Cloudburst

  I felt the blood draining from my face.

  “Oh, my God,” Jordan said, realizing. “Kiera told you I called?”

  I nodded. “What did happen, then?” I asked.

  “Kiera called Donald and told him she had just found out that Ryder Garfield was going to meet you at the motel. She claimed she knew nothing about it and didn’t want him blaming her. She told him exactly where you were, room number and all, and said she was sorry she had planned this special outing. She had been expecting it to be only you and her.

  “He called me immediately, raging about it. He said he called Dr. Steiner to see if Ryder had indeed left the school. She had just discovered that he had and had just called his parents. Donald told her exactly where Ryder was going, and Dr. Steiner called his parents with the information.

  “Of course, I don’t think any of us imagined that Ryder would be so distraught that he would take his own life. No matter what was going on in that family, no parent would want to lose a child that way.”

  I really thought for a moment that I had lost the ability to move, even to swallow.

  “You knew how adamant Donald was about it all,” she continued. “Of course, I wonder now what really motivated him, just as I wondered what truly motivated him to buy you that expensive necklace.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “Sell it, and give the money to some charity, to the homeless.”

  She did look different behind Donald’s desk; she did look stronger, and that took the trembling out of my body.

  “What are you going to do today?” she asked as I started out of the office.

  I thought a moment. “Get off my knees. I’m not making and selling lanyards anymore.”

  I didn’t elaborate to take the look of confusion off her face. That would have to come later, I thought, and went upstairs to get my things together.

  I wrote a note for Jordan, explaining that I wouldn’t be able to have dinner with her. I asked her not to worry about me and pinned the note to the outside of my door, and then I left the house quietly. Alberto had parked my car in the garage the day Donald had picked me up at school. As unobtrusively as I could, I got in, started it up, and drove away. A short time later, I was on the freeway heading north to Kiera’s school.

  There is an old saying Donald actually uses. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

  In the back of my mind, I could hear my mother softly chastising me.

  “Remember the safety valve? Remember being skeptical? Remember me telling you that the world is divided into two kinds of people, the gullible and the deceptive? It’s only good and sensible self-defense to be distrusting and a little deceptive yourself. This isn’t paradise yet. We’re always in one danger or another, no matter where we are. Remember all that?”

  “Yes, Mama, I do,” I said. “I was a fool.”

  After nearly two hours, my cell phone rang. I saw that it was Jordan, but I didn’t answer it. She would only ask me to turn around and come home. I knew she would be angry and disappointed in me, but I was as determined to do what I had to do as she was determined to do what she had to do. I hoped she would understand.

  It started to rain, which made driving more difficult on the freeway. When I was taking driving lessons, my instructor always groaned at the sight of rain and went into a tirade about how people here didn’t know how to drive in the rain. They didn’t slow down, and they could easily lose control because the roads could get as slippery as roads with ice.

  “Stay farther back,” he’d advise.

  The one thing I didn’t want to happen now was a car accident. I heard his warning and dropped my speed. It was dreary and slow for the next two hours, and then the rain stopped and the clouds began breaking up. Weather changes in this part of California could come quickly. When I reached dry road, I sped up. I wanted to get there before it was dark.

  Kiera’s college had a population that wasn’t much larger than the student body at Pacifica. All her life, she had enjoyed special treatment in ideal places. Her college reeked of privilege and wealth. Set off the main road in a beautiful rustic area with Monterey pine trees and perfect manicured grounds of rich green grass and flower beds and fountains, the college had two main buildings for classrooms and administration. To the left and right of them were the dorms. All of them looked like real residences, with pretty shutters, arched windows, and soft, light blue siding. There were walkways and bicycle paths linking every structure. Right now, young men and women were walking and talking, riding their bikes, or just sitting on the benches to get the last warm rays of a retreating sun. I saw the parking spaces for guests and pulled into one.

  When I stepped out, there were two women who looked more like teachers than students walking by. I asked for directions to Kiera’s dorm and headed toward it quickly. When I walked in, there were four girls in the small lobby talking. It looked as if they had all just returned from classes. They still carried books. Everyone turned to look at me.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Kiera March.”

  “Try any rock outside,” a tall, dark-haired girl said. They all laughed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’s usually under a rock,” the girl next to the dark-haired girl said. Everyone smiled.

  “Well, right now, she might be in her room,” I said. “Which way, please?”

  “Just take the stairway on your right,” a girl with pretty light red hair and green eyes said. “Her room is the first on the left upstairs. You can’t miss it. On the door, she has a sign that says ‘Keep Out.’ ”

  “Yeah, like anyone would want to go in,” the tall girl said. They all widened their smiles.

  “Really, do you know if she’s here?”

  “We don’t keep track of her,” the redhaired girl said softly.

  I started to walk toward the stairway and stopped, turning back to them. “Why do you all dislike her so much?” I asked.

  “Are you related?” the tall girl asked.

  “No.”

