The Silent Scream (16 page)

Maybe their housemates would eat and eat and they’d all be gone for hours.

A car pulled up in front of the house. A girl jumped out and began hurrying up the driveway.

Jess stood up. It wasn’t Cath or Linda or anyone else she knew. Jess moved down the steps to greet the girl. Maybe she was looking for directions.

“Hi!” the small, dark-haired girl said as she arrived, breathless, at the top of the hill. “Is Milo home?”

Jess drew in her breath. “Milo?”

The girl handed Jess a blue windbreaker. “I’m Daisy Lindgren. Milo and I were studying at the library last week. It rained and I didn’t have a jacket, so he loaned me this windbreaker.” She laughed. “It was weird … we left our stuff upstairs to work down in the computer room and when we came back up, there was another jacket on Milo’s chair. He said it was his, but he’d lost it. Had no idea how it got there. And boy, was he ticked off when he saw a big tear on one shoulder. Said it hadn’t been there before. Anyway, since he had
two
jackets and I didn’t have any, he loaned me this windbreaker. Could you see that he gets it, please?”

Jess took the windbreaker. A sudden sense of dread came over her. Milo had said he was at the library that terrible Friday night. And he had said his jacket was missing. “When … when were you at the library with Milo?” she asked, her voice sounding hoarse and ragged. “What night last week exactly?” Don’t say Friday, she prayed, do not say Friday.

“When?” Daisy Lindgren frowned. “Well, let’s see, I had chorus practice on Wednesday, and I went shopping for shoes on Thursday, so it was … Friday. I was at the library with Milo on Friday night.”

“H
OW LONG WERE YOU
in the library with Milo?” Jess asked, forcing the words out. The girl would say she had been with Milo only for a few minutes Friday evening. Maybe half an hour. After that, Jess told herself, he came back to Nightingale Hall to sabotage the furnace valve, push me down the cellar stairs, and wait for me outside the window. Because that
is
what Milo did.

“How long? All night. We got there about eight, I think, and stayed until midnight, when the library closed.” The pretty face screwed up into a frown. “Why?”

“You couldn’t have been there all that time,” Jess said desperately, wishing Ian would return. “Linda—my housemate—was there. If Milo had been there, Linda would have seen him.”

“We were downstairs. At the computers.”

Jess’s stomach was doing somersaults. Milo had been downstairs at the library last Friday night for four hours? No …

“Our world history professor told Milo he wouldn’t accept one more handwritten paper from Milo. Said he couldn’t read his hen-scratching. Milo can’t type and he doesn’t have a typewriter. I couldn’t read his handwriting, either, so he had to dictate his paper to me while I typed it into the computer.”

Milo didn’t have a typewriter? He couldn’t type? Of course he could. He had typed those letters to Giselle …

Hadn’t
he?

There was a pause as Jess struggled for the right questions to ask, questions that would give her the answers she wanted to hear.

“
Where
is Milo?” the girl asked again.

“He’s … he’s not here.” There weren’t any “right” questions. She had already asked the questions, and Daisy had given her the answers. And Daisy had told the truth, Jess was sure of that. Sickeningly sure.

Why hadn’t Milo told them he couldn’t type? Why hadn’t he said he couldn’t have written the letters because he couldn’t type? Why hadn’t he
told
them he wasn’t alone at the library, that a girl from school could provide an ironclad alibi for him?

Jess knew the answer. Because no one would have believed him. They had already made up their minds.

“Thanks for bringing Milo’s jacket,” Jess told the girl. Her whole body felt numb. “I’ll see that he gets it.”

But, of course, she couldn’t do that. She had no idea where Milo had gone.

His thin, bearded face danced before her eyes. And she realized then that what she had seen in his face that Friday night hadn’t been anger, after all. It had been pain. Simple pain. Because the people he lived with had judged and convicted him unjustly.

A car horn sounded at the bottom of the hill.

“Gotta go,” Daisy said. “Listen, tell Milo I’m sorry I didn’t get the jacket to him sooner, okay?” She gave Jess a quizzical look. “You never did say where Milo is, exactly. Oh, well, see you.”

