When (32 page)

I LEFT FARADAY TO HEAD
to the waiting room. He came out and sat with me while Wallace was in surgery. Faraday spent much of that time on the phone
getting yelled at by his boss, who was angry at him for leaving the scene. Around four thirty my own phone rang. The caller ID said it was from Stubby’s house. “Dude!” I sang
happily the moment I picked up. “I’ve missed you!”

“Maddie?” I heard a woman say.

It took me a minute to recognize her voice. “Mrs. Schroder?”

“Yes, sweetie, it’s me. I’m calling to see if you’ve heard from Arnold.”

“Uh…no. Isn’t he home?”

I could almost feel the anxiety from Mrs. Schroder radiate through the phone. “No. No, he’s not here, and I don’t know where he’s gone. I came home from the grocery store
with Sam and Grace, and Arnold wasn’t in his room and he didn’t leave me a note.”

“Maybe he’s out boarding,” I said, and then I remembered that Stubby had thrown away his skateboard. “Oh, wait,” I added.

“He threw his skateboard away,” Mrs. Schroder said, and then she sniffled. “He’s been so depressed lately, Maddie. I’m very worried about him.”

“Maybe he went for a walk or something.”

“That’s why I’m worried. With that killer still on the loose…”

I wanted to reassure Mrs. Schroder that the FBI knew who the killer was and that he was probably on his way to Canada, but I didn’t know that for sure. The truth was I had no idea where
Wes Miller was. He could be roaming the streets looking for unsuspecting teens to abduct, torture, and kill.

“Maybe you should go look for him,” I said.

“Will you come with me?”

I glanced over at Faraday. I didn’t think he’d mind if I left to go search for Stubs, but I’d need Mrs. Schroder to come pick me up, and I didn’t want to worry her about
why I was there. “Sure. I’m at the hospital right now, uh…visiting a sick neighbor, so could you come pick me up?”

Faraday was still talking on his phone, so I wrote him a note that said I’d gotten a ride home, and he nodded and waved good-bye.

While I was waiting for Mrs. Schroder, Donny called me. “Hey, kiddo,” he said with a weary sigh. “Man, have I had a day!”

I smirked. I could bet him I’d had more of one but decided to tell him about it later. “What’s up?” I asked.

“My car broke down. I had to get it towed and the guy can’t work on it till Monday.”

“Are you staying in the city?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want you in that house alone. You go over to Mrs. Duncan’s house and spend the night, okay?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure, Donny,” I told him because I didn’t want to argue and possibly make him mad enough to rent a car and drive up to babysit me when he really needed to
deal with his car.

“Good. I’ll call you in the morning.”

Stubby’s mom pulled up then, and I waved to her as I clicked off with Donny.

Mrs. Schroder had Stubby’s two siblings with her, and they were making a racket in the back. Her face was creased with worry. “We’ll find him,” I promised.

We started our search in Poplar Hollow, going street by street from the Schroder residence out toward my house and beyond. We tried the park, and the school, and then it started to get dark.

I didn’t get seriously worried until about seven o’clock, when we still saw no sign of Stubby. We got Grace and Sam something to eat and continued our search, but he was nowhere.

At last we headed back to the Schroders’ and I helped put the kids to bed, then I waited with Stubby’s mom in the kitchen, willing him to come home, but the hours ticked by and there
was still no sign of Stubs.

When I couldn’t take it anymore I got up from the kitchen table and said, “Mrs. Schroder, does Stubby still have that scooter in the garage?”

She nodded and wiped her eyes. She’d been crying steadily now for over an hour. “I checked. He didn’t take it.”

“Can I borrow it?”

She gave me a puzzled look and I explained. “There’s one place we haven’t looked where I think he might be. It’s over in Jupiter.”

“Take the scooter, Maddie,” Mrs. Schroder said. “But please be careful. There’s a helmet on a hook in the garage. You have to wear that. And please call me if you find
him?”

“I will,” I promised, and she fished around in a drawer for the keys to the scooter. Taking them from her, I hurried out.

It took me only about ten minutes to make it over to Jupiter, and then I had to crisscross through a neighborhood to the skate park, which was always well lit until eleven at night. I’d
had a thought that, even if Stubs hadn’t gone there to skateboard, maybe he’d gone to watch the other boarders.

