The counselor, Pierson, suddenly showing up at the group home. Telling her he’s watching her.
Laura, bleeding from the wounds of some terrible secret.
The darkness of the van and what happened to the skeleton girl—
In the driver’s seat, Ms. Sharonda suddenly speaks. “You have something you want to tell me?”
Cara is jolted back to the present.
Tell her?
The thought makes her flush hot and cold.
Can she tell her? Does she dare? Would that do anything but get her in a Level 14 home, doped out of her mind?
Her thoughts feel so loud she can hardly contain them . . . but nothing comes out of her mouth.
Ms. Sharonda shakes her head, tight-lipped. “Well, you got away with it. You got yourself right out of that school.” She glances away from the road, looks at Cara directly. “I don’t want to see you back. You’re out now—you stay out. Are we clear?”
After a moment, Cara nods. That’s the plan. She’s going to stay as far away as she can get.
The car leaves the flatness of the desert valley to ascend into the hills toward Temecula. Sunny grape fields sprawl over the hills, dotted with the olive trees and date palms that also thrive in the Mediterranean climate.
It all feels vaguely familiar. She has very few memories of the time before The Night. Before The Night, there were visits from a pretty, lively person who laughed hard and cried hard. After The Night, when Cara went to live with Joan, there was no laughing. There was a man, too, who wasn’t nice. There was fighting, and crying. The man left. Cara left soon after, to the first of an endless parade of failed foster placements and group homes, and the dreams at night, always the monsters in her dreams . . .
She shuts that line of thought out.
The house, too, is familiar, a comfortable two-story tract home in a hillside community with quiet curving streets and cul-de-sacs. She has stayed there briefly over the years. Not often, and only briefly. She knows Aunt Joan got the house from insurance money Cara’s father left her. Cara knows there is money for her, too, that will come to her when she is eighteen years old. But that is an abstract fantasy, completely inaccessible. Eighteen years old seems like centuries away. She has never believed she will live that long.
Ms. Sharonda pulls the car into the driveway and stops.
Aunt Joan comes outside and speaks to Ms. Sharonda for a long time, while Cara sits on the metal bench on the porch. Her cousins watch from the window. They are young: Erin a shy nine, and Patrick a bratty ten-year-old, sullenly staring at her.
Finally, her aunt turns away from the car. Ms. Sharonda looks up at the porch, toward Cara. “We’ll be talking,” she says, an assurance and a warning.
Aunt Joan forces a smile and walks up on the porch toward Cara. Cara can feel her aunt flinch even as she hugs her, and she pulls back again quickly.
Then Aunt Joan calls her by the other name, which Cara supposes is all right. The whole school will know by now. After the fight, there will be no going back.
“Well, Cara, it’s good to see you. Let’s get you set up in the guest room.”
Joan takes her into the house, up the stairs, to a room that Cara remembers staying in before. Her aunt chatters nervously. “I was just going to start dinner. I’m sure you have homework to do . . . I remember the piles of homework we used to get in high school. I can drive you to the mall if you like, after, or maybe you’d like to take a walk . . . I’m not sure what you like to do.”
As if she actually has a choice.
Cara says only, “A walk sounds nice.”
That seems to please her aunt. “We’ve got some pretty great views in the neighborhood. Even just in the backyard.”
Joan abruptly stops talking and touches Cara’s face, looking at her. She winces at the bruises the fight has left. But then she looks deeper. “You look so much like . . .” There are tears in her eyes and she clears her throat. “You’ve grown up into such a beautiful young woman. Your father . . .” Her voice catches again. “Your father would be so proud.”
All Cara can see is blood. Her aunt seems to be crying tears of blood. She looks away.
Joan brushes at her eyes. “What those boys did . . . it’s not right. It’s not fair.” Her aunt’s face becomes distant. “I want you to know I’m sorry I didn’t visit more. It was just . . . I just . . .”
Cara knows. There will be no help from her. There never has been.
Patrick openly hates her. He follows her into the hall as she goes downstairs, and whispers “Freak” at her when his mother isn’t looking. Cara stops that with a look, but his fury simmers underneath his skin.
“Nobody wants you here, freak.”
She smiles and says something under her breath, too low for him to hear. It incenses him, the not knowing.
“What did you say, freak?”
She looks at him steadily, until he shifts uncomfortably.
“Stop it.”
She continues to smile, not looking away, as Patrick starts to panic.
“Stop it. Stop it. Mom!” he yells, skittering away from her.
Cara turns and goes out through the back door, into the yard. The back of the yard slopes up to a hill overlooking the neighborhood, and she climbs up to the highest point, and sits on the ground, looking out.
Beyond the neighborhood, a quiet subdivision of curving streets and cul-de-sacs, the desert stretches out to infinity.
She breathes in, suddenly so tired she could lie back and fall asleep right here on the grass.
It has been three days since she stopped her medication. The shadows are becoming longer by day and at night the moon whispers to her as it grows. But on the hill, looking out, it is peaceful. The wind murmurs softly, but it is not the dark slithering of It.
