The Summer Man

Chapter TWO





Lisa waited a few steps down the trail, in the dark. Coach usually parked at the head of the trail—there were no streetlights where Eleanor dead-ended—and she went to his car, but tonight, she wanted to walk and talk, not to do it, not have sex.

Thinking of sex with him gave her a chill, sweet and heavy and terrible, too, her heart suddenly picking up speed. He was married and more than twice her age, and she knew what people would think if they knew, but it felt so good, so wrong and wild and good…

He says I’m beautiful; he says I’m his beautiful girl.

She clamped down on the thought. It was over. It had to be over now. He had been getting…strange. It had been a mistake, telling him that she loved him. She hadn’t meant to, but two weeks ago he’d said he loved her, and she’d had to say something, she couldn’t just leave him hanging. And then he’d started talking about the two of them running away together, and she had nodded and agreed because she didn’t want him to feel bad, but she had to tell him; she couldn’t let him keep thinking what he was thinking.

Lisa crossed her arms against the chill, wishing she had somewhere to sit, hoping it wouldn’t go too badly, that he wouldn’t be too upset. She knew it was going to hurt him and was afraid he might cry or even yell at her. He’d never yelled at her before—not since they’d started doing it—but he’d raised his voice to the team more than once, like when they were playing Port Angeles and gone into halftime down by seven…Coach definitely had a temper, but he wasn’t crazy; he wouldn’t yell if they were outside where anyone could hear them…

That made her think of Amanda Young, what she’d said at Pam’s party. Lisa’s lip curled. Total bullshit. Coach would never hurt her, never, and Amanda was a bitch for calling that shit out right in front of everybody, practically. That was not cool. Nobody knew anything; they’d been careful, there was no private connection between her and Coach, and Amanda’s dramatic bullshit scene had created one.

All the more reason to do this now.

She saw the glow of approaching headlights a block down, heard the familiar purr of the Volvo’s engine. He could have walked, he lived close enough, but he almost always drove if he could, so they’d have a dry, clean place to lie down. Not tonight, though, not unless it was to say good-bye, one final time together…

That sweet, heavy chill tried to overtake her again, but she was suddenly nervous, because there was his car, it was time, she was going to tell him, tell Coach—

Ed! His name is Ed!

—that she didn’t want to be with him anymore.

She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders as the lights splashed over the dead end’s turnout, trying to make herself ready. Walk and talk. It would all turn out OK.





Miranda Greene-Moreland breezed into the newspaper office early Monday morning with a beaming smile and open arms, followed a beat later by her husband. James Greene-Moreland was lugging a large cardboard box—presumably containing the picnic leaflets—and he set it on Bob’s desk with an audible sigh of relief.

“Robert!” Miranda said, and Bob stood, allowing himself to be embraced, his cheek smacked. As usual, Miranda reeked of lavender oil. Her outfit today was a long, blousy floral affair over an ankle-length skirt, belted with a wide macramé sash that she had undoubtedly made herself.

“Please, Miranda, it’s Bob,” Bob said, knowing she’d ignore him. She always did.

“We’ve brought the flyers,” Miranda said. “They turned out beautifully. James, show Robert the flyer.”

James hurried to comply, handing over one of the leaflets, a half page of tan paper—what Miranda would undoubtedly call “ocher”—that was adorned with a pretty good sketch of the lighthouse to one side. COME ONE AND ALL, the flyer proclaimed, and beneath that:

PORT ISLEY’S ANNUAL EMBRACE OF THE SUMMER SOLSTICE

FINE FOOD, GOOD COMPANY, DIVERSIONS OF EVERY KIND

At the bottom, in smaller print, were the specifics—June 21, eleven a.m. to eleven p.m., Stanton’s Point Park at the lighthouse.

‘Embrace of the Summer Solstice’? What the hell was wrong with ‘picnic’?

“Isn’t it perfect?” Miranda said, not really a question so much as an exclamation. “Simple, clear, and concise, but inviting, too—the font is Copperplate Gothic Light. James actually suggested Times New Roman, but the Copperplate is so much more refined, don’t you think?”

“I like the lighthouse,” Bob said.

“I know,” Miranda said, presumably in agreement. “It’s by Darrin Everret. He’s new this year, came to us all the way from Massachusetts. All his landscapes are simply amazing. He did a piece on one of the trails in Kehoe Park? You can just smell the trees, it’s so real.”

“Well, I can’t thank you enough for picking the flyers up,” Bob said, hoping to deter her from launching into a fresh spiel of uninspired adjectives. Once she started talking about the retreat’s new “prodigies,” he’d be doomed to a good half hour of amazing.

