Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy (4 page)

One by one, I picked out the items on the list and did some searches. Okay, okay. Ghosts at the Abrams farm were probably a stretch. But I looked up everything I could find on hallucinations, and I didn't think I was hallucinating when I saw all that stuff.

Wikipedia said, “A hallucination is a perception in
the absence of apparent stimulus that has qualities of real perception.”

Huh? Did Angel write definitions for these people?

The rest of the article explained that hallucinations could come from seizures and infections and drugs and falling asleep when you thought you were awake and migraines and staying in dark rooms too long and brain tumors. I rubbed the sides of my head. Brain tumor. That would be my luck. I clicked on another article.

About halfway down, I found “Flashbacks vs. Hallucinations,” looked up “flashback,” and read aloud, “A sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of a past experience.” Wikipedia again. Yep. Angel had a job waiting for her in the future, writing articles for Wikipedia.

I read about flashbacks on two other sites and figured out that the word meant reliving bad stuff from the past. That made me think of Captain Armstrong, when he thought he was back in the desert still fighting in the war but he was really standing in his driveway trying to pick up his newspaper, remembering scary things.

Except, how could I be remembering something I had never seen?

My head hurt.

Maybe I did have a brain tumor.

I clicked off the web browser and uploaded the pictures of the Abrams farm to get my mind off hallucinations
and flashbacks and Captain Armstrong and scary war things and brain tumors, but they didn't help much. They reminded me of disaster movies where the camera sweeps across endless fields of everything splatted and exploded. The only thing missing was the doomy-boomy music.

Most of the shots captured ashes and melted stuff. All the black char made me shiver.

Fire. The farm, burning. Cissy and Mom . . . What did I see?

Those flecks—

I shivered, then rubbed my eyes to make that image go away. I had to rub my ears, too, because they were buzzing again.

When I looked up, all I could see were my closed white blinds. I was sitting at the desk in front of my bedroom window, but I always kept the blinds closed and the windows shut at night. I couldn't shake the feeling that something would jump through the darkness and get me.

Was that normal? I picked at the bows on my nightgown.
Am I on the way to getting sick like Mom?

No. I smacked my ears until the buzzing stopped. Not happening. Not going crazy. I was fine.

But I saw things at the Abrams farm. Images that couldn't have been real.

Maybe they were real. Maybe they were flashbacks, not hallucinations.

“No,” I said out loud this time. I had to rub my arms to keep from shivering again. It was stupid, feeling so cold when it was spring in Mississippi and already hot even with air-conditioning.

I clicked through a few more pictures. More ashes. More soot. I printed the first one and made a note on it.

The next picture was the same, and the one after that and the one after that. I didn't know how journalists and detectives did it, looking at pictures of crime scenes over and over again. These shots only had burned-up wood and farm tools, not bodies and blood or horrible stuff, and my brain already didn't want to keep studying them. Maybe I wasn't cut out for journalism, either.

I ticked through pictures of skeleton house boards
and scorched trees, then some shots of the area closer to the woods. Normal trees. Grass so green, it almost hurt my eyes. Then I found the corner of Angel's pink dress, and one image of her sunburned knee. We were thorough investigators—but effective? Not so much. We had a long way to go before we'd be one of those teams people made television shows about.

I shivered all over again when I got to the picture of the brush where I thought I had seen someone hiding, right after my hallucination or flashback or whatever that had been. There was nothing in the brush but trees and leaves. So that wasn't real either. It was just me being chicken about stuff jumping at me through the darkness.

It wasn't something I talked about much, being scared of the dark. More like what was in the dark that I couldn't see. I always thought something had to be there, something awful and dangerous that vanished when I finally made it to a switch and flooded the world with light. Sometimes it was hardest and scariest to see what was right there beside you—what had been there right beside you all along, waiting to snarl and bite you and eat you whole.

My chest got tight from just thinking about how it felt to get stuck in a dark room and have to run for a switch. “I'm a great big baby,” I muttered, tempted to turn off my lamp and pull up my blinds and make myself stare out the window into the night until I just got over it.
I had tried that before, lots of times, and it never worked. But I kept doing it whenever I could find the courage, because maybe the next time I'd make it past the panic and I wouldn't be a baby anymore.

When I stood, my legs shook. I glanced at the picture of the brush where nobody was hiding, then switched off the lamp. Then I went and opened the blinds really fast, before I could wimp out. The second they opened, I stepped toward the desk.

Well?

If something did jump out of the darkness and bust through my window like a rabid fire-breathing lizard on a rampage, I wanted to give it some space.

Quiet pressed into my ears as I stared out the inky glass. If Mom had been home, she would have had the television on in their bedroom, watching true-crime documentaries or gathering recipes off cooking channels. Sometimes she listened to music, and sometimes she played movies. Silence was never a problem when Mom was here.

But Mom's not here.
I hated that so much. Tears tickled my eyelids, but I ground my teeth until they went away. I had already cried enough after I got home, and Dad said Mom would be gone for a while.

