Beachcomber (19 page)

Until now. Her heart beat a little faster as she opened the case and picked up the pistol. It was heavy. The metal was warm from the heat of the trunk and smooth in her hand. The sun glinted off the bright steel. Curling her finger around the grip, she waited for the familiar churning in her stomach that occurred whenever she touched one. Her stomach tightened, but didn’t cramp into full-blown nausea as it had when she had last touched it, which had been when, at her mother’s insistence, she’d put it into her trunk, supposedly to take out again when she reached her apartment and stow away in her own lingerie drawer. Over time, she’d forgotten all about the gun’s existence; probably she’d thrown up some kind of mental block. She hated guns like some people hated spiders, but thanks to her early years in Pleasantville she knew how to use one. Her father had taught her.

But she wasn’t going to think about that. Remembering served no purpose. The point was, she knew how to use the gun. If her life was at stake, if she had to shoot to defend herself, she could. And, she thought, remembering how Elizabeth Smolski had been slaughtered on the beach, remembering the glinting eyes looking in at her through the gap in the bathroom door, she would.

Oh, yes, she would.

The problem was, she had a gun but no bullets. It had been unloaded when her mother had given it to her, and the box of bullets that had been included had been lost long ago. As far as problems went, though, that one was easy enough to remedy. Tucking the pistol away inside her purse, feeling ridiculously like her mother as she did so, Christy slid into her car and headed off for Hardy’s Sporting Goods, which she remembered seeing not far from the sheriff’s office.

“You’re about the twentieth woman I’ve sold bullets or some kind of weapon to today,” the clerk said as he rang up her purchase. He was a grizzled man in his late fifties with a beer gut swinging pendulously over the belt of his navy slacks. The name tag on his maroon polo shirt identified him as Dave. “You must’ve read the story in the paper.”

Christy felt a tingle of premonition. “What story in what paper?”

“The one about the serial killer.” He handed over a brown bag with the bullets in it along with her change. Nodding to his left, he added, “We got a rack of ’em over there.”

Christy looked, and saw a wire rack filled with a neat stack of newspapers near the exit. With a quick “thanks” she headed that way and picked up a paper, then pushed through the door and walked back out into the blazing heat.

There it was, all right, she saw as she crossed the parking lot, capped with a big, bold headline:
IS A SERIAL KILLER STALKING AREA BEACHES?
Beneath the question
were eight small photos in two neat rows. Christy didn’t have any trouble recognizing them as the pictures she’d seen on Sheriff Schultz’s desk the day before. Sliding behind the wheel of her car, she read the article before she did anything except turn on the air-conditioning.

Eight young women have vanished without a trace from beach towns in and around the Outer Banks over the last three years. On Saturday night, one was found dead on an Ocracoke Island beach. Elizabeth Ann Smolski, 21, of Athens, Georgia, was still alive when a tourist found her lying on the beach shortly after one
A.M.
She subsequently died of knife wounds before rescuers could reach her in what Sheriff Meyer Shultz has characterized as a particularly violent homicide. Terri Lynn Miller, 21, of Memphis, Tennessee, who disappeared with Smolski on August 2, has not been found. Neither have six other young women ranging in age from 18 to 25 who have been reported missing along a two-hundred-mile strip of coast that includes the Outer Banks. None of the missing women were local residents.
Besides being visitors to the area, they share similar physical characteristics: all are described as attractive, with a slim build and dark hair. Except for Terri Lynn Miller, all wore their hair shoulder-length or longer. These similarities, coupled with the sheer number of disappearances and Smolski’s murder, are causing some in the law-enforcement community to speculate that the area may be harboring a serial killer who stalks vacationers as they frolic on our beaches. Authorities are calling him the Beachcomber… .

There was more, but Christy’s hands were shaking so badly that the words blurred as she tried to read them. Viewed all together, the pictured women did indeed look eerily alike. They could have been sisters, almost. The sad thing was, they were all smiling, all happy-looking, clearly having no inkling what the future held for them. Remembering Elizabeth Smolski’s fate, Christy felt dizzy. She had to lean her head back against the seat and close her eyes. The paper dropped from her suddenly nerveless hands to slide into the passenger seat. A vivid memory of those few minutes on the beach, when the poor girl had begged for help—and she had run—was impossible to get out of her head. But if she hadn’t run, she would undoubtedly
have died, too, she reminded herself fiercely. And she still might.

