Lurker

4

“I still think Dale sent that text,” Laurel said, curling her legs under her on the overstuffed chair in her bedroom. She dropped the remote in her lap and reached for the glass of tea she’d set on the windowsill.

“Why would he?” Drew asked from her place on the bed.

The two had forged a functioning truce since Nicki’s vigil the night before. Mandy imagined it was more a result of Drew’s fear of being left home alone than any real forgiveness, but it was a start. Now the three of them sat in Laurel’s bedroom. An Ashton Kutcher DVD was paused on the television screen.

“To freak her out,” Laurel said. “He gets her all scared with this whack job running around, and she comes running back to his big strong arms.”

“Oh,” Drew said, as if that made perfect sense.

“It’s not Dale,” Mandy said. “He’s not into subtle. Last night he left three voice messages on my cell. Besides, even if he were able to think of a scheme like that, which I’m finding highly doubtful, I don’t think he’s sick enough to do it. I mean, the message was basically laughing at Nicki’s death, unless I’m totally missing something. He may be an ass, but I don’t think he’s that deep down cruel.”

“He let you catch him sniffing around the chat easy enough.”

That was true. Maybe Dale was sick, like really twisted. It happened all the time. The guys that seemed to be so together were often just good at hiding something foul and dark. And someone like Dale, a privileged brat who apparently had no morals, could certainly work up that kind of nastiness. No, she thought. You’re just angry at him. Dale wasn’t a freak. He was a guy—just a big, stupid guy. He wasn’t evil.

“How would he block his user ID? I mean the text message came through without a handle. Dale couldn’t have figured out how to do that. He can’t even program his cell phone.”

Laurel smiled broadly and put her tea back on the windowsill. “Maybe not, but he also can’t figure out geometry, which is why he has geek-king Matthew do it for him. Are you seeing my ever-so-subtle point?”

“I didn’t even know you could hide your ID like that,” Drew said.

“Well, it happened, which means it can be done.” This from Laurel. “I’m the Goddess of Tech, but they come out with functions and features so fast that even I can’t keep up.”

“So,” Mandy said, “you think Dale had Matt do this for him?”

“I’m just saying it’s one big, obvious, really likely possibility.”

“God, that’s so romantic,” said Drew.

Laurel slowly turned her head toward Drew on the bed, then looked at Mandy. “You are going to let me slap her, right?”

“Well, he’s doing all of this for Mandy,” Drew said. “Just to get her back. I mean he’s obviously thinking about her a lot.”

“Logic fault,” Mandy said. “If he had spent ten seconds thinking about me—the ten he spent writing ‘kewl profile, let me grab your tits’ to that girl online—none of this would be an issue.”

Laurel laughed and clapped her hands. “Girl’s got the right head on this one.”

“I just think it’s cool to have someone missing you that way.”

“And yet so many stalker victims still press charges,” Mandy said. “Look, whatever. It’s over. If it was him, his plan didn’t work. If it wasn’t…”

Mandy didn’t know how to finish that statement. She didn’t have to. As she was speaking, Laurel’s door burst open and her father shoved his head in the room. Drew, naturally, yelped and fanned her face, and Laurel opened her mouth to protest, but her father was already talking.

“Turn on the news,” he said, stomping into the room, heading directly for the television. “They have a picture of the guy. You all need to see this, need to know what to look out for. Why is the screen frozen? Who is this? What’s wrong with this television set?”

Laurel pulled the remote from her lap and hit a button, sending Ashton Kutcher’s face away and replacing him with an episode of Saturday Night Live. “What channel?” she asked.

“Try four.”

Laurel pressed a button. The three girls gathered on the bed for the best view of the screen. A grainy black-and-white picture hung frozen above the anchorman’s shoulder. Then it came to life, showing a hunched man in a black coat pulling someone across what looked like a parking lot. The angle was odd; it seemed to be shot from high up. The man was looking over his shoulder, giving the camera a blurry profile. The person with him yanked hard, trying to escape. He yanked back, and all of them gasped when Nicolette Bennington’s frightened face came into the frame.

“Where’s the volume?” Laurel’s father asked.

Laurel hit a button.

