Fawn laughed in that sultry, alluring way she usually saved for when they were in bed together. “We need to do a lot more than just talk, baby. I’m dripping wet for you.”

  She laughed again, but this time it was more of a schoolgirl giggle.

  Chuck sighed. “I don’t have time for games, Fawn. I need to know if you had anything to do with the break-in at my house today.”

  A brief, stunned silence ensued.

  This was followed by a heavy exhalation of breath. “Have you lost your mind, Chuck? Why would I do that? And why would I do that thing with the pumpkins? How psycho do you think I am?”

  She sounded believably indignant. Chuck sighed in surrender. “All right, all right, I believe you. Never really thought that was your style, anyway.” Chuck slowed to a stop at a traffic light. “Look, I’m gonna have to let you go. I just left Karen and the kids at the Embassy Suites downtown. I’ve got some stuff I need to look into before I head back.”

  That sultry, alluring laugh returned. “I’ve got something you could look into. I wasn’t lying before, you know. I really am dripping wet for you. I just got out of the shower and I’m sitting naked on the edge of my bed.” She paused. “Can you picture that in your head, Chuck?”

  Unfortunately for Chuck, he could, as the stirring at his groin proved.

  He swallowed thickly and said, “Yeah, I can picture it.”

  “Russ is out of town again. As usual. We could get together.”

  Chuck said nothing.

  Fawn laughed, the sound somehow softer, silkier, and more seductive than ever. “Or better yet, I’ll do the thinking for us. I’m hanging up now. I’ll call the usual place and reserve the room. I’ll get back in touch with you in about an hour.”

  Again, Chuck said nothing.

  Which said everything.

  Fawn ended the call.

  After driving around aimlessly for a few more minutes, Chuck pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store, parked in a corner near the road, and used the Internet browser on his phone to look up the name of someone he’d tried hard never to think about. He expected the search to turn up little to no information, but the first result brought up a listing for an Elliot Parker, who apparently was still residing in Willow Springs. Premium access was required for his street address. Chuck paid the nominal fee, saw that the address was in an area generally considered the bad part of town, and programmed it into the Odyssey’s GPS.

  Some twenty minutes later he pulled into the lot outside a blocky-looking two-story building tucked away behind a strip mall that had fallen on hard times. Many of the shops that had formerly occupied space in the strip mall appeared to have permanently closed, judging by the proliferation of realtor signs in their windows. Chuck felt no small amount of incredulity upon first glimpsing the building behind it, which the reverse lookup service had provided as Elliot Parker’s legal residence of record. The gray cinderblock building had a large rollup metal door in front that was currently shut. A short set of steps next to it led to a windowless steel door. The place had a utilitarian, industrial feel to it. It did not seem like the kind of place where anyone would actually live. On the other hand, there were no signs anywhere announcing it as a place of business.

  Chuck got out of the Odyssey and did a slow stroll around the building. All the windows on the first floor were blacked out, which was more than a little creepy. The second floor windows did not appear to be blacked out, but it was impossible to see anything through them from the ground, nor was there any way to ascend to the second floor from the outside.

  There was another windowless steel door at the back of the building. Chuck took a look around the surrounding area. An old, rust-flecked pickup truck was parked by a Dumpster at the back of the rear lot. Something about it struck a distant note of familiarity, but when he couldn’t identify where he’d seen it before—or even if he actually had—he shrugged the feeling off, figuring he’d seen numerous similar trucks before. Its presence here suggested there might be someone he could talk to on the premises, another resident, perhaps, if not Elliot himself.

  He circled back to the front of the building and, after a brief hesitation, climbed the steps to the windowless door there and raised a hand to knock. Again, though, he hesitated and turned away from the door to take another look around. The rear of the strip mall was close, separated from this property by a narrow strip of sickly-looking grass. He saw no vehicles parked behind the mall, nor were there any people milling about. Though he could hear traffic from the main road, he had no view of it from this vantage point. All at once, he felt isolated and vulnerable. He wished he’d gone home to get his gun before attempting anything like this.

  Chuck lowered his hand, stared at the steel door a moment longer, and then descended the steps back to the parking lot. He got back behind the wheel of the Odyssey and stared through the windshield at the squat little building, drumming his thumbs on the rim of the steering wheel as a burgeoning sense of anxiety continued to build inside him.

  He wanted to believe Elliot Parker had nothing to do with Lloyd McAfee’s murder or the weirdness with the pumpkins. On the surface, it seemed absurd. Many years had passed since that shameful day in the woods. Almost a lifetime ago, really. Too long, Chuck wanted to believe, for even the bitterest person to harbor a desire for bloody vengeance. So much time had passed, in fact, that the obvious correlations between that long ago incident and today’s events didn’t occur to him until well after the law had departed the scene at his house. At the time, he’d been too focused on paranoid thoughts about Fawn. Later, however, a memory of Elliot tied to that tree in the woods with a pumpkin shoved down over his head came to him like a punch to the gut.

