But the melody that came forth . . . it was incredible. And yet I also believed that Tristen Hyde really did create it, because it somehow reminded me of Tristen himself.
I cocked my head, listening closer and easily picturing him. Confident, kind of enigmatic . . . and comfortable at the edge of a grave. Although my computer’s speakers were cheap and tinny, the song was undeniably powerful. Dark and ominous, yet . . . majestic, like the storm that had finally broken in earnest outside.
“That’s amazing,” I said, forgetting that I’d been reluctant to look at Tristen’s online persona, as his composition continued to play. “Really beautiful.”
Becca wrinkled her nose, though, and ended the music with another quick tap of her fingernail. “Kind of gloomy, I think.”
Wishing we’d heard more, I watched as Becca navigated to some photos of Tristen, and my stomach got ticklish again, like when she’d first announced her intention to check out his page. Although obviously MySpace was public, I felt like we were trespassing, spying on him.
Becca clearly didn’t feel the same way. She clicked on an image, making it bigger, and whistled under her breath. “Wow . . . He is so hot, don’t you think?” she asked, eyes trained on the screen.
I didn’t say anything. I just stared at Tristen’s photo, feeling even more uncomfortable, like he had actually joined us in my bedroom, although the picture had clearly been taken at a concert. Tristen was seated at a glossy black piano, his thick hair falling over his forehead, and he wore a tux, which made him look much older than a teenager—even more so than the tie I’d seen him wear. He must have been playing, but the photographer had captured a moment when Tristen had glanced up from the keys, his brown eyes directly meeting the lens, and the intensity I saw there . . .
I felt myself blushing again, and I was glad Becca was also looking at Tristen and not at me.
“It’s not just how he looks, but the way he talks, with that accent,” Becca added over her shoulder. “You know he went to this super-exclusive school in England, right?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said, although I wasn’t surprised by the news. Tristen spoke more like a teacher than . . . well, most of the actual teachers at Supplee Mill. I peered harder at the photo, thinking that Tristen definitely was intriguing, in a way.
Suddenly Becca swung around to face me, laughing. Maybe at me. “You know you think he’s hot, Jill,” she teased, like that would be the funniest thing in the world—if it had been true. “I saw you checking him out in chem!”
“No, I wasn’t!” I wasn’t . . .
“But a guy like Tristen,” Becca said, twisting one of her curls around her finger. “He wouldn’t be good for somebody like you, Jill—no offense!”
My cheeks caught on fire then, both at the unfair accusation that I liked Tristen . . . and at the insult I was perceiving. “What does that mean?”
“You’re sweet,” Becca said in a way that didn’t exactly sound like a compliment. “And Tristen . . . Well, he talks really smooth, but he’s got a rough side, too.”
I sort of rolled my eyes. “Come on, Becca . . .” I honestly couldn’t believe Tristen Hyde would be anything but well-mannered, maybe even kind of . . . proper.
“Well, he beat Todd Flick to within an inch of his life!” Becca defended her assertion. “That’s pretty rough!”
I jolted, nearly slipping off my mattress. “Tristen beat up Todd?”
“Yeah.” Becca seemed genuinely surprised by my ignorance. “Didn’t you hear?”
“No.” Jill Jekel was last on the gossip phone tree. “What happened?”
Becca dismissed motive with a wave of her pink-tipped fingers. “Something about Tristen hitting on Darcy, which is ridiculous, because she is not his type.”
I studied Becca’s delicate, pretty face, wondering how she knew Tristen even had a “type.” I also fought against a terrible urge to take twisted delight in Todd Flick, who’d teased me for years, getting a beating. Nobody deserved violence. I hated violence. “Tristen didn’t really hurt Todd, did he?”
Becca had clearly been relishing the gossip, but the smile she hadn’t quite been able to hide slowly disappeared, and her eyes clouded. “Tris broke Todd’s arm.”
“No . . .” My eyes darted to Tristen’s photo. He couldn’t, could he?
