Tyler’s laugh, the cackle of a demented hyena, grated worse than her own. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d been totally alone—a couple of weeks after prom, maybe—and she felt awkward next to him. “Your definition of fun needs a major readjustment. C’mon, loosen up a little.”
“I’m plenty loose.” She stared at his hand, which had wandered to her bare leg, and her face warmed. When he laughed again, she bristled, annoyed. Not with him—well, not entirely. Tyler Lowry couldn’t help being who he was any more than Ted Bundy or Shadow Man. But with herself, or who she used to be, because that clueless girl somehow believed she’d needed to impress him. “This whole lake trip was my idea, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, pushing a sun-bleached lock of hair from his forehead. “I still can’t believe Dakota Roark lied to her mom.”
Frankly, neither could Dakota. But she’d gotten good at that lately. It had been an easy sell—Hannah’s mom is taking us shopping in the city—with Hannah eagerly agreeing to cover for her, thinking Dakota had plans to spend the day making out with Tyler lakeside. Tyler thought so too, judging by the sly grin on his face.
“I guess Little Miss Perfect has a dark side,” he added, squeezing her knee.
She shrugged, suddenly emboldened by her secret plan. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
He raised one eyebrow, impossibly cool. “Let’s hope so.”
****
“Keep going straight on Highway 28 East,” Dakota said, studying the hand-drawn map she’d printed from the Shadow Snoops’ EXTRAS folder and tucked inside her book, where it was hidden from Tyler’s view.
He frowned at her, slowing the car to a crawl. “Shouldn’t I turn off here? Eric said Pleasure Cove is a great spot.”
She would’ve laughed, but she felt a tiny pang of sympathy for him, realizing exactly the type of pleasure he had in mind. He wouldn’t be visiting Pleasure Cove today, literally or figuratively. “I know a better place. It’s more secluded.”
“Alright.”
Tyler revved the engine and sped down the highway, passing the turn just as she’d asked him to. Just as Shadow Man had done twenty years ago for the last time. And many times before that. Thirteen of the sixteen victims had been found near the southeast corner of the lake. He must have been familiar with the area. Maybe he lived or worked nearby. According to Mindhunter, most serial killers had a comfort zone, a home base, where they stalked and killed their prey.
Dakota watched the wind blow through the sycamores in the distance. Even as the sun streamed in through the window, warming her, she shivered.
“Hey, how come you weren’t at my party last weekend?”
It took her a moment to remember where she was. Who she was talking to. Tyler with his chiseled jaw and tanned skin. Tyler who’d already committed to playing lacrosse at Duke. Tyler who’d practically seen her naked. “I told you. I got grounded.”
“Puh-lease. You never get grounded.”
“Yeah. Hannah said the same thing.”
“Well, I was bummed when you didn’t show.” For a moment that lasted as long as a lightning strike, Dakota wondered if she’d misjudged him. “I thought for sure you’d be there. Maybe in that sexy red bra.”
“Speaking of the red bra, did you delete that picture yet?”
“Are you kidding? It’s my wallpaper.” He chuckled softly, patting the outline of his phone in his shorts pocket. If he’d had it anywhere else, she would’ve grabbed for it herself. Tossed it out the window. Watched it crack like an egg against the highway. “I’m joking, Dakota. God.”
“So you deleted it, then?”
“I can’t. Not until I see the real thing.”
“Take this road here,” she said, her stomach making the same hairpin turn as Tyler’s Jetta. Dakota cracked the window and took a breath, her whole body jostling as the wheels met gravel. “Keep going. It’s just a little further.”
“You weren’t lying. This spot is way out in the boonies. You’re not gonna kill me, are you? Toss me in the lake?”
Dakota resisted her good-girl impulse. The prim voice in her head always telling her how to act, how to be, how to seem. Where had that voice gotten her lately, anyway?
“Why do you think I’m reading a book about serial killers?”
Tyler did a double take, and she laughed dryly.
