The Darkness Gathers by Lisa Unger Page A

betrayed mother; the sad, beautiful wife. But there was a flicker of something real under the facade. Lydia had caught a glimpse of it, but she couldn’t tell what it was. It annoyed her that Jenna hadn’t given herself away.
    People subconsciously telegraphed the truth in their speech and in their gestures. Lydia had learned long ago that the furtive gesture, the thing left unsaid, the shifting glance spoke volumes. It was her gift to intuit the truth even when it was hidden, even when it escaped the notice of others. She’d had this ability all her life but had really only acknowledged it after the murder of her mother.
    Two days before Marion Strong was killed, Lydia saw her murderer in a supermarket parking lot. Lydia was waiting for her mother in the car while Marion ran into the A&P to get a quart of milk. Sitting in her mother’s old Buick, the fifteen-year-old Lydia punched the hard plastic keys on the AM/FM radio, checking each preset station for acceptable listening. Suddenly, she felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She felt heat start at the base of her skull and move at a quickfire pace down her spine. A hollow of fear opened in her belly. She turned around and looked out the rear windshield.
    The car’s side windows were open and the already cool fall air seemed to chill and the darkening of the sky quickened. The man stood with his legs a little more than shoulder width apart, one hand in the pocket of his denim jacket, the other resting on the side-view mirror of his red-and-white car, which reminded Lydia of the car in Starsky and Hutch . His flaming red hair was curly and disheveled, blowing into his eyes. She remembered that he did not move to keep it off his face. He just stared and rocked lightly back onto his heels and then forward onto the balls of his feet. Seeing him standing beside his car, his gaze locked on her, made her senses tingle. She detected malice in his unyielding stare, perversion in the way he began to caress the side-view mirror when their eyes met. She reached over to lock the doors and roll up the windows without taking her eyes off of him.
    When her mother returned to the car, Lydia pointed the man out to her. He just stood there smiling. Marion tried to tell her it was nothing. But Lydia could see her mother was afraid by the hurried way she threw the milk into the backseat and the way she fumbled to put the key in the ignition. They drove off, and the man pulled out after them. But when Marion made a quick turn, he did not pursue them. They laughed; the threat, real or imagined, was gone. But Lydia would look back at that moment as the point at which she could have saved her mother’s life. She had written down the license plate number with blue eyeliner on the back of a note a friend had passed to her in class. That information had led to the apprehension of Jed McIntyre, serial murderer of thirteen single mothers in the area around Nyack, New York. But only after he had killed Marion Strong, leaving her where Lydia would find her beaten and violated as she returned home from school.
    She knew now, of course, that even if they had reported the incident in the parking lot to the police, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. But when she got that feeling, the feeling she and Jeffrey had come to know as “the buzz,” she had never been able to walk away from it again, wondering always who else would die if she did.
    She looked at Jeffrey, Detective Ignacio droning on in the periphery of her consciousness. Jeffrey had finished his meal and had started working on hers. She heard her blood rushing in her ears and she pushed down a feeling of anxiety that welled inside her. She hadn’t felt like this in so long, not since Santa Fe, when she started to believe there was a serial killer at the beginning of a rampage. It was more complicated now, though. When the buzz had hit her before, she jumped into action. It gave her purpose. Every time, she was infused with