Betrayal (23 page)

Brianna turned on the phone and nearly jumped up and down when the screen flickered brightly.

Drew must have replaced the SIM card,
she thought and smiled.

But her giddiness dissipated when a strange new text flashed across the screen:

It was from a number she knew all too well, but the message was confusing. Was this text actually for her? And what was “it”? Brianna scrolled up to see the text history, but there was only the single message. Any others had all been erased.

That's odd,
Brianna thought, turned on the flashlight, and found her way to the bedroom.

Peering through the darkness, she saw that the room still had the remains of a bed—and a musty blanket.

Gross! How did I end up in a dump like this?

The door slammed, and though it seemed impossible, the rickety house got even colder.

“Brianna!” Drew yelled out.

“I'm in here.”

“I have something for you. I think you're going to like it.”

Drew breezed into the room, and Brianna's mood brightened.

“I hope it's a space heater or a hot panini.”

“It's better than a panini,” Drew said.

“What is it?”

“Hug first,” he said, reaching for her in the dark.

Drew kissed her on the forehead and ran his hands up over the small of her back. The effect gave her even more goose bumps. She pushed away, and like a sprung trap, his hands were around her neck.

“Hey, stop messing around, stupid!” she said, trying escape.

Drew grinned. “Game over, Bree.”

“You're hurting me,” she gasped.

Brianna started to choke as she tried to twist her way from her boyfriend's vise-like grip.

“That's kind of the point,” Drew whispered in her ear. “You've called me stupid for the last time. You're the stupid one. You always have been and soon you will be dead.”

TO HAYLEY AND TAYLOR'S DISMAY, Text Creeper would not give up. The mystery texter sent yet another message, and this one crossed the line of mere commentary:

At least the creep was polite
, the sisters thought. Of course, it didn't matter how polite Text Creeper was. Taylor and Hayley knew they shouldn't meet him. It violated another one of their crime writer dad's cardinal rules:
“Politeness is sometimes a trick. A killer will pretend to be friendly, or even needy—then, bam! You're buried alive.”

Hayley and Taylor picked up their phones as if they were AK-47s, synchronized, loaded, and ready to fire in tandem. As they sat at the big kitchen table, house number 19 smelling of cinnamon and sugar from an apple pie Taylor had made in her continuing quest to learn how to do one domestic thing better than anyone, the twins started scrolling through the text messages from the freak who had stalked them since Olivia died:

Naively, they had believed that if they simply ignored him, he'd go away. Maybe he was a creepy thrill seeker who liked to mess with the heads of young girls. How would they ever know if they didn't meet him and find out what he wanted?

“I'll text him back,” Hayley said.

“What are you going to say?” Taylor asked.

“Something short,” Hayley said. “I don't know.” She thought a moment and worked her thumbs over the characters on her phone. She spun her phone on the table so Taylor could see what she wanted to send:

Taylor stared at the tiny screen and then looked her sister in the eye.

“Holy crap, Hayley. Are you sure?”

Hayley nodded. “We can always back out. But I want to get to the bottom of this. Nobody seems to be able to figure out who killed Olivia. So what are we supposed to do? I want to know what's up. We aren't like other people. We can do this.”

Despite how hard they tried to be just like everyone else, the fact of the matter was that they were not. Their mom knew it. Savannah knew it. If they could help find Olivia's killer, both twins believed they had to try—even if it meant meeting Text Creeper.

Taylor pushed back her chair and got up. She carried her pie from the counter where it had been cooling to the table.

“What makes you think this freak knows something?” she asked.

Hayley disregarded the question and eyed the pie. It looked pretty good—maybe the best one her sister had made in her never-ending pursuit for baking supremacy. “I could tell you I have a feeling,” she finally said. “But when I say that to you of all people, it sounds so lame. But, really, that's all I have. And maybe a little bit of hope.”

Taylor wasn't convinced. “Shouldn't we tell Dad? Mom?”

