Page 58 of Half the Summer's Night
I remember now.
The two tourists snicker and smirk and move onto the next hole. I stare after them, my blood pulsing.NowI can hear them,the twin rush of the breaths. It sounds like waves crashing on the sand.
“Rowan?”
Abi’s voice drags me out of it. I whirl around, and she studies me, frowning a little.
“Did you find the ball?” she asks.
I force myself to focus on her. The pretty light in her eyes—she’s not wearing her glasses today, so it’s brighter than usual. The soft, wind-blown muss of her hair.
“Yeah,” I say, swooping down into the palms. Fortunately, I find the ball easily. A white spot in the middle of the dirt. When I hand it over to Abi, she smiles at me, and I can feel myself calming.
A little.
We work through the rest of the course, and I feel like I’m being pulled in half. Rowan is doing his best to be charming, to say stupid shit that makes Abi laugh, because it’s addictive, how sweet and musical her laugh is. And the real me never makes her laugh, so I want to relish the novelty of this as much as I possibly can.
But the real me is also very cognizant of why I’m here. I watch the two tourists like a predator, tracking them through the whimsical sculptures that guard each of the holes. They’re two stations behind us, a constant, nattering presence. At one point, as I’m attempting to finagle a ball around a glittering waterfall, they shift downwind of me, and I catch their scent: Beer. Aftershave. A salty, peculiar fragrance that I’ve always thought of as the blood inside a body, even though I know that’s ridiculous. But everyone’s is unique, and now I have theirs.
Worse, they keep talking about Abi. That’s something else I sense radiating off them: lust, hot and sour at the same time. But they keep laughing. Laughing at her? At us?
I tamp down on my rage. Focus on Abi. She’s trying to knock her ball past an animatronic butterfly, its wings flapping in a slow, steady rhythm, and I like how she looks standing next to it, like she might ride it away from here.
Away from me.
I shove the thought aside. She doesn’t know who Rowan Hanover really is. She doesn’t fear him.
She didn’t suck his dick in the graveyard outside her house.
Abi swats the ball, and it vanishes past the butterfly’s wing just in time.
“Got it!” she cries, turning toward me with a big, bright grin on her face. “Well, got it through, anyway.”
“I bet I can get it in a hole-in-one,” I tell her, because I’ve noticed that when I tease her like that, she wrinkles up her forehead and sticks her tongue out at me, and it makes me feel normal, a little.
I try to turn my attention away from my potential victims, at least while we’re here. I’ll need to track them after we’re done, but for now, I try to enjoy my time with Abi. As we play, she talks to me in a way she never does to my true self. She asks me about the Blood Raiser posters in my office, and we go off on a long, spiraling tangent about horror movies, which she knows a shocking amount about. She tells me about her two best friends, Penelope and Chloe, how they met in college and how she misses them. She does not talk about the murder of Olivia Pearce or the fact that they haven’t caught her killer yet.
She thinks I’m normal, after all.
Eventually, we come to the eighteenth hole. It’s a big, animatronic pirate ship, the cartoon version of which is slapped all over Neptune Adventure’s many billboards around town.
“Good lord,” Abi says. “Finally seeing it in person is something, huh?”
“It looks exactly like it does on that one billboard on the highway,” I say. “The huge one? I see it every time I drive out to Walmart.”
Abi laughs, and like the dozens of other times she’s laughed this afternoon, it makes my blood spark like lightning. “Tell me about it,” she says. “God, that billboard is ugly.”
She moves closer to the pirate ship, scoping it out. I’ve already gotten a sense of how it works, though, because I’ve been eyeing it as we played the other rounds. It has the moving parts I was looking for: cannons that slide in and out of their cubbies, an animatronic crew that makes the ropes move through pulleys so the sails rise and fall. You have to shoot the golf ball off a big curving ocean wave that keeps sliding back and forth, so it flies into the ship’s deck, where you then have to send it through a maze of moving crew members and other pirate-themed obstacles.
The movement, that’s what caught my eye, though. All those little metal pieces that could pinch and trap and shred.
Male voices rise behind us. My victims. I glance back at them over my shoulder, just in time to see one nudge the other and point.
At Abi. She’s climbing up onto the pirate ship, and the wind has blown her skirt up, revealing a flash of her pale underwear underneath.
The two tourists snicker. And then one of them—the taller and more muscular one, the one with his hair shorn close to his scalp—lets out a loud, piercing whistle.
Abi freezes halfway up the ladder. And I feel the way her emotions shift. She was happy to be here with Rowan?—
