Jenna didn’t look sick at all when she answered the door, which only increased my suspicion that she was staying home because of the threats. We closeted ourselves in her room and talked about the game. I have to admit to bragging about the triangle offense. Sure, we still might have won, but that was the turning point of the game, and Jenna had been so sure Coach Scott wouldn’t use it.
“Those messages stop yet?” I asked casually when there was a lull in the conversation.
“No,” said Jenna. She looked up at me as if she knew I wouldn’t like what she was about to say. “I messaged him back again.”
I pulled away from her as if she’d bitten me. “What? Jenna, of all the stupid—”
“I knew you’d say that.” She was defiant.
“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t contact him again. You can’t get into a conversation with this guy. It’ll only make it worse.”
The look on her face told me it already was worse. I sat back down on the bed.
“Okay, tell me what happened.”
Jenna took a deep breath. “I sent him a message saying I’d keep quiet, that he didn’t have to worry about me. If he stopped the messages, I’d never go to the police.”
“And?”
“And he said that wasn’t good enough. That I still had the evidence and he couldn’t trust me. So I asked him again, What evidence? and he got really angry. Said, I’m tired of your games. You know what evidence I mean. But I don’t know!” She looked confused and scared. I didn’t know how much more of this she could take.
I put my arm around her, and she leaned into me. I felt helpless. There had to be something we could do.
“When exactly did these messages start?” I asked her.
She sat up and blew her nose. “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “Until Noah told me to keep them, I’d delete them right away.” She shuddered. I could imagine how it would feel to have them sitting on your phone and your computer. A constant reminder that someone was stalking you.
“Well, approximately then,” I said.
She thought for a minute. “A few weeks ago now. Maybe early February?”
“And they came in through Facebook?” An idea was starting to form in my mind.
She nodded.
“Let’s see what you posted around that time then,” I said, getting up and sitting at her desk in front of the computer. “Maybe he saw something there that started this whole thing.”
She nudged me over and squeezed onto the seat with me, and we scrolled through her posts, looking back to February. I couldn’t think of anything different or unusual that had happened around that time. School was in. The regular basketball season was coming to a close, with playoffs just around the corner. Jenna’s team had been doing well, but they were a good team. It’s not like there was any game fixing going on or anything.
We scrolled right back to January and then moved forward again. At first glance, there didn’t seem to be anything unusual—photos from basketball games, Amber’s birthday, a concert Jenna and I had gone to in Portland a few weeks earlier. There were selfies taken goofing around with her friends at school, photos with her cousin Mel from Canada, pictures of her two dogs, quotes she’d taken off the Internet, a pencil drawing Amber had done for her in art class. It was the usual stuff.
“Wasn’t your cousin here back in December?” I asked. It was the only thing that seemed out of place.
“Yeah, she left right after New Year’s,” said Jenna. “I didn’t get around to posting the pictures of her visit for a while though.”
I flicked back to those pictures and looked more closely at the date. She’d posted them on February 3. Right around the time she started getting the messages. But a month after Mel went back to Victoria.
“When did she leave exactly?” I said.
“January 2,” said Jenna. “This picture here was taken the day she left. We stopped at the 7-Eleven on the way to…” Her voice trailed off. I didn’t need her to finish the sentence. That was the day the 7-Eleven had been robbed. And she’d been a witness who had seen nothing. Or had she?
I clicked on the photo, and Jenna’s and Mel’s faces filled the screen. They were standing with their backs to the store, grinning at the camera. They’d always been great friends as well as cousins. In the larger version of the photo, we both now saw what hadn’t been so clear before. There was a male figure opening the door to the 7-Eleven behind them. Dressed in a gray hoodie and jeans, he fit the description from Crime Stoppers. I zoomed in. The man was looking over his shoulder, as if scouting the area, and his face was clearly visible.
“Oh my god,” said Jenna.
“Oh–my–god,” I repeated with emphasis.
It was Jesse Derby.
Chapter Twelve
Jesse Derby. I couldn’t believe it. He was a teammate. A low-life, betraying sneak of a teammate, but still a teammate. The idea of him having participated in the robbery of the 7-Eleven was unthinkable. And yet the evidence was right in front of me.
“This is it,” I said. “This is why you’re getting those messages from Nick Smith. He’s probably the other guy you saw who they’ve been talking about on Crime Stoppers—the one with the leather jacket.”
“But Jesse Derby?” said Jenna. “What’s he doing mixed up in something like this?”
“I don’t know. He’s always kept pretty much to himself. Especially these last couple of months.” And no wonder, I thought. He was freaking out, worrying that Jenna would take this photo to the police.
“You know you have to go to the cops with this,” I said.
She stood up and started pacing. “Dylan, that’s exactly what I can’t do,” she said. “These guys mean business.”
“Which is why you have to go to the cops.” I took her hands, forcing her to stop walking. “Jenna, you can’t let them get away with it. With the robbery or the stalking.”
She looked down at our hands, fingers entwined, and said nothing. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. And I could only imagine what she was feeling.
“If you bury this, they’ve won,” I said. “And you’ll never have any peace of mind. You’ll always be looking over your shoulder, wondering if they’re still watching you.”
