Lisa Jackson - Most Likely To Die

Her old friends would be shocked.

Jake would have been, too.

But his imagined reaction was moot. He had been dead for two decades. And even if he had lived, she wouldn’t possibly still be trying to shield him from the evidence of her fling with somebody else, would she?

Not unless they were married or something…

And she and Jake Marcott never in a million years would have gotten married.

She knew that now.

Jake didn’t have the qualities she’d want in a husband.

Jake didn’t even have the qualities she wanted in a boyfriend.

But she never let on about that-about what kind of person he had really turned out to be. You didn’t speak ill of the dead.

“So who is he?” Isaac asked again, thoughtfully nibbling the curved triangular edge of a tortilla chip.

“He’s just someone I used to know, back in Portland,” she heard herself admit.

Must be the tequila.

“Old boyfriend?”

“Not really.”

“Did he get back in touch with you?”

“I did, actually.”

“Have you seen him, or just talked to him?”

“Seen him.”

“And you wish you hadn’t, right? Because things have fizzled?”

“No, that’s not it at all.”

“I didn’t think so.” Isaac nodded. “There was still something there, right? And it scared the hell out of you?”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“There always is. Is he married?”

“No!”

“In prison?”

“No!” She shifted her weight uncomfortably. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“I can tell. Let me just say one thing, and then I swear I’ll change the subject. You haven’t seen this person in years, and he was someone you once cared about. You’re not married, he’s not married…or in jail. An added bonus.”

She barely cracked a smile at his weak joke.

“All I’m saying is that I can see how someone like you would get scared off and walk away. And you shouldn’t do it. Take it from me, Lindsay. You don’t want to have regrets. If I ever had another chance with Rachel-”

“It isn’t like that at all,” she cut in.

“In some ways, it is. We all lose people we love, Lindsay. Not all of us are lucky enough to find them again. If we do, we shouldn’t let go that easily.”

“You’re talking about you and Rachel, not me and-”

“You’re right,” he said, his dark features having taken on the potent expression he always wore when Rachel’s name came up. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just-”

“Obsessed?”

She meant it lightly, but his scowl told her this wasn’t a joking matter. Not to him.

Not any more than Wyatt was to her, but for far different reasons.

“Let’s just drop it,” she said. “Okay?”

“Definitely.”

And they tried to talk about other things. Her job, his work as a computer-software engineer, his new girlfriend, the Yankees, the weather.

But none of it banished the ghosts of the past that swirled around their table, and Lindsay was grateful to call it a night.

Isaac offered to walk her home, but she declined. She lived only a few blocks east of here, and it was hardly on his way; he had to go west to take the subway downtown.

They parted with a promise to get together again soon, but she wasn’t entirely sure that they would.

As she made her way along the narrow block leading east from Lexington Avenue, a vaguely uneasy feeling crept over her.

The street wasn’t deserted; not in this neighborhood at this hour on a beautiful night in May. The block was lined with luxury apartment high-rises and a smattering of older brick buildings, some with security-gated storefronts on the ground floor. Colorful annuals tumbled from stray planters and the occasional windowbox, and every so often the sidewalk blocks were broken by a carefully tended young tree.

A few people were out and about: an elderly man leaning heavily on a cane, a young couple strolling holding hands, a stout middle-aged woman walking a pair of impossibly small dogs joined by a single leash.

Lindsay snuck a glance over her shoulder and glimpsed a dark figure about a third of the way down the block behind her. It seemed to dart into a doorway abruptly…

Almost as if the person didn’t want me to see him.

But it was probably just her imagination.

Whoever it was must have happened to arrive at his destination just as she looked back. Paranoia made her think he was trying to hide from her.

She turned her head forward again and walked on, much more quickly, looking over her shoulder all the way home.

That was a close call.

The killer crouched in the shadows beside a tall yellow brick apartment building, trying not to breathe in too deeply. A foul-smelling garbage can was just a few feet away.

What if she had seen you?

Relax. Even if she did, she wouldn’t recognize me.

The wig, the thick glasses, the padding…

It was an apt disguise. Such an apt disguise that she didn’t even recognize herself whenever she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a plate-glass window as she passed.

That was a strange feeling-being invisible right in plain sight.

But it shouldn’t have been.

Not for her.

Wasn’t that the reason all this had started in the first place?

Yes. And now it was almost time to bring it full circle.

What goes around comes around…

Hearing the voice echoing in her head, bringing with it a vague memory of something painful, she tried to remember who it was who’d said that to her.

One of her teachers?

Sister Neva?

Oh.

It was Jake, she realized. Well, wasn’t that a coincidence.

“What goes around comes around,” he’d said, laughing at her as she’d cried.

Now, looking back, she couldn’t remember what she was crying about-only that he’d hurt her, in return for some perceived injury she’d supposedly inflicted on him.

Trembling, hiding in the building’s shadows beside the smelly garbage can, she closed her eyes and saw Jake Marcott’s smirking face.

What goes around comes around.

Yes, it sure does, Jake, she told him now, remembering the satisfying whiz and thwack of the arrow as it slammed into him, pinning him against the tree. Remembering the look of shock on his face as he glanced in horror at the slowly spreading red stain on the front of his shirt, then up at her.

He asked why, in a voice that was almost too weak to discern.

Why, indeed.

She didn’t bother to answer his pathetic question.

There wasn’t time; she had to get away, back to the others. She had to prepare herself to react to the shocking, so-called tragedy that was about to strike them all.

And anyway, there was no reason to explain it to Jake. He should have known why.

It was his own fault. His, and theirs-the girls whose lives had, in some way or other, been intertwined with Jake’s, and, fatefully, with her own.

Jake had paid the price for his sins.

Haylie had, too.

And one by one, the others would join them, forever becoming part of the legend of St. Elizabeth’s school.

Oh, yes, what goes around comes around, she thought gleefully, brazenly stepping out of the shadows after all, into the pool of light from a street lamp.

She gazed down the block, hoping to see Lindsay scuttling off like a frightened child.

She was already gone.

Oh, well. It was enough, for now, to know that she was poised at the perimeter of Lindsay Farrell’s charmed life.

Poised like the wrecking ball that would soon claim the old school where it had all begun.

And when it came time for release, she would swing in with all her might, destroying everything in her path.

Lindsay would have known Aurora Zephyr anywhere.