Ghost Flower (35 page)

“Eight. Like Nina. That’s what made me think of it.”

I fell in love with him at that moment. It was like the pin being pulled out of a grenade, the tiny little ping that turns something inert into something dangerously combustible. I stared at him, willing him to kiss me. His eyes moved over my face, from my eyes to my lips and my chin. For a split second I saw something soft and yearning.

“What if you don’t want to contain them? The wildfires?” I asked.

“People would get hurt.”

“Not if they were careful.”

“I don’t think that would work.” He shook his head, and I thought
I saw a whisper of sorrow in his frown. “See you tomorrow.” He turned and left.

I watched him go, feeling confused and rejected and cherished and paid attention to at the same time. He knew all my secrets now, and he’d neither embraced me nor repudiated me. He’d just accepted me.

As a friend,
I reminded myself.
A dangerous friend.

Best… friends forever.

My phone rang, jolting me out of my thoughts, and I saw it was Grant. “Are we still on for lunch?”

I’d completely forgotten about our date. I said, “Of course. Sure. I—”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m—I’m fine. I just—”

“Where are you? I’ll come and get you.”

I described where I was, and he said he’d be there in five minutes. But my phone rang again almost immediately. “Are you having second thoughts?” I said, trying to joke.

“You’re… in danger, Ro-Ro,” Liza’s voice said.

“What did you do to Regina?”

“Girl… no good. Distraction… They’re coming for you.”

Despite myself, I shivered. I thought of Reggie being attacked in her apartment with no sign of anyone coming in or out. “What do you want from me?”

“Pay attention… they are already…”

“Already what?” I demanded

“
Turn around
!”

I turned and saw Bridgette crossing the street toward me.

Before she reached me, Grant’s car pulled up at the curb. I ran for the door and leaped in.

PART III

AWAKE

She’s had this nightmare before.

She’s running through an unfamiliar landscape, pursued by footsteps that get closer with each step, each breath. Tree branches slash at her, and her ankles wobble like buoys.

But this is no dream, no nightmare she can wake from. The footsteps she hears behind her now are real. Her neck aches for real, every muscle in her body burns, and each breath sears her windpipe. But she can’t stop.

As she runs, flashes of what happened earlier in the night grab at her, trying to slow her down, trap her. Shopping at the mall. The party. The bathroom. The text messages. The fight.

Opening her eyes and seeing the girl, wide eyes nearly sightless, lying on the gravel next to her. The girl saying, “Go. It’s me they want, not you.”

Hearing herself promise to be right back. “I’ll bring help. I won’t leave you alone.”

Her chest heaves with a sob, which catches in her throat as the beam of a flashlight scores the path in front of her. She’s been found, they’re closing in, they—

She veers away from the flashlight and is engulfed by complete darkness. Giving her eyes no chance to adjust, she heads blindly toward where she thinks the path should be. Before she reaches it, she stumbles over a rock and is flung headlong past the path and down a steep slope.

Hands out in a vain effort to slow herself, she tumbles over the dirt escarpment until her back thuds against some kind of ledge. Her eyes jolt open with pain and shock. Reaching out with one hand, she discovers she is lying on a ledge of dirt caught between the branches of a dry tree. Above her, she sees the edge of the flashlight beam.

The light zigzags down the wall she’s just descended, getting closer with each pass. It stops inches from where she is, close enough that she can see it reflecting off her pinkie nail. Nothing happens. Could they not have seen her?

Above her a single set of footsteps paces along what must be the edge of
whatever gully she’s fallen into with a regular one-two gait, as the beam played in wide arcs around the whole area. A pebble trickles down and hits her in the face, and as she shifts to shunt it off, something cold slithers across her wrist.

She bites back a scream. She lies there petrified, her heart racing so fast she can’t hear the footsteps above, until she realizes the thing on her wrist is just the chain from her BFF necklace. It must have broken as she fell and slid down her clothes. Soundlessly she closes her fingers around it and gropes for the pocket of her skirt. Finding it, she pushes the broken chain in next to the twenty dollars she always carries for emergencies.