Still nothing.
“Jenna…?”
Finally, she looked up at me. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. I mean, how could I go to school and face Jesse Derby knowing what I know now? But Dyl…I’m scared.”
“I know,” I said, pulling her close. I was scared too.
We set off for town in my Civic. Neither of us said much. The air in the car was practically crackling with tension. The whole situation seemed surreal, like something out of a movie. This wasn’t Jenna and me racing into town with evidence of a crime, it was some other teenage couple. Some kids out of a movie driving down a dark, lonely road. In a minute it would start to rain or snow, and they would smash into a fallen tree or skid off into the ravine, never to be seen again.
I slowed down a bit and tightened my grip on the steering wheel. The last thing I wanted was to have an accident on the way to town. There was no hurry. It wasn’t like the cop shop closed at six o’clock or anything. They would be there whenever we arrived, and we would show them the photo and tell them what had been happening to Jenna. That had to be enough to arrest Jesse Derby, and Nick Smith as well—or, at least, enough to bring Nick in for questioning.
Lights appeared in my rearview mirror. Great. That was all I needed. Some local tailing me down the road, impatient for his night out or something.
Suddenly, the lights came toward us. They loomed up as if we were at a standstill. I felt a thump from behind, and my heart rate went from 75 to 175 in less than a second.
“Dylan, it’s the black pickup!” cried Jenna. There was real fear in her voice. She knew as well as I did that this was no coincidence. “It’s them,” she said. “Hurry, Dylan, it’s them!”
I didn’t need any urging. I sped down the mount
ain as fast as I dared. I careened around corners, tires squealing, and raced through the straight stretches. I could only hope that if there was a car coming up the hill, I would see its headlights before I smashed into it head-on.
“I can’t shake them,” I said.
Jenna was frantically punching 9-1-1 into her phone.
“Someone’s trying to run us off the road,” she said into the phone. “We’re on—”
I whipped around another corner, and she lost the signal.
“Damn,” she said, trying desperately to get them back.
The pickup slammed into us again. Jenna screamed.
I didn’t want to slow down. I knew what had happened last time when I’d done that. But we were approaching Devil’s Bend, and there was no way I could take it at the speed we were going.
“Hold on,” I said. I went into the bend and hit the brakes. With tires screeching, we skidded around the corner, inches away from the metal barrier. I managed to stop us from going into a spin, but we’d lost a lot of speed. As we came onto the straight, the pickup pulled out alongside us.
It swerved toward us, just like it had the time before. I held my ground. There wasn’t much room to maneuver. I couldn’t let him force me off the road again. The truck bumped the side of the Civic, and my side mirror crumpled.
“Do something, Dylan,” said Jenna.
“Like what?”
We rounded the next bend side by side, so close that if I’d opened my window I could have touched the side of the truck. If we met anyone coming the other way, we were doomed. I sped up out of the corner, hoping to get ahead of him, but he kept pace. He drifted closer, and I felt the crunch of gravel under my tires. I twisted my steering wheel to the left, and the car slammed against the pickup. My little Honda was a featherweight fighting against a heavyweight though. It was no contest. The truck didn’t budge.
I was tempted to stop. Get out of the car and haul Nick Smith out of the truck, demand to know what he was doing. But there was no guarantee he would let me get near the truck. Truck versus Civic was bad enough. Truck versus man was a disaster. Besides, even if he did get out of the truck, I doubted he was the talking kind. He’d proven that he would go to any length to get what he wanted. And we couldn’t delete that photo. We couldn’t let him get away with this, or Jenna would never be truly free of him.
I was close to losing control though. Somehow we had to get away from him.
We came to a straight section of road, and I hit the gas.
“Hang on—I’m gonna try something,” I said.
When I was almost at the corner, I stomped on the brake. The tires screamed, and the truck shot past us. I slammed the car into Reverse and hit the gas again as the truck skidded to a stop. When I’d gained some distance, I put the car back into Drive. The truck’s back-up lights came on. In the next instant, it was barreling toward us. I stomped my foot down.
“Dylan, are you crazy?” yelled Jenna.
“I hope not,” I said through gritted teeth.
I wrenched the wheel hard to the left. The car veered around the truck, and we took the corner at top speed. I knew there was a driveway on the other side. The Marshalls’. If I could reach it before the truck got going again, we might have a chance.
We fishtailed out of the turn, and I saw the Marshalls’ mailbox up ahead. I stepped on the gas and swung into the driveway without slowing down. Switching off the Honda’s lights, I eased up on the gas. I couldn’t afford to put the brakes on. Any light would give away our position. So we bumped along the long dirt driveway toward the Marshalls’ house in the dark, hoping beyond hope that Nick Smith hadn’t seen us turn off.
I saw the headlights of the truck go past and glanced over at Jenna. We were safe. For now. It wouldn’t be long before he realized we weren’t ahead of him, though, and what would he do then?
Chapter Thirteen
The Marshalls weren’t home. I parked the Civic behind some trees and turned off the engine. If anyone came into the yard, they would see us, but we were hidden from the road. It was the best I could do.
