The Night Walker (Nightmare Hall) (7 page)

It was still raining when she decided to dress and go for a walk to clear her head. Tobie should be home soon. She had probably already heard about Reed and Jake. She’d have all kinds of questions.

But Quinn had no answers.

She dressed quickly and went to the closet for her yellow slicker and matching yellow rain hat. When she was a kid, she’d had a fit every time she’d had to wear an outfit exactly like it. Her mother had laughed when Quinn had come home from shopping for college and unearthed from a shopping bag the yellow rain gear. “
Now
you decide it’s okay to wear,” she’d said, “after all those arguments we had on rainy days!”

Quinn liked the brightness of the yellow and the slick, rubbery feel … exactly the same things she’d hated as a kid.

Well, she thought as she shrugged into the coat, that’s what growing up is, I guess. Changing.

Slapping the hat on her head, she left the room.

The building was very quiet. Given the rainy, dreary weather and what had happened the night before, it seemed most people were sleeping in.

When the door to Devereaux had swung shut behind her, Quinn tilted her face upward, toward the rain, and slid her hands into the raincoat pockets.

And yelped softly, as something sharp sliced into a finger.

Quinn yanked her injured hand from the pocket. The ring finger on her left hand was bright red. A long, deep slice zigzagged its way up to the second knuckle.

What had she left in her pocket that was so sharp?

Pulling a tissue from her jeans pocket, she wrapped it around the bleeding finger and, using her other hand, hesitantly probed the depths of the left raincoat pocket.

Her fingers touched not one, but several sharp, jagged points.

Quinn stood perfectly still as her hand left that pocket and moved to the right one. Carefully, gingerly, her fingers tiptoed downward, until they touched …

Glass. Small pieces of sharp, jagged glass.

Her pockets were filled with broken glass.

Q
UINN STOOD IN THE
rain in front of Devereaux, one hand in a pocket of the yellow slicker.

Why would there be broken glass in her raincoat pockets? How was that possible?

It wasn’t.

But when she looked down at her left hand, the finger was still bleeding. Vivid red splotched the soggy tissue wrapped around it, as if to say to her, “It most certainly
is
possible, and here’s the proof!”

Because she didn’t know what else to do, she began walking. A few feet away from the door, she almost walked straight into a large trash container. She stopped, looking at it as if she’d never seen one before. Then her eyes cleared, and slowly, carefully, she began emptying her pockets, dropping each new shard of glass into the container as she unearthed it.

There wasn’t that much of it. Half a dozen pieces, like sand in the pockets of her shorts after she’d been to the beach.

She saved one thick, uneven splinter. Removing the bloody tissue from her wounded finger, she wrapped it instead around the piece of glass and carefully slipped it back inside the raincoat pocket.

Turning around, she headed for Lester.

Except for a few umbrella-sheltered teachers, briefcases in hand; dashing across campus, she had the early morning to herself. There was some comfort in that. She didn’t want to run into anyone she knew, not now. She didn’t trust herself to keep from blurting out, “I don’t know where I was or what I did last night when I was supposed to be sleeping!”

When she reached Lester, she hesitated. She couldn’t do it. Deliberately going back to take another look at that battered car was crazy. If she
had
been anywhere near the scene of the attack, she didn’t want to know it. She
didn’t
! What good would it do her? It would just make things worse than they already were.

But … hiding from the truth wouldn’t do her any good, either, would it? If she had left the room last night, shouldn’t she
know
it? If her nocturnal walks were becoming more frequent, she had to do something to stop them. There had to be some way. Counseling or medication … tying herself to her bed, if necessary, anything to stop this feeling of having no control over her own life after she fell asleep.

Taking a deep breath and letting it out, Quinn rounded a corner of the building. Maybe the police had already removed the car, taking it away as evidence.

They hadn’t. It was still there, sitting beside the building like a broken toy.

And someone was standing beside it. But it wasn’t a policeman.

Involuntarily, Quinn took a step backward, into a narrow doorway. She didn’t want to be seen approaching the car. Didn’t the police always say a criminal was likely to return to “the scene of the crime”? If someone saw her there, they might think she’d had something to do with the attack.

