by Tara Brown
Third Time’s a Charm
Crimson Cove Mysteries
Book Three
A Novel by Tara Brown
Copyright 2016 Tara Brown
http://TaraBrown22.blogspot.com
Amazon Edition
This ebook is a work of fiction and is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. No alteration or copying of content is permitted. This book is a work of the author’s crazy mind—any similarities are coincidental. Any similarities are by chance and not intentional.
Cover Art by Lori Follet at Wicked Book Covers
Edited by Andrea Burns
Other Books YA Books by Tara Brown
The Born Trilogy
Born
Born to Fight
Reborn
Crimson Cove Mysteries
If At First
Second Nature
Third Time’s a Charm
The Light Series
The Light of the World
The Four Horsemen
The End of Days
Imaginations
Imaginations
Duplicities
The Blood Trail Chronicles
Vengeance
Vanquished
First Kiss
Sunder
White Girl Problems
The Seventh Day
Once upon a time, in a small coastal village plagued by thoughtless, mindless creatures, there lived five evil bitches.
Each one worse than the next.
Narcissistic.
Rude.
Fake.
Selfish.
Spoiled.
They lived every day as if they were princesses, and they were.
Invited to all the best parties. Dressed in only designer clothes. Dating only the most eligible young men.
But their lives were made on the broken backs of many victims.
Their streets were paved with evil deeds.
And their houses were made of cards.
It was time to wake the sleeping giants and shake the earth.
It was time to break the princesses and watch them each fall.
Anonymous
Prologue
I stared into the choppy gray sea, mystified by the last six minutes.
“Did she come back up?” Lainey whispered, ignoring Linds too.
“No. I don’t know. Maybe somewhere else.” I shook my head, but I couldn't force my eyes away from the place where she had gone under.
“Do you think she swam?” She spun around on the dock, staring at all the places the girl might have gone. “What if she got away?”
“She didn't.” The words were forceful and rigid, how I felt. A tremor shuddered through me as I finally took my eyes away from the sea. “She has to be dead. It’s the only way.”
“What about under the dock?” Lainey stared at the cracks under us. My eyes followed hers, dragging my face down. I didn't mess around or try to get a better angle. I dropped to my knees to get close—so close I could taste the ocean and see my own eye staring back at me from the reflection on the dark water.
I had to be sure.
“There’s nothing here.” I wasn't positive though. I couldn't be sure. Not without going into the cold Atlantic. A small part of me wanted to. I wanted to be that certain. “How long does exposure take?” I appeared to be asking the dock or whispering to the sea.
“She won't make it longer than twenty minutes. The water’s forty degrees. Twenty minutes is the longest before her muscles stop working. She should already be in agony if she’s still in the water and not drowned.” Lainey shivered when she said it, as if the words made her colder.
“It’s been seven minutes. We can wait the rest.” I got up and looked back at the ocean.
Neither of us moved. We both knew we would be standing in the cold, staring at the seawater, until we were sure she was dead.
Chapter One
It Follows
Droplets echoed, mimicking beats of songs I knew but then changed their tempo, maybe to torment me.
Everything about the small four-foot by four-foot space was designed to torment me.
My breath going in was the same as going out because there was no ventilation.
It lacked the life force I needed to survive in the dark.
I suspected the air only changed when my food and water scraped along the floor to me. Whoever gave me the food and water didn't speak. They didn't breathe. They opened the small door, slid the tray in, and closed it.
I stopped caring about the food and water and focused on how fresh the air was for that couple of seconds. I noticed the way it was different and I felt different in it, even for a minute or two.
Lack of breeze, light, and comfort made me realize everything else in my life was unnecessary. I didn’t need anything but fresh air, space to stretch, a bed, and light.
Food and water had become something of a distraction. Eating made me think of things, daydreams. They were the only color I saw.
“Dear stupid, pathetic diary, last night was the best night of my life.” Her voice came out of nowhere again, as it always did. I suspected she sat there, outside the cell, listening to me recycle the air, waiting for my breath to slow just enough from lack of oxygen before she spoke, startling me back to reality. “I’ll pause here for the dramatic effect. I assume you meant for me to do that when you put the seven exclamation marks behind life, like a moron. Did you even study grammar at your fancy school?” She paused and I blinked, trying to find even a fraction of light to fix my eyes to.
Her voice had been the first thing I heard when I woke in the box, except for the scraping in the walls, but that was less of a sound and more of a vibration. Whatever was trying to get inside was closer. Sometimes it was hard to hear her over the noise of it.
She and the constant scratching in the walls worried me almost as much as the state of my mind.
