Die Before I Wake (20 page)

But somebody had placed those batteries on the stairs. Somebody had been in the house while I was upstairs in the attic sighing over Yuri and Lara. Riley was the logical answer. He had free rein of the house, was in and out all day, and lived right there on the property. He’d already come in and scared the crap out of me earlier in the day. It would have been easy for him, on a casual walk-through, to pull two double-A’s from his pocket and set them in a spot on the wooden staircase where I couldn’t possibly miss stepping on them.

But to what end? What possible reason could Riley have for wanting to see me hurt? He had no reason to hate me. As far as I could tell, my brother-in-law was an amiable, mildly sarcastic slacker who was too laid-back in his dealings with the world to muster the energy to hate anyone.

The girls had been at school, which ruled them out. That left the field open to the other six billion people on the planet. The doors were never locked.

In a town the size of Newmarket, that was common practice. And knowing how the gossip vine works in small towns, probably a well-known fact. Anybody who had a strong inclination to steal the silver could have done it a long time ago.

But I was too tired to think about it anymore. My brain felt like it was clogged with molasses. The Demerol was starting to wear off, and my body was a single dull, throbbing ache. I tried to find an inch of me that didn’t hurt, but there didn’t seem to be one. Tom, taking note of my pale face and glassy eyes, declared that I’d had enough company for now.

And like my own personal Prince Charming, he scooped me up in his arms and carried me upstairs to bed.

I was grateful for the change of venue. The bedroom was cool and dark, our bed soft and cozy. He undressed me, tucked the covers under my chin, then went into the bathroom. I heard water running, and then he was back, with a paper cup. “Here,” he said,

“take this.”

I opened my eyes, tried to focus on the big blue pills in his hand, but I couldn’t tell if there were two or four of them. He propped me up and I took them, one at a time, and washed them down with cool tap water. “What are they?” I asked afterward.

“Something to make you feel better. You should sleep like a baby.”

“And wake up feeling refreshed?”

“You fell down the stairs, Jules. You’re bruised from head to toe. I don’t want to sound discouraging, babe, but tomorrow isn’t going to be a cakewalk.”

“I suppose I should thank you for telling it to me straight.”

Empty cup in hand, he loomed over the bed, his shadow on the wall greatly exaggerated, and said,

“Try to get some sleep.”

That shouldn’t be a problem. I was already halfway there. “What about you?” I asked groggily.

“I’m going back downstairs for a while. Don’t worry, I’ll check on you regularly.”

“I know you will.” I reached out, and he grasped the hand I offered. “You take such good care of me.”

“Go to sleep, Jules. I’ll be up to bed in a bit.” I don’t remember him letting go of my hand. One minute I was awake; the next minute I wasn’t. Tom was right. I did sleep like a baby. Assuming that babies experience strange and disturbing dreams, that is.

They were almost hallucinogenic in their intensity, those dreams, so vivid, so very real to me, that afterward I couldn’t have sworn in a court of law that they didn’t really happen. Even the impossible parts seemed feasible. At first, like E.T., I was trying to phone home to get a ride from the hospital, but I didn’t have my cell phone with me, and the head nurse refused to let me make a call from the nurse’s station. So I stood outside the entrance, watching strangers come and go, none of them with cell phones until three teenage boys in a souped-up old Barracuda pulled up to the entrance, hip-hop music playing so loud it shook the sidewalk. I knew these dudes would have cell phones, and when I approached the driver and asked to borrow his, he looked put-upon, but handed the phone over readily enough.

Except that I couldn’t seem to dial the number.

Every time I tried, my fingers slipped off the buttons, or I accidentally hit the wrong digit and had to start over. I just couldn’t make the connection go through.

My frustration kept building, and the kid was getting impatient, and finally he told me if I wanted a ride home, I should climb into the backseat.

I don’t remember getting into the car, but suddenly there I was, sitting in the back of the Barracuda, hip-hop vibrating all around me and Beth Larkin sitting beside me. Except that it wasn’t the smiling, blond Beth I’d seen in the yearbook photo. This Beth had pasty skin and dark, sunken eyes. Her hair, what was left of it, hung in black, wet strings, tangled with leaves and debris from the river. Her eyes held an emptiness that wasn’t quite human. She reached out a cold, moss-covered hand and touched me, and I recoiled in re-vulsion. Her teeth, when she opened her mouth, were black and snaggly. “Watch your back,” she said. “Don’t trust anybody.”