“Or designing them,” he added, before she could remind him. “They’re very nice. Um eloquent.”

“They are, aren’t they?” Miranda gushed. “Now, they’ll be going out in this week’s edition, is that right?”

As if she didn’t know. “That’s the plan,” Bob said. The Port Isley Press—managed, operated, and edited by the silver-haired Bob “Robert” Sayers—came out every other Wednesday. Since the picnic was on the coming Saturday, having it go out two weeks from now didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“Wonderful,” she said. Miranda had crowned herself Isley’s unofficial PR personality at some point and had decided their annual picnic wasn’t trumpeted nearly loudly enough, to her taste. She’d actually lobbied for the job, presenting her case at one of the council’s quarterly meetings, offering to foot the cost of advertising herself. The council’s response had been a big shrug, which had pretty much mirrored Bob’s regard for the issue, thus leaving Ms. Miranda Greene-Moreland in charge of the yearly picnic flyer.

Summer solstice embrace flyer, actually, Bob thought. Good Lord.

Miranda filled Bob in on the news from the retreat—officially the Greene-Moreland Artisan’s Community—as James fussed with the flyers. There were several new artists, twelve in all, making it a full seventeen residents for the summer. Bob nodded at what she said, the quicker to relieve himself of her presence. He didn’t dislike Miranda, exactly, or her henpecked husband—she was like a force of nature, to be endured rather than judged, and her husband was as close to a cardboard cutout as a person could get—but Bob had work to do. Deadline to get the issue to the printer’s over in Port Angeles wasn’t until six, but while his pieces were finished, he had yet to edit what his “reporters” had turned in. This week, there was still the high school English teacher’s monthly book review to get to, plus a few final tidbits from this year’s journalism class. He hadn’t looked at Nancy’s stuff, either. There was also one of Dick Calvin’s gardening columns. Dick didn’t understand what punctuation was for; his pieces always took time.

Which Nancy was going to do, Bob thought, stealing a glance at the clock by the door. Where the hell is she, anyway? He didn’t particularly give a crap about punctuality, but Nancy was almost always in on Mondays by eight, eight thirty at the latest. It was after nine already.

“All done,” James said, smiling. He held an armful of bundled flyers.

Nodding at him, Miranda wrapped up her gently wandering rant about the spiritual rewards of art, how much more satisfying those were than the monetary, and leaned in to kiss Bob’s cheek once more.

“It’s been wonderful, as always,” she said. “Now, you’ll be at the picnic, of course.”

“Of course,” Bob said. Everyone would be. There were connections to be made, affairs to rekindle, summer faces to be air-kissed. It usually had a better turnout than the Fourth, when half of Isley would be out on boats, watching Port Angeles’s firework show. Or getting drunk at a backyard barbecue.

Behind Miranda, the door to the office opened. Nancy Biggs, his sole part-time employee, walked in. Her expression was dark, almost grim, but when she saw that the Greene-Morelands were in the office, she smiled widely. Bob could barely tell it was fake.

Miranda didn’t bother with the hug-kiss for Nancy—Ms. Greene-Moreland only seemed to deem it appropriate with men—but she did go through the flyer presentation again. Nancy responded appropriately, briefly oohing over the lighthouse drawing…but then went out of her way to apologize to Bob for being late, which was when he knew that something was up. Nancy cared as much about being on time as he did.

Miranda took the hint and sailed out of the office after another round of see-you-at-the-picnics, James at a close heel. The second the door closed, Nancy dropped the smile.

“They found a body at Kehoe Park,” she said.

“What? When? Who did?” Even in his surprise, he had to appreciate Nancy’s decision to hurry the Greene-Morelands off before speaking; if she’d dropped that particular bomb with Miranda in earshot, they’d have had to suffer her for another hour.

“A body,” Nancy said. “This morning, by the trail the kids use to get to school.”

“A kid found the body?”

She shook her head. “School’s out now, remember? Since Friday. A jogger, I think. A teenager.”

“The jogger was, or the victim?”

“Who?”

Bob clenched his teeth and tried to remember that Nancy tended to rattle easily. “Nancy, who was killed?”

If she noticed his agitation, her face didn’t show it. She simply seemed anxious. “A teenage girl, is what I heard. This morning. I got up just before eight, and there were already deputies there.”

It took the county sheriff’s people almost an hour to get to Port Isley, their upscale little town on the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Someone had called it in early. Assuming that the chief had called the county after securing the scene, the body had been found—or reported, at least—no later than six thirty.

