“Well you did save my life, after all. How did you find me?”

“It was Skip, really. He found me on the beach—he was running around looking for you and told me he’d turned the jeep over, and he was afraid you were wandering around out there with a concussion or something—that he’d seen you through the fog, but you ran from him, and went for the lighthouse…”

Kelsey shut her eyes against the sudden images and turned her head away.

“Your knee’s busted pretty bad—and your forehead—but I think you’ll make it. Here. It’s probably cold by now, but I got you some tea.”

“You’re pretty good at this.” Their eyes met…held…she knew that hers had filled with tears again. “Why…didn’t he kill Beth?”

Neale looked down, not speaking for a long time. Finally he said, “I guess only Justin knows the answer to that. We never will.”

An overwhelming emptiness filled her. She stared at his bowed head. “What will happen now?”

His voice was tired but matter-of-fact. “With Skip’s pull around here, and his own story about what happened, I don’t think there’ll be much trouble getting this thing settled.”

She nodded, finding it hard to speak. “And what will you tell your dad?”

He hesitated, scanning her face with his eyes. “That it’s over,” he said quietly. “That it’s all finally over.”

She felt the tears racing down her cheeks, felt his strong, gentle fingers as she groped across the covers for his hand. “Second chance,” she whispered.

And he smiled at her.

“Second chance,” he said.

And raised her hand to his lips…

And kissed it.

A Biography of Richie Tankersley Cusick

Born on April Fool’s Day 1952, Richie Tankersley Cusick was destined at a young age to write scary books. In a career spanning three decades, she has paved the way for young-adult horror writing, a genre she continues to publish in today.

Although born in New Orleans—home to some of the country’s most ancient ghosts—Cusick spent her early years in a small bayou town called Barataria, which once provided a safe haven for the fearsome pirate Jean Lafitte. A true Southern writer, she took early inspiration from the landscape of crumbling mansions, Spanish moss, and aboveground cemeteries, and began writing stories at a young age. For years a ghost lurked in her family’s house, making particular trouble around the holidays, when he would strip the Christmas tree of its ornaments and hurl them to the floor.

After graduating from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Cusick took a job at Hallmark and moved to Kansas City, where she once again shared her home with a mischievous spirit. It was then that she started work on her first novel, Evil on the Bayou (1984), based on her childhood memories of life in the eerie Louisiana swamps. Its success allowed her to leave Hallmark and begin writing fulltime.

When Cusick’s novel-writing career began, horror fiction for teens was a new genre. Along with authors like Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine, Cusick pioneered the form, finding success writing chilling stories with only a dash of the gore that defines adult thrillers.