As she turned and ran down the hill, the short, full skirt of her dress whipping out behind her, Jess thought, I want to go with her. I want to run down the hill, too, and up the road for miles and miles until I’m so far away from here that I will be able to forget Nightingale Hall and what we did to Milo Keith.

But she knew there was no place far enough away for that.

“Jess!”

A voice, calling her name. It sounded like it was coming from behind the house.

It came again, her name shouted with urgency. And it
was
coming from behind the house. It had to be Ian calling her. No one else was home. She hadn’t seen him come outside, but he could have taken the fire escape. What was he doing out back?

Shivering with cold, Jess turned and hurried around the side of the house. There was no one there.

“Ian?” she called. “Where
are
you?”

“Jess, I’m down here!” The voice was coming now from the creek that meandered through the woods at the bottom of the slope behind the house. Through the trees, she could see a faint golden glow on the rushing water. Ian must have a flashlight. What on
earth
was he doing in the woods?

Jess smiled. Maybe Ian thought a creek in the woods was a really romantic spot.

“Hurry
up
!” he called. “You’ve got to see this!”

She’d have to remove her shoes. Trying to climb down the slope in high heels would be insane.

Carrying the shoes in one hand, she aimed for the yellow glow, pushing aside a final clump of undergrowth as she arrived at the creek.

“Ian,” she began over the babble of the rushing creek, and then stopped as her eyes were automatically drawn to a spot illuminated in the water by the broad beam of the flashlight. There was something there, submerged. A large piece of paper … its top edges firmly pinioned by a smooth, gray rock, its bottom edges flapping frantically as the rapidly moving water pulled and tugged at it.

Her curiosity aroused, Jess bent to peer more closely into the creek. It wasn’t a piece of paper. It was a … photograph. Of a girl. A beautiful girl. Even with the eerie distortion caused by the flowing water, turned a garish yellow by the flashlight’s glow, Jess could clearly make out the features.

The girl in the watery photograph was Giselle McKendrick.

And the photograph fluttering in the creek had been defaced with the same ugly black slash mark that marred the smaller photo found by Jess in her room.

Jess gasped and turned to face Ian.

But it wasn’t Ian, after all, aiming the flashlight at the photograph. It was Trucker.

“I didn’t know you were home,” Jess said, frowning. “Where’s Ian?”

“I left the dance early.” Trucker shrugged. “No one noticed. Came home, changed my clothes, and decided to fish for a while.” He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, open at the throat, and jeans. “Milo put this picture here, Jess. A few minutes ago. I saw him, but he didn’t see me. He put it there, then he called you, and ran. He
wanted
you to see it. Up to his old tricks again.”

Milo? No … Milo hadn’t done any of the things they’d thought he had, so he couldn’t have done this, either. Milo wasn’t a criminal. Milo was a victim.
Their
victim, and they would have to make it up to him somehow.

But … if Milo was innocent, then who … who was
guilty
?

And why was Trucker lying about Milo?

Then she watched, lost in confusion, as Trucker waded into the water and bent to remove the photograph. And as he stretched out his arm, the collar of his shirt gaped open further and revealed a cruel, jagged slash in the soft flesh of his throat. It looked painful. And it looked recent. As recent as, say, no more than a week ago?

When she slashed backward with that chunk of glass, toward a figure straddling her and leaning forward to whisper in her ear, where would her thrusting arm have been likeliest to strike? The face … or the throat? There was no mark on Trucker’s face. But there
was
a very ugly mark, the kind easily made by a large chunk of broken glass, on his throat.

She had begun backing away even before he stood up, saying, “I think I’ll leave it there. It’s proof that Milo hated Giselle. We can show the others when they get home. When I tell them I saw Milo put it there …” his voice broke off as he saw the expression on her face.

She realized, too late, that she should have hidden the fact that she’d guessed the truth. Maybe she would have had a chance, then. He knew the minute he looked at her. She could see it in his eyes.

“Where is Ian?” she whispered. “What have you done to him?”

T
RUCKER LAUGHED. “YOU COULD
say Ian’s …
tied up
right now.” Seeing the look of horror on her face, he added, “Oh, relax. He’s still breathing. And he never knew what hit him.”

