The Follower by Kate Doughty (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

Bella is cut off by the sound of Mrs. Cole’s voice calling for the triplets. Rudy doesn’t take his eyes off her. “Can we—”

“Here,” Bella says, handing him her phone. “There’s a bonfire happening this weekend—you guys should definitely come. We’ll fill you in then.” Bella swaps numbers with Rudy and Cecily. Amber’s debating asking Jada for her number when Cecily, Bella, and Miles break to take a quick selfie. She tries to work up the courage, but before she can make a move toward Jada, her parents are there, greeting the other kids and steering them toward checkout. Of course.

Mom hadn’t been able to get any kind of discount on the wood. Amber watches Mr. O’Donnell as he rings them up, wondering what he really thinks about the renovation, what he’s not saying. If he knows anything about this Evan kid.

As her family continues their afternoon errands, Amber realizes that Mr. O’Donnell isn’t the only townie to be . . . frosty toward them. Their day around town results in a strange flip-flop between fans who gush over them and ask for selfies, and townies who either approach them with guarded, cautious greetings or practically ice them out of conversations. There is a pretty strict age divide between the former and the latter. Word had clearly gotten around by the time they stop for coffee later that afternoon. The barista takes one look at their fancy shoes, expensive jeans, and stylish haircuts before he forms his face into a stoic wall and asks them if they are new in town.

Which, of course, they are.

No matter where the go, it’s always the same. The ask. And then, when Mr. Cole reveals that they are fixing up the Tremont house, the feigned surprise. About half the town is aware of them—or what a social media influencer even is—and the other half is oblivious. Teenage cashiers stare at designer goods with thinly veiled jealousy; the man at the post office goes on a tirade about how wealthy New Yorkers keep ruining small towns by buying vacation homes in “scenic upstate,” inflating property values. Opening them up to the kind of people who would want a renovated McMansion. People like you, he implies.

But no matter their reaction to the Coles, no one offers any information about the deaths. Not that Amber or any of the Coles ask, of course. But that doesn’t stop Amber from listening more closely to her parents’ conversations with other adults than she normally would, or from feeling uneasy. Just new-house jitters, Amber tells herself. These people are just small-towners suspicious of the social media folk, not vindictive townies actively harboring a secret. But as the Range Rover nears the Tremont house, she finds that harder and harder to believe. After all, they’d already uncovered one more secret about the “death house”: that Alex Grable wasn’t the only one. There had been another. A boy. And Amber has a strange gut feeling that he isn’t the only thing the Tremont house is hiding.

They round the corner and the house comes into view.

Cecily screams.

Mr. Cole slams on the breaks. Amber feels her mouth drop open.

A side of the turret is streaked with blood. No—not blood. Paint; it is paint. It has to be. A deep red trickles down the side of the window and over the porch awning before dripping onto the driveway right in front of the Range Rover. And in the middle of the dark circle of red is—something. A bent, broken shape. Rudy’s already out of the car, and Amber leaps up to follow him. She sprints toward the turret, years and years of interval running finally paying off. Above her, it looks as if the house is bleeding, as if Alex Grable has committed suicide and bled all the way down.

For a terrible second, Amber catches sight of the twisted shape underneath the turret and thinks that it is going to be a body.

But as Amber nears, rationality catches up with her panic. It’s not blood; it’s paint. A dark red paint that could only have been thrown from the turret window. Which means that someone had been inside their house.

She stops, barely winded, next to an exhausted Rudy. Up close, she finally recognizes the twisted, broken lump that lies in the center of the pool of red paint.

There, drenched in what looks like blood, is the wrecked remains of her computer.

CHAPTER 8

Rudy

Cecily had screamed. And Rudy? He’d plotted. The Moment he saw Amber’s computer in the middle of a faux blood stain, his mind started going a mile a minute. And it kept going, even while his mother had called the police. Even after the Coles had gone to bed. Of course, Rudy had spent half the night thinking about the Tremont house and the other half on their account, answering DMs. A lot of them were about the house, and more are about Alex Grable—the account, not the person. A lot of people had noticed the messages, and Rudy wasn’t sure how to respond.

Mrs. Cole had called immediately to report the break-in—it had to be a break-in; there was no way that blood paint came from anywhere but the turret—and, after confirming that they were safe and that there was no one in the house, gave a full report to the police. By the time she’d finished giving the report, it was already late in the evening, so Mrs. Cole had agreed to wait until the next morning for a full inspection from the officers. Of course she would, Rudy thought. His mom never wanted to make a scene.

At least, not to the public. At home, Rudy knows all too well how dramatic she can be. The previous evening had been one long cry of How is she going to edit? from his mom, who had insisted that the situation be remedied as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Amber’s computer had more high-end graphics processing than all of the