Dark Screams, Volume 3 Read online

  It was hers. It was Peter’s mom’s.

  Despite the fact that I would never be able to get the stains out of my jeans, I sat on a charred board and began to read.

  By the time I got halfway through the journal, I understood everything. Mrs. King’s husband died in a car accident, leaving her alone to raise their beautiful son. And while she was devastated after losing him, her son brightened her days in ways she never imagined possible.

  Then came the horrible night of the fire. She was awakened by the acrid scent burning her lungs. She ran to Peter’s room, but he was gone. She searched frantically, screaming for him, eventually crawling through the smoke blind, heedless of the fire lapping at her heels, scorching the threads of her nightgown, until a firefighter pulled her from the flames literally moments before the second story collapsed in on her.

  She was still in the hospital when they found Peter’s body days later, buried in cinder and ash, but Mrs. King begged the authorities to listen to her. She never believed their findings that Peter had been playing with matches and accidently caught the house on fire. There were too many variables that didn’t fit.

  First, Peter never went to the basement. Not only was he forbidden, but he was scared to death of it. He’d called it the “dark hole” and would never have gone down there alone.

  Second, Mrs. King never kept matches in the house. Or lighters. Where would he have gotten them in the middle of the night?

  But it was the third and final variable that was the clincher. Peter had been born premature and was very short for his age. The body found in the fire was a full six inches taller than he was.

  Even with all that, it took her a while to piece it all together. The key to solving the puzzle came a week after Peter’s death, because that was when the sheriff—the same sheriff who headed the investigation of the fire—reported his own son missing, and Mrs. King knew what happened. In her gut at first, but later she could back up every claim with solid evidence.

  Her conclusion? Her son, Peter, did not die in that fire. It was not his body in the basement, but the sheriff’s son’s, a four-year-old boy named Brian. The sheriff had killed his own son, either intentionally or accidentally, but it happened. And to cover it up, he took Peter out of his bed as he slept, placed his own son’s body in the basement, then set fire to the house. After telling friends that Brian was bedridden for a week to explain his absence, he reported him missing. He needed that time frame to cast doubt if anyone ever figured out the truth. The sheriff was a murderer and no one believed the grieving widow who’d lost her son on top of her husband and was grasping at straws for answers.

  I placed a hand over my mouth to stifle a sob of shock and sorrow. Mrs. King had been put through hell, and no one believed her. No one would listen, chalking up her rants to grief and the need to find someone other than her son, anyone other than her son, to be at fault for his death.

  Peter stroked my hair as another sob wrenched from my throat. I could feel the pain Mrs. King went through in every sentence she wrote. In every word. It shattered my heart.

  The soft touch of my hair felt good. Comforting. Oddly enough, I was beginning to like Peter. Then reality hit. I stilled, let my gaze slide to the side, and fought my natural inclination to curl into a fetal position. If Peter didn’t die in the fire, who was stroking my hair?

  “You’re—You’re not Peter, are you?”

  The entity scratched the top of my left hand. Not hard. Just enough to get my attention.

  “I’ll take that as a no.” I glanced down at the journal. “Are you the sheriff’s son? Are you Brian?”

  Another scratch.

  I furrowed my brows. “Are you Mrs. King?”

  After a moment, I felt a brush of fingertips over my face. I nodded in understanding.

  “Have you been following Nancy Wilhoit?”

  Another soft caress, and I wondered, if it was so easy to communicate with her, why was she constantly abusing Nancy? What did Nancy have to do with any of this?

  I continued reading. As Mrs. King’s health and mental acuity declined, so did her handwriting. It became harder to read the closer I got to the end, and then, as abruptly as all that, it was over. I got to the last entry. It ended mid-sentence, but even at that point, Mrs. King was not in any way suicidal.

  A gasp filled the small room and I realized it was mine. I realized what had happened. “You were murdered, too,” I said, astonished.