“Vincent and I totally made out. I can’t wait to see him at the party tonight. I bet there’s more where that came from. I’m going to totally lose it to him.” She laughed again as she read on, “My favorite part of kissing him is that Sage doesn’t even know how much he despises her or how much he cheats. Maybe when he and I get together tonight he’ll choose me over her.” She giggled harder as a loud banging made me jerk. “You girls are such bitches. Slutty and hateful bitches. All of you. Every one of you would lie, cheat, and steal from the people you call friends and family.” She sighed and there was a sound like skin sliding down metal. “You wonder how you ended up here, how this is happening to you? Well, there it is. This is exactly why someone would go to great lengths to mess with you. You whores deserve everything you’re getting.” She didn’t sound evil; she sounded bored or lifeless.
And then she didn’t sound like anything.
Maybe she was sitting again, still and creepy.
When I didn’t hear her move or breathe or mock me, I worried what else she was doing. Her entire day seemed to be spent making me suffer.
When I had first heard her voice I begged. I pleaded. I bribed. But nothing worked. She laughed and mocked and pretended to cry with me.
So I stopped talking.
She had switched from mocking me to reading my diary to torment me. It had started out as shocking. Not as shocking as waking in a box, but shocking none
theless.
No one knew where my diary was and yet she did. She had it. Her flipping of the pages, through my best and worst moments, was a type of mental assault.
Having someone read my old thoughts made me realize how much I had changed.
How much the world had changed.
It used to be my playground and now it was my cell.
This cell that had seemed so impossible, now fit the whole world in it with me.
Not only had I brought all my baggage with me, but I couldn’t imagine a way out.
Sometimes there was only the scratching, mixed with the sound of my sniffles or the strange way I breathed with limited air.
No hope of anything beyond that.
I almost wished to be back on the table with her cutting into my skin and laughing as I screamed. That’s the first place I woke after the party. There and then here.
I’d thought being there was bad, as bad as this could get.
Strapped to a cot-like table with the little dark-haired bitch cutting and laughing and wiping the blood away with her dirty hands.
I was wrong.
This was much worse.
Here there was no physical pain, except the shortage of air and space.
The rest was mental.
My mind was still sound enough to be my only form of escape.
If I focused hard enough, I could still see the waves of water rushing the sand-covered beaches, creating color in the dark.
The wind trickled through the crimson leaves that framed my yard, making the sound I feared I might never hear again. I hadn’t appreciated it when I heard it every day for seventeen years.
I hadn’t appreciated anything or anyone.
My feet could still feel the grass and my skin the pool.
Sixteen years had been spent taking it all for granted, even hating some of it.
I hated my father and mother for the way they lied about everything.
I hated my life and the way my act of being a moron was so easily eaten up by the people who thought they knew me.
I hated myself for being a sheep and not the wolf I acted like.
But that was before.
There was a line in the sand for me now. Before and after.
Sierra, before, had always performed and laughed and played and sulked. She had made it seem so effortless, as if she never thought before she acted. Even though the whole thing was an act and all she did was think. She was filled with false confidence and bravado.
I missed her.
The Sierra I was now, was a different girl.
I was never going to be the old me again. The false bravado was the first thing to melt away with the first cut of my skin.
I hated that too.
“Vincent told me he didn’t know it was me he was making out with. He said he thought it was Sage, and if I told her, he would say I had forced myself on him when he was drunk.” Her voice seemed closer, like she spoke into a crack in the wall, as she continued to read from my diary.
Tears leaked from my eyes as the shame of that moment crippled me more than she already had. How could I have been such an idiot to try to have sex with my best friend’s boyfriend? How had I thought being with Vincent would make me happy? Why wasn’t I just happy with space and food and friends and clothes and air?
“You honestly tried to steal your best friend’s boyfriend?” She said it as though she had read my mind, which she sort of had. “You’re such a disgusting slut.” Her verbal blows came frequent and cut deep, but the blood didn’t pool at my feet or trickle down my arms and legs. It left my heart cold and leaked from my eyes as she found another page of what I had thought I didn’t care about anymore.
She found the right pages, the ones where I had truly left a piece of myself—my marrow and blood—on the paper. She read only the ones that still hurt. The ones I hated myself for, even more than I hated her.
“You’re pathetic, Sierra. I can’t believe you wrote any of this down. I can’t believe you admitted this to yourself and continued to hold your head so high and mighty.” She didn’t laugh that time. “That’s not even the worst one. The one from a year later, when you’d already slept your way around Manhattan, you actually wrote about that guy from Jersey. You hooked up with him in his car and then he kicked you out on the street. He left you to walk and flicked a roll of ones at you for the cab ride.” She shuffled on the other side of the wall and then went quiet again.
