The twisted dead, p.15
The Twisted Dead, page 15
“No.” She swallowed. “I just need a minute.”
She didn’t want to see Evan’s death. But she thought she had to. It might be the last chance to get justice for Evan and his family.
Keira turned back to the alcove. Her palms were damp and her heart ran too fast. The emotional residue—the stain caused by death—radiated out of the ground. She didn’t need to search between the bricks for flecks of red to find the place Evan had died. He’d been killed almost exactly in the centre of the geometric pattern.
Keira knelt down beside it. If the vision still existed, she only needed skin contact to access it. There was a chance it was already gone, though. Not every death left a memory, and the pressure washing could very well have eradicated or weakened it.
Still, she had to try.
Keira set her jaw and reached her hands towards the stones. She touched the centre of the pattern. Her vision flashed to white.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Keira was still in the courtyard. It was different, though, in subtle, uncomfortable ways.
The plants in the pots were a fraction smaller and a fraction more leafy. The stones looked older. Dirt and age had crusted over them and built up in the gaps between. They had not yet been pressure washed.
Ahead, the stone wall was bare. No plaque. No memorial. Not yet.
A figure stepped into Keira’s view. He had an open, gentle face and tawny skin. A satchel was slung over one shoulder; it looked heavy with books. Everything about his appearance was understated but tidy. His shirt had been ironed and a light jacket matched the brown in his pants. His smile was warm but, Keira thought, held just a hint of hesitancy.
Evan Radecki.
He spoke, but the words were lost to Keira. She strained to read his lips. He was asking if she needed help, she thought.
No. Not me. He can’t see me.
A second figure stood near her, wearing a striped jacket. Its hood had been pulled up. From Keira’s angle she wasn’t able to see the figure’s face.
Her body turned cold. Dread, heavy and icy, filled her chest.
Quick. Focus. You only have once chance at this.
She strained forward, trying to see under the hood, but the scene swam around her. Evan had approached the figure. There was something like an apology in his face. Empathy. Mason had said he would have made a great doctor; it was very much like Mason to admire someone who contained so much kindness.
Still, Keira could not see under the hood to make out the stranger’s face. The sun’s angle was wrong, throwing his features into shadow.
The visions never lasted long. She only had seconds. Desperate, Keira darted her eyes across his form as she memorised as much as she could. He was a man but small. Only a little taller than Keira herself. She could see his hands: they were trembling. His skin was very pale. The jacket clung to angular shoulders that had been hunched.
The images swam again, leaving Keira reeling. Evan and the stranger were closer, Evan standing at the man’s side, one hand gently placed on his shoulder. He was speaking, but there was no smile on his face any longer, just sadness.
Something silver glittered in the man’s right hand. A pocketknife, held carefully at his side.
Nausea rose in Keira. She would not be able to escape the next part of the scene, no matter how badly she wanted to. All she could do was try to stay focussed and gather as much information about the stranger as she could. His jacket was cheap cotton, but his sneakers looked expensive. So did the pocketknife: pure silver. Something about the blade snagged at the back of Keira’s mind, as though there was something important about it that she should recognise, but it slid away again before she could grasp it.
The image shifted once more. The stranger had thrown himself at Evan. They tumbled to the ground, the stranger on top, the blade plunging into Evan’s chest and into his right lung. Evan’s mouth opened, but the impact would have been sudden enough to knock the air out of him.
Mason would be on the clock tower’s other side, Keira realised. If she’d had the ability to move, she could have craned to see over the courtyard walls and glimpsed him there, hesitating.
Instead, she had no choice except to watch the brutal attack before her. The images shifted erratically, blending in strange ways, as the red-slicked knife rose again and again. Evan fought back, his hands scrabbling at the stranger’s jacket, but the knife wouldn’t stop.
