Hanging by a Thread (7 page)

My drama skills, forged at the legendary Blake School, were unmatched in this sleepy town. All I had to do was get ahold of myself. Break it down. Think it through.

What exactly had I felt when I touched the cotton fabric? I closed my eyes and concentrated, teasing apart the emotions until I could identify them individually.
Terror, dismay, grief
. Okay. I felt milder variations of those every day. Well, every week, anyway. What teenage girl didn’t?

But there had been something else.… I replayed the scene that had fast-forwarded through me along with the jolt, searching for the details among the confusion.
The sensation of being thrown sideways, a sharp pain as my knee struck something, a second impact, a lurching stop. A face—wide eyes and grimace, briefly familiar—a quick vein of … could it be relief? And then—

My fingers closed on the fabric again, my arm reaching for the jacket almost of its own accord, and I was rocketed back into the vision, the sucking vortex of a sense-memory stronger than any other, a hole in the earth that opened to a chasm with no bottom, a wicked blade that grew sharper as it cleaved. All these things were true in that moment, and if I knew—somewhere, deep down where my mortal heart still beat and my veins still carried blood—that this wasn’t real, my mind skipped over that knowledge and entered the other surreal place, a place of darkness and fear.

My throat closed up tight, immobilized by the images that had taken hold of me. They were more powerful than my own instincts, stronger than my sense of self-preservation. The urge to resist faded, lost in my swirling
battle. I needed to breathe but couldn’t be bothered. Black stars splatted against the silver sparkle like fat raindrops, obliterating, obscuring, making me forget, making me start to not care. My fingers trembled and clenched, and then relaxed, angry no more, barely twitching.

I pulled the jacket closer, using both my hands now, shoving the fabric under my chin. It seemed inexplicably silky and I rubbed it against my skin as though it were infused with precious oils, rare scents. The faraway voice of reason whispered weakly that I should be casting the thing away, disposing of it, burning it—and still I could not stop.

“Youuuuu,” a different, stronger voice said. A voice thick with fury, desperation, anguish. A face, its features blurred, contorted and twisted with pain, and I recoiled from it, but I couldn’t move.… Somewhere, in another place and time, I knew that my fingers clutched the jacket and couldn’t let go. But that reality was fading rapidly as the face regarded me with hatred, barely more than an outline, the details shimmering and fading in a cascade of the silver sparks. I didn’t know why this entity despised me so much
.

This was different from other visions I’d had. Usually they were like old-fashioned films, frame after frame from the past whirring by, events in which the wearer had participated, damage he or she had caused, wrongs committed. I’d heard voices before, but it was rare. This one felt more personal. Somewhere, a person’s rage was so strong that it could be transported through the medium of the jacket, had managed to travel the same dark path as the visions, to speak to me this way.

My mind danced between what it knew and these borrowed memories, blurring them together until the terror became my own. My fear was deep and raw, a fear for my very life. Something—someone—wanted to harm me, and unless I did something to stop them, they would succeed. But at the same time I felt … pity. And guilt. I had done something to deserve this; I had played a part in whatever horror had transpired. But what had I done? The memories eluded me with maddening, quicksilver speed, disappearing just as I thought I was about to understand.

The face came closer, snarling and spitting, wailing, taking up the entire screen of my inner eye, brandishing itself across the expanse of my mind. Hands … The face was no longer disembodied; a shadow figure raised its arms toward me, reaching, threatening, longing to hurt me, strike me, strangle me. Agonizing tremors wracked me even while I knew my mortal body was locked in place, immobile, helpless. It felt as though the vision would somehow cross over, as though its rage was strong enough to defeat the thin barrier between the remembered and the real and find a way to hurt me from deep within my mind
.

“You know why.”

The voice hissed at me, wrecked and broken, and I could make out teeth and bared lips. And I did know why—or not why, exactly, only that I deserved what was coming
.

A fist swung toward me. Sharp pain. Flickering light. Everything rushing away
.

Then nothing
.

