Psycho Killer (2 page)

Blair’s mother was famous for her dinner parties, and this was the first since her infamous divorce. The Waldorf penthouse had been expensively redecorated that summer in bruised reds and molten browns, and it was full of impressive antiques and artwork cleverly scavenged by her decorator from the estates of recently deceased art collectors before they went to auction. In
the center of the dining room table was an enormous silver bowl full of white lilies, petrified scarab beetles, and desiccated pussy willows. Gold-leafed place cards lay on every red-lacquered plate. In the kitchen, Myrtle, the cook, was whisper-shouting Ozzy Osbourne songs to the soufflé, and the sloppy Irish maid, Esther, hadn’t dropped her famous blood pudding and Ritz cracker canapés down anyone’s dress yet, thank goodness.

Blair was the one getting sloppy. And if Cyrus Rose didn’t stop harassing Nate, her boyfriend, she was going to have to go over there, spill her scotch all over his tacky Italian loafers, and bludgeon him to death with her empty tumbler. Not that she’d ever actually kill anyone, but it was fun to imagine it.

Such
fun.

“You and Blair have been going out a long time, am I right?” Cyrus said, punching Nate in the arm. He was trying to get the kid to loosen up a little. All these Upper East Side kids were wound way too tight.

Hence the high mortality rate.

“You sleep with her yet?” Cyrus asked.

Nate turned redder than the gore smeared on a butcher’s apron. “Well, we’ve known each other practically since we were born,” he stuttered. “But we’ve only been going out for like, a year. We don’t want to ruin it by, you know, rushing, before we’re ready?” Nate was just spitting back the line that Blair always gave him when he asked her if she was ready to do it or not. But he was talking to his girlfriend’s mother’s boyfriend. What was he supposed to say? “Dude, if I had my way we’d be doing it right
now
”?

“Absolutely,” Cyrus Rose said. He clasped Nate’s shoulder with a red, meaty hand. Around his fleshy wrist was one of those
gold Cartier cuff bracelets—very popular in the 1980s and not so popular now—that you screw on permanently and never take off, unless you cut off your own arm.

Or someone cuts it off for you.

“Let me give you some advice,” Cyrus told Nate, as if Nate had a choice. “Don’t listen to a word that girl says. Girls like surprises. They want you to keep things interesting. Know what I mean?”

Nate nodded, frowning. He tried to remember the last time he’d surprised Blair. The only thing that came to mind was the time he’d brought her an ice cream cone when he picked her up at her tennis lesson. That had been over a month ago, and it was a pretty lame surprise by any standard. At this rate he and Blair might never have sex.

Nate was one of those boys you look at, and while you’re looking at them you know they’re thinking,
That girl can’t take her eyes off me, I’m so hot
. Although he didn’t act at all conceited about it. He couldn’t help being hot—he was born that way. Poor guy.

That night Nate was wearing the moss green cashmere V-neck sweater Blair had given him last Easter, when her father had taken them skiing in Sun Valley for a week. Secretly, Blair had sewn a tiny gold heart pendant inside one of the sweater’s sleeves, so that Nate would always be wearing her heart on his sleeve. Blair liked to think of herself as a hopeless romantic in the style of old movie actresses like Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, Sissy Spacek in
Carrie
, or Glenn Close in
Fatal Attraction
. She was always coming up with plot twists for the movie she was starring in at the moment. And usually someone wound up dead.

C’est la vie.

“I love you,” Blair had told Nate breathily when she gave him the sweater.

“Me too,” Nate had said back, although he wasn’t exactly sure if it was true.

When he put on the sweater, it looked so good on him that Blair wanted to howl like a werewolf, rip off all her clothes, and jump him. But it seemed unattractive to scream in the heat of the moment—more Janet Leigh in
Psycho
than Marilyn in
Some Like It Hot
—so Blair kept quiet, trying to remain fragile and baby bird–like in Nate’s arms. They kissed for a long time, their cheeks hot and cold at the same time from being out on the slopes all day. Nate twined his fingers in Blair’s hair and pulled her down on the hotel bed. Blair put her arms above her head and let Nate begin to undress her, until she realized where this was all heading, and that it wasn’t a movie after all—it was
real
. So, like the well-trained, civilized girl she was supposed to be, she sat up and made Nate stop.