  I received neither a nudge nor a caress, but instead felt a slight nudge on the pages in my hands. Something fell out of the back of the journal. A piece of paper. I picked it up and shined the light on it. It was a picture of a small boy. My chest tightened. I knew who it was, but I asked anyway.

  “Is this Peter, Mrs. King?” I looked up and around, wishing I could see her. “Is this your son?”

  A touch as soft as a summer breeze swept over my cheek and I slammed my eyes shut, keeping them that way for a long time.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, before turning back to the picture. He was beautiful. He had dark hair and a sweet face. But I was drawn to Peter’s eyes. They were different. Unique. And his mouth. I’d seen that mouth before.

  “It’s him.”

  I jumped at the sound of a female voice coming from the stairs. I swung around only to be blinded by another flashlight. The newest guest kept it trained on my face. I raised my arm to block it, but it didn’t help much.

  “You really shouldn’t have come here.”

  “Samantha?” I asked, not able to place the voice.

  “Please,” she said, easing down the steps. “As if that ho would have the guts to come out here alone at night.”

  I finally placed the mid-tones of Nancy’s voice and smiled. “Nancy, I went by your house, but your mom said you were at church.”

  “I was. It’s one of the few places the bitch doesn’t bother me.”

  “Mrs. King?” I asked, growing more suspicious by the moment. “You know it’s Mrs. King and not Peter?”

  She lowered herself off the final step and let a long sigh escape her. As though she were bored. As though she were disappointed in me. “Of course, I know. I’m not an imbecile. Did she show you the diary, too?”

  I glanced down at the journal in my hands. “Yes. You mean you’ve read it?”

  She finally lowered the light, but that led only to a convergence of white spots on my cornea. “Duh,” she said, stepping closer. “I read it years ago.”

  Understanding washed over me. “And you saw the picture. You know that Toby MacAfee is really Peter King.”

  She smiled at me. I could see the glow of her teeth in the low light. “Do you know what they would do if they found out?”

  “Who are they?”

  “The cops. Child services,” she said, a microsecond before wincing. She whirled around. “Stop it!” When she turned back to me, she calmed. “She’s such a bitch, I swear.”

  “What would they do?” I already knew, but I wanted to hear her say it.

  “They’d take him away. His closest relatives—his only relatives—live halfway across the country. I just can’t risk losing him.”

  “Nancy, that’s insane.”

  She went rigid, her face twisting into a mask of anger. “I am not insane!”

  Oh-kay. “But, Nancy, he has a right to know. There are tests they could run.” I had no idea how Peter was still in Renfield. Had he been adopted? How did no one recognize him as belonging to Mrs. King? I suddenly had way more questions that answers, but first I had to get past Little Miss Fatal Attraction. “Nancy, the bottom line is, Toby has a right to know.”

  “But I just got him back!” she yelled, balling her hands at her sides. “I remember him when we were little. We used to play together. I loved him so much. Then he died in the fire and”—her breath hitched in her chest—“but he came back.”

  When I shook my head, not understanding, she continued.

  “He came back to Renfield five years ago. He�
�d been adopted by a couple from Trent, but they moved to Renfield and I recognized him.” She stepped closer as though pleading with me to understand. “That’s when I came here. To this house. That’s when I found the diary. And I knew for certain it was him.”

  “It was his eyes that gave him away,” I said, glancing at the picture.

  “Exactly. You understand.” She brightened, believing I was on her side. That I would keep her great and terrible secret. “If they find out, they’ll take him away and he’s the only boy who is nice to me. The only one who’s ever been nice to me. And he noticed me the other day for the first time since he got back.”

  That was why Mrs. King tormented her. Nancy was the only one who knew the truth and she refused to step forward and show the journal, or any other evidence Mrs. King had acquired, to the authorities.

  “Nancy, he has a right to know.”

  She set her jaw, and only then did I realize her moods spun faster than a centrifuge. She was not stable and she would never be okay with my going to the authorities.