“But I’m not dumb enough to toss you in the lake. The decomposing gases under your skin would float you right up. Or with my luck, you’d get tangled up in a fishing net and dragged to the surface.”
He thought about it for a while, his face darkening.
“You’re so weird lately.”
She didn’t disagree. Just pointed up ahead, where the road came to a shadowy end.
“This is the place.”
Tyler parked the car and looked at her expectantly. But she reached for her backpack, cracked the door, and hopped out fast, avoiding his blue eyes. Just in case. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d fallen victim to their spell. On prom night—before the incident—she’d let him slip his hand inside the top of her strapless dress. No. She’d more than let him. She’d wanted him to.
“C’mon,” she said, knocking on the window of the driver’s side where Tyler sat, sullen. “I’ll race you to the water.”
Dakota knew Tyler would sprint after her. She also knew he’d run out of steam. They both would. Because the path to the lake, long grown over, appeared as a scramble of hatched lines on the map, the words less than a mile but feels like twenty printed by whoever had drawn it.
“How’d you find this spot anyway?” Tyler asked, stopping to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He’d already tugged off his T-shirt, those hard-earned lacrosse muscles on full display, and Dakota thought of her old self. How she’d drooled over him like Gus at his food bowl.
She listened to the push and pull of her breath until it slowed, imagining herself as one of Shadow Man’s victims, running for her life through these woods with the devil himself behind her. It hadn’t happened that way, of course. By the time those dead girls made it here, their legs were useless. Just flesh and bone getting cold and going nowhere.
“I read about it.” Which was true enough. A 1980 article in the Napa Valley Register, published after a fox trapper had discovered the remains of victims number four and five, Miriam Woodbury and Jacqueline Pierce, within a half-mile radius of where they’d found Susanna Donnelly. A grid search had uncovered two more victims, who’d disappeared in the late seventies, giving the police no choice but to utter those two fateful words: serial killer. “Some people say it’s haunted.”
It was the best she could do without telling him the whole sordid story that he’d probably blab to everybody at Napa Prep.
“Cool,” he said, trudging ahead, oblivious to the graveyard beneath his feet. And the dark thoughts, sunk like headstones, in Dakota’s mind.
This is a long way to carry a body. Shadow Man must have been strong and fit.
When Dakota spotted the shoreline through the trees, she pulled up short, letting Tyler go without her. A lone fisherman stood on the small patch of beach, his line cast into the water. She couldn’t make him out, not with the midday sun glaring off the water. Just past him, Glenda Donnelly’s wooden cross, the one Dakota had first seen on True Crime Confidential.
“I guess you’re not the only one who knows about this place.”
Tyler sounded disappointed, but he waved to the man, and the man waved back, a gesture that eased Dakota, though she couldn’t say why. Surely, even Shadow Man could be polite when he needed to be. Especially when he needed to be.
She turned her eyes from him and quickly caught up to Tyler.
“Wanna swim?” he asked, already peeling off his socks and heading for the water, his sneakers discarded carelessly in the grass.
“You go ahead. I’ll b
e there in a minute.”
She ignored Tyler’s frustrated groan and retrieved the map from her bag, glancing back at the fisherman. He recast his line, and it dropped into the water without a sound, sending ripples back to the shore. Somewhere in the woods, she heard the cry of a bird, as sudden and shocking as a scream. But Tyler swam on, arm over arm, and the fisherman waited for fate to take a bite. So Dakota walked back in the direction from where they’d come, purposefully meandering so she could tell Tyler, if he asked, that she was just wandering.
Really, she knew exactly where she needed to go. The map told her the way. West from the giant tree with the face of a grumpy old man. Straight ahead to the clearing between the sycamores. This was Shadow Man’s burial ground. She had to see it for herself. How better to know him?
Dakota stood at its center, weeds tickling her legs, and spun around to take it in. The grainy newspaper photo had told her nothing of the black heart of this place. As the strong summer wind kicked up, it felt ironically alive, smelling of hot, dry grass and dust. The sycamores moved gracefully above her like angels spreading their wings. Their leaves murmuring to her in a language she couldn’t understand.
