Gaskins hunted by the light of the moon, by the feel of his loins, by the rage in his heart. He took what he wanted and that urge consumes me, too. This isn’t a warning. It’s a promise. Save me a spot on the front page.
X
“So a copycat? Or a wannabe killer?”I ask, ignoring the ill feeling in my stomach. “Did you tell my mom?”
She shakes her head. “Not yet.”
“She gets a lot of fan mail. Good, bad, and creepy. This obviously falls into creepy, but maybe a bit more specific than the others. She was going to talk to her agent about the ones at the store, but I don’t think any of them were this bad.” But I wonder if I’d paid that much attention. After a while it starts to blur together. I would have noticed this though, right?
“Should we go to the police?” she asks.
“Probably—at least before the party tonight. Maybe have an officer onsite.”
She stands, brushing the sand off her backside. She offers me a hand to get out of my low to the ground chair. I take it and stand, the animosity I felt toward her when I first saw her today vanishes. She’s now caught up in this because of me and my mom. “Let me go change and we can go to the police station together.”
We walk together to the trailer and taped to the aluminum door is a yellow flower and a note that simply says, “Good Luck Tonight!”
“That’s sweet,” she says.
I remove the flower and note and open the door. She follows me in and I leave them on the table. “You can wait out here. I’ll do a quick change behind the curtain.”
I pull the curtain across the opening and I hear easily on the other side. “That whole thing at the bar last night was crazy. You don’t think the guy that said all that stuff to you could be writing these letters, do you? He seems to have a problem with women.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “The guys said he’s just a jerk and always has been. I’d never met him before and didn’t really get a creeper vibe off of him. Just an asshole vibe.”
She snorts. “We should probably tell the police about him, though.”
“Good idea.” I change into a T-shirt and shorts. I’m sticky from the sunscreen but a shower will have to wait. I open the curtain and see her looking at a photo of me and all the guys on the beach from last summer. Ivy took it and sent to me while I was at school.
“They seem like good friends.”
“They are.”
“And Avery’s in the group?”
I shake my head. “No, not really. I mean, I think they’ve known him forever but they don’t hang with him much. I just met him this summer.”
“Oh, okay. He’s been helpful with a lot of the myths of Donald Gaskins. He’s super into it. Of course in a place like this it’s not hard to find people willing to talk. Most of it’s irrelevant.” She picks up the good luck note and studies it. Her lips turn down in a frown and she reaches in her pocket and retrieves the postcards. She holds them up to one another.
“What?”
“This lettering…it looks kind of similar.”
My heart drops to my stomach. I snatch the two from her hands.
“See the ‘g’ here and here? And the ‘t’?” She points between the two.
I feel a lump rise in my throat and I walk to my room, reaching for the few notes left on my bed. The one from when I arrived this summer and a few others. I hold them out.
“We probably shouldn’t touch them.” She looks around. “We probably shouldn’t touch anything.”
“What? Why?” I know why. He’s been in the trailer.
“Summer, we have to call the police.” She hands me my phone off the table. It’s sitting right next to the flower. “Do you want me to call your mom?”
“No, not yet.” My mind is reeling. Pete. Pete is the one that gave me the flowers. He’s the one that has a key. Is he also sending those letters? No. I refuse to believe that.
“I don’t want to call yet.”
