Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (13 page)

“It’s like taunting,” I muttered.

“That’s exactly what it is.”

On the screen, the delineation of black against white blurred. I’d seen Jessica’s shoes. In my dream. They’d been cast off in the corner of the room.
“Oh, God.”
I barely recognized the sound that scraped from my throat. “Jessica’s flip-flops…”

The cops had not found them at the house on Prytania.

Chase moved fast, twisting from the computer back to me.

“Stop,” he said, and his voice was so low and soft I would have sworn he touched me. But one hand remained on the side of the table, while the other curved around the back of my chair. “You have to stop torturing yourself. Her parents haven’t received anything—and they’re not going to.”

“But she didn’t call you back, either,” I said. “Victoria told me.”

He edged closer, going down on one knee and bringing his face level with mine. “Is that why you’re in here? Alone?”

I closed my eyes and pulled in a breath, came close to drowning on the musky smell of leather and some spice that was all Chase.

“Trinity.”

The quiet command feathered through me, and once again I let myself see.

“It’s okay,” he said.

I watched his mouth form the words, slowly lifting my eyes to his, stunned by how badly I wanted him to touch me. Just touch me. “What’s okay?”

“To let me see. Let me know.” And then he did it, slid a hand from the sterile table to the side of my face, his fingers soft, but warm and strong and … there.
“Yesterday.”

I absorbed his touch, the warmth streaming through me. “Chase,” I said, and again, my voice was quiet. But in the tomb-like expanse of the library, I would have sworn his name echoed.

Or maybe that was my heart.

“I don’t know how to do this.” The uncensored honesty surprised me. Emotion knotted my throat. “I don’t know how to walk through every day like everything is normal—”

“Not normal.” His thumb slipped to the side of my mouth. “But that doesn’t mean you have to walk alone.”

The words, so thick and quiet and devastating, scraped through me. I looked away from him, back toward the computer—

“But that’s all you know, isn’t it?”

I stilled.

“Living with your grandmother, in the mountains, so far from your home. The life you could have had.” Gently he turned my face back to his—I hadn’t even realized his hand was still against my cheek. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. You’re here now.”

The backs of my eyelids stung.

“You’re not alone anymore,” he whispered, and when he said it like that, with his eyes on mine and his thumb skimming my cheekbone, it was so very, very tempting to believe.

His hand shifted, his index finger sliding beneath my eyes. “You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”

I tried for a smile. I don’t think it worked. “Not much.”

“Neither did I.” Something in his eyes softened, blue turning translucent. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

My throat worked. My eyes stung a little more. I glanced down, to the silver chain he almost always wore, the blackened cross against the patch of wiry hair, the fleur-de-lis and dog tag on either side. All I had to do was lift my hand—

“I almost texted, but didn’t want to wake you if you were sleeping.”

I slid my hands to the skirt of my uniform, pressed my fingers against my thigh. “Why?” I asked before I could stop myself. “What were you thinking about?”

His eyes met mine. “Your dreams.”

Two simple words, but they knocked the breath right out of me.

“Did you have another one?”

I glanced out the window, to the crowded courtyard. Soon the bell would ring.

Not soon enough.

“Nothing special,” I said, choosing my words carefully. Just of a field. It was dusk. Clouds darkened the sky, shadows turning the overgrown grass from green to black.

Upon waking, I’d stabbed out the first five of LaSalle’s numbers before stopping myself.

“What if I can make one come true?”

The bell rang. At least I thought it did because outside everyone started to move. But I didn’t hear it, heard nothing but Chase’s question—and the distorted haze of possibility.

“One of your dreams,” he said when I looked away from the window. “What if I make it real?”

My eyes met his. My heart almost sliced free of my chest—my dreams were so not greeting-card material. “That’s not a good idea.”

For a frozen second he looked at me, and for the first time I realized the shadow about him had lifted.

“I don’t know where Jessie is,” he finally said. “And I can’t make her come back. I can’t … fix her. But I can do this.” Never looking away from me, he pulled something from his pocket. “I found them.”

