When he’d asked her to go somewhere with him after work, she’d thought, why not? Why not go out with him and have a little fun? She was always working when everybody else was partying, so why shouldn’t she have her turn?
But it was getting a little too weird for her. When he’d asked her to go with him, she had thought that he meant to take her to his house. Not hiking over the river and through the woods to some shack out in the middle of nowhere. Rae Ann drew her jacket around her arms and glared around. What was this nasty place? And what was that smell?
She protested to him, and he laughed and grabbed her tightly, pulling her into his body. His eyes looked manic, and Rae Ann knew that she shouldn’t have come. When she told him that she wanted to go home, he only sneered.
“What’s the matter?” He shook her roughly for emphasis, scaring her even more. “You’re not talking your way out of this. I know exactly what you are. You’re a whore. Did you think that you could hide it from me forever? A whore!”
He slammed her against the wall so hard that she thought her head would go through the plaster. Her back and shoulders felt bruised, and the blow stunned her.
“You’re going to pay, you bitch,” he said into her face. “You’ve been swinging your ass at me for a long time, teasing me and leading me on, and you’re going to pay up now. Always walking around with your tits and your ass hanging out, flaunting them at me; now I’m going to use you like the whore that you are.”
He kept shaking her, shaking her, his hands gripping her wrists cruelly and painfully. Then he began to strike her repeatedly in the face and on the head, screaming obscenities at her.
“No!” Rae Ann cried out between the blows. “I’m not like that. I came with you because I liked you. I really liked you!”
He grabbed her wrists and gave them a vicious twist, bringing her to her knees. He tugged her arms behind her back and tied her wrists together with a plastic tie from his pocket. Dazed and only half-conscious by now, she only dimly felt what he was doing. His hands slipped under the short skirt that she wore to work and ripped at her underclothing; she heard the cloth tear. He tumbled her onto her back and unbuckled his belt.
Rae Ann trembled all over and stared up at him as he put the belt around her neck and pulled it tight, wrapping the end around one hand.
As he pumped on top of her and she struggled for breath, all she could see was his face. His nice, normal, handsome face was contorted into that of a monster.
“No, Corey,” she managed to croak when he loosened the belt for a moment. “Please. Please.”
He only laughed and tightened it again, and Rae Ann knew that she was never going to leave this house. She was going to die here in this filthy place.
She closed her eyes and thought about her scrupulously clean tiny apartment and all the pretty little things she’d decorated it with. Just yesterday, she’d found a framed tintype in one of the thrift shops she visited daily. The solemn little girl in the picture had a face like an angel, and Rae Ann had felt compelled to bring her home.
She called that sweet little face up in her mind right now, until it was all she could see and all that was important to her. Funny to think that the little girl was long dead; maybe she’d see her in heaven, if there was one.
Rae Ann died with a smile on her face, and it was a good five minutes before Corey even noticed she was gone.
Chapter Two
The funeral for Kira took place five days later, after the police released her body. It was a perfect day; the kind where the Florida skies are deep and cloudless and the humidity is low enough so that the heat is bearable. As Jessie stood with Mrs. Davis and Shannon in the cemetery next door to the church, she thought that the atmosphere was all wrong. It should have been cloudy and raining, she thought darkly. There should be thunder, lightning, and wind to lash us. It shouldn’t be the sun shining brightly down on them all. It shouldn’t be just like every other day in Florida. This day was different because Kira was dead and the weather should reflect that, too.
David and Teresa Matthews stood gazing vacantly at the coffin that contained the remains of their only child, as if they hadn’t quite figured out what had happened yet. Their son Tom and daughter Caitlin stood behind them, both of their faces swollen from tears. Once, as Tom swayed, Mr. Matthews put out a hand and pulled him upright.