The desert seems clean and peaceful and safe. She could hide in the desert. She could bury herself in the sand and sleep for a million years . . .
She feels a presence behind her.
She twists around . . . to see Erin standing some distance behind her. She is just a wisp of a girl. Her dark eyes and dark hair, almost black, make her olive-toned skin seem pale.
Erin looks up in the sky. “The moon is up.”
Cara is startled to hear her say it. She looks up and realizes Erin is right. Just over the hilltops, she can see the faint white disk.
“Yes.”
“But it’s day.”
“The moon doesn’t go away because it’s day. It’s always there. Sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can’t, but it’s always there.”
Erin looks at Cara and Cara can feel the need in her. She seems cowed by something, scared of her own shadow, something that has nothing to do with Cara’s presence in the house. There is a bruised sense about her, without actual bruises. She is so small, and suddenly Cara is afraid for her.
Her aunt’s voice comes from the back door of the house, calling. “Erin!”
Even from a distance, Cara can hear the frantic undercurrent beneath her words. Aunt Joan moves quickly up the hill, holding out a hand to the younger girl.
“Don’t bother your cousin, sweetheart. Come on inside to play.”
Erin looks at Cara. Cara nods at her to go.
As they walk away from her she has to breathe through a rush of anger.
Her aunt does not want her near Erin.
Cara knows she thinks it will happen again. That whatever killed Cara’s family, Joan’s family, is still out there, that it might come back at any time.
But she also understands that her aunt is afraid of her, has always been afraid of her.
She knows she is not Normal. But is she really so different?
It seems only that she sees how things are. There is someone in or around the high school who is evil, who wants nothing but to cause pain, torture and death. The skeleton girl is locked away, trapped in a living hell, and the thing that did that to her is walking free.
And people do nothing. Her aunt, Ms. Sha
ronda . . . they know these things happen, are happening, and they do nothing . . .
She fights another sickening wave of anger.
She knows she cannot go back to the school. She cannot. But her aunt is right to be afraid.
She escaped It once, as a child, and It has been after her ever since. It will come for her. As the counselor, as the man in the van . . . or someone completely else. It found her at the school and It will find her here—
She is breathless with the terror of the thought. She presses her hands into the grass, gasps in, forces herself to inhale.
You’re here. You aren’t dead. Sit. Be still. Think.
She breathes in . . . and out again, concentrating only on her breath.
The moon continues its slow climb into the sky. And gradually she is able to focus on it.
Out in the daylight. What does it mean?
She sits and watches the neighborhood, the mothers arriving home with kids in their cars.
The cars.
They seem to glow in the afternoon light.
She watches, and waits, and the moon begins to whisper.
After a time she stands and walks down the hill. She walks the curving streets of the quiet neighborhood and looks at the cars from a closer vantage point, with special attention to the Hondas and Toyotas and Acuras. She notices the newer cars are mainly parked in driveways and in garages . . . and that more of the older ones are parked on the street. One of the older ones has another thing about it that is particularly interesting to her.
She takes another slow loop around the block, then goes back to the house.
“Did you enjoy your walk, Cara?” her aunt asks, from the kitchen doorway.
“It was good,” she answers.
She has seen what she needs.
Inside she helps Aunt Joan lay out a dinner table just like in shows on TV: place mats, cloth napkins, a centerpiece of flowers. She watches her aunt to make sure she gets the correct placement of flatware, and when she sits, she takes the napkin from the ring and puts it in her lap in the same way that her aunt and cousins do.
Normal.
The smells of spaghetti sauce and broccoli are sharp, too strong without the haze of medication, and she feels her stomach roil with nausea. But she swallows back the sick and eats gingerly.
Across the table, Patrick glares at her, Erin sneaks glances at her in between toying with her food. And Aunt Joan tries to make conversation.
She starts, “How is school, Cara?” and then immediately realizes the absurdity of the question. She looks away from Cara’s bruises. “I mean, your classes . . .”
Cara understands the desperate need to hear something Normal, and plays along.
“It’s a good school. I like Spanish. And Chemistry.”
“Mr. Lethbridge says you’re an excellent student.”
Lethbridge. Another reason she must get away. She doesn’t know what it is with the vice-principal, but there is danger there. She feels sick that he is watching her, has been talking about her.
“I’m trying,” she says.
Patrick sneers at her and she stares back at him until he looks away.
After dinner she offers to clear the table while Patrick heads for the family room and parks himself in front of the television.
She carries dishes into the kitchen as her aunt flits in and out. Her chance comes when the phone rings, and her aunt goes upstairs to talk.
She begins a quick, furtive search. In a bottom drawer, there is a box lined with blue velvet, with a set of tarnished silver. The carving knife tempts her, but it is too big to conceal easily. But there is a whole set of steak knives shoved in with the more expensive pieces. One of these is deadly sharp and small enough to hide any number of places.
The laugh track of the sitcom her cousins are watching in the other room turns to the raucous music of a commercial, always so much louder than the show. Cara quickly pockets the knife and slides the heavy drawer shut.