As I pulled up into the lot, I saw one lone kid zipping up and down the ramps. I knew immediately who it was.

I reached into my pocket and called Mrs. Schroder. “I found him,” I said.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Maddie! Where is he?”

“He’s at the skate park in Jupiter. I’ll bring him home in a little while.”

After hanging up with Stubby’s mom, I sat on the scooter for a long time and watched my best friend whiz up and down on what appeared to be a brand-new board, doing twists, turns, and
other tricks.

Something had changed in Stubby—he was far less clumsy and stiff on the board. It was as if he’d lost the fear of screwing up and was committing himself to every stunt, as if he
didn’t care what happened. That courage proved to be exactly what he needed to land the trick.

When I was so cold I was starting to shiver, I walked over to the ramp. Stubby flew up the opposite side, flipped his board around with his feet, landed perfectly, and whizzed back down out of
sight only to reappear at the top of the ramp closest to me and land his board on the rim. I looked at him in amazement as he grinned down at me—his eyes still black and blue and his nose
swollen, but grinning all the same. “Mads!” he exclaimed, clearly happy to see me—and I knew that my friend was back.

“Nice board,” I called, pointing to his new ride.

He stepped off of it and onto the rim of the ramp, then did a little kick with his foot, and the board flipped up to land neatly in his left hand. “I got it today!” he gushed,
already moving toward the stairs.

I waited for him at the bottom. “Your mom’s been worried sick about you,” I said when he landed next to me in the grass.

His face fell and he eyed the skyline. “Aw, man! How late is it?”

“It’s after ten.”

Stubby’s jaw dropped. “It is not!”

I showed him the display on my phone and he palmed himself on the forehead. “I lost track of time,” he said. “Is she really mad?”

I handed him my phone. “Better ask her yourself.”

Stubs talked to his mom for a bit, and mostly he just said he was sorry over and over, and then he asked her if it was okay if he and I went to McDonald’s ’cause he was starving. She
told him to be home by midnight, and once he hung up he grinned at me again. “Crisis averted.”

Stubs drove us to McDonald’s, and we sat in a booth and joked and laughed like old times. I told him about what’d happened earlier at Wes Miller’s place, and Stubby was so
amazed by it all that he made me tell him a second time. It was after eleven by the time we left the restaurant to get home before Stubby’s curfew.

Stubs dropped me at my driveway, and I handed him his skateboard and he strapped it to the scooter with a bungee cord he kept in his seat. Then he saluted and was off again.

I watched him go with a wistful sigh. It felt so good to have my friend back. I turned toward my house and thought about what Donny had said. Looking at Mrs. Duncan’s darkened windows,
however, convinced me not to wake the old woman. Plus, the patrol car was parked between my house and our neighbor’s on the other side. I could faintly make out the dark outline of the police
officer inside, and I waved to him and headed up the drive.

As I rounded the corner of the house I sniffed the air. Something smelled familiar—then I realized: it was cigarette smoke wafting toward me. When I got to the back door, I saw that the
kitchen light above the stove was on and the back door was open. Only the storm door was shut.

I opened the back door tentatively, the smell of cigarette smoke growing stronger. My first thought was that Ma had somehow escaped rehab and had come home. My heart lifted. I missed her so
much. “Ma?” I called excitedly, stepping into the kitchen and shutting the back door before locking it. I heard the noise of a throat clearing from the vicinity of the living room.

“Ma?” I called again, hurrying to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

The orange glow of a cigarette butt caught my attention immediately. A figure was sitting in Dad’s chair, lifting the cigarette to their lips and making it glow bright.

“Ma?” I asked one more time, as a whisper of alarm snaked up my spine.

I started to back up, but then the light next to the chair was flicked on. “Hey, Maddie,” Rick Kane said.

My breath caught in my throat as my mind filled with questions. What was Rick Kane doing in my house? How had he gotten in? Had he heard about his cousin? Did he know that Wes had nearly
murdered an FBI agent? Did he know that Wes had also murdered all those kids? And hadn’t he called off work because he’d been having chest pains? How had he survived?

