OTHER TITLES BY DOT HUTCHISON

  A Wounded Name

  THE COLLECTOR SERIES

  The Butterfly Garden

  The Roses of May

  The Summer Children

  The Vanishing Season

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Dot Hutchison

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542005579

  ISBN-10: 1542005574

  Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

  To the girls who whisper and the girls who scream,

  and the ones made of rage who burn in between

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  When I was younger, my grandmother used to swear that lightning bugs knew when storms were coming. The more lightning bugs there were, the more they flickered and glowed, the worse the storm was going to be. I was never sure if she actually believed that or if she just liked telling me.

  There are certainly worse things to believe.

  It’s hard not to think of that right now, though: my grandmother slowly rocking on her back porch, a wispy cloud of smoke around her as she steadily worked her way through two packs a day, her voice creaking as we looked out into muggy summer evenings and she told me to count the lightning bugs. There is a storm coming tonight—a proper gully washer, according to my phone—and the air is thick with moisture and fireflies. A warmer-than-usual spring brought the fireflies out early this year.

  I take a deep breath, feeling the heavy moisture creep into my lungs. Sweat-damp clothes cling unpleasantly. It’s going to be a long, miserably hot summer if this spring is any indication. This late at night the rest stop is deserted. We’re just close enough to town that travelers would rather press on to someplace more populated before stopping, and even the truckers are largely off the road. Many of them are probably an exit or two south at Café Risqué, and they’ll wander up here in the early hours of the morning looking for the prostitutes who know where to wait for easy marks. For now, however, there’s precisely one car in the parking lot, a two-door sports car that looks too expensive for its current location.

  It’s parked a good distance away from the buildings, out of range of the diffuse yellow lights. A couple of smaller lights are posted at intervals to at least make people aware the pavilions are here, that the grassy stretch of picnic space is broken up by concrete and wood from time to time, but they’re not meant for evening use. They’re meant to indicate, not illuminate.

  Fortunately for me—unfortunately for general safety—that also means that the pavilions have no security cameras.

  I lean against the wooden post, looking out at the trees that loom behind the rest stop. The stop was built near the crest of a hill, but not far at all into the wood, the ground is broken by a jagged gully. There are signs posted around not to go into the forest because of poor visibility and uncertain ground. Some of the signs have additions tacked on below: BEWARE OF ALLIGATORS.

  “Why we here again?”

  I turn to the voice and see the young man swaying drunkenly down the path. It seems to take him extraordinary effort to stay relatively upright. Then again, he was blisteringly drunk even before I picked him up with a bottle of paint-thinner vodka. “We’ve still got a bit of a drive, baby,” I tell him. “You said you needed to stop on the way.”

  “Yeah.” He blinks at me in the moonlight, mostly shadow. “Yeah, I need a piss. But why we down here?”

  “The bathrooms are closed for maintenance.” I wave out at the woods. “You’re a guy. You can get away with plan B.”

  “Hell, yeah, I can piss in the woods!” He kind of sounds like he’s cheering. It’s almost funny, but more sad; this is the best conversation I’ve gotten from him.

  Jordan stumbles down the path. Where the sidewalk gives way to marshy grass, he falls to his hands and knees and starts laughing. “Oh, man, my dick is gonna get muddy. You gonna be okay with that?”

  “I think we can manage to wash the mud off at my place,” I say.

  “You don’t want to take care of it now?”

  “Do I want mud and piss in my mouth? Not so much. Come on, baby, do your business in the trees, and we can get on with the rest of the night.”

  He starts laughing again, but he does push himself back to his feet and meander into the woods, past the tree line and into the shadows. Stray bits of light gleam demonic red off eyes close to the ground, there and gone and there again. Around his crashing footsteps and the snaps of twigs, I can hear deep-throated croaks and singing crickets and the occasional grumble of a car passing on the interstate down the hill. In that relative silence the jangle of his belt is surprisingly loud.

  Thankfully, thunder booms and rolls overhead to drown out the sound of his pissing, the bass rumbling through my bones to make my toes tingle in my sneakers. There’s still time before the rain hits, the clouds congregating to the southwest and gradually shifting to cover more of the sky.

  Suddenly there’s a dull roar, a crunch of breaking bone, and a pained, panicked scream. After pulling the mini-flashlight out of my pocket, I click it on and train it toward the trees. The light is just barely strong enough to see Jordan falling to the ground, and it reflects red off a pair of eyes. The gator lumbers backward, dragging Jordan with it out of sight. His screams get hiccupy and strained as alcohol and shock combine to temper his reaction.

  Normally people aren’t in very much danger from alligators; the four-legged suitcases are at least as scared of us as we are of them. Humans are far more likely to be bitten by a shark than an alligator. But it’s April, and the gators are starting to get frisky and hungry ahead of mating season, throwing off the sluggishness of the winter months. There were problems with alligators in the gully last year, too, but the winter convinced people that the danger had passed.

