Page 64 of Kill Your Darlings

Thom stood, and as he did, the below-water pool lights turned off. A wave of fear jolted him, but he told himself the lights were on an automatic timer. He checked his watch. It was ten o’clock exactly.

At first, he thought the voice was coming from the pool house, but it was actually coming from the concrete path that led from the front of the main house. A female voice. “Hello,” she said again, loudly.

Thom’s body went cold and rigid. He could see her walking toward the pool, along a path illuminated by lights that were built into the ground. The fence was behind him, and he could quickly go over the top of it and run back toward his car. But it was too late. She’d see him and then she’d see the body. He and Wendy had already decided that Bryce’s death needed to be an accident.

Without even thinking about it, he walked, moving fast, aroundthe pool toward the woman, and said, “Hi there,” in a voice that sounded fairly normal in his own ears.

“There you are,” she said, and to his relief she stopped walking toward him. She was around his age, wearing a very short skirt and a fuzzy sweater that glowed in the lamplight. Her hair formed a dark halo around her head. Her perfume competed with the smell of chlorine that hung in the air.

“Bryce isn’t here,” Thom said.

“Oh, you’re not Bryce,” she said, unclasping her purse, and for a moment Thom wondered if she was going to remove a police badge, or maybe a gun.

“No. I was here looking for him.”

“Okay,” the woman said. She was now tapping out a cigarette from a hard pack. “This is Bryce’s address, though, right?” She had a strong Texas accent.

“It is,” Thom said, his mind rapidly calculating how to get her to leave before she noticed the body in the pool. “But he definitely isn’t here.”

“Okay,” the woman said, drawing it out. Thom had no idea what the situation was, but this woman was coming over as some sort of blind date. “You don’t think he’ll be coming back soon then?”

“Um, I don’t think so.” Thom was suddenly aware that his right hand and the sleeve of his sweatshirt were wet. He rubbed it against his thigh, and felt this woman’s eyes flick down, taking it in. “Hand’s wet,” Thom said, and laughed.

“If he comes, tell him Holly was here, ’kay?” She dragged at her cigarette and took two steps back, not quite turning around.

“Will do,” Thom said, and his own words came out wrong in his head. He suddenly seemed to have a Texas accent as well.

Holly turned and walked back down the path, moving faster than she had when she’d ambled onto the scene. When she turned the corner Thom turned himself, speed-walking past the dark pool,Bryce’s body just visible bobbing in the deep end, then hoisted himself up and over the fence. He quickly checked his compass, pointing it northwest, and began to run, not paying attention to the contours of the ground this time, just running, his mind calculating at an equally furious pace. She’d gotten a good look at him, but did that even make a difference? Would she even hear about the local rich boy who’d fallen into a pool and drowned? And if she did, would she go to the police to tell them she’d been there and seen someone else?He was acting totally strange, Officer, and I think his hand was wet.Thom just didn’t know. All he knew was that it had gone so right and then suddenly it had gone so wrong. His foot landed hard in a divot in the ground and he stumbled but didn’t fall, kept running. The church was now visible, lit only by starlight, but to its right he could make out the headlights of a car skimming through the dark. If the woman, if Holly, had turned right out of the Barrington homestead, then that was probably her. If she’d turned left she’d be gone forever, but why would she turn left? Lubbock was back past the church.

He’d lost sight of the car by the time he got back to his rental, but he jumped into the driver’s seat, inserted the key, and started the rental up, backing up into the road, spraying gravel. He had been driving for two minutes before he realized his headlights weren’t on. He couldn’t remember where the switch for the lights was but managed to flick them on just as he was reaching an intersection, the only car ahead of him taking a left that would lead back to downtown. He followed at a distance. He couldn’t be sure that he was following the car being driven by Holly, but there was a good chance it was her. He hadn’t seen any other cars on the road since driving back from Happy Lake.

