Ghost Trackers (4 page)

Maybe.

“I got a phone call not too long ago,” Amber said. “From Greg Daniels, if you can believe it.”

For a moment, he didn’t have any idea whom she was talking about, but then it hit him. “You mean
our
Greg?”

He remembered that Amber had been kindasorta friends with Greg, while he and Drew . . .

Whatever his next thought was, it vanished before it could coalesce in his mind. It was as if he had walked right up to the edge of a memory, and then,
poof
! It was gone. Weird.

He told himself not to worry about the vanishing memory. It had been fifteen years since he’d thought about Greg Daniels, after all. The memory would return to him in time.

Right. Like your memories of what happened that night in the Lowry House
.

“What did Greg want?” he asked. “To take a long-distance stroll down memory lane with you?”

“Not exactly.” Amber filled Trevor in on her conversation with Greg.

“I can see why he’d want to attend the reunion,”
he said when she was finished. “I mean, it’s everyone’s fantasy to go to a high-school reunion and rub your former classmates’ collective noses in how happy and successful you’ve become. But—and correct me if I’m wrong—it sounds as if he’s got you thinking about going yourself. Not that that’s a bad thing,” he hastened to add.

“He
did
get me thinking,” Amber said. Her tone changed, became kind of dreamy and distant. Trevor had never heard her quite like this before, and he wondered if she was on some new kind of medication. “It would be nice to see you again. And Drew.”

“Drew’s going?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But he might, if
you
talked to him.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Amber, but going to a high-school reunion doesn’t”—he searched for the right words—“sound like your kind of thing. When did you become a fan of nostalgia?”

“I told you that I’m not interested in helping you do a book about the Lowry House. But I’ve been thinking that maybe revisiting the past, at least in some small way, might not be a bad thing. I’ve tried medicine and therapy to help me deal with the nightmares, and they haven’t done much good. The only thing I haven’t tried is going home.”

When Amber had turned down his first request to work on a Lowry House book, Trevor had decided to pay her a personal visit. It had taken
some convincing to get her to agree to see him, but she did, and they met for a coffee at a Starbucks near where she lived. He’d been shocked by her appearance. She’d been so thin, so frail-looking. But what struck him even harder was the way she acted. She’d been full of energy and life in high school, but that day, she was nervous and withdrawn. He had no idea if doing something as simple as going to the reunion would help return Amber to her previous self, but if there was any chance at all that it would . . .

“All right. I’ll give Drew a call, see what he says.”

“Great!” she said, displaying a hint of enthusiasm for the first time since their conversation began. “Thank you so much, Trevor!”

“No sweat.”

They said their good-byes and disconnected. He selected Drew’s number from his cell’s contacts list but didn’t call right away. He’d been glad to hear some life in Amber’s voice when they discussed going home, but he doubted that Drew would react quite so positively to the idea. Drew had a sweet gig at a psychiatric hospital outside Chicago, and he’d made it quite clear the last time they’d spoken on the phone that he’d put the past behind him and was determined to keep it that way.

Still, he’d promised Amber.

He was about to call Drew’s number when he saw a man standing alongside the highway not too
far ahead. At first, he assumed that it was someone whose car had broken down, and he thought about stopping to help. But then he realized that there was no car. The man stood by himself, with no vehicle nearby. He then assumed that the man was a hitchhiker and was less thrilled about the idea of stopping. He’d seen enough suspense movies to know that picking up hitchhikers was never a good move, and while he felt guilty for assuming the worst about a man he’d never met, he didn’t lift his foot off the pedal.

As he got closer, Trevor saw that the man was dressed in a black polo shirt and jeans. Hitchhikers should be scruffier than that, he thought. This guy looked as if he worked in an office with a corporate casual dress code—a financial advisor, maybe, or an insurance salesman, who for some strange reason had decided to take a stroll along the highway and had paused to take a rest.

