Guilty by Lee Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page A

She clasped her pink bathrobe tight around her neck against the cold night air and looked down at the hand-made clay cat dish, decorated with Garfield cartoons and glazed yellow. "She hasn't even touched her Tender Vittles. Rusty, have you seen the cat?"
    "No," Rusty replied from inside the cabin, "and if I do I'm gonna clean the toilet bowl with it. Why don't you come back in here and watch Johnny Carson with me?"
    She let the screen door slam behind her and stared into the wall of trees where the light cast from the porch melted into darkness. Crickets hummed and a gentle breeze wafted across the lake and ruffled through the tall trees.
    "I'm going to go look for the cat."
    "Lore-ahhhh," he drawled, "you don't want to be out there looking for the cat."
    "Yes, I do." She stomped off the porch into the trees, her yellow thongs slapping against her heels with every step.
    "For Christ's sake, Laura, have you forgotten about the escaped convict?" Rusty wailed. "Laura, did you hear me? Laura?"
    She didn't hear him. She had already stormed angrily into the thicket, just glad she was going to be away from Rusty's Schlitz-y breath and clammy hands when Loni Anderson came on the Carson show. Loni and her trampy hair and cow teats always made him horny.
    But her irritation soon cooled in the night air and she ran out of steam, stopping dead in her tracks. She stood still. The night closed in around her. She became aware of the crushing silence and the impenetrable darkness and realized she care didn't if Cuddles ate his Vittles or not.
    She heard a crunch, the sound of leaves being crushed underfoot. Her head jerked instinctively towards the sound. It was behind her.
    "Cuddles?" she ventured. Another crunch, then another. Something was moving towards her. She stayed planted to the ground, as immobile as the trees around her. "Cuddles?"
    Suddenly there was a loud shriek. She stumbled backwards, startled, as a half dozen loons burst out of the brush screaming, wings fluttering, and flew off in every direction. She clutched her robe at the chest and felt her heart thumping excitedly. Loons. She sighed gratefully. Just some loony loons.
    She was still looking at the trees where the birds took flight when she saw a familiar flash of blue terry cloth.
    "Rusty, what the hell were—," she began, but then stopped. Her husband emerged from the trees, moving slowly towards her, his arms flush against his sides, his eyes staring past her, his jaw hanging open.
    Then he stopped, just a few feet away from her, his lower lip twitching.
    "Rusty, what's the matter with you?" she said, planting her hands firmly on her sides. "Why are you acting like a zombie or something?"
    A sound, the beginnings of a word, growled in his throat, and then he tipped forward onto the ground. And she saw the ax buried deep in his back.
    Laura's terrified scream melded with the killer's banshee cry of manic glee as he came running out of the trees like a pole vaulter, holding a pitchfork. Cuddles the cat was speared on the end.
    She back-stepped into a run, clamoring wildly into the trees, yelling for help.
    "Cuddles wants to seeee you," he cried after her, his pea coat flaring out like wings as he ran.
    Laura scrambled through the brush, jerking her head around to see him gaining on her, his face alight with a wild, toothy grin. She screamed, stumbled, and went flailing into a tangle of bushes.
    He loomed over her and held the pitchfork poised over her head. The cat's blood streaked down the three muddy prongs and dripped onto her pale, anxious face.
    "Here," he hissed, "give Cuddles a kissy-poo."
    The man wrinkled his face with disgust and brought all his weight down against the pitchfork . . . and a dozen fifth-grade girls squealed with gleeful terror and cowered in their sleeping bags, the glow from the TV set the only light in the Hendersons' dark living room.
    "Their parents are going to kill me," Nina Henderson groaned in the kitchen, plucking the ten candles from