“I thought I explained all this right after we were nearly killed in the snow. Remember? If not, I’ll fill you in: What I intend to do as soon as I get out of here is chase you down. So don’t think you’ll be getting away.”
She winked. “Catch me if you can.”
“I can,” he said confidently. “And trust me, I will.”
So her life was going to make a major left turn, she thought, imagining a future with Cooper Trent. Who would have thought?
Buoyed that at least this nightmare was about to be behind her, Jules left the cafeteria and walked across the campus for one of the last times. Now, the campus seemed serene, even peaceful. The sun was shining brightly, rays glinting off the ice collecting around the edges of Lake Superstition. The campus once again had that idyllic appearance captured in so many of the photographs on the Web
site, an Eden-like setting filled with promise for teens with problems.
The mountains spired into the blue, blue sky and she heard the
whomp, whomp, whomp
of the medivac helicopter before she saw it slowly descending onto the snowy campus.
The seaplane bearing the academy’s logo was still locked in ice and was a sober reminder of Spurrier and all of his diabolical plans. How could one man affect so many? Shuddering, she headed toward Stanton House.
Life here at Blue Rock Academy would never be the same.
Would Spurrier survive?
Ever admit to the murders?
She doubted it. Even Zach and Missy were screaming that their leader had no intention of killing anyone. But then they were blind and trusting, almost as if Spurrier were part of their family, like children who refuse to see the evil side of their parents.
Family loyalty was usually deep; sometimes to the point of the ridiculous. Just look how much she, herself, had gone through, the lies and deception, all for her sister.
She glanced at the area in front of the clinic, the trampled snow, the blood that still remained. The horses had been rounded up and were back in their stalls, once again safe under Bert Flannagan’s care. But the students involved in the attack would never forget, be changed forever.
As would she.
And Shay.
She changed her mind about returning to her suite and decided to check on her sister instead. There was something false about Shay’s reactions to the ordeal, and Jules wanted to be certain her sister was okay, that she would be able to put all this horror to rest and live a normal life.
Well, as normal a life as Shay could sustain.
Truth to tell, Jules was bothered by something else. Shay’s being able to leave today, within the hour, just didn’t ring true, despite Father Jake’s rationale.
Shaylee was known to lie, to bend the truth to her own way of thinking, to work Jules into doing what she wanted and damn the consequences. Her track record spoke for itself.
Shay might believe she was miraculously “cured” of the horror of being confined and kept hostage by Eric Rolfe, but Jules knew it would take years of therapy, if that, before her sister stopped playing the people around her, pretending that she was “just fine.” Deep in her heart, Jules wondered if Shay ever would be normal, whatever that was. Ever since Edie had remarried Rip Delaney, Jules’s father, Shay had been acting out, adolescence stealing the sweet child within. As Father Jake had said, “A pity.”
Jules hurried up the stairs of the empty dorm. It was still, other-worldly quiet with most of the students either being questioned in the admin building, or gathering in the cafeteria. Jules knocked on Shay’s door. “Hey, are you about ready?” Unlatched, the door opened of its own accord, swinging into the hallway.
Shay, alone, a cell phone jammed against her ear, jumped. Startled, she turned around to face the open door. “What the hell?” she demanded, angry, one hand knocking over her half-drunk can of soda. “Shit, Jules, you scared me!”
“Sorry,” Jules said, realizing her sister wasn’t as calm as she’d pretended. Jules pulled the door shut behind her as the Coke continued to gurgle from the can. “I thought—”
“I’ll call ya back, Dawg,” Shay said into Nona’s cell phone, the one she’d never returned, as she clicked off and turned to face Jules. “He’s out, you know. On bail,” she said with a grin.
“Maybe you should avoid him.” Jules walked to the desk, searching for something to clean up the mess.
“Right.” Without thinking, Shaylee grabbed a towel from her desk, dropped it over the spreading stain of dark soda, then placed her foot atop the towel and smoothed it over the floor.
Nudging the towel with her toe.
Sopping up the liquid. Slowly.
In an
S
formation.
As natural as if she did it all the time.
Jules, standing near the window, stared at Shay’s foot. The circular motion. Familiar. Dark.
Her heart nearly stopped beating.
