Skeleton Key

PROLOGUE





1


Kayla Anson didn’t know when she first realized she was being followed, but by the time she reached the Litchfield Road, the signs were unmistakable. It was seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, October 27, and the roads were awful. Three days of drizzle had been followed by three nights of below-freezing temperatures. There was patch ice everywhere, black and slick. The sky was cloudless and infinite. The moon was full. Lined up on the side of the road here and there, now that she was beyond the last little clump of houses, were harbingers of Halloween in the country: clothes stuffed with straw to look like corpses, skeletons made of plastic, jack-o’-lanterns with no candles in them, so that their faces looked like visions, etched in black. It all made her wish she had never come out tonight, on her own, even though she knew there couldn’t be any-thing really wrong. Kayla Anson was nineteen and she got followed a lot. People recognized her car. People recognized her, too, from the picture that had appeared in Town and Country and been reprinted in the Waterbury Republican. Next week there would be a picture in the Torrington Register-Citizen and it would start all over again. “Debutante of the Year,” the captions always read, and “the beautiful legacy of a graceful tradition.” It made Kayla want to scream. She wouldn’t have been a debutante at all if she had been able to go away to college this year. She would have been safely settled at Stanford if it hadn’t been for Annabel. And Annabel—

Kayla slowed a little to get a look at whoever it was who was coming up behind her. For a moment there, she had started to be afraid. Once she saw the vehicle, she relaxed. It was one of those farm things with the big wheels. Kayla had never known the name of them. This one was relatively fast, although most of them were much slower than ordinary cars. Some of them crawled along the blacktop at only a couple of miles an hour, so that traffic got backed up behind them so far it took half an hour to straighten it out after they pulled over to the side of the road. There were dairy farms all over this tiny northwest corner of the state, although a lot of them were moving out You saw stories about it every other day in the local papers. The weather was bad and the soil was rotten and the taxes were much too high. People got tired of holding on.

This particular farm vehicle was very, very fast. It had come up behind her now and was staying a single car length behind. Kayla squinted into the rearview mirror and tried to get a look at the driver. All she saw were very bright headlights and the dark shape of something vaguely human. The headlights were so bright, she had to switch the mirror into night position just to go on driving. The vehicle had that grumbly roar of something with a muffler that wasn’t working properly. Kayla wished she knew what to call it. It was so much easier not to be afraid of things when they had names.

The problem with all the publicity she’d been getting about being a debutante was that it was also publicity about other things, and the other things could be dangerous. Kayla Anson, only surviving child of multibillionaire venture capitalist Robert Mark Anson and his only heir. Kayla Anson, poor little rich girl, rich girl with everything, rich girl without direction, rich, rich, rich. Once, when Kayla was seven and her father was still alive, she had been almost kidnapped on the sidewalk in front of the Brearley School in Manhattan. She had just come out of the building with her books in a book bag when the long black car pulled up to the curb. She had just turned down the street in the direction of the bus stop when the man got out and came running through the crowd of children toward her. She hadn’t been afraid then, either. She hadn’t even been aware of what was happening. Her best friend at the time, Linda Markman, had pulled her out of the way. The man who was chasing her had gone careening out of control and fallen on his side. After that, everyone seemed to be jumping on him. Kayla had felt only this: that the whole thing was stupid, and that it should be happening to anyone on earth except her.

The farm vehicle was now only half a car length behind her. Kayla could finally see some things for sure. It wasn’t an ordinary farm vehicle, in spite of the big wheels, because it was made by Jeep. It seemed to be a bright metallic blue. Kayla punched the buttons on her car radio and got Big D 103 FM out of Hartford. The Rolling Stones were singing “Under My Thumb,” but that was beginning to fade. What was coming up next was the Beach Boys doing “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Right up ahead of her on her left was the Victory Independent Baptist Church. The sign out front said: HELL IS TRUTH, SEEN TOO LATE.

“Crap,” Kayla said out loud. She pressed her foot down on the gas and felt the car underneath her speed up. It was a good car, and it could be fast: a BMW two-door with a German engine, imported, literally. Her lawyers had had it shipped over from Frankfurt in May. She streaked on up the hill in the direction of Litchfield and thought about her mother, who had been so very opposed to the whole idea of Kayla’s buying a car.