The room tilted. It was fast and sudden, a fleeting moment of vertigo over as soon as it began. I’ll never know why. But I think maybe, in that one fragile heartbeat before I asked the question, I sensed everything was about to change. “Found who?”

His hand touched mine, and I looked down to find a small square of paper pressed between his fingers and my palm, an address neatly printed in black.

Then I looked up.

“Your parents,” he said. “I found your parents.”

*   *   *

The house blew me away.

Tall and boxy and peach, with full-length windows, dark shutters, and tons of wrought iron, the late-nineteenth-century Italianate sat back from the street, shrouded by huge trees and overgrown shrubs, barely visible to the casual passerby. An iron fence cordoned off the yard from the sidewalk. A padlock glistened against the frail gate. A winding walkway led to the tall porch.

Through the branches of the countless live oaks, wind whispered, and Spanish moss swayed.

“This was Gran’s house?” I asked, putting my hands to the iron, so warm from the afternoon sun.

Chase moved past me, toward the
PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign attached to the gate. “Been in her family since 1897.”

It was hard to accept. In the mountains we’d lived in a one-story, four-room log cabin. There’d been the kitchen, the TV room, a bedroom for each of us. Here, in this moody old house where my grandmother had been born, and in turn had given birth to her children, there had to be no fewer than twenty rooms.

Darkness gaped from the windows, but I would have sworn curtains shimmied beyond the grimy glass. “She never said a word,” I whispered. Neither had Aunt Sara. I’d been here for a couple of months, but never once had my aunt volunteered that our family had an ancestral home not ten minutes away.

“You’re sure she didn’t sell it?” I asked.

Chase looked beyond the fence, toward the flowering trees doing their best to hide the porch. “I’m sure.”

So was I. He stood only a few feet away, but the set of his jaw and rigid stance of his body told me all that the dark sunglasses concealed. The closer we’d gotten to the Garden District, the quieter he’d become. Since getting out of his car, he’d spoken only in response to questions.

Understandable, I told myself. For the past few days he’d been a rock, standing strong in the face of questions and accusations and unthinkable possibilities. It was only natural the weight of all that would take its toll. That, and the fact that Coach had benched him for the week due to his bum ankle.

The urge to step closer, to reach out and touch, to promise him everything would be okay, made me look away.

That was so not a promise I could make.

My grandmother had lived here until the day she packed up and moved to Colorado. I tried to see them, to imagine them as they’d been, the yard manicured, the climbing rose and bougainvillea carefully tended, my father and my aunt playing hide-and-seek among the huge oaks while my grandparents watched.

But that was a fantasy, I knew. My grandfather had never even met his youngest child. He’d died of a massive heart attack two weeks before her birth. My grandmother had been left alone in this cavernous old house with two young children to raise.

Maybe that’s why, ultimately, she’d walked away and never looked back.

Even the house looked sad. “Does anyone live here now?” I asked. I didn’t think so, but it was hard to imagine a place like this sitting empty for fourteen years.

Still not looking at me, Chase fingered the padlock, which immediately fell open.

I didn’t need precognition to know what was going to happen next. Chase Bonaventure and the status quo did not go hand in hand. He was not someone to stay out, stay away, no matter what signs or locks stood in his way. If he wanted in, he found a way.

“No.” With the word he pulled open the gate. “Not since your grandmother.”

Which meant that like the house on Prytania, my family home sat empty, as did so many other structures in New Orleans. You could barely travel a block without finding boarded-up shops or restaurants, houses big and small, a massive hospital in the heart of downtown. I’d even heard of an amusement park quietly rotting away.

It was like life just … moved on. But the buildings, silent placeholders, remained.

Standing in that swath of afternoon sunlight, I watched Chase move away from me, along the cracked concrete of the walkway.

