The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (16 page)

Liam McCullough was sitting five rows above them in the bleachers. Echo could feel his eyes on her back.

“Wow,” Marilyn breathed, “you and Pruitt. Who’d have thought it?”

“Not me,” Deejay said, her eyes returning to the tennis court, and Ruthanne said philosophically, “Well, who can explain love?”

Echo wanted to scream, “It’s not love, it’s not! It’s hate!” Not to mention fear.

In spite of all the time she was spending with Pruitt, Echo had learned nothing useful. Whenever she brought up the motorcycle, Pruitt said, “I am
not
going to tell you where it’s hidden, so forget it. We’re not going to talk about it.”

She was getting nowhere. Meantime, everyone on campus thought she had a thing for Aaron Pruitt. Gag.

Each night when she went to bed, she expected at any moment to hear a knock on the door. She would get up, answer it, and find policemen there, extending a pair of metal handcuffs toward her. “Come along now, miss,” they would say. “We don’t want any trouble. The owner of the minimart has identified you as the girl on the back of the bike.”

And if a knock came and it wasn’t the police, it would be Pruitt, come to finish her off for good.

By the end of that week, Echo wanted nothing more than she wanted an end to all of this, one way or the other. She couldn’t stand it any more, the fear, the anxiety of waiting for the next biker attack, the confusion about what to do. Pruitt hadn’t threatened her lately, but that was because she went with him when he insisted.

She had to find a way out of this.

Make up your mind to do something, Echo, she scolded herself on Thursday night when she was lying in her bed. Make up your mind and then
do
it. Just
do
it!

A knock did come then, but Echo knew immediately that it was neither the police nor Pruitt because Trixie’s high, shrill voice called, “Echo! Forgot my key! What’d you lock the door for, anyway?”

Echo let her in.

“I guess it’s not such a bad idea, locking the door,” Trixie admitted, flopping down on her bed. “Did you hear the latest bit about that minimart attack?”

A silent nod was the only answer she got.

“They said there was a girl with him this time. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and the store owner said her hair was …” Trixie tilted her head, stared at Echo. “Was copper-colored. And long. And curly. He said she was fat.”

“Who?”

“The girl on the bike,” Trixie answered impatiently. “Aren’t you listening, Echo? The girl riding with the biker had hair the color of yours, according to the guy on the radio in Tony’s car, but she was fat. ‘Generously-sized,’ he said.” Trixie laughed. “Anyway,” she got up and moved to the bathroom, “I guess that lets you off the hook. You are most certainly not ‘generously-sized,’ Echo.”

Echo realized then what the store owner must have seen when he heard the commotion outside and hurried to the windowed door. He’d seen her sweatshirt. The thing was so bulky and oversized to begin with. With the bike racing around the parking lot at high speeds, the wind had filled up her sweatshirt with air, like a balloon. When it billowed out around her, she must have looked twenty or thirty pounds heavier than she actually was.

When the phone rang, she answered it, sure that it was for Trixie. But it wasn’t.

It was Pruitt.

“Tomorrow night,” he said without a greeting. “Movie. At the mall. Pick you up at eight.”

“No.” Echo kept her voice low, to keep Trixie, still in the bathroom, from hearing. “I’m not going.”

There was a brief silence. And then, “Oh, yeah, you are.”

The easy confidence in his voice maddened her. She was
so
sick of that voice! Sick of
him.
“You’re a killer, Pruitt,” she hissed into the phone. “You kidnapped me and dragged me off to that minimart. And then you blackmailed me into hanging out with you on campus as if we were friends. We’re
not
friends, Pruitt!”

“Yeah, right. Tell it to the cops, Echo. I’m sure they’d believe you.”

She had never hated anyone so much. “I’m going to find that bike,” she said quietly, evenly. “And when I do, the police will link it to you. I will be so thrilled to testify against you, I won’t even care if I’m expelled from school.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

Trixie opened the bathroom door, a white towel wrapped around her head.

