Killing Britney Page 17

  “Where are you from?” he said, leaning back on his bed. He was shirtless and tan. “Ithaca’s a pretty small town. I figure I would have seen you around before.”

  She was sitting on top of his blond wood desk, and she leaned in toward him. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

  When he nodded, she went on. “You’re never going to believe this, but I’m running for my life.”

  Given all she’d accomplished so far, she felt like she could do anything now.

  She told him the whole story.

  “I know this girl named Britney who killed her mother a few years ago—don’t get me wrong, her mother was crazy. She’d been tormenting her for her entire life. And one day she just couldn’t take it anymore. Their family went on a rafting trip, and she and her boyfriend Karl drowned her.”

  “Jesus!” Nick said.

  “Everyone thought it was an accident, and that would have been the end of it, but when Karl went to jail on a drug charge, she started dating this jock guy named Ricky.

  “If only Ricky had loved her less. If only he hadn’t tried so hard to find the answers to her mother’s death. He should have left things as they were. He should have believed her when she said she didn’t want to know. Then everything would have been fine. But he had to go snooping. He had to follow his suspicions—even though they were leading him toward discovering the horrible secret she’d hidden from him.

  “She had to do something before she got caught. Karl was still in love with her, and once he got out of jail, she convinced him to kill Ricky.”

  Britney felt like she was falling into a trance, as though the events she was relating had happened to someone else, not her.

  She reached over and took Nick’s hand, gazed at his delicate knuckles for a moment before kissing the base of his thumb and letting his hand go again.

  “After that, things started to unravel. Karl became insanely jealous. She told him it was over between them, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. She had to kill him. And then she was off, killing any and everyone who came anywhere near discovering the truth about what she’d been doing.

  “Since I knew the whole truth about her, she especially wanted to get to me. I barely escaped. We were on a lake, frozen over for the winter, but the weather had turned and the ice was thin. I fell in—or more likely, she pushed me in; we were tussling and it was hard to tell which.

  “I had to swim for my life, blindly, following my instincts, heading off randomly, hoping against hope that I would find an opening before I ran out of air. It was terrifying. I still can’t believe I made it. I took off running and I haven’t stopped since.”

  She gauged Nick’s response. He was speechless. His eyes were popping out of his head.

  “I’m really lucky to have gotten away,” she said.

  “That’s just …” he said. “That’s out of control!”

  “That’s the thing about this girl, though,” said Britney. “She was completely controlled. She almost never made a mistake. I can only think of one.” She remembered Adam and twisted the ring on her finger.

  “What was it?”

  Her eyes darted around the room like she was looking for someone in the shadows.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “She might find out.”

  The muscles in his neck and shoulders tensed briefly. He was starting to get spooked.

  “How would she know?”

  “Oh, she’d know. She has a way of finding these things out.”

  He jumped from the bed and threw a T-shirt on. “Let’s go,” he said. “We should tell the police about this.”

  Britney shouted, “No!” Then turning sweet again, she said, “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I don’t know why you haven’t gone to them already…. I mean, if this girl’s still at large—”

  The color drained from his face as the truth sank in.

  She cocked her head and smiled an ambiguous smile. Her hand trailed up toward an area just above her heart and she ran her finger over the spot where she used to toy with the hockey pin on Ricky’s letter jacket. She wondered if Nick could guess what she was planning to do next.

  Table of Contents

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