Once she reached the first building she relaxed, slowed to a trot and finally to a walk. There were other girls here, standing in the doorway to the Student Union, walking from the Union to their dorms. And by the time she pushed open the door to her own dorm on the far end, her fear had calmed enough to let her feel anger again.
Up the stairs then, to the back, to her corner room.
The door locked behind her.
From a low chest of drawers set into an alcove on the righthand wall she pulled out a thick towel and scrubbed her wet hair, taking deep breaths, hearing again the voice of the alien answering her, echoing, taunting her, and at the same time warning her that they could reach her whenever and wherever they wanted.
She wasn’t safe—not there, not anywhere.
When her hair was as dry as it was going to get with the towel, she stood in front of her dresser mirror and pulled a brush through it, mindlessly, deliberately not thinking until she was done. Then she unlocked her door and crept out into the hall, turned left, and headed for Marysue Beauford’s room.
The door was open.
She poked her head in and saw the girl from Virginia sitting at her desk, notebook open, textbooks strewn across the desktop and on the floor beside her. Jennifer knocked on the door frame, and Beauford turned, her smile fading when she saw the look in Jennifer’s eyes.
“What?” Marysue asked. “What is it? You look terrified.”
“I saw another one,” she said, coming in and closing the door behind her.
“When?”
“I was down at the pool and I saw one.”
Marysue started to get up, fell back into her chair, and shook her head slowly. “You’re sure?”
“It talked to me.”
“I’m dreaming, right, Field? This is a nightmare, and any minute now you’re going to wake me up and tell me it’s time to get to class.”
“I wish it was.”
Marysue groaned. “I knew it. I knew they wouldn’t go away if I pretended they weren’t here.” A long, loud sigh, and she said, “Tell me.”
Jennifer dropped onto the bed, hands clasped between her thighs, and told what had happened, what the alien had said to her, and what she thought it meant. “We haven’t got any more time, Marysue. We have to do something, and do it now.”
Marysue turned her chair around and raked her hands through her long black hair. “What?” she asked. “What can we do?”
Jennifer looked at her without raising her head. “I have an idea.”
“Oh, no,” Marysue moaned. “Not another one.”
Jennifer almost smiled as she pulled at a strand of hair straggling over her shoulder. But it was true—over the past two days, since the disappearance of Overbrook and Klopher, she had been trying to think of a way to get an adult, someone with authority, to go with them to the alien hideaway they had discovered in the woods beyond Ballad Hill. Just telling someone wouldn’t do—no one would believe them—and it was beyond them to bring one of the aliens themselves—they were too strong, too clever, too adept at passing for humans.
“The cops,” she said.
Marysue only stared.
“We have to get the cops. We have to convince them to come with us. It’s the only way.”
“You’re nuts.”
She shook her head. “No. If the cops could see what we saw, our problems would be over.”
“You have a fever,” Beauford told her. “Or you’re hysterical. Field, we’ve been over this a hundred million times, and you know they aren’t going to believe us. The only ones who did were Overbrook and Mrs. Klopher, and look what happened to them—they’ve disappeared.”
Jennifer massaged her knees slowly, stretched her neck, and finally got to her feet. “I was thinking about Rumbel.”
“Who?”
“Rumbel. Remember? He’s a cop. Lee and Conrad told us about him.”
It took a few seconds, but Marysue finally said, “Sure. But what can he do?”
Jennifer paced to the door, to the desk, and back to the door again. It was probably a very dumb idea, but it was the only one she had.
Lee Fawkes and Conrad Chang, high school students from Staines who took a couple of classes at Thaler, were part of the group that had uncovered the alien plot. Lee had told Jennifer about a policeman, Rumbel, who had a grudge against teenagers. Whenever he could, the man would hassle the teenage population of Staines, whether they were walking, driving, or just standing on a corner waiting for the light to change. Lee called him a movie stereotype—fat and obnoxious.
But Lee assured them the man definitely was not stupid. He knew exactly how far he could push within the limits of the law, and he had never once gone over that line.
Suddenly Marysue’s eyes widened, then just as quickly narrowed. “Hey, wait a minute, child, I don’t know about this,” she said very slowly.
“Are you reading my mind, Beauford?”
“I’m reading your death sentence is what I’m reading,” Marysue said.
“But it’ll work!” Jennifer insisted eagerly. “All we have to do is find out when he’s on the road, then get him to chase us to the alien hideout. Once he sees it, he won’t care about us. He’ll be thinking about them and what a hero he’s going to be.”
“I don’t think so.”
Jennifer hurried over and dropped to her knees in front of her friend. “Marysue, think! It’ll work! I know it will!”
“But suppose he’s one of them?”
“We’ll just use the test on him.” The aliens used a device attached to their sides that permitted them to breathe the earth’s atmosphere. All Jennifer had to do was contrive to stumble against Rumbel, brushing his side and noting his reaction. They could move on from there. It was simple. Perhaps dangerous. But it was, for the moment, the only way they had to distinguish the aliens from everyone else.