At the porch, he took the three steps and veered right, vanishing behind a screen of hanging baskets, the fern oddly bushy and vibrant and …
alive
.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to move. But for a few minutes I was content to stand on the outside, watching the breeze play with the trees, the mix of sun flirt with shadows. Then I could see him again, at one of the tall windows framed by those black shutters, with his back to me, looking in. And all I could think was …
go to him
.

I eased through the gate and the shade of the beautiful trees, acutely aware of the scent of—

Gardenia, I realized as I slipped up the steps. There beside the railing, gardenia bloomed wildly, spilling and dripping, fragrant white against rich green. The smile was automatic.

My grandmother had loved gardenia. It had been one of her few indulgences, a whimsy I’d never understood. But she’d almost always had a candle of gardenia burning in her bedroom.

Now I knew why—it brought her back here, even if only in her mind, her heart, to this place she’d felt compelled to abandon.

I wanted to know why.

Wood creaked beneath my feet when I reached the porch. I stilled, realizing the breeze had done the same. As had Chase. He remained where I’d last seen him, at the window with a hand lifted to the side of his face to shield his eyes from the sun.

“See anything?” I asked.

This time, he said nothing.

“Chase?” Moving closer, I saw the shimmer of gauzy white on the other side of the window. Inside, I would have sworn I saw the outline of sheet-draped furniture. “Is that what I think—”

I never got the chance to finish.

He turned, his eyes, no longer obscured by dark lenses, meeting mine. “When I was six, my mom’s aunt from Phoenix came to visit.”

It was such an out-of-left-field statement that I instinctively said nothing in response.

“They thought I was outside,” he said. “Riding my bike. But it was hot and I was thirsty and I came back for some water. I was in the kitchen. They were in the living room.”

I watched him, stunned that someone could stand so close, but be so very, very far away. “What happened?” I asked, because without doubt, something had. Something big.

He looked beyond me, but I knew he wasn’t seeing the porch or the house, the trees. He was a kid again, standing in what should have been the safety of his mother’s kitchen.

“They were looking at a photo album,” he said, and my heart started to pound really, really fast. “And my great aunt was talking as if she’d received the most amazing news. ‘It’s all worked out so well,’ she said. ‘No one would guess they’re not yours.’”

I felt my breath catch, my eyes widen, worked hard to shove the surprise away.
“Chase
—
”

“I stood there,” he said. “I stood there and listened to them talk about me like I was some stray dog they’d brought in from the rain.”

“No,” I said, and then I moved, stepping closer, lifting a hand to his arm.
“No.”

Something flashed in his eyes, the blue swirling like a marble. “I left. I turned around and left, walked out the door and ran.”

The pain in his voice, that of the boy he’d been, the boy whose illusions had been shattered without warning or provocation, had my fingers pressing tighter.

“Where did you go?”

He looked beyond me, to that invisible spot beyond the shroud of the oaks. “Away,” he said. “I ran from street to street, looking inside every house I passed, at every person…”

Wondering. He didn’t say, but even without the words, I knew. I understood. It was the way I walked the streets of New Orleans, with each person I passed, wondering if they’d known my parents. If, once, they’d known me.

“A cop found me in Walmart,” he said. “Took me home.”

I made myself swallow. “I’m sure your parents were worried sick—”

“They lied,” he said, and finally his eyes met mine. “Even after I told them what I’d heard, they tried to lie.”

Nothing could have stopped me from stepping closer, bringing my other hand to his arm.

“She tried to tell me I’d misunderstood what I heard.”

Desperation drove people to do stupid things. “I can’t even imagine…”

“She kept telling me about the day I was born,” he said, his voice harsher now, sharper, “as if she’d actually
been
there.”

I really didn’t know what to say.

“And then, when they finally admitted the truth, that I was adopted, they tried to say they’d never told me to protect me. That they hadn’t wanted to burden me with the truth—”

“Like my grandmother,” I whispered, as the pieces finally fell together. Chase’s curiosity about my parents, his quick discovery of property records … it was as much about him and what he’d lost, as it was about me.

“But lies don’t protect,” he muttered, moving finally, lifting a hand to feather the hair from my face. “Lies destroy.”