Most Likely to Die Read online

  SOMEONE’S WATCHING

  Kristen switched on the ignition and the radio came on…but she hadn’t been listening to it on the way over to the school. She glanced down at the illuminated dash and realized it wasn’t the radio at all, but a cassette, stuffed into its slot in the dash.

  A shudder slid down her spine and she glanced through the fogging windshield where the wipers were already moving, scraping a pink piece of paper back and forth.

  Glancing around, she opened the window and snagged the soggy piece of paper from the glass. The letters on the pink page were faded, the paper nearly torn to shreds, but she recognized it for what it was…the photograph of her and Jake taken at the Valentine’s dance two decades earlier. A picture she’d hidden far away in a school scrapbook that she hadn’t looked at in years. Her stomach knotted as she stared at their faces, smiling, carefree, innocently unaware of what the horrid night would bring. Worse yet, scrawled across their smiles was a jagged red slash, the color of blood.

  Kristen nearly screamed.

  But she didn’t have to.

  Because as the music on the tape faded and the sounds of the dance so long ago disappeared into the night, there was a second of silence, a click, and then the tape issued a scream of pure, unadulterated terror…

  Books by Lisa Jackson

  Stand-Alones

  SEE HOW SHE DIES

  FINAL SCREAM

  RUNNING SCARED

  WHISPERS

  TWICE KISSED

  UNSPOKEN

  DEEP FREEZE

  FATAL BURN

  MOST LIKELY TO DIE

  WICKED GAME

  WICKED LIES

  SOMETHING WICKED

  WICKED WAYS

  SINISTER

  WITHOUT MERCY

  YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

  CLOSE TO HOME

  AFTER SHE’S GONE

  REVENGE

  Anthony Paterno/Cahill

  Family Novels

  IF SHE ONLY KNEW

  ALMOST DEAD

  Rick Bentz/Reuben Montoya

  Novels

  HOT BLOODED

  COLD BLOODED

  SHIVER

  ABSOLUTE FEAR

  LOST SOULS

  MALICE

  DEVIOUS

  NEVER DIE ALONE

  Pierce Reed/Nikki Gillette

  Novels

  THE NIGHT BEFORE

  THE MORNING AFTER

  TELL ME

  Selena Alvarez/Regan Pescoli

  Novels

  LEFT TO DIE

  CHOSEN TO DIE

  BORN TO DIE

  AFRAID TO DIE

  READY TO DIE

  DESERVES TO DIE

  Books by Beverly Barton

  AFTER DARK

  EVERY MOVE SHE MAKES

  WHAT SHE DOESN’T KNOW

  THE FIFTH VICTIM

  THE LAST TO DIE

  AS GOOD AS DEAD

  KILLING HER SOFTLY

  CLOSE ENOUGH TO KILL

  THE DYING GAME

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  LISA JACKSON

  MOST LIKELY TO DIE

  WENDY CORSI STAUB

  BEVERLY BARTON

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Contents

  Part One

  KRISTEN by Lisa Jackson

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two

  LINDSAY by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Three

  RACHEL by Beverly Barton

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Part One

  KRISTEN

  by

  Lisa Jackson

  Prologue

  St. Valentine’s Day Dance 1986

  St. Elizabeth’s High School

  Portland, Oregon

  What the hell does she want from me?

  Jake Marcott hated to think what her plans might be. Standing in the near-freezing night air, he braced himself for whatever demands she was certain to make.

  Bitch!

  He didn’t know whether he loved her or hated her.

  Probably both.

  He lit a cigarette with shaky fingers, a residual effect from the car accident that had left his best friend dead and nearly taken his own life.

  Ian.

  God, he missed that crazy son of a bitch. Things would have turned out so differently if Ian hadn’t been thrown through the windshield. If his goddamned neck hadn’t been broken. Shit! The crash and spray of glass, the screech of tires, the groan of metal twisting and splitting still echoed through Jake’s brain. Ian’s face, freckled from too much sun, floated into Jake’s mind for just a second before Jake pushed it quickly away. Too many times he’d wondered what would have happened if the tables had been turned, if Ian were still alive and he had been the one to die.

  It messed him up to think about it.

  Everything seemed washed out and pale now…the joy bled from it.

  He drew hard on his cigarette and thought about the tranquilizers in his pocket: the prescription that Doc Flanders just kept refilling, barely asking any questions, somehow knowing how deep Jake’s pain was, that the little white tablets were a nearly useless balm for the ache splitting his soul.

  Get over it, Marcott, he told himself and was pissed that he was here in his damned tuxedo, missing the dance and waiting for her. When would he ever learn?

  Clearing his throat, he looked around at this, the eeriest part of St. Elizabeth’s campus.

  Why this lame, clandestine meeting?

  Because she’s a psycho. You know it. You’ve always known it.

  Jake took a drag from his cigarette and let smoke stream from his nostrils in the cold night air. He shoved a hand through his hair and glared up at the night-dark heavens. A few stars were visible, not that he cared. He was sick of dealing with the fallout from the accident, his woman problems, and the whole damned world. Eighteen fucking years old and he sometimes felt that his life was a waste.

