Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (28 page)

But I did not trust myself to move.

Did not trust myself to do anything.

Chase had questions. That’s why we were here. But I had no idea what to tell him. No idea what was real or what was some kind of weird distorted memory—or unspeakable fear.

No idea what I’d seen.

Felt.

“Hold me,” I whispered, and he did, he moved with a gentleness that made my heart ache, taking me into his arms and pulling me against his body—his still-wet body.

My clothes were dry. But his remained cool and damp.

I wanted to cry. I didn’t know why, didn’t understand, but knew that I wanted to cry.

“Baby,”
he murmured against the top of my head. “Baby.”

I made my arms lift, made them wrap around his middle, even though they felt about a hundred times heavier than before. And I held on. Held on so, so tight.

“What the hell happened—did you see something?”

I made myself breathe. That’s what I concentrated on. That’s what I needed to do.

“You can tell me,” he said quietly—so unbelievably gentle that something inside of me hurt.
“You can tell me.”

“I c-can’t.” Didn’t know how. Didn’t understand.

“Yes, you can.”

“No. I…” Breathe. Slowly. Make the hard thrumming of my pulse fall quiet. Make my body stop shaking. Then I could think.

Then I could allow myself to remember.

“Take me home,” I whispered, because that’s what I needed, to go home, where it was bright and safe and the walls didn’t throb. And the silence did not scream.

“Trinity.” Chase’s voice was oddly quiet as he pulled back and tilted my face toward his, and even as I tried to turn away, he kept his finger under my chin and his eyes staring on mine. Any other time, I would have sensed what was coming. Any other time, I would have braced myself. But even though Chase held me, everything I felt, heard—
knew
—kept shifting.

“Detective Jackson is here.”

I blinked. The rolling continued, all those pieces I’d worked so hard to keep together, rolling, like marbles. Scattering. “W-what?”

Chase’s hands were on my shoulders, holding firm—when had that happened? “Detective Jackson is downstairs,” he said, and even as I told myself it was Chase’s voice—
I knew it was Chase’s voice
—I couldn’t make everything connect.

“Detective Jackson?”

He pushed to his feet, bringing me with him. I was aware of all that, aware of the blood pouring back into the numbness of my feet and the violent tingle in my soles and toes, but the connections weren’t there.

“He wants to talk to you.”

I blinked, swallowed, flexed my fingers. Exhaled.

“Baby, you gotta help me out here,” he said so steady and calm, so normal, as if I wasn’t zoning in and out right in front of his eyes. “If I don’t get you downstairs, he’s going to come up…”

I looked past him, down the hall where all the doors again stood open, allowing light to spill in and kill the shadows.

“Okay.” And then I slipped past him, past the room where Jessica had been trapped like an animal in a cage, where I’d heard her scream, beg, cry.

“Wait! Come back! You can’t leave me here!”

“Watch me.”

“No—you’ll be sorry!!”

That voice? I knew that voice. But I no longer knew if the ugliness was left over from the game I’d unwittingly played the week before—or if the terror stemmed from something far more unspeakable.

“Well, well, here she is, patron saint of the Lost Souls Club.”

The staircase sprawled out in front of me, wide and curved and rotting, leading down to the spacious foyer, where there’d once been marble and crystal and flowers.

I don’t know how I knew that. I just did. Places had memories, my grandmother had once told me. Long after everything else is gone, the people and the things, something of them remains.

“Won’t you join us?” LaSalle’s partner asked, as if inviting me for beignets and café au lait. He stood at the base of the stairs, his foot propped on the bottom step. With his dark collarless shirt and pressed pants, the big diamond stud in his left ear and those neat little cornrows, he looked all
GQ
again, like a man waiting for his date to join him, not …

I wasn’t sure what I was at that moment. A witness? Person of interest? Suspect?

“I’ve got you,” Chase said, yanking my awareness back to him. I felt him take my hand, loved the warmth of his flesh, the strength of his fingers threading between mine. Through the push-pull of vertigo, I was aware of him leading me down the stairs.