Now the footsteps stop, and the beam of the flashlight remains stationary a few feet in front of her head, as though whoever has it is standing and listening. She holds her breath, listening, hearing nothing.

From above, a voice whispers her name, a voice she recognizes. “Come out, I just want to help you,” it says. Its tone is genuine, nice. But she knows this is a lie. It’s the same voice she heard right before everything went black. The voice that said, “You stupid moron, why did you change your clothes?”

The light makes another arc, grazing her arm this time, and she thinks,
This is it. It’s over.
But then the beam of light returns to the side of the person holding the flashlight like a well-trained puppy. Illuminating his navy blue canvas sneakers for a few moments before he moves on.

“I have to get help; I promised,” she thinks as the branch below her gives way, and she tumbles down, falling headlong into complete darkness.

G
rant looked a little taken aback at the enthusiasm with which I burst into his car.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yes. I’m just—happy to see you.”

He eyed me. “I was thinking maybe we could go out to my place but—”

“Let’s go,” I said enthusiastically. Bridgette was waving at me frantically. “I’d love to see where you live.”

The drive out to the trailer that Grant shared with his brother—“we like to call it a trailer estate, actually”—was only thirty-five minutes, but the landscape and the feeling of the air changed so dramatically, it might as well have been thirty-five hours. Tucson dropped away like the tide ebbing during the first ten minutes of the drive, and after that we were in flat, golden desert.

We exited the main highway, looped under it, and were on a smaller, secondary road that was headed right into the hills. After the second mile the pavement stopped, and we were driving on a rocky dirt track. I realized Grant drove his Bronco out of necessity,
not vanity. Green pom poms of scrub desert blanketed the horizon on either side of us, and the hills in front looked flat and reddish brown in the midday sun. A handful of cows grazed on the rise next to the road.

“Yours?” I asked.

“They belong to the Kims, Roscoe’s parents. They own the ranch; my brother oversees it,” he said.

He glanced over at me and looked like he was going to say something, but instead reached out and tucked his hand over mine. I smiled at him. Without taking his eyes off the dirt track, he smiled back, and we drove the rest of the way like that.

We crested a rise between two hills and a valley spread out below us like a golden bowl. The only building you could see was a double-wide trailer.

“Home sweet home.”

I felt like we were a reinterpretation of Adam and Eve, alone together in a secluded paradise. As we got closer to the trailer, I noticed a corral built from slats of wood off to one side. “You have horses?”

“A horse,” he said. “A project of my brother’s, trying to break her. She’s a bit wild though.”

As we pulled up, I saw what he meant. The massive horse eyed us, snorted, then reared on her hind legs and made a kind of shouting noise for fifteen solid seconds. Her landing made the earth shake, and she stood there, glaring at us, pawing the ground with one foot.

Grant’s eyes got huge. “Never seen her do that before,” he said. “Well, now that you’ve met the welcoming committee, let me give you the rest of the tour.”

He pointed to a faded chair and table set up off to the side of the trailer with an old transistor radio on it. “The media room.” His finger
moved to a trough that looked recently dug—“the mud baths.” He spun around and pointed to a dog house covered in peeling paint. “The guest house.” He came back to me. “I know you’re accustomed to something kind of luxe so—”

“Is that why you’ve been so nervous?” I asked.

He didn’t look at me, just nodded and led the way up the stairs into the trailer. He held the door open for me to enter and let it shut with a clatter. Then he stood there, his arms at his sides, little bars of sunlight crossing his face from the slatted blinds, his eyes glued to the tips of his navy blue PF Flyers sneakers. “I really like you. And you’re Aurora Silverton, and I’m—me.”

“You’re terrific,” I said.

“No, you are.” His face looked stricken, and he grew even more serious. “Which is why I’m really sorry for what I’m about to do to you.”

My mouth went dry, and I felt my pulse in my neck. “What?”

