The Whisperer (Nightmare Hall) (5 page)

Shea sagged back against the wall. That’s why he wasn’t afraid to meet with her. He knew she couldn’t afford to tell. The incriminating evidence only pointed to her.

He was clearly in charge here.

But … was it
safe
to meet with someone who would do what he was doing? Blackmail, wasn’t that what it was? Who knew what he was capable of?
Someone
had attacked Dr. Stark. It was crazy to meet with him alone.

As if she had a choice.

Her tears were tears of frustration now. She’d done one stupid thing, and now she had to risk meeting with a blackmailer … would it ever end?

He could have made copies of the tape. If she paid him whatever he asked, he might come back later, when she thought it was all over and she was safe, and say, Gee, I forgot to mention, I just happen to have another copy … and another, and another, and another. …

Maybe it would
never
end.

Swallowing hard, she asked, “Where? Where do you want to meet?”

“I don’t know yet. Haven’t decided. Look for a note in your mailbox saying where and when. And,”
the whisper deepened, scratching like sandpaper along the telephone line,
“be there, Shea. Or be sorry.”

The line went dead.

No, oh no … he was going to make her
wait?
She couldn’t stand that. As much as she dreaded meeting with him, she wanted this awful business
finished!
If that was possible. …

How long was he going to keep her dangling?

And how long would it be before she totally and completely lost her mind?

Shea was still sitting on her bed, immobile, when Tandy arrived twenty minutes later. Shea knew it was exactly twenty minutes because she’d been staring at the clock ever since she hung up. Unable to move, she had replaced the receiver and sat there watching the minute hand slowly, steadily, circle the small, round face on her clock radio. She’d had to fight the urge to reach out and grab the thin, metal hand and stop it in its path, keep time from moving onward, toward that moment when, one way or another, she was going to have to face the music.

Ruining a perfectly good clock radio wasn’t going to save her.

“What’s up?” Tandy asked breathlessly, dropping her books on her bed. The first thing she did when her hands were free was what she always did, first thing, when she got up in the morning, whenever she came in from outside, and any number of times in between. She brushed her hair.

Tandy had beautiful hair. It was the color of lemonade, naturally wavy, and fell to her waist. Tandy admitted that taking care of it was a pain, but quickly added that she couldn’t stand the thought of cutting it. Her swim coach nagged at her constantly to cut it, but she adamantly refused. Periodically, she had the ends trimmed at the mall beauty salon, but never allowed more than half an inch removed.

Shea might have thought then that it was a little weird. But she didn’t now. Watching in envy as Tandy, standing in front of the dresser mirror, moved a brush through the thick, pale strands, she wished
she
had something to hide behind.

When she didn’t answer, Tandy turned away from the mirror. “Shea? What’s wrong? Are you sick? You look like you just woke up. Didn’t you go to your afternoon classes?” She whirled to face the mirror again. “I hope it isn’t anything catching. I can’t afford to be sick these last few weeks of school.”

That was Tandy, all right. Thinking mostly of Tandy. Her self-absorption was one reason they had never become really close friends, like so many other roommates had. She had insisted on the bed nearest the window. She had asked for the larger dresser, which Shea had agreed to because Tandy clearly had more clothes than she did. And if Tandy was home on evenings when Shea invited friends in, she always asked Shea to take them downstairs to the lounge, saying she needed “peace and quiet” to study. Fortunately, she dated a lot and wasn’t home most evenings.

“I guess you heard about Doctor Stark,” Tandy said, peering into the mirror to study her reflection more closely. What she saw seemed to satisfy her. She walked over and sat down on her bed, propping her feet up on the pile of books she’d dumped there. “Creepy, right? I know you couldn’t stand her, but even you can’t be happy about this.”

Shea had been expecting that. Tandy didn’t know the meaning of the word “tact.” “That’s a crummy thing to say. I think what happened to Dr. Stark is horrible. Have you heard how she is?”

Tandy opened a textbook. “Yeah,” she answered, not looking up, “I heard she might be paralyzed.”

Shea gasped. “Paralyzed. But …”

“I was in the library, and the assistant librarian said Dr. Stark can’t move her legs at all.”

