“Suze!” A shadow blocked out the light streaming from the bay windows to my room.
I looked back over my shoulder. Gina was leaning out, looking anxiously after me.
“Shouldn’t we—” She sounded, I noted in some distant part of my mind, frightened. “I mean, shouldn’t we call the police? If this stuff about Michael is true—”
I stared at her as if she’d suggested I…well, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The police?” I echoed. “No way. This is between Michael and me.”
“Suze—” Gina shook her head so that her springy curls bounced. “This is serious stuff. I mean, this guy is a murderer. I really think we need to call in the professionals here—”
“I am a professional,” I said, offended. “I’m a mediator, remember?”
Gina did not look comforted by this piece of information.
“But…well, what are you going to do, Suze?”
I smiled at her reassuringly.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s easy. I’m going to show him what happens when somebody tries to kill someone I care about.”
And then I leaped off of the roof into the darkness.
I couldn’t bring myself to take the Land Rover. Oh, sure, I was perfectly willing to commit what pretty much amounted to murder, but drive without a license? No way! Instead, I hauled out one of the many ten speeds Andy had tucked away along the carport wall. A few seconds later, I was flying down the hill from our house, tears streaming from my eyes. Not because I was crying, or anything, but because the wind was so cold on my face as I sailed down into the Valley.
I called Michael from a pay phone outside the Safeway. An older woman—his mother, I suppose—answered. I asked if I could speak to Michael. She said, “Yes, of course,” in that pleased way mothers use when their child gets his or her first call from a member of the opposite sex. And I would know. My mother uses that voice every time a boy calls me and she answers. You can’t really blame her. It happens so rarely.
Mrs. Meducci must have tipped Michael off that it was a girl, since his voice sounded much deeper than usual when he said hello.
“Michael?” I said, just to be sure it was him and not his father.
“Suze?” he said in his normal voice. “Oh my God, Suze, I’m so glad it’s you. Did you get my message? I must have called about ten times. I followed the ambulance to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me into the emergency room to see you. Only if you were admitted, they said. Which you weren’t, right?”
“Nope,” I said. “Fit as a fiddle.”
“Thank God. Oh, Suze, you don’t have any idea how scared I was when I heard that crash and realized it was you—”
“Yeah,” I said shortly. “It was scary. Listen, Michael, I’m in a jam of a different kind, and I was wondering if you could help me out.”
Michael said, “You know I’d do anything for you, Suze.”
Yeah. Like try to kill my stepbrothers and my best friend.
“I’m stranded,” I said. “At the Safeway. It’s kind of a long story. I was wondering if there was any possible way—”
“I’ll be there,” Michael said, “in three minutes.” Then he hung up.
He was there in two. I’d barely had time to stash the bike between a couple of Dumpsters in the back of the store before I saw him pull up in his green rental sedan, peering into the brightly lit windows of the supermarket as if he expected to see me inside riding the stupid mechanical rocking horse, or whatever. I approached the car from the parking lot, then leaned over to tap on the passenger side window.
Michael whipped around, startled by the sound. When he saw it was me, his face—pastier than ever in the fluorescent lights—relaxed. He leaned over and opened the door.
“Hop in,” he said cheerfully. “Boy, you don’t know how glad I am to see you in one piece.”
“Yeah?” I slid into the front passenger seat, then slammed the door closed after I’d tucked my feet in. “Well, me too. Happy to be in one piece, I mean. Ha ha.”
“Ha ha.” Michael’s laugh, rather than being sarcastic, as mine had been, was nervous. Or at least I chose to think so.
“Well,” he said as we sat there in front of the supermarket, the motor running. “You want me to take you, um, home?”
“No.” I turned my head to look at him.
You might be wondering what I was thinking at a moment like that. I mean, what goes through a person’s head when they know they’re about to do something that could result in another person’s death?
Well, I’ll tell you. Not a whole heck of a lot. I was thinking that Michael’s rental car smelled funny. I was wondering if the last person who had used it had spilled cologne in it, or something.
Then I realized the smell of cologne was coming from Michael himself. He had apparently splashed on a little Carolina Herrera for Men before coming to get me. How flattering.
“I have an idea,” I said, as if I had only just then thought of it. “Let’s go to the Point.”
Michael’s hands fell off the steering wheel. He hurried to right them, placing them at two and four o’clock, like the good driver he was.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“The Point.” I thought maybe I wasn’t being alluring enough, or something. So I reached over and laid a hand on his arm. He was wearing a suede jacket. Beneath my fingertips, the suede felt very soft, and beneath the suede, Michael’s bicep was as hard and as round as Dopey’s had looked.
“You know,” I said. “For the view. It’s a beautiful night.”
Michael wasted no more time. He put the car in gear and began pulling out from the parking lot before I even had time to remove my hand.
“Great,” he said. His voice was maybe a little uneven, so he cleared his throat, and said, with a little more dignity, “I mean, that sounds all right.”
