her thunder.

  Thunder, she repeated silently, thinking about tonight’s sudden storm. While it had been no match for the storm that had been raging the night she and Kenny had first discovered this place, it had nonetheless been a pleasurable reminder of the mayhem they’d unleashed. She’d always loved storms, their moments of high drama—lightning flashing, thunder raging, winds howling. Sometimes she would go outside in the middle of a particularly violent storm and dare the lightning to strike her. She’d feel the rain slapping viciously at her face and experience a euphoria that was almost sexual, a release almost as intense as when she took a knife to her flesh.

  Nothing fake about those feelings, that was for sure. Nothing missing then.

  But her grandmother had been right about one thing—she wasn’t like other people.

  She was special.

  Did Kenny still think so? she wondered, hearing his impromptu shower shudder to a halt. Kenny loved taking showers, sometimes as many as five in a single day, sometimes in the middle of the night, like tonight, when he was too wound up to sleep. He’d been talking again about their having a three-way. “Aren’t I enough for you?” she’d asked plaintively.

  “ ‘Course you are. Don’t be silly. I just think it might be fun to experiment, that’s all.” He’d climbed out of bed, headed for the bathroom. Seconds later, she’d heard the shower running.

  She was waiting for him to emerge from the bathroom when she heard the tapping at the window. Not branches against the glass, she realized suddenly, opening her eyes and turning her head toward the sound. More like the sound of someone knocking.