Ten (19 page)

Without thinking, she reached her hand into the bathroom and flipped on the light.

“What you are doing?” T.J. asked.

Meg stepped inside. “Look, there’s something—”

Meg froze. Staring back at her from the mirror was Nathan.

Only instead of a crazed killer rushing at her, Nathan’s face was a lifeless mask of fear and pain. His mouth hung open in a silent, unfinished scream, his body skewered to the bathroom door with an arrow through the heart.

It was too much. Meg stumbled back and covered her mouth, bile rocketing up her throat. Then she spun on her heel and ran.

Meg bent over, elbows on knees, trying to catch her breath. It was as if her lungs wouldn’t cooperate. She gasped sporadically for air between frenzied sobs. Meg was so lightheaded she thought she might pass out, and the muddy ground in front of the Taylors’ house came in and out of focus with each pounding thump of her heart.

She didn’t hear anyone come up behind her.

“Hey.”

Meg screamed. She tried to run but there was an arm around her. She panicked. There was a murderer loose. She could be next. She had to get off the island. She had to get Minnie and herself off that freaking island. Meg pumped her legs, attempting to break free of the strong grip around her waist. But she couldn’t.

“It’s okay,” a familiar voice said. “You’re safe, you’re safe. It’s just me.”

T.J.

Meg let her body sag in his arms. “It’s not fair, it’s not fair,” she repeated. Hot tears poured down her cheeks.

“I know, baby,” T.J. said. He pulled her toward him. Before she knew it, her face was buried in his chest, his arms holding her close as she sobbed uncontrollably.

“Why is this happening? What did we do? Why us?”

T.J. took her face in his hands. He gently wiped the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs, and she watched as his eyes scanned her face from hairline to chin and back again. Then without warning, he bent his face down and kissed her.

Meg had fantasized about kissing T.J. about a zillion times. The moments would come to her randomly: waiting for the bus after school, sitting across from him in Honors English, catching sight of the smiling dimples on the far side of the cafeteria, and, most poignantly, in those moments between sleep and consciousness when she lay in bed waiting for the snooze setting on her alarm to kick in and force her into the world of the living. Those were the most delicious moments. She would imagine his lips pressed against hers, one hand at the small of her back, the other ripping the ponytail holder from her hair before lacing his fingers in her brown curls.

And as amazing as those moments were, they were nothing compared to the real thing.

It wasn’t a romantic kiss. It wasn’t Mr. Darcy kissing Elizabeth in the carriage after their wedding. It was a desperate kiss, frantic even. T.J. pulled her to him so tightly that she could feel every inch of him, even through their raingear. His hand moved up under her coat, grasping her as if he was afraid she would disappear.

Meg surprised herself by matching his intensity. She kissed him as if she’d been doing it all her life. Strong, fierce. She unbuttoned his coat and had a hand up under his sweater before she could even register what she was doing. His skin was hot and smooth and she wanted to feel every inch of it, right then and there, regardless of what was going on around them. Or perhaps because of it? Meg had no idea. She only thought of T.J. and how desperately she wanted him. She didn’t care about anything else—not the murders, not being stranded on the island, not the strange writing on the bathroom mirror that seemed oddly familiar....

“Wait.” It was her voice, not his. Though considering how intertwined they were she wasn’t entirely sure.

T.J.’s hand cupped her cheek as he pried his lips from hers. “Huh?”

“Wait.”

“Why?”

“We need to go back inside.” Meg couldn’t believe what she was saying.

T.J. paused for a moment, then took her hand and started to lead her back across the isthmus toward White Rock House. “Right. You’re right. We’ll be safe there.”

“No,” she said, pulling him back. “We need to go back inside the Taylors’ house.”

T.J.’s eyes grew wide. “No freaking way.”

“I know,” she said. Meg pictured the four dead bodies inside and felt instantly sick again, but there was something she needed to see. The writing on the mirror. The way Nathan had been killed. It all seemed familiar somehow. “I need you to look at something.”

“Yeah, no. I saw everything I needed to see in that house.”