A few seconds later, we were cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway. It was only ten o’clock or so, but there weren’t many other cars on the road. It was, after all, a weeknight. I wondered if Michael’s mother, before he’d left the house, had told him to be home at a certain time. I wondered if, when he didn’t come home by curfew, she’d worry. How long, I wondered, would she wait before calling the police? The hospital emergency rooms?
“So nobody,” Michael said as he drove, “was really hurt, right? In the accident?”
“No,” I replied. “No one was hurt.”
“That’s good,” Michael said.
“Is it?” I pretended to be looking out the passenger side window. But really I was watching Michael’s reflection.
“What do you mean?” he asked quickly.
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that…well, you know. Brad.”
“Oh.” He gave a little chuckle. There wasn’t any real humor in it, though. “Yeah. Brad.”
“I mean, I try to get along with him,” I said. “But it’s so hard. Because he can be such a jerk sometimes.”
“I can imagine,” Michael said. Pretty mildly, I thought.
I turned in my seat so that I was almost facing him.
“Like, you know what he said tonight?” I asked. Without waiting for a reply, I said, “He told me he was at that party. The one where your sister fell. You know. Into the pool.”
I do not think it was my imagination that Michael’s grip on the wheel tightened. “Really?”
“Yeah. You should have heard what he said about it, too.”
Michael’s face, in profile to mine, looked grim.
“What did he say?”
I toyed with the seatbelt I’d fastened around myself. “No,” I said. “I shouldn’t tell you.”
“No, really,” Michael said. “I’d like to know.”
“It’s so mean, though,” I said.
“Tell me what he said.” Michael’s voice was very calm.
“Well,” I said. “All right. He basically said—and he wasn’t quite as succinct as this, because, as you know,
he’s pretty much incapable of forming complete sentences—but basically he said your sister got what she deserved because she shouldn’t have been at that party in the first place. He said she hadn’t been invited. Only popular people were supposed to be there. Can you believe that?”
Michael carefully passed a pickup truck. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I can.”
“I mean, popular people. He actually said that. Popular people.” I shook my head. “And what defines popular? That’s what I’d like to know. I mean, your sister was unpopular why? Because she wasn’t a jock? She wasn’t a cheerleader? She didn’t have the right clothes? What?”
“All of those things,” Michael said in the same quiet voice.
“As if any of that matters,” I said. “As if being intelligent and compassionate and kind to others doesn’t count for anything. No, all that matters is whether you’re friends with the right people.”
“Unfortunately,” Michael said, “that oftentimes appears to be the case.”
“Well,” I said. “I think it’s crap. I said so, too. To Brad. I was like, ‘So all of you just stood there while this girl nearly died because no one invited her in the first place?’ He denied it, of course. But you know it’s true.”
“Yes,” Michael said. We were driving along Big Sur now, the road narrowing while, at the same time, growing darker. “I do, actually. If my sister had been…well, Kelly Prescott, for instance, someone would have pulled her out at once, rather than stand there laughing at her as she drowned.”
It was hard to see his expression since there was no moon. The only light there was to see by was the glow from the console in the dashboard. Michael looked sickly in it, and not just because the light had a greenish tinge to it.
“Is that what happened?” I asked him. “Did people do that? Laugh at her while she was drowning?”
He nodded. “That’s what one of the EMS guys told the police. Everybody thought she was faking it.” He let out a humorless laugh. “My sister—that was all she wanted, you know? To be popular. To be like them. And they stood there. They all just stood there laughing while she drowned.”
I said, “Well. I heard everyone was pretty drunk.” Including your sister, I thought, but didn’t say out loud.
“That’s no excuse,” Michael said. “But of course nobody did anything about it. The girl who had the party—her parents got a fine. That’s all. My sister may never wake up, and all they got was a fine.”
We had reached, I saw, the turn-off to the observation point. Michael honked before he went around the corner. No one was on the other side. He swung neatly into a parking space, but he didn’t switch off the ignition. Instead, he sat there, staring out into the inky blackness that was the sea and sky.
I was the one who reached over and turned the motor off. The dashboard light went off a second later, plunging us into absolute darkness.
“So,” I said. The silence in the car was pretty deafening. There were no cars on the road behind us. If I opened the window, I knew the sounds of the wind and waves would come rushing in. Instead, I just sat there.
Slowly, the darkness outside the car became less consummate. As my eyes adjusted to it, I could even make out the horizon where the black sky met the even blacker sea.
Michael turned his head. “It was Carrie Whitman,” he said. “The girl who had the party.”
I nodded, not taking my gaze off the horizon. “I know.”
“Carrie Whitman,” he said again. “Carrie Whitman was in that car. The one that went off the cliff last Saturday night.”
“You mean,” I said quietly, “the car you pushed off the cliff last Saturday night.”
Michael’s head didn’t move. I looked at him, but I couldn’t quite read his expression.
But I could hear the resignation in his voice.
“You know,” he said. It was a statement, not a question. “I thought you might.”
“After today, you mean?” I reached down and undid my seatbelt. “When you nearly killed me?”