When I looked back to Becca, I saw that she’d gotten not just solemn but almost . . . spooked. And although we were alone, she lowered her voice, so I could barely hear her above the rain pounding the house. “I . . . I kind of know a secret about Tristen, too,” she added. “Something from last summer. A story that I never told anybody.”
“Really?” I swallowed thickly, suddenly not sure I wanted to hear any more. Not from Becca. Not about Tristen, who’d once held me. “Um, maybe you shouldn’t . . .”
But Becca continued confiding in me, with a strange expression that I’d never seen before, not in all our years as friends. “I kind of . . . saw Tris, over the summer,” she said. “And this thing happened . . .”
My fingers curled around the edge of my mattress, and I searched my friend’s expression for some clue as to what she meant by that word “saw.” Like, she saw Tristen with her eyes? Or had Becca Wright gone out with the only guy I’d ever come even close to kissing? I really didn’t want to hear more. Yet I found myself asking, “So . . . what happened?”
I never got to hear the end of Becca’s story that night, though, because, before she could tell the rest, my bedroom door swung open, causing us both to jump nearly out of our skins. “Mom!” I cried. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
My mother stood in the doorway, wet from the rain, looking so grim and tired that, without even being told to go, Becca slipped on her sequined flip-flops, gathered her stuff, and slunk out, muttering, “See you,” to both of us before darting down the stairs.
Mom didn’t say a word until we heard the front door shut. Then she brushed her damp, graying hair from her forehead and announced, “We need to talk, Jill. I have some bad news.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
That was the first reply that sprang to mind, and although the words seemed very matter-of-fact, very resigned, in my thoughts, they sounded surprisingly bitter, almost angry when I heard them blurted out loud.
Of course Mom had bad news.
Would there ever be news of any other kind, in the cursed old Jekel house?
Chapter 7
Jill
MY MOTHER SAT HUNCHED at the kitchen table, shivering a little in her damp scrubs, which clung to her frame. I found myself staring at her shoulders, two bony knobs jutting through the thin cotton fabric. “I’ll make you some tea,” I offered. “And something to eat while we talk.”
“Just tea,” Mom said, not even sounding interested in that. “I’m not hungry.”
“But you should eat,” I told her, a cold knot forming in the pit of my stomach. She’d stopped eating, dropping to nearly one hundred pounds, before her breakdown. “Just a little something.”
“No, Jill.”
I couldn’t force her, so I went to make the tea, putting the kettle on the stove and taking a china cup from the shelf. “So, what’s up?” I asked, although I had my suspicions. Bad news . . . that was usually about Dad. “Did the police find something?”
“No, Jill. Nothing.”
“Oh.” Although Mom certainly hadn’t led me to expect anything good, I was still a little foolishly disappointed that there was no news at all about my father.
Ever since we’d learned about the grainy videos captured by Carson Pharmaceuticals’ security cameras that showed my dad working at three and four a.m., sometimes with a man whose face was indistinct because they kept the lights so low . . . Ever since then I’d clung to the hope that someday the mysterious man would be identified, and not only would the police solve the case and bring Dad’s killer to justice, but Dad would somehow be vindicated.
Silly me.
The kettle whistled, and I reached
for it, filling the cup. “So, it’s nothing about Dad? Or the other man?”
“Jill.”
I turned around to see my mom staring at me, looking more steely than she had in months. “What?” I asked, not sure what I’d done wrong.
“The police are never going to solve the case,” Mom said, sounding more forceful, too. Sounding angry. “They lost interest when they learned that your father was a criminal, too, as surely as his killer!”
I’d known that my excitement was ill-advised, and yet when Mom said that, snuffing out my hope, and calling my dad a criminal, a flash of anger tore through me, too. A wave of fury that bordered on rage. Mom was giving up on Dad, too . . . My fingers wrapped around the teacup, and for just a second I had this crazy urge to hurl it across the room so it would shatter against the wall in a million pieces.