  So where was she?

  He glanced around and wondered if she’d show.

  Tired of waiting, he tossed what was left of his Marlboro into the darkness, watching the red ember arc, then sizzle and die on the frosty grass. He glanced up at the full moon hanging low in the sky and heard the thrum of a bass guitar throb through the hills. Edgy, his nerves strung tight as the piano wires inside his grandmother’s old upright, he paced back and forth in front of the oak tree just as he’d been told. Hidden deep in the maze of hedges, the leafless oak seemed to shiver in the wind, brittle branches reaching upward like skeletal arms scraping the sky.

  From deep in the maze he was invisible to anyone. Even a crafty old nun peering out of her third-story window in the hundred-year-old brick building guarding the acres of this campus couldn’t see him here.

  The place gave him a b
ad case of the creeps. Throughout the rounded corners and dead ends of the lush labyrinth, benches, fountains, and statues had been placed. Beneath the oak a sculpture of the Madonna stared down beneficently. Arms upraised, she stood silent, white as bleached bones, and surrounded by topiary cut into the shapes of dark creatures that, tonight, seemed sculpted by the devil.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s just plants, Marcott. Nothin’ more.

  Angrier by the minute, he glanced at the digital readout of his watch.

  She was late. Nearly ten minutes late. So he’d give her another five and then he was gone…a ghost.

  Besides, he had more important things to do than to waste time on her.

  Snap!

  He whipped around, toward the sound of a twig breaking.

  He saw no one.

  “Hey, I’m here,” he said in his normal voice.

  Nothing…no response, just the faraway thrum of music and laughter and the soft whisper of the wind.

  A stealthy footstep.

  The hairs on his nape lifted.

  Surely it was she.

  Right?

  “’Bout time you showed up,” he said to the inky darkness, his heart pounding a little.

  “I was about to give up on you.”

  Again, she didn’t say a word.

  Christ, what was the problem with her?

  Always playing these damn head games.

  At that thought, he smiled…maybe that’s what she wanted. For him to chase her down. Find her in this maze of clipped shrubbery.

  He heard the sound of a footstep again. Closer now. And something else…breathing.

  Oh, she was close…

  “I know you’re there,” he whispered.

  He couldn’t help the smile that threatened his lips.

  Still, she didn’t respond.

  All the better.

  “Have it your way,” he said. “I’ll find you.”

  His eyes narrowed in the night and he noticed a dark shape move a bit…away from the twisted shadows of the topiary only to fade away again.

  So this is what she wanted.

  A thrill of anticipation sang through his brain. His blood heated.

  Jake Marcott could never back away from a challenge.

  Where the hell is Jake?

  He’d been gone for over ten minutes, and Kristen had the first worrisome sensation that she’d been ditched. At the high-school dance. By her new boyfriend. On the two-month anniversary of when they’d started dating. It was like the lyrics of some bad 1950s song.

  Don’t panic, he said he’d be right back. Just find him, she told herself.

  Jake was easy to spot. At six-four, he stood half a head taller than most of the boys and a foot above a lot of the girls, so why couldn’t she spot him? “Where are you, Jake?” she muttered to herself. Tall and lean, with wide shoulders, thick brown hair, and an almost shy smile that had caused many a girl’s heart to beat triple time, Jake Marcott was definitely a hunk.

  Kristen scanned the packed gym, her gaze skating over the knots of students clustered in the corners and crannies of the old gym. A few couples were dancing beneath a canopy of twinkling lights strung from the ancient rafters. Music thrummed, drowning out most conversation, and a fog machine, supplied by the DJ, gave the old building a creepy, intimate ambience. It was late, nearly eleven, and most of the guys had ditched their ties and jackets, but the girls were still dressed in gowns of silk, satin, lace, and chiffon, some sophisticated and sleek, some outrageously frilly, but all far more interesting than the stupid uniforms they wore daily to this, the last all-girls Catholic school in Portland.

  Next year St. Lizzy’s, the final bastion of separation and education by sex, would, like its brother and sister schools, fall to the sword of coed classes, a nonuniform dress code, and more lay teachers than nuns. Kristen’s senior class was, thankfully, the last of its traditional, and in Kristen’s estimation, archaic kind. There was even talk of updating the social curriculum enough that the St. Valentine’s Day dance wouldn’t be held in the creaky old gym where it had been for nearly seventy years, but could conceivably be hosted someplace way cooler, like the Portland Art Museum or on one of the old stern-wheelers that churned their way up and down the Willamette River, or one of the turn-of-the-century hotel ballrooms around Portland—anywhere but in this dingy, old gymnasium.

  “Hey! Kris!” a female voice yelled over the din, just as a song ended.