  My survival instincts kicked in. Better late than never. I secured the picture in the journal, took a deep breath, and rushed for the stairs, but she lunged at me. Grabbed a handful of hair, and I was officially in a girl fight for my life. I didn’t care how cliché the act, I sank my teeth into her arm and she cried and kicked out, landing a kick to my left knee.

  Sadly, I sucked at fighting. I could not get her to let go of my hair. She had a death grip on my brown locks and was not giving an inch as I fought to get to the stairs. If I could just make it to the car. That’s all I thought about. Getting to the car. But she had insanity on her side, and when she wrapped an arm around my throat and tightened her hold until the edges of my vision blurred, I realized insanity was winning.

  About the time my muscles stopped working due to their oxygen supply running out, I heard a sharp thud. A moment later, Nancy went limp on top of me.

  I scrambled out from under her and sucked in lungfuls of air, coughing between each breath. I looked past the motionless form of Nancy Wilhoit, psycho extraordinaire, and saw the wide smile of Samantha Vargas. She held a blackened two-by-four that now shimmered in one tiny spot with a smidgen of Nancy’s blood.

  “I told you not to trust her,” Samantha said, her brows raised like a schoolteacher scolding a student.

  I rushed over to her and drew her into a deep hug. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  She laughed and hugged me back. “I am, too, but let me get this straight. Peter didn’t die in that fire?”

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Not a lot,” she said, stroking and patting my back. “Just enough to have me completely confused.”

  I stepped out of her arms and showed her the picture. “This is Peter King.”

  She took the picture and studied it, squinted at it, turned it this way and that, then gasped softly, almost as though she couldn’t bring herself to believe it. “That’s—”

  “I know,” I said, smiling at her. Then I looked back at Nancy. “But right now, we need to call the police.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, unable to tear her gaze off the picture. “I called my dad.”

  I’d forgotten that her dad was the sheriff.

  Wait. Her dad was the sheriff.

  I took a step back, easing away from her, when she noticed the horror in my eyes.

  In answer to that, she rolled her own. “As if. He’s only been sheriff for a couple of years, and I never had a brother named Brian.”

  “You heard that part, did you?”

  “Yep. But seriously? Toby MacAfee?”

  “Toby MacAfee.” Once I made sure Nancy was still breathing, I turned for the stairs, suddenly wanting to be nowhere but out. My recent injuries, however, were starting to make themselves known. I almost fell when I tried to take the first step to freedom. Pain shot up my leg from where Nancy had kicked my knee. Samantha caught me to her, wrapping an arm around my waist and hefting me along with her.

  “I hope these stairs hold,” she said, as I aimed the flashlight.

  “Me too.”

  “If not, I’m using your body to break my fall.” She was a good egg, that one. Maybe I should give the in-crowd another chance.

  I stopped and looked back into the dark basement, raising the journal in salute. “I’ll get this to the right people, Mrs. King,” I said. I didn’t receive an answer that time. Maybe it was enough for her to know that I’d try. And I would. If the authorities wouldn’t listen, I’d go straight to Toby-slash-Peter and tell him the whole story.

  “So how do you like Renfield now?” Samantha asked me as we hobbled up.

  I grinned. “I think I like it here.”

  I Love You, Charlie Pearson

  Jacquelyn Frank

  Chapter 1

  I love her. She is the most beautiful creature the world has ever known and I have no choice but to love her. She doesn’t see me, not yet, but I don’t blame her for that. I haven’t exactly been throwing myself in her path. Besides, she’s kind of an older woman.

  I’m not the only one that loves Stacey Wheeler. She’s head cheerleader, she’s bright and bubbly and popular. Everyone loves her. And she has the most beautiful mouth. It’s soft and moves so prettily when she speaks. You can see her tongue beyond the whitest teeth. When she smiles I know that smile is meant to be for me one day. One day soon.

  It’s the only reason I look forward to school. Otherwise it’s nothing but a day filled with haters. Loud and obnoxious, angry mouths full of foul words and feelings. It’s strange how, no matter how much I try to keep myself from being noticed, try to keep my head down, they still see me. They find me every single day and they hate on me. The older boy, jocks like Terrence Wentworth and Brian Green, those trite idiots who fill their own stereotype so damn perfectly it’s sickening. I might respect them more if they had strived to be unique in even the smallest way. And the fact that Stacey actually goes with Terrence makes me question how happy she could possibly be.

