Curse (Blur Trilogy Book 3) (16 page)

“I’m sorry.” Mia held up a finger. “Did you just say fifty
thousand
dollars?”

“Yep.”

“That could buy a
whole
lot of Fritos.”

“Yes, yes, it could.”

“So, then, we’ve got some things to look into.” Nicole ticked them off on her fingers. “First: Who’s Marly Weathers? Second: What’s Gatlinburg Holdings? And third: What do any of these things have to do with Malcolm Zacharias?”

“If anything,” Kyle said.

“Yes. If anything.”

“Man.” Mia was shaking her head. “We are talking a
lot
of Fritos.”

“Focus,” Nicole told her. “Remember? Daniel? Missing? Your friend? I’ll take social media. Mia, you hit Wikipedia. Kyle, Google.”

“A Dr Pepper to whoever comes up with the best stuff,” Kyle told them.

“But you’re the only one who likes Dr Pepper.”

“Then I hope I win.”

“How about if I win I get to keep that debit card,” Mia suggested helpfully.

“Focus.”

“Right.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

1:00 P.M.

8 HOURS UNTIL THE DEADLINE

As we drive, Tane tells us about his first blur.

It happened in L.A.

“So, the cops were looking for this guy from my neighborhood. It’s, well, let’s just say I don’t live in a gated community. A drug deal had gone bad and a guy got shot. He was in rough shape.”

“Did he make it?” Alysha asks.

“Yeah, he survived, but cops were searching everywhere for the shooter. I’d been following the story, you know, online. Also, this friend of mine had a police radio so we were listening in on that. And then suddenly it was like this voice in my head was telling me things I shouldn’t have been able to know. I saw the guy who’d been shot. He was lying right in front of me in the road—I mean, I wasn’t there, I was with my buddy in his room, but I saw it like I would’ve if I was really at the site of the shooting. And everything became clear.”

“Clear?”

“The voice told me to go to this one abandoned building we used to hang out in. I didn’t have an
y
idea what I’d find.”

“But you went?”

“Yeah. Turns out, the shooter was holed up there. I ended up finding the guy and I had to decide whether or not to turn him in.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I figured if he’d already shot one person, from there on out it would just get easier to shoot others. So in the end, I called the cops. And they got him.”

When he was done, he asked Alysha to tell us about her blurs. “If you don’t see anything, how does that work? Is it like your dreams? Your nightmares, where you hear or touch things?”

“I guess. Sort of. I hear people speaking, snippets of conversations, sometimes frightening noises, and then I have to piece it all together to make sense of it. That’s how I helped find this girl from Billings who’d been kidnapped. She was twelve. Pandora Hutchinson. And she—”

“Hang on.” I don’t mean to interrupt her, but the girl’s name catches me off-guard. “Did you say her name was Pandora?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“It’s just that the myth of Pandora’s box has been on my mind the last couple weeks.”

“Weird.”

“Another coincidence,” Tane says.

“If coincidences even exist.” Alysha shifts in her seat and her leg brushes against mine. “I think stuff always happens for a reason, even if we can’t tell what it is at the time.”

“Like with the story of the Chinese farmer’s son?”

“Maybe. Yeah. So, well, with Pandora—she lived near me and I was listening to the news stories about her. I didn’t go into a trance or anything, but it was like I could hear someone in a coffin and she was crying out and she said his name, the name of the guy who’d taken her, and then buried her. It was almost like I could imagine myself being there, trapped in that coffin, in her place. The scent of cedar. The sweat. The dirt falling between the cracks and landing on my face. Everything.”

“Did they find her in time?” There’s a slight chill in Tane’s voice.

“Yeah. Thank God. I was at school when I had the blur. I started screaming. Freaked everyone out. The public safety officer came to help me. I kept repeating the kidnapper’s name and the cop recognized it—I guess they’d already questioned the guy once but then let him go. He was a checkout person at the grocery store where Pandora’s family shopped.”

Alysha takes a deep breath, then lets it out as if she’s trying to help herself relax. “They went to his house and found a shovel with some type of soil on it that led them to the part of the county where she was buried. They were able to use details from my blur to locate her. It was all over the news afterward. I think that’s how Malcolm first heard about me.”

“So that was your first one?”