As they neared Lubbock, traffic picked up. Thom had read somewhere, probably in a detective novel, that trailing a car at night was relatively easy because most cars’ rear lights were noticeably unique. He found this was the case. The car he was following had thinrectangular rear lights set far apart. He kept his eyes on them, not worried if other cars slid between him and the car he was following. They had entered a busy part of town, a string of bars, college kids coming and going along the sidewalk, then the car took a sharp left down a less populous street, tall buildings on either side. The car was going slow, and he wondered if she was looking for parking. He hung back, but she’d stopped the car and he had to keep going. He took a chance and glanced in her direction as he slowly drove past, almost surprised to find that he was following the correct car. There was Holly, same big hair, a lit cigarette between her lips, beginning to back into a spot just big enough for her compact Nissan.

Thom took the first right he could and immediately parked, partially blocking an alleyway entrance between a college bookstore and what looked like a museum with an enormous sheet-glass façade. Both of the buildings were dark. One moment he was sitting there, overcome by what he believed he needed to do, and the next he was outside of the car, the knife in his hand. Maybe he could simply threaten her, or even beg her, tell her to never mention this to anyone or he would find her and hurt her. But would that really work? He began to move back in the direction where she’d been parking the car. As he was coming up to the cross street, knife in his hand, but still folded, the woman turned the corner and they were face-to-face.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, her eyes confused. He jumped on top of her and together they crashed to the sidewalk. The breath must have been knocked out of her lungs, because she opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. It was like a silent movie.

1992

August22

8:02 p.m.

The parking lot at the Happy Lake Baptist Church was a mile from the Barrington Ranch by road, but it was only about a half mile if you walked across a stretch of scrubby desert land.

“Make sure you park at Happy Lake Baptist Church and not Tuxedo Valley First Baptist, which is pretty close to our house as well, but the wrong church,” Wendy had told him. He remembered thinking that whenever she talked about Texas things, she did so with the slightest of Texas accents, a barely noticeable drawl.

“Happy Lake Baptist Church,” he had said back to her, memorizing the address and also memorizing how to walk from there to the ranch house.

“Bring a compass,” she’d told him, “and go exactly southeast and you’ll come right out behind the pool. There’s a fence but it’s easy to climb.”

He was in the parking lot now, the engine of his rental Dodge turned off, the lights doused. He’d left Austin at three in the afternoon and it was just after eight now. He stepped out of the car into the warm night. The air was still, and the stars really were big andbright in Texas, casting the stark-white church and the empty parking lot in a sickly yellow glow. He was wearing dark jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt. All he had on him was a pair of gloves in the pocket of his hoodie, a cheap compass he’d bought a month earlier at an army-surplus store back in New England, plus a less-cheap hunting knife he’d bought with cash in Austin that afternoon. He hadn’t planned on bringing a weapon—he didn’t plan on using it on Cooper Bryce Barrington—but it felt like a security blanket. A tool that might come in handy if something went wrong.

He used the compass for only a short time, because pretty soon he could see the lights of the ranch house on the horizon. Wendy had told him that the nearest neighbor was about a mile away. It had to be the right house.

He pushed the compass back into his pocket, his fingers touching the handle of the folded knife. He’d heard yipping sounds already that sounded as though coyotes had gathered around a kill, and he was glad to have the knife. Keeping his eyes on the uneven terrain, he kept walking toward the lights of the ranch house.

Wendy had been right about the fence—steel slats, but not even as tall as he was. Still, he stood for a moment outside of the property staring in. He was situated right behind the pool, illuminated by underwater lights so that it gave off an eerie phosphorescent glow. Wendy had told him she was the only one who ever used it, and he pictured her now, doing laps in a white one-piece. On the other side of the rectangular pool was what must have been the pool house, where Wendy lived with Bryce, her husband. As she’d said, it was the size of most people’s actual house, a single-story replica of the big house on the property, a monstrous ranch built in the 1980s, its windows dark. The pool house, on the other hand, was completely lit up, all the windows ablaze, and bright spotlights on the front door and all along the pool decking. The darkest area that Thom saw was behind a shed that probably housed the pool equipment.

---