Chapter One

One August

 

As the night wind blew, the three lithe young female forms tripped along the grassy meadow behind the ancient house. In a sudden panic, thinking they'd seen lights go on inside, they darted behind a shed some fifty feet away, collapsing in a heap on the fragrant earth, laughing, exhausted and relieved that they could no longer be seen from the windows by Graham Reynolds. He'd been known to shoot trespassers, or anything else that moved in the dark. And though these three wild ones had been warned, the hint of danger only aroused their youthful sense of adventure.

A dare was why they'd taken the chance against Graham's rifle this night. Alex Lonnigan had sworn the three didn't have the guts to pick a handful of blush roses from beside the back porch, where, as the gentle caretaker of his garden, Graham tended the prize winning bushes with meticulous attention. Hallie McCarty was not about to let such a dare go untried, especially from the arch enemy of her youth, Alex Lonnigan. The two had been tormenting each other ever since Alex first tied Hallie's pigtails into knots while she was sleeping in kindergarten. As the years went by, it had become more of a contest between the two seeing who could out manipulate, out deceive or out-smart the other in sometimes very nasty practical jokes. At first, it had been very personal, like the time Alex stole Hallie's underclothes from her gym class and had them strung up on the flag pole, or when Hallie meanly massacred Alex's stilted prose while she was grading papers as her English teacher's assistant. Toward the end of their public school days however, the pranks became less personal, more of a testament to the power the two had persuading their friends to perpetrate daring acts of mildly malicious vandalism.

Three weeks before Hallie found herself trespassing on Graham Reynolds's property, Alex and Jed Pease had swiped Darrel Jone's old VW bug, painted it orange and pushed it into the town square at midnight-that prank the best one that Finnegan Acres had seen in ten years, certainly topping anything Hallie had contrived. (She wished she'd thought of it herself.) Picking Graham Reynolds's roses didn't seem like an equal challenge, but it was one that would earn the respect of everyone sixteen to twenty-one for miles around, considering the sometimes violent nature of the victim.

This challenge match between Alex and Hallie should have proved childish by the time the two were sixteen, but in an out-of-the-way town like Finnegan Acres, tucked in an out-of-the-way part of a lazy Midwestern state, there was too little to keep the youth busy on hot and lonesome summer nights.

"You got that cigarette you promised?" Sara Braithwaite asked Hallie.

"Yeah, somewhere," she answered, fishing through the pockets of her jean shorts. Pulling out a pack of Virginia Slims-they were much more womanly than the Marlboros they'd smoked the week before-she handed Sara the pack and her lighter.

"You know we don't have time for this," Deanna Cameron exclaimed. "We've got to get those roses and get out of here. That old guy's probably looking out the window right now. What if he sees the smoke?"

"He can't see the smoke in the dark, dummy," Hallie told the nervous fourteen year old. "Just relax." Lighting her own cigarette, the more mature looking Hallie leaned back against the rickety boards of the shed, closed her eyes and took a long drag. "You know, we've got to find some way out of this berg," she mused. "Sometimes there's so little going on here I could scream, or at the very least run naked through the town square."

"Hallie," Deanna droned as she blushed embarrassed to hear her friend talk that way.

"Grow up, Deanna, or we won't invite you again," Hallie sassed.

"At least you get to graduate the end of the year," Sara said.

"Yeah, but it's gonna be one loooong year," Hallie returned, sounding bored. Hallie's mop of straw colored curls framed a pretty face. The McCarty's always grew beautiful women, and Hallie was no exception with her well-carved features. Though she had a prominent nose, it was not too large, and of course her eyes with their dark brows and soft brown glow were the kind that half the high school boys dreamed about in bed at night-that and her swaying breasts and well-rounded butt. Sara, much less pretty than Hallie, was more exotic with her darker complexion and simple face, though that didn't take away from the fact that in her plainness there was a causal beauty. Her smooth dark tresses, even in the dim starlight, gleamed. Deanna, on the other hand, was all blonde-her hair not from a bottle, like Hallie's. She'd be spectacular when she dropped the awkward little girl look and wore contacts instead of her coke bottle glasses. Though the trio had little physical resemblance, all three were lithe and stunning females. And most importantly, all three could be hell-on-wheels when they were in the right frame of mind. It was a sultry night and their parents didn't have a clue where they were. And challenged by their equally as bored and frustrated male counter parts, it would promise to be a night to remember.

Inexperienced with smoking, Deanna struggled to light her cigarette, fiddling with the lighter that didn't seem to work, especially when she faced into the wind. Her thumb trying to work the device kept pressing on the wheel. Two, three, a half dozen times, she was annoyed enough to clamp down too hard on the lighter, and suddenly the flame leapt high in front of her eyes.

"Oh, my god!" she gasped, as she jumped to her feet. The lighter dropped to the brittle grass at her feet. Flames jumped higher as the fire caught the breeze and the dry grasses ignited in seconds. The two girls on the ground hopped up, first to get away from the fire, and then to try stamping out the conflagration. But the fire was dancing on the brisk wind with flames shooting every which way, shingles on the rickety shed quickly catching fire. Seeing the blaze igniting all around them, rising high into the night air, they shrieked, all three racing toward the woods.

Into the night, the sound of a rifle shot exploded through the sound of the wind. The trio raced faster still, as behind them the old shed crackled and sizzled, flames leaping upon flames. There was nothing that could save the ramshackle building, and within five minutes Graham Reynolds shed was burnt to the ground.

When Deanna and Sara reached the property fence, they leapt over it in seconds and turned around looking for Hallie, expecting to find her at their heels. She was not in sight.

"Good god, where is she?" Sara wondered. They could see nothing of what was happening in the fire-illuminated dark near the house. At least two-hundred feet away, their vision was blocked by smoke and fear. All they could remember was the sound of the rifle shot. Had she been hit? Looking at each other with blank faces, they were in tears.

"Wait! Look!" Sara said, pointing back to the house. As the smoke lifted for a moment, they thought they could see the form of their friend, mounting the back stairs of the house, on the arm of Graham Reynolds. She'd been caught.