Stubby’s jaw dropped. “It is not!”
I showed him the display on my phone and he palmed himself on the forehead. “I lost track of time,” he said. “Is she really mad?”
I handed him my phone. “Better ask her yourself.”
Stubs talked to his mom for a bit, and mostly he just said he was sorry over and over, and then he asked her if it was okay if he and I went to McDonald’s ’cause he was starving. She told him to be home by midnight, and once he hung up he grinned at me again. “Crisis averted.”
Stubs drove us to McDonald’s, and we sat in a booth and joked and laughed like old times. I told him about what’d happened earlier at Wes Miller’s place, and Stubby was so amazed by it all that he made me tell him a second time. It was after eleven by the time we left the restaurant to get home before Stubby’s curfew.
Stubs dropped me at my driveway, and I handed him his skateboard and he strapped it to the scooter with a bungee cord he kept in his seat. Then he saluted and was off again.
I watched him go with a wistful sigh. It felt so good to have my friend back. I turned toward my house and thought about what Donny had said. Looking at Mrs. Duncan’s darkened windows, however, convinced me not to wake the old woman. Plus, the patrol car was parked between my house and our neighbor’s on the other side. I could faintly make out the dark outline of the police officer inside, and I waved to him and headed up the drive.
As I rounded the corner of the house I sniffed the air. Something smelled familiar—then I realized: it was cigarette smoke wafting toward me. When I got to the back door, I saw that the kitchen light above the stove was on and the back door was open. Only the storm door was shut.
I opened the back door tentatively, the smell of cigarette smoke growing stronger. My first thought was that Ma had somehow escaped rehab and had come home. My heart lifted. I missed her so much. “Ma?” I called excitedly, stepping into the kitchen and shutting the back door before locking it. I heard the noise of a throat clearing from the vicinity of the living room.
“Ma?” I called again, hurrying to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
The orange glow of a cigarette butt caught my attention immediately. A figure was sitting in Dad’s chair, lifting the cigarette to their lips and making it glow bright.
“Ma?” I asked one more time, as a whisper of alarm snaked up my spine.
I started to back up, but then the light next to the chair was flicked on. “Hey, Maddie,” Rick Kane said.
My breath caught in my throat as my mind filled with questions. What was Rick Kane doing in my house? How had he gotten in? Had he heard about his cousin? Did he know that Wes had nearly murdered an FBI agent? Did he know that Wes had also murdered all those kids? And hadn’t he called off work because he’d been having chest pains? How had he survived?
While all my questions tumbled over each other in my mind, Rick stood up, and a smile spread slowly across his face. But it wasn’t a nice smile. It wasn’t the smile he’d offered me each time we’d met. This was a sick smile—similar to the one his cousin had worn. Sinister and dark, but perhaps even more evil. This was the smile of a serial killer.
“No,” I stammered, backing up as my mind started to put it all together with a thousand synapses firing all at once, like the finale of a fireworks display. It’d been Rick. All along, it’d been Rick. And now, here he was. In my house. Stepping forward to kill me, too.
I took another step back and began to turn, intending to run, but Rick came at me so fast I barely had time to react. In an instant, he had me twisted around with my right arm pulled up behind me and his free hand pressing hard across my throat, cutting off most of the oxygen.
I struggled, but he pulled up harder on my arm, and I would’ve screamed in pain if I’d had any air. “Ah, ah, ah, Maddie,” he said softly…tauntingly. “If you struggle, I’ll hurt you so much worse than if you don’t.”
I shut my eyes; tears were leaking out of them and streaming down my cheeks. Rick eased up a bit on the pressure of my arm and at my throat, and I sucked in a lungful of air. I was about to scream when I felt a sharp prick at my neck. “Scream, and I’ll cut your throat,” he said.
I held back a sob and more tears flowed down my cheeks. “Why?” I gasped. He’d been so nice. He told me I’d helped him by giving him a year to prepare and take care of his family in the event of his death.
“Why?” he repeated. “Well, Maddie, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? But I think you deserve an answer, so I’m going to tell you.” Rick pivoted me toward the mantel, and my gaze landed on the photo of my dad.
“See, when I first came to see you,” Rick began, “and I heard what you had to say—that I’d die on December sixth, twenty fourteen—well, I believed you meant it. Like I told you before, I’ve got a few health issues, and I figured it was perfectly logical that I’d bite the dust at fifty-three. My dad died at fifty-five, and I’ve got an uncle who kicked the bucket at forty-nine, so it runs in my family.
“And like I also told you, I decided to get all my affairs in order and make sure my family was well provided for, and I did all that, Maddie. I did it all. But then those dark cravings that I’d fought against my whole life started to crop up again, and I had an amazing thought. I was going to die soon anyway, right? Why not act on some of those thoughts? I’ve wanted to my whole life, you know. And I wondered what it’d be like to stop trying to be someone else and instead let me be me. So I did. And I can tell you it’s been awesome.”
I was so scared that I felt light-headed.