Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1) (6 page)

Mom, not Dad, spoke from the answering
machine. She wanted me to call her at work immediately. Sighing, I
picked up the cordless and wandered into the living room as I
dialed my mother’s work number.

“Evelyn Andrews,” my mother answered
on the third ring.

“It’s your daughter,” I told
her.

“Good, you’re home. I left some money
for dinner under the toaster. It looks like I will be stuck here
for a while. I’ll call and update you periodically.”

“Update” was mom code for “make sure
you are there.” “I’ll be here,” I said into the phone. I reached
for the laptop sitting on the coffee table and hit the start
key.

“Get your homework done – ” my mother
started to lecture.

“I will,” I cut her off.
“Um, Mom? Were there any hang-ups on the answering machine
yesterday?” I held my breath, waiting for her answer. Even if my
father had called, my mother wasn’t likely to tell me. She
was
the reason he no
longer took an active role in my life.

“No, Endora, your father didn’t call,
which is a good thing since he isn’t allowed to have any contact
with you,” my mother replied after a long pause.

“Okay, right, sure. Bye.” I hung up
quickly, before I could remind my mother the moratorium on
visitation only extended until my eighteenth birthday. My father
was legally free to call and see me as much as he liked
now.

My parents’ marriage had never been a
happy one. They’d fought constantly about everything. Mostly about
me, though. Even back then mom was overprotective, and Dad thought
she was smothering me. After an epic battle of wills that lasted
well into the night, my father moved out.

I was twelve then.

Two days later he picked me up from
school and said we were going on vacation. Apparently, Mom never
received the memo. She called out the National Guard, and my father
was arrested for kidnapping.

A bitter divorce came next, complete
with a nasty custody battle that my mother won. Initially, my
father had been awarded limited visitation. That didn’t last long.
My mother was still a US Attorney then, and she convinced a judge
that it was in my best interest to sever all ties with my father.
By the time I was thirteen, my mother quit her job and we moved
from our home on the edge of D.C. to the suburbs of
Maryland.

The laptop hummed to life in front of
me, and I waited while the internet connection was made. I
considered searching for my father online and finding a way to
contact him. But I’d tried that numerous times over the past five
years without success. After the judge had stripped him of his
parental rights, my father became a ghost. He risked my mother’s
wrath once a year to call and wish me happy birthday. He always
called my cell from a blocked number and refused to give me a way
to contact him.

My cell
phone
, I thought, brightening a little. I
hadn’t checked my messages since the previous night. I picked up
the cordless again, this time calling my own voice mail. I typed in
my access code and waited.

“You have one new message and five
saved messages,” a mechanical voice informed me. I hit one to hear
my messages and crossed my fingers.

“Please be Dad, please be Dad,” I
chanted.

“Hey, Eel. Happy birthday, sweetheart.
I’m sorry I missed you, but I hope you did something fun for your
eighteenth.” A fist tightened around my heart at the sound of his
voice. I clutched the phone harder so I wouldn’t miss a word.
“Listen, Eel. I really need to talk to you as soon as possible. Try
and keep your phone nearby and charged. I’ll try to reach you again
tomorrow.”

The strained quality in my father’s
voice gave me pause. Something was wrong, and he was going to try
to call back tomorrow. Not tomorrow, today. And my phone still
didn’t work. I swore under my breath. I really wanted to talk to my
dad. Not only because it had been a year since our last catch-up
session, but he sounded almost scared in his message. Maybe he was
in some kind of trouble?

I dialed my voice mail again. This
time I chose the option to change my outgoing message. After the
beep I spoke in a slow, deliberate tone when I said, “You have
reached Endora. My phone is not working, so it is safe to call me
at 410-545-9189 until further notice.” I hoped my father would
understand that giving him the house number and telling him it was
safe to call meant my mother was not home.

Two hours later, I had yet to work on
my history paper, receive a phone call from my father, stop
obsessing over the lake monster I’d imagined and the boy who’d
pulled me from the water, or figure out how I knew the Bronco would
run the stop sign. Instead, I was sitting on my bed dissecting
every moment of the past twenty-four hours like it was the fetal
pig in my anatomy lab.

Deciding my fixation was reaching an
unhealthy point, I grabbed the antique-style phone on my bedside
table. When I was younger, I’d been enamored with all things turn
of the century; so when my mother had finally decided I was
responsible enough to have a telephone in my room, she purchased
the 1890s replica. Luckily, I knew Devon’s number by heart, which
is more than I could say for just about anyone else’s. I dialed,
cradling the headset between my ear and shoulder and counting the
rings.

“Eel?” she answered on the fourth
ring.

“Yup, it’s me,” I replied.

“What’s up?”

“Want to come over now? My mom is at
work and…” I let my voice trail off. Devon knew I hated all the
alone time my mother’s extended work hours created. Not that my
mother was great company when she was home anyhow.

“Sure,” she replied kindly. “You ready
for pizza now?”

“Nah, we’ll get delivery
later.”

“Be there soon,” she said into the
phone, but then her voice became muffled. “Rick, stop, I’m trying
to talk to Eel,” she giggled, and I heard a soft thud followed by
Rick’s deep laughter.

“Are you at Rick’s?” I
asked.

Rick had an apartment he shared with
his friend Bill Thompson in town. Devon’s parents had practically
forbidden her to go there, but it went in one ear and out the
other, much like with any other rules they imposed.

“Yup, we were just…watching a movie?”
she said it like it was a question, and I assumed that “watching a
movie” was a euphemism for getting naked between Rick’s
sheets.

“Oh well, why don’t you finish,
um…watching your movie?” I suggested.

“Don’t worry, Eel, it’s over,” Rick
yelled over the line, and I wondered if Devon had me on speaker
phone or if the volume on her cell was just up that
high.

