Choker (22 page)

Suddenly, the cell phone at her elbow exploded. Cara bit back the scream at her lips so hard she drew blood. Her heart hammering, she stared at the tiny glowing screen. It was Mom. Her hand was shaking so hard she fumbled the phone, dropping it, before she managed to get the case open.

“Honey?” Her mother’s voice seemed to come from another planet.

“Hi, Mom,” Cara whispered. She wiped at the trickle of blood running down her chin from her bitten lip.

“How’s everything, honey? Are you okay?”

Cara could hear the chatter of conversation in the background. She pictured her parents in her grandmother’s brightly lit living room, the TV on as usual. Grandpa Lorin in his recliner, the remains of dinner spread on the table behind them. She stared into the darkness.

“Mom, there’s something wrong here,” she whispered. “I need help.”

“What is it, Cara?” Her mother sounded startled. “Honey, what is it?”

“It’s Zoe. She’s back, and she’s done something awful.” She waited, breathing. She felt lighter. It would be okay now. At least she wasn’t alone. Her parents would help her figure out what to do.

“Zoe? Oh, no. No, Cara.” Her mother’s voice was stricken. “Cara, tell me what’s happened. What’s the awful thing? Cara? Cara?” Cara felt a strong urge to close her eyes. She needed dark, just for a minute. From behind her eyelids, she heard a scrabbling, scratching sound, and suddenly her mother’s voice was cut off.

“Mom?”

But the phone was dead. Cara took it away from her ear and stared at it in her hand. It felt too light all of a sudden. There was something on the table in front of her. The battery. She turned the phone over. The back gaped open.

Cara stared at it. Then the house phone exploded from the kitchen corner. Cara jumped. But she couldn’t get out of her seat. Zoe might find her. The phone rang and rang, but before she could answer it, she heard the soft tap of footsteps. They were coming from the front porch. Her breath stopped. Maybe it was just a branch, scraping against the porch. But there weren’t any trees around the house. She sat upright, listening.

Scritch. Scritch
. Now it sounded as if someone was scratching their nails against the door.
Scritch
. Cara’s breath caught in her throat. She pictured Zoe, crouched like a cat on the front porch, scratching her fingernails to be let in. With a sense of inevitable dread, Cara heard the front door latch creak open. Zoe was here. Her footsteps were coming across the foyer. She was in the living room now. Now she was across the living room. Now she was in the kitchen.

A figure appeared in the doorway. Cara screamed. She screamed and screamed as hands grasped her shoulders. Someone was shouting her name. Zoe was shouting her name just before she wrapped her hands around Cara’s neck to strangle her, like she’d strangled Sydney and Alexis.

“Cara! Cara!” It wasn’t Zoe’s voice. It was a man’s voice. The hands on her shoulders were a man’s—Ethan’s. Ethan was standing in front of her.

Cara collapsed in his arms, sobbing hysterically. “She was here, Ethan,” she sobbed. “Then she ran out. And I don’t know where she is. I’m so scared.”

“Cara, Cara.” Ethan gripped her shoulders and looked down into her face. “It’s okay. I’m here now. Whatever’s the matter, it’s okay.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into his chest, cradling her until her sobs slowed, then stopped. “Okay. There, that’s better.”

He eased her into a chair at the table and went over to the sink. Cara heard him running water, and then a warm, wet dishcloth was put in her hand. At the same time, he flicked on the overhead lights, flooding the room. Cara blinked in the sudden brightness. The ordinary kitchen was there around her, solid. She felt her panic subside. Shakily, she pressed the wet cloth to her face.

Suddenly she remembered what had happened just a few hours ago. “Ethan, you’re back. What happened at the station?”

His face clouded over. He sat down at the table. “I was questioned and released.” His voice had a hard edge. “Questioned in my own girlfriend’s death! They were complete assholes about it, too.” The edge slipped from his voice, and he suddenly buried his face in his hands. His shoulders bowed. “I’m telling you, Cara, it was awful. They kept asking me what we’d argued about, where had I gone after I dropped you off. They weren’t saying they thought I did it, but I could tell that’s what they were thinking. And she’s dead!” His voice broke. “She’s really dead. That’s the worst of it. Her body . . .” He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence.

Cara stroked his back. His pain reached out like waving tendrils. “I know,” she murmured. “I can’t bear to think of her rotting in the barn like that.” She shook her head.