Of course, she hadn’t. She was just there to … to check something out, that was all.

But the same suspicion could apply to the person at the car now, couldn’t it? What was he doing there, standing by the driver’s side and reaching in through the yawning gap where the driver’s door had been?

The rain came down harder, until she could barely see. But she didn’t dare get any closer.

The figure, in jeans and a blue hooded jacket, withdrew its arm. It was holding something in one hand. Then it straightened up and began to move away from the car.. Walking quickly, shoulders hunched against the pelting rain, it hurried in Quinn’s direction.

She did
not
want to be seen here.

Reaching behind her, she grabbed the doorknob and twisted. The door opened, and she darted inside, closing it quickly behind her.

But she stayed where she was, watching through the door’s glass window. It seemed very important that she get a look at the person who had returned to the scene of the attack.

The window wasn’t very clean. And the curtain of rain pulled a protective cloak around the tall figure, walking with its head down as it passed Lester.

But Quinn managed to get a good look as it passed only inches from where she stood.

Suze. The hood slid backward as she passed and Quinn could see her face clearly.

What was Suze doing at Jake’s car?

If Quinn had had any doubt, the last of it disappeared as the figure reached the corner, and lifted its head before deciding which way to go. Quinn ducked further back into her hiding place, but that was Suze’s face, all right.

When she was sure Suze was gone, Quinn darted back out into the rain and ran over to the car. The sea of broken glass surrounding the wreck was still there.

She carefully removed the large shard of tissue-wrapped glass from her raincoat pocket and, bending, picked up one of the larger pieces on the ground.

The two chunks of glass were exactly the same thickness.

They were exactly the same texture, fairly new, glossy-smooth.

They were exactly the same noncolor. No greenish tinge to one or pinkish tinge to another to differentiate them.

The two pieces of glass certainly looked identical.

Quinn stood up, feeling sick again. She dropped the telltale piece of glass on the ground, and hurried away from the car.

All thoughts of fresh air and exercise banished from her mind, she almost ran back to Devereaux.

When Quinn entered 602, Tobie’s tote bag was lying on her bed. Good. Tobie had returned, but she was probably in the bathroom. There was time to do something about the raincoat. No one had seen her in it. If it
had
somehow been at the scene of the attack last night, she didn’t want anyone knowing it was hers until she figured out exactly
how
it got there.

But putting it down the incinerator chute seemed like a bad idea. Suppose it
had
been seen behind Lester last night? If the police came around hunting for a yellow slicker and hat, she’d better be able to produce hers. A lot of people knew she owned a rain set like that. If she no longer had it, wouldn’t the police wonder why?

She hadn’t done anything wrong. Burning her raincoat would make her feel as if she had.

Instead, she rolled up the coat and hat in as small a ball as possible, wrapped them in an old sweatshirt, and placed them at the very back of the closet, behind a pile of dirty laundry. Even when the laundry was moved, all Tobie would see was an old sweatshirt.

Quinn felt almost as guilty as she would have if she’d burned the coat and hat.

Am I hiding evidence? she wondered as she wiped her face with a tissue and took clean, dry socks from a drawer.

Evidence of what? She hadn’t
done
anything!

Suddenly, in her mind’s eye, she saw herself raising her arms and lowering them, once, twice, three times, and then her younger sister Sophie’s round, pink face screwed up in fear, her bright blue eyes wide with bewilderment as she woke from a sound sleep to find her beloved older sister pummeling her.

“But I didn’t mean it!” Quinn whispered softly to herself, sinking down on the bed.

“What didn’t you mean?” Tobie asked as she came into the room. Without waiting for an answer, she threw herself down on her bed. “I’m not leaving this room today,” she said flatly. “It’s lousy out there. I can afford to cut this one time. I’ll get the notes from people. I’m just going to stay in bed.”

“You okay?” Quinn asked. Tobie seemed awfully pale. Maybe she was scared. Who could blame her? That could just as easily have been her and Danny sitting in the car.