I
WASN
’
T OUT LONG
. When I came to, I was lying on the carpet in the middle of the room, the sun streaming in at an angle as it slipped lower toward evening. The oven timer was going off, and I vaguely remembered the casserole. The denim jacket lay inches from my outstretched hand, a stray thread trailing from the cuff seam.

It looked perfectly innocent now, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I stuffed all the other clothes back into the box, and then I went to the kitchen. After taking out the casserole and turning off the oven, I dug into the utensil drawer for a pair of tongs and took them back to my room. I stood over the jacket and took a deep breath, feeling ridiculous. But if the thing worked so strongly on me, maybe there was a chance it would work through the metal and plastic of the tongs, and if so, I wanted to be ready to drop them rather than endure the vision again.

Let go
, I whispered to myself, just in case. The visions seemed to paralyze me, or at least prevent me from moving
on my own; but if I knew in advance—if I was ready—surely I could overcome that.

Slowly, cautiously, I reached the tongs toward the jacket and, holding my breath, prodded the denim fabric. Nothing. I let my breath out in a sigh of relief, gingerly picking up the jacket and dropping it into the cardboard box. When no fabric protruded over the edges, I jammed the top down on the box and then, for good measure, got the tape from the junk drawer and taped it shut.

I sat cross-legged next to it for a moment, trying to figure out what to do next. I could walk outside to the garbage bin, upend the clothes into it, and in two days the trash truck would haul them away and I’d never have to deal with the jacket again. Yes. I could be free of this confusing vision; whatever bad deeds had been done by the person who wore the jacket were in the past, and nothing I could do would change that.

It was an old excuse, one I brought out whenever I didn’t want to act on my visions, which was most of the time. Nana had told me, all those years ago, that I wasn’t required to do anything at all, and that if I didn’t, the visions would slowly disappear. But I hadn’t always let that happen. Occasionally, I stepped in.

When I was thirteen, I touched one of my mom’s clients’ coats and saw a vision of a woman going through a medicine cabinet, stuffing bottles into her purse. It was years before I understood that she was stealing drugs to support a habit, so I hadn’t said anything.

But the next year, when I had a vision of one of the boys
in our building shoplifting candy from the little convenience store down the block, I told the proprietor.

When I had a vision of a girl in my chemistry class stealing the exam key, I left an anonymous note for the teacher.

I was learning something about myself—that I could not always resist trying to bring justice to those who might get away undetected.

I had always suspected that was the point of the visions. It was true that our strange gift had been born in the midst of violence and bloodshed; my great-great-grandmother’s death had been avenged when her killer was executed, but now I believed that her descendants were meant to right other wrongs too. Even minor ones. Even the ones that didn’t have obvious victims. The visions seemed to be giving me the chance to change things in the future.

But this time was different. I didn’t want this … communication. Or curse. Or whatever it was. But now it had found me. It wanted something from me. The individual in the denim jacket had done something. Maybe something
really
bad. The possibilities spun through my mind.…

But that was ridiculous. Winston was a small town, and whatever passed for news made the rounds within hours. When one of Mom’s clients, a patent attorney, got a DWI, everyone knew by the next morning. When the town council voted to approve a second Starbucks, protestors had mobilized by lunchtime.

There had been no new tragedies in Winston since last summer. Whatever the owner of the jacket had done, it
hadn’t been bad enough to make the news. The visions must be mistaken, or exaggerated, or I was misinterpreting them, and I could get rid of the thing with a clear conscience.

Except.

I couldn’t forget the face, the terrible expression of pain and fury, the sensations I’d relived. Something bad had happened. And here, in the box, was the evidence. Even if I decided I could ignore all that, I had a feeling the jacket wasn’t about to let me.

With a feeling that I would regret it, I carried the box to my room and shoved it into the back of my closet—just as I heard the front door.

I met Mom in the kitchen going through the mail, her big sunglasses pushed up on top of her head.

“Hey, Clare-Bear,” she said absently. I winced at the old nickname, one I thought she’d finally forgotten. “God, what a day. Want to go get a pizza, forget all our troubles for a while?”