Ethan raised his head. Tears had left a few wet streaks down his cheeks. “What are you talking about? How do you know that?”

Cara stared at him, frozen. His wide blue eyes stared back. Then his expression changed. His brows drew together. “What were you talking about when I came in? Who was here?”

Cara’s mouth opened and shut a few times. She longed to tell him everything, but there was a block inside her, preventing her from speaking. Ethan leaned forward and laid his hand over her clenched fist resting on the table. “What’s going on, Cara?” His voice was low and intense.

Cara could feel the pressure inside her build to a peak and then, under Ethan’s blue gaze, release. She opened her mouth and, with a great shuddering sigh, poured out the entire awful story, starting with Zoe’s appearance in her bedroom, her strange behavior, and, finally, her confession that she’d killed both Sydney and Alexis. Finally, Cara stopped talking and stared at her jeans. Her shirt had a smear of lipstick on it. Ethan sat back in his chair. He looked as if someone had hit him in the face several times.

“Cara . . . we have to go to the police,” he said. He drew his arm over his brow as if trying to keep all he’d learned inside his head. “This girl is out there somewhere, and she’s dangerous. We have to find her.”

Cara nodded silently. She couldn’t fight it anymore. Zoe would have to be found, and she’d have to confess.

The game was up.

Chapter 28

C
ARA PUSHED HER WAY THROUGH THE DEAD GOLDENROD
in the field behind her house. Overhead, clouds scudded across an inky sky. Her flashlight bounced ahead of her like a ghostly spotlight, illuminating a branch, a patch of ground, the trees nearby. The air was cold, frosty, and her breath hung in a cloud in front of her face.

Behind her, Ethan walked carefully in her path, holding his own flashlight. Cara could hear him breathing behind her. She could tell from the rustling and crackling in his wake that Stanton and Fitzgerald were following closely behind. Their own flashlights cast powerful beams that cut into the blackness. They’d left their cruiser outside of Cara’s house after she and Ethan had called the station. Cara had told them there was only one place Zoe could be.

They were nearing the barn. The evidence inside had already been removed, the cops had said, and all the necessary fingerprints taken. Cara could see the bulk of the barn up ahead through the trees. The silvery gray walls seemed almost to shimmer in the night. Cara’s flashlight shone on the trunks of the trees, then bobbed over to the barn door, still draped with crime-scene tape. Her heart clenched when she saw the door was partially ajar. She turned around.

“She’s here!” she hissed.

Stanton and Fitzgerald stopped immediately and fanned out, concealing themselves adroitly behind nearby bushes. Ethan stepped behind a tree. According to the plan they’d made back at Cara’s house, the officers would stay outside if Zoe was in the barn. Cara would go in and try to reason with Zoe, have her come out quietly.

Cara crept up to the barn door. She stopped at the inky crack and listened. For a long moment, she heard nothing. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Zoe had run away. Then she heard it: a soft rustling. The rustle came again. She was in there.

Cara turned around, and her eyes met Ethan’s. His forehead was creased with concern. He started to come to her. Cara shook her head violently and motioned him back.
I’ll be okay,
she mouthed. He reluctantly slipped behind the tree again.

Cara turned back to the door. She turned sideways and, with difficulty, slipped through the crack in the door. The interior was an impenetrable wall of blackness. Cara pressed her back against the reassuring scratchy roughness of the barn door. Then she lifted her flashlight. She gasped when it fell on Zoe’s figure standing only two feet away, cold and pale in the ghostly beam.

“I was expecting you, Cara,” Zoe said. She wasn’t smiling. Her voice was cold and dead. “Traitor.”

The word floated on the air between them.

“Zoe, it’s over,” Cara said. She heard the quaver in her voice and steadied it. Her heart was pounding so loud in her ears, she could barely hear anything else. She felt surprisingly dizzy for a moment, vertigo overtaking her. Against her will, she glanced up at the barn rafters, half-expecting to see Alexis’s dead face staring down at her. But it was utterly black. The body had been taken away by now. With an effort, Cara dragged her gaze back to Zoe, standing in front of her. “The police are outside, Zoe,” she said. “You have to come out.”

“I can’t believe you’d do this to your best friend.” Zoe’s voice cracked, and suddenly her shoulders sagged. She started weeping, openly, heartbreakingly, like a child. Her gasping sobs tore at Cara. As if in a dream, she stepped toward her friend. Zoe lifted her head, her hair hanging in her face. “I loved you,” she wept. “I loved you.”

