The Last Victim (19 page)
Authors: Kevin O'Brien
In fact, she commanded the room, and it was a heady experience to have Brad’s pals hanging on her every word. She was so used to them treating her like a second-class citizen. Now they loved her. And they loved one particular revenge fantasy that played on Mallory’s obsession for Gorman’s Creek—as well as her claustrophobia.
“Oh God, that’s a fantastic idea!” Cheryl said, slapping the top of the breakfast table. “Let’s do it! Mallory totally deserves it. She’ll get so scared, she’ll shit in her pants again—like she did in fifth grade.”
Sitting on the kitchen counter, Brad shook his head. “That’s really juvenile. It’s more like a junior high school prank. And to tell you the truth, I don’t feel like getting in trouble again—just to pick on poor Mallory Meehan.”
“The bitch ratted on us!” Cheryl retorted. “I had to do forty hours of community service last month because of her.”
“And she stole Mom’s necklace,” Bridget added. “You should have seen how awful she was to Sonny Fessler. She kept calling him ‘retard’ right to his face, and screaming at him—”
“We got to do this, man,” Fuller insisted, with a mouthful of Cheetos. “The skank deserves it.”
“Shit, Bridget,” Olivia said, laughing. “I had no idea you’re such a kick-ass hell-raiser.”
And Bridget had no idea what she’d just started.
While Brad and his friends made plans and scouted the Gorman’s Creek locale, Bridget didn’t take any of it too seriously. She didn’t think they’d actually go through with the prank. But then Cheryl announced the date for putting their plan into action: Saturday, August 3.
It was up to Bridget to get the ball rolling. They gathered in the kitchen that Saturday afternoon while Bridget phoned Mallory and pretended to make amends. “I think you were right about the boys being killed in Gorman’s Creek, Mallory,” she lied. “I . . .”
Bridget hesitated. She suddenly didn’t like herself for using the deaths of Andy and his friends as a way of luring someone into a trap. She wasn’t enjoying this.
Brad and Olivia dragged Fuller out of the kitchen because he kept cracking up. But Cheryl took the proceedings very seriously. Sitting across the kitchen table from Bridget, she nodded and prodded her to go on.
“Um, you know how the newspapers said the boys had no shoes or socks?” Bridget continued. “I think I found something—in Gorman’s Creek. There’s a crawl space right by the Bowers house. Remember, I found it while we were exploring together? I saw some dirty sneakers in there. I—I didn’t make the connection until I was looking over some old newspapers in the library this morning. Do you want to go back to Gorman’s Creek with me tonight? Maybe there’s a reward we don’t know about. You and I could split it.”
Mallory seemed too smart to go for the bait. Part of Bridget figured it wasn’t really going to happen.
But two hours later, at 7:45, Mallory met her at the break in the barbed-wire fence along the Fesslers’ property. It was still light out, with dusk just starting to creep over the horizon. They didn’t have any trouble navigating the crude trail.
The plan was pretty simple. Before reaching the remnants of the Bowers house, Bridget would pretend to get scared. She’d turn and run back, screaming that Mallory could have the reward money all to herself. That was the cue for Brad, Cheryl, Olivia, and Fuller to pop out of their hiding places. They would be in disguise. Brad and his friends would grab Mallory, then drag her to the crawl space and throw her inside. The claustrophobic Mallory would freak out. They would sit on the trapdoor—for five minutes. “No longer than that,” Brad had insisted. “And if she starts crying too much, let’s abort. We don’t want to hurt her. We’re just going to scare her.”
At one point, Brad had even suggested they should take off their disguises once they moved away from the trapdoor. He wanted to help Mallory out of the little bunker, then maybe take her to dinner or something. He saw the prank as a way of getting even and then burying the hatchet.
“Just how far is your head up your ass?” Fuller had retorted. “That bitch will be out for blood afterward. I say once we get off the trapdoor, we run like hell. By the time she gets her fat butt out of that crawl space, we’ll be halfway home.”
The disguises, it had been decided, would stay on—in case Mallory later went to the police about it. Mallory had been the victim of so many pranks by so many different classmates for so many years, the cops probably wouldn’t single out the foursome she’d ratted on almost two months before.