“Holy shit,” I heard someone mutter, but it was a second before I linked the voice to its owner.

“Pitre,”
I whispered.

He stood off to the side, near the arched doorway that led to the room that had once been used for dining. “She’s like an eff’in ghost again.”

“I told you to get the hell out of here,” Chase said.

But Pitre just stood there in the arched doorway. Only darkness gaped behind him, but I would have sworn he had his back to a wall. “I … c-couldn’t,” he murmured. “Not after … not after last time. Not until I knew if … she was okay.”

In his eyes that same bottomless confusion glittered, just like the night in the closet. “So scared,” I murmured, driven by the voices I’d heard, the images I’d seen. None of which made sense. “It was so dark, and she was alone. So many closed doors…”

Pitre shook his head from side to side, staring at me as if I had a bloody weapon in my hand. “What the fuck happened—”

“She thought it was just a game,” I said, unable to look away from him. “Until she saw the knife.”

Pitre shook his head, as if he didn’t understand. “There wasn’t a knife,” he said. “That was Saturday night—”

Chase didn’t let him finish.
“Now,”
he seethed, and with the single word Pitre faded away. Or maybe he backed away. I wasn’t sure. I only knew that by the time I reached the marble of the entryway, he was gone.

“I’m going to need you to come with me, Miss Monsour.”

The front door hung open. Outside, through the haze of late afternoon rain, I saw a black SUV parked in the street.

“You didn’t say anything about going anywhere with you.” That was Chase. His voice was hard.

“Look, we can do this the easy way,” Detective Jackson said, “or we can do it the hard way. But trust me, either way, your girlfriend is coming with me.”

Sometimes I dreamed. Actually, I dreamed a lot. I’d fall deep, deep into sleep and see things. Do things. Things that seemed real. And then I would wake up, and it was like the two worlds, the dream world and the real world, would crash into each other and it would take me a few minutes to tell one from the other. To know where I was. And what was happening. What was real.

Disoriented, I stared up at Detective Jackson, at the handcuffs dangling from his fingers, and prayed for that moment to come, the one where pieces fell into place.

“I’m calling my mom,” Chase said.

“That’s a good idea,” Detective Jackson fired back, so totally casual.

I’ll never know if lightning really streaked down from the sky somewhere beyond the front door—or whether it was only a trick of my imagination. But the line was that stark, that severe, and from one heartbeat to another the veil between the two worlds shattered and the numbness fell away.

Holy dear God. Detective Jackson was looking at me like he knew something bad. Something really, really bad.

“Where’s Detective LaSalle?” The question tore out of me, chased by a sharp blade of panic. “He—”

“Looking for your aunt.”

I stilled. My heart slammed hard. “My aunt? Why?”

Detective Jackson’s smile was the kind that said I was either a total moron—or a world-class liar. “Really, Trinity? You want to do this here?”

I tried to swallow. Couldn’t. “Do what?”

Never looking away from me, he slid a hand into the pocket of his sports coat and pulled out a small plastic bag. “Recognize this?”

Shadows slipped and fell, but not deeply enough to conceal the small silver hoop dangling in midair.
My earring.
One of a pair I’d purchased my first week in New Orleans, when I’d finally been free to pierce my ears.

“Where did you get that?” I breathed.

Jackson’s smile cut straight through me. “I think the better question is, where did
you
lose it?”

Curled around my hand, Chase’s fingers tightened.

“It is yours, isn’t it?” Jackson asked.

My mind raced. I tried to remember, but even as my fingers found the empty spot at my ear, I could find no memory of taking the earrings out.

Slowly I looked up, to the knowing in Jackson’s eyes—and the confusion in Chase’s. “I … don’t know.”

“Oh, but the look on your face says otherwise,” Jackson said, slipping the bag back into his pocket.

Chase stilled. “What are you talking about?”

Jackson smiled. “Do you want to tell him, sweetheart … or shall I?”

Everything around me—inside of me—started to vibrate.
“No,”
I whispered.

“It’s called the missing link,” Jackson said, and his voice was empty, cold, completely stripped of emotion—or reprieve. “And it was found yesterday, about ten feet from Jessica Morgenthal’s purse.”

