But there were times when Adam wondered about the depth of her commitment. Moments like when Daphne regarded him with her features arranged in a way that could be interpreted as a subtly seductive pout.
Moments like right now.
Daphne pulled her leg back inside the car and turned toward him. The look on her face made his breath quicken. “I have an idea.”
Adam cleared his throat. Oh, yeah? What would that be?”
She smiled. “I don’t want you to think of what we’re about to do as breaking the law.”
Meaning she still wanted to visit Hopkins Bend, regardless of Adam’s new misgivings. And she was willing to use any means necessary to manipulate him into going along with it. He had never verbalized the depth of his feelings for her, but of course it was something she understood anyway
“How should I think of it?”
She reached out and touched his knee. “Think of us as characters in a fantasy story. We’re not Adam and Daphne. We’re other people and we live in a faraway, enchanted realm. I’m a princess. Obviously. And you’re a handsome commoner hoping to win my hand against all odds.”
“Handsome, eh?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Huh.”
The fanciful scenario was a little hard for Adam to swallow. He wasn’t an unattractive guy, but his looks were only a slight shade above ordinary. A fairytale princess would be unlikely to give him a second glance. Daphne’s tactic was an undisguised appeal to his male ego, nothing more. It was actually a little insulting.
She seemed to sense his thoughts. “It’s a story, remember? A story can be whatever you want. You make the rules. You shape the reality. And in this story the handsome commoner is about to embark upon an adventure, a hazardous journey deep into the haunted forest to impress the woman he most desires.”
Adam stared at her a long moment. “What are you really saying?”
She stopped smiling and the dreamy tone she’d adopted was gone when she said, “I wasn’t too into the idea of checking this place out when you brought it up, but now that we’re here, I really want to see it. Make it happen and I’ll reward you.”
“Meaning?”
“
Meaning you’ll probably get lucky.”
Adam frowned. “What about William?”
William Martin was the boyfriend. He was her world, her “everything”, as Daphne always put it. He was a nice guy who got along with almost everybody, just a genuinely good person all around. Adam always hoped for a reason to hate William, but it just wasn’t possible, which was why Daphne’s reply sort of disappointed him even as it stirred excitement.
“William will never know.”
Adam thought about that.
Despite his moral qualms, this was a temptation he knew he wasn’t strong enough to resist. He would do as she asked. He was opening his mouth to say so when he heard the noise. Daphne heard it, too. She twisted around in her seat to peer at the road behind them. Adam glanced at the rearview mirror. At first he didn’t see anything, but then a hazy shape appeared in the distance. It took a few more moments to discern the outline of a law enforcement vehicle. The noise they’d heard was the rising rumble of a powerful engine.
Adam’s hand drifted to the Saab’s gearshift.
Daphne glanced at him. “Don’t do that.”
Adam shook his head. “No, we better drive on. That’s a cop.”
“So?”
“So we’re parked outside a restricted area. He’s gonna stop and give us shit about it for sure if we don’t get out of here. Close that door.”
Daphne didn’t reply and Adam took her silence as acquiescence.
His hand worked the gearshift and the Saab rolled forward a few feet before he realized the door on Daphne’s side was still open. He stepped on the brake pedal and looked at her again. Her arms were folded beneath her breasts and there was a mischievous smile on her face. The car’s brief moment of forward motion had caused the door to swing open a little wider. “Please close the door.”
Still smiling, Daphne shook her head. “Nope.”
Adam groaned. “Please stop playing around. This is serious.”
“Who’s playing? It’s too late, anyway.”
Adam looked at the rearview mirror.
Shit.
She was right.
The cruiser was right on top of them now and was beginning to slow down. Its flashers came on as it slid into place behind them at the side of the road. Though he couldn’t make out door emblems from his vantage point, Adam guessed it was from some other town a little farther down Old Fort. Being a ghost town, Hopkins Bend no longer had a police force.
He glanced at Daphne. “Let me do the talking.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“What’re you gonna tell him?”
Adam shrugged. “I’ll say we stopped to take a picture of the barricade and that we’re about to leave.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. “Great story.”
“You got a better one?”
“Just tell him we’re lost.”
Adam shook his head. “No, because then we have to make up some lie about where we were really heading. Then there’ll be lies upon lies. It’s best to keep it simple. Stopping to take a picture is close enough to the truth that we don’t have to bullshit him. He’ll scold us and send us on our way and that’ll be the end of it.”
Daphne pouted. “And we don’t get to see the ghost town.”
Her tone was no longer playful. Daphne rarely turned genuinely sullen, but when she did, the dark mood often wouldn’t lift for hours. Adam knew if he didn’t act fast to prevent her shift in mood from becoming entrenched, the remainder of the day would be irretrievably spoiled. And then it would be another two whole weeks before they could hang out again. Once every two weeks, William traveled two-hundred miles to attend to operational matters at his company’s sister facility in Memphis. Daphne preferred to schedule her outings with Adam on those days because it was the one time of the week when she could easily spend time alone with him without William knowing about it.
“We’ll get into the town.”
Daphne lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? How?”
Adam frowned.
That was a good question.