Shea was speechless. Paralyzed? Couldn’t move her legs? The thought of Dr. Stark, who strode along campus paths and sidewalks as if she owned them, never doing so again, was sickening.

“I wonder who’ll take her classes?” Tandy mused aloud. “Maybe that cute T.A., the one who helps us at the computer.”

Shea wasn’t listening. Was the person who had rendered Dr. Stark immobile the same person who had whispered in her ear earlier? And if it was, did he know yet what the consequences of his cruel act were? Would he care?

Maybe not.

How soon would she find a note in her mailbox? Could it be there already? He might have slipped it in there as soon as they’d finished talking.

“I’m going downstairs to check my mail,” she said abruptly, and got up.

Without looking up, Tandy said, “Bring mine, too, okay?”

Tandy could use a good maid. Oh, well. “Sure. Be right back.”

Tandy turned on her radio and, as music filled the room, returned to her book.

She doesn’t seem all that upset by what happened to Dr. Stark, Shea thought as she left the room. It was Tandy who had defended the teacher at Vinnie’s when everyone else was trashing her. Yet she had passed on the news of possible paralysis so casually, as if she were talking about a hangnail.

Well, Tandy wouldn’t win any awards for having great depth or compassion, Shea told herself. You already knew that.

Okay, that’s true, she argued silently, but a teacher she’d said she admired might never walk again, and all Tandy Dominic can think of is whether or not someone “cute” will take Dr. Stark’s place?

Depressing.

As she neared the long row of brass mailboxes recessed into the lobby wall, she put Tandy’s lack of compassion out of her mind, replacing it with her own predicament. Would the note be there already?

She didn’t want it to be there. Because if it wasn’t, she could force the whole ugly business out of her head until morning. Maybe, if she worked really hard at it, she could even convince herself, just for today, that life was perfectly fine.

Impossible. Never happen.

Then she decided she
wanted
the note to be there. The suspense of waiting a whole night would kill her. Better to get it over with, see what he really had in mind for her.

She wanted—she didn’t want—she wanted …

Unlocking the mailbox, she reached one hand in and let her fingers explore.

Nothing.

She was going to have to wait.

Wait … with her nerves on edge, her teeth clenched … wait for the knock on the door from the police … for another call from the whispered voice, wait …

S
HEA WAITED … WAITED … WAITED.
There were no more weird phone calls, no notes in her mailbox. The campus grapevine told her that Dr. Stark was recuperating slowly and that the police had no clue as to the identity of her attacker. The young teaching assistant who took over her classes was female, much to Tandy’s disappointment. Shea studied and went out with Coop and her friends and had almost allowed herself to forget about the phone call, about the telltale paperweight, about that terrible afternoon in Dr. Stark’s office. Almost …

And then one sunny, warm afternoon a few days later she unlocked her mailbox and reached inside to pull out her mail. And there it was—a sheet of white notebook paper, folded in half, ripped unevenly along one border. Her name was scrawled across the front in black ink. SHEA FALLON.

Without unfolding the piece of paper, Shea closed and locked the mailbox. Her breathing became erratic as she left the wall of boxes and slipped in through the door to the fire stairs. She didn’t want to be seen reading the note.

Shea unfolded the paper, but could hardly read it because of the dim lighting. She strained to make out the letters.

The words were misspelled and scrawled in such a way that the entire note looked like the work of a first-grader.

Dere Shea,

Mete me at midnite tonite in the woods behind Nightmare

Hall. Down by the creke.

Be ther or be sory.

The note was unsigned.

Shea let the note drop into her lap and sat on the step for a long time. Here it was, at last. Hadn’t she known it would show up, sooner or later? She’d gone out with Coop, she’d sat through classes, she’d eaten meals, and washed her hair and studied and read, just as if everything in her life were normal. Fool.

Because all the time, he was
there,
waiting … waiting to remind her that her life wasn’t normal, and wasn’t going to be … probably for a very long time. Maybe never again.

Sitting there forever wasn’t going to do any good. She got up, clutching the note in a clenched fist.

