Desolate Angel (15 page)

Sarah’s solitary existence continued, even in the middle of the noisy cafeteria. She sat alone at a table in a far corner of the vast room, hidden by a pillar from the hopeful eyes of the boys. An austere lunch sat untouched before her while she buried her nose in a book.

It seemed a lonely life for such a young girl, walking and eating alone among so many people who could have been her friends. I was relieved when, a few minutes before the bell, another girl approached Sarah’s table. She was a few years older than Sarah and every bit as breathtaking. Her deep brown hair was straight and cut well below her shoulders. It shimmered each time she turned her head. Her skin was perfect, smooth and unblemished, and still lightly browned from the summer sun. She was tall and slender, and carried herself with a confidence usually found in older women. She towered over Sarah as she stopped by the table to say hello.

She smiled at Sarah, revealing perfect teeth. “How’s it going?” she asked in an unexpectedly alto voice. “Did you find someone to lend you the notes?”

Sara smiled back. “Jeanie let me look hers over. I think I did okay. You missed the bus this morning.”

The other girl nodded. “Overslept again. My dad was pissed when he heard.”

“You shouldn’t have told him,” Sarah said. “He’d have never known.”

“They called him,” the girl explained. “Too many tar-dies in one month.” She hesitated. “But you know how it is. They cut you slack.”

“You played the dead mother card?” Sarah asked, laughing.

“It ought to be good for something.”

Sarah’s eyes seemed suddenly to focus on some place far away. “Yeah, it ought to be,” she agreed. Their eyes met. “You going home on the bus today?”

The other girl nodded.

“See you then,” Sarah said.

“Sure. I’ll save you a seat.” The girl walked gracefully away, her hair swaying with each step, another beautiful young woman left without a mother, another young life left without a real home to call home.

At least Sarah was not alone.

Chapter 17

There are advantages to being dead. Finding a seat on the school bus is one of them. Eavesdropping on two young girls is another.

As I sat down in the seat behind Sarah and her friend, I ignored a drowsy kid with long hair who smelled like patch ouli on one side of me and a twitchy fat kid who smelled of pizza on the other. I could easily hear as the two girls exchanged small talk about schoolwork and teachers. They offered statements up to one another shyly at first, as if unsure whether the other would find their concerns too mundane. Yet each girl was respectful, almost tender, toward the other. The older girl, who seemed to be around sixteen or seventeen, was especially thoughtful of Sarah’s shyness. She drew Sarah out with questions about books, established common ground with their shared disdain for the rows of goofy boys sitting in front of them—every one of them hopelessly unmanned by these two beauties. Then she made Sarah laugh with a pointed comment about a teacher. That laugh startled me. I had never heard Sarah laugh before then. At last, though, the older girl uttered the sentence she’d been leading up to and I understood the bond between them even more.

“My dad is taking her to Bermuda for the weekend and he’s letting me stay by myself so I don’t pitch a fit.”

“The blonde lawyer?” Sarah asked. Her face crinkled with distaste. “Didn’t you say she was about twelve?”

The other girl nodded. “Practically. Way younger than him. I think maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine. He thinks it makes him look younger or something but he just looks even older and more pathetic next to her.”

Ah, men, I thought wryly. How we deluded ourselves. We believed we were in control, when the truth was that any teenage girl could sign, seal, and deliver our egos to us on a platter with a single, truthful insight.

“What are you going to do?” Sarah asked her friend. A cloud passed over her face when she asked the question. Bad memories.

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds like your dad is getting serious with her.”

The other girl sat quietly. “Nothing,” she finally said.

“Nothing?” Sarah asked.

The other girl shrugged. “What can I do? If he wants to marry her, he will. And don’t think she’s not trying to get him to ask. Last week, she didn’t return three of his phone calls, that I know about, and he was going crazy. But there’s not much I can do. I leave for school next year anyway.”

“But your mother’s only been dead a year,” Sarah said. “How can he?”

The other girl shrugged again. “He’s not meant to be alone.” She nodded her head wisely. “Not many men are, you know. They get lonelier than we do. She’s not the ideal stepmother, but at least she treats me like a sister and doesn’t try to be my mom. Plus, she’s my size and has some pretty cool clothes and she’s always trying to buy my love.” The girl held out her arm and jangled her bracelet. “Check these out. They’re real.”

“Really?” Sarah bent over the gemstones. “Those are nice.”

Her friend nodded. “Nothing but real diamonds and real gold for Taylor.” Her voice sounded too old for someone so young. When had our children stopped being children?

“At least—” Sarah started to say, then stopped abruptly.

“A least what?” the other girl asked.

“At least you have a great dad,” Sarah said quietly. “A really great dad, and cool grandparents, and a thousand cousins and uncles and aunts.”

Her friend nodded. “And I bet every single one of them is going to hate Taylor.” The girls burst out laughing and every male head on the bus turned to watch. I can’t say I blamed them. It was the sound of sirens luring men to their death on rocky seas.

“I’ll invite you to the wedding,” the other girl told Sarah. “Want to be a bridesmaid? I could guilt her into it.”

Sarah shook her head. “No way. I’m opposed to step-mothers on principle.”

“I bet you are,” the other girl said as she rose from her seat. “It’s us.”

“Already?” Sarah asked and I understood then that their minutes on the bus together might be all she had when it came to human contact that brought her pleasure without expectations or danger in return.