Both Kira’s parents seemed calm throughout the ceremony, almost placid even, but as the minister uttered the last words of the service and the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground, an anguished wail of sorrow suddenly welled from Teresa Matthews’ throat. She heaved herself into her husband’s arms, burying her face against him. Jessie could barely stand to look at her pain, and she clutched Mrs. Davis’ arm and looked away, her own throat tight. She knew just how Teresa Matthews felt, because she’d felt exactly the same way at her mother’s funeral.
She kept her face turned resolutely away from her mother’s tombstone. She never visited her mother’s grave. She couldn’t see her mother’s name written on that smooth stone; she couldn’t bear it. Maybe sometime in the future, but not now. she wanted to cry , but she knew that once she began she wouldn’t be able to stop. She would cry for Kira and her mother and Kira’s parents, and she didn’t want to do that here.
Jessie looked at Shannon instead; she didn’t seem to be holding up that well, either. Her face was pale, not its normal rosy color, and she stood listlessly beside Jessie, her head down and her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Her parents were here somewhere; her mother had been friends with Teresa Matthews since the girls were in grade school, but Shannon had elected to stand with Jessie. Maybe she thought that Jessie needed some extra support, considering that the last time Jessie had been here, it had been to put her mother in the dark, dank ground.
Jessie looked around at the crowd and was surprised by how many had showed up from the college. She didn’t know that some of these people had even known Kira. Most of them had probably never lost anyone to death before, and some looked grief-stricken while others were openly sobbing. Still others slouched beside each other looking shocked, their eyes vacant.
Angelique Alea waved to Jessie, and she gave her a wisp of a smile that soon disappeared. She knew Angelique slightly, and she knew that Kira had hung out with a little bit. Kira always said that Angelique was better in small doses; she could be just a little intense sometimes and she made her tired just standing next to her. She couldn’t spend more than two hours with her without having to go home and take a nap.
Andy Mossiman held onto one of Angelique’s hands with both of his own, and he was staring at the ground. He raised his head when Angelique said something to him, long enough to give Jessie a brief, ghastly smile. Jessie looked around at the rest of them, wondering what they were all thinking. Were they, like her, wondering if any of the others in the crowd knew what had happened to Kira? She’d tried asking around at school about the party Kira had been going to attend, but she’d gotten few answers. A lot of them seemed to think that she was blaming the theater club for Kira’s death, but that wasn’t true. She just wanted to know what happened.
Jessie walked with Mrs. Davis toward the Matthews, and as they came close Jessie held out her hand to Kira’s mother. Teresa would have none of that; she’d known Jessie Hartwell since the girl was in kindergarten, and she drew Jessie into her arms.
“I’m so sorry,” Jessie said against her silk-covered shoulder. “I loved her so much.”
Teresa’s hand caressed Jessie’s hair as she left her arms.
“She loved you, too,” she said and her faint smile faded as her eyes wandered to her daughter’s grave. For a moment, she seemed about to dissolve into tears again, but she struggled for control and found it. Mrs. Davis held out a palsied hand to her, and Teresa turned away from Jessie, trying to force herself to smile as the older woman conveyed her sympathies.
“I gotta go,” Shannon muttered suddenly in Jessie’s ear, and she took off without saying anything to
either of Kira’s parents. Jessie stared after her as Shannon almost ran out the gates of the cemetery.
***
Jessie was working on her English paper when the telephone began to ring. Mrs. Davis was next door visiting, and cursing under her breath, Jessie got up to get it. There was a phone on the desk in the hallway, and she couldn’t stand to listen to it ringing. She sped down the narrow hall and picked it up on the fifth ring, right before it went to the old-fashioned answering machine.
“Hello?”
Nobody answered, but Jessie could hear breathing on the line. She huffed air from her nose impatiently. What kind of perv got a thrill from making crank phone calls? God knows what he was doing on the other end of the line. She started to hang up, and then heard her name spoken softly.
“Jessie…I can see you.”
“Who is this?” she asked sharply.