“By your apartment?” he asked. Nancy lived in one of the nicer complexes west of the park, on the back of the hill.

“Yeah. Well, that little dead end half a block away, where the trail starts. And there was another state car at the main entrance, on Eleanor. I swung by on my way in.”

“Any idea who was killed?”

Nancy shook her head. “Annie was there, but she said she couldn’t talk. She said she’d try to call later, once Vincent says OK.”

Annie Thomas was their “in” at the police office, part of Chief Vincent’s summer patrol. Stan Vincent employed about twenty full-time officers between June and September, plus any number of part-timers. In the off-season, there were only ten, and Vincent still sometimes closed the office on Sunday afternoons, routing everything through cell phones. Port Isley wasn’t exactly abuzz with crime.

“She’s who told me it was a girl. She also said…she said it was a mess,” Nancy added, her voice lowering as though they weren’t alone. “That it was most definitely homicide.”

“Who found her? The body, I mean?” Bob was surprised to find that he felt a bit flustered himself. He’d been a reporter for almost forty years, interned on a paper right out of high school, and though he’d never worked a crime beat, he’d seen a few murder scenes in his time. Since coming to Port Isley, though? Not a homicide town. He’d lived there nine years and thought he could count the number on one hand.

“Maybe Nora Dickerson? She was there, in her sweats. Or Poppy Peters, he walks in the park most mornings. Could have been one of the summer people, though.”

Bob nodded, looked at the clock. He should wait for Annie to call, or put in a call himself to Stan Vincent; the guy was uptight but usually fair…it was still pretty early, though…

F*ck it. Bob walked to the door, grabbed his coat off the hook. “I’m going up there,” he said. “Can you man the office? Take a look at Dick’s column, check over the book review?”

“I can, but…I thought I could go with you,” she said. “I mean, this is a real story, isn’t it?”

A real story. And right at the kickoff of tourist season. He’d be hearing from Dan Turner within the hour, probably chockfull of phrases like “let’s handle this carefully” and “we don’t want to start a panic.” There was no way the council would trust Bob to go solo on this, not without at least trying to help spin it…and considering that the Press only ran because of a healthy town subsidy, courtesy of the mayor’s office, and half the ads in his little rag came from council members or relatives thereof, he’d have no choice but to play ball. Even a decade ago, the very thought would have raised his ethical hackles. These days…these days, deciding not to run some nasty little detail in order to spare someone—a neighbor or friend, likely—pain or embarrassment didn’t strike him as all that terrible.

A murder, though.

“Yeah,” he said. “Looks like it. But we’ve got to get this week to bed, and you’re better on layout than I am. A lot better.”

Nancy looked pained.

“But I was already up there…doesn’t that make it my story?” she asked.

Bob shrugged into his coat. “In comic books, maybe,” he said. “Don’t worry, you can write up Deputy Annie’s interview, do all the follow-up. I just want to see what’s going on.”

He reminded her to clear a spot on the front page—he’d written an op-ed on classic film that could hold until a future issue; that would give them enough space with a little juggling—and promised to pick up coffee on the way back, which earned him an actual smile. Then he was on his way, stepping out of the small building that housed the Press and Wiseman’s Insurance and into a brilliantly bright day, the sky cloudless, the wind from the bay sharp and numbing this close to the water. He considered walking—Kehoe Park was maybe fifteen minutes from the office—but it was almost straight up the hill, too. And there was the paper to consider. He didn’t want to be out long; Nancy couldn’t be expected to do everything…

Could be you’re just getting old, Bob, he told himself as he settled into his battered, aging pickup. Don’t want to walk when you could drive.

Well, no shit, he thought, and cranked the heater before starting up the hill.





As soon as the police let her go, Nora went home, ticking off a to-do list as she jogged the half mile from the park. She’d want to call Curt, first, obviously, shower…Then she’d hit the Klatch, to tell Jen.

She’ll shit, Nora thought, feeling an anticipatory guilty glee, she’ll just shit.

It was funny. Jen had just been talking about personal safety, hadn’t she? Like her and Curt, Jen and Alex had migrated to Port Isley from a larger city—Seattle for Curt and Nora, LA for Jen and Alex. Jen ran Coffee Klatch, a charming little cafe just off Main, and the two would meet up most mornings for lattes. Two—or three?—days ago, they’d been talking about how strange it was, not to live somewhere you had to worry about people breaking into your car, and then Jen had said that with the summer people coming, she and Alex had been talking about getting a dog, for protection. There were a number of drifters who inevitably blew through each year. What little crime there was in Isley always seemed to be a summer thing. Never mind that both couples had been summer people to Isley for a handful of years before; now that they were “natives,” the annual tourists were to be despised, just the tiniest bit. And really, there were always a few strange men wandering around each summer.

