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Cindy stood up from her bunk. “You’re not going to just leave me here, are you? Unlock my jail cell.”
He shared a meaningful look with Gabriel. His friend seemed to want him to decide her immediate fate.
Nathan leaned hard against the door. “Fine.”
He grabbed the keys from Gabriel, took two more stable steps to the door of her cell, and unlocked it. “Head toward the front of the park. Find the police. I’m sure you’ll want to press charges against the man who bloodied your face.” He turned away, unwilling to give her any more of his time. “We need to go find Suzanna. I have a really bad feeling that she needs us.”
* * * *
Suzanna’s legs literally folded beneath her the moment she saw Kevin’s face. Five years fell away, and she was right back to that terrified woman attending her parents’ double funeral and still on the run after eleven moves. Her eyes slammed shut, and she cried out in pain. “No! It just can’t be.”
“Get up. Face him,” Marcus said with bile in his tone. He grabbed her hair again. She stood on wobbly legs, feeling like she would have not a single hair left on her head by the end of the day, if she lived that long.
Waiting to hear Kevin’s simpering voice, she finally opened her eyes after several seconds. She focused in on the figure before her. It was creepy, but it also wasn’t Kevin.
There was, however, a life-size model of him, complete with a pine-scented air freshener dangling from his outstretched hand in some sort of macabre display.
Kevin is dead. Kevin is dead. She repeated the silent mantra to herself as she opened her eyes wider and studied the lifelike mannequin next to the gravestone. Out of the corner of her eye, she also saw the disturbing open grave with fresh dirt to one side a couple rows away. If he didn’t frighten her to death with the Kevin doll, he could still shove her into the hole and smother her.
She glanced at the figure representing Kevin again. Her spine went rigid just looking at it. Marcus had put some sort of rubber mask on the head of the mannequin. It looked remarkably like Kevin, and was completely creepy regardless of her aversion to seeing Kevin. She looked away.
Marcus had found a way to cover the original tombstone in the cemetery with Kevin’s birth and death stats. At least the death date was correct. She couldn’t speak to his beginning. A perverse memory intruded as she realized that the five-year anniversary of Kevin’s death was, in fact, tomorrow.
She didn’t know any personal information about Kevin. It wasn’t as if they’d ever even had a relationship. He just started following her after one very short blind date. Then he wouldn’t stop no matter what she did. And there were other issues. The phone calls. The inappropriate gifts left in places he didn’t have legal access to. Like her car, and once, her apartment. She shuddered. That and the fact that he made it his job to follow her everywhere.
“You’re lucky that I didn’t use a mask of his face after he was killed. We had to have a closed-casket ceremony, thanks to you.”
“I didn’t do anything to him.” But she had. She’d ultimately led him to his death, in a nanosecond of fear and panic.
“You promised to marry him.”
She stiffened. “I most certainly did not! We had one blind date. That’s it. I turned him down for any further contact, and he started following me. He was a stalker. I had to get a restraining order against him. Several times. But it didn’t matter. He just kept at it. He kept after me.” Five years of pent-up anger rose quickly from her angry soul. She did feel guilt over his death, but she also hadn’t started it.
Marcus began talking as if she hadn’t said a word. “After Kevin’s death, I spent many months trying to think up the perfect punishment for you, if I ever came across you. I looked in all the places you’d gone beforehand. It was just pure luck that I stumbled across you when I did. Although I had a bit a help from Kevin.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He had quite a little journal hidden away about you. He predicted places you might go next. Probably why he found you so easily all those times. He was very smart about certain things. Like finding you. He had noted three places you might move next. I found you on my second try.”
