Lurker

4

“I still think Dale sent that text,” Laurel said, curling her legs under her on the overstuffed chair in her bedroom. She dropped the remote in her lap and reached for the glass of tea she’d set on the windowsill.

“Why would he?” Drew asked from her place on the bed.

The two had forged a functioning truce since Nicki’s vigil the night before. Mandy imagined it was more a result of Drew’s fear of being left home alone than any real forgiveness, but it was a start. Now the three of them sat in Laurel’s bedroom. An Ashton Kutcher DVD was paused on the television screen.

“To freak her out,” Laurel said. “He gets her all scared with this whack job running around, and she comes running back to his big strong arms.”

“Oh,” Drew said, as if that made perfect sense.

“It’s not Dale,” Mandy said. “He’s not into subtle. Last night he left three voice messages on my cell. Besides, even if he were able to think of a scheme like that, which I’m finding highly doubtful, I don’t think he’s sick enough to do it. I mean, the message was basically laughing at Nicki’s death, unless I’m totally missing something. He may be an ass, but I don’t think he’s that deep down cruel.”

“He let you catch him sniffing around the chat easy enough.”

That was true. Maybe Dale was sick, like really twisted. It happened all the time. The guys that seemed to be so together were often just good at hiding something foul and dark. And someone like Dale, a privileged brat who apparently had no morals, could certainly work up that kind of nastiness. No, she thought. You’re just angry at him. Dale wasn’t a freak. He was a guy—just a big, stupid guy. He wasn’t evil.

“How would he block his user ID? I mean the text message came through without a handle. Dale couldn’t have figured out how to do that. He can’t even program his cell phone.”

Laurel smiled broadly and put her tea back on the windowsill. “Maybe not, but he also can’t figure out geometry, which is why he has geek-king Matthew do it for him. Are you seeing my ever-so-subtle point?”

“I didn’t even know you could hide your ID like that,” Drew said.

“Well, it happened, which means it can be done.” This from Laurel. “I’m the Goddess of Tech, but they come out with functions and features so fast that even I can’t keep up.”

“So,” Mandy said, “you think Dale had Matt do this for him?”

“I’m just saying it’s one big, obvious, really likely possibility.”

“God, that’s so romantic,” said Drew.

Laurel slowly turned her head toward Drew on the bed, then looked at Mandy. “You are going to let me slap her, right?”

“Well, he’s doing all of this for Mandy,” Drew said. “Just to get her back. I mean he’s obviously thinking about her a lot.”

“Logic fault,” Mandy said. “If he had spent ten seconds thinking about me—the ten he spent writing ‘kewl profile, let me grab your tits’ to that girl online—none of this would be an issue.”

Laurel laughed and clapped her hands. “Girl’s got the right head on this one.”

“I just think it’s cool to have someone missing you that way.”

“And yet so many stalker victims still press charges,” Mandy said. “Look, whatever. It’s over. If it was him, his plan didn’t work. If it wasn’t…”

Mandy didn’t know how to finish that statement. She didn’t have to. As she was speaking, Laurel’s door burst open and her father shoved his head in the room. Drew, naturally, yelped and fanned her face, and Laurel opened her mouth to protest, but her father was already talking.

“Turn on the news,” he said, stomping into the room, heading directly for the television. “They have a picture of the guy. You all need to see this, need to know what to look out for. Why is the screen frozen? Who is this? What’s wrong with this television set?”

Laurel pulled the remote from her lap and hit a button, sending Ashton Kutcher’s face away and replacing him with an episode of Saturday Night Live. “What channel?” she asked.

“Try four.”

Laurel pressed a button. The three girls gathered on the bed for the best view of the screen. A grainy black- and-white picture hung frozen above the anchorman’s shoulder. Then it came to life, showing a hunched man in a black coat pulling someone across what looked like a parking lot. The angle was odd; it seemed to be shot from high up. The man was looking over his shoulder, giving the camera a blurry profile. The person with him yanked hard, trying to escape. He yanked back, and all of them gasped when Nicolette Bennington’s frightened face came into the frame.

“Where’s the volume?” Laurel’s father asked.

Laurel hit a button.

“Again, police are looking for this man in connection with the abduction and murder of Nicolette Bennington.”

“Damn,” Laurel’s dad said angrily. “That didn’t give you a good enough look. If you kids were paying attention and actually took this seriously instead of just watching your little heartthrobs telling fart jokes…”

“Dad! Breathe! We’ll download it off the Web.”

Her father looked at her like she’d just slapped him. Confusion and anger took turns scrunching his features. With no reply, he simply shook his head and walked out of the room.

The best picture they could find, the one that showed the most of the man’s face, filled Laurel’s computer screen less than two minutes later. The image was black-and-white, taken by a security camera concealed in the eaves of the library. It showed the large, stooped man in a long black coat, his hand firmly grasping Nicki’s bicep. He looked feral, like an animal.

“God, Nicki must have been so scared,” Drew said.

Yes, Mandy thought. She was scared herself, and she was only looking at a bad picture of the man. She wasn’t being held by him, dragged into the dark woods at the back of the library where he would…

“He’s like grandpa old,” Laurel said. “Total Crypt Keeper.”

She had that right. From the side, the man’s nose was rounded like a beak over his thin lips. His chin seemed to point downward, but Mandy thought that might just be a trick of the shadows or maybe a beard that had lost definition in the photograph. The eye she could see was surrounded by puffy flesh. His eyebrows rested on a pronounced ridge. His cheek sank into shadow just above his jaw. Mandy thought about the images of witches she’d seen in elementary school. He reminded her of those, only male, without the hat and broom, and very real.

“Gotta be a drifter,” Laurel announced. “They would have caught him already if he was local. You can’t hide a face like that.”

Though disturbed by the image, Mandy found herself relieved. Nicki’s killer had not been one of them, had not been a friend or acquaintance—she’d never hang out with someone like that—and this knowledge was soothing in its own way. She felt safer.

“At least we know who to look out for,” Drew said. “God, he’s so creepy.”

“Yes, he is,” Laurel agreed. “I think we need some Ashton to wash that freak out of our eyes.”

Mandy left Drew at Laurel’s house, hoping her friends would talk and put last night’s misunderstanding behind them for good. Walking through the cool afternoon air, she felt uneasy. She lived in the same neighborhood as Laurel, only seven blocks away, and though she never once saw anyone creeping through yards, the terrible man from the news followed her home. She kept throwing looks over her shoulder and to the sides, checking the narrow yards that ran beside familiar houses. She carried him in her head, his beak nose, his thin lips. The thought of his fingers made her skin crawl.

Her feet moved faster as she told herself that he had moved on. He couldn’t stay anywhere in town—in the state—without being recognized. His face was all over the news. His face, his nose, his lips, his fingers…

Don’t run, she told herself. Just be cool. There’s no way he’s out here. Don’t freak. Walking up her own driveway, Mandy tingled with anxiety. She didn’t want to be alone in