But of course I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t break things. Instead, my eyes filled with tears. Crying . . . that was the pathetic way I expressed rage. “Mom, please don’t call him a criminal.”
My defense of Dad, weak as it was, only seemed to make her more mad, though.
“Your father lied to us, Jill,” she said through gritted teeth. “He stole out of the house in the middle of the night while I was working and you were sleeping! He stole chemicals from his employer!” She paused, then dropped the bomb she’d been holding all along. “He stole your college fund, Jill! Nearly every cent!”
I froze in place, stunned into mute silence. “What?” I finally asked.
“Your college money,” Mom repeated, her own anger seeming to dissolve closer to tears. Her eyes got wide, miserable, like suddenly she couldn’t believe what she was telling me, either. “He withdrew it from the bank in the months before his murder. I don’t know why, and I tried to work extra shifts to replace some of the money, but I’m so tired . . .”
Mom closed her eyes again then, anger seeming spent, and buried her face in her hands, like she couldn’t bear to face me when she added, “I’m so sorry . . . but I don’t know if you can go to school next year. Even with loans—I just don’t think we can afford it right away.”
The teacup that I held did shatter then, but not in a satisfying way, as it slipped from my fingers, which seemed to have gone numb. “No.” My voice sounded strangled in my ears. “Dad wouldn’t have done that. Not to me.”
Mom still didn’t look at me, and it seemed like the room started to spin. I reached for the kitchen counter to steady myself.
My college fund . . . I had a shot at valedictorian, but I might not even go to school? My father had stolen my future?
All at once, as I stood in that puddle of tea, I hated my dad, just like I suspected Mom did. For a split second I was glad that my father was dead.
“I’m sorry, Jill,” Mom mumbled again.
“Yeah. Me, too.” Silly, silly me . . .
There was nothing else to say after that. Not much left to feel, even. So I got a rag and cleaned up the mess I’d made. Mom sat at the table, not even trying to help, like she was too exhausted to move.
When the kitchen was clean, I went back upstairs and climbed into my bed, where I stared straight into space, into the darkness, for about an hour, my mind just blank. Completely numb, like somebody had jammed a needle full of Novocain deep, deep into the cortex of my brain.
Then, when the room was pitch black—it must have been almost midnight—I noticed that the green light on the bottom of my laptop’s monitor was glowing. I got up, went to my desk, and shook the mouse, thinking I should shut down the computer for the night. Heaven knew we Jekels couldn’t afford to waste power!
But when I rattled the mouse and the screen came to life, I jumped a little.
Because there, staring straight out at me, was none other than Tristen Hyde, whose MySpace page Becca had never closed.
Tristen, the guy who’d come to my rescue the first time I’d hit rock bottom.
I slid down into my desk chair, studying Tristen’s face. Studying him and wondering, with a growing flicker of excitement.
Was there a chance he might be able to help me again?
Maybe. If I could just convince him . . .
But the rules we’d have to break, the locks we’d have to pick . . . Was I really ready for that kind of trespass, even to right the huge wrongs done to me?
I leaned closer, staring hard into those intense, brown eyes.
And was I ready to do those things with . . . him?
Chapter 8
Tristen
“TRIS, THIS ISN’T THE ROUTE coach mapped,” someone griped as I led the cross-country team off the paved streets and onto the path that ran along the Susquehanna River. “Coach said—”
“Coach isn’t here,” I reminded them over my shoulder. “If someone else wants to lead . . . ?”
I didn’t await a response. Of course they would follow me, their captain, because they knew that, should one of them pass me, it would be only a temporary state. I would let my lungs burst before I ceded my spot in front.
“I hate this trail,” I heard a loud complaint from the back.
“Me, too,” I muttered. But I had to take that route again and again. Needed to see the spot. Face it down.
As we ran deeper into the forest, the canopy of trees grew denser, blocking the September sun, and shadows dappled the path. The path in my nightmares. The dreams where I held the knife.
Stop it, Tristen, I told myself. Get control.
