The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (8 page)

The haunting wail of Nancy Becker’s voice giving up all hope wrapped itself around the car during the long descent.

When the bright red machine landed in a deep ravine across the highway from campus, it bounced several times like a red rubber ball, then exploded in a giant red and yellow fireball.

The roaring flames consuming Polk’s beloved red Miata were no threat to Nancy Becker and Polk Malone, though. Because they were both already dead, killed instantly in the violent impact.

The biker sat at the very edge of the overlook and watched as, far below him, flames gobbled up the Miata and its occupants.

Then he sped away into the gray-blue dusk, leaving a trail of black smoke in his wake.

“Y
OU’RE GOING OUT WITH
who?” Trixie asked in disbelief.

“Whom,” a nervous Echo corrected automatically. She wrestled her hair up into a haphazard topknot. “I keep forgetting you’re not an English major.”

“No. Psych. And I wish I’d learned enough already to figure out why on earth you’d be going out with someone like Aaron Pruitt. Deejay and Marilyn couldn’t believe it, either, and Ruthanne almost had a stroke. He’s a friend of theirs, I guess, but he’s so … so …”

“So
not
gorgeous and
not
charming and
not
athletic?” Echo suggested, an edge to her voice. “Well, that’s okay, Trixie, because as you and I both know,
I’m
not exactly Miss Popularity, myself.” Of course that didn’t make her a maniac, like Pruitt.

Trixie had the decency to flush. “I … I didn’t mean …”

“Whatever.” Echo dug into her scalp with the edge of a bobby pin and winced. But it was her anger she felt the most. Until now, she had planned to make it clear to everyone who saw her at the rec center that night that she wasn’t with Pruitt willingly. She hadn’t been sure exactly how to do that, except by looking as if she were having a lousy time, which she was sure wouldn’t be a problem. But now, she felt a sudden, fierce need to defy Trixie. It would be different if Trixie knew what Pruitt had done. Then she’d have reason to hate and fear him. But Trixie
didn’t
know that. Only Echo did.

The trouble was, she had no idea what to do with that knowledge.

“Anyway, I finally found out how Pruitt got into a fraternity,” Trixie said. “I always wondered. He doesn’t seem like the type. But Deejay told me his father is loaded. Pruitt and Banner Investments?”

“Never heard of them.”

Trixie’s expression said, “Well, no, you wouldn’t have, would you?”

“Pruitt, Senior, is a Salem alumnus. And a Sigma Chi. That’s how Pruitt, Junior, got into Sigma Chi.”

“Thank you for sharing that, Trixie. See ya!” And Echo was out the door.

Mistake, she told herself angrily as she entered the elevator. Big, big mistake. I should have said she was right about Pruitt and I was only going out with him as an experiment, to see what makes a geek like that tick. Trixie will remember I got defensive. It’ll be the first thing she thinks of if I find that motorcycle and turn Pruitt in to the cops. I can just hear her telling everyone, “Well, you know, there
were
two people on that bike in front of Johnny’s Place and one of them could have been a girl, and Echo
was
dating Pruitt, and did she ever get ticked when I made a silly little crack about her going out with him. She got
very
defensive.” Trixie would toss her head in that way she had and add, “Of course, since I’ve lived with her since the very beginning of the year, I know her better than anyone on campus and I can tell you that becoming a wild biker is
just
the sort of thing that would appeal to Echo Glenn!”

When am I going to learn to keep my mouth shut? Echo asked the mirror in the lobby when she passed it.

The minute she stepped outside, she heard sirens. More than one. Off-campus, but close enough that the sound was unmistakable.

Echo stopped, looked around. She smelled smoke. And … gasoline.

Off to her left, across the road from campus and into the woods, a huge black cloud of smoke rose up from the trees. A fire? There had been a burning ban on for most of the spring .because of dry conditions, but recent rains had ended that edict.

A boy jogging past her slowed and commented, “Looks like that smoke’s coming from the ravine. Accident, maybe. That dirt road that runs alongside the ravine is treacherous.”

Echo didn’t know the woods on that side of the road that well, so she didn’t answer, and he went on his way.

Accident? How awful. She hoped no one had been hurt. People said that ravine was very deep and rocky. It wouldn’t be a pleasant place to land if your car skidded off the road.

Since there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about whatever had happened, she kept going.

