She thought of the kiss she’d given him at the fair, and the reaction on his face. Of course whatever he had to tell her mattered.
He moved for the door and she stepped in front of him.
“Still friends, right?”
Tim held her gaze, but she didn’t see the gleam in his eyes he’d had at the fair.
“Yeah, still friends,” he said.
Then tell me what’s wrong, she started to say when her friends beat her to it. Everyone erupted in a loud cheer of wonder, sounding like a crowd of people viewing a Fourth of July fireworks display.
She listened to the voices coming through the wall change into laughter, followed by a second array of shouts, hoots, and whistles.
“I’ve got to tell them to keep it down,” she told Tim. “My dad said I could have a pool party, but he never said when. The last thing I need is one of the neighbors calling the cops. Just stay here and I’ll be back in a minute.”
Outside, Mallory found the group had fanned out among the lawn chairs positioned around the pool. All eyes were now focused on Elsa while she tread water in the deep end. A crumpled pile of her clothes lay near the diving board and even through the screen of waves covering her body Mallory saw that she’d jumped in wearing only her underwear.
“Woo-ee,” she breathed. “This feels great.”
“I’ll bet you do,” Adam answered.
The comment earned him a slap on the shoulder from Becky.
Mallory giggled, automatically looking to see Derrick’s reaction. She found him sitting at the patio table, and out of all her friends he seemed to be the only person not eyeballing Elsa’s slim form while she glided through the water. Instead, he stripped off his tank top and reclined in one of the patio chairs.
Mallory gazed at the way his tan skin lay taut over the muscles of his abdomen and chest. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but now that he’d shed the tank top she saw silver barbells pierced through both his nipples.
He smiled at her, and a hot blush rushed into her face. She began to turn away, then stopped short when she spotted the small bags of cellophane his friends had laid out on the table behind him.
“What’s that?” she asked Troy.
“Glitter.”
“What?”
“Glitter,” Troy repeated.
“You mean drugs?”
The kid smirked. “I prefer the term, mood-enhancers.”
Mallory glared at him. “No way,” she said. “Not cool. Definitely not cool! If I get caught—”
“Don’t wet yourself,” the boy laughed. “This stuff is like high-end caffeine tablets. It’s nothing hardcore.”
She turned to Derrick for assistance, arguing that if her dad came home and found them all hyped up on “mood-enhancers” it would be the end of any pool parties for the remainder of her life.
“You said the kid was gone,” Derrick replied. “And your dad’s at the movies. He won’t be back till after twelve at the earliest.”
Chris nodded. “Yeah, we can blaze out of here by then. He’ll never know.”
Mallory fell silent, not certain how to reply. She didn’t want to disappoint Derrick, who obviously didn’t think the situation was anything serious, but she didn’t want to lose her father’s trust, either. Then, while her mouth fumbled to find a reply to Chris’s last statement, she suddenly had a brainstorm.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I know the perfect place to hang out, somewhere we won’t be seen or bothered by anyone. There’s an old barn in the back woods, behind the neighborhood. It must have a dirt road or a driveway that connects to it off one of the county roads. We could go there.”
The group glanced to one another for reactions, and all seemed to like the idea of exploring an abandoned farm.
“Cool, let’s do it,” Adam proclaimed, clearly eager to sample Troy’s goods.
“Sounds like fun,” Lisa added.
Derrick’s friends looked annoyed by the idea of having to relocate again, but they both obeyed when he told them to pack up their shit and get moving.
They all waited for Elsa to collect her clothes then left the yard together, hurrying back through the house and out the front door. In the foyer again, Mallory started to set the alarm—which Lori had carelessly left off—when she suddenly realized they were one person short.
She glanced back into the house while the others continued out to the cars. “Hey, Tim, come on, we’re going to go check out the old barn.”
When he didn’t reply, she walked to the bathroom but found the room empty.
“Are you coming or what?” Becky called from the front door.
“Tim’s gone,” Mallory answered, rejoining her friend. “He must’ve left when we were out at the pool.”
“So?”
“He didn’t even say goodbye. I think he’s mad because of Derrick.”
Becky shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, right? Make it up to him later. Let’s go.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Exiting the house, she closed the door and locked it with her key, wishing that she’d had at least once more chance to thank Tim for inviting her to the fair. She cringed with another stab of guilt, realizing now that she’d just been setting him up for a fall by going.
She tried not to think about it. Instead, she hurried down the front steps and rounded the Mercedes, eventually settling down into the front seat next to Derrick.
Lori listened to the action upstairs.
The sound of footsteps trailed from one end of the house to the other, accompanied by the muffled noises of half a dozen voices.
She didn’t budge.
Overhead, she caught the clearer sound of a girl calling out to someone named Tim—Tim Fleming?—mentioning something about a barn.
Lori remained silent, not daring to speak.
It could be a trick. Maybe the girl was really… that thing.
After a moment of calm, the girl’s footsteps trailed to the front of the house and then came the sound of the front door closing.
Lori remained motionless.
Higher up the wall, she caught the subtle sound of insect legs scuttling over the cinderblock wall, a June bug or some other sizable beetle that had entered through the window frame.
Bugs! her brain wailed. Oh, God, please no, not bugs!
She stuffed a fist in her mouth, knowing that to scream at the bug or to lash out in hope of squashing it would call attention to her location, the same way calling out to the girl moments ago would have done.
Outside, a car engine came to life. Then another.
Don’t move. He’s out there. He wants you to cry for help.
She listened to car doors closing.
Suddenly, something dropped onto her face, something hard and smooth, about the size of a gumball. Half a dozen prickly legs gripped the skin of her cheek.
Covering the fading whir of the departing car engines, Lori screamed.
CHAPTER 33
Melissa trailed behind Frank when they left the empty ranch house, glad to trade the oppressive silence of its vacant rooms for the noise of crickets singing in the shrubs.
She found the night sky a blank chalkboard, lacking even the slightest hint of the starlight she’d observed earlier. A wind blew across the front yard, blustering her hair. The scent of ionized air carried on its back was the sure forewarning of a storm.
Together, she and Frank had searched the large home from top to bottom, but even their combined efforts failed to locate clues to the identity of her attackers. Against Frank’s recommendation, Melissa planned to use his cell phone to call for backup and request a forensics crew to process the new crime scene. Upon their arrival, she would make sure they scoured every inch of the dwelling for any indications of what had happened.