In a flickering memory, one that she’d repressed for years, she saw her sister’s small boot-clad foot on another towel, dropped onto the floor near Rip Delaney’s body, covering a small stain of blood. Not blood that Jules had spilled from pulling the knife from her father’s body, but from the wound already there.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. In her mind’s eye, in jagged pieces she caught a glimpse of her father, lying dead, the knife in his leg, bleeding out from his femoral artery. She was already too late as she’d walked into the room with the flickering television screen and found Shay mopping up the blood with her foot. Jules had screamed and yanked out the butcher knife, but it had been too late.
What had been Shay’s excuse? She was trying to help?
The memory, so long a blur, was clear as glass.
Jules’s insides turned to ice.
It couldn’t be!
And yet the motion that Shay did so naturally was identical to the one in her mind’s eye.
No way! She had to be imagining things! Her head began to pound painfully as she remembered the bloodstain near Andrew Prescott’s body in the stable. Swiped over, as
if someone had spilled his blood and tried to wipe it away in a smooth, swirling motion, the darker “S” shape visible.
Another flash of memory: the small smeared pool by Maeve Mancuso’s corpse. Again, smooth, sure strokes. A snake-like shape darker in the wiped stain.
And, no doubt, on the sleeping bag where Nona Vickers had lost her life there was the same bloody signature: Shay’s signature. The snakey, blurred
S.
Jules swallowed hard, her head screaming denials.
She focused again, back in the moment, her gaze fixed on Shay’s foot.
God help us.
Glancing up, Jules saw her sister staring at her, a knowing smile playing upon Shay’s full lips. “For the love of God, Shay,” Jules whispered, her voice trembling. “What did you do?”
This couldn’t be happening! Couldn’t! Shay wasn’t a killer! There had to be something else, someone else … But the light in her sister’s gaze in that moment burned bright with triumph and something else, something far more sinister and evil-bred.
In that instant of recognition, Jules knew. But she had to hear it from her sister’s lips. “You killed them?”
No, not Shay. NOT SHAY!
“Nona? Drew? Maeve? You murdered them?” she asked again, hoping beyond hope that she was wrong.
Please deny it. Please. I’ll believe you!
“How else was I going to get you to believe me?” Shay asked innocently, an undercurrent of satisfaction in her voice, not a trace of denial. “How else would you have gotten me out of here?”
“No, you couldn’t have,” Jules whispered, shaking her head, refusing to think her sister was a monster, horrified to believe Shay capable of cold-blooded, premeditated murder.
“Are you too stupid to see that you would never have gotten me out of here unless you thought there was danger
to me and my life?” Shay asked, anger sparking. “You thought I should be locked up; you just came down here to make yourself feel better about it.”
“I don’t … no …” But that much was true. They both knew it.
“Right, and it wasn’t bad enough! That was the problem. So someone had to die. I figured it should be someone who thought they were smarter than I was, someone who got off on being mean to me. Nona and Maeve, they were a good start. Andrew; he just got in the way. You know, that same old problem: Wrong place, fucking the wrong girl.”
“What! Wait a minute. Don’t lie, Shay,” Jules said, clinging desperately to the belief that Shay’s talk was just bravado; that she’d snapped when Eric Rolfe and Missy Albright had trained rifles at her back. “You didn’t kill them! You couldn’t!” Jules argued, trying to get through to her. “Lauren Conway disappeared a long time before you even got here.” That was it; proof that her sister was confused.
But Shay didn’t bat an eye and Jules’s blood was pulsing through her body with the knowledge that there was an explanation. “You really are naive, aren’t you? God, Jules, I would hate to be you. Of course I didn’t kill Lauren! I think Spurrier or his band did. Maybe it was even an accident, but I knew it could work to my advantage and it did, didn’t it?”
Jules saw the hatred in her sister’s expression. “And Dad?”
“Rip? That perv? Are you kidding? Of course I killed him, because you couldn’t! You were so blind when it came to him! Do you know how he looked at me? At you?” she demanded, her lips curling in disgust. “I did us both a favor!”
“What? No—”
“So he didn’t touch me, big deal! It was only a matter of time. And he was half in love with you.”
“What?”