“Again, police are looking for this man in connection with the abduction and murder of Nicolette Bennington.”

“Damn,” Laurel’s dad said angrily. “That didn’t give you a good enough look. If you kids were paying attention and actually took this seriously instead of just watching your little heartthrobs telling fart jokes…”

“Dad! Breathe! We’ll download it off the Web.”

Her father looked at her like she’d just slapped him. Confusion and anger took turns scrunching his features. With no reply, he simply shook his head and walked out of the room.

The best picture they could find, the one that showed the most of the man’s face, filled Laurel’s computer screen less than two minutes later. The image was black-and-white, taken by a security camera concealed in the eaves of the library. It showed the large, stooped man in a long black coat, his hand firmly grasping Nicki’s bicep. He looked feral, like an animal.

“God, Nicki must have been so scared,” Drew said.

Yes, Mandy thought. She was scared herself, and she was only looking at a bad picture of the man. She wasn’t being held by him, dragged into the dark woods at the back of the library where he would…

“He’s like grandpa old,” Laurel said. “Total Crypt Keeper.”

She had that right. From the side, the man’s nose was rounded like a beak over his thin lips. His chin seemed to point downward, but Mandy thought that might just be a trick of the shadows or maybe a beard that had lost definition in the photograph. The eye she could see was surrounded by puffy flesh. His eyebrows rested on a pronounced ridge. His cheek sank into shadow just above his jaw. Mandy thought about the images of witches she’d seen in elementary school. He reminded her of those, only male, without the hat and broom, and very real.

“Gotta be a drifter,” Laurel announced. “They would have caught him already if he was local. You can’t hide a face like that.”

Though disturbed by the image, Mandy found herself relieved. Nicki’s killer had not been one of them, had not been a friend or acquaintance—she’d never hang out with someone like that—and this knowledge was soothing in its own way. She felt safer.

“At least we know who to look out for,” Drew said. “God, he’s so creepy.”

“Yes, he is,” Laurel agreed. “I think we need some Ashton to wash that freak out of our eyes.”

Mandy left Drew at Laurel’s house, hoping her friends would talk and put last night’s misunderstanding behind them for good. Walking through the cool afternoon air, she felt uneasy. She lived in the same neighborhood as Laurel, only seven blocks away, and though she never once saw anyone creeping through yards, the terrible man from the news followed her home. She kept throwing looks over her shoulder and to the sides, checking the narrow yards that ran beside familiar houses. She carried him in her head, his beak nose, his thin lips. The thought of his fingers made her skin crawl.

Her feet moved faster as she told herself that he had moved on. He couldn’t stay anywhere in town—in the state—without being recognized. His face was all over the news. His face, his nose, his lips, his fingers…

Don’t run, she told herself. Just be cool. There’s no way he’s out here. Don’t freak. Walking up her own driveway, Mandy tingled with anxiety. She didn’t want to be alone in the house. Once inside, she locked the door with trembling fingers, then hurried to the kitchen to test the back door locks as well. Upstairs, checking e-mail, she did not turn on music, but instead listened for any break in the house’s quiet.

Again, she was surprised by how few e-mails waited in her inbox. Half a dozen friends she’d seen at the vigil dropped notes, commenting on the sad event. Dale wrote her two notes, both of which she erased on sight. The ritual of e-mail comforted her. There was spam from an online clothing store where she’d bought a blouse once, an offer to buy Viagra online, and a note from a screen handle she didn’t immediately recognize.

Kylenevers

Subject: Me Again

Hey, sorry about yesterday. I know we don’t know each other. Kyle here. I feel kind of bad about IMing you like that. With everything going on with N., I just wanted to chat…don’t know a lot of people and was kind of upset. Going to the vigil last night helped. A really nice ceremony. Were you there? Anyway, sorry. Maybe we can chat some other time. I really did like your profile.;-) C ya.

K

“Not needing a looz for my buddy list,” Mandy said. She closed the e-mail and was navigating the cursor to the delete button when the doorbell rang.

The sound was so unexpected, her heart leaped into her throat. She stood, left the desk, and creeped to the window. Doing her best to look without being seen, she searched the curb, then looked down at her driveway.