  Kristen turned to spy Mandy Kim, her jet-black hair coiled high onto her head, hurrying through the throng. Petite and athletic, she was weaving her way toward her through the knots of couples. Inwardly Kristen groaned. Mandy was one of those friends who were quick to point out any flaw in others. An A student who was captain of the soccer team, president of the Honor Society, and had already been accepted by Stanford, Mandy could be a real pain. Tonight she was dressed in a sleek black gown that exposed enough of her back to give Sister Mary Michael conniptions. “Where’s Jake?”

  If only I knew. “Outside, I think,” she said, noticing that Mandy’s date, a tall, handsome Asian kid with a stare so unblinking Kristen was certain he was wearing contacts, stood right behind Mandy, looking over her head, one hand cupped over her shoulder as if he were navigating her.

  “Oh.” Mandy turned her head to look up at her date. “You know Boyd.”

  “Yeah. Hi.”

  Boyd mumbled a greeting, but his attention seemed keyed on the spot where the tips of his fingers scraped the smooth skin of Mandy’s nape. His last name was Song and he was forever getting teased about his name…Boyd Song, or Bird Song, Birdie, and finally Big Bird.

  “Maybe Jake’s with Nick or Dean,” Mandy went on, mentioning Jake’s two best friends who also attended Western Catholic, an all-boys school and the counterpart to St. Elizabeth’s. “You know, I saw them all talking a while ago, near the back doors.” She leaned closer, as if to whisper the darkest of secrets. “Hey, did you see who Bella brought?” Mandy’s dark eyes deepened. “Wyatt Goddard! Remember? He’s been kicked out of about a million schools, including St. Ignatius and Western. Goes to Washington now and Boyd says he’s been suspended twice this year. Twice.” She said it in disbelief, and yet there was the tiniest trace of admiration in her voice for something that frightened but fascinated her. Boyd nodded. “I’m surprised he was allowed into the dance,” Mandy went on conspiratorially. “What’s Bella thinking?”

  Who cares? Kristen thought, but kept her opinion to herself, her eyes searching the crowd for any sign of Jake while Mandy rambled on and on about the couples on the dance floor.

  Kristen just needed to find Jake.

  Boyd kept rubbing Mandy’s shoulder, gently kneading her skin. Obviously he was hoping to turn her on as, no doubt, he was getting off on the simple touch. Mandy didn’t act as if she noticed. “So Jake just took off? I wonder if he was looking for Lindsay…I saw them talking a while ago, out in the hallway,” she said, motioning to the gym’s wide double doors that were surrounded by red and white helium-filled balloons and had been forced open.

  “I think he wanted to smoke. Outside.”

  Mandy’s eyebrows lifted and there was a bit of a gleam to her gaze, the barest of a disbelieving smile touching her glossed lips. “Sure.”

  Boyd kept on rubbing, his eyes even more glazed. Geez, he was really into it. Kristen didn’t dare let her eyes drop for fear she might see evidence of his enjoyment pressing hard against his rented tuxedo pants.

  The disc jockey spun “What’s Love Got to Do With It” by Tina Turner, and Mandy, grabbing Boyd’s hand and breaking his trance, headed for the dance floor.

  Kristen was gratefully alone again.

  And still no sign of Jake.

  Well, crap. Jake had been gone the better part of half an hour and Kristen wasn’t the type of girl to stand in a corner and wait. She tried to fight the paranoia that he’d taken off on her, that he’d either hooked up with his ex-girlfriend Lindsay or that he’d ditched her for
a chance to get high with his friends.

  No way.

  Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, she eased her way through the tangle of students, recognizing familiar faces, seeing a few new ones but unable in the semidark room to discern who went to St. Elizabeth’s, Western Catholic, or Washington. Nor did she care.

  She walked past a chaperone in a pink suit and stepped into the cold night through an exterior door.

  Lindsay Farrell, her dark hair twisted atop her head, her face seeming wan in the bluish illumination from a security lamp mounted high overhead, nearly ran into Kristen. “Oh, sorry,” she whispered and then, recognizing her friend, stopped short. Lindsay’s ice blue dress was sleeveless, her arms bare, and she crossed them over her chest, warding off the chill of winter. “It’s freezing out here,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Let’s go inside.”

  “I’m looking for Jake.”

  “Oh.” Lindsay’s mouth puckered into a little frown and the air was suddenly charged with unspoken recriminations. Kristen suspected that Lindsay still loved Jake; the reason for their breakup was still a deep secret.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Me? No. I mean, not for a while…” Lindsay’s voice trailed off and she edged toward the open doors.

  “Earlier?”

  “Yeah, with you.”

  “Where’s Dean?” Kristen asked, the bad feeling that had started in her gut growing deeper.

  “Dean and Nick went to check out Chad Belmont’s new car.” Lindsay shivered and cast a glance up at the moon, which was shining like an icy disc in the sky. “Kind of a weird night, huh?”

  Really weird, Kristen thought. No one in her small circle of friends seemed to be with her date. Isn’t that what the Valentine’s Day dance was all about? Being together? Being in love? Or was she kidding herself? Was she just a stupid, hopeless romantic? Why would one night be any different than any other?