Marysue looked doubtful, but Jennifer’s excitement was growing. At least it was a plan. Anything was better than doing nothing.
Jennifer stood and patted Marysue on the shoulder. “Think about it, okay? We can’t do anything until the morning, anyway, so sleep on it.”
“Right,” Beauford grumbled. “I’m supposed to sleep after all this. I haven’t slept in weeks, and I may never sleep again.”
Jennifer shrugged and left, then stood in the hall for a moment before moving on to Monica Holt’s room. There the door was closed, and Monica didn’t respond to her knock. She waited a few minutes, passing the time with some girls wandering back from the shower room, from downstairs, from one room to another. Soon she decided Monica wasn’t going to return anytime soon. Telling Monica the plan would have to wait.
Back in her own small room she sat at her desk and stared out the casement window toward the hills ranged behind the campus. All she could see, however, was her own reflection shimmering every so often when a gust of wind slammed against the rear of the building.
It’ll work, she told herself. It’ll work because it has to.
She thought of Lee then and wished he were with her, just to hold her and make her feel safe. After all they had been through together, she didn’t know if she loved him. But it was enough, for then, to know that he was as close a friend as she was ever likely to get. That was important. Especially now.
She looked at her books, looked at her notes, and knew she wasn’t going to get any studying done. With a sigh she rose, put on her nightgown, turned off the lights, and made sure the door was locked. Then she slipped into bed and lay staring at the ceiling.
Within a few minutes she was asleep, dreaming of the pool and the wolf-creature not letting her out of the water until her strength failed and she sank to the bottom.
Listening to the frantic beating of her heart.
Watching herself struggle to regain the surface.
Seeing a face in the rippling light above.
She snapped her eyes open and sat up, drenched in sweat. Blinking at the sunlight pouring in through the window, she real
ized that someone was pounding on her door.
She pulled on her robe and unlocked the door, stepping back as Monica Holt pushed in and said, “You’d better get dressed, Field. I just heard that Lee’s been arrested.”
Three
THE DRIVE INTO STAINES SEEMED TO TAKE FOREVER.
By the time Jennifer had thrown on a pair of jeans and a sweater and had dug her jacket out of the closet, Monica had gotten hold of Marysue, and the three of them ran to the student parking lot where they piled into Monica’s white Mercedes.
They knew they would be in trouble for leaving the school so early in the day, but Monica had insisted they go at once and Jennifer concurred. She had no intention of pretending it was going to be an ordinary day as she had in the past in order to prevent others from growing suspicious of her actions.
The battle was about to be joined.
The trip from the hillside campus down into the valley was only a little more than three miles, but she felt as though she were traveling a hundred before the forest fell away and the ground leveled out again.
A hundred miles, and a hundred years.
No one said anything.
Monica, her blond hair covered by a blue baseball cap, hunched over the wheel, clearly wanting to speed but not daring to. Marysue, in a heavy sweater and jeans, her hair tied back in a hasty ponytail, sat in the back and for the first time didn’t complain once about Holt’s driving. And Jennifer, in the passenger seat, only stared, without seeing, out at the farmland and the old houses that soon formed the outskirts of town.
“I don’t believe it,” Marysue said at last, pushing forward to rest her forearms on the back of the front seat.
Monica only grunted.
“I just don’t believe it. I mean, what could Lee have done?”
“I have no idea,” Holt said, slapping her hand on the horn when another car tried to pull out from a side road in front of her. “All I know is what I told you.”
Jennifer couldn’t even begin to guess what Lee had done, but she felt somewhat ashamed that she wasn’t entirely surprised that he had been arrested. Several times in the past Lee had shown her that he wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with breaking into houses or hot-wiring cars. A good deal of his past, in fact, was unknown to her, but she had never had occasion to question it before. Not seriously, that is.
This arrest, however, changed things.
The car moved slowly through the short business district, past the Hilltop Diner, the movie theater, and small offices until they reached the park. The police station and town’s jail, a new brick and marble building, was on a corner diagonally opposite the center of the four-block-square park. Monica parked on the street in front of the building, pocketed her keys, and waited for Jennifer to move.
“I don’t know if I can go in there,” she responded to the unasked question. She stared at the entrance, thinking that except for the sign over the double doors, it might just as well have been a real estate office or a clinic. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t be silly,” Marysue said gently.
Jennifer smiled weakly, took a deep breath, and pushed open the door. As she waited for the others to join her, she looked up at the sky, which had become overcast. The gray clouds hung low over the valley and added to the chill already in the air.
And while she didn’t believe in premonitions, she knew, suddenly, that Lee’s arrest had something to do with them.
“Onward,” Monica said, taking her arm. “Let’s go.”
They pushed through the doors and found themselves in a short hallway. On the right was a closed, unmarked door. A few yards down, on the left, another door opened into a large room, which a high counter cut in half. Molded plastic chairs were lined up along two walls, and behind the counter were several desks. At two of them policewomen banged away at ancient typewriters. A man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform stood at the counter, scribbling in a large book.