“I know. It never takes long when you’re here.” The girl smiled at Sarah as I followed them down the aisle. They ignored the stares of the boys and the sudden quiet that fell upon their classmates as they passed by. There was something about Sarah’s friend that caused their insults and lewd suggestions to die on their tongues. Her dignity made them feel diminished and outclassed from the start. I hoped Sarah would learn from her. She would need it.

The two girls waved their thanks to the bus driver and stepped out into the sunshine, blinking against the glare. I stepped down after them and there, in the middle of the sidewalk, in a quiet suburban neighborhood, with sunlight spilling around us, I felt a stab of evil so pervasive and powerful that I clutched my hands around my middle as if that might, somehow, protect me from it.

I looked around, seeing nothing but a deserted block and empty houses, doors locked against the world while their inhabitants were away, extra cars lined neatly at the curb and in driveways. I felt the danger, though, and I felt it in every fiber of my being. I knew it was there. It was the same darkness that had lingered over the body of Vicky Meeks.

Her killer was near.

The girls walked down the sidewalk together, chatting about inconsequential matters, oblivious to what I felt. When they reached the corner, Sarah turned right and the other girl turned left. They waved each other a farewell.

An SUV parked to my right abruptly pulled out from the curb and rolled down the street, the sound of its engine unnoticed by anyone but me. I turned around to get a better look at the driver. I could feel the choking darkness drawing closer. It was shiny black and its windows were tinted as deeply as the law allowed, hiding its driver from view. I’d seen it before—I’d seen it following Maggie.

Tinted windows could not stop me. Within seconds, I sat in the front seat next to the driver, surrounded by the smells of new leather seats—and a feeling of danger so pervasive it sucked the very oxygen from the air.

The driver was Alan Hayes.

He sat behind the wheel, his back ramrod straight, his tie perfectly knotted, his shoes immaculate and gleaming, his expensive suit custom fit to his frame. He did not look like a man who had been questioned by police the night before. He looked like the leader of a European conglomerate, tall, sophisticated, and utterly successful.

I clung to how he looked, not wanting to believe that the feeling of danger came from him. I told myself that he was just a nervous father following his daughter home from the bus stop, anxious to see that she was safe. Overprotective, perhaps, and maybe for the wrong reasons, but he had lost one daughter, so the fear of losing another would be very real for him. Surely he was not the source of the darkness surrounding us—would I not have sensed such distilled evil the night before, in his home?

He turned left, away from Sarah, following the other girl.

I peered at his profile, trying to read his thoughts. I could penetrate nothing, though I could see tension in the way he held his jaw and sensed an anger in him, perhaps triggered by his encounter with Maggie the night before. I felt a need rising in him and I was afraid to examine it more closely. I did not want to know what that need was. I did not want to know it even existed.

The girl picked up her gait. Her hair began to swing back and forth with each long stride. I felt the rising need in the car shift, feral and unpredictable, as if an animal had stirred in the shadows of the backseat.

It was coming from Hayes. Eagerness roiled off him in waves as he crept along, hidden in his car, following the girl. His tension was gone, subsumed by a hunter’s obsession. He focused on the girl with an unwavering, relentless concentration that made his eyes glitter. His breath was coming in shallow gasps and he kept touching his lips with the tip of his tongue, as if he were tasting something delicious. His nostrils flared, though he could not possibly smell her, and a smile crossed over his face. It was not the kind of smile to inspire happiness. It was a smile of self-satisfaction to come.

I was afraid.

I knew he could not see me. I knew he could not touch me.

Still, I was afraid.

The young girl continued her walk down the block, each stride as regal as the one before. She was unaware that she was being watched, protected by her youth from knowing that evil could strike even when you were close to home, that evil could claim you even in bright sunlight.

She turned into the driveway of a ranch house that sprawled across a generous lot surrounded by six-foot-high bushes for privacy. Hayes slowed the SUV and drew to a stop along the curb. He shut the engine off and waited, the smile on his face stretching wider. He knew what was about to come.

The young girl bent over, revealing the backs of her thighs and a flash of pink as her skirt inched up over her legs. Hayes groaned softly, his relentless self-control crumbling. I felt no desire at what I was seeing, only fear for what might happen next. The girl stuck her hand in a small opening at the back base of the steps, where latticework and smaller shrubs nearly concealed a small crawl space. Extracting a small gray rock, she turned it over and slid something toward her: a tab that opened to reveal a tiny compartment. In the compartment, I knew, was a house key.

Hayes knew it, too. He laughed quietly—it was a ratch eting sound that had no humor in it—as the girl replaced the fake rock in its now-useless hiding spot, then skipped up the steps and let herself in the front door of the house she thought of as home, the place she considered safer than all other places in the world. She slipped the key into a jacket pocket as she stepped inside.

Hayes waited a moment, checked the empty street and sidewalks to make sure he was alone, then slipped soundlessly from the front seat of his car. Within seconds, he was gone from sight, having disappeared down the driveway, where towering bushes protected him from any neighbor’s eyes.

I followed. He did not hurry. His movements were not the slightest bit furtive. He walked as calmly as if he were striding the halls of the college and intent on being in class on time—until he stepped abruptly sideways with practiced ease and disappeared between two tall spruce bushes guarding the back corner of the house. It was the perfect hiding spot. His tall frame was concealed in the shadows between the elongated branches of the spruce pines, yet he stood only inches from the sliding glass doors that formed the back wall of the corner room. He had a perfect view inside.

He found his spot and waited, growing completely still, content to bide his time. He had done this before.

What would he say if someone discovered him, standing among the bushes, impeccably clad? What possible excuse could he give for being there?