“Look, I know I’m asking a lot but …”

He pulled Meg to him and wrapped his arms around her. He felt so strong, so safe. She wanted to stay there forever. “But what?”

Meg sighed. She could hardly believe what she was saying. “Something’s wrong.”

“Something’s wrong? You mean more than that Kenny was bludgeoned to death, the Taylors died in their sleep, and Nathan has an arrow through his heart kind of wrong? Could there be a worse kind of ‘wrong’ than that?”

“I’ll explain later. Right now, I need to go back in there and—”

He brushed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. “And you don’t want to go by yourself.”

Meg nodded. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to march back into that house without him. “There’s no one else I trust, and we need to figure out what’s going on before—”

Once again he finished her thought. “Before one of us is next.”

“Yeah.” Meg glanced back at the Taylors’ house. It still looked inviting and comforting from outside, fully lit, just as it had twenty-four hours earlier when she’d trudged across the beach. But something sinister lingered in the house now, something that appeared to be stalking them all. Could she escape it? Even if she ran to the other side of the island, would she really be able to escape whatever it was that was after them?

No, she had to go back in. She had to figure this out if they had any chance of escaping with their lives. She felt the weight of the journal in her coat pocket. That was the key to the mystery. It had to be. She was so close to figuring it out. She had to push on. And she needed T.J.’s help.

T.J. leaned his forehead against hers. She felt him inhale deeply, then slowly let all the air out of his lungs. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Meg felt like a sleepwalker as she entered the Taylors’ house. She saw everything clearly and accurately, the toppled television, the rippling curtains, the bright lights glowing from the wall sconces. But it was as if she was completely removed from the situation, like she was watching it on a video screen. She knew what awaited her on the second floor and yet somehow that knowledge actually stemmed the tide of panic. Once she made the decision to go back inside, she was oddly calm. T.J. seemed to have the same mindset. He walked confidently by her side. Detached, almost, from the horror around them.

Maybe the killer felt that way too? After the first or second murder, maybe it got easier, so by the time he or she bludgeoned Kenny and shot Nathan with an arrow, it was a very detached, businesslike event.

Meg couldn’t believe she was comparing herself and T.J. to a killer. What was going on with her?

They stepped over Kenny’s body and went straight into the master bedroom. They moved quickly, not wanting to stay in the house a second longer than they had to.

The bathroom light was still on, and Meg marched straight up to the mirror, trying to keep her eyes on the writing, not Nathan’s face.

She’d caught barely a glimpse of the words before she’d seen Nathan’s body and fled the room. But they were familiar somehow, written in red paint, just like the slash marks at White Rock House.

For the day of their disaster is near.
The phrases were coming together. From the video, from the back of Claire’s photo, from the journal, and now here.

“That’s weird,” T.J. said. Meg saw his face reflected in the mirror. But he wasn’t looking at the phrase of text; he was staring at Nathan’s body.

“What?”

T.J. stepped around her and moved to the far side of Nathan’s body, examining the arrow wound. Meg turned and looked at the body straight on for the first time. Shot through the heart with an arrow, Nathan hung from the bathroom door. His body slumped forward, arms hanging limp, head lolled to one side with jaw open in a horrifying soundless scream.

T.J. pulled the door away from the wall, swinging the body closer to Meg. She stumbled back against the sink. Her stomach clenched and she had to cover her mouth with her hand, fighting to maintain her composure.

“Sorry,” he said.

Meg swallowed. “What are you doing?”

T.J. tugged on Nathan’s shoulder, prying his body a few inches away from the door. Then he stepped away and shook his head. “Look.” He pointed to Nathan’s chest, from which the thin, metal arrow still protruded. It was amazing to think something so small could take a human life. “See where the arrow is? And the blood …” T.J. pointed to the thin circle of red on Nathan’s shirt, radiating outward from where the arrow pierced his body. “It’s coming from the wound, right? But then what’s this?”

T.J. moved his finger down to Nathan’s stomach and Meg immediately saw what he was getting at. Closer to Nathan’s abdomen there was another ring of blood.

