Evil All Along, page 11
part #8 of The Last Picks Series
Everything was fine. Everything was great. Our, um, relations had been fantastic—as always. Bobby was so attentive. So careful. And it only made it better when he got so worked up that he lost control, when he forgot all about being attentive and careful. And tonight hadn’t been any different.
Bobby hadn’t seemed any different either. I mean, sure, he hadn’t said anything. But I’d told him he didn’t have to. I knew it was hard for him, being expressive like that. I knew it didn’t come naturally to him. I knew he was doing it for me, because he knew how much it meant to me. So, really—if you looked at it that way—I was being considerate. I was cutting him some slack. After all, we’d only been together a few months now. We were still figuring things out.
And honestly, wasn’t it a little bit his fault? I mean, Bobby was attentive. He had to have noticed that it made me uncomfortable when he said stuff like that. Stuff that obviously wasn’t true. Things he didn’t need to say. He had to have noticed, but he kept doing it anyway. That he liked marking my skin. My skin’s already got plenty of marks, thanks—they’re called a million moles. That I’m beautiful. Yeah, I own a mirror, guy, I know what I look like. Why couldn’t he just—why couldn’t he just not do that? Any of that? Without me having to tell him and make everything weird.
Rolling onto my stomach, I pulled my pillow over my head and decided I had never, post-coitus, had such a strong urge to bite someone. In this case, myself. For being such a colossal idiot.
(For the record, I’d never had any urge to bite someone post-coitus. I’m not a raccoon.)
I was still lying there, stewing in the dark and calling myself a lot of names they won’t let you use on the Disney channel, when I heard the footsteps.
They were soft. In fact, if my room hadn’t backed up against the servants’ staircase, I probably wouldn’t have heard them. If I’d been asleep, I definitely wouldn’t have heard them. And in an old house like this one, that was a real feat—especially since it seemed like every other floorboard was determined to squeak, groan, make a weird clicking noise, or otherwise protest being walked on.
And since snooping is better than lying in the dark and semi-hating yourself for opening your big mouth, I slipped out of bed, pulled on clothes, and padded out of the room.
I caught Keme in the kitchen. He was dressed in his usual getup—a pair of board shorts that were frayed where the hem had worn out, a Santa Cruz hoodie, worn and cracking slides. He had at least pulled on a pair of socks. He was in the process of unlocking the side door. When he saw me, he froze. His eyes were so shadowed they looked bruised. Red, too, as though he’d been crying. But his mouth was set in an uncompromising line. And the set of his body was fight-or-flight.
“Hey,” I said.
Nothing.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
Keme stared at me for another second. Then he seemed to dismiss me. He slid the deadbolt back.
“What’s going on?” I said.
He opened the door.
“Hey, where are you going?” I didn’t like the sound of my own voice—shrill, rising. I sounded like a nagging TV mom.
Keme didn’t even glance back. He stepped outside and started to pull the door shut.
My earlier anger at—well, I almost said at Bobby, but it was really at myself, and I was mature enough (barely) to admit it—crashed over me. “Hey!” I snapped. “I’m talking to—Keme!”
The last was more of a shout than I would have liked, but only because he was getting away.
(Which makes it sound like he was a prisoner, which was definitely not the case. On the other hand, he actually was getting away.)
So, I went after him. I stepped into a pair of Bobby’s New Balances that he’d left near the door, and I sprinted out into the night.
It was dark, and the shock of the cold ripped a first, startled breath from me. The ocean sounded louder than ever, and the wind competed with it, rising louder and louder until it sounded like a train whistle. Clouds blotted out the moon and the stars, and I could only barely make out a shape moving across Hemlock House’s lawn toward the inky lines of the woods.
Charging after him, I shouted. “Keme!” I couldn’t tell if my voice would carry over the noise. “Keme, get back here!” But that dark shape kept moving toward the trees. The tang of the ocean flooded my lungs with each breath. The grass was wet and cold where it brushed my ankles. Ahead of me, the little dark spot that was Keme was getting smaller and smaller, so I started to run.
