Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (8 page)

This time, I screamed. But it didn’t stop him, didn’t stop anything. The killer was focused, and I knew the arsonist was dead. I backed away, away from the trees, away from the splintering wood of the house burning down to ash.

And then I was in Kate’s soft bed again.

Alone.

CHAPTER 17

I was drenched in cold sweat and started shaking uncontrollably. I knew I had to get into a hot shower and forced myself up. It was after four now and Kate still wasn’t home. The feeling of the vision lingered, the arsonist and his pride, the killer and his darkness.

And Kate. Kate had been there. I pulled out my cell phone and got her voice mail. I could only hope that she was okay.

I stood under the hot water for a long time warming up, trying to wash it all off. At least I didn’t have a headache. When I came out of the bathroom, Kate was there by the door.

“Abby, are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, wrapping my hair in a towel and pulling my robe tighter. I sat down on my bed and she sat next to me. “I had another vision. What’s happening to me?”

I started crying. For years I never cried, and now I always seemed to cry. This wasn’t who I was.

“It’s okay, Abby, it’s okay. I’m here now,” she said, wrapping a fleece blanket around my shoulders.

She smelled like the strong smoke of the fire.

“You got my message, right? I called earlier but you didn’t pick up.”

“No, what message? Where have you been?”

“I was on a story,” she said, looking serious. “But tell me about your vision. Everything.”

“There was a terrible fire.”

“Oh, my God!” she said. “You mean you saw the fire? There was a big house fire on the south side of town tonight. That’s where I was. I was covering that story. Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw
you
. At the fire. I was right in front of you, yelling. But you didn’t see me.”

She stared at me with large eyes.

“What? You saw me in your vision?”

I nodded. I knew it sounded insane.

“This is unbelievable,” she said. “What else?”

I told her everything else. The arsonist. The killer lurking in the woods. The murder.

“And you’re saying that the killer murdered the man who started the fire? They didn’t report a body. I just came from the scene. There were no injuries or fatalities.”

“He’s in the woods somewhere. I followed them. He killed him and then I started screaming and woke up.”

Kate checked her phone.

“What was Dr. Mortimer doing with you?” I asked.

I had to ask. Kate looked shocked, then embarrassed.

“Oh, he came along when I got the call. He thought he could help if there were any victims,” she said.

Her cheeks went a shade darker. She sat by my computer and leaned back in the chair, thinking and trying to figure it out. I could tell she didn’t want to discuss Dr. Mortimer, which didn’t surprise me. I had caught her and she wasn’t expecting that. She wasn’t ready to tell me anything.

“So you saw both of us in your vision?” she said. “That’s amazing. These visions of yours seem to be getting more and more detailed.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, sighing.

I waited another minute, but she didn’t say anything as she looked at her messages.

“Kate, it’s not like I’m not happy you’re together,” I said.

She kept fiddling with her phone, ignoring me, or maybe just thinking. She looked like she was about to call someone.

“Matt dropped by earlier,” I said.

“Matt was here? Shoot,” she said. “He called about a dozen times tonight. I don’t know what I was thinking, I should have just called him back. Sorry, Abby, that must have been uncomfortable. Look, nothing has happened with Dr. Mortimer. We were just talking, that’s all. I’m not going to tell Matt that because he’ll jump to conclusions about things that aren’t there yet.”

I nodded.

“But I do think I have some feelings for him,” she whispered. “Maybe. He’s really great. Isn’t that what you have always told me? But I am still very attached to Matt. Nothing is changing for the time being. I’m just trying to figure it all out first.”

I had never heard her use the word
attached
before when talking about Matt. That word didn’t bode well for him winning out. But I wasn’t going to say anything. And I was happy that Kate was falling for Dr. Mortimer. I just wanted Matt to know. I didn’t like lying to him and that’s what it had felt like.

I told her about his new painting and she seemed to wince when I mentioned that he had stopped by
The Bugler
with his homemade muffin looking for her.