Tobie nodded and crawled back into bed.

It looked like a tempting idea. “It is getting pretty nasty out there.”

“You were
outside
? Already? I thought you were probably downstairs eating breakfast. You don’t have an eight o’clock on Fridays. What were you doing out there?”

Was Tobie deliberately avoiding the subject of last night’s attack? She must have heard about it. How could they not talk about it? Impossible. “I just went for a walk, that’s all. Listen, Tobie, is Suze a friend of Reed’s? Or Jake’s?”

Tobie’s face fell. She’d heard about the attack, all right. She had obviously made up her mind to ignore it, pretend it hadn’t happened.

But it had.

“Suze?” Tobie thought for a minute. “I don’t know. Why?”

Quinn didn’t want to tell Tobie that she’d seen Suze at the car. Not until she knew why Suze had been there. “I just wondered. Suze seemed really upset last night, so I thought …”

“I don’t want to talk about this now,” Tobie said, pulling her quilt up around her shoulders. She reached up and pulled her high school yearbook from the shelf. “And I’m sure Suze wasn’t the only one upset about it. Everyone must be.”

Yes, Quinn thought, but
everyone
didn’t go back to the car at the crack of dawn this morning, did they?

Well,
two
of us did. I
know
why I was there. But why was Suze?

“Are you going to stay here with me?” Tobie asked, opening the yearbook.

Quinn shrugged. Maybe if she stayed inside, Tobie wouldn’t bury herself in that yearbook again. It always seemed to depress her. On the other hand, Quinn wanted to get out on campus and find out what people were saying about last night’s attack. “Count me out,” she told Tobie. “I have a quiz in math, anyway. Can’t afford to miss it.”

When she left the room later, Tobie was lying on her bed looking at her yearbook, one hand reaching up to continually twist a lock of red hair.

Most of the gossip on campus revolved around the attack of the night before. Although Reed and Jake had been released from the infirmary that morning, they weren’t attending classes. No one really expected them to.

But at lunch in Lester’s busy cafeteria, Quinn was waiting on line for her soup when she overheard Suze and another girl, in line ahead of her, discussing the attack.

“Well, Reed
saw
something,” Suze told her companion.

Quinn moved an imperceptible inch forward. Reed had
seen
who attacked them? In all that rain?

“What?” the second girl said. “Did she see someone? Who was it?”

Quinn held her breath.

“Oh, she doesn’t
know
who,” Suze replied. “All she knows is, it was someone wearing one of those yellow rubber raincoats and a matching hat.”

T
HE DAY SEEMED TO
drag on endlessly. Quinn did all the things she was supposed to do: She went to class and she took notes, although she had no idea what she was writing.

She knew that she looked normal. Jeans and a sweater, normal. A little mascara on the thick eyelashes Tobie envied, normal. Straight brown hair fell around her face, normal. She walked like a normal person, sat like a normal person, probably even answered any questions put to her like a normal person.

But if people could have seen inside her head … a giant crazy quilt of questions spinning around in there like a load of colored clothes in a dryer. Reed had seen someone in a yellow raincoat and hat at the car. The pockets of the yellow raincoat in Quinn’s closet had been full of glass. How had that glass made its way into her pockets? And what was Suze doing at the car first thing in the morning after the attack?

And … although it had nothing to do with the attack, why hadn’t Tobie told her roomie about the boyfriend who had died? How could she
not
have told? Wouldn’t keeping something so awful all to yourself be like carrying a mountain around on your shoulders?

Because it seemed important that she act as normal as possible, Quinn joined Ivy and Suze in a trip to the mall after classes. The rain had stopped, the sky had cleared, and the sun had warmed the air to bare-arm weather. It seemed the wrong kind of day to be sitting in an empty dorm room worrying over unanswered questions.

So she called Tobie from the lobby, inviting her along on the mall trip. “It’s nice out now,” she pleaded, “and you’ve been in that room all day. Come with us.”

Tobie declined. She sounded tired, her voice husky.

She’s been crying, Quinn thought with certainty. I should hide that yearbook from her. It just makes her sad.