“Dad is clueless,” Hayley said, feeling a little disloyal by saying so, but it was true. When it came to whatever it was that was going on with them, he
was
oblivious. She let out a sigh. “Mom's been working so much, we've hardly seen her.”

Taylor set out some plates and forks. “Meeting someone we don't know is dangerous. We both know it. God, we've heard stories about the dumb girls who get in a car in a mall parking lot only to be dismembered a half hour later and ditched behind a Jack in the Box.”

“I think it was a Taco Bell,” Hayley said, correcting her sister. “That's not going to happen to us. We're smarter than those dim-witted girls.”

Taylor cut a slice of pie and arranged it on the plate. Apple pieces slid from inside the shell, and she frowned a little. “Those girls probably thought they were smart, too.”

“Okay,” Hayley agreed. “Look, we're meeting in a public place—our home turf in the middle of the day. There are two of us. You know, like the ‘buddy system.' Besides we're not going anywhere with him. We're not getting into his car or skeezy van.”

Taylor waffled. Deep down she wanted to settle things too, but she wasn't certain if Text Creeper was going to help them or hurt them.

“I'm not sure,” she said, poking the edge of the pie crust with the tines of a fork.

“Too late,” Hayley said, pushing the Send button.

“Pretty flakey,” Taylor said.

Hayley looked at her sister. “Us or him?”

“The pie,” Taylor said, offering her sister a bite. “Pretty stupid of us, if you ask me.”

“Maybe.” Hayley took the fork. “We'll see.”

IT WAS FIVE MINUTES BEFORE FOUR and both girls were feeling every bit of the angst that they expected would come with meeting Text Creeper.

Their dad was working on putting in an asparagus bed in the backyard. The twins had fibbed to him, claiming they were going to town to hang out for a little while.

Kevin was grateful for a reason to stop digging the trench. The heavy rains, cold weather, and hard-packed soil were making him sweat.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe you'll be back in time to help me plant.”

“Okay, but don't wait on us,” Taylor said.

“Yeah, you don't want the roots to dry out,” Hayley added.

“I can cover them with a tarp so you don't have to miss out,” he said, half joking and half serious.

Both girls loathed yard work—so much so that Colton did most of it around their place as a favor. And that was
before
he and Hayley had started dating.

The big green town water towers were about a hundred yards from their house. As the girls started down the picket-fenced sidewalk they could see the figure of a man standing on the corner. He wore a dark-blue coat and a baseball cap. He was in his fifties. Or maybe his mid-thirties. It was hard to tell. As they approached him, they saw he had dark eyes and wire-rimmed glasses fitted with transition lenses. Hayley tried to burn every detail of the man's appearance into her memory.

Just in case a sketch artist was ever needed.

“I'm glad we could finally meet,” he said, crushing a cigarette butt in the gravel in the shadow of the water towers.

“Yeah. I guess,” Taylor said. She wanted to say that littering was against the rules in Port Gamble, but they had bigger issues to deal with than a cigarette butt.

“What do you want?” Hayley asked.

The man's smoky breath pushed at them. “I want to talk to you. And you know about what, don't you?”

Both girls stepped back, committed more than ever never to smoke.

“No, sir, I don't,” Hayley said. “I don't know what it is that you think you need to tell us.”

Taylor, taking a cue from Hayley, felt more emboldened. “Or why you keep harassing us.”

The man shook his head. “I didn't think of it as harassing,” he said. “I thought of it more as getting your attention.”

“That's what all stalkers say,” Taylor said, now on a roll. “People like you think your attention is wanted. It isn't. It is wrong on every level.”

“It might even be against the law,” Hayley added.

“You seem quite agitated, Hayley,” he said.

Was it just a good guess?
Hayley wondered. He did have a fifty-fifty chance, but even so, he said her name with such confidence that it was a little unnerving.

“I'm not agitated, and I'm Taylor, anyway,” she said.

