The Sacrificial Daughter (16 page)

The front was out of the question. Jesse spun and felt a pain in her ankle, a mild warning to take it easy—she ignored this and sprinted with everything she had round the long end of the building. Hope and fear waged a war within her as she ran, and it was wild stupid hope that had the upper hand. This hope ran straight up against cold reason and rushed around it like water splitting around a stone in a river. Her hope ignored the fact that even the teachers were afraid of the killer. They had rushed out of the school just as fast as the children had the day before. But she still had Mr. Daniels.

Although he rushed about, always in a lather over minor details, he was also easily distracted. She was pinning her hopes that the science teacher had come across an interesting bug or a sparkly rock and that he could still be on the school grounds.

She was close. He was indeed just getting into his car as she rounded the corner of the building, but he was at the far end of the parking lot, a good fifty yards away. Jesse took two steps toward him and then stopped; the battle within her had swung decidedly in favor of fear.

Her growing fear had her calculating the odds of catching Mr. Daniels attention. They weren't good. Jesse was already gasping for breath after her long sprint around the building and she still had another half a football field to go. Not only that, the science teacher's inattentiveness would now work against her. She could see herself running along beside his car, pelting it with rocks, without him even batting an eye.

And if she wasn't able to grab his attention, what then? She would be out there exposed and so wonderfully, deliciously alone.

With that terror filled thought, she retreated back to the side of the building and crouched low near a small juniper bush. Painfully, she watched Mr. Daniel's car toddle off...slowly...very slowly. As it left on its unhurried way, tears filled her eyes, blurring her vision.

She could have caught up to him. But now it was too late.

As the taillights of Mr. Daniel's car faded and Jesse's eyes filled even more, she shrank back further into the juniper bushes. Normally, she hated the stinging feel of the nasty shrubs but just then, with a panic making her bones ache, she welcomed it and she would have covered herself head to toe if she could have.

If

After a moment she realized there wasn't enough bush for her to properly hide in. Anyone even casually walking by could spot her with ease and it wouldn't take much for someone a little further away...someone slinking through the nearby forest to catch a glimpse.

Jesse knew she couldn't stay where she was, yet she didn't know if she could move either. The bushes were nothing, yet at the same time they were all she had. She squirmed in deeper and laid back, listening to her ragged breathing, feeling the thumping of heart.

A part of her felt silly. The reasoning part.
Why, with the whole town available to him, would the killer choose to hang out at the school after it let out?

The bike! It was the killer who destroyed it and he knew that she would have to walk home.

Really?
the voice asked.
You have no other enemies? And would the killer actually come up to the school in broad daylight and abuse a bike?

No, the killer wouldn't do such a thing. He was clearly too smart for that or he would've been apprehended long before.

And didn't your father assure you that the killer would never go for you?

Yes, but he could be wrong. There is always a first time for everything.

Then get back to me when he is wrong
, the voice replied, confident as always. As usual, it had all the answers to her questions, but what about her feelings? What did it say to the very real feeling that Jesse knew that she was alone and not alone, both at once?

Nothing...the voice was altogether silent on that pertinent fact. This little mental argument took all of ten seconds, but it was many minutes before she eventually got up. It was the cold that finally had her moving. Her tears began to sting her raw cheeks and her jungle boots, though stylish, did little to keep her toes from going numb. She knew, as all kids living in northern Michigan did, the dangers of hyperthermia.

When her shivering started to quake deep into her chest she knew that she had to move, but to where? Her home lay east of the school and slightly north of the ponds, but the killer's home lay in that direction as well. And it was in those woods that she had heard...whatever it was...the day before following along after her.

The main strip of the town lay directly east of her, just down the road, not far at all. Yet it might as well have been on the other side of the planet as far as Jesse was concerned. There was no way she was going to walk down that road again. That left her only heading west, which was the exact opposite that she needed to go, and south.

In her mind she pictured the maps of Ashton that hung on the walls of her father's office. If she could remember correctly, there was a subdivision called Johnson's Farm, to the south of the school. It was probably only a mile or two away through a belt of forest. Would the killer think to watch for her moving in that direction? Was he even around? She didn't know the answer to either question, but without any other options she decided to head that way.