The diary entry she brought up made me remember the night, made me relive it. The memory was worse than any physical torture she could have doled out.
The night had been so disgusting; I regretted it more than anything else. Even more than pining after Vincent for so long. Or trying to get Jake to like me, despite knowing he was into Lain.
The night she was talking about, I’d hooked up with some guy at a party, some random. We were drinking Crown Royal and dancing in a flat in Jersey. He had a nice smile and a hot body. His name was lost in the darkness. I told him I had to use the bathroom. I didn’t. Instead, I stared at myself in the mirror, contemplating how drunk I was. I wanted to back out of leaving the party with him, but my stupid drunk brain convinced me he could be different. He could end up being the one who made me feel everything. I imagined we would make out, and he would be the best kisser, and we would laugh and maybe go get something to eat instead.
But I was drunk and that was a daydream for another time.
I was so drunk that my blinking was out of sync. The image in the mirror tripped me out. I almost smiled at that but through the door I heard the guy I was about to leave with talking to another guy.
He told the guy to go find Rachel and hook up with her—she was so wasted she wouldn’t even know it was happening. His friend laughed and said that was disgusting, and it wouldn’t matter if Rachel knew or not, he would know. He wouldn’t be able to live with the fact he’d hooked up with someone who was trashed or worse, sleeping.
My guy told him he was a loser and that was why he was a virgin.
I didn’t look back at my reflection.
I should have.
The girl in the mirror would have told me to run, not walk, away from that guy.
But I left the bathroom and let him take me to his car.
I let him leave me on the side of the road.
I did it knowing he was scum.
I wanted him to be the guy who made me feel everything, and he did, for a minute. He made me feel everything bad a girl can feel. And in a disturbing way I relished it. The same way I relished everyone thinking I was an idiot. Because they expected so little, it was easy to meet their expectations. The same way I relished my parents thinking I was a failure. Feeling bad was better than feeling nothing.
And nothing was what I feared I would find here in the dark.
Eventually, I would stop being afraid. I would go numb everywhere.
Ironically, her reading the diary was the one thing keeping me sane. The torture she inflicted made me feel everything all over again. It chased away the nothing.
“I think this is my favorite. I know I keep saying that, but this one’s it.” She sighed, not with impatience but with satisfaction. “Today, when I asked Mark why he wanted to break up, he said we weren’t really dating and I deserved to be with someone who cared about what I had to say, not just what I looked like naked. He said he wished he was that guy, but he wasn’t. I think he believes I’m so dumb I didn’t feel the insult. I think he’s convinced being beautiful naked is more important to me than being listened to. I made him think this. I make them all think it.”
A thump on the wall made me jerk.
“Sierra, seriously? How are you this pathetic? I feel like a broken record here, just going on and on about you being pathetic. I need a thesaurus to figure out another word for it so I don’t sound stupid too.”
“Pitiable. Pitiful. Dismal.” The words fell from my cracked lips like grunts. The old air made my throat sore. I didn’t answer her much but sometime
s I needed to say something to stop myself from going completely crazy.
“Pitiful. That’s a good one. I’ll try to use it. Thanks.”
The thump came again but I didn't jerk.
Dismal.
The cell was dismal, almost as dismal as my chances of escaping were.
Almost as dismal as my attempt to be a human being.
Chapter Two
Psycho
“Can you hear them scratching?” she whispered into the crack. “They’re coming for you.”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to pretend I didn’t hear the tiny feet scratching. But the sound was reverberating off my skull. It was the soundtrack to my dreams, the theme to my nightmares, and the only constant in my world.
But I didn't fear them anymore.
Fear and shame had taken a backseat.
Loss of time.
Loss of senses.
Loss of mind.
I could vouch for that procession.
Light deprivation made it impossible to know the time.
Crawling around the cell, the box I was in, wasn’t enough movement. It made me twitch with anxiety when the small spaces closed in on me. It didn’t always do it but when I let the walls close in, they took over everything.
The scratching was louder, closer. The walls tightened. The dark obscured.
This resulted in my being closer to the nothing.
“You know, slutface, I can’t actually fault you on the poetry in the back of this journal. It’s actually good. I hate that you’re not the dipshit everyone thinks you are. I mean, you’re not as smart as Lainey. But you’re closer than the other girls. Even if you have the self-esteem of a homeless prostitute and half the class.” She banged on the wall, something I imagined she did to annoy me or get her point across. “You’re a poet and you know it.”
We sat in silence again.