Then she was gone, and so was the Barracuda, and suddenly I was standing on the veranda of Tom’s house. I tried the door, but it was locked. Inside the house, I could hear Tom and his mother arguing.

“She probably put the damn batteries there herself,” Jeannette said. “Look at all the attention she’s getting out of it.”

I waited for my Galahad to defend me. He didn’t disappoint. “Did you look at her?” he said. “Two black eyes, a sprained ankle, a concussion. You should see her back. The bruises. She’s in terrible pain, Mother. Who would do something like that just to get attention?”

Then Claudia was speaking. “What about the note?” she said. “She’s read the note. If we don’t do something about it, the truth will come out. And then where will we be?”

“Stay out of it,” Tom barked, and then, somehow—

I think I flew there—I was at the Swift River Bridge, teetering on the rail, while below me, a voice that seemed to emanate from the swirling waters themselves whispered to me, “Jump! Jump!” I released my hold on the rusted piece of iron I’d been using to balance myself, leaned forward, and was just starting to fall when a hand grabbed me and pulled me back, down off the railing and onto the relative safety of the gridwork that made up the bridge’s road surface.

The body attached to the hand turned out to belong to the old man, Roger Levasseur. “Why’d you do that?” I screamed at him, hopping mad. “Why did you save me? Don’t you understand that I wanted to jump?” He stared at me with those red, rheumy eyes. I saw sorrow in them, and compassion. And an intelligence I’d missed the first time around. “But what about the children?” he said. “They need you. Taylor and Sadie and Angel and little Davy. If you jump, who’ll take care of them? Not me. I’m too old.”

“And you smell bad,” I said.

“You have to fight for them. You have to protect them.”

“How?” I asked him.

“Talk to Mel,” he said. And he disappeared.

Alone on the bridge, I walked to the railing and looked over the side. Below me, water rushed and swirled. Beth Larkin, her youthful beauty restored, floated faceup on top of the water, her pale blond hair bobbing on the river’s surface. She opened her eyes. They were a soft blue, the color of chicory growing by the roadside in August. But when she opened her mouth, her teeth were still snaggly and black. The blue eyes darkened with anger. “See what you started?” she said.

I awoke abruptly, my chest heaving as I gasped for breath. What the hell had been in those pills Tom gave me? I glanced over at him, sleeping still and silent beside me. Tom always slept that way, with a tidy economy of movement, like a wax doll, only the rise and fall of his chest attesting to his humanity.

Although it seemed as though I’d just gone to bed, pale morning light filtered through the gauzy window curtains. I still had a killer headache, and after a night of lying in one position, I’d added stiff-ness to my arsenal of complaints. Not to mention that I needed to pee like a racehorse. Trying not to disturb Tom, I lifted the covers, sat up, and carefully swung my legs over the side of the bed.

It took a minute for the room to stop spinning, but eventually it righted itself and remained steady. My head and my ankle both still throbbed, but my balance had been partially restored, and the air cast gave me some measure of support. My vision was still a little funky, but I hoped to have enough equilibrium to make it to the bathroom without falling on my ass. Moving like a four-hundred-year-old woman, I hobbled across the twelve feet of empty space between the bed and the bathroom doorway. Exhausted by the effort, I clung to the door frame and took a series of deep breaths, waiting for my strength to return. As if I actually believed I had any.

After I’d used the facilities and shuffled to the sink to wash my hands, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror. The shock nearly sent me into a relapse. It was uncanny, my resemblance to Beth.

Not the live one, but the dead one in my dreams, the one with the sunken eyes and the snaggly teeth.

Except that I had something she didn’t: two fat, purple shiners. Jesus God. If this were Halloween, I could rent myself out as a party favor, guaranteed to terrify even the bravest of children.

