Chapter 46 #4
“If you will excuse me, boys,” I said, feigning boredom. “All this testosterone is about to drown my shoes.” I turned and walked away. I knew there wouldn’t be a physical battle. Karson wouldn’t want to get thrown out, and he couldn’t exactly vampire control the whole room.
His claim on me was surprising, and maddening.
I couldn’t work out how he felt about me.
He didn’t want me dead. He had some kind of protective urge, but why?
Not for something physical, he was out of my league.
Not that I cared, I told myself. But apparently lying to myself was just another thing I wasn’t good at.
The alcohol whooshed around inside my head. My heel burned. I needed some fresh air. I made it halfway out the door.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Karson breathed fire into my ear.
I stopped and glanced around, a couple by the door were watching us. They couldn’t hear what we were saying, but our body language and the look on Karson’s face was enough to tell a story.
I threw out a hand. “I told you I would get into his office and find out what he knew. And that’s what I was doing.”
“Do you never learn.” He snarled. “Your naive behaviour is going to get you killed.”
“I can handle myself.” I turned to escape his anger. I stepped outside onto the porch.
“Handle yourself?” He grabbed my arm, stopping my flight and raised his voice. “Do you know what he was thinking? Do you have any idea of what he thought was on offer? Do you?”
Two older couples chatting in the corner turned to stare.
Mortified, I hissed, “Let go of my arm.”
He let go and turned to the couples. “This is of no concern to you,” he said, “you have seen nothing.”
They went back to normal conversation as if nothing had happened.
“Must be handy . . . to act like the world’s biggest bastard and mind control people not to take notice,” I snapped. I hoisted my dress up and stepped down the stairs.
He followed me down. “And when Jefferson made a move on you, and I can assure you he would have made a move. What exactly would you have done?”
I stopped, stared up at him. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I didn’t know.
“Answer me,” he growled, “you want to play games. What would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” I snapped. A lump formed in my throat and choked me. I don’t know why or where the sudden urge to cry came from. I turned my head out to the lake, watching the ripples, trying to distract myself. My head began to thump. I closed my eyes for a moment and then reopened them.
“What were you going to do, just come out and ask if he’d killed the Tolles?” Karson retreated somewhat. “And if he had, what do you think might have happened to you?”
“Nothing, because I’m not actually that stupid.” Even as I said the words, I knew I probably would have been that stupid. “And anyway, he hardly seems like a killer.”
“Why, because he smiled at you? You are a child, Amelia, and your ignorance is going to get you in way too deep one day.”
“I can swim,” I barked, “just go back inside.”
He held my eyes. I could see the debate whip through them, to stay and argue or to go. In the end, he turned and strode back up the stairs.
I walked onto the grass, took my shoes off, clasped them in my hand and headed to a seat that sat overlooking the lake.
The grassy banks were lit by lots of small, solar-powered garden lights.
The moon waved a mirror image against the expansive steel water.
Frogs croaked. The faint scent of the water lilies tickled the night air.
I moved over to a little white bench and sat down.
“Nice night.” Mike Bowden appeared beside the bench, a whiskey glass in one hand. His hair was swooped over to the side, like it was well past a haircut and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a packet of smokes. He held the pack across.
I shook my head.
“Sorry to hear about Katrina and Robert,” he said, flicking the lighter and drawing back on the smoke. He blew out a puff. The smell of smoke clogged my nose.
“Nice suit,” I said.
He nodded, ignoring my jest, and took a sip of whiskey. “Seen you arguing with Karson,” he said casually, glancing across the lake.
I shrugged. “So?”
“You should be careful around him. He was the last person Lucy spoke to before she disappeared.”
I hadn’t asked Karson if he killed Lucy, but I knew questions wouldn’t force him to kill her. He’d simply use mind control to ward her off.
“Lucy,” I said, tapping on my head, feigning drawing back the memory of her. “That’s right, the girl who went hiking in the middle of the winter. There were stories online about her, but they seemed to have disappeared. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
He stiffened and threw the last of the whiskey down his throat. “I don’t control what goes on or what goes off, I just write the stories.”
