Free Shadow Creek by Joy Fielding Page A

Nikki. Nikki, with two
k
‘s.
    It was Nikki who had the most fun.
    “Call me Nikki,” she’d instructed that silly woman at the cottage on the edge of Shadow Creek. Stupid woman, she thought now. Selfish, too. Wouldn’t even let me use her hair dryer when there was one right under her bathroom sink. She’d stumbled on it when she went to take a shower. The thought turned her smile into a frown. It had taken the better part of thirty minutes to wash away that stupid woman’s blood. It had gotten on everything—her clothes, her hair, even her teeth.
    “Did you get any in your mouth?” Kenny had asked with obvious worry. He’d been calling himself Kenny for several weeks now. The name was good luck, he’d said, although hecouldn’t say why. “Wouldn’t want you picking up any strange viruses.”
    “I didn’t get any in my mouth,” she told him, so touched by his concern for her welfare that she could barely breathe. Nobody had ever worried about her like that before. Nobody had ever been so protective. Nobody had ever made her feel so special, so loved. She would do anything not to disappoint him.
    Anything.
    They’d made themselves dinner with the leftovers in the fridge, helped themselves to two bottles of wine, then had sex repeatedly in their victims’ too-soft bed, listening as the still-torrential rain pummeled the roof over their heads.
    “That’s one hell of a storm,” Kenny said.
    “Good thing we’re inside,” she agreed.
    “Safe and snug as two bugs in a rug.”
    “I can’t believe they don’t have a TV.”
    “Cheap bastards,” Kenny said.
    “You should have seen their faces when I told them you’d cut the wires.” She laughed. “When they realized something wasn’t right, that they were going to die … That was the best part.”
    “Sorry I missed it.”
    “Next time you’ll be there,” she said. “So you won’t miss anything.”
    “Thinking about what’s best for me, are you?”
    “Always,” she said.
    And it was true. Ever since they’d been introduced—“Call me Jason,” he’d said—she’d thought of little else.
    “Honestly,” her mother had remarked. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. It’s like you’re on another planet.”
    It wasn’t even that he was all that good-looking. Rather, he was what her grandmother used to describe as “interesting.”His features were somewhat coarse—his nose wide, his lips full, his eyes an unremarkable shade of brown. Still, there was something about him that commanded attention. Maybe it was the way he stood, the insolent tilt of his shoulders, the subtle forward thrust of his slender hips, the manner in which his thumbs hooked into the side pockets of his too-tight jeans, the way his eyes appeared paradoxically vacant and knowing at the same time.
    The way he looked into her eyes, and then past them, as if he could see right through them into the furthest recesses of her soul, effortlessly settling into the darkest corner of all.
    Her secret place.
    “We don’t keep secrets,” he’d told her. “Not from each other.” Which was when he told her about his parents’ multiple marriages, how he’d taken a knife to stepmother number two after a particularly nasty argument and been placed in an adult psychiatric hospital for the better part of a year, how he’d slept in a ward with psychotics and schizophrenics, all much older than his eleven years, and how he’d been raped by one of the attendants, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a potbelly, whose breath smelled of black licorice, how even now the slightest whiff of black licorice made him retch.
    He told her that while he was in the hospital, his mother had married some old guy from Texas and left New York without so much as a word of goodbye, and how he’d been released into the not-so-welcoming arms of stepmother number three, who had two children of her own and who was forever calling them by each other’s names. “That’s when I