Sara (24 page)

That sounds familiar
, Laney thought as she turned to the next page.

Jared's best friend, Alec Johnson, was the next one to die. Just two days after Sharon's suicide, he was killed in a car accident. Driving home from a party where he'd had too much to drink (according to the article, his blood alcohol level had been three times the legal limit), he'd missed a turn and driven his sports car into a tree. The car had exploded—there was a picture of the smoldering wreckage that made her wince.

And Glenn himself was quoted in that particular write-up, as one of Alec's friends. “What is going on around here?” he had said. “Three of my closest friends have been taken in little over a week. I don't know what to think anymore.”

Three of his closest friends
, she thought, a shiver going down her spine.
So he knew the victims in Farmington, too.

The next kid on the death list was a loner named Gary Rasmussen. Before she read the accompanying article, she looked long and hard at the picture accompanying it.
He couldn't have been part of the same group
, she decided. He had acne scars, his long brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and he had a diamond stud in one ear. He scowled at the camera. She knew the type—he probably smoked, cut class a lot, wasn't a particularly good student, and was just marking time till he was old enough to drop out. According to the article, he'd been a bit of a loner. His body had been found next to a county road, in the ditch. He'd not only been hit by a car, but apparently the car had backed over him as well. She winced as she read that. The police chief believed he'd been hit, backed over, and the driver got out of the car to roll his shattered body into the ditch. No one had any idea what Gary was doing out walking in the country—which apparently was very much out of character for him.

The next to die was a cheerleader named Mary Sheen, who just missed being pretty. Her nose was a little too long, her mouth a little too wide, but she wore really cute glasses and her smile was infectious. Mary took an overdose of sleeping pills the day after Gary's body was found—no one could even say for sure if the two had even known each other. But she had been Tiffany Fowler's best friend and, like Tiffany, had been having terrible nightmares before her suicide. She told one friend, apparently, that the dead kids came to see her while she was sleeping. She'd also been behaving erratically. Her boyfriend, Glenn Lockhart, was too distraught to talk to the police.

Glenn.

There was a break of about a week before Dylan Radford was found drowned in the school pool. Dylan was on the swim team, and no one, least of all the swimming coach, had any idea how he'd managed to get into the closed pool area at night. He was a champion swimmer, with Olympic dreams—so his drowning made absolutely no sense.

Randy drowned, too
, Laney thought. Her hands were shaking as she turned to the last page—but it was Stacy Bolton, the one she'd read on the computer. She put the pages aside and stared out the windshield. The wind whistled around the car, blowing so hard the car rocked a little bit.

A ring of deaths, more than half of whom were people who were close to Glenn.

Randy and Noah
had
been close to Glenn—even if Zack hadn't.

But that Gary Rasmussen kid didn't fit in with the others at Farmington, either.

It couldn't all just be a coincidence, could it?

Laney didn't think so.

She ticked them off on her fingers. Accident, suicide, accident, suicide, accident…and here, the same pattern. Accident, suicide, accident.

This was pretty damning—for Glenn. There was no mention of Sara in any of the write-ups. But that didn't mean she wasn't there, hadn't somehow followed him here two years later.

But that didn't make sense, either. Sara was living with her aunt and uncle. Glenn had come here first—and it
was
too much of a coincidence that she had relatives in the same area.

And Glenn had acted like he'd never seen her before that night in Vista.

Unless they were in on it together
.

The thought chilled her, and she shivered. She started the car, turning on the heater.
I'd better take these to Tony and see what he thinks
, she thought. She started to put the car in reverse, but the car stalled.

She restarted it, and again, when she slid the gearshift, it stalled.

“What the hell?” She turned off the heater and started the car again. This time the engine coughed and died before she could shift gears. When she turned the key this time, nothing happened.

“Great.” She looked over at the library, which was dark. Hers was the only car in the lot—whoever was parked there must have left while she was reading the articles and she just hadn't noticed. She popped the hood and opened the car door. She stood up and grabbed her cell phone out of her purse. It slipped out of her hands and clattered underneath the car. She swore and got down on her hands and knees to reach it. She got her hands on it, but as she started to sit up she hit her head on the bottom of the car door—and fell unconscious to the pavement.

Candy and Sara were walking in a bare field. It was dark, the quarter moon sending very little light through the clouds. Sara's arm was around Candy.

“RUN! Get away from her!” she tried to shout at Candy, but nothing came out of her lips. She tried to walk toward them, but nothing happened. Her bare feet were like lead, mired to the ground. She tried to shout again, but only a hoarse croak crept past her lips. She was helpless. Sara was going to hurt Candy, she had to do something, get help, anything, but she was unable to make a sound, unable to move, and across the field the sound of Sara's laughter came to her ears, and she was cold, so very very cold, Candy was going to die and she could do nothing to help her, nothing to stop Sara, she had to do something, and then the moon reflected off the scythe that Sara was holding, and she brought it down across Candy's throat, and the blood was coming out, torrents and torrents of blood, who would have thought there would be so much blood in her, and she was falling, and Sara was laughing, laughing, laughing…

Laney sat up. Her head hurt from where she'd hit it.

“Oh, my God, Candy.” Mercifully, her phone still worked despite being dropped. She dialed Candy's number. It rang, and rang, and rang—and never went to voice mail.

That wasn't good.

Tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Candy.”