“Oh, perfect,” she whispered, seeing Dale’s silver Audi parked on the white concrete.

The doorbell rang again. Mandy considered ignoring it, like she had ignored his phone calls and his e-mails, but told herself she was being childish. This wasn’t the mature way to handle a relationship. Not that being mature was one of Dale’s strong points. Still, she knew that if she didn’t talk to him, he’d keep coming around. Besides, if he was playing stupid jokes, like sending her twisted text messages, she wanted to put a stop to it. Right now.

At the front door, she looked through the window and saw Dale bouncing on his heels nervously. She hated to admit it, but he looked great, wearing a thin black leather jacket over a cream-colored sweater and perfectly faded jeans. His black hair was properly mussed and fixed with product. To her, he looked like a young Keanu Reeves. In fact, that’s what most people thought. Mandy reached up to pat down her hair, then stopped in defiance.

She didn’t care what she looked like, not for Dale. This wasn’t a date!

Mandy opened the door, consciously drawing a frown on her lips. “Dale,” she said dryly, as if already completely bored with the conversation, though her heart beat fast.

“Hey,” he said, still fidgeting with nervous energy. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said coolly.

“Yeah, good. Look, you didn’t return any of my messages or anything, and I was getting kind of worried. Things are kind of weird now with Nicki and all.”

“I’m a big girl,” Mandy told him. “I can take care of myself.”

“Sure, yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s just, well, I was worried.”

“You said that.”

“I know,” Dale replied, his voice shaky. He bounced on his heels again, looked over his shoulder at the street and the houses, looked back at Mandy. “Could I come in? I mean, so we can talk?”

“Dale, I’ve said all I intend to.” She liked the confident sound of her voice. It was strong and in control. This was the way she had sounded in her head, when she’d imagined all the things she would say to him. “We obviously have very different ideas about what a relationship is.”

“Come on, Mandy. No, we don’t. I was just flirting, being stupid. It’s no big deal. Nothing happened.”

“Well, Dale, something did happen. You got caught. Besides that, you humiliated me, and now I have to deal with that, and so do you.”

She could see him struggling for a comeback. He was trapped. She didn’t know if he was going to go the childish route and get angry with her, make some nasty comment, or if he was going to continue trying to talk his way out of it. When he did speak, he actually surprised her.

“You’re right,” he said. “I was stupid, too stupid to even know why I did it. But all of this stuff with Nicki is really getting to me. You know, making me think? About you and me and other stuff?”

Mandy’s heart warmed. He looked so sad. She actually felt sorry for Dale, even after everything he’d done. But for all she knew, this was just another trick, another game. Part of her wanted to hold him and kiss him and pretend she’d never seen the instant message. Another part of her, the intelligent part, wanted to remain strong. Maybe they could work things out, but not until she knew for certain Dale was sincere.

“We’ve all been thinking a lot,” she said. “I can’t believe Nicki’s gone, and it scares me, but I’m not going to use that as an excuse for us to get back together.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that things are different now. God, you never listen to me.” Anger was creeping into Dale’s voice. He wasn’t getting what he wanted, and since that was such a rare thing for Dale, he didn’t know how to deal with it.

“You should go,” Mandy said. “We can talk later.”

“I want to talk now,” he said.

“I don’t.”

“Why is it always about what you want?” he asked, the anger now clear. “It’s not always about you. I mean, you just show up at my house and spy on what I’m doing. Then you freak out, and you don’t even let me explain.”

“I believe your explanation was ‘Guys and girls are different.’”

“Well, they are,” Dale said, reverting back to his original argument. “I was just messing around. It didn’t mean anything to me, but to you it’s like some relationship nine-eleven.”

“Bye, Dale,” she said and closed the door. She threw the lock quickly and felt his fist hit the door through the handle.

Mandy leaped back, heard him shout, “God!” in frustration, then ran up the stairs, ignoring the ringing doorbell. He must have jabbed the button a dozen times before finally giving up.

In her room, Mandy sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the window. Her nerves were dancing on coals. That sick feeling took hold in her stomach again, and she gnawed on her thumb. Only when she heard Dale start his car and back out of the drive did she relax, and then just a little.