It lasted too long. Longer than Keira had imagined might be possible. She tried to close her eyes to block it out but the scene continued to play across the back of her eyelids. The killer’s hoodie almost slipped away from his face, and for a second Keira thought she might be able to glimpse him properly, but then he pulled it back into place, leaving her with just the image of pale hair and the end of his nose.
The images shifted a final time. Evan lay still. His head rested back on the stones, and his eyes were open but unseeing. The killer rose and staggered away, clutching the knife in his bloodstained hands.
Keira had known this was how the vision would end, but she still felt her heart break as she stared down at Evan. He lay in a slowly widening pool of his own blood. The killer had cut his throat to finish the job: a jagged line ran from ear to ear. His limbs were limp, his gentle face slack. The satchel had burst open during the attack and textbooks scattered out of it, slowly soaking up the blood.
The killer’s chest rose and fell quickly as he reached into one of the planters and pulled out a backpack. He fumbled to unzip it, then dropped the knife inside before tugging the hoodie over his head and bundling it up.
The murder had been planned. He’d worn the cheap hoodie to catch the blood spatter and had brought the backpack to hide the dirtied clothes as he walked back to whatever refuge he had. He wiped the hoodie across his hands in an attempt to clean them, then stuffed it into the backpack.
Keira was still at the wrong angle to see his face, though. His hair was blond, like she’d thought. Small ears poked out of the side of his head. But almost as though he knew she was there, he still wouldn’t face her. He kept his back to her as he clutched the backpack to his chest and moved towards the courtyard’s exit.
Turn around. Keira bored her eyes into the back of his head, willing him to react. Let me see your face.
He stopped in the courtyard’s entrance. She imagined he was running through his itinerary a final time, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, reassuring himself that he hadn’t left any evidence at the scene.
Come on. Turn!
The vision was almost over. She could feel it fraying at its edges as it unravelled.
Please!
At the last second, the killer turned. He glanced down at Evan’s body a final time, and Keira finally got a clear look at his face. Her heart froze.
The vision dissolved. In an instant she was back in the centre of the courtyard, on her hands and knees, touching the place where Evan’s body had laid.
A rushing noise filled Keira’s ears. Her limbs had turned to water. She nearly pitched forward into the stones, except strong arms caught her.
“You’re okay.” Mason spoke gently into the back of her head. “You’re back now. Just breathe.”
Her throat ached. Her heart ran so fast that it felt as though it were bruising itself against her rib cage.
“Breathe,” Mason repeated, and Keira realised she’d been holding her breath. She inhaled, and it ached as it travelled through her tight throat.
The dizziness abruptly morphed into nausea, and she heaved. Mason pressed a hand to her back, comforting, as he waited for the queasiness to fade. In that moment, she wanted to be anywhere except in that courtyard.
“Can we leave? Please?” Keira asked.
“Of course.” Mason adjusted his hold on her and then lifted, and somehow they both got to their feet.
Zoe came up on Keira’s other side and threaded her arm through Keira’s. “These time-hopping things really do a number on you, huh?”
“They’re not the most fun I’ve ever had,” she mumbled. The rushing was slowly fading from her ears, but she could still feel the uneasy prickling at her back. The stain of death. The stain of suffering. She wanted nothing more than to be away from it.
They emerged around the side of the clock tower. Mason supported part of her weight as he led them back towards the parking lot. The campus was growing busier; Keira could feel curious glances sent her way like lasers trained on her back. She pulled forward, quickening their pace, as her legs began to regain their stability.
The walk back to the car felt far longer than the first trip had. As Keira dropped into the passenger seat, she let herself slump forward to rest her head on the dashboard.
“Keira?” Mason climbed into the driver’s seat beside her while Zoe squirmed in between the shopping bags at the back. “Are you feeling sick?”
“I’m fine.” She forced herself to smile. “I’d just like to get away from the campus.”
“We can do that.” The car rumbled to life as he started the ignition. “Zoe, can you pass me a water bottle?”
