“You should be careful around him. He was the last person Lucy spoke to before she disappeared.”
I hadn’t asked Karson if he killed Lucy, but I knew questions wouldn’t force him to kill her. He’d simply use mind control to ward her off.
“Lucy,” I said, tapping on my head, feigning drawing back the memory of her. “That’s right, the girl who went hiking in the middle of the winter. There were stories online about her, butthey seemed to have disappeared. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
He stiffened and threw the last of the whiskey down his throat. “I don’t control what goes on or what goes off, I just write the stories.”
“I noticed the glowing endorsement for the development you wrote, some state of the art journalistic skills there.”
“Listen, I’m not here to argue. I just wanted to warn you. I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s an asshole.”
“He is,” I agreed. A top notch, state of the art asshole. “That doesn’t make him a killer.”
“Lucy had his name circled, alongside the names of quite a number of missing hikers and a few people who died in car crashes. You tell me that’s a coincidence.”
“He didn’t kill her,” I said, defensively.
“You sound certain of that.” He drew back and blew the smoke out to the side.
“I am,” I answered, “you’re swimming up the wrong lake. Not that you swim anymore. You’ve been given a row boat and told which direction to paddle.”
He dropped the cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with his new shiny shoes. “We do what we need to do to survive.” He was matter of fact, but he couldn’t entirely disguise the torment in his voice. He turned and headed back towards the house. “Oh,” he stopped and said, almost like it was an afterthought, “I’d stay away from Jefferson too. Right away.”
“He’s fine to pay your bills though, right?”
His lips jerked. “Have a good night.”
I sat, mulling his words over in my head. I didn’t profess to know Karson well, but he’d saved my life—a girl he barely knew—not once, but twice. They were hardly the actions of some psychopathic killer. Lucy, as sad as it was, went hiking in the middle of winter, during a storm. Even experienced climberscould succumb under those elements. Sure, not finding her body was perplexing, if a storm had rolled in, she shouldn’t have been able to get far, but maybe she’d walked in a completely different direction than they’d searched. Maybe she fell down a mine shaft or a crevasse, or got swept away in a river. Maybe she froze to death and the animals cleaned her up.
Maybe Karson killed her.
That was a lot of maybes to consider, bar the last one. Lucy was dead, a tragedy, yes, but was it murder?
I closed my eyes, letting the discontent slide away, felt the soft breeze on my face, breathed in the rich scent of nature. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s sweet voices rang out into the night air. I sat there for some time until my mind settled and my body relaxed.
A sharp, unnatural noise snapped my eyes open. I wasn’t sure what had made it. An animal maybe? Whatever it was, it was abrupt and out of place.
A bird screeched and rose into the sky. I stood up, immobilized, I stared into the tree line. The ruffle of the wind shifted the trees, twisting shadows against the ink-dark expanse of the woods, like snakes. There was a movement of something underneath the trees. Too solid to be a shadow. I blinked and strained to draw it into focus, but it’d gone.
I searched the trees again for a long minute. A thick, deep cloud had seated itself in front of the moon and the night deepened, the forest become a pit of darkness. I found myself thinking I was about to feature in some stage play, ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much,’ slayed before she could divulge the secrets of a gruesome underground world. At least the red would blend with my dress, I thought wryly.
I craned to see into the furthest reaches of the forest and found nothing out of place. I dismissed the thought asparanoia, my mind was unsettled, it turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. That seemed the logical explanation.
I forced myself to go back to the party. I bent down, collected my shoes off the ground, and headed back toward the house. I picked my way across the soft lawn. I made it halfway when a high-pitched, terrified scream came from around the side of the house. I ran, feet pounding, heart pumping, dress hindering my legs, toward the screams. I rounded the corner; I couldn’t see anyone. I tossed the shoes to the ground, collected the bottom of the dress in my hands and sprinted forward. I came to the end of the next corner and stopped. Off to the right, over near a garden shed, a young couple stood like statues, ashen-faced. The woman’s hand was clutched over her mouth, she was bug-eyed, staring at something.
Urged by higher winds, a blanket of obscurity shifted, and the moonlight opened like curtains, illuminating the horror before us. I stared down, frozen, unable to move for a heartbeat, my head struggling to think around the horror. Laying on the ground was a man. Blood bubbled sluggishly from his torso like a hellish flood. His jacket was open and flayed, his white shirt had been shredded. Among a pool of red I could make out long, thin rip marks that ran though the fabric and had sliced deep into his flesh.
His eyes fixed steadily to the moon, as if he was purposely focusing on the only thing left worth seeing with his last breath. The bottom part of one ear was missing, torn off, and long, thin, jagged tears ran from under his ear and forked across his neck. His throat spurted crimson rhythmically, like the seconds hand of a clock.
There was only one thing that would make the blood spurt like that. A pumping heart. Incredibly, his chest rose and fell in faint, fast breaths. He was still alive.
“Oh, I, oh!” the girl’s voice cracked. She turned, staggered a few feet away, and puked. The boy followed suit.
The initial shock wore off quickly. I needed to stop the bleeding. I rushed forward and dropped to my knees.
A second burst of shock stormed through my mind and stole the breath from my lungs.
The man lying before me was Jefferson.