Trevor’s mind flashed to a common paranormal experience people had been reporting for decades: the phantom hitchhiker. The stories varied in some details—the hitchhiker might be male or female, for example—but the basic manifestation remained the same. A ghostly apparition appeared on the side of the road, usually at night but sometimes during the day, standing deathly still, not moving, not speaking. If a traveler stopped to offer the person a ride, the ghost would get into the vehicle, saying little until they reached a certain
destination, which the driver would later learn was the spot where the spirit had died or perhaps was close to the location where its body was buried. In some variations of the story, the driver would pass by the ghostly hitchhiker and find that the spirit had materialized on the passenger seat, as if determined not to be left behind.

Given what Trevor did for a living, it wasn’t uncommon for him to have ghosts on the brain, and as he began to pass the man, he told himself to forget about spectral hitchhikers, and he fixed his gaze straight ahead as he drove by.

Out of the corner of his eye, Trevor saw the man raise a hand as if in greeting, caught a glimpse of a wide grin on his face, teeth a blur of white as his car zoomed past.

He kept on driving, and although he tried to resist glancing at the rearview mirror to check out the man’s reflection, in the end, he had to look. He was not surprised to see the image of the road behind him but no sign of the man in the black shirt.

He knew there was probably a mundane explanation for the man’s disappearance, such as his having stepped away from the side of the road, but it was damned eerie, coming so close on the heels of his conversation with Amber. Even weirder was the feeling he had that the man had seemed familiar somehow. Something about the way he’d moved, and that smile of his . . .

Trevor realized then that he was still holding his cell phone. Drew’s number remained on the display screen, but he hesitated to call it. Despite Amber’s decision to return to Ash Creek, maybe she
had
been right when she’d balked at helping him write about that night at the Lowry House. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to go rooting around in the past.

Then again, he was a reporter. That was what he did, wasn’t it?

He made the call.

“How have you
been doing with your hands, Rick?”

Drew Pearson kept his gaze focused on his patient’s eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was make Rick feel uncomfortable by training his attention on the man’s hands. It was important to make sure patients felt respected and validated while they delivered news, good or ill, about themselves.

The man sitting across from Drew was in his early sixties, bald on top, white hair on the sides of his head trimmed so close to the scalp that pink skin was visible beneath. The lower half of his face was covered with white stubble, and his eyes were tinged an unhealthy yellow. The residents at Oak Grove Wellness Clinic were encouraged to wear regular clothes so they didn’t feel like stereotypical mental patients, but Rick Johansen had been institutionalized for a good part of his adult life, and he felt more comfortable wearing clothing that resembled hospital gowns: a loose gray T-shirt, blue sweats, and slippers.

He sat in a chair opposite Drew’s, his right leg crossed over his left, foot bouncing nervously. Drew was tempted to make a note of the nervous gesture on the pad resting on his lap, but he didn’t want to look away from him to do so.

Rick held up his hands. Each of his ten fingers was wrapped in adhesive strips, and not just on the tips. The entire length of each finger was covered with strips, making Rick’s hands look as if they belonged to a mummy swathed in flesh-colored bandages.

“I’m doing OK, I guess. I put these on this morning, and while I’ve picked at them a little, I haven’t torn any of them off.”

Drew could tell by the tone of Rick’s voice that he was lying, but even if the man hadn’t spoken, the adhesive strips would have given him away. They were all fresh—none of them dirty, none of them with edges beginning to peel away from the skin. That meant he’d put them all on just before their session. Maybe he had been picking at the strips throughout the day and scratching at the flesh beneath, prompting him to reapply them before the session. Or it could mean that he hadn’t worn any until now and had, as usual, been digging at the skin of his fingers, gouging bloody furrows in them. The only way Drew would know was if blood began to seep through the strips as they talked.

Still, he smiled and nodded. “Looks good.” He’d
been working on building trust with Rick, so it was important to take the man at his word—or at least appear to.

Rick smiled, displaying teeth as yellow as his eyes, looking as pleased as a child who had been praised by a beloved adult.