Near one of the big, mossy rocks, the trapper had found Miriam’s skull. It had been bashed with a blunt object, possibly the butt of a rifle, and burned. Dakota serpentined through the rocks, surveying the ground, half-expecting to see it there, its empty eyeholes fixed on her. Or to feel the bony fingertips of Jacqueline’s scorched hand latching onto her ankle, still red hot.
As she peered into the deep crevice between two of the larger boulders, the earth there began to move, to pulse. Almost imperceptibly. Until the brown and gold of the grass at her feet writhed in a slow, easy rhythm.
A snake!
The realization knocked the wind from her, and Dakota clasped her hand to her chest. She lifted her foot to inch backwards, but the snake moved too. She heard herself cry out.
“Gopher snake. It won’t hurt you.”
The voice came from the path behind her. Deep and unfamiliar. But she turned toward it, already knowing who she’d find.
Up close, the fisherman looked her father’s age. What she could see of him anyway. His wide-brimmed hat shadowed his eyes, partially obscuring the rest of his face.
“Are you sure? It looks exactly like a rattlesnake.”
What she could see of the fisherman’s mouth turned upward into a gash of a smile, revealing a top row of jagged teeth. “Yep. You wouldn’t be the first to be fooled. Sometimes, he’ll even act like a rattler, shaking his tail back and forth at you. But he’s not venomous.”
Dakota nodded, only half-convinced. It unnerved her the way the fisherman said he like the snake was his good buddy.
“He’s probably more scared than you are. Just come toward me.”
The fisherman extended his hand toward her, the other still latched tight to his cooler and reel. She looked at his stubby fingers, black hair on pale knuckles. Then back to the snake. And she thought—of all things—about Ted Bundy and the fake crutches he’d hobbled around on, searching for his next victim.
Dakota stepped back, and the fisherman let his hand fall to his side with an embarrassed shrug. So what if he wasn’t Shadow Man? Surely, he’d hidden some dark part of himself from the world, from her. No different than her father. Than Tyler. Probably Boyd too. All of them shadow men.
“Did you catch anything?” she asked as the long tail of the snake disappeared between the rocks.
“The bass weren’t really biting today, but I hooked a couple of catfish.” He opened the lid of the cooler and offered her a glimpse of wide mouths and slimy whiskers. The eyes filmy with death. The slick, black bodies piled like casualties in a mass grave, one of them still flopping.
“What about you?” he asked. “Find what you were looking for?”
The snake might as well have slithered right across her shoe. Because she turned cold again, fixed to the spot. Until the fisherman pointed to the map in her hand.
She opened her mouth to answer him, but he spoke first.
“Be careful around here. If you can’t tell the gophers from the rattlers, you might get yourself in trouble.”
****
“I want to leave.” Dakota hadn’t intended to say it quite like that, but as soon as Tyler waded out of the water, his broad shoulders already pinked from the sun, she expelled the words in one fast breath.
“Now? Why? We just got here.” Tyler stretched out onto the oversized beach towel he’d arranged on the shore, leaving her perched on the corner, her feet tucked beneath her. His bare chest rose and fell with each breath, and she turned away before he caught her looking. “Where’d you go, anyway?”
“I saw a snake.” She held out her phone to Tyler, showing him the image of a gopher snake she’d located on Wikipedia. She’d still been buzzing, high on adrenaline, when she’d read the description. The gopher snake, a constrictor, kills its prey by suffocating it or pressing it against the wall of its burrow.
“Okay.” He thought she was a big baby. His voice gave it away. “That’s why you want to leave?”
“Not exactly.” How could she explain it to him when she didn’t understand it herself? This place felt all wrong. She felt stupid for begging Tyler to bring her here. “I think I’m just tired. I swam laps this morning and . . .”
Dakota couldn’t think what to say next. She hadn’t swum laps in nearly a month. Her mom still dropped her off at the Napa Valley Swim Club three times a week, but she avoided the sleek, black-capped swimmers in the lap lanes and stayed in the shallow end, practicing her underwater breath-holding technique. She’d managed to increase her personal best to seventy-five seconds.
