by Diane Hoh
Shivering with cold, Jess turned and hurried around the side of the house. There was no one there.
“Ian?” she called. “Where are you?”
“Jess, I’m down here!” The voice was coming now from the creek that meandered through the woods at the bottom of the slope behind the house. Through the trees, she could see a faint golden glow on the rushing water. Ian must have a flashlight. What on earth was he doing in the woods?
Jess smiled. Maybe Ian thought a creek in the woods was a really romantic spot.
“Hurry up!” he called. “You’ve got to see this!”
She’d have to remove her shoes. Trying to climb down the slope in high heels would be insane.
Carrying the shoes in one hand, she aimed for the yellow glow, pushing aside a final clump of undergrowth as she arrived at the creek.
“Ian,” she began over the babble of the rushing creek, and then stopped as her eyes were automatically drawn to a spot illuminated in the water by the broad beam of the flashlight. There was something there, submerged. A large piece of paper … its top edges firmly pinioned by a smooth, gray rock, its bottom edges flapping frantically as the rapidly moving water pulled and tugged at it.
Her curiosity aroused, Jess bent to peer more closely into the creek. It wasn’t a piece of paper. It was a … photograph. Of a girl. A beautiful girl. Even with the eerie distortion caused by the flowing water, turned a garish yellow by the flashlight’s glow, Jess could clearly make out the features.
The girl in the watery photograph was Giselle McKendrick.
And the photograph fluttering in the creek had been defaced with the same ugly black slash mark that marred the smaller photo found by Jess in her room.
Jess gasped and turned to face Ian.
But it wasn’t Ian, after all, aiming the flashlight at the photograph. It was Trucker.
“I didn’t know you were home,” Jess said, frowning. “Where’s Ian?”
“I left the dance early.” Trucker shrugged. “No one noticed. Came home, changed my clothes, and decided to fish for a while.” He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, open at the throat, and jeans. “Milo put this picture here, Jess. A few minutes ago. I saw him, but he didn’t see me. He put it there, then he called you, and ran. He wanted you to see it. Up to his old tricks again.”
Milo? No … Milo hadn’t done any of the things they’d thought he had, so he couldn’t have done this, either. Milo wasn’t a criminal. Milo was a victim. Their victim, and they would have to make it up to him somehow.
But … if Milo was innocent, then who … who was guilty?
And why was Trucker lying about Milo?
Then she watched, lost in confusion, as Trucker waded into the water and bent to remove the photograph. And as he stretched out his arm, the collar of his shirt gaped open further and revealed a cruel, jagged slash in the soft flesh of his throat. It looked painful. And it looked recent. As recent as, say, no more than a week ago?
When she slashed backward with that chunk of glass, toward a figure straddling her and leaning forward to whisper in her ear, where would her thrusting arm have been likeliest to strike? The face … or the throat? There was no mark on Trucker’s face. But there was a very ugly mark, the kind easily made by a large chunk of broken glass, on his throat.
She had begun backing away even before he stood up, saying, “I think I’ll leave it there. It’s proof that Milo hated Giselle. We can show the others when they get home. When I tell them I saw Milo put it there …” his voice broke off as he saw the expression on her face.
She realized, too late, that she should have hidden the fact that she’d guessed the truth. Maybe she would have had a chance, then. He knew the minute he looked at her. She could see it in his eyes.
“Where is Ian?” she whispered. “What have you done to him?”
Chapter 27
TRUCKER LAUGHED. “YOU COULD say Ian’s … tied up right now.” Seeing the look of horror on her face, he added, “Oh, relax. He’s still breathing. And he never knew what hit him.”
Ian was okay. Jess began to breathe again. But … he wouldn’t be able to help her out of this.
Her eyes moved to the photograph, still flapping in the water. “You … you killed Giselle?”
Trucker’s expression sobered. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. It was her fault.” His eyes darkened with rage. “She made me so mad. The way she treated me, after all I’d done for her.”