Jennifer hesitated. Monica winked at her and strode to the counter. Waited. Cleared her throat and pushed her cap to the back of her head.
The sergeant put down his pen, closed the book, and looked up. And smiled. “Yes?”
“Get out the keys, Sarge, we want to see a prisoner,” Monica said brightly and scowled when Jennifer jabbed her in the back.
“Lee Fawkes,” Jennifer said, her voice small and nervous. “I’m—that is, we’re friends of his, and we heard that he was in some kind of trouble.”
The sergeant, a young man with short brown hair and thick eyebrows that nearly met across the bridge of his nose, looked over his shoulder at a large round clock on the wall. “I think,” he said, “he’s out by now.”
“Out?” Marysue said.
“Sure.” And he smiled again. “I don’t know where you got your information, ladies, but he’s not a prisoner. Never was, as far as I know.”
“But he was arrested,” Monica insisted, shifting her cap down so that the bill almost covered her eyes. She leaned forward to look at his name tag. “Sergeant Easton, I’m sure he was arrested.”
Easton never stopped smiling. “Miss, I’m afraid you have a rotten grapevine.” Then he looked at Jennifer, and the smile softened. “There were some questions that needed answering,” he said.
“Mr. Fawkes was asked to come in and provide us with some information. That’s all.”
Jennifer, too astonished to say anything, grabbed Monica and pulled her away from the counter. “Questions?” she whispered angrily. “Who told you he was arrested?”
Monica shrugged. “I got a call from a friend, a guy I know, okay? He said—”
“I know what he said,” Jennifer snapped. “What I want to know is—”
“Miss?”
She turned to the sergeant, who nodded toward the door. “Your friend just walked by.”
Jennifer ran out of the room, skidded on the tiled floor as she turned, and saw Lee just leaving the building. She raced after him, slapping open the doors and calling his name. He turned, frowning, and his mouth opened when he saw her hurrying down the steps.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “I thought—Monica heard that—” She stopped, catching her breath, and forced herself not to throw her arms around his neck.
For his part Lee seemed embarrassed at the attention. His sandy hair was tousled by the wind, his dark leather jacket zipped closed to the neck. And when Marysue and Monica burst from the station as well, he shook his head and looked away.
“What are you guys?” he asked Jennifer, turning back. “The cavalry?”
“We were worried,” she answered.
“Oh.” Then he took her hand and started to walk with her, but stopped when she resisted and pointed at Monica’s car. “No,” he said. “Let’s walk a little. I have something to tell you.”
“You sure do,” Marysue said, coming up to them with Monica. “I want to know why you weren’t a for-real prisoner.”
Jennifer saw a spark of anger flare in his eyes and then saw it fade just as quickly as it had appeared. She hoped he wasn’t going to be in one of his moods. Most of the time he kept his temper controlled, and Jennifer loved being with him, but he had moments when he couldn’t control either his envy or his distrust of the wealthy Thaler girls. Jennifer didn’t count because she was on a scholarship. Marysue had won his approval only because she was a friend of Jennifer and Conrad Chang.
At the first corner, they crossed the street and arranged themselves on a bench in front of the hedge that separated the town park from the street. Traffic was light, the breeze now calm, and a scattering of dead leaves settled beneath their feet.
“I was still in bed,” he said, “when Rumbel came.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Marysue said.
Lee glared at the curb, his shoulders hunched. “He wanted to know where I was last night and the night before that. Seems like there are some guys working the neighborhoods. Breaking in, stuff like that.”
“Yeah.”
“Because I am in polite company,” Marysue said in her best southern belle voice, “I will only say that it stinks.”
“They didn’t keep you though,” Monica said.
“Because I was with my dad all last night,” said Lee. “I worked late at his store, went home with him, and stayed home.” His smile was humorless. “I still don’t think Rumbel believes me.”
“Maybe you can get him for harassment or something,” Beauford said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Monica told her. “The guy’s just doing his job, that’s all. Maybe somebody saw someone who looked like Lee.”
She didn’t flinch when Lee gave her an acid look, and only shrugged when Marysue muttered something to her too quietly for Jennifer to hear.
Then Lee said, “Speak of the devil.”
The girls looked across the street and saw a large man leaving the police station. He was in an ill-fitting dark blue suit, his head covered by a battered brown hat, and even at that distance they could see that his face was flushed. He walked with the gait of a man used to carrying too much weight, and in his left hand he was holding a long cigar.
For a moment he stopped and looked at the Mercedes, nodded, peered inside, and nodded again. Then he patted the roof and moved on.
Jennifer sighed silently and shifted when the man made a sharp left turn and walked across the street right for them, ignoring the cars that honked at him, glaring at one that shrieked to a halt only inches from his leg. When he reached the curb, he put the cigar in his mouth and pulled a lighter from his trousers’ pocket. As he watched them with eyes nearly buried in folds of fat, he lit the cigar and turned away to blow smoke over his shoulder.
“You’re supposed to be in school,” Rumbel said, slowly moving his head so he could glare at them. His voice was deep and rough edged.
“We don’t have any classes right now,” Marysue said politely.
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