“Mom—it’s
Saturday
. I’m busy tonight.”

She blinked, raising her eyebrows, and really focused on me. “Oh. Are you sure?”

“Uh … yeah.”

“It’s just that … wow. The days have kind of been running together. That MacGregor audit is killing me—and he was in today, brought me
that
.” She pointed to the leather bag she took with her everywhere; it was overflowing with file folders and binders. “He hasn’t filed his expenses in five
years
.”

You’d think that after being an accountant for two
decades, my mom would be used to clients whose record-keeping left a lot to be desired. And they were her best customers, anyway, the ones who paid extra for overtime, whose accounts clocked the endless hours that paid the bills.

I had thought Mom would be happier as her own boss, but now I wasn’t so sure. She was working even longer hours, meeting with all the firm’s clients to transition them over. So much for her promises to slow down, stress less, reconnect with her old life. And I was getting tired of it.

“Sorry,” I said, without much sympathy. “But I’m going to the beach tonight. Remember?”

Mom wrinkled her nose and frowned. “Don’t you guys ever do anything besides hang out at that beach? When I was in high school, we wouldn’t have been caught dead there at night.”

You didn’t have any friends
, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “You should be glad. It’s free.”

“Yes, except for the three swimsuits you bought this year alone and the sandals you had to replace after you lost the ones that were practically brand-new and the sunglasses that, I should point out, we could have gotten at Target for a tenth of what you paid—”

“Mom.”
I hated when she did this—she could get herself completely wound up in seconds when it came to money. Ever since Dad stopped sending the support payments, she’d become completely obsessed. It wasn’t like I wanted to defend my dad—he’d recently forgotten my birthday for the second year in a row—but he
had
given us his half of
the house, which I knew was worth a lot of money. “I bought those myself, remember? With money I
earned
?”

Mom glared at me, her nostrils flaring, a sure sign she was working herself up again. The sunglasses were a sore point, but I couldn’t exactly live in a beach town, where I wore them every single day, and not get a decent pair. Besides, it was Mom who was always drilling it into me that it was better to spend money on a few good pieces than buy every trend. Well, she used to say that, anyway, before I started making most of my clothes from thrift-shop finds.

“Yes. All right. I’m sorry.” She flashed me a brief smile. “I’m beat anyway. I think that staying in tonight’s just what I need.” She patted her tote bag, where I knew a paperback was buried under all those folders—Mom never went anywhere without a romance novel.

I almost felt sorry for her. She hadn’t been on a date in a couple of years, or even out with friends since we moved back to Winston. She was still pretty, despite her efforts to hide it with her boring haircut and clothes, but she was getting deeper and deeper into a rut, doing nothing but working and sleeping.

But that was
her
choice. I knew there were a dozen people she could call, right here in town. When I was little, she used to take me to a playgroup with a bunch of moms she’d gone to high school with, including Rachel’s. Why couldn’t she be normal and play Bunco or host jewelry parties like all the other moms and just leave me alone?

“Mom … have you called any of those old friends of yours?”

She turned away from me, lifting the foil on the casserole cooling on the counter, poking at the steaming contents. “A couple … I might have coffee with my old tennis partner next week.”

“What about Mrs. Slade? Weren’t you guys going to do a girls’ night?”

Mom gave me a funny look, one I couldn’t interpret. In the time we’d been back, I’d seen Rachel’s mom almost as much as I saw my own, since she didn’t work and was always around the house when we hung out there. I remembered her and my mom drinking coffee and talking when Rachel and I were little. But as far as I knew they’d barely seen each other since we moved back. Rachel couldn’t explain it either.

“I’m sure we will,” Mom said evasively. “As soon as things settle down.”

I thought about pointing out that it didn’t get a whole lot more settled than a middle-aged woman spending her Saturday night with a romance novel and a bowl of ice cream. But in the end, a desire to keep the peace—or at least stay out of trouble so I could go to the beach—won out.