“I noticed the glowing endorsement for the development you wrote, some state of the art journalistic skills there.”
“Listen, I’m not here to argue. I just wanted to warn you. I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s an asshole.”
“He is,” I agreed. A top notch, state of the art asshole. “That doesn’t make him a killer.”
“Lucy had his name circled, alongside the names of quite a number of missing hikers and a few people who died in car crashes. You tell me that’s a coincidence.”
“He didn’t kill her,” I said, defensively.
“You sound certain of that.” He drew back and blew the smoke out to the side.
“I am,” I answered, “you’re swimming up the wrong lake. Not that you swim anymore. You’ve been given a row boat and told which direction to paddle.”
He dropped the cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with his new shiny shoes.
“We do what we need to do to survive.” He was matter of fact, but he couldn’t entirely disguise the torment in his voice.
He turned and headed back towards the house.
“Oh,” he stopped and said, almost like it was an afterthought, “I’d stay away from Jefferson too. Right away.”
“He’s fine to pay your bills though, right?”
His lips jerked. “Have a good night.”
I sat, mulling his words over in my head.
I didn’t profess to know Karson well, but he’d saved my life—a girl he barely knew—not once, but twice.
They were hardly the actions of some psychopathic killer.
Lucy, as sad as it was, went hiking in the middle of winter, during a storm.
Even experienced climbers could succumb under those elements.
Sure, not finding her body was perplexing, if a storm had rolled in, she shouldn’t have been able to get far, but maybe she’d walked in a completely different direction than they’d searched.
Maybe she fell down a mine shaft or a crevasse, or got swept away in a river.
Maybe she froze to death and the animals cleaned her up.
Maybe Karson killed her.
That was a lot of maybes to consider, bar the last one. Lucy was dead, a tragedy, yes, but was it murder?
I closed my eyes, letting the discontent slide away, felt the soft breeze on my face, breathed in the rich scent of nature. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s sweet voices rang out into the night air. I sat there for some time until my mind settled and my body relaxed.
A sharp, unnatural noise snapped my eyes open. I wasn’t sure what had made it. An animal maybe? Whatever it was, it was abrupt and out of place.
A bird screeched and rose into the sky. I stood up, immobilized, I stared into the tree line.
The ruffle of the wind shifted the trees, twisting shadows against the ink-dark expanse of the woods, like snakes.
There was a movement of something underneath the trees.
Too solid to be a shadow. I blinked and strained to draw it into focus, but it’d gone.
I searched the trees again for a long minute.
A thick, deep cloud had seated itself in front of the moon and the night deepened, the forest become a pit of darkness.
I found myself thinking I was about to feature in some stage play, ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much,’ slayed before she could divulge the secrets of a gruesome underground world.
At least the red would blend with my dress, I thought wryly.
I craned to see into the furthest reaches of the forest and found nothing out of place. I dismissed the thought as paranoia, my mind was unsettled, it turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. That seemed the logical explanation.
I forced myself to go back to the party.
I bent down, collected my shoes off the ground, and headed back toward the house.
I picked my way across the soft lawn. I made it halfway when a high-pitched, terrified scream came from around the side of the house.
I ran, feet pounding, heart pumping, dress hindering my legs, toward the screams. I rounded the corner; I couldn’t see anyone.
I tossed the shoes to the ground, collected the bottom of the dress in my hands and sprinted forward.
I came to the end of the next corner and stopped.
Off to the right, over near a garden shed, a young couple stood like statues, ashen-faced.
The woman’s hand was clutched over her mouth, she was bug-eyed, staring at something.
Urged by higher winds, a blanket of obscurity shifted, and the moonlight opened like curtains, illuminating the horror before us.
I stared down, frozen, unable to move for a heartbeat, my head struggling to think around the horror.
Laying on the ground was a man. Blood bubbled sluggishly from his torso like a hellish flood.
His jacket was open and flayed, his white shirt had been shredded.
Among a pool of red I could make out long, thin rip marks that ran though the fabric and had sliced deep into his flesh.