  I let Terrence beat on me behind the field house two days ago. It was painful, I admit. Meaty fists crunching into my flesh and my bones. I opened my mouth during one hit, making certain my teeth would cut into Terrence’s clenched fingers. They say fight bites can get infected and can be dangerous. So I figure if I can’t beat him now, maybe I can beat him later.

  In general, being in tenth grade sucks. You have no position in life. No power. No way of controlling your own destiny. And when school is done with, after Terrence is done with me, I have to go home and enter a whole different world of pain and torture.

  I know. It sounds dramatic and soap opera–like, but it is what it is and if you want to get to know me you have to hear the truth of it. All of it. But it’s not as important as all of that. I may be young, but I have risen above the fact that my father, before he finally left us, was a mean-assed drunk and my mother…

  She was beautiful once. She used to have the most glorious flaxen hair, like…as if she were a princess or something. Yeah, that’s it. Like that Rapunzel with all of that long blond hair. Did you ever wonder about that? About how some fat-assed witch could climb that rope of hair without ripping it out of her head or her weight just yanking her whole head off her shoulders? I do. I wonder about things like that. And sometimes I can picture it. The witch ripping Rapunzel’s head off her shoulder, her open neck gushing blood in wild spurts.

  Anyway, it used to be really pretty. My mom’s hair, not Rapunzel’s neck.

  Stacey has blond hair, too. It shines like it’s absorbing the sun and then reflecting it back. Like her smile, it can be blinding.

  My mother’s hair is dull now. She keeps dying it with these cheap-assed Clairol coloring kits that burn the life out of it and leave it hanging from her head like used hay. But that could also be from the drugs. She works, holds down a job most of the time, but only to be able to feed her nose or fill her lungs with that oh-so-compelling poison. She pays the rent, I guess. Gi
ves me money so I can shop for food for me and my little sister, Sybil. I’m not much of a cook. I can boil water real good. So we eat a lot of spaghetti. Ramen noodles. Mac and cheese. That hits a few of the food groups, anyway. We’re doing all right between that and the free lunch at school. It gets hard on the weekends, though. It always gets hard on the weekends.

  If she goes off to work or on a binge, then we get by all right. Sybil sits and watches cartoons from well-worn DVDs. We don’t have cable or anything. The house sucks overall. It’s some old farmhouse she got for cheap rent because it’s falling down rotten in most places.

  I clean up the kitchen after we eat, but the rest of it…it’s immaculate. It’s not much with its worn-out furniture and cracked glass coffee table, but it’s as perfect as it can be.

  At least it is when my mother isn’t around. When she’s around she throws her stuff around, leaves things on every damn surface she can find. She’s a disgusting slob with no self-respect or consideration for us kids. But at this point, that doesn’t surprise me. She’s been like this for almost as long as I can remember. Ever since she was introduced to the joys of crack.

  But otherwise the house remains immaculate. I make sure of it. My room is…spotless. It has to be. Who can function in a mess? I don’t have much, but what I do have deserves to be clean and organized. I can always find anything at the snap of a finger. I even make certain my DVD cases, what few I have, are completely free of dust. The DVDs haven’t got so much as a fingerprint on them. It’s all perfect. It has to be.

  It’s ready for when Stacey comes. Not today. Probably not tomorrow, but one day very soon she will come and she will see my room and she will know I have kept it clean for her. That I wouldn’t allow dust or smudges or filth anywhere near her. She’ll know it’s a clean and safe environment. Safe from the likes of Terrence.

  Because he hurts her. I know he does. I’ve seen him grab her arm and shake her hard. So hard her hair swings in a wide arc, catching the sunlight, falling soft around her tensed shoulders. So hard it makes me want to grab him by his thick throat and crush the life out of him.