They figured Mallory wouldn’t go to the cops about this anyway, because she’d have to admit that she was trespassing in Gorman’s Creek. They figured they were pretty safe if they kept their disguises on.
All their planning, plotting, and second-guessing seemed like a lot of work for a silly prank. As Bridget trudged through the woods with Mallory, it struck her as pointless. Brad’s first instincts about this revenge fantasy now seemed on the money. They were five college-bound adults, cooking up a scheme barely worthy of junior high school kids.
Bridget may have had the idea, but Cheryl had become the driving force in making it happen. Bridget figured Brad went along with this scheme for Cheryl—and whatever kind of sex she’d promised him.
But as they came closer to the Bowers ruins, Bridget wondered how she could derive any pleasure from this. Yeah, for a while, she felt like Cheryl, Olivia, and Fuller considered her a friend, an equal. She felt accepted by them—not as Brad’s twin sister, but as another cool member of their little group. Yet when she thought about it, they really were a bunch of jerks—not all that better than Mallory.
“You saw the corpses, didn’t you?” Mallory was saying, veering off the path—toward what was left of the Bowers home. “Did you see that the boys were barefoot?”
“Yes, I saw,” Bridget muttered. She kept asking herself how she could use that detail from Andy Shields’s murder as a decoy in this stupid prank.
“You babysat for him. Do you remember what kind of sneakers he had?”
She remembered—after seeing those dead boys without any shoes or socks. Andy had loved his dark green Converse All-Stars.
“No, I don’t remember his shoes,” Bridget lied. She stopped in her tracks. “Listen, Mallory,” she whispered. “Let’s turn back. I made all that up about seeing some sneakers in the crawl space out here. It—well, it was an awful thing to lie about. I made that up just to lure you out here.”
Mallory stared at her. “Nice try,” she said with a shrewd smile. “What, did you find out about a reward or something? Did you want it all to yourself?”
“Mallory, there is no reward. There’s
nothing
out here. It’s all a lie.”
nothing
out here. It’s all a lie.”
Stubbornly, Mallory moved toward the clearing—and the remnants of the Bowers house. “You just don’t want me getting any of the credit for solving these murders. Well, I’m the one who told you those boys were killed here in these woods. I’m the one who’ll have a best seller writing about it—”
Bridget started after her. “Don’t you understand? It’s a trap. I’m trying to help you. It’s all a setup.”
She stopped and watched Mallory head toward the Bowerses’ front stoop. “You guys!” she called. “You guys, I’m not doing this! It’s a stupid idea—and I’m calling it off!”
Mallory turned and stared at her.
“Hey, guys?” Bridget called again. She kept waiting for someone to call back—or spring out from behind a tree. But nothing. Could it be that they’d all changed their minds? Had Brad talked some sense into them? Or was this a joke on her? Whatever the case, Bridget felt relieved. She let out a little laugh. “C’mon, Mallory, there’s nothing here. Let’s just—”
Bridget didn’t finish. She saw a figure dart out from behind the Bowerses’ old, crumbling brick fireplace. Bridget gasped. It didn’t seem human with its distorted, brown face. After a moment, Bridget realized it was Olivia with a nylon stocking pulled over her head.
Mallory swiveled around. She let out a deafening scream.
All at once, someone in a gorilla mask came out from behind a tree. Two more people, wearing over-the-head rubber masks of Ron and Nancy Reagan, jumped out from behind some shrubs.
Bridget knew they’d be in disguise, but what she saw seemed surreal—almost funny. They all wore pale green lab coats—probably from the supply her dad brought home from the recycling plant. The maid sometimes wore them while cleaning the house.
“Get her!” someone said in a raspy voice.
They swarmed in on Mallory, who kept shrieking. She started to struggle, but the one in the gorilla mask—Fuller, probably—came up behind her and grabbed her around the waist. The force of it seemed to knock the wind out of her.
Bridget thought he might have cracked one of Mallory’s ribs or something. As they wrestled with her, Bridget caught a glimpse of Mallory’s face, and she was wincing in pain.