“Yes. There were people who were sa
yi
ng I was ps
yc
hic, but that wasn’t it for me. It’s not supernatural or paranorma
l—a
t least I don’t think it is. It’s just that m
y
blurs, the
y
help me hear things I wouldn’t normall
y
be able to hear and when I decipher them, there are answers embedded inside ’em that I hadn’t even realized I’d pieced together.”

I nod in agreement, but then realize that, of course, she can’t see me doing it. “It’s the same for me. So do either of you have any history of this sort of thing happening in your family? Any mental illness? Depression, or—”

Malcolm’s phone rings, the same chiming tone as before.

Senator Amundsen.

I answer. “Hello?”

“Ever
yt
hing alright with the driver? You’re on
yo
ur wa
y?
”

“Yes.”

“Listen, I was thinking, is there anything I can do here that would help you out when you arrive? Maybe to facilitate the visions to help you find my daughter?”

“Well, it’s probably the same for Petra, but we can’t make the blurs—or the visions, whatever—come on command. We only experience them when our minds have images, sounds, details to work with. So as much as you can tell us about her would be helpful. Also, pictures, videos—and especially any info you have about what happened when she disappeared.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with.”

When I’m off the phone again, Tane, Alysha, and I talk through our family histories. They know about a few cases of depression and even schizophrenia among their relatives, but we can’t identify any one specific thing that all three of us have in common, other than the fact that we were all going through a stressful time when our blurs first began.

“Before you two came to the center,” Alysha says, “Malcolm told me that he couldn’t explain for certain why my hallucinations had started, but that adolescence is a time of tremendous change. I mean, obviously it is—developmental, physical, hormonal, all that. Our brain’s physiology is developing at an astonishing rate and any of those factors, or a combination of all of them, could be the deciding one. He said he didn’t know what was most important in causing the hallucinations. But he did mention what he called the honeybee factor.”

“What’s that?” I ask her.

“He encouraged me not to think of the hallucinations as being genetically caused, but instead that I was just genetically
predisposed
toward having them. Then, whenever I encounter the right environmental cues, they kick in. Like with a bee sting—
y
ou never find out if you’re allergic until you’re stung. Having a reaction, well, it’s partly who you are, partly being at the right place at the right time—or the wrong one, depending on how you look at it. Some people are allergic but are never stung so they never find out. He said the hallucinations require a convergence of genetic predisposition and environmental cues. That’s part of what makes all this so rare.”

Huh.

Genetics. Family history. Environmental cues. Analytical thinking.

All pieces of the puzzle, one by one falling into place.

Along with pain and tragedy.

Rips in the fabric of reality.

The conversation trails off as we each take some time to process things.

After a little while, Tane yawns a few times, and not long after that, soft snoring drifts from the front seat.

While he rests, I quietly watch Georgia pass by outside the window and Alysha repositions her leg again, softly brushing it against mine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Dr. Adrian Waxford received word from General Gibbons that her flight would touch down at the
McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville at 4:51 p.m.

That meant that, even with the time it would take to pick up her rental car, fight through Knoxville traffic, and drive up into the mountains, she would probably still arrive at the Estoria Inn by seven.

That should be plenty of time to show her around and then get her on her way to a hotel for the night before Senator Amundsen sent out the email at nine.

Now, as Adrian waited for Henrik to bring in Malcolm Zacharias, he went to see how the newest arrival was adjusting to life at the Estoria.

The man formerly known as Ty Bell was beating his chair desperately, yet futilely, against the one-way mirror.

Adrian watched until the subject finally gave up, collapsed in the corner, buried his face in his hands, and began to weep.

Hmm.

Interesting.

Perhaps he was a little too mentally unstable right now for the Telpatine test.

Zacharias, then?

That was a possibility.

But the more Adrian thought about it, the more he realized that the most profitable test, the most ideal candidate, would be one of the kids that Henrik mentioned were at that center in Atlanta.

With their hallucinations, it would be remarkably instructive to watch how they reacted to the drug. It could provide him with far more pertinent data than a test on someone who did not experience those altered mental states.

He decided to see how things played out, but if there was any way he could test the Telpatine on one of those teens before Sergei found and killed them, it might save him months of research.

“Okay,” Kyle said to the girls. “What do we know?”

Mia went first. “If
yo
u believe Wikipedia, Marl
y
Weathers is a reclusive billionaire who lives somewhere in upstate New York.”