She winced and drew a deep breath as she turned up her drive. It had been terrible, less than halfway through her run and then just stumbling across her like that, one pale hand practically right on the path, the rest of her crumpled in a little runoff trench that skirted that part of the trail. The state of her clothes, the rips and the stains…

…her face…

Nora stopped at the attached garage and leaned in to stretch her hamstrings, breathing deeply. She hoped she wouldn’t end up with some sort of posttraumatic disorder from what she’d seen, but she could already imagine picturing that poor girl every time she closed her eyes.

It had taken Chief Vincent and two of his people less than fifteen minutes to get there. Nora had been impressed by Chief Vincent’s thoroughness, using a video camera, blocking the paths, just like the true-crime-type shows she occasionally caught on cable, only with the dull parts left in—the waiting, the bland conversations among those who waited. Funny how reality could be so much less dramatic than television.

I saw plenty enough drama, she thought, visualizing the girl’s face as she grabbed one ankle, lifting her heel up to her butt, stretching her quads. Mutilated, no other word for it, and Nora was pretty sure she’d seen bite marks. The girl had apparently been a local, Lisa something. When one of the officers had seen her, he’d said it was Lisa something before Vincent had shushed him. Meyer? Myron?

Nora shook her head and went inside, kicking her shoes off in the kitchen. She took a shower first, then called Curt. He needed several assurances that she was well enough to let him stay at work and actually brought up the whole getting a gun thing again. She decided to go to the Klatch, but after she’d dressed and started up the SUV, she felt compelled to drive by the park on her way. And when she slowed to a stop behind the parked ambulance—its lights dead, the attendants standing by for a cigarette as they waited for the police to finish whatever they were doing—she felt further compelled to get out for a moment, to stand with the dozen other watchers. Nora didn’t recognize most of the watching group—summer people, mostly, although Sadie Truman was there. Sadie nodded and smiled at her but was too immersed in conversation with some overdressed summer woman to come over. When a hand touched her shoulder, Nora jumped.

Then smiled. It was Bob Sayers, one of the more interesting local characters…he ran the town paper and was a popular dinner guest with the better educated of Port Isley’s population. Bob had worked for the Seattle Intelligencer for decades as a reporter, before retiring to Isley.

Bob smiled back. “Sorry,” he said.

“That’s OK,” she said. “I’m not usually so jumpy.”

Bob tilted his head toward the park and the gathered cops. “Understandable, considering. I heard there’s been a murder.”

Nora nodded. “A local girl. Right on the main trail.”

Bob lowered his voice, leaning in slightly. His breath was warm and inoffensive. “You saw it?”

“On or off the record?” she asked, smiling again.

Bob grinned. He was handsome, in a paternal sort of way—silver hair, warm eyes, good crow’s feet—though a little too old for her to seriously flirt with. Besides which, she and Curt weren’t that bored with each other. Not yet, anyway.

“Absolutely on,” he said. “But if I quote you, you don’t have to be Nora Dickerson. You could be ‘a female jogger,’ if you’d rather. Or just ‘local citizen.’”

Nora kept smiling but hesitated, anyway. No one had told her not to speak with the press, but it seemed obvious, what with the victim’s family notification and all. Did they already know? Surely by now.

Nora nodded. “Yes, I saw her. I—I found her, I guess. I called the police, anyway.”

Bob’s expression turned solemn. “That must have been scary. Were you out jogging?”

“Yes. And yes, it was,” she said. “I was just a couple miles in, too. I hit the trail, probably around six thirty, and I was just past this dip in the path, maybe two hundred meters in, and there she was.”

She grimaced. “Just lying there in this little runoff next to one of the trees, faceup, one hand practically right out on the path. Her eyes were open, but it was obvious that she was dead, that she wasn’t seeing anything, you know…”

Was she babbling? She stopped talking. Bob nodded. She had the impression that he was listening very carefully.

“I heard it was bad,” he said. His tone was gentle.

“It was definitely unpleasant,” she said. “There was…there was a lot of damage.”

“Did you recognize her?”

“No, but one of the deputies said that it was Lisa. Lisa Meyer, I think. Definitely Lisa something.”

