I’ve been reading too much J D Robb. No other crime writer is half as enjoyable. So I’m writing my own trashy crime novel.
Prologue
The girl wasn’t sure what were louder, the thumps of her feet hitting the sodden ground, the beats of her heart close to bursting or the desperate sobs of her breath as she ran. There was a flash of pain in her foot as she trod on something sharp and when her next step failed her momentum flung her off balance and down into the wet bushes. She didn’t even have the breath to shriek as she went down. She put her hand to her fgoot and felt a cool wetness. Whether it was blood or water from the rain that had cleared earlier she didn’t know, but it hurt like hell.
It was hard to limp quickly, but she kept moving. The blood wasn’t so loud in her ears now and on the wind she could hear snatches of laughter and shouts. She couldn’t hear footsteps. Carly had run after her when she bolted, calling out with drunken amusement.
“It’s a game, Sonja, he didn’t mean it. Come back.”
Carly stopped at the tree line, turned back to the group with her hands in the air. Sonja knew the two men who has also followed her wouldn’t give up so easily.
She limped through the woods. The forestry department burnt the undergrowth away before each summer season, so she picked her way easily through knee high scrub and tried ignore the throbbing in her foot, punctuated by sharp jabs of pain. She had to keep going. No undergrowth meant there was nowhere to hide. She’d been hunting with her father once at this time of year, climbed into his truck yawning and arrived in the forest before the dawn. As the sun had spilled through the trees, her father had gestured at a group of deer, clearly visible even at a distance. All he’d had to do was raise the gun slowly to aim and – crack – the doe was down. He’d butchered it there and wiped his hands on the damp bracken. Sonja had felt sick then, staring at the bright blood against the green. Now she wondered if her own blood was falling, red and shining in the ferns.
She had noticed that all the sounds had stopped and had slowed her pace when a thin scream floated through the trees and made her jerk to a stop. The noise went on and on and Sonja could not tell if it was one person screaming for a very long time, or many screams that mingled together and got so jumbled over the distance that she could not tell one from another.
“Carly!” she choked out the name and her aching foot took an involuntary step back in the direction she’d come from. The scream, or screams, stopped with a chilling finality. Without realizing what she was doing, Sonja took off running again. In blind panic she barely missed trees and boulders as she ran away from the clearing with the manor house, away from the fire, away from her screaming friends and from the man she’d seen coming down the stair case. The man who’d been bloodied to the elbows, his hands caked in dark red with a dull splatter across his crisp white shirt.
“Sauce,” he’d said, when he’d seen her looking with her voice trapped in his throat.
“Just sauce.” And he’d licked his finger.
Sonja had run. She’d pulled at Carly’s arm and when her friend wouldn’t step away, she’d told her someone had grabbed her because she didn’t like how closely the man’s friends were listening in. She’d jabbed a finger at her crotch, letting Carly draw her own conclusions from the obscene gesture and Carly had laughed and pulled the sleeve of her sweater from Sonja’s grasp.
“It’s a frat party, Sonj, that’s what is meant to happen.”
And then the man had come outside wearing a clean shirt and with clean hands, but with a smudge of red at the corner of his mouth and Sonja had left her friend and ran.
It had been blood. Sonja’s family hunted – her father, her brothers, she’d even held the old gun herself. She’d rubbed her fingers along the dark wood and the well polished metal, felt the coolness of it against her cheek as she sighted and stiffened her arm against the retort when she’d fired. She’d missed that time, scattered the group of rabbits and been laughed at by her father. But she’d gotten better and once had shot a deer in the throat, stood over it as the blood pumped quick and hot out of the wound and onto the forest floor. She knew blood. She knew the thickness of it, the coppery smell. It had been blood all right and the man had lapped at it with his tongue while she’d watched.
In the darkness, in her desperate rush, Sonja was lucky she heard the river before she plunged over the edge of the cliff in the dark. She tried to peer over the edge from a step or two away, trying to judge the distance to the water below. It could have been a few feet or a ten-story drop from all she could tell. It was pitch black; The rain had only let up as her and Carly had arrived at the party and the clouds still had enough in them to block the stars. Sonja tried to think – what river was it? Did it feed into the lake? Should she follow it up, or down? She looked down again. It was too dark to see the water, but she could hear it, violent and swollen from the rain and crashing in it’s banks. She didn’t even know which way the water was flowing.
Standing still and indecisive at the edge, Sonja didn’t hear the man step out from behind the tree, but she knew he was there. She could smell the blood on him, fresh blood that hadn’t been washed away. It seemed she could feel the heat of him, the danger. He stepped towards her, one foot slow and then the other and cleared his throat.
Sonja didn’t wait for him to speak. Didn’t wait for those bloodstained hands to reach for her. She simply breathed in deep and launched herself as far out into space as her body would carry her, before she fell down and down and down and was swept away by the dark torrent.
The man didn’t look over the edge after her. He took a small flashlight from his jacket pocket, flicked it on and, whistling, strode back to rejoin the fun.