By the time I reached the tree line, I was breathing hard enough that it was kind of embarrassing. Worse, I’d lost Keme. I didn’t have my phone. I didn’t have a flashlight. I didn’t have anything. I took a few strides left, peering into the trees. Then I turned and went right. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—some sign of where he’d gone, whatever that might be. I wasn’t the Hardy Boys. I couldn’t track him by his footprints or a bent branch or a broken stalk of grass. (Did the Hardy Boys ever track anybody? Was I thinking of someone else?)
Then I saw the trail. It cut into the woods like a tunnel into a cave. The darkness here, on the lawn, was oppressive; the darkness under the trees was absolute. Above me, the wind tore at the branches of pine and fir and spruce, filling the air with a vast rustling sound that almost drowned out the crash of the waves against the cliffs. I risked a glance back and saw a silhouette moving in front of the house. My first thought was: Oh God. I decided if I had to see Bobby in that particular moment (on top of every other psycho behavior I’d exhibited that night, I was wearing his shoes), I’d throw myself into the ocean.
I plunged into the forest.
Within the first few paces, I knew I’d made a mistake. Darkness closed around me like a fist. The sound of the wind whipping through the branches became total, obliterating everything else. The air was resinous, sweet, but it was also freezing, and so damp that it was almost particulate. I thought I could feel it against the back of my neck like a million tiny, invisible raindrops that never actually fell.
A crash of thunder seemed perfectly (ill) timed for me to realize that this wasn’t just a lot of wind and clouds. This was a storm. And while we didn’t get a ton of them on the coast, the ones we did get tended to be whoppers.
“KEME!” I called in my best Millie impersonation.
The wind sliced the air. Even over the rustle of the branches, it sounded like a scream.
I trotted forward, trying to stick to the path, hands held up to fend off any possible low-hanging branches. My heartbeat had moved up to somewhere inside my throat, and the sound of branches cracking and leaves and needles whispering against each other made it seem like at any moment, something was going to erupt out of the brush around me. It was so dark I couldn’t even see my hands.
And then the wind stopped.
It was a lull, or a change in direction, or something. But the sudden silence was somehow even worse. I stopped moving—it was an animal reaction, instinctive.
Behind me, a twig snapped.
The sound hadn’t been natural. The animal part of my brain knew it immediately. Something—someone—had stepped on a twig, and it had cracked.
“Keme?” I called.
The silence became a whirlpool, and I realized, in an instant, I’d made a terrible mistake.
Footsteps pounded toward me out of the dark, and I turned and plunged into the brush.
I ran blindly and prayed I wouldn’t smack headfirst into a tree. The wind picked up again, howling, and branches creaked loudly enough to drown out my panicked footfalls. My world shrank down to snapshots: ferns appeared out of the darkness, slashing at my arms; old logs seemed to pop up in front of me at the last moment; the ground, covered in its thick pine duff, revealed itself yard by yard.
And then it dropped away completely.
I scrambled into a turn, and Bobby’s sneakers slid across the packed duff, threatening to send me falling. One foot slid out over the drop. I thought I felt the spray thrown up by the waves crashing against the cliff. Lightning flashed, and the world was lit up like a photo negative: the stark white boles of the trees, the black scribble of the edge of the cliff, a blackberry bush that looked like it was hanging in the air, like some vast net waiting to catch me.
The wind dropped again, and another of those strange, momentary lulls descended. Over the crash of the waves below me, I could make out clearly the sound of someone struggling through the brush.
I made the decision in an instant: I sprinted toward the blackberry bush. When I reached it, I dropped onto my belly and slid under the canes. Thorns scratched my ear, the back of my neck, my arms, my hands. But I barely felt them—they were more like little, stinging tugs of resistance than anything else. I got as deep as I could, drew my legs in against my body, and tried to take slow, quiet breaths. Stars flashed in front of my eyes, and I shook as I lay there. The musty smell of dead leaves suffocated me.
