Lurker

“This is very informal. If you’re uncomfortable answering questions now, you can come down to the station with your parents later. We don’t want to make this tragedy any harder on you than we have to.”

“Okay.”

“Now then, did you know Nicolette Bennington?”

“Yes. I mean, we weren’t best friends or anything.”

“But you knew her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see her outside of school?”

She thought about Nicolette in dark glasses holding Hamlet’s leash standing in a Lady Foot Locker, thought about the girl lying under an oak tree fascinated by the book in her hands. But she said, “No, not really. We didn’t hang out.”

“Do you know who she did hang out with?”

“She kind of kept to herself. I mean, she was nice. Everybody liked her, but she just kind of kept to…I already said that. No.”

“Did she ever mention a boyfriend?”

Mandy shook her head. The only time Nicki ever mentioned boys was in a joking way, like they were funny to her. Mandy couldn’t remember if she’d ever dated any of the boys at Lake Crest.

“Okay,” said Officer Romero. “This question is a little tougher, and I want you to really think about it. Have you noticed any strange men hanging around your school, maybe parked in a car or standing across the road?”

A nervous joke occurred to Mandy: Aren’t all men strange? She mentally scolded herself for such an inappropriate thought. This was serious, and she had to treat it that way. So she put her mind to work, imagined all of the times she’d left the grounds after school. But Dale was in those thoughts, his arm looped around her neck as he walked Mandy to his car. She certainly didn’t want to be thinking about Dale, but it was impossible not to. They always used to leave together. Not anymore, she thought.

She edited Dale out of her thoughts, concentrating on memories of the streets and yards and trees surrounding the campus. Nothing came to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I haven’t.”

“That’s okay.” The woman lifted a small business card from the desk and handed it to Mandy. “This is the number of the police station. You can call us anytime.”

“Thank you,” Mandy said, sliding the business card into the pocket of her blouse. She stood and then blurted out the question that had been nagging her since the assembly. “What happened to Nicki, Officer Romero?”

The police officer’s pretty face scrunched as if in pain. “It’ll be on the news tonight,” she said. “What I can tell you is that she was abducted from her home last night. The body was found a few hours later.”

The body? Mandy thought in disbelief. How could she say that? It wasn’t a body. It was a girl. A girl named Nicki. A girl she knew!

“Thanks,” she whispered, and walked out of the room.

2

Mandy’s room was a mess, or so her mother said. The rest of the house was spotless and shining, filled with glass and metal and marble. The only concessions to forestry were the hardwood floors throughout and a series of bookcases in her father’s den, but even these were sanitized, the pine having been bleached near white. Everything beyond her bedroom door was modern and cold. Mandy just didn’t like it, even though her friends thought the minimalist gleam was cool. In defiance of all things sleek, Mandy had a cherrywood bedroom suite with a matching computer desk. Her bed was covered in a thick fabric with an intricate print of swirling crimson, brown, and gold. Last year, she had insisted that her mother buy her a deep red cotton rug to cover the floor, because the polished boards made her think of a bowling alley. While her mother kept all the glass and stone tabletops clear, save for the well-placed bronze or crystal knick-knack and silver picture frame, Mandy used the surfaces in her room. Books and magazines, CDs and DVDs, school papers and pictures of her friends were everywhere: on her desk, on her chest of drawers, stacked in neat piles on the floor.

“We can have cabinets built in for all of that,” her mother once said.

Mandy had rolled her eyes and asked her mother to leave.

Though she loved her room, even Mandy had to admit that it was dark that afternoon. The curtains were open, and sunlight poured through. It didn’t matter. The room felt dark, and Mandy imagined she could be on a sun-drenched beach, and she’d still think it gloomy.

On the bed, Drew flipped through an issue of Teen People, not really reading, barely gazing at the pictures. Mandy could tell that her friend was just looking for a distraction from the morning’s bad news. They’d talked all the way home, and this was a quiet pause, a moment for the batteries to recharge.

Poor Drew, Mandy thought. She was always a little scared of the world, though Mandy didn’t know why. Boys absolutely terrified her, and even before this terrible business with Nicki, Drew had hated being alone.

Mandy sat at her computer. She had done a Google search to see if Nicki was on the news yet, but the only mentions said little more than Officer Romero had. Girl abducted. Body found. She checked e-mail and, except for a note from Laurel—Yeah, Daddy’s flippin’. See you next decade.—her mailbox was empty. Strange, she thought. She’d expected to have dozens of e-mails from friends wanting to discuss Nicki, her death, and the cops at school. Mandy thought they should all be talking about this, yet even she couldn’t think of who to write to or what to put in a note.

It was all just so weird. This was the kind of thing you saw on the news, like the Middle East. It was something distant, something you understood in the way you understood the moon. Murder existed. It was there. But you never expected it to come close to you.

Behind her, the television was on. She kept her ears alert, waiting for some news about Nicki, but the big city stations probably wouldn’t run the story until five. That was hours away.

“Do you think it was someone from school?” Drew asked, dropping the magazine on the bed. “I mean, do you think anyone here could have done this?”

Mandy didn’t know. It should have been impossible to believe—these were people she’d known for years—but the idea was with her now. Maybe freaky Derek with the big ears and the biker jacket had finally snapped, no longer satisfied to just get high and listen to Nu-metal. Peter Harris or Ned Schwartz could have done it. They were so obsessed with video games and horror movies—they’d totally be suspects. It could have been a teacher. Not someone like Mr. Lombard or Mr. Stahlman, who taught English, but Mandy certainly wouldn’t put it past Mr. Grohl: even as shop teachers went, he was pretty skeezy. It could have been a woman, she reasoned. After all, no one had said how Nicki was killed. But all of this was silly. These were her friends and her teachers.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess. I just wish they’d tell us something.”

“I know!” Drew said too loudly. She leaned forward on the bed, her eyes wide. “It’s like the worst part because we don’t know anything. I mean, was it a drifter? Or like maybe her family? Or a boyfriend or something? It’s like they won’t tell me who to be afraid of, so I’m afraid of everyone.”

That wasn’t exactly new territory for Drew, but Mandy knew what she meant. Without some idea about the cause or the killer, there wasn’t much to hold on to in the way of comfort.

“God, it could be anyone,” Drew said with more than enough drama to exasperate Mandy.

She was about to say something logical, like It couldn’t be our parents or your brothers or Laurel, just to contradict Drew’s uber-paranoia and keep her from bursting into tears again, but her cell phone trilled. Drew leaped off the bed with a yelp. Her hand fanning the air in front of her face like she was trying to get rid of a bad smell, Drew danced from foot to foot.

“Oh my God! That scared me so bad.”

“You need a pill,” Mandy said, sliding over the bed to grab her phone from the nightstand. She checked the