“9-1-1. What is your emergency?” I heard faintly from Jenna’s phone. She’d gotten a signal.
“Someone just chased us down Hillridge Road,” Jenna said in a surprisingly calm voice. She’s always been good in emergencies. I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. I peered into the trees, searching for lights. “They tried to run us off the road, rammed us with their truck.”
The voice on the phone said something I couldn’t hear, and Jenna answered.
“We turned into a driveway, but we’re scared he’ll come back.”
Another question.
“Yeah, I got the license-plate number. It’s…”
I grabbed Jenna’s arm. “Jenna. There are headlights on the road.” If he came up the driveway, we were sitting ducks. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Jenna looked at her cell and swore loudly. “My phone just died.”
We jumped out of the car and dashed into the woods surrounding the Marshalls’ house. A short distance away, we stopped, crouched behind a large bush and peered back at the Marshalls’ yard. I could hear Jenna panting and knew her heart must be racing as fast as mine. I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. Whatever happened, we were in it together.
The lights turned into the driveway. For a brief instant I fooled myself into thinking it might be the Marshalls coming home, but that hope was quickly dashed as the Ford F-150 pulled into the yard. It stopped in front of the house, and someone got out of the driver’s side. As he walked through the beam of the headlights toward my car, I saw that it wasn’t Nick Smith at all. It was Jesse Derby.
Jenna and I looked at each other in surprise. I guess we both had been thinking that Nick Smith was the mastermind of this whole thing. That Jesse had been coerced into giving him information about Jenna, had somehow been an unwilling participant in betraying his teammates. This was clearly not the case.
In unspoken agreement, we both started backing away.
Jesse slammed his hand on the hood of my car, kicked the front tire and let forth a stream of swearing. Then he turned his gaze to the woods.
We didn’t wait to see any more. We ran.
We should have tried to be quieter, but panic does things to your brain. It goes into fight-or-flight mode, and our brains were telling us to fly.
In the darkness of the forest, we tripped and stumbled on roots, crashed through bushes, ran into unseen branches. In short, we must have sounded like a couple of Sasquatches running through the woods.
I could hear Jesse crashing through the trees behind us. We had a head start, but only just. I glanced back to see exactly how close he was. Big mistake. I couldn’t see past the nearest tree anyway and ended up flat on my face, tripping over a rock.
Jenna dragged me up.
“Come on,” she whispered, like we hadn’t been making any noise at all. “This way.”
I didn’t know where we were going, only that we were running downhill and at the bottom of the hill was town. But Jenna had grown up on this mountain. She’d spent her whole life walking and running on its trails. I didn’t think much of it was secret to her.
I followed her up a small rise and onto something that resembled a track. The going was a bit easier here, and a bit of moonlight filtered through the gaps in the trees. We raced along, leaping over roots and fallen branches. I thought Jenna must have cat eyes. She saw obstacles on the path long before I did and pulled me out of their way before I could trip on them.
At last, we slowed near a stream running alongside the path. Jenna put her finger to her lips to warn me to be quiet. I urged her to hurry. I could hear Jesse approaching in the distance. Jenna crept down the bank to the water’s edge, then stepped out onto a rock and jumped across to the other side. I followed.
It seemed like a dead end. The bank on this side of the stream rose to a rock face that would be difficult to climb. I had to trust that Jenna knew what she was doing.<
br />
We crept quietly upstream for a few yards and stopped near a bush. Jenna pulled some branches aside and disappeared behind them. I slipped in after her.
It was as dark as the inside of a box in there. As my eyes adjusted, I realized we were in a small cave, no more than a few feet deep. There was a sliver of light filtering through the bush at the entrance. From outside, you couldn’t tell the cave was even there.
I held my breath as I heard Jesse nearing our hiding spot. He wasn’t making any attempt to be quiet. He was wheezing like crazy and muttering under his breath. He’d slowed down, obviously realizing he couldn’t hear us anymore. His footsteps stopped almost directly across from the cave, and I could imagine him looking around, listening, trying to figure out which way we had gone. I didn’t dare peek out.
In the darkness of the cave, I couldn’t see Jenna beside me, but I could feel that she was holding her breath as well. Our hands were locked together, my fingers aching under her grip. She was trembling.
Jesse went a little farther along the track. I could hear him swearing and cursing. It sounded like he was searching the bushes near the track, smashing each one with a large stick, maybe a baseball bat. Or was it a rifle? My imagination was running wild. With each crash, Jenna jumped a little. I let go of her hands and pulled her closer.
She wasn’t expecting it, and her foot scraped along the floor of the cave as she tried to keep her balance. It sounded like a firecracker to us. I closed my eyes, cursing myself for my stupidity.
We waited, expecting at any second to hear Jesse crossing the stream. Expecting the bush to be wrenched away from the entrance to the cave, our hiding place revealed.
It didn’t happen.
The smashing of bushes slowed and then stopped. There was silence for what seemed like an eternity. And then a scream of rage and frustration. Jesse’s footsteps moved back along the track the way he had come and faded into silence.
Off the Rim Page 7