Once again, the wind began to scream, and it devoured every other noise. So, I had no warning when a shape burst out of the tree line. I tried to get a sense of it—male, female, young, old—but the darkness was too deep. Maybe if they had moved against the horizon, where I could have picked out their silhouette. But my pursuer stayed close to the trees, and I got only impressions of movement.
Movement, I realized, that was coming toward my hiding place.
I tensed. My body’s automatic reaction was to draw even tighter in on itself, to make myself as small as possible. I realized too late the stupidity of my plan: I had trapped myself. I couldn’t get myself free of the blackberry bush in any reasonable amount of time. If this person, whoever they were, spotted me, I wouldn’t be able to get away.
As my pursuer moved closer, the sounds of their passage finally became loud enough for me to hear over the ambient noise: ferns whispering as they dragged on clothing; the scuff of needles underfoot. I wanted to close my eyes, like this was one of those movies Keme sometimes made me watch even though he knew they’d give me nightmares. (Like Annabelle: Creation—I didn’t sleep for a week.) But I forced myself to watch.
When they drew even with the blackberry bush, the figure stopped. They were nothing but a deeper darkness against the night. And then they turned, and something glowed in the darkness. If this person hadn’t been standing almost on top of me, I never would have seen it—it was designed not to be seen. But I recognized it, and because my dad was who he was, I knew what those tiny pinpricks of green meant.
They were tritium night sights.
And they meant this person had a gun.
A small eternity passed before my pursuer moved off again. Brush rustled. Ferns hissed. And then the sound of their movement dissolved into the roar of the wind and the waves, and I was alone.
Chapter 12
It was a long, cold, miserable night. Not least because the storm broke as I was still wriggling out from underneath the blackberry bush.
By the time I got home, I was soaking wet, scratched to, um, heck, and shivering uncontrollably.
To say Bobby was unhappy when I woke him up would have been to put it mildly. He locked me in the bathroom, and then—with nothing but a pair of sleep shorts and his gun—he secured the house. He called the sheriff’s station. And then he came back and did one of the things he does better than anyone else in the entire world: he took care of me.
He got me in a hot bath. And once my core temperature was above freezing again, he cleaned up my scratches as best he could. He bundled me into fleece pajamas and put me in bed with a mug of instant hot chocolate.
And then the inquisition began.
I told him all of it, starting with when I heard Keme sneak out of the house, and I’d barely finished by the time his phone buzzed. Bobby went downstairs, with firm orders for me not to get out of bed.
I didn’t. I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. I was exhausted, and in spite of the bath, I was still shivering. Some of that, a part of me acknowledged, was doubtless the adrenaline finally working its way out of my system. And part of it was the lingering fear. I felt strangely lucid, and it felt like I was seeing everything that had happened earlier that evening through the wrong end of a telescope. There’s nothing like being chased through a darkened forest by a maniac with a gun to put things in perspective.
Eventually, a cruiser arrived—and because it was just my luck, Tripple was driving it.
Bobby stayed with me while Tripple searched the grounds. And even though Bobby went downstairs to talk to Tripple after he finished, I heard enough to know that Tripple hadn’t found anything and that he thought this was another cry for attention. You’d think, after solving how many murders, I’d get a little credit, but apparently for Deputy Tripple, I was such a glutton for the spotlight that there were no depths to which I wouldn’t sink.
“Not to mention,” Tripple said, his voice carrying up the stairs, “it’s our job. We’re the ones who should be doing it, not some kid with a bony butt who can’t stay home and mind his own business. God, he makes you look like a joke, son.”
“What did you say about Dash?”
Bobby wasn’t the threatening type. He wasn’t the bluster and shout and wave his arms type. He was the ask questions type. Real questions. With real consequences.
And apparently Tripple knew it, too, because he mumbled, “It’s not safe for him—”
“I know it’s not safe. And so does Dash. But Dash is the only reason Keme is not still sitting in a cell. And Dash is the reason we know Channelle was having an affair. Dash is the one who found her. So, if it’s our job, we’re doing it pretty poorly.”
