Read Infamous: (A Bad Boy Romantic Suspense) for Free Online

mindless activity, one she did almost every place she ate at. After her food arrived (the burger was serviceable, the fries were criminally good) she started to write down random observations in her little notebook. The sound of laughter with an edge, like it wasn’t genuine. The smell of spilled beer and various aftershaves and perfumes. The way the cold night air would burst in whenever the door opened, cooling the overly heated interior for just a moment.
    Snippets of conversation floated around her.
    “…and then she caught him with the assistant! Some twenty-year-old, you know, same old story. I don’t know why she doesn’t just divorce him, take half and the kids, and get the hell out of here…”
    “…sales have been slow but they’ll pick up with the festival. Mavis made some of those little felt figures of the Rider again and people just love to get ’em for their kids…”
    “…he was a shit, you know he was. Maybe it was an accident, maybe not. I’m not sorry he’s dead and neither are you.”
    “God, I’m so sick of pumpkin everything! Every year it’s like this and now you got pumpkin coffee and tea and I don’t know what else. Who the hell wants pumpkin coffee?”
    “…so I says to her, I says, you can’t just wipe it down with some water, you gotta really scrub…”
    “…I know! There she was, underwear around her ankles, white dress hitched up, and Carl between her legs, just going at it on her wedding day!”
    “Did you hear that they didn’t have heads? Accident, my fanny. It was that fucking ghost rider thing.”
    “Now, you know there’s no such thing…”
    “Says you. I know better. I seen it. Lots of others have too. You’ll see. There’ll be more. There always are.”
    Taylor strained to hear more of that last one, but the speakers had walked away. Obviously not everyone in Sweethollow thought the recent deaths were what the papers and cops were insisting they were. Like they always insisted they were. She hoped some folks like that would be willing to talk to her eventually. Locals could be kind of difficult with outsiders in places like Sweethollow. She wondered how they’d see her, now that she’d gone all “citified.” She’d have to be careful, that was for sure. Because she wasn’t sure she could get very far if people decided to clam up.
    Of course, there was the library, the old stories, and the history of other deaths. But that was just a fun bit of old, picturesque, small-town weird history without the current deaths. Without the gruesome and unexplained details.
    Did Taylor really believe in a ghostly rider doling out death in the darkest night? Not really. What she did believe in were serial killers and copycats. Which could explain why there’d been so many similar deaths over the years. That’s what she was hoping to crack open and expose like a hidden boil. It was about time someone got to the bottom of it.
    She remembered the deaths from ten years before. That time it had been a bunch of fellow students, and the town had been devastated. Two girls, both popular, one a cheerleader, the other a gymnast. One boy, a sort of midlevel nerd who’d been well liked. The girls had been found in the woods, not far from the Windy Bridge. Well, parts of them had. The boy had been found at the side of the main road, victim of an apparent hit-and-run. Taylor hadn’t known any of them personally, but none of them had been bad kids. The girls’ deaths had been declared the result of a mutual suicide pact, which Taylor had never thought made any sense. She had a hard time understanding what the boy had been doing out there at night. Someone had said he’d been drinking, or whoever had hit him was.
    Going back, deaths like these had happened before…although usually to people who had some kind of “bad” history. Abusers. People suspected of killing others in town. Criminals of other sorts. And they were almost always men. Hell, even a Quinn, Anton’s