But not if she could help it.

She’d be damned if she was going to go gently into that good night. Growing up in Pleasantville had its minuses, but it also had one major plus: she’d learned to do whatever it took to survive.

The feeling that she was being observed seeped into her consciousness slowly. When she recognized the warning tingle for what it was, her eyes popped open and she sat up. Pulse racing, clutching the steering wheel with both hands, she glanced all around. Lots of cars, lots of people. No one who seemed to be paying the least attention to her.

But her heart pounded, and weird little prickles raced over her skin.

That was good enough for her. Taking a deep breath, she put the car into gear and pulled out of the lot. The small faces of the pictured women were still visible from the corner of her eye as she drove. It occurred to Christy that she might well have been one of them, might yet be one of them. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead and dampened her palms, making the steering wheel feel slippery as she gripped it.

Panicking would not help her, she told herself. Thinking might.

She’d planned to make her next stop the management company’s office to pick up the keys for the new locks at the cottage. Instead, she headed back through Ocracoke Village to the Curl-o-Rama. Spelled out in print, the serial killer theory suddenly seemed as probable
as a botched hit. If it were true, then the killer was probably targeting her because he feared she could identify him. Or maybe because she fit the physical description of the missing women.

That last was something she could change.

Marching into the Curl-o-Rama, Christy told the girl at the front desk what she wanted. Minutes later, draped in an enveloping black cape, she was tilted back over a shampoo bowl as a hairdresser named Claude went to work on her. Claude was tall and pudgy, dressed all in black, and wore his own hair in a neat ponytail at the nape of his neck. Under other circumstances, this would undoubtedly have given Christy pause. But these were desperate times, and they called for desperate measures.

Claude positioned the chair so that her back was to the mirror and refused to let her look as he put the finishing touches on her hair.

“This looks so
fabulous
on you,” he said, running his hands through her newly shorn locks in what she guessed was an effort to give them that tousled look. “So young, so fresh, so new.”

In the chair beside her, a middle-aged woman with her hair wrapped in neat little foil packets looked up from the magazine she’d been reading to eye Christy’s head appraisingly.

“Your husband’s sure gonna get a surprise.”

“I’m not married.”

“Oh, really? Well, I’m not surprised. Husbands hate it when their wives change their hair.” Frowning, she looked Christy’s hair over some more, then
glanced at her own hairdresser, a plumpish blonde who was just coming back on the floor after taking a break. “You know, Linda, maybe I should get my hair cut like that.”

“Henry’d kill you.” Linda opened one of the little foil packets to check the color. “You’re always saying how he likes your hair long.”

“But it’s a pain. And I’ve been wearing it this way since high school. And I’m forty-seven years old!”

“Sometimes it’s good to do something different,” Claude said, and spun Christy around so that she could look in the mirror. “The same old thing all the time can get boring.” He was still busy smoothing stray ends into place as he met her gaze through the mirror. “So, sweetie, what do you think?”

Eyes widening, Christy stared at her reflection. She looked nothing at all like herself, was her first thought. Her hair was barely jaw length, scissored into feathery layers, and as blond as Marilyn Monroe’s.

“It’s definitely not boring,” she said, still looking at herself. With her eyes and skin, that pale blond shade should not have worked. But, somehow, it did.

“That’s what I want, not boring,” the woman beside her said positively.

“Marilee …” Linda made it into a warning.

“I like it,” said the receptionist, who had left her post at the front desk to get in on the act.

The entire place was now staring at Christy’s hair.

“I can always take you dark again, if you want,” Claude offered, his hands gently kneading the base of
her neck. Clearly he took her continued examination of her reflection as an expression of doubt. Christy met his gaze through the mirror. He looked rapt.

