The Next Killing. Rebecca Drake

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СКАЧАТЬ swallowed hard, shifting her backpack. She’d been so excited when she got the note, pausing near her locker between classes to pull the little square from its hiding place under her math book.

      “Meet us this afternoon near the track.” She’d read the single sentence over and over again, amazed that they’d asked her, thrilled to be chosen.

      She lingered when school ended, waiting for others to leave before slamming her locker and hurrying out the side door. The track was empty, but one of them was sitting in the bleachers, waiting. The other stood just beyond the fence.

      The walk across the playing field beyond the track was so quiet that she could hear the crunch of grass underfoot. They hardly talked, smiling occasionally if she asked a question. In the silence she heard the slight, wheezy sound of her own breathing.

      Beyond the playing field the grass came up higher, tickling the skin at their ankles. The shed came into view, standing alone in the shallow basin of land below a slight rise.

      “Wouldn’t that make a great clubhouse?” one of them said, stopping in front of it. Gray clapboard with faded green asphalt shingles peeling off the roof, it had a double door held together by a wide chain and a heavy padlock. The lock hung open.

      “Maybe,” she said, her voice betraying the doubt she didn’t feel free to express. The sun beat down on them. She could feel the heat underneath her uniform blouse, sweat trickling into the new space created by the small buds appearing on her chest that was swaddled in what her mother stupidly called a training bra.

      “Why don’t you go inside and look it over?” they said, making it sound like a suggestion, though one hurried to unhitch the padlock and the other pulled the chain through the metal loops. The door squealed as it opened and she’d leaned cautiously inside.

      “No,” she repeated. “It’s too dark.”

      “That’s just because your eyes haven’t adjusted. Step all the way in or you won’t be able to really tell.”

      She looked from one to the other, searching for some indication that they were joking. They stared back at her with those strange, fixed smiles. Like alligators, she thought, and wished she hadn’t come.

      “Don’t you want to be part of the club?”

      How many times had she wished to be popular like they were? Yes, she wanted to be part of the club. She wanted to sit at the good seats in the cafeteria. She wanted teachers to smile at her the way they smiled at them. She wanted girls to feel envy when she walked down the halls and for boys’ heads to turn on the streets.

      She let her backpack slip from her shoulder and drop to the grass. The door creaked, swinging slightly on its rusting hinges. She looked at the gloom and thought of wolf spiders and bats. She swallowed hard.

      “Go on,” one of them said. “Hurry up.”

      She took a deep breath and stepped inside.

      The sudden shove in her back knocked her forward and she fell hard, slamming her knees onto rough wood floor. The door banged shut, the entire shed shuddering with the impact.

      Blackness engulfed her. She screamed, struggling to her feet, and stumbled around, hands outstretched, trying to find the door. By the time she reached it they’d restrung the chain and fastened the lock.

      “Let me out! Please!” She pounded the door and it shook in its frame, but didn’t budge. Her begging and pleading went unanswered, though she could hear their muffled voices outside.

      “You stupid wannabe,” one of them called. “This will teach you to stop following us around.”

      Their laughter rang through her sobs as she lurched around in the blackness, slamming her shin against something hard, stabbing her hand on something sharp. Things clattered to the floor, smashing her foot, rolling around her. Something splashed her legs.

      The smoke surprised her, a gentle waft against her face. She coughed and shied away from it, nostrils quivering at the scent.

      There was a cracking sound, like a tree branch breaking, and suddenly there were flames racing along the floorboards, tongues of orange licking at the juncture of old walls, climbing the leg of a rickety workbench, lapping at her feet.

      Choking on the billowing smoke, tears streaming from her eyes, she tried to stamp out the flames and beat them back with her hands. A sweet smell, like meat on a grill. Her own flesh burning. A line of fire reached the roof, turning a rotting beam to ash, which fell like hot, black raindrops on her head and shoulders.

      Above the angry hiss of the fire and her own cries she could still hear their laughter. She would hear that sound forever.

      Chapter One

      The school had stood on the hillside for more than a hundred years. It had been there for so long that it looked as if it had sprouted from the woods surrounding it, the tops of stone buildings appearing suddenly above the trees like lichen in a sea of green.

      Lauren Kavanaugh pressed her face against the taxi window to catch a glimpse of it through the rain while running her hands down the horizontal pleats creasing the pale linen skirt of her borrowed suit. She tried not to believe that wrinkled clothing was going to cost her the job.

      “You visiting someone up the Hill?” the cabbie asked. His had been the only cab idling outside the local train station, where most of the commuters had been heading the opposite way, north into Manhattan. He must have seen her confusion because he laughed. “I mean St. Ursula’s. We call it the Hill because it’s up there.” He gestured out the window, but the road had turned again and the buildings had disappeared. All she could see was a mountainside covered in trees.

      “It looks like a forest,” she said.

      He chuckled. “Oh, the school’s in there. It’s a big campus—close to two hundred acres. You got a sister there?”

      “No, I’ve got an interview.”

      “Oh. Well good luck.”

      She could see his eyes appraising her in the rearview mirror. “You look a little young to be a teacher.”

      She didn’t reply to that, just stared out the window as they passed through the outlying streets. It was quite different from the packed streets of Hoboken, where she paid a fortune to rent a tiny apartment on the third floor of an old row house.

      The center of Gashford was the intersection point of two long, wide streets lined with small businesses, a bank, and a post office, and no building was higher than ten stories. They’d sped past it and past the tree-lined, residential streets surrounding it and then on past the larger homes spaced farther apart with sweeping lawns. Now they were outside town, where civilization was encroaching on less desirable land; in either direction were cockeyed realty signs stuck in patches of sparsely covered mud.

      The edges of the road were sprinkled with late summer wildflowers drooping under the continuous downpour. She could smell the unfamiliar scent of wet grass through the cracked windows.

      The cabbie chattered on about the mild weather they were having for August and Lauren made murmuring noises of agreement, but all the while she was thinking about how greener this was than Hoboken and how she needed this job.

      The СКАЧАТЬ