She’d kept on making him stop right on up until today. Only two nights ago, Nate had come over after a party with a half-drunk flask of brandy in his pocket, gotten into bed with her, and murmured, “I want you, Blair.” Once again, Blair had wanted to scream bloody murder, jump on top of him, and smother him with kisses. But she resisted. Nate fell asleep, snoring softly, and Blair lay down next to him, imagining they were the stars in a movie in which they were married and he had a drinking problem and possibly a multiple personality disorder, but she would stand by him always and love him forever, even if he occasionally spoke in tongues and wet the bed.

Blair wasn’t trying to be a tease; she just wasn’t
ready
. She and Nate had barely seen each other at all over the summer
because she had gone to that horrible boot camp of a tennis school in North Carolina where she had tried to poison everyone’s Kool-Aid, and Nate had gone sailing with his father off the coast of Maine. Blair wanted to make sure that after spending the whole summer apart they still loved each other as much as ever. She’d wanted to wait to have sex until her seventeenth birthday next month.

But now she was through with waiting.

Nate was looking better than ever. The moss green sweater had turned his eyes a dark, sparkling green, and his wavy brown hair was streaked with golden blond from his summer on the ocean. And, just like that, Blair knew she was ready. She took another sip of her scotch and cocked her fingers around the glass tumbler as if she were firing a shiny .38 caliber pistol.

If only she could take Cyrus out of the picture—
bam!
And everyone else at the party for that matter—
bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Then she and Nate could do it right there in the living room, naked, with the whole damned penthouse to themselves, save for the corpses.

She finished her drink and set the tumbler down on a marble side table with such force that both the glass and the marble cracked.

Oh, yes. She was definitely ready.

“Keep the change,” Serena van der Woodsen called as she stepped out of a cab on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, three blocks from the Archibalds’ townhouse. The trip uptown from Grand Central had gone too quickly. She needed some fresh air, and she certainly didn’t need to be spotted right in front of Nate’s house. Not today. Of course, anyone who mattered was already at Eleanor Waldorf’s autumn soiree. Besides, no one would believe their eyes if they saw Serena van der Woodsen here, on the Upper East Side, when she was supposed to be away at boarding school.

Her scuffed brown Ralph Lauren lace-up paddock boots were silent on the sidewalk as she made her way toward the townhouse, a pair of huge tortoiseshell Céline sunglasses masking her enormous navy blue eyes. A bicyclist paused to let her pass. Park Avenue wasn’t as wide as she remembered, and the tulips in the median were long gone. A bored doorman glared accusingly at her as she turned the corner, the green awning above him casting a gloomy shadow across her path. Soon the iron gates of Nate Archibald’s stately limestone townhouse loomed before her.
Serena tightened the belt of the translucent brown plaid plastic Burberry trench coat she’d purchased from
Bluefly.com
in case things got messy—the only item of clothing she’d ever bought online, off-season, and at a discount—took a deep breath, and rang the bell.

No answer. She rang it again and waited. Again, no answer. It was after five o’clock. Hopefully Lourdes and Angel—the couple who served as the Archibalds’ housekeepers, cooks, gardeners, handymen, manicurists, hairdressers, masseurs, chimneysweeps, exterminators, launderers, tailors, EMTs, and answering service—-had gone home.

Serena donned her taupe cashmere-lined goatskin Sermoneta gloves and dug the key out of her eelskin Dolce & Gabbana Harpoon microhobo—the key Nate had given her the summer before last, when everything had gone so very wrong, or so very right, depending on whose side you were on. The gate creaked open and a black squirrel streaked out of the green hedgerow bordering the walk. Oh, the irony! She just happened to have enough squirrel poison in her bag to kill an entire army of black squirrels.
Are the black ones the juveniles?
she wondered aimlessly, as if trying to distract herself from the true nature of her break-in.

Which is? We’re all
dying
to know.

The black and white tiles of the foyer gleamed with clean familiarity. Growing up, Serena had spent almost as much time at Nate’s house as she had in her own home. Serena and Blair and Nate—always an inseparable, precocious trio. In first grade they’d doused each other with the garden hose out back. In third grade they’d practiced kissing, determined to get it right before they were all cursed with braces or retainers. In fifth
grade they’d stolen half the bottles in the liquor cabinet and mixed cocktails from a recipe book Blair had shoplifted from the Corner Bookstore.