Where she had been a nimble teen dashing around earlier, the cold had turned her into an old crone. Grimacing and hearing her joints pop and crack, she struggled to get up. She even stood hunched over like an old lady, with her arms tuck in close to her chest, trying to stay warm in her light leather half-coat.

Hurrying into the forest helped. It got her blood pumping and her muscles began to relax. Yet what helped her most of all was that nothing seemed to be following after her. The forest behind was silent; the forest in front equally so. This had a tremendous calming force on her mind and once her fears eased, her shivering disappeared altogether. There was no denying that she was still cold, but the affectation her body had assumed stemmed from a purely emotional state.

When she realized this, she smiled and then laughed...very quietly...at how she had reacted. Her reasoning mind had been correct after all: the killer hadn't been out there, or if he had been, he was sitting up in the woods north of Schoolhouse road freezing his gonads off. She laughed again, this time a touch louder at the thought.

Not necessarily
. Her annoying reasoning voice was back.

The town of Ashton, with its sub-divisions that crept like tendrils throughout the hills and forests, covered somewhere north of twenty-five square miles. The reality of her situation was that he could be anywhere.
Anywhere
. The word was like an echo in her mind and the truth in it made her stop in her tracks. Just like that, fear crept back into her soul and with it came again the shivering. It started in her hands and quickly ran up her arms, before it then invaded her chest.

Rabbit like, she hunkered down on her heels and tuned all of her senses outward in an attempt to get a greater awareness of her surroundings. The day was cold, but bright and she was able to see fairly well. However, there was nothing to see but the snow-strewn forest. Her ears were perked up and without any wind to speak of the conditions were ideal. However, apart from the hammering of her heart and her barely controlled breathing there was nothing to hear.

After a minute of squatting she had to admit to herself that she was alone. Wonderfully perfectly alone. Oddly or maybe sadly, at that very moment she couldn't think of another person she wished was there in the forest with her. Yes, if the killer was around she would love some company, but since he wasn't...there was nobody. Not even Ky. What had just happened was too painful. It should have been expected, but it was still painful.

Standing, she let out a long slow breath and tried to decide if she had gone south enough. She had been tromping through the forest for a good ten minutes and her idea was to try to get in as deep as possible in this stretch of forest before turning east. What she didn't want to do was get all the way to the sub-division.

Being alone as she was, she would stand out, not only in the eyes of the killer, if he was around, but also to the locals. It would be an understatement to say that she wasn't liked and there was no sense making a target of herself. There was another reason she wanted to stay in the deepest part of the forest and that was despite it seeming to be the ideal place for a murder to occur, she actually didn't figure there was much chance at finding the killer there.

The murderer would be on the edge of the forest looking outward, waiting for a kid to come by all alone. Her horrifying trip into town the day before had been proof enough of that.

Goosebumps flared at the memory and she tried to shake them off. Walking would help she decided and turned south again, thinking to go on a few minutes more before altering her course. Unfortunately, she was off on her judgment of both time and direction. When she finally turned, thinking she was heading east, she didn't get very far when the land changed abruptly. Ahead of her about forty yards the forest seemed to suddenly stop and the land appeared to stretch out, flat and wide open.

"What the hell?" she whispered, craning her neck to try to see properly through the last of the trees. The land wasn't as flat as she first thought, in fact it was decidedly irregular. Jesse started forward, but it was only seconds before she realized what she was looking at. It was the Ashton cemetery. The very place where Mary Castaneda was found strangled to death.

"Oh crap!" Jesse hissed. Without thinking, she went rabbit again, sinking into a squatting position behind a gnarled old tree. Her senses were back on full alert and she stared all about her, straining her ears trying to hear the slightest noise. But there was nothing to see or hear. There was plenty to ponder on, however.

How on earth did Jesse find herself all the way out here? The cemetery was more west of the school than south. In addition, according to the maps, it was a good two miles away, which would mean that she had been walking for at least a half hour. Maybe more.

A quick check of her watch showed the time at 4:12 p.m.

"Oh crap," she hissed again, this time at the watch. Jesse couldn't take her eyes off the face of the watch, still un-believing. How could it be so late? How was she going to get home before dark?