Jules couldn’t believe her ears.
“Always hugging you, hanging on your every word, acting like you were so damned special.”
“He was my father.”
“Well, he wanted something more.” Shay’s face contorted in disdain, her psychosis visible in her features.
“You’re nuts,” Jules whispered. This was unbelievable! Yes, Shay and Rip hadn’t gotten along, yes, Shay had never understood a father’s devotion, but this sick delirium was so far gone … “So you killed him?” Jules whispered, horrified to the marrow of her bones. She couldn’t believe what was happening here.
“Oh, what did you think? That somebody broke in and stabbed him in the leg for what? His Visa card?” She rolled her eyes.
“But why?”
“I told you, he freaked me out!”
What kind of monster was she?
“He was so shocked … and I guess I was, too. But I watched him bleed out and I felt this … this rush of power. It was funny really—” Shay said, her voice trailing off, as if she were lost in the memory.
“Funny? My father’s murder was ‘funny’?” Jules couldn’t believe she’d been duped for so many years, that the chameleon who was her sister had fooled her so completely.
“You know what I mean, I was kinda transfixed,” Shay said, “just watching the blood flow out of his body. There was so damned much of it. Everywhere … and I had to keep away from it, of course, so I did. I even pretended to dial nine-one-one as he lay there, trying to reach for the phone.”
“But there was an intruder …”
“Sure there was!” Shay was nearly laughing, enjoying the look of horror on Jules’s features. “He’d left his wallet
on the table, so that part was easy. I just hid it from Edie and ditched it with a homeless guy on the street on my way to school the next day.”
“But there were footprints,” Jules argued, realizing the depths of her sister’s depravity, that she was enjoying the fact that she’d gotten one over on Jules, on Edie, on Rip, on the police.
“The same size as his own. Did the police even notice? Odd thing about that. Remember the good shoes that Edie had tucked away into some sacks for Goodwill?” She lifted her shoulders as if to say, “Easy.”
Jules felt sick inside, starting to believe the mind-numbing truth.
“And then you came in and I had to wipe up … with the towel, to make it look like I’d just found him, too. I had to start crying and screaming, but you didn’t even notice. One glance at him and you really freaked out, lost your damned mind.” Shay grinned. She was almost giddy! “Man, did I luck out!”
“But you were so young … oh, God, why did you do it?” Jules asked, trying like crazy to wrap her mind around the depths of her sister’s depravity.
“Duh! Can’t you figure anything out. I already told you I was saving us and I knew if he was gone, if Edie and I were left alone, you wouldn’t leave.” She was studying Jules carefully now, her bravado melting into suspicion. “You were going to. I knew it and you were the only one who really cared about me. At least that’s what I thought. But I was wrong. It all changed. You had plans to go away for college and you were hooked up with some boyfriend that I’d never met, the same son of a bitch who became my pod leader down here … how’s that for bad luck?”
Trent.
“I can’t believe this.”
“Of course you can’t, Miss Goody Two-shoes.” Shay snorted a laugh. “You never believe anything bad about
anyone. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to convince you the school was rotten, but I got lucky with Spurrier and his band of lunatics.” She was pleased with herself. Gloating again, though still wary. “You know, I wondered if you’d ever put two-and-two together. Those bloodstains near Andrew’s and Maeve’s bodies were a pretty big clue. I was just testing you and you failed, Jules. Really failed. I mean, how dense are you?”
So it was true. Jules had to accept the truth.
Shay was a cold-blooded killer. And standing between her and the door. This girl who had once adored her, now a woman who, in so many ways, resembled Jules, was planted firmly in the middle of the room as if she intended to block her sister’s escape. Had planned it. Dear God, what had happened to Shay? Where was that sweet little girl she’d once loved? How had she become this monster?
Shay’s lips twisted as if she were reading Jules’s mind. Her eyes glimmered with a hideous light. “You still don’t ‘get’ me, do you, Jules?”
“No.” It was the truth. Maybe she never had.
“And you never will.” In a heartbeat, Shay’s eyes went blank, no emotion visible. Whatever connection they’d once had had been severed years ago and now, for the first time, Jules felt a tremor of fear.
“It’s time to go,” Jules said firmly, one eye on the door.