The Inmate (36)

“Yes!” Chelsea swipes a strand of her soaking wet black hair with bleached tips from her face. “Tim and Shane are not murderers. They’re not.”

“Maybe it was you,” Kayla shoots back.

“Me?”

“Sure, why not? After all, everybody knows Brandon was cheating on you. Maybe the two of you had it out, and it didn’t end well for him.”

Chelsea’s lips form a startled O. “You bitch…”

A tear escapes Kayla’s right eye. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing mascara across her cheek. Her eyes dart between the four of us, her breaths coming faster with each second. “I’m getting out of here—car or not.”

“Kayla, don’t—” Shane starts to say.

But it’s too late. Kayla has turned around, and she’s running in the other direction down the poorly paved path to the farmhouse, the rainwater reaching up above her ankles like she’s wading through a shallow stream. Presumably, she’d thought she wouldn’t be outdoors much during this sleepover, so she’s wearing a pair of chunky heels with what had once been a stylish leather trench coat before the rain destroyed it. My coat and sneakers aren’t much better, but I’m still tempted to follow her.

She makes it barely twenty feet. I don’t know if her foot catches on something, but she takes a quick nosedive into the muddy water on the ground. Tim swears loudly, then races out after her.

“Look at Prince Charming go,” Chelsea mutters under her breath.

I shoot her a look. “What? You think he shouldn’t help her?”

Chelsea doesn’t answer—she just takes a ragged breath. Like Kayla, her makeup has run all over her face, making her appear almost maniacal. I’m glad I only wore lipstick tonight, which largely rubbed off when Shane and I were kissing.

Kayla looks like she’s not going to let Tim help her at first, but she finally accepts his hand and allows him to pull her back to her feet. She casts a regretful glance at the road behind her, which is becoming more flooded with every passing second, and then follows Tim back to the farmhouse. It’s hard to tell if her face is damp from tears or the rain.

Shane is hovering at the front door and gives Kayla a once-over as she steps back onto the porch. “You okay?”

She glares at him but doesn’t say a word.

“Let’s go inside,” Tim says. “At least it’ll be dry.”

With that declaration, I can’t help but notice how soaked he got while rescuing Kayla. We’re all soaked, actually. We look like a bunch of drowned rats. Kayla got the worst of it though, when she slipped in the mud. Her dark hair is plastered to her skull and her trench coat looks like it will need to be peeled off her skin. There are flecks of mud on her face, intermingled with her ruined makeup.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Kayla hisses at him. “Trap me in the house with no way out…”

“Hey…” Tim raises his hands. “I’m just saying… we don’t want to get sick out here…”

“Sick!” She casts a horrified look at Brandon’s body, still lying on the porch. “Someone is dead! And one of you did it! You had to have…”

“Kayla…” Tim takes a careful step toward her. “You need to calm down…”

“I’m not going to calm down!” She takes a step back, almost stumbling over her own heels. “I don’t trust any of you. So until the power comes back on, leave me the hell alone.”

With those words, Kayla runs back into the house. Her footsteps disappear up the stairs and the sound of one of the bedroom doors slamming echoes through the house.





Chapter 24


PRESENT DAY




The next morning, before I start my clinic, I make a trip to the infirmary to check on Shane.

While I’m walking down another long hallway of flickering lights, a voice from behind me calls out my name. I pause and turn around in time to see Marcus Hunt sprinting down the hallway in my direction.

Great. What now?

I hope he doesn’t start harassing me for dates. I can’t deal with that on top of everything else. One thing I can say for sure though is that I’m going to start carrying my pepper spray in my hand instead of leaving it in my purse while I walk out to my car. One good spritz of that stuff and he’ll know to leave me alone.

“Brooke.” He skids to a stop in front of me. “Hey.”

“Hello.” I avoid his eyes. “What do you need, Officer Hunt?”

He tugs at the collar of his stiff blue correctional officer uniform. “You can call me Marcus.”

I don’t respond to that. “What do you need?”

He grabs a few sheets of paper that he had stuffed into his pants pocket. He hands them to me—they’re filled in with his spidery handwriting. The name on the top sheet of paper is Malcolm Carpenter.

“I know you were trying to get that mattress for Carpenter,” he says. “We got one for somebody a couple of years ago, and I remembered these were the forms that needed to be filled out. I tried to fill in as much as I could for you.”

I look down at the papers in my hands, stunned. I have been struggling to get that mattress for Mr. Carpenter with little success, and Dorothy has been actively trying to keep me from getting it. I even attempted to call Dr. Wittenberg, who is apparently my supervising physician, even though I have never met the man—and I wasn’t able to connect with him either.