Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance (38 page)

Jimmy shook his
head as if he hadn’t heard her correctly.  "What?"

"Stop saying
'what.'"

"But…how?  I
mean, how does that happen?"

Tabitha sat down
at the dining room table.  "He somehow got hold of a pen.  They found him
in his cell with the pen embedded in his neck.  They said the only fingerprints
they found on the pen were Devlin's."

Jimmy sat down at
the table near Tabitha.  "What about the guy in the cell next to
him?"

"What about
him?"

"Didn't he
hear him?" Jimmy asked.  "I mean, if a guy stabs himself in the neck,
wouldn't he be choking and stuff?"

Tabitha looked
exasperatedly at Jimmy. "I have no idea.  Why would you ask that?"

"If the guy
made noise, why didn't the cell neighbor call someone?  None of this whole
story makes any sense."

Tabitha reached
out and grabbed Jimmy's arm.  "Jimmy, nothing here makes sense.  Remember,
this is beyond what's normal.  The whole thing.  I have no idea what happened
to the guy in the cell next to him.  I just know that the man who was our main
suspect is now dead, and he appears to have killed himself.  And that man was
one of the most prominent men in town, and he had powerful friends."

Jimmy shook his
head again.

"Jimmy,"
Tabitha said, pausing when she noticed that Jimmy had been putting on his shoes
and was about to go out.  "Where were you going?"

"Jesse,"
Jimmy said.  "We need to talk to Jesse. Tabitha, he's the one person whose
story hasn't added up and who has the real story about that night and he might
be willing to talk now that Devlin is in jail."

He paused for a
moment.

"Or
dead."

"No,” Tabitha
said, “You aren't going anywhere.  No one is going anywhere right now.  This is
all moving too fast and it’s all too weird.  People are dying left and right
around here."

"I have to,
Tabitha," Jimmy said.

"Your mother
would never agree to this," Tabitha said.  "She wouldn't let you
go."

"You're not
my mother," Jimmy said, his voice getting a bit too shrill even for his
own comfort.  "Besides, I was trying to sneak out."

"Were you
going to steal a car?" Tabitha asked.

"I thought I
saw a bicycle in the garage," Jimmy said.  "I was going to take a
bike."

Tabitha sighed. 
Then she shook her head again, holding one hand up to her head.

"I cannot let
this happen," Tabitha said.  "You cannot do this.  I understand why
you want to, but I cannot let that happen until I can go with you, and right
now, I have a responsibility to the newspaper.  And this is a big story."

With that, she got
up and walked back into the kitchen.  He heard the tones of the phone being
dialed.  After another moment, Jimmy heard her talking to someone on the other
end.  Jimmy guessed that it was a reporter.

Jimmy waited for a
moment to see if she was going to come back.  When it appeared that the phone
calls were not going to stop and that Tabitha had gotten entirely lost in her
work, forgetting all about Jimmy, he got up and snuck out the front door.

The cold air felt
good on his skin.  His brain was flying in a thousand different directions.  He
had the image of Devlin Little, jabbering away and begging for Jimmy to leave
him alone, and then grabbing a pen out of his pants pocket.  Did his jumpsuit
have pockets?  Jimmy could not remember.  But he imagined Devlin raising the
pen up to his own throat and then thrusting forward.  Soon he would be gagging
on his own blood and choking, clawing at the hole he had made.  Jimmy
shuddered.

He walked around
to the side of the house and opened the side door to the garage.  Inside, the
space smelled dusty and old.  In the corner was a rusty lawnmower, and there
were other gardening implements scattered about.  There was enough space for a
car, but Jimmy had only seen Warren and Tabitha park in the driveway.  Against
one wall, behind what appeared to be a wheelbarrow, was a bicycle.  It looked
like a very ancient twelve-speed bike that had not been ridden in a while.

Jimmy walked
across the cement floor of the garage, his feet crunching on things that he
couldn’t see.  He reached the bike and yanked; the bike came out with a bit of
a groan.  He noticed that, somehow, the tires were not flat.  Perhaps Warren
had gone for a ride sometime recently.  There were some cobwebs amidst the
spokes, but it was in good shape. 

He wheeled the
bike over to the side door.  He opened the door and guided the bike out of the
garage.  He stood beside it for a moment, debating internally whether the idea
was a good one or not.  Then he thought about Sapphire, and decided that there
really was no other choice.  He had to do this.  He got on the bike and rode
off. 

At first the bike
was awkward and strange.  He wasn’t used to a bike as big as this one. 
However, once he was about a mile away from the house, he had things going
smoothly.  He was shifting gears effortlessly, and dazzled at just how fast the
bike could get going.  The cool air blew through his hair, and he looked up into
a crystal blue sky.  It was a perfect day.  Inside his head the buzzing had
started again, but it was soft and far away.

Are you there?
he thought.

There was no
response.  He could sense that she was there, almost hear her thoughts rushing
around in whatever passed for a brain when she was not in corporeal form. 
Jimmy could sense fear and trepidation coming off of her in waves.  Jimmy was
afraid that he had frightened Sapphire when he wanted to push Devlin Little. 
His angry side was not something that he had wanted her to see.  Hell, he
wasn't even sure that he had an angry side until it came out in the jail.

"I'm sorry
about that," Jimmy said aloud, sending the thought across the distance to
where Sapphire was.  "But remember, I did stab a guy with a fork and
head-butt another when you were there."

It's different
when you’re nearly destroying a man's mind completely
, came the sudden reply.  It was so sudden that Jimmy's bike veered
toward the edge of the road for a moment. 

He's dead now
, Jimmy said.

I know,
Sapphire said. 
I was around when he crossed over.  He looked at
me and shrank away in fear.  Then, well, then bad things happened.