“You’re not going to live long enough to find
anything,”
Pruitt hissed into the phone. “You never learn, do you, Echo? You
called
the police. You sent them to that cave, and then you sent them to me, and how much good did it do you? Do you really think a single police officer will listen to you now? Go ahead, go hunting in every cave on that hill if you want. But in the meantime, you’re going to be keeping me company, you got that?”

She slammed the phone into the cradle, wishing fervently that the noise would shatter Pruitt’s eardrum.

“Wow, who was that? You just turned cranberry red.”

“No one.” True. No one at all.

When Trixie had dried her hair and gone to bed, Echo got up and sat on the windowseat. If you were Pruitt, she asked herself, where would
you
hide the motorcycle that could connect you to several deaths?

The answer came, sharp and clear, as if she were reading a newspaper headline. CLEVER KILLER HIDES MOTORCYCLE IN CAVE ALREADY SEARCHED BY POLICE.

Of course! Could there be a safer place?

Her heart was pounding. If she was right … if she found the bike … it would be all over, one way or the other. Okay, she’d get in serious trouble, herself. But it would be worth it to get Pruitt off campus forever. So he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.

She didn’t have a flashlight. Hers was still somewhere out there on the hill. She wouldn’t be surprised if Pruitt had taken it when he cleaned out the cave.

Fumbling around in Trixie’s desk drawers, Echo finally found a flashlight. It was pitifully small. She checked to make sure it was working. It was, although the beam was pathetically narrow, and very pale.

It would have to do. If she waited until morning, she’d jump right out of her skin. Sleeping would be impossible.

Almost as an afterthought, she grabbed a nail file off her night table. It was metal, and long, and sharp. Might not scare anyone, but it was better than nothing.

Pocketing the flashlight and yanking a sweater off a closet hanger, Echo left the room, closed the door behind her, and headed down the dim, quiet hall to the elevator.

E
CHO COULDN’T BE SURE
Pruitt wasn’t following her as she hurried across a cool, foggy campus, but it didn’t seem likely. If he’d been watching their dorm windows from outside, he’d have seen the lights go off. Thinking they’d gone to bed, wouldn’t he then have returned to the frat house to sleep? It was very late, almost two in the morning. But then, maybe Pruitt stayed up all night, like bats and vampires and werewolves and other blood-sucking creatures of prey.

At the last minute, Echo changed her plans. Something about Pruitt’s medical file had been bothering her. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, she only knew something hadn’t seemed right. As she came near the entrance of the infirmary, sitting dark and silent in the foggy mist, she decided to detour before going to the cave. There were no patients in there now, she knew that. The lone doctor on call would be asleep on a cot in the back room. This could be the perfect opportunity to go over Pruitt’s file again.

Inside, Echo was grateful that the flashlight’s beam was so narrow and pale. Harder for someone to spot her that way. And she knew her way around the infirmary so well, she really didn’t need much light.

The medical records file was locked. But breaking into a file cabinet seemed trivial compared to being linked with the Mad Biker. One crime leads to another, Echo thought, and felt in her pockets for the nail file she’d brought.

She used it to pry open the cabinet. It took a while, because she had no idea what she was doing, and every little sound she made brought a scream of protest from her nerves. At one point, she tugged so hard on the drawer handle, a pile of folders waiting to be filed in the drawers sailed into the air, landing on the cold white tiles.

When the drawer finally slid open, Echo remembered what it was that had been bothering her about Pruitt’s medical file. Under, “Scars, Birthmarks, Etc., he had written “None.” Yet the journal entry had stated quite clearly,
“I will have scars inside and out that will never go away.”

She
knew
where Pruitt’s inside scars were … in his sick and twisted mind. But where were the visible scars from the motorcycle accident? She had never noticed any.

Fingers fumbling nervously, she checked his file again. There it was, “Scars—none.” And no mention of “Ross,” either.

Echo sat back on her heels, the folder in her hands. She glanced down at it again, checking the item labeled “Serious injuries.” If you’d ever had one, you were supposed to check the box and write in the space allotted what that injury had been. In the allotted space on Pruitt’s file, there, again, was the word “none.”

Had he just not wanted to mention the motorcycle accident that had killed Ross?

Echo replaced the file and closed the drawer, painfully aware that anyone who took a good look at the lock would see that it had been tampered with. But no one would know she had done it, unless Pruitt was dogging her footsteps even this late at night.