Jess wanted to turn and run. But there was nowhere close by to run to. Trucker would catch up with her … and kill her.
Jess kept her voice level. “What had you done for her, Trucker?” If she could keep him talking, stall till the others got home …
Trucker’s face took on a faraway look, and his voice softened. “Her car broke down on the freeway one afternoon. It was raining, I remember, a real summer downpour. I was driving a tow truck to earn some money for college, and my truck was the first one to come along. When I knocked on her window, she rolled it down, and then she started crying. I mean, it was a cloudburst. I could tell she wasn’t the kind of person who cried all the time, and this had been building up for a while. The dam just burst. She spilled out all this stuff about her mom being in the hospital, really sick, and her dad not being home when she tried to call him from one of the freeway phones and how she hadn’t wanted the stupid little sports car in the first place. She said her daddy only gave it to her because he felt guilty about spending so much time at the hospital.”
Trucker shook his head, not noticing that Jess was shuffling her feet backward in the tiniest of steps as he spoke. “At first, I thought she was just some spoiled rich girl. But the more she talked, the more I could see she needed taking care of. So,” he finished proudly, “that’s what I did. I took her home, got her car fixed, and when I brought it back to her, I stayed. She was glad to have the company.”
“I’m sure she was,” Jess agreed, nodding.
“And I never left her side again, except to go to work, the rest of the summer. I could see that her old friends didn’t understand her like I did. They weren’t what she needed. I was all she needed. After a while, she saw that, too. She didn’t need anybody but me. That made us both happy.”
Suddenly, Trucker shouted, “Stop right there! And don’t move another step!” His face twisted in anger. “You must think I’m a complete idiot!” Thrusting the still lit flashlight into a front pocket of his jeans, which turned his face into an eerie yellow mask, he reached into another pocket and pulled out a long, thin wire, bending it into a circle.
Like a necklace, Jess thought, her heart pounding.
Keep him talking, her mind warned fiercely. “If you were so good to Giselle,” she said rapidly, “why didn’t she go with you when you came here to get her last spring?”
He had begun walking toward her slowly, the wire held loosely in his hands. Her question stopped him. His eyes narrowed. “Because this place changed her.” He glanced up the hill toward Nightingale Hall, its lights gleaming faintly through the trees. His voice shook with rage. “I hate this place!”
But when he looked at Jess again, he spoke normally. “That summer, she agreed when I said we’d be together forever. But then her mother died and her father remembered that he had a daughter. Giselle was so grateful for the attention he finally gave her that she agreed to go to college when he insisted. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to leave me, I know she didn’t. She did it for him.”
Jess didn’t believe that. Maybe Trucker honestly believed that, or maybe he was just kidding himself. But from everything she’d heard about Giselle, she believed college had always been in Giselle’s plans. A momentary loneliness and terrible sense of loss had made her temporarily dependent upon Trucker. That was understandable. But Jess was certain that even if Giselle’s father hadn’t pulled himself out of his grief and tended to his daughter again, sooner or later Giselle would have ended her dependence on Trucker. In fact, going off to college had p
robably been her first step in that direction.
And Jess would bet anything that Giselle had left willingly, maybe even eagerly. She had probably never intended to marry Trucker. He’d wanted it so much, he’d fantasized that it was true.
“Then she came here,” Trucker went on, delivering another glowering stare toward the house. “And she changed. She ignored my phone calls, my letters. I thought we’d get it all straightened out at Christmas. But she didn’t come home. She went to stay with a friend instead.” His eyes went back to Jess. “She was so ungrateful! After everything I’d done for her!”
Jess’s ears strained for the distant sound of tires on gravel. But the air remained maddeningly still. An owl hooted up near the house, but there was no crunching of gravel.
“You did all that stuff in the house,” Jess said, “and framed Milo. Why? No one even knew Giselle had been … killed. Or that you had anything to do with her death.”