Despite his age, Rick
was
like a child in many ways. He’d been transferred to Oak Grove several months ago, and this was Drew’s twelfth session with him. When Rick had first been assigned to his caseload, the man barely uttered a half-dozen words during a session. He’d mostly stared down at his hands, which he kept in his lap, scarred and bleeding fingers scrabbling at each other as if his hands were a pair of crabs determined to kill each other. Over the course of their sessions together, Drew had worked with Rick to gain his trust and get the man to relax in his presence. Slowly, he began speaking more, and his self-mutilating decreased. Drew was encouraged, and he had high hopes for today’s session. He thought Rick was on the verge of a breakthrough, and today might well be the day it happened.

To look at Rick now, you’d never suspect he’d killed seven people, but he’d done just that in his twenties. He’d been at a family reunion, sitting at a picnic table in the backyard with various assembled relatives. For no reason that any therapist had ever been able to determine, he had stopped eating his potato salad, stood up, walked to his
father’s garden shed, picked up a sledgehammer, and caved in the skulls of seven family members. He’d also wounded three others in the process, one of whom had ended up paralyzed for life. Although he fought with an inhuman ferocity, the surviving men in the family eventually managed to restrain him. During his initial psych evaluation, he had claimed he’d heard a voice telling him to kill his family. In fact, he said he’d been hearing such voices all his life. When asked why he’d decided to listen to the voices after so many years, he’d smiled and said, “Because it made them shut up.”

His obsessive-compulsive self-mutilating had begun almost immediately afterward, as if he hated the hands that wielded the weapon that had killed his family members.

Unsurprisingly, he had been found unfit to stand trial and was committed to a mental institution. He’d remained institutionalized ever since, transferred from one facility to another as the decades passed. He was what some of the staff referred to as a “lifer,” a patient so seriously disturbed—either by his initial problem or by the long years of being confined in an institutional setting—that he’d never be released.

But Drew refused to believe that Rick and others like him were beyond hope. There was
always
hope, even if sometimes it seemed almost impossible to find. He had earned the nickname
“Dr. Die-Hard” because of his stubborn refusal to give up on a patient, no matter how hopeless the case seemed. Some on Oak Grove’s staff attributed this to sheer ego on his part. He had graduated from Princeton with his PhD in psychology at age twenty-five, and by his early thirties, he’d become an acknowledged expert in posttraumatic stress disorder. Other staff members believed that he was deeply dedicated to helping people heal.

If he was asked why he worked so hard to reach those patients whom others believed to be helpless cases, he would have smiled and said, “Because it’s my job.” But the truth was that despite the outward differences between Drew and his patients, inside they were the same, suffering from the aftereffects of encounters with darkness. Deep down, he believed that if he could help his patients, someday he might learn how to help himself.

He was tall and thin, with a narrow, almost aristocratic face whose sharp features were softened by kind brown eyes and a caring smile. His light brown hair was thick and a bit disheveled, as if he’d just woken up from a nap and had neglected to brush it. Doctors at Oak Grove were encouraged to wear suits, but he always dressed casually, and today he had on a dark blue long-sleeved pullover shirt, light blue jeans, and running shoes. As far as he was concerned,
doctors who garbed themselves in professional dress were trying to distance themselves from their patients, using their clothing like armor to protect themselves and keep patients from getting too close.

He believed that psychologists should meet their patients on a level playing field, as one person to another, with mutual respect and openness. To this end, not only did he dress more casually than the other doctors on staff, but his office décor was also relaxed. Two comfortable chairs that faced each other, a bookcase filled with novels and nonfiction books about anything
except
psychology. A desk off to the side covered with unsteady mounds of papers and files. White curtains framing a window that looked out on the facility’s well-landscaped grounds. And covering the walls, framed photos depicting images from small Midwestern towns like the one he’d grown up in. Hanging on the wall behind the patient’s chair so he faced it all the time was a picture of a home that resembled the Lowry House. He kept it there to remind himself of why he did what he did—and to keep him from forgetting any more than he already had about that night so many years ago.