Bob opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, gazing over her shoulder. Nora turned, saw that there was a flurry of motion among the assembled police. Several of them, the police chief included, were hurrying to their cars. Vincent shouted a few orders to those remaining behind before climbing into his 4x4. His face was decidedly flushed. The state cars turned on their flashing lights, and all of them—three cars but at least seven people, in all—sped away from the park, barely slowing at the cross street as they took off toward downtown, east, up and over the hill.

“What’s going on?” Nora asked, not really expecting an answer.

“My guess, they’ve found another body,” Bob said mildly, but when she turned to look at him, she saw that his expression wasn’t mild at all. He looked grim, which was very much how Nora was feeling as she considered the idea.

Perhaps she’d been too hasty to reject the whole gun thing, after all.





Although she woke up and got dressed immediately—she always did when Peter was over—Amanda ate breakfast, four cold Pop Tarts and instant coffee with assloads of sugar, in bed, and was reading when her mother tapped on her door. Pink Floyd played quietly on her ancient stereo. She liked Dark Side in the morning. Mellow.

“’Manda, your friend Devon is here.”

Amanda ignored the vague sarcasm, frowning at the clock on her nightstand as she stood up, book still in hand. It wasn’t noon yet. “Yeah, OK.”

Devon had mentioned that he would be coming by, but not until later, like three. Peter had usually cleared out by then—he worked part-time at the docks, some kind of boat maintenance thing, also did some construction work when it was available—and Devon tried to avoid him as much as possible. Well, and Amanda’s mother, too; she used to be nicer to him, but since hooking up with Peter, she’d picked up some of his general bigotry. In Peter’s book, fags were for bashing, or at least making fun of. He was a total shithead.

Amanda turned off the music and stepped out of her room, closing the door behind her. She scooped up her high-tops on the way to the apartment’s front door; Devon would be waiting outside. Peter and her mother were sitting on the couch, watching TV, Peter in jeans and a ratty Motorhead T-shirt, her mother still in her bathrobe. There were a number of beer cans on the coffee table by their feet, though most were undoubtedly empties from the night before. Grace Young wouldn’t really get going till later.

“Where’re you going?” her mother asked, barely glancing away from the television, although there was a commercial on. She lit a cigarette, flicking her cheap lighter with chippedpolish nails.

“I don’t know. Down to the Klatch, probably.” Amanda tied her shoes leaning against the front door, wishing she had more time to get ready. She hadn’t been wearing makeup lately, and her hair was short enough that she didn’t really need to f*ck with it, but she should’ve brushed her teeth. She didn’t want Devon to have to wait too long, though, and there was no way he’d come inside.

“Have you seen my bag? The flowered one?”

Peter snorted loudly. “Maybe your boyfriend has it. Bet he looks pretty with a flowered bag.”

Her mother didn’t laugh, but she did smile. Disgusting.

“Hilarious,” Amanda muttered. She wanted to say about ten other things, to both of them, but didn’t. Devon was waiting, and picking a fight with the motherf*cker and motherf*ckee would only prolong her stay. Peter snorted again but didn’t say anything else.

“When’ll you be home?” her mother asked. “’Cause I wanted you to go to the store later; we’re out of some stuff. Bread. And chips.”

“I’ll call,” Amanda said. Her bag was crumpled under her coat, propped against the stereo shelf. She grabbed both and opened the door, saw Devon standing next to Peter’s pickup, smoking. When he saw her, saw her watching, he tapped his ashes on the rusting hood in a dramatic overhand gesture. Amanda smiled.

“When?” Her mother’s voice, hoarse from years of chain-smoking, was rising in volume and pitch. Not a good sign. “When are you going to call? You say that, but then you never do, and I don’t know where you are half the time, so when?”

“By four, OK?” Amanda started to step out.

“Hey!”

Amanda gritted her teeth, turned back to look at her. At them.

Her mother’s worn but still pretty face was caught in a shaft of sunlight from the open door, the light making her squint. Smoke swirled through the light, a warm rush of air spinning in from outside. “Be careful, baby.”

For a half second, Amanda felt the nearly perpetual knot in her stomach spasm tighter, a random burst of sadness and anger and guilt, along with too many other feelings to sort through. Her mother was barely a parent most days and drank too much when she wasn’t at work to be even halfway reasonable. Amanda had mostly accepted it; it wasn’t like she had a choice. She’d be out in a few months, anyway, away from her mom and whatever new dickwad she dragged home every year or two. It was that rare moment when Grace expressed concern—sober concern, anyway—that still got to her, that made her feel really deep-down shitty.

“Yeah, don’t you two go picking up any sailors,” Peter added.

Grace mock-slapped his shoulder, turning away from the door. “Peter!”