“Sooner or later, someone would have found the letters and asked some questions. I knew they were here, so I came here, got a job, and started hunting. When Milo showed up, I knew I had the perfect patsy for a frame, because he’d known Giselle. She talked about him a lot. She felt bad because they weren’t friends anymore. As soon as I heard his name that first day on the front porch, I knew I was home free. How many guys named Milo can there be? Just to be sure, I asked him where he was from, and I wasn’t disappointed. So I snatched Cath’s essay and later planted it in Milo’s notebook. And I knew exactly where I’d plant the letters when I did find them. In Milo’s room.” Trucker grinned. “And it worked, didn’t it?”
“But you and Milo were in the cellar together. Didn’t he see you take the letters?”
“I was down there alone long enough to find the letters before Milo got there.”
“And he never sent you upstairs for soda, did he? You were setting him up, letting us know he was down there alone because you were already planning to hide the letters in his room.”
“Smart girl. But I didn’t have all the letters. You still had one.”
“If you’d killed me in the cellar,” Jess said, her voice shaking, “You never would have found the letter I had.”
“I intended to blow up the house and everything in it that night,” Trucker said, his own voice trembling with fury. “But you turned off the gas. You ruined my plan. And now,” his voice grew softer again as he began walking toward her, the wire in his hands, “you have to be punished for that. I’ll take care of Nightingale Hall and your precious friends later, when they’re all asleep in their beds.”
“They’ll come looking for me,” she protested, beginning to back away again. “They won’t go to bed if I’m not there.”
“Yeah, they will,” he said casually. “Because you’ll leave a note saying you and Ian have decided to make a night of it elsewhere.” He grinned. “They’ll believe that, of course, because Ian won’t be around, either. He’ll be here. With you.” His voice became cheerful, almost lilting. “I think watery graves are kind of romantic, don’t you?”
Jess searched wildly for another question and found one. “But if you loved her, how could you kill her, Trucker?”
His jaw clenched. “She wouldn’t come with me, stupid! I came all this way and then she said she didn’t love me, which I knew wasn’t true. It was this place, the people she lived with here, that turned her against me. I knew if she’d just come away with me and we were alone together, we’d get back to where we used to be. But she was so stubborn.” Trucker shook his head. “It wasn’t my fault. She made me lose my temper!”
“You strangled her and made it look like suicide.”
Trucker frowned. “Well, of course I made it look like suicide. What choice did I have?” And then, his eyes shining yellow like a wild animal’s in the glow of the flashlight in his pocket, he advanced upon her, the nasty-looking wire held out in front of him.
Jess knew she couldn’t outrun him. She could fight him, but he was heavier, stronger than she was. She had nothing in her hands but her high heels and although she glanced around frantically, she saw nothing she could use as a weapon.
Trembling violently with fear and frustration, she threw her heels at him. They bounced harmlessly off his chest and fell to the ground.
Trucker laughed and kept advancing.
When she tried later to explain what happened next, no matter how carefully she put it, it came out wrong. Because there wasn’t any way for it to come out right and still make sense.
One second, Trucker was almost upon her, the wicked wire necklace in his hands, and she knew she was about to die.
But in the next second, the wet photograph of Giselle ripped free of the rock holding it hostage, lifted itself up out of the babbling creek, and whooshed through the air to plaster itself across Trucker’s face. It molded itself to his features like a second skin, blinding him and effectively sealing off his air passages.
As Jess watched with her mouth open, her eyes wide in disbelief, Trucker dropped the wire circle to claw frantically at the sodden, smothering photograph. It remained firmly plastered to his face. His chest heaved in an effort to breathe. His feet staggered backward as he fought to escape the suffocating mask. When he fell, his hands still digging and scraping at the dripping wet picture of Giselle McKendrick forming a death mask over his face, he fell hard, backward, into the creek.
There was a loud, sharp crack as his head crashed into the round, smooth rock that had held the photograph prisoner only moments earlier.