“Why wouldn’t we believe Wikipedia?”

“No one really knows who Mr. Weathers is. There’s speculation Marly is really a woman.”

“That bank lady on the phone seemed to be confused that I was a guy. They had it listed as Ms. Weathers. So, who knows?”

“Yeah, well, anyway, the foundation is only a couple years old. Same with Gatlinburg Holdings—it was started two years ago. On the surface it looks like it’s some sort of investment firm that also promotes—wait, let me pull it up.” She went to the site and read, “‘We support the community through peer-led education and advocacy programs that equip the next generation to make a positive impact on society.’”

“Does it say how the programs work?”

“It’s mainly stuff for students in the Smoky Mountains. Field trips. Nature hikes. Like that. There’s an educational center. But there’s more: They also do work to stop mental illness in teens and abuses in the juvenile justice system.”

“That’s random for a nature center,” Nicole said.

“Right—I thought the same thing, but all the money comes through this investment firm. I guess it fits, I don’t know, but I think I win that debit card. I’m craving some Fritos.”

“Didn’t we just eat?”

“You can never be too full for a Fritos.”

“Shouldn’t that be singular? Like a Frito?”

“There’s no such thing as a ‘Frito.’ Fritos is a brand name. Can I just see that bank card for a sec?”

“Not so fast.” Kyle turned to Nicole. “What about social media?”

“Nothing so far on Malcolm Zacharias—which is sorta weird. I mean, I can’t find
anything
on him—at least not based on what we already know he looks like from seeing him last winter. There’s some stuff on that Gatlinburg educational center Mia was talking about and the foundation in Philly. Both seem to be pretty open about what they do, but not really into lots of publicity. What about you?”

“Basically confirmed what you two came up with, except I also found some more stuff on Waxford. Since Zacharias was interested in stopping him, I thought I’d look him up just in case he had anything to do with all this. Probably a dead-end, but there were rumors he was searching for a site in Tennessee to continue his research.”

“Interesting.”

“So where does that leave us?” Mia asked.

Nicole looked at them thoughtfully. “Well, like you mentioned earlier, Mia, Philadelphia is out of the question, but . . . Gatlinburg is what—only a couple hours away?”

“Probably more like three or four,” Kyle answered. “Why?”

“Pull up the site for the educational center and check their hours.”

Mia did. “It looks like they close at six thirty in the summer. Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“See how far it is to Gatlinburg.”

Kyle consulted his phone. “Almost two hundred miles.”

“Wait.” Mia flagged her hand in the air. “Slow down. And
why
exactly would we drive two hundred miles to this nature center?”

“Think about what else they do,” Nicole said. “Research into mental health for adolescents—that fits with Daniel. And they also work for justice reform.”

“And that fits with Waxford,” Kyle said.

Mia shook her head. “It’s a stretch.”

“Also,” Nicole added, “wasn’t the group that Malcolm works for trying to stop Dr. Waxford’s research on prisoners? I mean, that was one of his major deals when he showed up in Wisconsin in December, right?”

“What are you suggesting? We just pop up there to Gatlinburg and start questioning people?”

“We’ve got the debit card, the address in Philly, the email and the possible connection to Dr. Waxford. The center does educational programs for teens. We’re teens. We want to be educated. Voila.”

“Can’t we be educated from here?”

“We’re not going to find Daniel by waiting here or randomly driving around Atlanta. I know it’s a little bit of a haul, but there’s still time to get up there and make it back tonight—if we leave soon. This is the most solid thing we have.”

Kyle wasn’t sure exactly where he stood on all this yet so, at least for the moment, he sat back and let the girls sort things out.

Nicole started to pace. “Let’s say we head out and maybe the campus cop guy calls us and tells us they found Daniel. So, awesome! Then we just turn around and come back. But if we wait, we won’t be able to get up there today to check things out before the center closes. If there’s anything we can do to find Daniel, anything at all, we need to do it.”

“And a phone call wouldn’t suffice?”

“How far do you really think that would get us if someone from there did take Daniel?”

“And contacting the cops?”

“With what we have here? Seriously? We can’t even prove that Malcolm Zacharias exists.”

Mia looked at Kyle, who shrugged. “She does have a point.”

“I hate it when people have points,” Mia muttered.
“Alright. Lemme go talk to m
y
aunt.”