Pushing her sunglasses up onto the crown of her head, Serena mounted the elegant red-carpeted staircase and trotted up to the second floor. She paused in the doorway of the master bedroom, so gilded and nautical with its Louis XVI décor, porthole-shaped skylight over the bed, and red, blue, and gold Persian carpet that had been rescued from the
Titanic
. Looking up, the sky was a torpid turquoise sea. October was weird like that.

Serena continued down the hall and up a narrower staircase to Nate’s private floor. There were his boxers on the bathroom tile where he’d left them. There was the rumpled plaid quilt lying askew on his bed. There were his model sailboats and the picture of him and Serena and Blair on the beach behind Blair’s house up in Newport. Nate’s eyes glittered greener than the ocean behind them. Blair was laughing. Serena studied her own face. She’d had freckles then, and an easy smile. Could she still smile like that?

With a gloved hand she grasped the sleeve of the heather gray Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt Nate had worn to play lacrosse that morning and held it to her nose, breathing in the heady soap and sweat scent of him. Nate, her Nate. Blair’s Nate.

Again she stared at the photograph. Her carefree twelve-year-old arms were wound around Nate and Blair’s shoulders as they laughed. Tiny, happy dimples creased her freckled cheeks. She blinked, and then, just like that, Nate was gone. She’d vanished him from the picture. All she saw was herself and Blair, the two girls. Nate was just a tiny speck, drifting and dissolving as he floated out to sea.

Still wearing her gloves, Serena dropped her bag on the desk and removed the giant syringe she’d procured from the groundsman’s shed up at Hanover. Two skulls with Xs through them and the word POISON were emblazoned on the oversized syringe in large black capital letters. She’d smuggled the syringe into the city in a violin case stolen from a Hanover sophomore who used to play first string in the school’s orchestra—before he went snowboarding with Serena and had to be air-lifted to the hospital with a fractured jaw, a severed tongue, a punctured lung, and two shattered wrists.

Serena opened Nate’s sock drawer and rooted around until she found the pair of balled-up neon yellow polyester Adidas soccer socks where he kept his stash of pot.

“
What a loser
,” she could hear Blair scoff at Nate, her voice pregnant with love and longing.
“I might finally do it with you if it wasn’t for those horrible neon things.”

Serena held the marijuana-stuffed socks in one hand and thrust the needle of the syringe into them with the other. The socks grew steadily heavier as they swelled with poison.

Nate’s tiny sailboat alarm clock ticked quietly. The silence in the house was excruciating.

Serena had always hated silence, and her time at Hanover Academy in New Hampshire had been full of it. Sure, she’d met some okay people up there, but as soon as she got close to someone, something always happened to spoil it.

There was Jude, for instance. Sweet Jude. One sunny autumn Saturday he’d taken her apple picking at a hilly farm a few miles from campus. It was very romantic. But when they reached the arbor of shiny green Granny Smith apples, she’d thought of Nate. How Nate loved to snack on the crisp, tart flesh of a Granny
Smith. How the green skin of his favorite apples matched the green irises of his eyes. Jude’s eyes were a dull gray, not gorgeous green. Jude’s hair was thin and straight and auburn, not thick and wavy and golden brown. Jude was from Massachusetts, not Manhattan. And although the apple picking stick in his hand resembled a lacrosse stick, Jude simply wasn’t Nate. So Serena had rammed the stick down Jude’s throat, catching his tongue and epiglottis in the little metal basket meant for catching apples and killing him instantly.

Then there was Milos from Milan. He’d taken Serena sailing. Big mistake. Milos was still missing, his shark-eaten body floating to and fro in the icy waters between Cape Cod and the Bay of Fundy, in Canada.

Sexy Soren, captain of the ski team, had built her a snowman, just like the snowmen she and Nate used to make in the garden behind Nate’s townhouse. When she finally made it back to her dorm, the bloody snowman was wearing Soren’s head.

Nate was the only sailor in her life, the only builder of snowmen, the only apple-loving boy. Oh, how she missed him. How she missed New York. The thought of Blair and Nate together in Manhattan without her made her want to kill her roommate, the dean, and everyone else at Hanover.