Trucker’s feet thrashed in the water once, and then he lay still. The flashlight in his front jeans pocket cast its eerie yellow glow upward, illuminating, where his face should have been, an eight by ten glossy photograph of a beautiful blonde girl with bright blue eyes. She was smiling.
Chapter 28
HER EYES FIXED ON the photograph smiling up at her from Trucker’s lifeless body, Jess sank to her knees. “Thank you,” she whispered, “thank you, Giselle.”
A hand on her shoulder caused her to jump.
“Take it easy,” a voice behind her said. Ian bent to peer into her face. “You okay?” A streak of dried blood made a dark red circle on his forehead.
Speechless, she nodded. Footsteps crunched on the other side of her. When she looked up, Milo was standing there. Cath, Jon, and Linda, still in their Ball clothes, were behind him, their faces white with shock.
She hadn’t heard the crunch of tires on gravel.
“Oh, Milo,” Jess cried, “you came back! I’m so sorry we accused you.”
“It’s okay.” Milo knelt beside her. They all stared at the bizarre scene in the creek. “I knew it was him,” he said of Trucker. “We were the only two in the cellar with that trunk. I knew I hadn’t taken the letters. So last week, I went back home to do some investigating. When I described Trucker to Giselle’s father, he said it sounded exactly like the guy Giselle had been dating, who’d said his name was Brandon. McKendrick didn’t like the guy at all. He said he’d taken too much control over Giselle’s life at a time when she was especially vulnerable. Her father blames himself. Said if he’d been paying more attention …”
“But his wife was dying,” Jess murmured.
“Right. The only person to blame is Trucker.” Milo and Ian helped Jess to her feet. “I came back to straighten things out. But when I went upstairs, I heard Ian trying to break down the closet door with his feet. I’d just let him out when everyone else came home. You were the only one missing, Jess. And then Ian looked out an upstairs window and spotted the flashlight down at the creek.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Ian said, and Jess nodded numbly.
And then, just as they turned to leave, there was a sudden gust of wind. The soft whisper of wet paper pulled their attention back to the creek. They watched in shocked silence as Giselle’s photograph slowly peeled itself away from Trucker’s face, lifted itself up, and flew swiftly through the air, up the creekbed until it was out of sight.
; When Jess could find her voice, she whispered, almost to herself, “She put the shadow on my wall, too, and the footprints in the hall leading to my room. She was trying to tell me …”
“What?” Ian asked. “What are you talking about?”
Jess smiled wearily. “Nothing. Never mind.” But silently, she added, “’Bye, Giselle. Rest in peace.”
Together, they all climbed back up the hill in silence, Ian holding Jess’s hand. When they reached the clearing behind Nightingale Hall, something in the air … a sudden, hushed stillness, stopped them in their tracks. They lifted their heads and listened.
And as they stood there, the big old brick house seemed to shudder, as if sighing heavily, and then settle back on its haunches peacefully.
When the air was still again, Milo said, “Giselle found justice, and the house is satisfied. It isn’t waiting anymore.”
No one laughed.
“Come on,” Jess said quietly. “We can go inside now.”
A Biography of Diane Hoh
Diane Hoh (b. 1937) is a bestselling author of young-adult fiction. Born in Warren, Pennsylvania, Hoh grew up with eight siblings and parents who encouraged her love of reading from an early age. After high school, she spent a year at St. Bonaventure University before marrying and raising three children. She and her family moved often, finally settling in Austin, Texas.
Hoh sold two stories to Young Miss magazine, but did not attempt anything longer until her children were fully grown. She began her first novel, Loving That O’Connor Boy (1985), after seeing an ad in a publishing trade magazine requesting submissions for a line of young-adult fiction. Although the manuscript was initially rejected, Hoh kept writing, and she soon completed her second full-length novel, Brian’s Girl (1985). One year later, her publisher reversed course, buying both novels and launching Hoh’s career as a young-adult author.