Text Creeper studied her through his thick lenses, as if he knew that was a lie. But he didn't call her on it.

“Why,” he asked, “did you consent to meet with me?”

“Maybe to get you off our backs,” Taylor said.

“Maybe because you're curious about things,
Hayley
.” He said Hayley's name tentatively, in a way that indicated he knew who he was talking to, yet playing along. A little game. That was fine with him.

Hayley noticed a gray van parked by the Dauntless Bookstore. Its engine was running. For a fleeting second, she felt a pang of nervousness reverberate through her body. She put her hand to her stomach to quell it. In doing so, she noticed she was trembling a little.

“Let's not stand around here,” she said. “People are watching. Let's walk the loop.”

Taylor looked at her sister. She wasn't sure what she was getting at. She glanced down the street. No one was watching them. In fact, there wasn't a soul out shopping, walking, or doing much of anything. Port Gamble was deader than dead.

The man agreed, and the three of them crossed the street, away from the van.

“You said you know who killed Olivia and that she deserved it,” Hayley blurted out.

The man didn't answer right away. Maybe he hadn't expected to be confronted so soon. Maybe he hadn't expected to be confronted at all. If that had been the case, he clearly didn't know as much as he thought he did about Taylor and Hayley Ryan.

“What are you talking about?” He grabbed hold of Hayley's arm firmly, but not enough to hurt.

As his hand touched her skin, in that second, Hayley saw everything.

Rain. It was last year, right after Colton's mom, Shania, had run over Moira Windsor, the newspaper reporter who had discovered their unusual abilities. A man in a dark-blue coat—Text Creeper. A woman screaming. It was Moira. Moira was hurt from the impact of Shania's car and her fall over the embankment, but she was alive. She was still very much alive. Shania had not been responsible for her death after all.

“Moira, you idiot!” Text Creeper called out. “All you were supposed to do was get me information on the twins by pretending to write a story!” He shook her roughly by the water's edge of Paradise Bay.

“But I tried!” Moira cried out. “I found the tape. Those girls aren't normal. They can see things. But now . . . I'm sorry.” Moira coughed and bent over. “Help me, please. I'm hurt.”

Text Creeper hovered over her. “I'll help you all right,” he said, pushing her face-down into the dark water. Moira's leg twitched slowly at first, and then violently.

Then she stopped moving.

“Good night, Moira,” Text Creeper said. “You were a poor excuse for an assistant. Next time, I'll do things on my own.”

“Hayley!” Taylor shouted, pulling her sister's arm free and snapping her back to reality.

“This isn't about Olivia, is it?” Hayley said to the man in front of them. “It's about Moira. And us.”

Taylor gave her sister a nervous look.

“Yes, let's focus on you,” Text Creeper said, his dark eyes flickering across their faces.

Hayley led him to the playground on the edge of town. It was out in the open, safe, by anyone's standards. Moms in Port Gamble never worried about someone snatching their kids from that park because things like that never happened there.

“You aren't the only ones like you,” he said. “There have been others.”

Just then, for the very first time, Hayley noticed the knife at Text Creeper's waist. She looked at Taylor and lured her eyes to the glint of steel held in place by his belt. It looked like a sharp knife—the kind used to gut a deer.

Or maybe kill a teenage girl. Like them. Like Olivia.

Her mind flashed to Olivia. Halloween night. Brianna. Drew.

Hayley looked at her sister and screamed without making a sound.

Run!

The man lunged at Hayley, and she did what Colton James had said was the worst possible thing a girl could do to a guy. She aimed her foot where it counted. She kicked him as hard and decisively as she could. Her aim was perfect. The man cried out and doubled over, and the girls took off.

RUNNING AS IF THEIR LIVES DEPENDED ON IT was the only thing Hayley and Taylor could do just then. Anything else would mean turning themselves over to the man pursuing them—and the deadly edge of his hunting knife.