Nice. Amanda slid out before anything else could be said. Peter sucked. He wasn’t as bad as last year’s model; Ted had been a total dirtbag—he’d been “in between jobs” for the entire six months he’d been around, and dumb as a stick, besides—but Peter was a bigot and, she suspected, a total letch. He’d never actively hit on her, but the few times they’d been alone together, even for like five minutes, he always tried to strike up conversations about her love life. She wasn’t an idiot. It was sick.

“What, you didn’t feel like coming in, hanging out with Peter?” she asked, hopping off the front step.

Devon dropped his smoke and ground it out with his toe. He didn’t answer but looked searchingly into her face. His hair, usually so carefully and subtly spiked, looked kind of flat. Like he hadn’t checked the mirror before he’d left home.

He still wasn’t talking, either.

“What?” she asked. “What’s up?”

“I tried to call like an hour ago,” he said. “Peter answered, so I hung up.”

“OK,” she said. No news there. “So, what’s going on?”

Devon continued to stare at her. It was starting to get weird.

“What the f*ck, Devon?” she snapped.

“That thing at Pam’s, that—that dream or whatever.”

Amanda nodded but didn’t say anything, her heart thud-thudding in her ears. Time seemed to slow. She already knew what he was going to tell her, from the confusion and appraisal in his expression. She’d had a vision, and she knew it had been real; of course it had come true.

“Cops found Lisa this morning, in Kehoe Park,” he said. He nodded vaguely behind the complex; Amanda turned to look, in spite of the fact that there was nothing to see. Amanda and her mother lived seven blocks from the park’s west entrance, three over and four away; from where she stood, she could only see a few waving, crooked treetops over the apartment’s rooftop.

“And then they found Ed Billings at his house, dead,” he continued. “And his wife. Darva, her name was Darva. He killed her, then killed himself.”

Amanda turned back, stared. “You’re shitting me,” she said, her voice far away, except she knew he wasn’t. It was just something to say.

Devon shook his head. “I don’t know who found Lisa, but Tiny Tina found the Billingses. She went over to have coffee or something with Darva, and there they were. She ran out screaming, made a big scene.”

“How’d you hear?” she asked, though she didn’t really care. Again, it was just something to say, to make the conversation happen. She felt numb and kind of stupid.

“Carrie called to tell Sid. I guess Carrie’s mother gave Tiny some water or something while they waited for the cops to show. And while they were waiting, one of her friends called to tell her about Lisa.”

Sid was Devon’s uncle and legal guardian, Carrie Watson his girlfriend. Carrie and her mother lived near the Billingses, as did Tiny Tina Yeltsin, the ancient town librarian. Tina was actually fairly average in size, but Amanda and Devon had privately dubbed her “Tiny,” based on her very small and wrinkled mouth, which looked remarkably like an anus when she pursed it at loud library guests, and anyone with “teen” in their age. It was one of their billion private jokes.

Amanda glanced back at the apartment and thought about what a huge drag it would be if Peter decided to leave early.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Get some coffee.”

They started walking, Devon being uncharacteristically silent as they headed downtown. Fine by her. Usually he wouldn’t shut up, and she still felt numb, unable to process. They’d talked it out at the party on Saturday night, like, two hours of chain-smoking in Pam’s backyard, and Devon had insisted that she have a drink, and she’d had, like, four, and they’d both decided she’d fallen asleep, after all. She’d spent most of yesterday working to enforce the decision in her stupid, hungover brain, and had managed to make herself believe it by last night.

Wasted time, she thought.

From the apartment they walked the flat and meandering blacktop of Fessenden until they hit Bayside, passing a trailer park and a couple of more complexes on the way. They slogged up the hill, both of them slowing as the incline steepened. Bayside Drive, Isley’s northernmost street, ran from the back of town—the down slope away from the bay, where most of the less-than-well-to-do folks parked their families—all the way to Main, and though it was a welltraveled road, it was still woodsy near the top of the hill. The shoulderless road was flanked by wide stands of evergreens, their tops twisted or broken; Isley suffered more than its fair share of windstorms. The sun was almost directly overhead, bright but not too hot; the sweep off the bay usually kept the temperature fairly moderate during the summer, at least on the upslope.

Just after the crest of the hill, two blocks after they’d started down, they reached Devlin Street. Devlin ran from Bayside along the eastern boundary of Kehoe Park, eventually becoming Eleanor, a small, dead-end bit of street at the park’s southeast corner, where the middle school used to be. People occasionally parked there at night to make out or f*ck; it was a dark spot.