While all my questions tumbled over each other in my mind, Rick stood up, and a smile spread slowly across his face. But it wasn’t a nice smile. It wasn’t the smile he’d
offered me each time we’d met. This was a sick smile—similar to the one his cousin had worn. Sinister and dark, but perhaps even more evil. This was the smile of a serial killer.

“No,” I stammered, backing up as my mind started to put it all together with a thousand synapses firing all at once, like the finale of a fireworks display. It’d been Rick. All
along, it’d been Rick. And now, here he was. In my house. Stepping forward to kill me, too.

I took another step back and began to turn, intending to run, but Rick came at me so fast I barely had time to react. In an instant, he had me twisted around with my right arm pulled up behind
me and his free hand pressing hard across my throat, cutting off most of the oxygen.

I struggled, but he pulled up harder on my arm, and I would’ve screamed in pain if I’d had any air. “Ah, ah, ah, Maddie,” he said softly…tauntingly. “If you
struggle, I’ll hurt you so much worse than if you don’t.”

I shut my eyes; tears were leaking out of them and streaming down my cheeks. Rick eased up a bit on the pressure of my arm and at my throat, and I sucked in a lungful of air. I was about to
scream when I felt a sharp prick at my neck. “Scream, and I’ll cut your throat,” he said.

I held back a sob and more tears flowed down my cheeks. “Why?” I gasped. He’d been so nice. He told me I’d helped him by giving him a year to prepare and take care of his
family in the event of his death.

“Why?” he repeated. “Well, Maddie, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? But I think you deserve an answer, so I’m going to tell you.” Rick pivoted
me toward the mantel, and my gaze landed on the photo of my dad.

“See, when I first came to see you,” Rick began, “and I heard what you had to say—that I’d die on December sixth, twenty fourteen—well, I believed you meant
it. Like I told you before, I’ve got a few health issues, and I figured it was perfectly logical that I’d bite the dust at fifty-three. My dad died at fifty-five, and I’ve got an
uncle who kicked the bucket at forty-nine, so it runs in my family.

“And like I also told you, I decided to get all my affairs in order and make sure my family was well provided for, and I did all that, Maddie. I did it all. But then those dark cravings
that I’d fought against my whole life started to crop up again, and I had an amazing thought. I was going to die soon anyway, right? Why not act on some of those thoughts? I’ve wanted
to my whole life, you know. And I wondered what it’d be like to stop trying to be someone else and instead let me be me. So I did. And I can tell you it’s been
awesome
.”

I was so scared that I felt light-headed.

“I considered choosing you, you know, as my first. I mean, you gave me such a gift, I wondered if maybe you had more to give?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and shuddered, and Rick squeezed me tighter. “But we both know I didn’t pick you first, Maddie. I wanted to, but I thought it might be too easy to trace your
death back to me. So I watched your house and waited, and one day I followed a woman home. And wouldn’t you know it? In her house was the perfect little lamb.

“Oh,” Rick continued, sighing pleasurably at the memory. “He was so sweet. He took such a long time to die, Maddie. It was the greatest bliss I’ve ever known. I thought
he’d be enough. And for a while he was, but then I started to have those cravings again. So I watched your house some more and followed the lady with the fur coat to the next little lamb.
And, Maddie, he was even sweeter than the first.”

I was crying now in earnest, and it was hard to breathe. I desperately wanted to pass out, to shut my ears to the horrors Rick was whispering to me. How had I not seen it? How had I not
guessed?

“I thought little Tevon would satisfy the cravings, but the opposite happened. They got worse. I kept thinking that you were the key, Maddie. You’d led me to this new freedom, and
you kept connecting me to all the right lambs. I thought it must be kismet. Maybe if I got very close to you, I could find one that would satisfy me enough until I died.”

Rick was whispering into my ear, and he ran his cheek along mine seductively. I stiffened, and my stomach lurched. I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter and tried not to be sick, but I could
taste the bile at the back of my throat.

He continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “That kid you hang out with, he looked interesting. So I followed him for a day, and he led me to the girl…Payton. She was so ripe for the
picking that I couldn’t resist. I set up a roadblock and snatched her right off the street. But she died too fast—hardly worth the effort. The cravings started right back up. I thought
again about taking you, but then I missed you that night at the park. So I decided to go back to the summer when I trailed you to your babysitting job.”