“I’m so sorry.” He lowered his head, and finally, I could see his eyes. They were filled with tears. “Suze, I don’t know how I’ll ever—”
“There was no seminar on extraterrestrial life at that institute, was there?” I glared at him. “Last Saturday night, I mean. You came out here, and you loosened the bolts on that guardrail. Then you sat and waited for them. You knew they’d come here after the dance. You knew they’d come and you waited. And when you heard that stupid horn, you rammed them. You pushed them over the side of that cliff. And you did it in cold blood.”
Michael did something surprising then. He reached out and touched my hair where it curled out from beneath the knit watch cap I was wearing.
“I knew you’d understand,” he said. “From the moment I saw you, I knew you, out of all of them, were the only one who’d understand.”
I seriously wanted to throw up. I mean it. He didn’t get it. He so didn’t get it. I mean, hadn’t he thought about his mother at all? His poor mother, who had been so excited because a girl had called him? His mother, who already had one kid in the hospital? Hadn’t he thought how his mother was going to feel when it came out that her only son was a murderer? Hadn’t he thought about that at all?
Maybe he had. Maybe he had, and he thought she’d be glad. Because he’d avenged what had happened to his sister. Well, almost, anyway. There were still a few loose ends in the form of Brad…and everyone else who’d been at that party, I suppose. I mean, why just stop at Brad? I wondered how he’d managed to secure the guest list, and if he intended to kill everyone on it or just a select few.
“How did you know, anyway?” he asked in what I suppose he meant to be this tender voice. But all it did was make me want to throw up even more. “About the guardrail, I mean? And their car horn. That wasn’t in the papers.”
“How did I know?” I jerked my head from his reach. “They told me.”
He looked a little hurt at my pulling away from him. “They told you? Who do you mean?”
“Carrie,” I said. “And Josh and Felicia and Mark. The kids you killed.”
His hurt look changed. It went from confused, to startled, and then to cynical, all in a matter of seconds.
“Oh,” he said with a little laugh. “Right. The ghosts. You tried to warn me about them before, didn’t you? Right here, as a matter of fact.”
I just looked at him. “Laugh all you want,” I said. “But the fact is, Michael, they’ve been wanting to kill you for a while now. And after the stunt you pulled today with the Rambler, I am seriously thinking about letting them.”
He stopped laughing. “Suze,” he said. “Your strange fixation with the spirit world aside, I told you: Today was an accident. You weren’t supposed to be in that car. You were supposed to ride home with me. Brad was the one. Brad was the one I wanted dead, not you.”
“And what about David?” I demanded. “My little brother? He’s twelve years old, Michael. He was in that car. Did you want him dead, too? And Jake? He was probably delivering pizzas the night your sister was hurt. Should he die for what happened to her? Or my friend Gina? I guess she deserves to die, too, even though she’s never even been to a party in the Valley.”
Michael’s face was white against the bits of sky I could see through the window behind his head.
“I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt,” he said, in an oddly toneless voice. “Anybody except for the guilty, I mean.”
“Well, you didn’t do a very good job,” I said. “In fact, you did a lousy job. You really messed up. And do you know why?”
I saw his eyelids, behind his glasses, narrow.
“I think I’m starting to,” he said.
“Because you tried to kill some people I happen to care about.” I swallowed. Something hard, that hurt, was growing in my throat. “And that’s why, Michael, it’s going to stop. Right here. Right now.”
He continued to stare at me though those narrowed eyelids.
/> “Oh,” he said in the same expressionless voice. “It’s going to stop, all right. Believe me.”
I knew what he was driving at. I almost laughed. If it hadn’t been for the painful lump in my throat, I would have.
“Michael,” I said. “Don’t even try. You so don’t know who you’re messing with.”
“No,” Michael said quietly. “I guess I don’t, do I? I thought you were different. I thought you, out of everyone at school, would be able to see things from my point of view. But I can see now that you’re just like everybody else.”
“You don’t have any idea,” I said, “how much I wish I were.”
“I’m sorry, Suze,” Michael said, undoing his own seatbelt. “I really thought you and I could be…well, friends, anyway. But I am getting the distinct impression that you don’t approve of what I’ve been doing. Even though no one—no one—will miss those people. They really were wastes of space, Suze. They had nothing meaningful to contribute. I mean, look at Brad. Would it be such a tragedy if he simply ceased to exist?”
“It would,” I said, “to his father.”
Michael shrugged. “I suppose. Still, I think the world would be a better place without all the Josh Saunderses and Brad Ackermans.” He smiled at me. There was nothing, however, warm in that smile. “You, however, disagree, I can see. It even sounds to me as if you’re contemplating trying to stop me. And I really can’t have that.”
“So what are you going to do?” I gave him a very sarcastic look. “Kill me?”
“I don’t want to,” he said. “Believe me.”
Then he cracked his knuckles. Can I just tell you, I found this quite creepy. I mean, aside from the fact that cracking your knuckles in front of somebody is creepy anyway, this was especially disturbing since it drew attention to the fact that Michael’s hands were actually quite large, and were attached to these arms that I remembered from the beach were remarkably muscular, and filled with ropy sinews. I’m not exactly a delicate flower, but hands attached to a pair of arms like that could do a girl like me some serious damage.