Cara felt her hands come up and touch Zoe’s face. “I love you, too,” she whispered. “Things just went wrong somewhere.”

Suddenly, Zoe grasped Cara’s wrists with frightening speed. Cara gasped in horror. Zoe’s face was white, her eyes blazing jewels set deep in her skull.

“It’s not over,” she spat. Before Cara could react, Zoe shoved her brutally. She fell to the dirt floor with a teeth-rattling jolt. Then Zoe was on her, clinging to her with her elbows and knees, like a huge, bony spider. Her face loomed above Cara, floating like the moon. Cara turned her head from side to side, straining her limbs to get free, but Zoe was dead weight on top of her. Dead weight.
Have you ever really felt dead weight?

Cara opened her mouth and screamed with all her strength. Her voice cracked, and her throat burned, but she screamed again. The sound was muffled in the vastness of the barn, and she felt a flash of the same desperation as the day she’d choked—that no one was going to hear her. There was no one to help.

But behind her, she heard a rumbling like thunder and understood that Ethan was there, tugging open the doors. “Cara!” she heard him shout. Zoe suddenly released her, jumping to her feet, and Cara pushed herself to her knees, just as Stanton and Fitzgerald ran to her side. Ethan clutched her arm.

“You stupid bitch,” Zoe spat. Her face was contorted in a mask of rage. “You think you’re safe. But you’re wrong—you’re so wrong.”

She turned as if to run toward the door.

“Get her!” Cara screamed. “Ethan! Get her!” She tried to run after Zoe, but she tripped, falling heavily to the floor again. She pushed herself up on her hands and knees. “She’s getting away!” She pointed. Zoe slipped through the doors. But no one moved. Stanton and Fitzgerald just stood like statues, staring at her. All the color was gone from Ethan’s face. He reached down and pulled Cara to her feet.

“Ethan,” she sobbed again. “Please, she’s getting away.”

“Cara!” Ethan shouted. “There’s no one there.” His face was furrowed with confusion. “There’s no one there,” he repeated, more quietly.

Stanton and Fitzgerald lowered their arms. Cara saw them glance at each other. All three pairs of eyes fixed on Cara. She shrank back. “What? What do you mean? She attacked me! She was right there . . . you saw her . . . didn’t you?” she whimpered.

Fitzgerald raised his eyebrows. He grasped Cara’s arm. His fingers felt like steel bands above her elbow. “You’re going to have to come with us, Cara.”

Ethan gasped. “Oh, Cara, no . . .” A sudden look of realization flashed over his face, and he exhaled and sat down on the floor as if all the strength had gone out of his legs.

Cara tried to yank her arm away from Fitzgerald, but his hand only tightened. “Ethan, help me,” she pleaded. “They don’t understand—it was Zoe.” Her breath was coming in wheezes. The tears built in her chest.

Ethan stepped toward her. Stanton put her arm out. “I’m sorry. Miss Lange, you’ll have to come with us.”

“Ethan!” Cara called over her shoulder as the police marched her away. “Help me!”

Chapter 29

T
HE INTERROGATION ROOM WAS SMALL AND DIRTY.
The walls were bare cinder blocks, and the fluorescent lights overhead cast a harsh glare on everything. Cara sat at the single metal table, her head in her hands. Her parents sat on either side. Stanton and Fitzgerald stood in front of them.

“We started home as soon as Cara called,” Mom was explaining. “I could tell Cara was entering a state when she said that Zoe was back. We were frantic when we were cut off. We left immediately.”

Stanton made a note on the yellow pad in front of her. “What do you mean by a ‘state,’ Mrs. Lange?”

Her mother glanced at her father. She took a deep breath. “Cara’s had psychiatric problems for a long time, officers.” Her hand rhythmically stroked Cara’s back as she talked. “It started when she was very small. She used to talk a lot about her imaginary friend, Zoe. All little kids have imaginary friends, but Cara’s seemed somehow . . . more real. She would play a lot in the abandoned house across the street, and when she came home, she’d tell me all the things she and Zoe had been doing there. She called it ‘Zoe’s house.’”

Mom took a breath before she went on. “A lot of things would go wrong in our house: things breaking, items disappearing. And Cara always insisted it was Zoe. She even told me it was Zoe when I found a paring knife in her room. That was our first inkling something wasn’t . . . right with Cara.”