  “What did she do, try to steal your boyfriend?” she asked.

  I started to shake my head and stopped. “I guess in a way, she did,” I said.

  They all lost their smiles.

  Something else occurred to me. “Did she always have a room upstairs? I mean, did she move recently?”

  “No. It’s one of the few single rooms,” the redhead replied. “There are only four in this dorm, and they’re all upstairs.”

  But she had written that she was on the first floor, I thought, and in one e-mail claimed that was why she was able to sneak Richard Nandi Chenik into her room. I took a step back toward them.

  “I don’t know why she would be stealing other girls’ boyfriends. Doesn’t she have a boyfriend, someone she’s been seeing for quite a while? A boy who goes to school here?”

  No one spoke.

  “A boy from England? Maybe some of you know him. Richard Nandi Chenik?”

  They all looked at one another.

  “This is a pretty small school,” the dark-haired girl said. “There’s no one named Richard Nandi Chenik from England.”

  “Who are you?” the redhaired girl asked me, more interested now.

  They all waited for my answer.

  “Another victim,” I said, and headed for the stairway.

  I paused in front of her door. The sign was there. It was probably her way of convincing herself that she had to fight off friends. Things had obviously turned sour very quickly for Kiera at this school. I was surprised that she continued to attend, although if she hadn’t, she would have risked everyone learning how unpopular she really was. She had been used to being a star at Pacifica and probably came on too strong here, where there were girls who were just as sophisticated and as self-confident, if not more so.

  I knocked on the door. There was no response, so I tried the door handle, and it turned and opened.

  The room was dark because the shades were drawn on the two windows, and the
re were no lights on. I saw her in her bed, lying on her stomach. I waited to see if she had heard me enter, but she was apparently asleep, dressed in jeans and a black sweatshirt. I looked for a light switch and then closed the door softly. She didn’t wake even when I turned on the lights.

  I picked up the chair at her desk and set it down where I could sit and look at her. For a moment, I wondered if she had taken some drugs and maybe overdosed again, but her eyelids fluttered and opened. She stared at me without speaking and slowly pushed herself up, the confusion twisting her face. She sat back against the headboard.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I came to ask you why you did it,” I said. She started to speak, and I quickly added, “Don’t say, ‘Did what?’ ”

  “So my father told you everything, is that it? I can’t believe you drove up.”

  “I wanted to look at you when you answered, Kiera. I wanted to see what was in your face so I would know what was in your heart. Do you have a heart?”

  “Oh, don’t go into any of that,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Analysis.”

  “I won’t. Analysis implies wanting to help you. I don’t want to help you. I was just curious. I remember all those nice things you said after you almost died taking that drug. I remember how you cried and how you apologized and told me about your nightmares. I remember how much you said you missed your little sister and regretted not spending more time with her and being kind to her. I remember your great desire to be my older sister, to be my pal. I remember it all, Kiera, down to every last syllable you spoke and every promise you made.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that. I did try to be a big sister to you, and what did you do? You tried to take my place.”

  “Take your place? Where?”

  “In my house! In my father’s eyes! You were the good one, the perfect new daughter, outstanding in school, playing Alena’s clarinet so well, getting the best grades, charming him into buying you that car and jewelry, and when that wasn’t enough, you tempted him to come to your bedroom.”

  “What? Is that what he said?”

  “He didn’t have to say it. I know.”

  “What did I ever do to make you think such a thing?”

  “It’s all right,” she said, nodding. “I know.”

  “So this was why you called to tell him about Ryder? You were trying to make me look bad again? That didn’t work the first time you tried. Why did you think it would work now?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You planned it all, didn’t you? You talked me into getting Ryder to meet me at the motel, all along plotting to turn us in, right?”

  “I was sick of hearing him tell me how smart you were, how talented, and how beautiful you were becoming,” she admitted. “He never gave me credit for being smart. Yes, he told me I was beautiful, but not like he talked about you. You were exotically beautiful, special, a weed that became a rose. And my mother . . . I told myself that if she bragged one more time about you, I would curse her so badly that she wouldn’t speak to me again. At least, it would stop.”

  “Don’t you realize what you’ve done? What a terrible thing you caused to happen?”

  “It probably would have happened anyway. If anything, you should be thanking me for getting you out of what would have been a big mess later.”

  “You can tell yourself that to make yourself feel better if you like, but you know it’s a lie. Your whole life is built on lies. That’s all you know. You’re pathetic, even more pathetic than I first thought when I saw you after the accident.”

  I stood up.

  “Don’t go off feeling superior,” she said. Her eyes were glassy, teary. “You aren’t any different from me. You’re just better at hiding it.”

  “If that were true, I’d follow Ryder into the bottle right now.”

  “Bottle? What bottle?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You don’t scare me with your weird talk,” she said.

  “I don’t want to scare you. I came up here to bash your head in, but I see now that even that wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Ha. You’ll call me again.”