  Like back then, it was Halloween season. Lloyd McAfee had been the instigator of the whole thing and now he was dead. His severed head had been shoved into a hollowed-out pumpkin. The arrangement of pumpkins on the kitchen table at Chuck’s house could easily be seen as a symbolic connection to his involvement in what had been done to Elliot all those years ago.

  It all added up, as crazy as it seemed.

  Elliot had suffered miserably at the hands of Chuck and his former friends in the distant past, enduring what had undeniably been a severe level of psychological trauma and humiliation. Chuck felt disgust as more details came back to him. The truth about that day was stark and brutal. It hadn’t been the usual sort of bullying they’d indulged in so often back then, which had been bad enough. They had tortured that poor kid for hours, had even briefly flirted with the idea of killing him to keep him from blabbing about what they’d done.

  Bile rose into Chuck’s throat.

  He opened the Odyssey’s door to lean out and puke on the pavement. When his stomach was done voiding its contents, he wiped his mouth with a shaking hand and leaned back in, settling behind the wheel again. He thought about Elliot. From what he could remember, the kid’s parents had been pretty worthless. Elliot had been a smart kid, well above average, really, but life had stacked the deck against him in so many ways. And then there was the matter of his brother, who’d died that same night. As he stared at the sad little building, Chuck found he could imagine someone like Elliot winding up there. It was a fittingly dead-end destination for someone who’d likely lived a sad, dead-end kind of life. He pictured Elliot sitting up there behind those grim, gray walls night after night for years, always alone, stewing in his bitterness until it turned toxic.

  Until he finally snapped.

  Chuck slapped a palm against the steering wheel. “Fuck!”

  The smart thing now would be to ring up that obnoxious hillbilly sheriff and tell him everything he knew about Elliot Parker. He picked up his phone and removed a card from his shirt pocket. It was the sheriff’s business card. The man had passed it off to him immediately prior to his abrupt departure from the scene earlier in the day. The number printed on the front was his personal cell number. Chuck got as far as inputting the first three digits before he deleted them.

  He cursed again and kicked at the floorboard.

  The thing about telling the sheriff what he knew was that it would include talking about what he and his friends had done to Elliot twenty-five years ago. He dreaded doing that for many reasons, not the least of which was picturing the look of disgust on his wife’s face when she inevitably heard all about it. And what of his kids? He’d tried so hard to be a good man since those wayward early years, had tried so hard to be a good father and good example to his children. What would they think of him now? It pained him to imagine it. On top of the situation with Fawn, it felt like too much. The beautiful life he’d built was already tottering on the brink of ruin. This might be just the last nudge necessary to blow it all apart forever.

  His phone’s text alert sounded.

  He looked at the screen and saw the picture of Fawn in her lingerie. He tapped it and read the message. As promised, she’d reserved a room at the usual place.

  She was already in route.

  Chuck stared at the message a full minute before typing his response: Be there soon.

  He needed a break, that’s all. A quick romp with Fawn could be just what he needed to clear his head and figure out how to handle the situation. Part of him knew he was just rationalizing what he was about to do. By seeing Fawn he was surrendering to his baser instincts in a moment of high stress, an act that exhibited weakness rather than strength. And he was yet again betraying everything that really mattered in his life. But he simply couldn’t help it. Fawn would make him feel good. And, at least for a short while, he could forget all about the things troubling him. Tomorrow would be different. He would be a man and deal with the Elliot situation head-on by telling the sheriff an edited version of the truth, one calculated to cast him in a somewhat less damning light.

  But that could wait.

  It could all wait just a little bit longer.

  Chuck started up the Odyssey and drove away from Elliot Parker’s home.

  12.

  Five days until Halloween

  Near Nashville, TN

  Gabriella Nofzinger was just under fifteen miles outside Nashville when her late 90’s Chevrolet Caprice died on her. A high school graduation gift from her parents a few years back, the dark green Caprice was still the only car she’d ever owned. In all that time, she’d had only the most minor issues with it. Never once had she experienced engine trouble of this magnitude.

  The first sign of something wrong came in the form of a slight sputter. She frowned when she felt it, surprised because until then the Caprice had been humming along smoothly, just like always. When several uneventful moments passed, she shrugged the sputter off as a meaningless anomaly and turned up the volume on the radio. Seconds later she heard a loud bang from somewhere beneath the hood. After that, the car started sputtering and jerking nonstop. She just managed to get the Caprice pulled over to the side of the road before the engine quit completely.

  Gabriella was in shock. At first she was simply unable to believe what had happened, such was her faith in the invincibility of her car. A part of her had been sure it would run forever. But now, in the space of just a few moments, that illusion had been shattered. Never having been in this situation before, she had no idea how to handle it. She wished she had someone with her to tell her what to do.

  Once that first moment of stunned disbelief passed, she turned the key in the ignition. The car did not start, nor did the engine sound like it was trying to turn over. There was only a flat, dead click when she turned the key. This was disheartening, but it was what she’d expected. That big bang she’d heard was something bad. She knew little about the inner workings of automobiles, but she knew that. The Caprice wouldn’t run again until a mechanic had done some serious work on it.

  Okay, so next step.