Meg’s curiosity got the better of her. She stepped close to the body, her nose just a few inches from it, to examine the spot T.J. indicated. Not only was there a second circle of blood, but it looked as if there had been some damage to the fabric in his sweatshirt, almost as if …

Despite her revulsion at the dead body, Meg quickly unzipped Nathan’s hooded Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt.

“What are you doing?” T.J. gasped.

Meg didn’t care. She had to see if her theory was right. She tugged the sweatshirt open and there, just above Nathan’s stomach in the middle of the second blood ring, was a hole in Nathan’s thermal shirt. A second arrow wound.

“He was shot twice,” Meg said, breathless.

“Whoa.” T.J. sat back on his heels.

“The way the fabric of his shirt and sweatshirt is pulling away from his body,” she said, feeling more and more confident in her discovery, “it looks like he was shot through the back first.”

T.J. glanced back toward the bedroom door. “The killer was behind them. On the stairs. He brained Kenny, then followed Nathan into the bedroom and shot him in the back.”

Meg nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.”

“And look.” T.J. swung the door so Meg could see it from the side. Two metal towel hooks were draped over the top of the door. Nathan’s body flapped slightly as T.J. stopped the motion of the door, and Meg clearly saw what he meant. Nathan had been hung there. The hooks dug into the fabric of his sweatshirt.

“The first shot must have killed him,” T.J. said. “Then he was hung here and shot again, probably with the same arrow, point-blank through the heart.”

The heart. Something nagged at Meg’s brain.
He said if I really loved him, I’d help him because if I didn’t, it would be like I was shooting him through the heart
. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

The writing. The deaths. A suicide note written on the back of sheet music. Images of a gavel like they use in debate team. Math problems scrolling across the screen.
Vengeance is mine
.

Choir. Debate team. A boy she was tutoring in algebra and his stupid friend.

Meg reached a shaky hand into her pocket and fingered the journal. Dear God, could it be? Lori, Vivian, Nathan, Kenny—could all of the victims have been in Claire’s diary?

It was insanity, and yet it all made sense. Lori, Vivian, and Nathan were all connected to Claire. It couldn’t be a coincidence, not with all this evidence staring her in the face. Nathan was the final proof.

She laughed, a sudden release of fear and frustration.

T.J. grabbed her by the shoulders. “Meg?”

She had the answer. She had the key to the murders. She spun around, taking in all sides of the room.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You don’t understand,” she said, trying to suppress hysterical laughter.

“You’re right, I don’t.”

Meg took a deep breath. “I know what the verse means.”

T.J. tilted his head. “What verse?”

She pointed to the mirror. “That line. It’s part of a verse. We’ve been getting it in pieces so I didn’t recognize it right away.”

“Getting it in pieces?”

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay.

For the time when their foot shall slide.

For the day of their disaster is near.

And their doom comes swiftly.”

T.J. shifted his gaze from the mirror back to Meg. “What are you talking about?”

Meg looked T.J. right in the eye. She pulled the journal from her pocket and held it up in front of his face. “I know who the killer is.”

TWENTY SEVEN

T.J. WANTED MEG TO EXPLAIN THE DIARY RIGHT
then and there … in a room, in a house full of dead bodies. Thankfully, Meg’s brain had rebooted and pulled her sanity back from the brink of no return. It was funny—suddenly she was collected, her brain running a mile a minute, where half an hour ago she was ready to curl up in the fetal position, squeeze her eyes tightly shut against the realities of what was happening, and pray she’d wake up from a horrible nightmare.

That said, no freaking way in hell was she going to plop down at the kitchen table in the House of Many Dead People and start dissecting the diary of a killer while surrounded by his or her victims. Screw that.

Despite his initial frantic need to find out what Meg was talking about, T.J. acknowledged that she was right in her desire to get the hell out of the house of death as soon as was humanly possible. So with a short sojourn into the kitchen on a successful hunt for a lantern and batteries, Meg and T.J. put as much space between themselves and the Taylors’ house as quickly as the weather and relative darkness would allow.

Once across the treacherous isthmus, T.J. started up the steps to White Rock House, but Meg stopped him.