Aaron Pruitt’s room at the frat house was as neat as Echo would have expected. A dime would have bounced easily on his perfectly made bed. There were no clothes on the floor, only thick, pale gray carpeting. There were no books and notebooks piled high on every flat surface, as there were in Echo’s room and in almost every other dorm room she’d ever visited. Two heavy wooden bookcases lined one wall. Echo wouldn’t have been surprised to find the books arranged alphabetically. They weren’t, but they were orderly.

Her eyes casually skimmed the titles. “Are all those books yours?”

Pruitt’s hair was even neater than usual. He shook his head, and not one strand moved. “No. They were already here. Belong to the frat house. Except for a couple dozen I brought with me and the ones I’ve borrowed from the library.” He gestured toward a neat stack on a middle shelf. “Due Wednesday. Hope I don’t forget.”

“You won’t,” Echo said flatly, glancing at those titles, too. One held her interest longer than the others. “You’re not the type.” And then realized how silly that was. The guy was practically a murderer. Why would he have any qualms about returning books late? She kept forgetting that he wasn’t the Pruitt she and everyone else had thought he was.

You had darned well better keep that in mind, she warned. Forgetting it could be … Echo shivered. She didn’t want to think about it.

The evening was every bit as miserable as she had thought it would be. The worst moment was when she walked with Pruitt into the rec center, which was far too crowded to suit Echo, and all heads turned in their direction. He seemed to delight in the attention. Shoulders back, a smug grin on his thin face, he imprisoned Echo’s hand in his and casually made his way to the front of the room, where he insisted they take seats in the second row.

“We didn’t have to sit so far up front,” Echo, rigid with embarrassment, whispered as they sat down. “You just
love
all this attention, don’t you?”

“Yes!” he whispered back. “You might as well learn to love it, too. I think we’re going to become an item.”

Not if I can help it, Echo thought grimly. She could hardly wait for the movie to end. She had to find that motorcycle and disable it somehow, then take the police to wherever Pruitt had hidden it. And now, thanks to the library books in Pruitt’s room, she knew where to begin searching. He had to have taken those books out for a reason. Maybe he was just doing a report and needed them for research. But maybe not. It was worth a shot.

But she certainly couldn’t begin hunting while Pruitt had a death grip on her hand.

His hand was so cold, almost icy. Echo decided that was because Pruitt had no heart and without a heart, no warm, pulsating blood pumped through his veins. Ice water, she thought, tugging against his hand in vain, that’s ice water in there.

The movie and the evening dragged on interminably. Once, Echo glanced over her shoulder in the darkened rec center and saw in the reflected light from the screen, Liam McCullough, sitting one row behind her and off to her right. He was out of the infirmary already. Couldn’t have been too badly injured, after all. Now if only Lily D’Agostino got that lucky.

Liam saw her staring at him and nodded curtly.

Echo’s head whipped around to the front. She didn’t want him wondering why she was staring at him. He might start thinking, even asking questions. That would not be good.

Pruitt insisted on taking her to Vinnie’s pizza restaurant after the movie. Echo tried to plead fatigue, but he dismissed her objections by reminding her that she had little choice. “I’m not ready to call it a night,” he told her coldly, “and since you’re with me, you’re not ready to call it a night, either.”

Visions of Lily D’Agostino trying to outrun the bike danced before Echo’s eyes.

She went to Vinnie’s with him.

In the restaurant, they sat with a group of Pruitt’s frat brothers and their dates, including Deejay, Ruthanne, and Marilyn. No one at the table seemed to pay that much attention when Pruitt drew up two chairs and pushed them into the center of the group. The girls from the whirlpool room told Echo “hi” and then returned to their conversation. Only Ruthanne shot Echo an inquiring look, which Echo ignored.

While they waited for their pizza, Echo told herself it was only her imagination making her think that Liam McCullough, sitting at a table opposite theirs, was staring at her. He didn’t know anything, couldn’t know anything. So why would he be staring at her?

“Quit looking over there,” Pruitt hissed in her ear. He squeezed her hand painfully. Echo winced. “It’s rude to stare at other guys when you have a date.” He glared in Liam’s direction. “I see he’s recovered. Too bad.”

“I suppose you were hoping he’d died,” Echo whispered. “He looks very much alive to me.”