As they crossed Devlin, Amanda slowed and glanced down, saw a scattered handful of people at its curve several blocks away, where the trees began and Devlin turned into Eleanor. She could also see a county cop car parked there, pulled off to one side, and what looked like a news van, probably from the local station affiliate in Port Angeles.

“Do you want to—did you want to go down there?” Devon asked.

“F*ck, no,” Amanda said. “Why? Do you?”

“No,” he said. “I just thought—I mean, you saw it, right?” He sounded excited, but a little wavery, too, his voice taut and high. “You said you saw Mr. B kill Lisa Meyer. You told me he was—that he was eating her face. You saw it.”

Amanda suddenly felt almost violently ill, her mouth flooding with watery spit. She dropped her bag and turned toward the ditch that ran alongside Bayside’s north side. There were more trees after the ditch and no houses past them, just a high, rusty fence that blocked a steeply angled drop to the water, two hundred feet below. She only made it to the bottom of the ditch—which, thank God, was muddy but not full of water—before she threw up her meager breakfast in a single, throat-wrenching glurt. She spit several times, leaning over the brownish puddle of chewed-up food, then stood up, looking back at Devon. He held her bag clutched to his stomach, his expression almost ridiculously concerned.

“I’m OK,” she said, not really sure if she was. Her voice sounded thick and hollow. She spat a few more times, then climbed back up to the pavement, her high-tops squishing in the soft dirt. “Tell me I’ve got breath mints in there.”

Devon rummaged through her bag and came up with a tin of Altoids. Thank God for small f*cking favors. She chewed several as they crossed to the south side of the street, walked to where the sidewalk began, and sat on the curb. Both of them lit up, the smoke rasping down Amanda’s grated throat, the mints making it taste like menthol. The entire puking experience finally made the world real again; she’d started to think, coming out of whatever lockdown she’d been in for the last fifteen minutes. She thought over the plots of at least a half dozen B movies that dealt with her very situation, trying to avoid the scariest ones.

“So what do you think?” Devon asked finally. He didn’t clarify; he didn’t need to.

She exhaled heavily. “I don’t know. I mean, I had, like, a vision, right? Saw the future?”

Devon nodded.

“If I’d said something…”

“Don’t even,” Devon said. “You didn’t make it happen.”

“But if I’d done something to change things, she wouldn’t have died.” She thought about Mr. B and added, “None of them would have.”

“Right, and if you had a time machine, you could go back and try to fix everything, but then something would happen that would make you see that it was fate, and you never could have stopped it anyway,” Devon said. “That’s an old Twilight Zone, I think. You feeling bad now does exactly shit. You know that, right?”

She sighed. “Yeah, I guess. But I still feel bad.”

“Fair enough,” he said, “though you’re totally wrong. But guilt aside, don’t you think—I mean, do you think you’re psychic or something? Did you have, like, some traumatic event lately, or an injury…?”

She looked at him, her best you’re-shitting-me face. “Yeah. You remember last week, when I got hit on the head with that big rock?”

“F*ck off,” he said. “I’m just wondering if maybe something triggered it. There’s always a trigger, right?”

She nodded, conceding the point. Presuming her experience was following movie logic, anyway.

“OK, so has anything like this ever happened before?” he asked. “I mean, obviously not like this, but some other ESP thing?”

Amanda didn’t dismiss it right off, though she would have before Pam’s party. She started to tell him no, then remembered something her mother had said a few times.

“I guess—when I was little, I used to say things about how people were feeling,” she said, deciding it sounded dumb even as it came out. “Never mind, that’s stupid.”

“No, what do you mean? Seriously?”

He looked serious, and she felt a rush of real affection for him. They’d been fast friends since eighth grade, when he’d come to Port Isley to live with his uncle after his parents had split and his mother had had some kind of nervous breakdown. He actually had a few friends—girls, mostly, since the hickdicks were too homophobic to be caught hanging out with him, although there were a handful of California-transplant faux punks who didn’t care…Devon was witty and likeable; he did pretty well in spite of his rather obvious orientation—but he was pretty much the only person she talked to at all. About anything real, anyway.

They were both due to graduate in a year, but he’d turn eighteen in October, and they had plans to run away to Seattle together as soon as they could, away from tiny, snooty Port Isley. Between them, they just needed to earn enough to put down first and last on a place, get real jobs and GEDs, get out of this shithole of a town…

Maybe I could take up reading palms or something, she thought. It wasn’t funny.

“My mother said that when I was just learning how to talk, I’d tell her things about her friends,” she said. “Like ask why someone was sad, or say that someone was angry. She said that she’d always find out later that I was right.”