“Leave this alone. Do you hear? Leave this alone or you’ll end up like Kira.”
Fear slid down her spine like a drop of icy water. The voice was husky and hoarse; a disguised croak that she couldn’t decipher, though she tried her best. I know who this is, she thought frantically. Who is it? The identity of the caller teased at the edge of her mind, but she couldn’t quite connect the voice to a face.
“Why don’t you try to scare somebody else, asshole?” Jessie kept the fear out of her voice with an effort.
The caller chuckled. “I know where you go, and I know what you do. Listen to me, or I’ll know and I’ll come for you.”
The line went dead, and Jessie pulled the receiver away from her ear and stared at it in her hand. The ice that had dripped down her spine spread to the rest of her body, until she was shivering and shaking. She dropped into a fetal position beside the wall. Someone was trying to frighten her away from her investigation into Kira’s death.
A sudden scalding anger began to chase the cold from her limbs. Just who the hell did they think that they were dealing with here? Some scared little kid who’d back off at the first sign of danger? No, she was Mandy Hartwell’s daughter, and they could go fuck themselves. They had no idea who they were dealing with; threats wouldn’t work on her. Her mother had always said that the best way to get anyone in her family to do something was to tell them they couldn’t, and she was right.
Nobody told her what to do, especially some psycho pervert who had to resort to crank calls to get what he wanted. She wouldn’t let him win.
Jessie stood up.
***
Shannon woke slowly. Darkness surrounded her, yet her room was filled with a strange shimmering glow, as if the moon had come to rest on her bed. She looked out the window, expecting to see a big round moon, but the night was deep silken ebony. She couldn’t see the moon at all. She let her eyes sweep the rest of her room.
Shannon sat up and gasped.
There was a giant owl on her dresser. She’d seen owls before, but they were the small burrowing owls of this are, and this was a barn owl. She’d only seen these in pictures before. As she watched, it spread its thickly feathered wings and seemed to stretch the same way she did when she woke from a nap. Shannon pulled the covers all the way up to her neck, scrunching down into her warm bed, her eyes darting this way and that.
The owl turned its head toward her and she saw that it was not there to hurt her. The light came from its blind eyes, a cold radiance that lit up the darkness of her room. The owl’s beak moved, and sound came from its throat, a high, screeching noise that was still recognizable as speech. Despite the distortion, she knew that voice. She knew it well.
“Come to me,” the owl said. Shannon covered her ears against the shrillness of it. “Come to me.”
Then it spread its wings again and the room filled with a light so bright that she covered her eyes to protect them. When she opened them again, the owl was gone. Numbly, she stood and began searching for her clothes.
She must go to him, for he had called. Her master needed her.
***
Maria Alonzo had gone to bed early that night, worn out from the funeral. She just couldn’t go to another one, she thought wearily before crawling under the covers of her neatly-made bed. Mandy Hartwell’s funeral had been bad enough, but Kira…she wasn’t much more than a child with her whole life ahead of her. It was too much. Maria had fallen into an exhausted sleep that had more to do with the emotional roller coaster she’d been on than any actual physical weariness.
She woke around midnight with the feeling that something was wrong. Something that didn’t have anything to do with the events of the day.
There was something wrong in her house.
She forced herself to lie still in the bed for a moment, listening to her husband snore quietly, straining to hear anything else. She could hear nothing but the normal sounds of the night, but the sense that something was wrong wouldn’t leave her. She got out of bed, being careful not to wake Marco. She slipped into her bathrobe and left her room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
She turned on the hallway light and peeped into Katherine’s room and smiled. The child of her middle years, her four-year-old daughter Katherine, was asleep on her back, her hair spread out on the pillow, her body spread-eagled across the bed. Katherine Alonzo slept like she lived – all over her space. She was the queen, even when she was asleep.
Maria hesitated at Shannon’s door. Shannon had been so funny about her privacy lately. But something had woken her, and she couldn’t rest until she made sure that her daughter was all right. She tapped softly on the door. When there was no response, she opened it and looked inside.