The walls pushed closer, but I could not move. Could not even breathe. It was happening. Just like I’d said earlier, to my aunt, when she’d promised me I was wrong.

“In the field,” Jackson went on in that same whitewashed way. “Exactly where
you
told us to look.”

The roaring started deep inside, a horrible grinding that drowned out everything … everything except the feel of Chase’s hand, so warm and strong, simply falling away.

TWENTY-FOUR

He backed away, one step, two, until no part of our bodies touched.

Jackson almost looked bored. “
A dream,
you said, but I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, when earrings fall out while you’re sleeping, they don’t usually show up fifteen miles away.”

“Trinity?” Chase said, the desperation in his voice so very, very clear. “
You
told them where to look?”

In my dreams, in my fantasies, there was no desperation. No doubt.

No hand that fell away.

“But maybe the whole thing with the parking garage
was
a dream,” he offered. “That would explain why the surveillance video shows no one but you.”

Chase stilled.
“Surveillance video?”

I looked at him, saw the dark void in his eyes. I tried to make my throat work, to explain, but something inside of me was slowly and methodically shutting down, taking my capacity for speech with it.

“Gosh, she didn’t tell you about
that,
either?”

This time I was the one who took a step back. But words wouldn’t form. Someone had been there. The same someone from the vigil. He’d followed me …

Or had he simply been like the knife and the old lady?

“Or maybe…” Jackson said, drawing out the word. “You were just trying to cover your tracks, like with the Facebook posts.”

The walls, so dirty and old and forsaken, edged closer.
You have the right to remain silent,
was all I could think.
Anything you say can and will be used against you …

“Facebook posts?” Chase asked.

Jackson shifted. “Every computer has signatures,” he said. “Footprints. Everything leaves a trail, and all trails can be followed. It’s all there on the hard drive—the Facebook postings from IWUZTHERE, the research into the DuPont and Roubilet cases, the ins and outs of how psychics operate.”

Chase turned toward me. The look in his eyes—
God
. The scorched look in his eyes destroyed me. “Trinity … what the
fuck
is he talking about?”

“Maybe it was an accident,” Jackson rolled on, before I could force a single word past my throat. Before I could
think
of a single word. “That happens. Things spin out of control. No one is saying you meant to hurt anyone.” His mouth twisted. “She goaded you. Tricked you. Locked you in that small room. You were mad. You wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine. But things went too far. You panicked…”

God, he made it sound so cut and dried.

“You didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said as the ringing in my ears tried to drown him out. “You felt bad. That’s why you came to us with the story about your dreams, like the bystander who helps put out the fires he starts.”

Chase still looked at me, but I could tell he was beyond the point of seeing. “
Trinity.
Tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Why? The word, the question—
the truth
—almost made me double over. But I didn’t ask, because I already knew.

Chase needed to hear.

Chase needed to hear me refute what Jackson was saying.

Chase.
He was the one who needed the words. The denial.

“I can’t,” I heard myself mutter, even as everything else faded. “I did research all of that. I pulled up those stories. I told them about the field…”

All true. All could be proven. And all were completely circumstantial. Even the IWUZTHERE account. If it was there, it didn’t mean I created it. My computer was a laptop. I had it at school. It wouldn’t take long for someone to “borrow” it.

But Chase took another step back.

When I was thirteen, a family from Boston built a place a few miles up the mountain from us. The woman had a daughter from a previous marriage. Her real father was dead, like mine. Her name was Cynthia. She was a year younger than me, and she’d been devastated about leaving the only home she’d known and moving to the wilderness of Colorado. But her stepfather had grown up near Denver, and he’d wanted to come home. The fact that that meant ripping Cynthia from hers hadn’t mattered.

We’d become friends. That summer we did a lot of hiking. She liked to take pictures, so we’d spent a lot of time photographing trees and wildlife.

One night she stayed at my house. We were going hiking in the morning. But she forgot her camera. So after breakfast we went over to her place to pick it up.