Psycho Killer Read Free

wasn’t as wide as she remembered, and the tulips in the median were long gone. A bored doorman glared accusingly at her as she turned the corner, the green awning above him casting a gloomy shadow across her path. Soon the iron gates of Nate Archibald’s stately limestone townhouse loomed before her.Serena tightened the belt of the translucent brown plaid plastic Burberry trench coat she’d purchased from Bluefly.com in case things got messy—the only item of clothing she’d ever bought online, off-season, and at a discount—took a deep breath, and rang the bell.
    No answer. She rang it again and waited. Again, no answer. It was after five o’clock. Hopefully Lourdes and Angel—the couple who served as the Archibalds’ housekeepers, cooks, gardeners, handymen, manicurists, hairdressers, masseurs, chimneysweeps, exterminators, launderers, tailors, EMTs, and answering service—-had gone home.
    Serena donned her taupe cashmere-lined goatskin Sermoneta gloves and dug the key out of her eelskin Dolce & Gabbana Harpoon microhobo—the key Nate had given her the summer before last, when everything had gone so very wrong, or so very right, depending on whose side you were on. The gate creaked open and a black squirrel streaked out of the green hedgerow bordering the walk. Oh, the irony! She just happened to have enough squirrel poison in her bag to kill an entire army of black squirrels.
Are the black ones the juveniles?
she wondered aimlessly, as if trying to distract herself from the true nature of her break-in.
    Which is? We’re all
dying
to know.
    The black and white tiles of the foyer gleamed with clean familiarity. Growing up, Serena had spent almost as much time at Nate’s house as she had in her own home. Serena and Blair and Nate—always an inseparable, precocious trio. In first grade they’d doused each other with the garden hose out back. In third grade they’d practiced kissing, determined to get it right before they were all cursed with braces or retainers. In fifthgrade they’d stolen half the bottles in the liquor cabinet and mixed cocktails from a recipe book Blair had shoplifted from the Corner Bookstore.
    Pushing her sunglasses up onto the crown of her head, Serena mounted the elegant red-carpeted staircase and trotted up to the second floor. She paused in the doorway of the master bedroom, so gilded and nautical with its Louis XVI décor, porthole-shaped skylight over the bed, and red, blue, and gold Persian carpet that had been rescued from the
Titanic
. Looking up, the sky was a torpid turquoise sea. October was weird like that.
    Serena continued down the hall and up a narrower staircase to Nate’s private floor. There were his boxers on the bathroom tile where he’d left them. There was the rumpled plaid quilt lying askew on his bed. There were his model sailboats and the picture of him and Serena and Blair on the beach behind Blair’s house up in Newport. Nate’s eyes glittered greener than the ocean behind them. Blair was laughing. Serena studied her own face. She’d had freckles then, and an easy smile. Could she still smile like that?
    With a gloved hand she grasped the sleeve of the heather gray Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt Nate had worn to play lacrosse that morning and held it to her nose, breathing in the heady soap and sweat scent of him. Nate, her Nate. Blair’s Nate.
    Again she stared at the photograph. Her carefree twelve-year-old arms were wound around Nate and Blair’s shoulders as they laughed. Tiny, happy dimples creased her freckled cheeks. She blinked, and then, just like that, Nate was gone. She’d vanished him from the picture. All she saw was herself and Blair, the two girls. Nate was just a tiny speck, drifting and dissolving as he floated out to sea.
    Still wearing her gloves, Serena dropped her bag on the desk and removed the giant syringe she’d procured from the groundsman’s shed up at Hanover. Two skulls with Xs through them and the word POISON were