  People, as a rule, aren’t very bright.

  More growls and a few bellows join the chorus of Jordan’s screams before a sickening thump and squelch silence the screaming. Maybe Jordan’s head hit a rock? I’m certainly not going to go over and find out.

  As hot as the spring has been, it’s also been wet—days and days of rain that keep the humidity soaring and make some of the meteorologists look nervously ahead to hurricane season. The creek in the gully should be a good depth, deep enough for the gators to stash Jordan’s body under the water to age for a while.

  Fun fact: alligators can bite, but they can’t chew. They rely on decomposition in water to soften their food enough that they can bite off chunks and swallow.

  I keep the flashlight trained on where Jordan disappeared, not because I think it’ll do anything to frighten off other alligators but because I’d like to see them coming if they start moving my way. No eye flash, no sign of scales. Probably safe to move.

  Pushing off the post, I walk back along the sidewalk to the main path and stumble over something on the concrete: Jordan’s keys.

  I was the one to drive us here, given his inebriation. We’re close enough to the same height that I didn’t need to adjust the seat or the mirrors, and I carefully removed all signs of myself from the vehicle before I gave him back the keys. My hair is tucked up into a hat, and even this late at night, the metal on cars is hot enough to hurt and burn; gloves may not be a popular fashion choice, but they’re a practical one. In more than one respect, as a matter of fact. Even the vodka bottle is back in my bag for later disposal so an intrepid officer doesn’t try to find out who bought that specific brand of vodka in the past few days. (Not that it would much assist an investigation; UF may not be one of the top-ten party schools anymore, but it is absolutely still a drinking school, and this is one of the cheapest bottles on the shelf.)

  The keys, though . . . there’s a reason I gave them back to Jordan. It’s important that it looks like he drove himself. I even made sure to park worse than he usually does. That wasn’t easy. Jordan routinely gets ticketed for taking up two spaces in permit lots because he’s an asshole and overprotective of his stupidly expensive car. That’s not a reason to kill him, of course, but it’s certainly not a reason to spare him.

  I pick the keys up by the main ring, careful not to let any of the teeth bite into my thin leather gloves. I could toss them into the woods, I guess, and hope it looks like they fell out of his pocket when he was attacked. The problem with that is making the lo cation of the keys match up with the path of carnage. That means getting closer to the alligators and the gully than I’d like to be at the moment. The keys jingle as I bounce them in my hand, weighing my options.

  After a moment I head back to the car and stand at the driver’s door as if I’ve just gotten out and locked it. The keys fall with a clink and a clatter to the asphalt, and with an almost accidental kick they’re half under the car. Drunk boy drops his keys. Perfect.

  Resisting the urge to whistle, I walk along the far edge of the parking lot to the ramp that leads back to the interstate, keeping a safe distance from the cameras mounted on the main building. I wait for a lone car to pass, then sprint across all three lanes of highway to the median. Luck is with me, and there are no northbound cars, which means I can cross the rest of the way to the shoulder. Safely tucked away in the shadows of the opposite rest stop—and still out of range of the cameras—I crouch down and shrug out of the straps of my bag.

  When I got accepted to college, my dad and I sat and went over the pros and cons of trying to get me a car. My scholarships would cover pretty much all of my actual school costs, but cars were expensive. Even a junker would add up with repairs, maintenance, and gas. Eventually we decided that Gainesville had a decent enough bus system that I could make it work, and I bought a bike instead. Not just any bike, though; this one is designed to get routinely folded down and stored, making it perfect for students with limited space. Two and a half years later, I can unfold it and set it to rights nearly in my sleep.

  In less than five minutes I’m off, riding along the shoulder of the highway until I can get to the next exit and the back roads that will take me home, thunder shivering down my ribs with each new rumble. When I look behind me, back to the quiet rest stops, I can see lightning flash within a cloud, a brilliant glow of rose and lilac that’s almost more the memory of the colors than the colors themselves, fading away as quickly as sunspots through your eyelids.

  Beautiful.

  My grandmother always said the lightning bugs knew when it was going to storm. I know it isn’t true, but on a night like tonight, it’s easy to believe it anyway.

  2

  Fidgeting with the pair of thin coasters, Rebecca watches the bartender make her drinks. The woman who was there an hour ago didn’t give her any grief for getting virgins, and she actually gave Rebecca one of them for free when she saw the large purple DD written on the back of her hand. The current bartender leered at her when she walked up, mocked her for not getting boozy, and then tried to badger her into adding alcohol, as if she were somehow less of a person for not wanting to get plastered.

  Sometimes she wonders if there are certain words men are genetically hardwired not to understand—no being the most significant of them.

  So she watches his hands, and he scowls when he realizes it. “Relax, Princess,” he tells her, almost shouting over the music. “I’m not adding booze.”