“Boy, I did the snack shopping for this trip. I packed energy drinks, soft drinks, and a bottle of pure flavoured syrup, but I can guarantee I did not pack any water.”
“I knew you wouldn’t, so I did. In the black bag.” He caught the bottle she tossed to him and unscrewed the cap. “Here, this will help.”
Keira accepted the drink. Her throat continued to ache but she forced herself to swallow some. “Thanks.”
“I can’t believe you packed water for a road trip,” Zoe muttered. “A time specifically designed to indulge in all that is unhealthy, like Dionysus at a weekend-long party. What else did you bring? Salads? Vitamins? High fibre cereal?”
“Just the water,” Mason said, steering them out of the carpark and towards the main roads. He cleared his throat. “And granola bars.”
“Utterly typical.”
Keira was grateful that her friends didn’t try to pry information out of her but let her sit as they coasted away from the university. Her mind wouldn’t keep still; it kept looping around the same dozen impossible questions, all without answers.
She’d only seen the killer’s face for a fraction of a second, but that had been all she’d needed. She thought she might be sick again.
“There’s a park up ahead,” Mason said. “We’re a few minutes from campus. If you want to stop.”
“Yeah.”
Mason pulled off the street. The park was heavily shaded and mercifully quiet. In the distance, two mothers watched their children play together. A jogger ran laps along the path. Keira climbed out of the car, still clutching the water bottle, and crossed the lawn to reach a picnic table.
The wood was rough and cracked under her fingers, and grass grazed her ankles as she sat. Mason and Zoe slid into the table’s opposite side. Then they waited, watching her with a mix of confusion and concern.
Keira took a slow breath as she fidgeted with the sticky edge of the bottle’s label. She had to tell them. As little as she wanted to relive what she’d seen in the vision, she was past the point of being able to keep secrets from her friends. They deserved the truth. More than that, they needed the truth. Even if it hurt. “I know who killed Evan Radecki.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“No way,” Zoe muttered. Her eyes were huge.
Mason took a sharp breath. “You recognised them?”
Keira’s mouth was too dry to do anything except nod.
He frowned, his eyes darting across the wooden table as he tried to make sense of what she was saying. “But today was your first time on campus. You’ve never met the other students. Who could you have—oh no. Please, not Professor Ayad.”
“No.” Keira managed a thin laugh. “No, it wasn’t him.”
“Thank mercy.” Mason sagged a fraction with relief. “He was my favourite teacher. I would have hated to lose him.”
“Especially after all that work you put into being a teacher’s pet,” Zoe added.
Mason ignored her as he leaned forward, closing the distance between himself and Keira. “If not him, then who?”
Keira was slowly shredding the label off the bottle. She didn’t know how to lead into the next part. It was going to be ugly no matter how she approached it. “Gavin Kelsey was a student at Ridgegrow, wasn’t he?” There was a second of terrible silence. Then Mason spoke, his voice thin. “Yes. You… Am I right in thinking you’re trying to tell me…”
Keira could only nod.
She’d met Gavin Kelsey, the cruel and sarcastic son of Blighty’s doctor, shortly after moving to the town. The encounter had left her deeply uncomfortable. And with good reason.
Her glimpse of the hooded man’s face had only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it was all she’d needed. The blond hair. The icy-blue eyes. Gavin had gazed down at Evan’s body with so much unbridled pride that she didn’t think she could ever scrub the image from her mind.
“You’re serious?” Zoe blinked. “Gavin? For real?”
Keira nodded again.
“Wow.” Zoe leaned back, staring blankly at the trees above them. “I feel like I should be shocked right now. But honestly, he’s always been a weaselly little snake. He was a nightmare when he was little and gets worse every year.”
“Gavin’s father wanted him to be a doctor.” Mason had grown pale. He looked shaken and stressed in a way Keira hadn’t seen before. She pushed the water bottle over to him and he took it, grateful, and drank deeply. When he resurfaced, he said, “Dr Kelsey paid his son’s tuition into Ridgegrow. And…well. It wasn’t much of a secret that Gavin Kelsey was only there because his father had made a sizeable donation.”