I cautiously pulled my nightie off over my head and dropped it on the counter. Thanks to Tom’s pro-pensity for mirrors—or maybe it was Beth who’d had them installed in every usable inch of space in that huge bathroom—I was able to view the bruises on my back. I looked like somebody had used me for a punching bag. Not just my tailbone, but my entire backside, from my rump to my shoulders, was mot-tled with bruises. During the course of my fall, I’d ricocheted like a ping-pong ball off every available surface. Although I hurt everywhere, I knew it looked worse than it really was. Bruising generally does. I also knew how lucky I was. I could have broken something, and then I would’ve been out of commission for a long time. Nevertheless, the sight of my reflection was disheartening, as well as a stunning reminder of my own mortality, something I hadn’t spent much of my young life dwelling on.

“Hey, you.”

I’d been so engrossed in cataloguing my charms that I hadn’t heard Tom’s footsteps. I turned to him, slowly and cautiously. “Hey, yourself,” I said.

“You look quite fetching wearing nothing but bruises and an air cast. Feeling better?”

“It’s the latest fashion for ghouls. The vertigo’s a little better this morning, and my head’s not quite so fuzzy. Everything hurts, and my vision’s still blurry, but I only see one of you this morning, so I guess there must be some improvement. Mostly I feel like a very old woman who just lost a fight with a Greyhound bus. And what in God’s name was in those pills you gave me? I haven’t dreamed like that since—

come to think of it, I’ve never dreamed like that.” He left the doorway and came into the room.

“They were just pain pills,” he said. “Sometimes, they have an odd effect on people.”

“I’ll say.” I turned back to the mirror and picked up my nightie. “Did you know we’re going to have a little boy named Davy?”

“Is that so?” He stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders, his eyes on mine in the mirror.

Turning the nightie right side out, I said, “That’s what Roger Levasseur told me last night in my dreams. And Beth was there, and these three teenage boys driving an old Barracuda, and you and your mother and Claudia were arguing, and—” His fingers traced a pattern against my bare shoulder that, amazingly enough, set my motor to running.

How could I possibly think about sex when I was half-dead? “What were we arguing about?” he said.

“Me, I think. Something about the batteries. Your mother thought—” As Tom’s hands continued their irresistible seduction, I struggled to remember the elusive snippets of conversation that had taken place inside my drug-befuddled brain. “Now I remember.

She said I probably put the batteries on the stairs myself. Engineered the fall to get attention.” His lips were soft and warm on my bare shoulder.

Against my skin, he murmured, “Who in their right mind would say something like that? Believe it or not, my mother’s very worried about you.”

“Probably more worried,” I said cynically, bunch-ing up the nightgown and pressing it to my chest,

“that I’ll file a lawsuit against her homeowner’s policy and her insurance premiums will go up.” Tom raised his head. In the mirror, I watched his eyes narrow. “Jules,” he said in a voice he might have used to scold a naughty child.

“I’m sorry, Tom, I really am, but the woman detests me.”

“You’re wrong. You’re not seeing her objectively.”

How much more objective could it get? I’d clearly heard her tell my husband that he should send me back where I came from. “Maybe,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “it’s you who aren’t seeing her objectively. Considering that she’s your mother, and all.” Studying his frozen expression, I added, “Which would be natural, of course. Seeing as how—well, you know.”

“You’d better quit now, Jules, while you’re ahead, because you’re digging your own grave a little deeper with every word that comes out of your mouth.” A shudder ran through my body. “Please,” I said.

“Don’t use that word.”

“Which word? Grave?”

I shuddered again. “It’s too close a reminder of what almost happened yesterday.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” He was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry.” He kissed the back of my neck. My knees weakened, and I dropped the nightie and gripped the edge of the marble counter to steady myself.

Studying my poor, battered reflection, I said,

“Tom?”

Distracted by his ministrations, he said, “Hmm?”

“You didn’t happen to see anything fall out of my pocket yesterday, did you?”

He went still for an instant. “Like what?”

“A piece of paper. I’m sure I had it in my pocket when I fell, but by the time I left the hospital, it was gone.”

“Maybe you lost it here. When you fell.”

“I don’t think so. Riley would have noticed. It must have fallen out at the hospital.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see anything.” His mouth worked its way down my shoulder, and he reached a hand around to cup my breast. “Was it important? Do you want me to call the E.R. and see if they found it?”