“Maybe I should just talk to him, he must sense it’s coming to an end,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt him. God, I hate breakups.”

She threw herself on the bed.

“But back to your vision. So do you have any idea where the body is? I’m going to call a guy I know on the force. He’s on duty tonight. I don’t think he’ll mind taking another look around the crime scene.”

“The body’s not far, I could still see the flames,” I said. “Unless he moved him. And Kate, I’m sure that he was the man who set the fire. When you pulled up, he was alive and standing in the crowd and I stood right next to him.”

She nodded.

“Well, that will be fairly easy to prove. He probably has evidence on his hands and clothes. They’ll be able to determine if he did it,” she said.

“Good,” I said.

“Man, he sure did quite the job on the house,” Kate said. “It’s completely destroyed. But it was vacant. Right now, the police think that a group was squatting inside at night and someone accidentally set the house on fire with one of those small camping stoves. With the real estate market the way it is and houses sitting empty, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. But they’ll be able to tell if it’s arson.”

It would be pretty easy to break into the empty houses that were for sale around town and sleep in them at night. I wondered if that’s what Matt was doing.

“Where did Dr. Mortimer go, by the way?” I asked, remembering that he had disappeared in my vision.

“We said goodbye right after we got there. I had interviews to do and since there weren’t any victims in the house, he got a ride back home from the paramedics.”

Kate cleared her throat.

“You never see him? His face, I mean. The killer?”

“No,” I said.

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I couldn’t tell if I was cold or scared, but that familiar fear was churning around inside me like a washing machine. I was suddenly exhausted. It was late and these visions took it out of me, like I used to feel the night after a real tough soccer game. Maybe Jesse and Kate were right. Maybe I shouldn’t be so caught up in any of this. Maybe I really needed to focus on myself.

“You okay, Abby?” Kate said, her gray eyes big.

“It’s a terrible thing to watch people die,” I said, releasing more tears. “Please, Kate, help me stop it.”

“I will,” she said. “Promise.”

CHAPTER 18

As I walked to class, I wondered why I had never seen his face.

As Kate had pointed out, the visions had become sharper and in this last one I saw so many details. I had seen Kate and Dr. Mortimer, the smug arsonist soon-to-be murder victim, the raging fire. But I never saw the killer’s face. Was it because I was too scared to look, or was it something else?

Amanda and her friends were standing next to their lockers, backs glued to metal as they eyed the kids walking by. They got all quiet as I passed, but I heard their hissing whispers soon after. My stomach dropped as I felt those sharp comments sting like darts on my back.

Amanda seemed to hate me more and more as the year moved along and I still had no idea why. From what I was able to piece together through pictures and old soccer videos, at one time we were really good friends. In fact, it looked like we were best friends. But since the accident, she hated me. She never came to the hospital and had stopped by the house just one time to see me with the coach and team. She called a few times, but it was forced. I could tell even back then.

The only logical reason I could think of was that it must have had something to do with me not being able to play anymore, that I had let the team down. I had not only ruined my own chances for a soccer scholarship, but ruined her shot as well. It made no sense though. I wasn’t up for dealing with it, but I knew that I’d have to confront her eventually.

In history, Mr. Collins gave me back my test, a C+, and that was okay lately. I’d take it. Actually, it was an improvement.

“Better! Keep it going!” was written at the top and circled.

I sighed. I was pretty sure that was the kind of note teachers wrote to the idiots in class.

I made it through the day. None of it was too exciting. But I was pleased with myself that I was able to do it, sit and pay attention, take tests, get Cs. That would be enough to pass, to graduate in June and get my diploma. It was afterwards that made my blood run cold. I had no idea what I was going to do.

Jesse was absent again. Dude was flipping out, I concluded as I dropped off my English paper. It made me kind of mad, actually. Here he was, super jock, grades that put the honor students to shame. He had everything and his future was golden, laid out perfectly. But he didn’t seem to care about any of that anymore.