Shannon’s bed covers were thrown back and the room was empty. Maria hurried to the window to peer out into the night, but it was too dark to see anything. She leaned her forehead against the cold pane of glass, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, she thought that she saw a figure slipping into the shadows of the bushes.
“I’m going to kill that girl,” she muttered to herself. “She think that she can go slipping around all hours of the night, but she will learn.” She muttered a few choice words in Spanish as she belted her robe more securely and marched toward the front door. Some curses just sounded better in her native language.
“Shannon,” she hissed as she stepped onto the lawn in her bare feet. “Get in here. I know you think that you’re an adult but as long as you live in this house, you will follow my rules.”
She hurried around to the side of the house where she’d seen the figure and smiled grimly when she noticed that the door to the shed was open. The girl was going to have to be smarter than that if she was going to put one over on her.
“Shannon, are you there?” she called in a low voice, her eyes searching through the darkness of the shed. She began to feel uneasy, as if eyes were watching her from the blackness. And something smelled horrible in here. She’d make Marco take a look around tomorrow. It smelled as if something dead was in the shed. She took a step back when she heard a small noise in the depths of the darkness.
“Shannon?” she called out. “Is that you?”
It was only instinct that saved her. When the sound at the back of the shed swelled into a snarl and something came charging out of the blackness, she jerked back and slammed the door shut. Something thudded hard against it, and Maria fled back across the yard, flew into the house and slammed the door behind her.
She stood with the door to her back, breathing heavily, her pulse racing. She was just about to go and wake her husband when she heard the back door open.
“Shannon?” she called hesitantly. She couldn’t contain her relief when her daughter stepped around the corner, her face pale.
“Where were you?” she demanded, her fear turning into anger. “Do you know what time it is? I don’t mind you going out, but you must at least tell me when you’re going!”
Shannon shrugged off the hand her mother put on her arm. Her eyes darkened with an anger of her own, and Maria took a step back from her, her breath catching. Mar
ia put a shaking hand up to her throat. Shannon looked as if…as if she hated her.
“I went for a walk,” Shannon said sullenly. “I was thinking about Kira and Jessie’s mom. I couldn’t sleep.”
Maria felt her heart melt. This must be so hard for her. All young people thought themselves immortal, and then to find out that they are not…the truth that rules our lives is difficult to accept.
Eventually, we all must die.
Her daughter was just learning this, and Maria remembered what that felt like. It was hard to talk to parents. She must have lain awake, thinking about it, agonizing, but didn’t want to bother her, wouldn’t wake her mother to talk. She still thought that being an adult meant handling everything alone, when the reverse was true. Everything is easier if it is shared. Maria felt tears sting her eyes and she hugged her daughter fiercely, ignoring the stiffness of Shannon’s body in her embrace.
“Go to bed, Shannon,” she said gently. “It will seem better in the light of the day.”
Shannon shuffled off to bed with her head down. Maria went to look at the angelic, sleeping Katherine once more, and then slipped silently into bed beside her husband.
In the morning, Marco could find no trace of a dog in the shed and Maria never thought another thing about it. The dog had gotten away somehow, no big deal. She’d call animal control and have them come out and look around the neighborhood so that it wouldn’t try to attack anyone else.
In the weeks to come, Maria kept waking in the middle of the night, feeling a strange compulsion to check on her children, to make sure that all the windows and doors were locked. In the daytime, she dismissed her fears as silly. Marco laughed at her, and she laughed with him. She was just worrying, that was all. It was her nature.
But when she woke in the dark of the night, her heart pounding with fear and her sheets soaked through with sweat, she knew that something was wrong. Maria was Cuban, and her history was steeped in voodoo and superstition. It was hard to leave behind completely the beliefs of her childhood, and though her family liked to scoff, she knew that the feelings she got were real.