“He didn’t finish school either, did he?” Keira remembered how, after Gavin had confronted her and her friends at the grocery store, Mason had mentioned that Gavin had been kicked out before the end of his first year.
“No. His grades were always precarious. Eventually the school expelled him for disruptive behaviour. Even so…I didn’t think he’d be capable of…”
“I’m honestly surprised you didn’t at least consider him,” Zoe said. “Weasel-snake that he is.”
Mason lifted his shoulders into a shrug. “Honestly? It was easy to forget he was there. He enrolled two years after me and had different classes and different social circles. It’s a big campus. I remember being surprised when I heard he’d gotten in, but otherwise, I almost never saw him. We only had one year where our time at Ridgegrow overlapped. But of course, that was the year Evan was killed.”
Keira frowned. “Why would he target Evan, though? It’s hard to imagine Gavin could have spent much time around him to build up a grudge.”
“The thing is, I was well-liked in my class, but Evan was beloved by the whole school. It was no secret that he was the best student from any year. I could imagine Gavin viewing him as something like a physical manifestation of his own failures. Evan was everything Gavin wasn’t: well-liked, capable, talented.”
“And so Gavin used him to take out his frustrations,” Keira muttered. Gavin Kelsey wasn’t a large person, and he wasn’t strong, but he liked to have control over others. It was rare he could get it, though; his own father, Dr Kelsey, was severe to the point of being overbearing.
Anyone else with a stifling home environment might have developed anxiety or poured themselves into hobbies. Gavin, though, had developed a cruel streak.
“Maybe it was, like, a spur-of-the-moment frenzy,” Zoe said.
“No.” Keira grimaced. “Gavin had planned it. He’d hidden a backpack there to store his dirty clothes once he was done. He must have known Evan would be walking that way to reach the exam hall and was waiting to lure him into the courtyard…possibly with some request for help.” She remembered the empathy on Evan’s face as he spoke with Gavin. He’d tried to be kind.
“There’s more.” Keira took a deep breath to steady herself. She hadn’t wanted to share this part with her friends, but there was no avoiding it now. “This isn’t the only time Gavin’s killed.”
Mason ran a hand over his jaw.
Zoe’s eyes widened. “What?”
“I accidentally touched him back in Blighty, and I saw something from his past. There was an older man standing on a bridge during winter. He made a joke about Gavin, and Gavin pushed the man over. He fell through the ice and didn’t come up again.”
There was a beat of perfect silence, then Zoe and Mason spoke in tandem: “Wilson.”
“You knew him?”
“He stayed in Blighty for a couple of years,” Mason said. “He didn’t have a permanent home and picked up whatever odd jobs were available, but he seemed friendly and was a hard worker. He vanished one day, leaving his belongings behind, but a lot of people thought he’d simply moved on to a different town.”
“They found his body the following spring,” Zoe said. “In a thawing pond a couple of hours from Blighty. The rumours were that he’d gotten drunk and fallen into a river. Even then, no one could agree if it had happened inside Blighty or somewhere else. The police didn’t take long to close the case. Wilson didn’t have family or an estate, so they just stamped accidental on his file and moved on.”
“I bet Gavin planned for that,” Keira muttered. “He couldn’t afford to have too many deaths connected to him, even tangentially. So he targeted Wilson because he knew his disappearance wouldn’t draw as much attention.”
For a moment, they were silent. Distant children shrieked with laughter as they played. Tree branches creaked overhead. The world felt almost too calm for what they were discussing.
“I need your advice,” Keira said, and swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I need to know what to do about Gavin.”
“That’s a good question. He’s killed twice.” Mason ran a hand across his face. “Is he likely to try to kill again?”
Zoe slapped an open palm onto the table. “Of course he is! Have you never listened to a true crime podcast in your life?”