“You wouldn’t want me to think he was competition, would you?” he murmured as their pizza arrived and the clamor for the best slices drowned out his words. “I have my ways of dealing with competition, Echo. You wouldn’t want to see McCullough back in the infirmary, would you? Or worse?”

Echo felt her knees begin to tremble under the table. “Competition?” she said lightly. “Don’t be silly. I don’t even know the guy. Anyway, he hates me.”

“Good. Keep it that way. Now eat up, before it’s all gone.”

Echo didn’t touch the pizza. Her stomach was churning with impatience, and the atmosphere at the table did nothing to stimulate her appetite. Ruthanne kept bringing up the subject of the biker.

And then Marilyn said, “Did you hear about those two kids who went off Lookout Point?”

In the act of reaching for her glass of water, Echo’s hand stopped in midair, as if someone had just rapped her knuckles with a ruler. “What two kids?”

Marilyn, satisfaction in her eyes because she was now the center of attention, answered, “Polk Malone and Nancy Becker. That disgusting biker pushed them off a cliff. A jogger running up there saw him racing down the hill a second or two after the crash.”

Echo was too stunned to speak. “Oh no,” she breathed. She deliberately avoided Pruitt’s eyes, but she heard him draw in his breath sharply.

“Nancy?” he said. “Nancy Becker was in Polk Malone’s car?”

“Oh, sorry, Pruitt,” Deejay said then. “I forgot. You knew her, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

“When?” Echo said. “When did it happen?”

“Late this afternoon. The car smashed into that ravine beside Rockridge Road. I heard they were both killed instantly. And there isn’t anything left of the car but ashes.”

Echo felt sick and dizzy. The smoke … the sirens … that had been a car burning. A car with two people in it. Two
dead
people. And one of them had been someone Pruitt
knew!

“That guy get the biker’s license plate?” Pruitt asked Marilyn. “The guy who saw the biker, I mean.”

“How should I know? And,” she added grimly, “I heard that if Lily D’Agostino lives, she’ll be a quadriplegic. Paralyzed from the neck down.” Marilyn shuddered.

“Well, what she did was pretty stupid,” Pruitt said crudely. “Guy on the radio said she tried to outrun that bike.” He seemed to have recovered quickly from the news of Nancy Becker’s horrible death.

Several people at the table shook their heads in disgust.

“Even if Lily isn’t paralyzed,” Ruthanne said almost absentmindedly, “she’ll probably be in pain for the rest of her life. I know what that’s like. Sometimes, it’ll get so bad, she’ll wish she
had
died.”

Maybe she’ll get her wish, Echo thought dismally.

Turning her attention to Echo, Marilyn asked, “By the way, Echo, did you ever remember if you knew any bikers?” To the others, she said in a confidential voice. “Echo thought maybe she knew some, so
I
thought maybe she’s met the Mad Biker, only she doesn’t know it. I mean, he certainly wouldn’t come right out and admit that’s who he is, right?”

Pruitt gripped Echo’s hand so cruelly, she thought he was going to break her fingers. I
didn’t
tell, she wanted to shout, I didn’t! Instead, she said to Marilyn, “We must all know one or two people who ride motorcycles, Marilyn, but, as you just pointed out, unless we actually see them on their bikes, we wouldn’t know it, would we?”

In the restroom later, Deejay said, “I think it’s good that you’re with Pruitt, Echo. I mean, he hasn’t dated at all since Nancy Becker broke up with him. They only dated once or twice, but I know he had a thing for her. He told me so. So I’m glad he’s not alone tonight.”

Deejay bent from the waist to brush her short, dark hair and Echo stared into the mirror. Nancy Becker, the recently deceased Nancy Becker, had given Pruitt the old heave-ho? And now she was dead. And Deejay was afraid he’d be really upset?

I don’t
think
so, Echo thought, her hands trembling as she finger-combed her own hair. She didn’t want to believe this. Cold-blooded murder? Was Pruitt really
that
sick?

He would know she believed he had pushed that Miata off the cliff. Could she pretend she hadn’t guessed? No. She wasn’t that good an actress. Had he done it because Nancy had dumped him? Or had he done it to show Echo that he meant business?

Maybe both.

Without saying good-bye to Deejay, Echo roused herself enough to leave the restroom, make her excuses, and insisted that she and Pruitt leave the restaurant. She really didn’t care if anyone thought that was weird. She just wanted to get out of there.