  “Less worried about the booze than the roofies,” she replies, “seeing as one of your coworkers drugged one of my classmates last week. And given that we have no word as yet that he’s been fired or arrested, I’m going to go ahead and watch.”

  He blinks at her. Then, carefully keeping his hands and the glasses in her view the entire time, he finishes making the drinks. When he plunks the glasses on the bar, liquid slops up the sides, some of it splashing over. “He hasn’t been fired.”

  “Shocking,” she says deadpan.

  “There’s no proof.”

  “Sure. Only witnesses who came forward to police and a picture of his stash behind the bar.” She balances the coasters on the rims to prevent both spilling and dosing as she walks. His scowl, she notices, has disappeared, leaving his furrowed brows as a mark of concern rather than anger. Did he really think stories wouldn’t spread across campus? Picking up the drinks, she eases back into the crowd.

  People press in all around her, yelling and laughing—in a few cases crying—and while this is a bar, not a club, there are a handful trying to dance to the combination of pulsing music and shrieking televisions. Mostly college students, she thinks, or people still drinking like they’re college students. This close to campus, especially in a bar this cheap and this prone to skipping ID checks, the students have pushed out nearly everyone else who might come.

  Rebecca weaves through the dancers and shifts around the knot of frat boys chanting and egging on two of their brothers competing to see who can chug a pitcher of beer the fastest. The corner she and her friends managed to stake out can’t really be called quiet, but it’s a bubble of something at least less chaotic. She slides into her chair near the walls and hands the second drink to her roommate.

  “You were watching him pretty closely,” Hafsah notes. She pulls away the coaster lid and sniffs at the drink.

  “It should be safe.” But it doesn’t stop her from studying the way the liquid moves against the glass and looking for any shifts in color or undissolved particles. Rebecca’s always careful about her drinks, but she can acknowledge that what happened to her classmate has her more paranoid than usual. She wishes they’d gone to a different bar, one without a recent history of roofies, but Ellie wanted this one.

  Ellie, she thinks, eyeing her friend, wants a fight.

  There are five of them around the table. Ellie’s two suitemates, Luz and Keiko, begged off in order to work on a group project. There should be a third suitemate—specifically Ellie’s roommate—but Kacey’s been in a coma since she was attacked the first week of fall semester. None of them want to replace her in their suite, but Ellie is the one to terrorize her newly assigned roommates until they run away and Housing surrenders. Rebecca mostly disapproves of bullying.

  She’s never tried to stop Ellie from keeping Kacey’s space sacrosanct, though.

  Susanna and Delia share a study space with Rebecca and Hafsah, and all seven of them share the bathroom, God help them all.

  In fact, Susanna and Delia are the ones who wanted to come and drink, self-medicating after stressful presentations, but Ellie is the one who decided where. Ellie, who poured herself into leather pants and a clingy, plunging top, who slapped on makeup as bright as any mating call. Ellie, who’s already on her third drink because she threw the first one in the face of a man who grabbed her ass at the bar. Ellie, who’s glowering over the rim of her glass at a couple a few tables over, the man leaning too far into the space of a woman inching so far away from him she’s barely still in the chair.

  “Ellie.”

  “He’s harassing her,” her friend snaps.

  “Yes,” agrees Rebecca.

  “And you’re just going to watch?”

  “I’m not going to go break his nose, if that’s what you mean,” she says evenly.

  Delia props her chin up on her fist—or tries to. It takes her a second attempt before she manages it. She’s not always a lightweight, but when Delia gets stressed, she forgets to eat. “His nose could use breaking,” she announces a little too loudly. “It’s so thin and twitchy. It needs character.”

  “Certainly Ellie has character to spare,” Hafsah replies, and Delia breaks down into giggles.

  Rebecca gently elbows her roommate. “Do not encourage her. The last thing we need is to get thrown out of another bar.”

  “You know, technically—” Susanna starts, and the others groan. “Technically,” she continues unabashed, “we’ve never been thrown out of a bar. Only Ellie has. We just leave with her because we’re nice.”

  Rebecca cants her head. “I thought it was to keep her from shanking people on the street.”

  “Only catcallers,” Ellie says with a shrug.

  Delia shakes her head. “Have you seen your ass in those pants? I’m pretty sure the pope would rip a whistle at the sight.”

  Closing her eyes, Hafsah mutters under her breath. Rebecca can’t actually make it out, but knowing Hafsah as she does, she’s pretty sure it’s a plea for forgiveness. It’s Hafsah’s usual response to all their little blasphemies.

  Glancing back at the target of Ellie’s ire, Rebecca sees that the man has an arm slung around his companion, trying to pull her back onto the chair and closer to him. The woman is unenthused, eyes darting around the bar. “I’ve got it,” Rebecca says.

  “You sure?”

 

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