Jimmy was curious,
and he still had a ways to go before he got to the library.  "What
things?"

Just…things
, Sapphire said. 
Sometimes people move on to bigger and better
things, and those who have spent their lives being selfish or doing wrong, I
guess, go somewhere else.

Hell?

I don't think
so.  Not in any way that you would think of.  Certainly not the Hell that I was
taught about in Sunday school. But the unclean spirits are taken somewhere, and
it is not pleasant.

There was a bit of
silence for a while.

They always go
screaming
, Sapphire said softly.

Jimmy could sense
her shivering at the thought.

Sounds like the
afterlife can really suck
, Jimmy thought as he
rounded a bend, shifted gears, and started up a tall hill.

It's certainly
not what I thought it would be
, she said.

There was silence
for some time.

What are you
planning on doing with Jesse?
Sapphire asked.

I don't know,
but his story didn't add up to you, and that makes me wonder what really
happened.  I think with Devlin Little gone, maybe he'll tell me what happened. 
Maybe we can finally put some puzzle pieces together.

I'm scared. 
There's something wrong with him, Jimmy.  I know he's your friend, but
something about him worries me.

I guess we'll
find out
, Jimmy thought. 
But Jesse is one of
the kindest people I know.  I just feel like maybe he saw something that scared
him that night.  Well, of course he did; he saw you killed and he loved you. 
However, there was something more.  Had I been there, nothing would have
stopped me from going to the police.  I would have been trying again and again,
for the rest of my life, to get the person who killed the woman I loved
arrested.  The fact that he didn't do that bothers me.

Sapphire said
nothing, and the buzzing in his head diminished.  Jimmy kept pedaling,
disturbed by how out of breath he felt.  He was still exhausted and drained. 
How much longer could he keep this up?  What would happen if he kept trying to
do this—altering reality, talking to the dead? Would he just dry up and blow
away?

He shrugged that
off and shifted gears again.  He was headed down a hill now.  Up ahead he saw
the turn that would lead him to the library. The sun was starting to go down
behind the trees and the sky was starting to look bruised with dazzling orange
and pink near the horizon.  It was beautiful, and Jimmy admired it for a moment
before focusing on what he was doing.  The road had been blissfully absent of
traffic. 

Jimmy rode the
rest of the hill down and then banked left.  He was riding at a speed that made
his heart pound and caused adrenaline to surge through his body.  He felt more
awake now and he rounded the corner, shot up the sidewalk, and came to a
squealing halt beside the library.  The place had an ominous edge to it that
Jimmy had never noticed before.  Normally it appeared bright and inviting, but
now there appeared to be lights off inside and Jimmy got his first real feeling
of dread. 

Jimmy leaned the
bike up against the side of the library and dismounted.  His legs felt a bit
wobbly, but his heart was pounding crazily.  He could feel the adrenaline still
surging through him.  His head buzzed both from Sapphire and from the
adrenaline.  He looked up at the brick side of the library.  The bricks
themselves seemed sinister.

"You are
losing it," he said to himself.  At the same time, he suddenly wished he
were the type of guy who always carried a gun.

He walked around
to the front of the library and mounted the stairs.  His legs felt heavy as he
did so, but he pushed on.  The lights were on inside, but only at the front of
the library.  The back end was dark; Jimmy could tell that the lights were off
when he looked in through the small rectangular window set in the front door. 
Jimmy pushed and the door opened with a creak that he had never noticed before,
but now seemed impossibly loud.

Jimmy stepped
inside.  Once inside, only silence greeted him.  Usually this late in the
afternoon, Jesse would be listening to music on an old, battered vacuum tube
infested radio that he kept on a shelf behind his desk.  This time, there was
nothing.  Even Blackie didn’t come padding out from behind the desk to greet
Jimmy.  There was just the smell of old books and motes of dust floating lazily
in the air, caught in the dimming shafts of fading sunlight through outside.

"Jesse?"
Jimmy called.  He hesitated, taking several steps inside before finally calling
out.  Alarm bells were going off in his head.

There was no
response.  Jimmy frowned.  The image of Jesse with a pen or knife sticking out
of his neck, facedown on the floor in the back filled his brain.  He pushed
that aside.  Certainly that had not happened. 

Had it?

It was hard to
shake the image once it was there, but Jimmy forced himself to move on.  He was
trying to be brave, even though every instinct inside of him was telling him
that it was time to head back and get some help.  Maybe he should call Tabitha
and get her to meet him here.  Maybe he should have suggested that Warren come
with him and bring his guns.

I can bend
reality
, Jimmy thought. 
Why should I be afraid?

It was a
comforting thought for about half a second.  But the truth was that warping
reality was killing him, and he hadn't been able to do much more than explode a
few light bulbs the last time he had tried it.  And that had nearly wiped him
out for days.  He still felt weak.  He doubted he would even be able to stop a
slow moving cart from running into him from down a long hallway, given the
state he was in now.

"Jesse?"
he called again.

Stupid.  So
stupid.  Why did he do that?  No one ever learned from the horror movies, did
they?  The person who wandered into a darkened room and called out always got
an ice pick to the head.  Yet here he was, doing just that.

"Jimmy?"

Jimmy jumped at
the sound of the voice.  For just a moment he was sure that it was the voice he
had heard from the giant, faceless creature that had haunted his dreams the
night before. 

"Yes,"
he replied.

"Ah,"
said the voice.  "Sorry.  I was going to close up early."

Jesse stepped
forward from the shadowy area near the back.  That was the children's area.  He
looked a bit disheveled.  He had growth across his cheeks as if he had not
shaved in a few days, and that was something Jesse never let happen.  His hair
was a mess, but that wasn’t uncommon.  His clothes, however, looked wrinkled,
and there were stains on his shirt, which was odd.