“This,” he said and held out a VHS tape with the words “
Tocco Luces:
A Film by Grant Villa” typed on the label.

I laughed.

“But first, what can I get you to drink?” He pulled open the refrigerator. “I have lemonade and—looks like lemonade.”

“That would be great.”

He poured out two glasses and brought one to me as I was looking at a shelf crammed with books and tiny animals whittled out of corks.

“My brother’s work,” he said. “He’s the artistic one.”

We toasted and made small talk, but I realized how nervous he was when he was reaching to show me something and knocked his glass down my shirt.

He looked panicked, like he’d done something irredeemable. To
show him it was okay, I said, “If you’re trying to get me out of my clothes, all you had to do was ask.”

He laughed and relaxed a little. “I’m so sorry. My closet is over there. Grab anything.”

He turned and carried the glasses to the sink, and I went to his closet. It had two shirts, three pairs of pants, a trench coat missing both a belt and button, and a pair of green high heels in size 10.

One of the people who was there that night. Someone close to you.

Grant? But he had left. He left early. Everyone saw him.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t have come back,
I realized.

There was a wide red stripe of dirt up the back of the trench coat and matching stripes of dirt on the backs of the green shoes.

That’s what I’d realized during the fire as I tugged Althea to safety. That was the answer. Liza had been dragged up to Three Lovers Point.

I closed the closet and was fumbling in my pocket for my phone when he came up behind me and said, “What’s taking so long, sexy?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to keep my voice cool and level. I pointed to the phone in my hand. “Bain just called, and something happened to my grandmother. I—I’ve got to get back to the hospital. It’s an emergency.”

He smiled at me. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, putting one hand on his chest and skirting around him through the door.

“It’s not just because you’re suddenly having second thoughts about my movie, is it?”

“No,” I forced a laugh. “I really want to see it. Soon. It’s just, my grandmother,” I gestured with the phone again.

“I understand,” he said, following me.

“Stay where you are, I can let myself out.”

He was smiling as he reached the door and stood in front of it. “I can’t let you do that.”

“I thought chivalry was dead.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I think we both know you aren’t going to be leaving here.”

I swallowed. “I don’t know—”

“There’s no phone service out here. You didn’t just get a call from Bain. You saw Liza’s trench coat and shoes in my closet. And you realized the truth.”

“That’s ridiculous. Look if you just let me—”

“I killed her,” he said, just like that.

My knees went out from under me.

Because I knew he was right. There was no way he could let me leave there. Not alive anyway.

“Why?” I asked.

“I didn’t mean to, not at first. I only wanted to teach her a lesson. But you coming out first when it was supposed to be her—you made me so angry. I squeezed too hard.”

“It was my fault?”

“I just wanted to teach her what it felt like to have someone hurt you. To be in someone else’s power. She had everyone fooled. Even you. Everyone thought she was so sweet and nice and compassionate. But at home—you should see what she did. She manipulated them. Terrorized them.”

This didn’t sound like the Liza everyone described, but it absolutely sounded like the Liza I knew in her ghostly form. “What do you mean?”

“She was a controlling bitch, and she enjoyed hurting people. She would threaten to hurt Ellie if Victoria didn’t behave how she
wanted. She made life in that house a living hell. I just—I just wanted to help.”

“By killing Liza?”

“I had to, don’t you see? It was the only way to free them.”

“How did you do it?”

“I strangled her outside of the party. Then I dragged her body to the top of the ledge. I took off the trench coat and the shoes—”

My mind flashed back to the red stripe on the back of the coat and the heels of the shoes. “—because they would have shown she was dragged and you wanted to make it look like she’d still been alive and walked up there herself.”

He nodded. “And then I pushed her over.”

“It makes—” The room started getting blurry around me, and I struggled to stand. Had he put something in my drink? I thought about him pouring out the lemonade for both of us. We both had some, but he—spilled his on me.

So I had to go to the closet.

“My God, you planned this. You wanted me to know. What did you put in my drink?”