Using her flashlight to guide her, she began scooping up the spilled folders. She didn’t intend to take the time to return each to its correct place. She shoved all the manila folders into a pile and would have returned them then to the top of the cabinet if she hadn’t noticed a name that stopped her.

SEXTON, MARILYN.

Echo felt a pang of sympathy. Marilyn had been in today to see the doctor? Marilyn never complained much, but everyone knew her arms and legs, which had had so much reconstructive surgery after the fire, sometimes plagued her. The whirlpool wasn’t always enough. This must be one of those times.

What was it like to be only eighteen and live with so much pain, like Deejay and Marilyn and Ruthanne?

Echo would never have looked inside Marilyn’s file, had it been closed. She considered the file private property. She had invaded Pruitt’s only because she was desperate for answers.

But Marilyn’s file wasn’t closed. The primary information sheet was sitting on top of the folder bearing her name. One particular piece of information leaped out at Echo as if to say, “Look! Look at this!”

It was a name written in the list of relatives. The name caught Echo’s eye and stilled her hand in the act of replacing the folders.

The name was “Ross.”

Marilyn had a relative named Ross?

Had
had, Echo realized, her eyes skimming the information. Past tense. Because the name was in the column marked “Deceased.” Dead. Gone. No longer alive.

Marilyn’s relative named “Ross” was dead.

Cause of death: “Accidental.” Marilyn Sexton’s relative named Ross had died in an accident.

A motorcycle accident?

Her eyes continued to fly across the paper. She found something else. Marilyn’s parents, according to the information she had provided to the university, were still very much alive. Also a brother and two sisters. Hadn’t anyone
died
in that awful house fire that had scarred Marilyn so severely?

“I will have scars inside and out that will never go away.”

Marilyn Sexton had scars. Lots of them.

Maybe there had never
been
a house fire. Maybe that was why Marilyn never talked about it. Because Marilyn’s scars had, instead, been caused by a tragic motorcycle accident that had taken the life of a beloved relative. A brother, maybe.

Such an accident could make someone very, very angry.

Echo looked again, this time to see who “Ross” had been to Marilyn … a brother? An uncle?

She blinked when she saw the answer. “Aunt.”

Aunt Ross? Ross was a guy’s name, wasn’t it?

Could be a family name. Echo knew girls named Morgan and Lee. And look who’s talking, anyway, she thought, what about your own name?

She replaced the pile of papers on the top of the cabinet, and left the infirmary, lost in thought.

Marilyn?
Marilyn?

How was Marilyn connected to Pruitt? To the motorcycle? Marilyn couldn’t possibly hop on a motorcycle. She had days when she walked almost as stiffly as Ruthanne.

Still … if you were as determined as the person who had written that journal, maybe you could do anything if you set your mind to it.

Marilyn?

If she hadn’t been so lost in thought, she would have heard the rustling sound coming from the bushes just outside the infirmary, seen the dark figure step out from behind them and then move toward the telephone hanging on the outside of the building.

But Echo was too distracted to notice.

T
HE CLOSER ECHO GOT
to the river, the thicker the fog became. The pale beam of her small flashlight nearly disappeared in the damp, gray mist.

But she kept going. She was more confused than ever now, and she was counting on the cave to give her some answers.
If
she was right about Pruitt being clever enough to return the bike to its original hiding place.

As she hurried, Echo fought to sort out what she’d learned about Marilyn. Marilyn had an aunt named “Ross” who had died an accidental death. Marilyn had visible scars. And no one in Marilyn’s family had died in a tragic house fire. Maybe Marilyn and her aunt had been in a motorcycle crash. The aunt had died, all because of a clerk’s negligence and cowardice. And Marilyn had vowed revenge, which was why she had never told the truth about the accident. She didn’t want anyone connecting her with a motorcycle.

Marilyn?

Then what about Pruitt? Where did he fit in?

It was Pruitt on that bike, Echo was positive. At least …

At least, it was Pruitt the first time, when they turned left at Campus Drive and drove along the highway. She had made that appointment with him in person.