Mandy fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She replayed their conversation in her head, always pausing at the moment he went from hurt to angry, wondering why his attitude changed so quickly. Maybe it was just hormones, like they talked about in Human Development class. She didn’t know, but it worried her. Would it always be like this? Were all guys like this? Even adults? Boy, she hoped not.

A tone from her computer announced she had new mail, but Mandy wasn’t interested. When her cell phone buzzed a few minutes later, she let it. She didn’t want to think about Dale, or Nicki, or her killer. In fact, she just wanted a few minutes of peace. No boyfriend. No tragedy. No monsters. No typing on a keyboard or talking into a microphone, having to think of clever things to say. She couldn’t remember the last time she just let herself zone out, ignoring messages inside and outside her head. She didn’t know if she could do it, but she was going to try.

Her experiment in mental deprivation did not go well. Mandy lay on her bed, stared at the ceiling, tried any number of tricks to block out Dale, Nicki, Laurel, Drew, and a man she thought resembled a cartoon witch. Instead of blocking them out, her mind jumbled them, and she went into a kind of daydream. Then, she fell asleep, and solid, true dreams took hold of her mind.

Dale and the Witchman sat together in the school cafeteria, joking and shaking their heads, talking about Mandy, she knew. The Witchman extended a long finger that looked like a scalpel and poked at the air. This made Dale double over with laughter, while the Witchman threw his hands up, miming the protests of a screaming victim.

Next to her, Drew said, “God, it’s so romantic. I mean, to have them thinking about you all the time.” Laurel nudged her shoulder. When Mandy turned to look at her friend, Laurel shook her head solemnly. Where her eyes should have been were empty black sockets. She held candles in both palms, and the wax dripped over her hands, sealing them in bumpy white gloves.

The cafeteria was gone. Behind Laurel, whose head continued to turn from side to side, stood a blond brick building, the library. It was night, and the floodlights bathed the edge of the parking lot in a dull amber glow. Beyond the light, a field of tall dead grass ran to a stand of black woods. The trees looked like they were moving, but then Mandy’s eyes adjusted, and she saw them:

A hundred people—men and women, boys and girls—seemed to be carved from smoke. They sat at similarly misty desks, typing frantically at computer keyboards, staring vacantly at panel screens made of fog. Two girls paced back and forth at the tree line, cell phones growing from their heads like tumors. They did not speak into the phones, simply listened, shambling back and forth between the trees.

Nicki was there, walking through the field of dead grass. Her steps were jerky and slow, and each one seemed to hurt her a little more. As she approached Mandy, she became less mist and more flesh, growing more solid with each agonizing step.

Mandy’s heart raced; her pulse thundered in her ears. Nicki was coming to give her a message. Mandy knew this, but didn’t want to hear what the dead girl would say. The thought of Nicki’s wisdom terrified her.

She tried to back up, but Drew and Laurel and Dale stood behind her, blocking her retreat. Her friends stared blankly past her, like they were hypnotized.

Then, Nicki was right in front of her. She still wore the sliver-moon earrings she was wearing the last time Mandy saw her.

“We’re going to miss so much,” Nicki said.

Mandy spun away. Her friends no longer blocked her path. They were gone. Everyone was gone. She sat in front of a flat panel screen that foamed with opaque mist. Two of her fingers jabbed keys frantically creating a single word, repeating it over and over:

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahaha…

She woke with a start, the details of her dream instantly forgotten. Sitting up in bed, Mandy looked at the clock on the nightstand just as her mother yelled, “I’m home,” from downstairs. It was a few minutes after six.

“’Kay,” Mandy called.

Wiping the sleep from her eyes, Mandy walked to her computer, looked at the screen, and felt an odd sense of dread. Why her computer should scare her, she couldn’t say exactly. As she sat down, she thought about something stupid Drew had said at the candlelight vigil.

She’s going to miss so much.

Drew’s ability to state the obvious in the most inappropriate ways was a long-standing character flaw. Everything was a romantic notion to her friend, and she didn’t seem to be gifted with the filter that kept such ridiculous ideas in her head and out of her mouth. Still, for all of her clumsy speculation, Drew had actually made an interesting point.