Ian was okay. Jess began to breathe again. But … he wouldn’t be able to help her out of this.

Her eyes moved to the photograph, still flapping in the water. “You …
you
killed Giselle?”

Trucker’s expression sobered. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. It was
her
fault.” His eyes darkened with rage. “She made me so mad. The way she treated me, after all I’d done for her.”

Jess wanted to turn and run. But there was nowhere close by to run to. Trucker would catch up with her … and kill her.

Jess kept her voice level. “What had you done for her, Trucker?” If she could keep him talking, stall till the others got home …

Trucker’s face took on a faraway look, and his voice softened. “Her car broke down on the freeway one afternoon. It was raining, I remember, a real summer downpour. I was driving a tow truck to earn some money for college, and my truck was the first one to come along. When I knocked on her window, she rolled it down, and then she started crying. I mean, it was a cloudburst. I could tell she wasn’t the kind of person who cried all the time, and this had been building up for a while. The dam just burst. She spilled out all this stuff about her mom being in the hospital, really sick, and her dad not being home when she tried to call him from one of the freeway phones and how she hadn’t wanted the stupid little sports car in the first place. She said her daddy only gave it to her because he felt guilty about spending so much time at the hospital.”

Trucker shook his head, not noticing that Jess was shuffling her feet backward in the tiniest of steps as he spoke. “At first, I thought she was just some spoiled rich girl. But the more she talked, the more I could see she needed taking care of. So,” he finished proudly, “that’s what I did. I took her home, got her car fixed, and when I brought it back to her, I stayed. She was glad to have the company.”

“I’m sure she was,” Jess agreed, nodding.

“And I never left her side again, except to go to work, the rest of the summer. I could see that her old friends didn’t understand her like I did. They weren’t what she needed.
I
was all she needed. After a while, she saw that, too. She didn’t need anybody but me. That made us both happy.”

Suddenly, Trucker shouted, “Stop right there! And don’t move another step!” His face twisted in anger. “You must think I’m a complete idiot!” Thrusting the still lit flashlight into a front pocket of his jeans, which turned his face into an eerie yellow mask, he reached into another pocket and pulled out a long, thin wire, bending it into a circle.

Like a necklace, Jess thought, her heart pounding.

Keep him talking, her mind warned fiercely. “If you were so good to Giselle,” she said rapidly, “why didn’t she go with you when you came here to get her last spring?”

He had begun walking toward her slowly, the wire held loosely in his hands. Her question stopped him. His eyes narrowed. “Because this place changed her.” He glanced up the hill toward Nightingale Hall, its lights gleaming faintly through the trees. His voice shook with rage. “I
hate
this place!”

But when he looked at Jess again, he spoke normally. “That summer, she
agreed
when I said we’d be together forever. But then her mother died and her father remembered that he had a daughter. Giselle was so grateful for the attention he finally gave her that she agreed to go to college when he insisted. She didn’t
want
to. She didn’t want to leave me, I know she didn’t. She did it for him.”

Jess didn’t believe that. Maybe Trucker honestly believed that, or maybe he was just kidding himself. But from everything she’d heard about Giselle, she believed college had always been in Giselle’s plans. A momentary loneliness and terrible sense of loss had made her temporarily dependent upon Trucker. That was understandable. But Jess was certain that even if Giselle’s father hadn’t pulled himself out of his grief and tended to his daughter again, sooner or later Giselle would have ended her dependence on Trucker. In fact, going off to college had probably been her first step in that direction.

And Jess would bet anything that Giselle had left willingly, maybe even eagerly. She had probably never
intended
to marry Trucker. He’d wanted it so much, he’d fantasized that it was true.

“Then she came
here,
” Trucker went on, delivering another glowering stare toward the house. “And she changed. She ignored my phone calls, my letters. I thought we’d get it all straightened out at Christmas. But she didn’t come
home.
She went to stay with a friend instead.” His eyes went back to Jess. “She was so ungrateful! After everything I’d
done
for her!”

Jess’s ears strained for the distant sound of tires on gravel. But the air remained maddeningly still. An owl hooted up near the house, but there was no crunching of gravel.