A moth smacked against the window, and I almost peed myself. I said something I'd get grounded for if Dad heard me, and closed the blinds as fast as I could. It took
a minute before I could breathe enough to stalk back to my desk, click on my lamp, and throw myself into the chair. Still a baby. That completely sucked.

I squinted at the picture of the brush, too ticked off for words—then I squinted harder. My fingers flicked across the laptop keyboard as I pulled the picture into the edit window, cropped it, and magnified it. Again.

And one more time.

I couldn't be totally sure, but right at the edge of the brush where I thought I had seen somebody standing, Angel had snapped a photo of a shoe. It looked like a black tennis shoe, the kind grown men wore.

I sent the photo to Peavine's phone with the note
that look like a shoe 2 u??

Almost immediately, his text tone sang out, and I read,
Kinda. Whaddya thnk?

sumbdy wz watchn.

Who?

dnt knw. the serial killer?

A few seconds went by, then Peavine texted that he had to go to bed.

My eyes shifted from the phone to the picture to the window. My stupid baby brain told me the darkness outside was just like a poisonous copperhead, trying to slither around the edges of my blinds to bite me. Would it get me put in some hospital in Memphis if I glued the blinds to the sill?

Peavine's mom was great, but I wished she would let him stay up later and talk to me. What should we do with the picture? If I showed it to Dad, he probably wouldn't think it was anything important. It was just a shoe. I couldn't even see if there was a leg in it. It might have been a shoe with no person attached to it at all. It wasn't like the police could do anything with a photo of a shoe, right?

What would a good journalist do to make sense out of this mess?

A good journalist would write.

But I didn't know what to write. I didn't even know where to start.

Finally, I opened a document to the side of the photos
and typed a list of what I knew for sure about the Abrams case:

1. Old Mr. Abrams got shot, and nobody knows who shot him.

2. The Abrams farm got burned to the ground, and nobody knows who set the fire.

3. Cissy and Doc might be dead or alive, and nobody knows where they are.

After I stared at it a while, I added some possibilities.

4. Mom might have been there.

5. I might have been there.

6. Somebody might have been watching us while we searched.

7. I might be crazy.

Great. Peavine and Angel and I had gone to the farm to search for clues and solve some of the mystery, but we ended up finding nothing but more questions.

I closed the computer lid, switched on the night-light near the foot of my bed, then turned off the lamp. To prove I wasn't a complete baby, I sat there studying the blinds, making sure the darker darkness didn't try to get inside.

After a while I got in my bed. Then I got back out of my bed, took my pillow and blanket, and got under the bed instead. For some reason, I didn't want to close my eyes. I didn't want to sleep. I definitely didn't want to dream about anything. What if the dreams turned into
hallucinations and I couldn't wake up? What if—

“Mom?” I tried to breathe but coughed instead. My room smelled like something on fire.

I got out of bed too fast, tangled my feet in my bedspread, and fell to my knees. My hair swung against my cheeks, making me shiver. It was wet. Why was my hair wet? It wasn't a bath night.

“Mom?” I got up and fought my way out of the bedspread. The muscles in my belly hurt, like the time I lifted Dad's weights too many times. Nobody met me in the hall outside my room. Silence hung like smoke in the house. No television. No Mom. No Dad.

My heart thumped in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I ran to the hall light switch and flipped it on. Yellow light blazed in a long strip, but darkness still crowded out of my bedroom and the guest bathroom and my parents' room. Fast as I could, I turned on those switches too.

“Mom!”

Nobody answered. My ears hurt from listening. I shoved open the door to the master bathroom, but nobody was there, either. The closet—no people in there. Out in the hall again, I ran to the kitchen.

Where was Mom? Dad should be home.

Lights. I had to turn them on. Kitchen. Pantry. Living room. Basement. I hit the switch at the top of the stairs, and something rattled down below.

I froze.

Air whistled through my teeth. My fingers dug into my palms. The muscles in my throat ached from wanting to yell for Mom again.

But what if that's not Mom . . .

Downstairs in the basement, a door closed.

I backed up so fast, I tripped over my nightgown and pitched backward—

My eyes popped open as I swung my arms, trying to keep my balance.

I was standing totally still in the dark, in front of the kitchen sink. A whimper slipped out as I jumped forward and flicked on the light to break the blackness before it reached for me.

What was I doing in the kitchen?

As I eased down from my toes where I had stretched to hit the light switch, my heel ground into something wet that crinkled. I jumped and picked up my foot.

One of my school drinks lay on the floor, where I had crushed the pouch. Nothing much was left in it, though, or it would have made a bigger mess . . . to go along with the chip wrappers and pieces of bread on the floor.

Had I been eating in my sleep? I had heard of sleepwalking, but sleep-eating? Really? My heart slowly moved from gallop to trot, then on down to walk. Little by little, I managed to breathe normally, even though I couldn't tell if my belly was bigger than usual.