Unlike Nicki’s dream of being a veterinarian, Mandy didn’t know what she wanted to do after school, not as a profession anyway. She presumed she would go to college and study something, figured she would get married and have kids. Over the years, she’d imagined her wedding day down to the finest detail as she sat around her room dreaming with Drew or Laurel; they’d all taken turns describing the perfect husband. These were the obvious things, events in a woman’s life that she’d grown to take as givens. But they said nothing about what she wanted for herself.

Little-girl dreams of pop stardom, modeling, being a great actress had all come and gone in their time, but even when she had lip-synced into a hairbrush; or strutted in outfits before her mirror, working the runway of exposed wood by her bed; or recited lines from her favorite movies; she never really expected them to come true. They were fancies, daydreams, distractions created on boring afternoons. They made her feel giddy and silly. It was fun to pretend, but Mandy took none of those glamorous careers seriously.

So, what am I going to be, Mandy wondered. What do I want to do?

She knew she wanted to travel, to see the world. Her parents had taken her on family trips to New York and to Walt Disney World in Florida. They had gone hiking in the Rocky Mountains. But these trips, while fun and full of wondrous sights, were only a taste of the exploring she intended to do. All the pictures she saw in history class and poli-sci opened her eyes to a planet full of interesting places. Some places were wrapped in obvious desires: dining in Paris; shopping in Rome; skiing in Austria, shooshing down the slopes with a hottie before getting drinks in a lodge; wandering through London just because it was there. But it was the other places—places like Prague and Thailand and Istanbul, places she knew little about but that sounded exotic and different—that really excited her. There were probably a thousand such destinations, filled with amazing people waiting for her.

What am I going to miss?

It occurred to her that the greatest shame, the biggest loss would be not experiencing those unknown things. New people she would never meet, new places she would never see.

“We’re going to miss so much,” Nicki said.

Mandy sat down at her desk and hit the space key to shut down the screen saver. Maybe surfing the Web would help her find the right career, some profession—and not something silly like being a flight attendant—she could pursue that would open the world up to her.

But before she opened Google to start her career search, she noticed the e-mail that had been sent to her by the guy named Kyle. She had intended to erase it, until Dale showed up and started freaking out. Now, she found herself opening the note again.

Kylenevers

Subject: Me Again

Hey, sorry about yesterday. I know we don’t know each other. Kyle here. I feel kind of bad about IMing you like that. With everything going on with N., I just wanted to chat…don’t know a lot of people…

Mandy read the entire note twice, and though she at first had thought it the miserable plea of a looz, she now figured he was just another kid, like her, who wanted to expand his world. She cut and pasted his screen name into the Profile Search box, just to make sure he wasn’t a complete goof, like some science geek who thought dissecting rats was interesting.

Name: Kyle Nevers (Nevers: like the airport in Nantucket)

Location: Elmwood

Gender: Male…Born: ’90s

Hobbies & Interests: How much time U got?

Favorite Gadgets: PC, cell, text: U name it, I’m there.

No picture. Not a good sign. And he certainly didn’t give much away in the profile, but Mandy wasn’t surprised. Most people her age knew better than to string together lists of personal information. It made it too easy for the creeps to start up a conversation. He lived in town, which struck Mandy as interesting. If he was local, he had to have attended Lake Crest High; there was no place else to go, unless…

Not Hammond, she thought. Ew! Okay, that wasn’t fair. The kids at Hammond Special Studies School couldn’t help being different. They had challenges, physical and mental. It’s not like they were dangerous or mean or anything.

With more than a little curiosity and a bit of excitement, Mandy clicked the Reply button. She wrote back, telling Kyle she understood exactly what he meant about feeling weird after Nicki’s death, and yes, they should chat sometime. She sent the e-mail before talking herself out of it, then leaned back in her chair.

There, she thought. I’ve just met a new person. Already on my way to expanding my horizons. Kyle might become a new friend, maybe a new boyfriend (no way, stop thinking about that), and if he turns out to be creepy, I’ll just block his messages. Delete him. Sending a reply was the polite thing to do. No harm in it.

Besides, Dale would be really pissed off if he knew.