He had just started thinking about it when Daphne started screaming. Her change in demeanor happened with such abrupt totality that he couldn’t begin to process it for a few seconds. She kept screaming, an ear-piercing sound that was explosively loud in the Saab’s interior. When Adam realized her gaze was trained on a spot somewhere behind him, he twisted around in his seat and gaped at something that made him squeal in fright.
Holy shit! Is that a—
3.
The boom of the gun ripped another scream from Daphne’s already straining lungs. Yet another followed in its wake as the back of Adam’s head blew apart. Blood, brains, and bone fragments splattered her face and blouse. More gore struck the dash. The body of her friend was falling toward her an instant later, the ruined back of his head coming close enough to give her an excruciatingly vivid look at the bloody, jellied remains of his blown-out cranial cavity.
She pushed at the body and scrambled away from it, falling backward through the open door. She landed on her ass on the road’s gravel shoulder, but her legs were still inside the car. Turning her head, she looked beneath the car and saw the booted feet of the assailant. He was still over there on the driver’s side. But then the man’s feet turned and began to move toward the front of the car.
Daphne shrieked and scrambled backward, extracting herself fully from the car. Once she was clear of the Saab, she rolled over and got to her feet in a shallow ditch. She got a look at the man’s leering face as he came closer. His dark hair was long and greasy and his face was covered in a thick layer of grime that looked like a combination of dirt and engine grease. He wore a mechanic’s shirt with the name Earl stitched on a patch above the breast pocket. The gun clutched in his right hand was a big one, a gleaming nickel plated monster.
Earl almost certainly wasn’t legally authorized to use a law enforcement vehicle. He was some kind of unhinged lunatic on a rampage, a cop killer driving a stolen cruiser. Daphne could think of no other logical explanation for what was happening. She needed to put some serious distance between herself and this greasy redneck son of a bitch before he started putting some ugly holes in her beautiful body with his gigantic gun.
But her options were few. She couldn’t take off down the road. He would shoot her down or catch up to her easily enough. She also couldn’t just stand around and hope to be rescued by the invisible army sentries the signs said were stationed in the area.
There was just one thing to do.
She wheeled away from the advancing predator and dashed into the woods. Amused by her terror, the man named Earl cackled and fired his gun into the air. The blast jolted Daphne’s already overdriven heart. The image of what a single bullet from that gun had done to Adam’s head was still at the forefront of her consciousness. The prospect of the same thing happening to any part of her body caused anything resembling coherent thought to temporarily abandon her. Maintaining constant, rapid forward motion was her only goal and at this she was successful for a time, moving with instinctive agility as she leaped over obstacles on the ground and ducked under low-hanging branches. She covered so much ground so quickly the part of her brain that managed reason and rational thinking began to click back into gear. Maybe she could risk taking a peek over her shoulder to see if the deranged mechanic had followed her into the woods.
Maybe—
Daphne gasped as her foot snagged on a vine. She was going too fast to do anything but pitch forward and land face-first on the ground. There had been no time to brace for impact. The patch of ground where she landed was flat and relatively free of rocks and tree stumps, but the force of the landing sent a shockwave of brutal pain through her body and temporarily immobilized her.
For long moments, she remained on the ground, a prisoner of the pain, but soon she discerned the faint sound of vines crunching beneath the fall of booted feet. So Earl had followed her into the woods. Of course he had. She had watched him commit cold-blooded murder. He wouldn’t want to leave behind a living witness to the crime.
The fact of Adam’s death hit her with fresh force and kept her on the ground for precious moments longer. That he was definitely dead was something she couldn’t deny. Under other circumstances—say if he’d died in a car crash—perhaps she would have had the cold comfort of temporary denial common in the wake of tragedies.
Right now, however, all that mattered was action. She braced her hands beneath her and gritted her teeth against the pain as she got to her feet, crying out in pain as soon as she was fully upright. She immediately regretted it.
A mocking voice sang out to her from somewhere in the woods: “I hear you!”
This was followed by another of those maniacal cackles
Daphne whirled about, unable to get a fix on the location of the voice. She had been down for the count for a few minutes. He might have had time to get ahead of her. He might be circling her even now, enjoying taunting her as he lurked somewhere just out of sight.
Maybe a dash back to the road was in order. She could haul Adam’s corpse out of the Saab and burn rubber out of this fucking place. She hated the thought of abandoning her friend’s body, but it would take too long to wrestle him into the passenger seat. She hated being that coldly pragmatic about the remains of someone she’d cared so deeply about, but in truly desperate situations you did what you had to do, regardless of how awful it was.
She did two more slow turns in the same spot as she continued to scan the area for signs of Earl. The forest was lush and dense, with lots of vegetation, dangling vines, and tall trees. It would be easy for someone stalking her to get close without being seen, but she doubted it could be done soundlessly, not even by an expert woodsman. If Earl was still advancing on her, she should be hearing those heavy boots of his crunching on vines and twigs.
But she heard nothing.
And then, somewhere nearby, a bird twittered. She heard a flap of wings and a rustle of leaves as it took flight. The sudden noise made her suck in a breath, but by now she’d mustered enough self-control to keep from shrieking.