“I’ll be right over, Eel,” Devon said,
and then promptly disconnected.

“Right over” in Devon time
turned out to be two hours ― her movie must’ve been really good.
When she finally barged through my front door, full of apologies
and carrying an extra-large pizza, I forgave her excuses. Extra
cheese and mushrooms weren’t her only “forgive me” gifts. She also
brought a selection of romantic comedies from the Red
Box.

In theory, the DVD vending machines
were great inventions. For a dollar you could rent a movie for the
night, which sure beat the $4.99 that on-demand charged. But Devon
and I had a problem with the returning part of the equation. As a
consequence of our inability to do just that, I had an extensive,
and extremely expensive, Blue-Ray collection. To make matters
worse, we rarely watched the movies. Instead, we favored gossiping
through entire films. Devon’s father often marveled at our ability
to spend so much time together and still always have so much to say
to one another.

That night was no different. While
chowing down on greasy slices of pizza and numerous cans of soda,
we caught each other up on every detail the other had missed in the
rare time we’d spent apart.

“You should’ve come in the hot tub
last night,” Devon mumbled in between bites of pizza. “Mandy was so
drunk that she let Kevin go to third base IN THE WATER!” she
punctuated each word to drive home her point. Translation: Mandy
was easy.

Of course, Devon had done much worse
with Greg Crenshaw in that same hot tub after one of Elizabeth’s
parties the year before. She and Rick had been on a “break” after
she’d caught him with an Arby’s drive-through girl. But since she
was my best friend, I didn’t point out the obvious double standard.
Instead, I widened my eyes to mirror her look of horror, like that
was the most shocking news I’d heard all day.

Gossiping was fun and all, but more
than that I liked how comfortable our conversations had become as
we commented on who hooked up with whom the night
before.

“I’m pretty sure they went all the
way, although that isn’t exactly something to brag about.” Devon
tapped her pointer finger against her chin, leaving a greasy
fingerprint.

“Be nice,” I scolded her. “Mandy is
nice and she means well. She just wants people to like her. It
sucks being the new girl. If you hadn’t come to my rescue and
deigned to be my friend, then I would be just like her.” It was
sort of true. If I hadn’t met Devon in the eighth grade, I would
probably be a loser with no social life. She’d introduced me to
most of the friends I had. And it was her parents who had convinced
my mother that Westwood was safe enough to let me go places without
a chaperone.

“No way. You would never do it in a
hot tub,” she teased. She meant it as a joke, but it stung a
little. Not that I would do it in a hot tub; I wouldn’t. It was a
reminder that I was the only virgin among my friends.

I wasn’t exactly a newbie to the
dating scene; I’d had my first boyfriend when I was six. His name
was Nate Shin, and he chased me through our first grade classroom
pulling my pigtails until I agreed to hold his hand. In the second
grade, he gave me a paper flower for Valentine’s Day, with a note
that read “Be my girlfriend? Check yes or no.” I checked “yes” and
we officially became an item.

For my birthday that April,
he gave me a stuffed teddy bear holding a heart that read, “I love
you this much.” In return, I gave him the chicken pox, which I’d
gotten from Regina Skloven. Later that same year, his family won
nine million in the state lottery and moved to Canada ― although
I’m not sure if the two events were actually related.

During my third and fourth
grade years, I fell into a dating slump. But in the fifth grade, my
chest had developed enough to necessitate a training bra, instantly
making me the object of affection for swarms of boys. My overnight
popularity faded just as fast as it had blossomed as other girls
began to develop.

In the sixth grade, I played my first
game of Spin the Bottle. His name was Brent Phizer and he wore
braces. Brent’s mouth jewelry cut my bottom lip, which caused me to
cry. The blood and tears that followed – both mine – had been
humiliating. By the time I was twelve, I had sworn off men
altogether.

When high school rolled
around, my embarrassing Spin the Bottle incident was ancient
history; but between sports and my mother’s refusal to let me date,
I didn’t have much experience with the opposite sex. And now, the
day after my eighteenth birthday, I had yet to share a meaningful
kiss with a boy that I was actually dating. I had long ago decided
college would be when I finally found my soul mate, unless I met
the kid from
High School Musical
sometime in the interim.

My fingers involuntarily went to the
burn on my cheek. Devon’s gaze followed my hand and her blue eyes
turned stormy.

“What really happened last night, Eel?
When we found you with that kid, you were acting weird. The two of
you were…I don’t know how to explain it. And when I brought him up
last night, you got all flustered.”

I laughed a loud, nervous sort of
laughter that was unnatural and forced. “What do you mean? I told
you what happened. And I did not get flustered.” Had I?

“What did you talk about?” Devon
prompted.

“What did I talk about with
who?”

“Come on, Eel. Don’t play stupid. What
did you and the kid talk about before we got there?”

That same uncomfortable laughter
bubbled up in my throat, and I averted my eyes from Devon’s
inquisitive gaze. “There wasn’t a lot of time for conversation. I
was too busy throwing up lake water.”

I met Devon’s gaze levelly. She pursed
her lips like she wanted to say more but wasn’t sure she
should.

“What? Just say it,” I
sighed.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Her
voice was soft and kind, but still probing. She would make a great
trial attorney one day.

I shook my head and drew my bottom lip
between my teeth. Telling Devon, or anyone else for that matter,
about the lake creature was crazy.

“You can tell me anything,” Devon
insisted.

I sighed and scrunched my eyes shut.
Maybe if I couldn’t see her face, the words would be easier to say.
“I think I saw something in the water. Like a person. But not. That
is what grabbed my foot.” The words flew out of my mouth in one
breath.