“I know,” he said. “You’re super competitive like me. You probably pushed yourself too hard.”
“Probably. Coach wants me to swim the fifty free this season, so I’ve been working on my sprints.”
Dakota’s phone beeped in her pocket, and she startled. As if the phone gods had struck her down and branded her a liar.
“You sure are jumpy,” Tyler said. He rolled over on his side toward her and plucked her book from her backpack with a grin. “Maybe you should stop reading this stuff, Mindhunter.” He made it sound like a dirty word.
“You looked in my bag?”
“It fell out when I got the towel. I didn’t know it was top secret.”
“It’s not. I just—”
Another beep of her phone, and Dakota slid it out, averting her eyes from Tyler’s face, somehow handsome even when it was scrunched in confusion.
Three missed calls from her mother, two messages. And two texts, both from Hannah, sprinkled with all caps and exclamation points.
911!
GO HOME NOW!!! Mom got called into the hospital this morning and ran into your dad. They know we’re not shopping in San Fran!!!
Dakota’s stomach lurched. Not only because she’d been caught in a lie. But also because she’d caught her father in one. That morning her dad had left the house before she and her mother had even finished breakfast. Golf bag in tow, he’d been headed for a round at Silverado Country Club. Maybe I’ll get a hole in one, he’d teased, ruffling Dakota’s hair. Apparently, that had been code for banging Mrs. Montgomery.
“Now we really have to go,” she said, springing to her feet and tugging at the towel beneath Tyler. It didn’t budge and neither did he. She stood over him, panic gathering strength in her chest.
“My parents know I’m not with Hannah.”
Tyler grabbed her leg, stilling her. “You’re already in trouble. What’s a couple more hours? I haven’t even seen your bathing suit yet.”
Suddenly Tyler’s horndog logic sounded perfectly reasonable. Why should she rush home to get grounded? Why did she have to tell the truth when no one else did? Why shouldn’t she have fun with her totally smokin�
�� boyfriend? Or whatever he was.
She tugged off her T-shirt and her cutoff shorts, pretending to ignore Tyler’s gawking at the white bikini she’d let Hannah talk her into buying.
“There,” she told him. “Happy now?” Then she ran toward the cool, mossy water like her whole life depended on it. Like Shadow Man himself was on her heels.
****
Dakota pushed Tyler’s hand away from the place it kept wandering—the bright silver button on her shorts—grateful for the console between them. Not that it had waylaid Tyler. He’d still managed to untie her bikini top beneath her T-shirt. Next stop, Pleasure Cove. She felt ridiculous for telling herself the day wouldn’t end this way.
“I think we should go,” she told him as he kissed her neck. “It’s almost five. My parents are gonna be so pissed.”
“C’mon, D. I want you so bad.” His hand again, more insistent this time. Why couldn’t he just stick to kissing? She liked kissing.
“Tyler. Stop.”
He pulled away from her and flopped back against his seat, breathless. Like he’d played a full four quarters. “God, you’re such a tease sending me that picture.”
“I didn’t want to send it. You kept asking me.”
“Well, I’m not fifteen anymore. And making out is getting old. I get that you’re not ready to put me on varsity, but at least let me try out for the JV team.”
“What are you talking about? You haven’t even asked me to be your girlfriend yet and you want me to . . .” She widened her eyes at him. She couldn’t say it out loud. Surely that was reason enough not to do it.
“So if I ask you to be my girlfriend . . .”
Dakota sighed and shook her head. “Just take me home.”
“Whatever.” He put the Jetta in gear but stopped mid-reverse. “You know, Hannah was right about you. You’re totally immature.”
“Then don’t hang out with me anymore. There you go. Problem solved.”
“Fine. I won’t.”
“And delete that picture. Now. I want to see you do it.”
“Here,” he said, tossing his phone at her. “Do it yourself. No big loss. It’s not like you’re Kylie Jenner or something.”
Shadows Among Us Page 15
