Her friend Heidi had gotten Vee into melancholy music after hearing her brother Tim play it on his computer. Then Tim showed them the Ouija board he kept hidden at the back of his closet behind a pair of old skateboarding decks, and Vee’s new obsession was born. She had been reluctant at first, but you don’t act like a chicken if you want to impress a guy like Tim.
It wasn’t that ghosts and death and alt-rock hadn’t interested Vee before she had fallen for her best friend’s brother, but Tim’s affinity for the darker side of things helped push her over the edge. She was vying for his attention, and winning the affection of a high school kid was a lot easier when she could talk about the same bands; when she could look the part rather than come off as a poseur. She’d gone so far as to show him a picture of her dad when he was a kid—the dark hair, the trench coat, the killer boots she’d spied in the back of her parents’ closet when she went snooping for money. Tim had taken one look at the high-school-aged Lucas Graham and thought it was awesome that Vee had been raised by a freak. When she dropped that her father wrote about serial killers and unsolved murders, she’d blown his mind and won a full-on “in” with Tim and his high school friends.
But that was all ruined now. And ironically, it was her dad’s fault. The man who had helped her win a plum spot among a group of older kids was the person who was stealing her away from them. And while Vee knew she’d be back at the end of the summer, eight weeks was an eternity. In eight weeks, Tim could discover a dozen new bands and find himself a girlfriend—a girl way cooler than her. Two months was plenty of time for Vee to lose her hard-earned place next to the boy she swore she was starting to love.
“Hey, Jeanie, get the map,” her dad urged.
Vee glared out the window for a moment longer, then grabbed her backpack out of the foot well. She rifled through it as the truck bounced along the highway toward the Pennsylvania border. Her dad had designated her as the official direction-keeper, and she had looked up their route on Google Maps while he had been busy packing up the last of his stuff. His eyes had just about fallen out of his head when she told him it was a forty-two-hour trip. Pulling the printed directions out of a purple pocket folder decorated with black Sharpie swirls, she smoothed their route across her lap and wrinkled her nose at the crooked blue line that cut across its top.
“Eight hundred miles today,” he told her. “We have to keep to the schedule.”
“How long does eight hundred miles take?”
“Twelve hours at least.”
She groaned at his answer.
“It says forty hours on your map, but that’s regular car speed, kid. This truck doesn’t go that fast.”
“Forty-two hours,” Vee corrected, then slumped against the bench seat. By the time they’d reach their destination, Tim Steinway wouldn’t even remember her. Virginia who?
She didn’t want to imagine some cool, dark-haired girl hanging off his arm when she finally got back home. Needing a distraction, she tossed the map printout onto the bench seat between them and gave her father a sidelong glance. “So, what did the guy you’re going to write about do?”
Her dad frowned at the steering wheel. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, but Vee wasn’t about to give him a choice. If she had to endure the possibility of losing Tim, had to deal with eight weeks of pure exile, she deserved to know what kind of a criminal was at the root of ruining her life.
6
* * *
KEEPING THE SUBJECTS of Lucas’s books a secret when Jeanie was younger had been easy, but the older she got, the more questions she had. Caroline used to tell her that Daddy wrote about monsters and ghosts. It was as accurate a description as any little girl would need. But Jeanie wasn’t so little anymore. Monsters and ghosts only repelled kids who were afraid of the dark, and Jeanie had proven that she liked the nighttime far more than she enjoyed the daylight.
“Did your mother bring that up?” It was the first thing that came to mind.
Caroline had always been good about not mentioning the specifics of his projects. Hell, she was the one who demanded he never breathe a word about his topics anywhere near their kid. Lucas had made a point of not keeping galley pages of his work anywhere in the house where Jeanie could find them. Any time he received a fresh shipment of new releases, he’d mail them out to friends and longtime readers. The leftovers ended up in the trunk, driven out to local libraries and cafés, all to spare his kid an accidental discovery. The copies he kept for himself were locked in a gun safe in the back of a bedroom closet. But now, with things between him and Caroline the way they were, it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover she had brought up Jeffrey Halcomb while packing up Jeanie’s things, if only to make his life more difficult than it was already going to be.
“I’m not an idiot,” Jeanie muttered. “I know what kind of things you write about. Killers and stuff.”
“And how do you know that?”
“It’s called Google,” Jeanie said flatly. Lucas held back a self-satisfied smirk. He had once asked Caroline what she thought would happen when Jeanie decided to look him up on the Internet. She had waved a dismissive hand above her head, as though the thought of their daughter taking the time to research her own father was ludicrous.
“Anyway, I looked up your books on Amazon, and then I looked up the guys in your books on Wikipedia. They’re all, like, ax murderers. You didn’t think I’d ever find out?”
“Of course I knew you’d find out,” he said. “You’re a smart kid.”
It had been plain stupid of Caroline to think they could protect their daughter from the darkness of his interests forever. But before he could dwell on the fact that his little girl knew he made a living off of other people’s pain, his thoughts twisted toward an even scarier thought: if Jeanie had googled him, what else was she looking up?
“I’m hardly a kid, Dad.”
He kept his attention on the road, but he could hear the eye roll in her voice.