Jesse didn’t like to talk about serious things and I knew that me nearly dying last year had hurt him. Maybe he felt like he couldn’t leave me next year, that I would fall to pieces if he went off to school, that my recovery would take a nose dive.

And maybe he was right.

But just as I was heading out the double doors and had written him off, there he was, walking to the gym with the team. He ran up to me, smiling, dribbling his basketball on the floor.

“Hey, Craigers,” he said. “Think fast!”

I caught the ball and passed it back to him.

“She shoots, she scores! Ahhh, the crowd goes wild!” he said, running around me and jumping up. “Hey, could you give me a ride after practice today?”

My heart was doing that strange fluttering thing it did now whenever I saw Jesse, especially if I hadn’t seen him in a while.

“Sure, I’ll swing back after Dr. Krowe,” I said. “I’m happy to see you. I bet the coach is too.”

He gave me a thumbs up and ran off to catch up with the other guys heading into the gym.

As I drove, I thought about Dr. Krowe. I thought about talking to him. Really talking. Maybe it was the anniversary that was coming up. Or maybe I was just tired of keeping everything bottled up inside. It seemed like the more I made it through the school year, the more lost I was becoming.

I sat in the leather chair across from him and inhaled slowly.

“It’ll be one year soon,” I said.

He put his pen on the pad and held his chin in his hand.

“How are you feeling about that?”

I stared at him for a minute. Then I looked away at a framed photo of his kids. I wondered if he missed them. He had told me when we started that he was a divorced dad and that they lived back East somewhere.

“Fine, I guess,” I said.

I was nervous, worried that once I began, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And I didn’t want to get all flustered and start talking about the visions. I was going to listen to Jesse’s advice on that.

“Frustrated, actually,” I said, crossing my legs and sitting up in the chair. “It’ll be a year and nothing’s changed. I’m not really moving forward. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going and I’m sick of everybody thinking I’m such a freak.”

Fat raindrops splattered against the window. I stared at them for a moment, trying to hide my wet eyes.

“Good,” he finally said.

“Good?” I asked, sarcastically.

“Good, because that’s the first real thing you’ve said since we started.”

I nodded slowly.

“Pick one thing. One thing you really want to discuss and we’ll go from there.”

I picked Amanda. I was honest about everything, about how she was always blowing me off and seemed angry with me and I had no idea why. And how it was really bugging me, but I was too afraid to talk to her.

“It seems to be getting worse,” I said.

“Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe she lost out because the team is no good anymore. Maybe she was riding on your coattails a little bit and now she has to do it on her own. Do you know if she has any colleges lined up for next year?”

Then I remembered. Something. It came from nowhere, just slithered back into my mind like it had always been there the entire time.

And it was big.

Before the accident, Amanda and Jesse had been dating.

“Oh, my God, it’s about Jesse,” I said. “It’s not about soccer. It’s about Jesse!”

“What about Jesse?” he asked, scribbling.

“Amanda was totally in love with him. I remember. I remember!”

It happened. The first lost memory had found its way back. A memory had returned. And then a few more filled my mind as I closed my eyes.

They came back in waves, more and more as I talked with Dr. Krowe about Amanda. We were in a car, her car, and she was driving. We were headed to the mall when she started talking about Jesse and then nervously asked if it would be okay to go out with him. I remembered laughing.

“Of course, Jesse and I are just friends.” I told her that even though there was a small tug at my heart. I had just started dating Conner. “You guys should go out, really.”

I remembered feeling happy that my two best friends would be together, that Jesse found someone he was interested in. Then I remembered seeing them together, in the hallway, and holding hands during football games.

Of course she hated me!

I told Dr. Krowe everything, even if it was painful realizing what I had been doing, I felt thrilled. Thrilled to have those memories back.

“Excellent,” he said as he wrote in his notepad. “This is a tremendous breakthrough. And it’s just the beginning. You’ve taken the hardest step here today, Abby. This has been a very good session.”