As she climbed the fire stairs to the fourth floor, she glanced at her watch. Midnight … she was to meet him at midnight. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. Eight hours. How was she was going to make it through eight whole hours? Waiting … waiting to see what “payment” the whisperer had in store for her.

Waiting to see what would happen if she couldn’t make the “payment.”

Who
was
the person whispering to her on the telephone? What did he want? Why had he stolen the videotape? And why had he picked the grounds of that ugly old house on the hill as a meeting-place?

Maybe he lived there. Shea quickly listed mentally the guys she knew who lived in the gloomy old off-campus dorm. Ian Banion? Tall, good-looking, athletic. Wouldn’t be him. Ian was a terrific person, as was Jessica Vogt, his girlfriend, who also lived at Nightmare Hall. And there was Milo Keith: quiet, poetic, with a sardonic sense of humor. No, it wouldn’t be Milo. He was a little off-center … well, maybe a lot off-center, but if Milo had something to say, he wouldn’t whisper it. He’d just say it, straight out, and let you do whatever you wanted with it. Jon Shea? An incorrigible flirt, who had teased her about stealing his last name. Magazine-cover-perfect Jon? She didn’t think so. Jon was too wrapped up in himself. If he was going to steal a videotape, it would be one in which he starred.

The thought of meeting some whispering, threatening stranger in those deep, dark woods behind Nightmare Hall terrified her. She was never going to get through the next eight hours. Never.

There were moments when she
wanted
time to pass quickly, wanted midnight to come, get it all over with. Then there were moments when she wanted the hours to drag as if they were slogging through tar, giving her time to think, to plan, to figure things out.

What she
really
wanted, she knew, was for someone to take a giant eraser and wipe away the past few days. So that she
hadn’t
gone into that office, hadn’t found the exam, hadn’t copied it, and Dr. Stark wasn’t lying in a hospital bed, unable to walk.

Because it seemed crucial that she act as normally as possible, she did all the things she usually did.

She ate dinner, down the road from campus at Burgers Etc., with Dinah and Sid and Coop, who, she thought, kept glancing over at her as if he had a question he wanted her to answer. But he never asked it.

She prayed that no one would mention Dr. Stark. She didn’t think she could deal with that. And at first, she thought her prayer had been answered. They began talking about their summer plans.

They were all, it turned out, staying on campus. Dinah had taken a lifeguard job at the Twin Falls country club, and told them that Tandy had done the same, as had her swim teammate, Linda Carlyle. All three were considering rooming together at Nightingale Hall. Dinah also mentioned that there was a party scheduled at the house the following Monday night to celebrate the end of a successful season for the swim team.

Shea had been invited and had planned to go. But that was before she’d dug herself a bottomless pit and jumped into it. Now. …

Shea was surprised to learn that Sid and Coop were both vying for the same summer job in the Animal Behavior Studies lab. Only one job was available, and they were both in the running. “Who decides who gets it?” she asked.

Sid’s lips turned downward. “Guess. Who’s the head of the A.B.S. lab?”

“Dr. Stark? But she’s … sick.”

“That’s right,” Dinah said emphatically. “She won’t be making any major decisions for a while. Someone else will have to decide.” She smiled at Sid. “Good thing, too, Sid. She wasn’t your biggest fan. I was in the lab twice when she yelled at you for not keeping the charts in order.”

“She’s hurt, but she’s not
dead,”
Sid countered. “And as far as I know, she hasn’t resigned any of her positions on campus. So she might still have the final say in which one of us scientific geniuses gets the plum job of the summer. It sure would look good on my record.”

“Mine, too,” Coop said amiably. “Any alternative plans, Frye? In case I pull this off, I mean.”

Sid shrugged. “Have to go back home and fry burgers at my dad’s place like I did last summer, I guess.”

Coop laughed, but Dinah looked uncertain.

She wants Sid to get it, Shea thought. So they can spend the summer together. Is that why she took the lifeguard job in the first place? Because she was sure he’d get the summer job and she wanted to be near him?

“I’m staying, too,” Shea volunteered. “Summer school. I’m going to take another whack at bio, see if I can do better.” She was sorry the minute the words were out of her mouth. Couldn’t they talk about anything but Dr. Stark? She seemed to be haunting their booth tonight.