As she stands, she has a flash of memory: her aunt’s husband, the not-nice one, tinkering with his car inside the garage.
She looks toward the back door that leads into the garage.
Then she opens the lid of the trashcan, pulls out the bag and ties the edges, eases open the back garage door. She steps into the dim garage, standing in the rectangle of light from the kitchen, and holds the trash bag in one hand as she scans the shelving unit.
There is a cabinet with tools, a treasure trove. She puts the trash bag down and helps herself to a screwdriver and flashlight, various thicknesses of wire . . . and then hits pure gold: a packet of clip leads.
She tucks the clips into a pocket, the screwdriver and flashlight into the waist of her jeans, and arranges her shirt over the bulge.
There are footsteps in the kitchen behind, someone coming. She twists around to pick up the bag of trash. As her aunt steps into the garage, all she sees is Cara depositing the bag in the can.
Aunt Joan looks at her. “Well, thank you, Cara, that’s very thoughtful.”
“You’re welcome,” she says.
She goes to the guest room that is hers for the night, and slips the knife under her pillow. Step one, completed. Step two will come that night.
ROARKE
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was late afternoon, and the shadows were long over the hills and valleys of the desert corridor crossing through the reservations at the base of San Jacinto Peak.
Roarke felt the knots inside him unraveling as he headed up through the mountains, with their stunning vistas at every turn.
Again, he found himself gripping the Rover’s steering wheel with both hands to negotiate the hairpin curves. And again, though he was almost certain Cara had killed the counselor, he was at a loss to understand how she had managed it. He’d checked, and there was no bus line on the route, now or in the past.
Had she hitchhiked?
And what had compelled her to do it?
He’d always thought, much like Ortiz seemed to think, that it was simply personal: revenge on the counselor for getting her sent up to YA. But did it somehow, somehow, connect to the other two girls?
He tried to put himself in teenage-Cara’s mindset.
As events unfolded at Las Piedras High, she must have thought, at least fleetingly, that the Reaper—It—was back to get her. How could she not? To have escaped that monster—only to end up in a school being stalked by a sadistic and deadly predator . . .
He felt the same rush of fear for Cara, a sense of urgency . . . the same feeling that had propelled him back on the road.
On one level, that was completely irrational. He knew that whatever had happened sixteen years ago, whatever encounter she may have had with this monster, she had survived it.
But did she really?
Was it whatever happened to her at that school that turned her into what she is?
His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden appearance of the red fuel light on the dashboard. He hadn’t seen a single gas station since turning off of 371, and the road he was on crossed straight through tribal lands.
Do Indian reservations have public gas stations? he wondered. If they don’t, how would they feel about a white, obvious lawman who has no jurisdiction on their lands wandering in to borrow a gallon of gas?
Something stirred in the back of his mind as he thought it. A new thought, something important . . .
But at that moment he rounded a corner and a general store came into view, with a couple of old gas tanks in front.
He pulled in to the drive in front of the fueling island.
Wind rippled the prayer flags hanging above an outdoor patio with picnic tables under oak trees. An unnervingly realistic dinosaur sculpture snarled down from the roof, something between a raptor and a T. rex, glaring balefully at all who dared approach.
Roarke got out of the Rover, removed a gas nozzle from a pump.
As he stood in the wind, waiting for the tank to fill, he saw that the moon was
already up, a pale disk in the blue of the sky. He stopped in his tracks, looking up at it.
Wolf Moon. Bitter Moon.
And it was far too close to full for his liking.
It was easy to get mystical, this far out in the wilderness. But the fact was, for each of three months now, the full moon had meant havoc and bloodshed and the brink of death.
The nozzle clicked off as the gas finished pumping.
As Roarke turned back toward the car, he saw an old Native American man sitting on the rough burl bench beside the door of the store, watching him.
Roarke stopped, looking back at him, struck by the ravaged beauty of his face.
What have you seen? he wondered. Would I even understand if you told me?
The old man stared back. And then turned his face away, toward the daylight moon.
Back in his Rover, Roarke wound his way down the snakelike road on the other side of the mountain toward Palm Desert.
When he hit the town, he cruised by the Wayfarers Club of Palm Desert, but it was locked up, no cars in the parking lot. He’d called the club and left a message on a voice mail system requesting a return call. He’d have to wait for a callback.
He pulled into the parking lot of the sheriff’s station just before five, but didn’t go in. He wanted a private conversation with Ortiz. He parked where he had a clear view of the front doors, and waited.
The wind whispered through the feathery mesquite in the planters, and the sun lowered, blood-orange over the desert.
Finally, Roarke saw Ortiz leaving the building, walking out to the side parking lot.
Roarke got out of his car and followed at a distance. He caught up with Ortiz as he was opening the door of his SUV.
The detective’s face twisted as he saw Roarke. “You. Again.”
Roarke stood his ground and spread his hands. “You’re the one who got me out here. Now I’m just finding so much fascinating stuff that I can’t stay away.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m here to get some information on an old case. Laura Huell.”
Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4) Page 13