  “Really? And where would I call, Kiera? Would I have to call England? Is Richard ever coming back, or has he left your imagination for good?”

  Her lips trembled.

  “You couldn’t find anyone to love you in reality, so you made someone up.”

  “Liar!” she screamed.

  “You told your mother all those fantasies and sent me those ridiculous e-mails. Remember? Remember how you snuck him into your room easily because it was on the first floor? Your dorm mates told me you’ve always been up here.”

  “They’re lying. Everyone’s lying because they’re jealous. They’re jealous!”

  She was still screaming when I closed the door behind me.

  I looked at her sign again.

  Keep out.

  Her tragedy was that she never let anyone in—not her mother, not her father, really, and maybe worst of all, not her little sister, who must have tried so hard to open the door.

  Epilogue

  I didn’t see Kiera for the remainder of the school year.

  Not long after I left her dorm, she had what Jordan described to her friends as a nervous breakdown. She didn’t want to get into the technical diagnosis involving an anxiety-depressive disorder. She couldn’t remain at the college. Jordan made Donald handle the situation. He found a good clinic in Oregon, far enough away to help him pretend she was simply at another school.

  I did graduate as the valedictorian. I didn’t expect to see Donald there, but when I got up to speak, I saw him way in the back of the audience, standing as unobtrusively as he could. Since the night he had come into my bedroom drunk, we rarely saw each other, and when we did, his gaze always shifted quickly from mine. He fumbled with an awkward apology that I thought was more a demand of Jordan’s than his own desire. I listened and just said, “Okay.”

  What else was there to say? Anything more would have led to more discussion and maybe his belief that I was forgiving enough for him really to reenter my life. I didn’t want that.

  He didn’t put up any resistance to Jordan’s legally adopting me, not that he could have. She went through the divorce, getting just about everything she wanted in the settlement. She didn’t want to remain at the estate, but she made it seem as if that was her compromise. She found a beautiful home in Beverly Hills. Of course, it was far more modest, but almost anything else in California would be.

  Her graduation gift to me was that she and I would travel to London for sightseeing and then on to Paris and the south of France. I had decided to remain in Los Angeles and chose to attend Occidental. I wanted to remain close to Mama’s grave and visit it from time to time. I also overcame my aversion to the places on the beach where she and I had slept and sold our arts and crafts.

  A few times, I went to the beach where Ryder and I had spent part of an afternoon. I sat about where I thought we had sat and just looked out at the ocean and watched the terns and pelicans. It reminded me of Mrs. Caro’s description of the sweet silence. It took time, of course, time and all the distractions Jordan provided for me, but slowly, hope seeped back into me.

  Maybe in that way, I was doing what I dreamed Ryder predicted.

  Maybe I was going into his precious bottle.

  And maybe, as he said, we were on his ship sailing to a place where no one could harm us again.

  After all, wasn’t that what we all dreamed we would find?

  Pocket Star Books

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  INTO THE DARKNESS

  V.C. Andrews®

  Available in paperback

  March 2012

  from Pocket Star Books

  Turn the page for a preview of

  Into the Darkness. . .

  Prologue

  He was looking at me from between the full ever
green hedges that separated our houses and properties. I don’t know why he thought I wouldn’t see him. Although, it was what Mom called a crown jewels day because there were no clouds and the bright sunshine made everything glimmer and glisten, even dull rocks and old cars with faded paint, scratches, nicks, and dents. The sun was behind me so I wasn’t blinded by its brilliance. In fact, it was like a spotlight reflecting off his twenty-four-karat-gold hair.

  Even from where I was standing on our front porch, I could see he had blue-sapphire eyes. He had a very fair complexion, close to South Sea pearl, in fact, so that his face seemed to have a hazy, soft glow, which contrasted dramatically with the rich, deep green leaves of the hedges.

  My first thought was that there must be something mentally wrong with him. Who else would stand there gaping at someone unashamedly? When someone stares at you and doesn’t care that you see him doing so, you’re certainly ill at ease, even fearful. You might be angry, but nowadays, especially, you don’t go picking fights with strangers. He wasn’t a complete stranger, of course. I knew he was our new neighbor.

  I had no idea whether he had been spying on me from the very first day that his family had moved into their house, but this was the first time I had caught him doing so. Because the hedges were easily five and a half feet high and he was crouching a little, I estimated that he was at least five feet ten inches tall. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a long-sleeve khaki shirt with epaulets, the sort of shirt you might find in a store selling military uniforms.

  For a few moments, I pretended not to have noticed him. I looked away and then sat on the wide blue moonstone porch railing and leaned back against the post as if I were posing for a sexy dramatic shot in a film. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath like when the doctor tells you to breathe in and hold it while he moves his stethoscope over your back. My breasts lifted against my thin, light jade-green sweater and I held the air in my lungs for nearly thirty seconds. Then, as if some film director were telling me to look more relaxed and more seductive for the shot, I released my breath and brought my right hand up to fluff my thick black-opal shoulder-length hair.