  She grabbed her purse from the passenger seat and took out her cell phone. There were several people she could call. Her father would definitely know what to do, but she didn’t want to talk to him. He would want to know why she was headed out to Nashville at half past midnight. The truth, that she was meeting up with her friends Jodi and Alysha to do some late night clubbing, would earn her a lecture. The old man didn’t care for her partying ways, believing she needed to be more serious and focus on her studies at the university. Which was grief she didn’t need right now.

  She tried to call Jodi instead. Her friends weren’t that far away. They could just come get her. But when she pulled up the number from her contacts and put the phone to her ear, the call didn’t go through. Frowning, she looked at the screen and saw the words “no service” in the left-hand corner. That was just as unusual as the death of her car. She wasn’t out in the fucking boonies. There should be a damn signal. Apparently, though, this was her night for all things mechanical to quit on her.

  Before she could let out a scream of impotent rage, bright illumination filled the interior of her car. A glance at her rearview mirror showed headlights directly behind her. Someone had pulled off the road to check on her, apparently. The glare from the headlights was such that it made discerning anything other than the vaguest outline of the other car impossible. She hoped it was a police cruiser. This seemed the most likely possibility, but the lack of flashing blue lights made her unsure.

  Squinting at the rearview mirror, she caught a glimpse of shadowy movement and realized someone was getting out of the other car. This was confirmed a moment later by the sound of a door closing with an emphatic thunk. She glanced at her side mirror and saw a tall, slender form approaching. The headlights of a passing vehicle briefly lit up the side of the road, giving her a better look. What she saw was a man in a black trench coat with pale skin and a wedge of thick, jet-black hair fashioned in a way that made him look like a rockabilly singer at the tail end of a long bender.

  Whoever he was, the stranger definitely wasn’t a cop. Upon realizing this, Gabriella felt a twinge of instinctive wariness. But she was optimistic by nature. She had a deep faith in the basic decency of most people. Of course, she knew there were bad people in the world, but she believed they constituted a tiny minority. This guy had stopped for a simple reason—he’d spotted a fellow motorist in distress and was merely doing his duty as a good citizen.

  There was nothing to worry about.

  He reached her driver’s side door and rapped a knuckle against the window. Gabriella pressed the button to lower it. The only result was a faint click. She felt silly. With the engine dead, of course the power windows were non-functional. Shaking her head, she cracked the door open.

  “Hi there! Boy, am I glad you came along.”

  The tall man nodded. “Having trouble?”

  “My car died.” She arched an eyebrow and made her smile extra flirty. “I don’t guess there’s any chance you’re an ace mechanic, are you?”

  “Afraid not. But I could give you a ride to wherever you’re going.”

  Gabriella’s eyes widened in delight. “Oh, that would be awesome! Thank you so much. You’re an angel…what’s your name?”

  “Steve.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Steve. I’m Gabriella.”

  “Hi.”

  Gabriella grabbed her purse and keys and stepped out of the Caprice. Steve sidestepped away from her as she emerged from the vehicle. She got the sense he was nervous around girls, particularly attractive ones. He looked like he was somewhere in early middle age, which made the skittishness a little strange. It made her feel sorry for him. She decided she would have to do something nice for him before they parted ways. A big kiss on the mouth would give him something sweet to remember her by. If he’d been better looking, she might have been up for even more than that.

  She smiled again. “Thank you again. You really don’t know how grateful I am.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  They walked over to his car and Steve opened the passenger side door for her, holding it open in a display of old-fashioned chivalry as she slid inside. She flashed him another high-wattage smile as he eased the door shut. “Such a gentleman.”

  Steve ignored this and circled around to the other side of the car. After settling in behind the wheel and checking his mirrors, he pulled out into traffic and rapidly accelerated.

  He stared straight ahead as he said, “Where are we going?”

  “I was on my way to see my friends Jodi and Alysha. They have a rental house in Hillsboro Village. Do you know where that is?”

  “Nashville. Near Vanderbilt University, right?”

  Gabriella nodded. “Right by Vanderbilt, actually. Have you been there before?”

  “Once or twice.” He nodded at a device mounted on the dash of his Honda Civic. “Put their address in the GPS. It’ll make getting there easier.”

  “Good idea.”

  Gabriella turned the device on its swivel stand so that the screen was facing her. “You really are a godsend, Steve. You just have no idea.” She entered the address, glancing at him when she was done. “It was the weirdest thing. First my car quit on me, then my phone had no service. I thought the universe was conspiring against me.”

  Steve made a soft sound that might have been a low chuckle.

  He said nothing.

  After a couple miles rolled by in absolute silence, Gabriella began to feel uncomfortable. She had a low tolerance for conversational lulls in general. Being in an enclosed space with a total stranger made the restlessness she felt in such moments worse than usual.

  “So, Steve…tell me about yourself. Do you live in Nashville?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Gabriella frowned when he failed to elaborate. “Well, where are you from?”

  She saw his hands clench tighter around the steering wheel. Only then did she begin to sense the depth of the tension gripping him. It triggered her first real feelings of trepidation. Again, however, she chose to brush them aside, reminding herself that some people—especially obviously shy people, like Steve—were as uncomfortable with small talk as she was with conversational lulls.