Yet I subtly picked up our pace, trying to outrace the images that were already bubbling up from my troubled subconscious. Of course, my thoughts matched me stride for stride—threatening to overtake me, hurrying faster than my footsteps.
This is the way I approach her . . .
I stretched out my legs, running harder.
“Geez, Tris.” I heard another protest, called loudly. “It’s just practice!”
Practice. Was the dream a form of “practice,” as Grandfather had predicted? Rehearsal for the crimes, the violence, to come . . . ?
Ahead of me the path veered nearer to the river, widening at the spot, the clearing, where I’d actually been with the girl that evening in July. The place that I also conjured again and again in the nightmare.
I’d nearly lost control with her. She’d been willing—and then something had happened, something I couldn’t recall. And I’d come back to myself to find her pushing me away, terror in her eyes. Just like in the dream.
And what had happened in England? Was there a chance I had really . . . ?
Behind me my teammates fought to keep up, their footsteps falling harder against the dirt, sounding for all the world like a mob chasing me. A lynch mob after Tristen Hyde. Murderer.
Pulling even farther ahead of my struggling squad, I began to tear through the clearing at a breakneck pace, mind flashing to London.
Oh, hell.
The blood. . .
I actually squeezed my eyes shut, a stupid thing for a runner to do, and of course I stumbled, my foot striking a rock, my ankle twisting sharply, and I went down, hard. Borne by momentum, my teammates did their best to avoid me, veering off the trail and crashing through the brush or leaping over me as I shielded my head with my arms, choking on the dust raised by their feet.
When they had all passed, I sat up, signaling at those who looked back, telling them to continue on. Standing, I coughed and brushed myself off, listening to the wind through the dry, rasping leaves and the trilling of the cicadas as I berated myself.
It was just a path. And the nightmare just a dream, as my father insisted. The missing moments—they could be explained, too, somehow. I wasn’t really dangerous.
Right?
Taking a deep breath, I continued on and ignoring the pain in my ankle, soon overtook my teammates again. Assuming my place as leader, I guided us out of that hated forest and back into the light.
However, when I arrived back at school, still pushing us all too hard, someone was waiting for me in the bleachers. A timid girl wi
th an innocent suggestion that would eventually plunge me even deeper into the shadows I’d just escaped.
Chapter 9
Jill
I WAS WAITING on the bleachers, trying to figure out what I’d say to Tristen, when the cross-country team came running in from the street and onto the track, finishing practice. Actually, it wasn’t so much the team that arrived as Tristen, alone. He was so far ahead of the other runners that, although I’d heard he was captain, he didn’t even seem like part of his own squad.
As I watched, Tristen finished a lap, literally running circles around the football players who grunted and tackled in the middle of the field—minus their leader. Tristen kept a steady and seemingly effortless pace until he reached Coach Parker and pulled up short, bending over and bracing his hands on his knees, taking a few deep breaths before straightening and almost immediately falling into a discussion with the coach, their eyes trained on the other runners, who finally entered the field and finished their own, weaker laps.
From where I sat, Tristen and Coach Parker seemed to be taking stock of the team, like they were co-coaches, not teacher and student. Tristen’s hands rested on his narrow hips, and his hair was dark and shiny, soaked with sweat. There was a deep, dark V down the middle of his T-shirt, too, and when he raised his hand to point at a straggler, I saw that although Tristen was lean, like most runners, his biceps were sharply defined, stretching the fabric of his shirt. And was it the sun that cast a shadow under his eye, or could I see, even at that distance, the bruise he’d gotten when he’d shattered Todd’s arm?
My fingers wrapped around the bleachers, squeezing. Maybe the whole idea of coming there . . . of the experiment, even . . . was bad . . . wrong.
I was standing up, thinking I should just go home, when I guess my movement caught Tristen’s eye. He glanced in my direction and hesitated for a second, like he was surprised to see me there. Then he shaded his eyes against the sun, smiled, and waved. I waved back, feeling like an idiot.