They dragged her around the Bowers ruins toward the plateau ridge.
“Stop it!” Bridget screamed. “Don’t! You guys—”
She had to refrain from yelling out their names. She didn’t want to give them away.
But Fuller took care of that by announcing, “Shit, this bitch is heavy!”
“I heard you, Fuller Sterns!” Mallory cried.
They hauled her down to the plateau, past the tree tilting over the ravine. Her heart racing, Bridget ran down to the ridge—in time to see them push Mallory into the crawl space.
“No, no, no!” Mallory cried. “Please, don’t—”
“Wait!” Bridget screamed. Then she heard something snap.
She was standing right behind them now. This close, she could smell that they’d been smoking pot and drinking. This close, she could see that Mallory was hurt.
She was curled up on the rotted wood floor of that tiny pit. The boards beneath her groaned and creaked. The floor started to give way.
One of the girls—Olivia or Cheryl—started laughing hysterically.
But the floor opened up, and Mallory screamed as she fell through the crater, down to the bottom of a shallow well. Suddenly, the screaming stopped.
“What the fuck? Oh my God,” Fuller muttered. He was holding on to his arm, which was bleeding. Mallory must have scratched him.
Bridget stared down the opening. She could barely see Mallory—about thirty feet down, lying on her side.
“Jesus, what are we going to do?” Olivia whispered. “Did we kill her? Is she dead?”
Everyone seemed to be talking at once. They took off their masks. Brad kept telling them to calm down.
Bridget felt as if her heart had stopped. She gaped down at Mallory’s crumpled body and prayed for some movement, just a little whimper, anything.
“Goddamnit, she better be dead!” Cheryl announced. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she desperately glanced around at the ground. She reached for a big stone by the tree trunk. She needed both hands to hoist it up, then struggled to carry it toward the well.
“What the hell are you doing?” Brad asked.
“I’m going to crush her fucking skull! You think she won’t turn us all in? She’ll make sure each one of us is screwed for life. She’ll—”
“For God’s sake, put that down,” Brad said. “Everybody, just—take it easy. Okay?”
Brad shucked off his lab coat. He was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt. Bridget could see he was trembling a bit. Still, he had a calming effect on the others. They all stood by and watched Brad lower himself into the crawl space. “Mallory?” he called. “Mallory, it’s Brad Corrigan, I’m coming down to get you.”
Bridget had a sickly feeling that he was talking to a corpse.
Brad tried to get his footing inside the little bunker, but what was left of the rotted floor wouldn’t support him. The decayed wood let out a groan. Brad scrambled back up to safety.
Bridget was looking down the well. Chunks of wood and dirt fell on Mallory, but she didn’t even flinch. “She’s dead,” Bridget heard herself say, while Brad was catching his breath. “She must have broken her neck in the fall.”
“I say we get the hell out of here,” Fuller announced, still holding on to his arm.
They started arguing with each other, bickering over who was to blame for this, and wondering out loud why that crawl space was built on top of a dry well.
“Who gives a shit why they covered up the well like they did?” Brad said, finally. “And it doesn’t matter who’s to blame for this. We’re all in it now. We’re all responsible. And we need to agree on what to do. So—let’s just calm the hell down—”
“We should go to the police—immediately,” Bridget said. “It’s the only sensible thing to do. If we just leave her here, it’s like we’re murderers. There’s a chance Mallory is just unconscious. Maybe a couple of us can stay here while the others go to the cops. Someone should stay—in case Mallory comes to.”
“Just a minute ago, you were certain she was dead,” Cheryl argued. “She isn’t unconscious, and she isn’t ever coming to. We killed her.”
“The cops aren’t going to believe this was an accident,” Fuller maintained. “Not when she ratted us out a few weeks ago. Look at the scratch marks on my arm. Shit, they’ll throw the book at us.” He sneered at Brad and Bridget. “You two may get off a little easier, because of your dad.” He let out a little laugh. “Then again, maybe they’ll want to make an example of the ‘rich kids.’ Either way, if we go to the cops, we’re screwed—it’s just a question of how much we’ll get screwed.”
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