The simple answer was that there was no way she could. This late in the year, sunset was a minute after five, but in the woods it would get dark even before then. And there was no question that she would have to stick to the woods now. The route home by way of the meandering streets was at least seven miles. Seven miles in which she would be totally exposed.

On the other hand the way through the woods was only about four miles, but it was not without its dangers. Jesse would have to cross between the two long ponds by way of the berm. That thought had her stomach aching. For good reason, she feared the choke point at the ponds. The killer could just sit like a spider in a web waiting for someone stupid enough or desperate enough to chance the quick way home.

When she thought on it, neither way sounded safe.

"Please, please, please," she whispered, pulling out her cell phone. "Please give me some bars. Please." It took half a minute for her phone to go through its "wakening" period as Jesse thought it and unfortunately, it was a half minute wasted.
No Service
shown steadily on the little screen.

Jesse didn't have half minutes to waste anymore. Without caring to turn off her useless cell phone she turned straight east and plunged through the forest. It wasn't a reckless plunge however. Jesse's fear was a counter balance unto itself. A part of her—the unthinking panicky part—wanted to run straight home as fast as she could. The other part of her—the over-analyzing part that thought the killer was behind every bush—wanted to creep along at a miserly pace out of fear of making even a single twig snap or just one leaf crunch beneath her jungle boots.

Together, these two pathetic halves kept her moving at a good steady pace. She wanted to head northeast to put her in the deepest part of the woods, however the ground was broken and hilly, and again she turned south by mistake. Cresting a hill, ten minutes later, she saw a slew of tired looking houses out past the edge of the forest. It was Johnson's Farm, the sub-division that she had hoped not to see.

"Crap!"

Jesse turned from the houses, tried to get her bearings and marched off again in the direction that she hoped was northeast. Her main problem lay in the fact that she was new to her surroundings, yet she had an elementary directional problem as well. She had heard, correctly, that the sun moved east to west, but on a southern course. By this she figured that if she stood facing the sun, she would be facing more or less south. She would've been correct if the time had been within two hours of noon. However with the sun almost set, it was dead in the west and so whenever she kept the sun on her right, she wasn't heading east as she thought, she was heading south.

Inadvertently she was not only taking the long way home, she was taking the most dangerous route as well. Instead of being deep in the forest where she thought she would be safe, she constantly found herself coming up on the edge of it.

"Am I lost?" she asked under her breath when she came up on an empty street. It was ten minutes to five...ten minutes to sundown...and it was already worrisomely dark in the woods. The idea of being lost struck her sharply and made her want to abandon the woods, but that empty street...the sight of it chilled her bones. It was so desolate.

She hoped this was the road that ran from the town proper out to the homes at Johnson's Farm and then on to the cemetery. If it was, as long as she kept it on her right, she would make it to the town eventually. With a tightening in her chest, Jesse stared up into the forest. Her idea of sticking to the depths of it was now out the window. Full dark would be upon her any minute and then getting lost was a guarantee...and who would bother to look for her if she did?

Don't answer that
, her voice of reason said. Because she was tired and hungry and freezing in her stylish clothes, Jesse ignored her voice of reason. No one would come looking for her. Her parents, if they even noticed that she wasn't home, wouldn't budge except to get a pad of paper so they could list her punishments at being late.

How about her friends? What friends? Ky was the closest thing to a friend and he truly wasn't anywhere near one. He was just a cute boy with mental problems that Jesse had a crush on. The painful fact was that no one would look for her if she were lost.

That's not true.

"Shut up," Jesse said to herself. "Time to get moving."

She began walking again, still in the forest but keeping the road on her right. Sometimes she seemed to stray close to it if a steep hill pushed her in its direction, but mostly it was just a fading grey river barely seen through the trees.

Someone would look for you.

"Stop it," she said out loud and hurried faster.

You wanted to explore this line of reasoning. There is one person who would look for you. And he might be looking for you right now.

Jesse almost clamped her hands over her ears to stop the reasoning voice. Instead she sped quicker, almost jogging along, hoping to see something that would look in anyway familiar. Yet there was nothing...no buildings, no parks, no street signs. The road, for all she knew, went nowhere.