“No.” Christy didn’t feel like being kneaded, and she didn’t feel like being stared at, either. Claude’s fascinated expression as he surveyed his handiwork was starting to give her the creeps. He was the right build for … No. She was not going to start seeing attackers under every bush. If she did, she’d go nuts. Shrugging out from under his hands, she stood up. “This is perfect. Just what I wanted.”

Which was the literal truth, she reflected as she handed over her credit card, not without a twinge for the amount the transformation had cost her. What with the hotel room, the gift shop clothing spree, and other assorted purchases, she was getting dangerously close to her credit limit, she knew. It didn’t help to reflect that, since she was now unemployed, her bank account had no prospects of being replenished anytime soon. But her financial health had to take a backseat to her
life.
And her life was what this expensive new hairstyle was meant to help protect.

Several hours later she still had trouble recognizing herself whenever she caught a glimpse of her own reflection in a shiny surface. But looking on the bright side, whoever was trying to kill her wasn’t going to recognize her easily either.

Of course, the fact that she was going to have to stay at the cottage again might just be a dead—she winced at the word—giveaway.

But the voice on the phone had said,
Be there, or you
will
be dead.
Call it a hunch, but she didn’t think he was kidding.

It was nearly six-thirty by the time she got up enough nerve to pull into the garage. She hadn’t wanted to wait until later because the very idea of walking through the cottage after nightfall made her stomach churn and turned her knees to Jell-O. The thought of calling the sheriff to beg for the loan of a deputy to stay with her occurred to her, only to be reluctantly dismissed. She knew as well as anyone how the mob worked. Like kudzu, that scourge of the South, they could take over anything. Infiltrating a small town’s sheriff’s department would be a piece of cake—and Sheriff Schultz himself fit the description of her attacker. Besides, what if the sheriff appointed Castellano her guard dog? If she trusted the wrong person, she would basically be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

The bitter truth was that she was on her own.

Willing herself not to remember the damage a gun could cause, Christy fished the pistol—a .38 Colt Automatic—out of her purse and broke into a full-blown cold sweat as she loaded it. Outside, the heat and humidity were just shifting into the bearable range, while the sun still beamed benevolently from low in the western sky. Inside, the cottage was cool and dark and once again pristine. From the looks of it, Christy realized with some surprise as she walked quickly through the rooms with her now-loaded pistol clutched in both clammy hands, the attack might never have happened.
The glass had been replaced in the patio door and the broken pieces removed from the carpet. The dresser was back in place beneath the mirror on the far wall of the master bedroom. The bathroom had been cleaned and a whole new door put on to replace the one that had been destroyed. Only the étagère was missing. Whoever the management company had sent over had done an incredible job. Even so, all she wanted to do was hurry up and get out of that house.

Which, of course, wasn’t happening. Until she received and then handed off whatever it was her mystery caller had said would be delivered, she was more or less locked into the cottage. Under the circumstances, the obvious thing to do was make herself as safe as possible inside the house. Forget Mace; if the guy came after her again, she was now armed with a gun. In addition to the new locks, thanks to her shopping spree at a local hardware store the front door was treated to one of those hanging alarms that wails at about a thousand decibels when the door is opened. It also had a rubber wedge shoved beneath it that, in theory, should make it impossible to open from the outside. The door that opened into the kitchen from the garage got similar treatment. The patio door was a little trickier, but she had found an alarm for it, too, as well as a brace made specifically to keep intruders from forcing it open. With all those protective devices in place, she felt safe enough to unload the few groceries she had bought. Then she opened the patio curtains wide to let in as much light as possible, and went to change clothes. After two days of wearing whatever
she’d been able to scrounge up in the gift shop, it would be nice to be back in her own things.

Using the bathroom where she’d been attacked was definitely out. After taking the quickest shower on record—scenes from the movie
Psycho
kept running through her mind, which greatly expedited the proceedings—in the second bathroom, she toweled off, stepped into her own undies, and pulled on a lemon yellow T-shirt dress with a big pink rose on the front of it. Loose and knee-length, it was perfect for what she had in mind: an evening spent lazing around in front of the TV trying to figure out how to keep herself alive.