Tripple said a few things that suggested his negative opinion of amateur sleuths near and far, and Bobby said something that suggested the conversation was over, although in less polite terms.
I tried to be understanding of Tripple. He’d been working nonstop, from what I could tell, ever since the murder, and so—like Bobby—he must have been exhausted. On top of that, it was a miserable night, and he must have gotten soaked, no matter what kind of poncho or raincoat he was wearing. And maybe it did seem like a hoax. After all, I couldn’t prove anyone had been out there. I couldn’t even give them the beginning of a description. But part of me still wanted to march downstairs and remind anyone who would listen that attention gave me hives.
When Bobby came back upstairs, there was nothing for us to do but sleep. We’d never find Keme tonight, not in this weather. So, I closed my eyes. And I emptied my mind. (I mean, I tried. I really did.) But I couldn’t fall asleep, even though exhaustion kept dragging my eyelids down. Even with Bobby’s arm pulling me against his chest. It was hard to remember that anything had been wrong between us. If anything had been wrong between us. If it hadn’t all been in my head.
And that, of course, was when I finally dozed off.
Bobby woke me the next morning.
It was seven o’clock.
I was sure there was some kind of mistake. I mean, this wasn’t the accidental, sorry-I’m-making-too-much-noise-as-I-get-ready-for-work kind of wake-up. (Bobby never did that, by the way. He was always very considerate. Plus he got dressed for work in ‘his’ bedroom.) This wasn’t even the cute, let’s-fool-around-because-I’ve-got-five-minutes-before-work kind of wake-up. (I knew because those started with kisses.)
This was businesslike.
This was professional.
This was rude.
“Stop faking,” Bobby said. “I know you’re awake.”
I cracked an eye.
He was already dressed in his uniform, and although he had to be exhausted, he looked as crisp and alert as ever. “I want you to stay home today, okay?”
I grumbled something.
“I don’t want you going out,” Bobby said. “Not until we figure out what’s going on. Someone tried to kill you last night. I want you where I know you’ll be safe.”
I chose not to mention what we both knew—Hemlock House wasn’t exactly the Fortress of Solitude. Plenty of people had gotten into the sprawling old house before, and several of them had wanted to shuffle me right off this mortal coil. Instead, I said, “Maybe they were trying to kill Keme.”
“They didn’t seem too particular.”
“Keme’s still out there somewhere. Keme could be in danger.”
“I’m going to look for Keme.”
“No, you’re going to work. And you’re going to do whatever the sheriff needs you to do, because it’s your job, and you’re a good deputy. And meanwhile, Keme is out there, and he could be freezing to death, he could be hurt, he could be hungry.” (I realized in order of magnitude, I’d gotten off track.)
“Keme knows how to take care of himself,” Bobby said.
“And I don’t?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you implied.”
Bobby drew a deep breath. Tension marked his brow. Then it relaxed, smoothing away, and he said, “I don’t want to fight with you.”
And because he was Bobby, that was exactly what he meant.
It took me about five seconds of childish petulance before I could mumble, “I don’t want to fight with you either.”
“I know you know how to take care of yourself—”
“Then you know I’ll be fine!”
He waited a beat before finishing, “—but you could have gotten killed last night. This person, whoever they are, has already killed two people. They almost killed a third last night.” I opened my mouth to make my point again about how I had managed to stay alive, but Bobby spoke over me. “Dash, it’s not a question of knowing how to handle yourself. Bad things can happen to anyone, no matter how good they are at taking care of themselves. Deputies and police officers and federal law enforcement officers—bad things can happen to anyone. And if something happened to you—” He cut off. His hands opened and closed against his thighs. He always kept his nails trimmed, almost blunt. I could see little crescents where they’d bitten into his palms.
Bobby has a lot in common with the superheroes. He’s strong. He’s fast. His moral compass points true north. (No wavering, not even when you could skip leg day and nobody would notice.) And I’ve mentioned the abs. He also is a little too responsible sometimes; I honestly think that at some level, he believes he could fix anything if he only tried hard enough.