Devon dragged off his smoke, exhaling as he spoke. “Well, that sounds psychic to me. Or, whatsa…empathic, anyway.”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “But that was, like, what, fifteen years ago.”

“Have you—has there been anything since the party?”

Which had been Saturday night, and it was only Monday. “No,” she said. “Just—”

He’s here.

In the backyard, right after.

Devon had an eyebrow raised. She shrugged. It was probably too vague to mean anything, but maybe he’d have some insight. She wanted all the help she could get.

“No,” she said. “At the party, though, when we went outside to smoke? I had this feeling—or thought, or something—that someone was…here.”

“Here, like here-at-Pam’s?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought, ‘he’s here.’ Like, literally, that’s what I thought, that’s all I thought.”

“Here in Isley, you think?”

“Dude, no f*ckin’ clue. Maybe.”

They sat and smoked for a moment. She felt like she should do something, take some action, but she wasn’t sure what or how. Maybe she should call the cops, tell them…tell them what, exactly? That she knew Ed Billings had killed Lisa Meyer? Duh. If they didn’t know it already, they’d figure it out in like three seconds, from blood and fiber evidence. She watched CSI. Even considering the TV bullshit factor, it was a wonder anyone tried to get away with murder anymore, and she seriously doubted that Mr. B had tried to clean up after he murdered Lisa but before he killed his wife and himself; he was crazy, obviously, but that seemed downright retarded. The cops wouldn’t need her input. The realization was a relief.

Of course, someone else might call the cops, someone from the party. It was unlikely that Stan Vincent would bother to follow up on something like that, but she supposed it was possible. The idea of being interrogated by the man wasn’t appealing, but it wasn’t like she had done anything wrong. Besides smoking pot, anyway, and she couldn’t see any need to mention that.

Thank God school is out. She wasn’t actively disliked at Isley High—at three hundred students, seventh through twelfth, the student body was too small for there to be actual outcasts. It was too inbred, everyone having grown up together; even the problem kids, special ed or whatever, had brothers and sisters. New kids still got hassled—she had unpleasant memories of it from when she and her mom had moved here, when she was nine—but they were generally accepted into the fold within a year or two. She had been. Still, a lot of people thought she was weird, because of how she dressed and her musical tastes and her tendency toward general morbidity. Even with school out, word would get around that she’d “seen” Lisa killed before the fact; just not as quickly.

Yeah, it will, she thought. The picnic. F*ck. Everyone went to the annual picnic, which was on Saturday. Maybe she should skip it this year…

“Were they having an affair?” Devon asked abruptly. “Lisa and Mr. B?”

“Probably,” she said. “I mean, considering how she acted at Pam’s, and then this.”

“You don’t know for sure?” he asked. “I mean, when you saw him kill her, you didn’t get like…I don’t know, a sense that they were…doing it?”

“I told you what I saw,” she said. “It was like watching a movie. No voice-over.”

He nodded. “What about the someone being here thing? Was that like a movie?”

“No, that was like—” She thought about it, tried to think of a way to express it. “Like just knowing something. Like a secret that someone tells you, or how you feel about someone. Does that make sense? It was almost like it related to me, kind of.”

“Not like some absolute fact,” he said. “More…subjective.”

“Right,” she said. “That’s totally it.”

“I’m f*cking brilliant,” Devon said. “That’s why the chicks all dig me.”

Amanda smiled, for about the first time since leaving the apartment. “Fag,” she said.

“Fat gothy lesbo whore,” he said promptly.

“I’m not a lesbian,” she said, and they both laughed. A strained laughter, maybe, but better than nothing.

They butted their smokes and started back down the hill, Devon letting the matter drop for the moment, telling her instead about his latest chat with gguy7. Gguy7 (gay guy, seven inches, Devon had gleefully informed her a few weeks back) was pushing for a meeting, which Devon was dodging. It was one thing to have an Internet love interest—a type-n-jack, in Devon-speak—another entirely to actually hook up. “Besides,” Devon said, and not for the first time since “meeting” gguy7 online last month, “that picture might be from twenty years ago; he’s probably a total troll now. It might not even be him.”

He was babbling a little, trying to make things normal, and Amanda nodded along, still thinking about what she’d seen at Pam’s party. She was absolutely sure that there were some vast implications to it all, that there were things she needed to figure out, decisions to be made, but nothing was occurring to her; she had no ideas.

Well, I won’t smoke pot anymore, she decided, and promised herself to give it up, at least for a few weeks. No pot, no visions, right?

Right.