She got back in the car and tried the ignition again. This time, it started without a problem or hesitation. She put it into reverse, and this time it didn't stall. She roared out of the parking lot and headed out of town.

Candy looked out her bedroom window as her parents' car backed down the driveway. She let the curtain fall back into place and shivered. Her parents were going to her uncle's for dinner. She'd begged off, claiming she'd promised to go spend time with Tony in the hospital. Her mother had clearly not been pleased, but hadn't argued with her. The wind rattled her window, and she shivered again. She wasn't looking forward to going over to the Sterlings'—and wished it hadn't gotten dark. But she'd agreed to go talk to them, no matter how big a mistake she thought it was. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was go into the house Sara called home.

Maybe I should have been more honest with Tony and Laney
, she thought as she pulled a black cardigan sweater out of her closet and slipped it on. She wasn't entirely convinced Tony and Laney really believed what was going on—which was understandable. Wasn't that why she hadn't told them everything? She could hardly believe it herself, let alone talk two other people into believing what she knew to be true. She couldn't explain it to them because she'd have to—

I'd have to tell them the truth about me
, she thought grimly,
and I'm not going to do that unless I absolutely have to.

She glanced back over her shoulder at the window. The wind was picking up. She grabbed her cheerleading jacket off its hanger and walked down the hallway. She didn't turn off any lights—which would infuriate her mother, who was always conscious about wasting electricity—but she didn't want to be alone in a house with dark rooms. In the living room, she checked her cell phone to make sure it was completely charged. It was, and she had three bars, which was good. She slid it into her jacket pocket. She looked over at the big bay window in the living room. It was so dark outside.

It almost seemed like the dark was pressing against the glass, trying to get into the house.

Trying to get at her.

She took a deep breath and swallowed. She was scared, terribly scared. Her heart was beating fast and loud.

I should have told them the truth
, she thought as she stared at the darkness on the other side of the big window.
But how could I tell them the truth? How could I prove to them that I—I'm special? Different? They would have thought I was crazy, had lost my mind, and I'm just not willing to let that happen yet.

She sat down on the sofa and rubbed her hands on her jeans.
It just freaked me out so much when they started talking about their dreams
, she told herself,
and it's only JUST started happening to them. They'd think I was some kind of freak.

She'd never told anyone about the dreams. For as long as she could remember, she'd had incredibly vivid dreams and nightmares. There had been a time, she remembered, when she was about eight or nine that the nightmares were so bad she woke up screaming every night and was afraid to go to sleep. She'd gone to see a child psychiatrist, been prescribed sleeping pills—and eventually the nightmares stopped. Something happened—she couldn't remember what, no matter how hard she tried—to make the nightmares go away—
either that
, she figured grimly,
or they'd come true somehow.

That was the scariest part of her dreams—they always came true.

When her older sister Gina had come home from college talking about a boy she'd just started dating and showed Candy a picture of the two of them together at a sorority party, that night she'd dreamed she was at their wedding. And just two years later, she was the maid of honor when Gina married him.

It wasn't always big things, either. Sometimes it was little things—like seeing her mother drop her bank card into a drawer so she could find it when her mother was looking for it, or where her dad lost his keys.

The little things made the big things that much more terrifying.

The night Laura Pryce's parents were killed, for example, she'd dreamed about the accident. She woke up, drenched in sweat and her heart pounding, knowing that Laura's parents were dead. She'd been in the backseat of their car, heading down the highway in the rain, driving slowly because the rain was so heavy Mr. Pryce could barely see the road. Then the back window filled with the headlights of the speeding eighteen-wheeler, and she heard the blare of its horn, and Mr. Pryce tried to swing the car to the left lane but he wasn't fast enough and the front of the truck slammed into the back of the car, throwing it up into the air, and it flipped several times before crashing back to the highway upside down and still flipping, and she heard their necks snap and she opened her mouth to scream…and then she woke up.

She'd gotten out of bed, not wanting to even try to go back to sleep for a while. It was raining outside that night, raining hard, thunder and lightning and a hard wind, and she walked over to her window and looked out. The Pryces lived just down the street, and as she looked at their house through the rain the flashing red lights of a police car came around the corner. It pulled into the Pryce driveway, and she knew Laura's parents were dead.

She'd known there was something terribly wrong about Sara Sterling the moment she'd first laid eyes on her at the football game. Her mother had told her Sara would be coming to the game with her aunt and uncle—and would be introducing herself. “I told them you'd be happy to introduce her around,” her mother had gone on, in her
I've made up my mind what you're going to do and you're going to do it
voice, which never failed to irritate her and always made her want to do the exact opposite, “so make sure you make her feel welcome.”

Sara had come up to her at halftime, with her pretty face and nice clothes. “You must be Candy,” she said in her throaty, husky voice.

Candy had smiled and held out her hand and opened her mouth to say
yes
, but when Sara took her hand something
happened.
Writing about it in her diary later that night, she couldn't think of the right words to describe what it felt like, finally just writing
It felt like my soul had just been sucked down into hell—
which was close but not quite right. She'd never gotten a feeling of any kind like that from another person before—and she couldn't let go of Sara's hand fast enough. The rest of the night was a blur in her memory—the second half of the game, driving with Sara into Kahola and going into the Vista where they ran into Tony and Glenn.

She didn't remember anything after they left Vista that night, actually.