I Will Come for You (16 page)

She decided to stretch her leg muscles. Her body had taken the plunge into the strait rather well. She didn’t feel bruised, only slightly freezer burned.

Natalie passed an open door. Her eyes were drawn into the darkness. A young man lay in bed, propped up on pillows, his face and torso bathed in the light from the TV. A white strap, fitted under his arms, kept him upright in bed.
Or maybe just kept him in bed. He must have felt her eyes upon him or sensed her presence in his door, because he looked away from the TV and called to her.

“You want to come in? It’s comedy night.
Old reruns of
Saturday Night Live.
”

Natalie shook her head. “No.
No, thanks.”

She took another step forward and heard his voice rise and smash against her ears, “Come on, luscious lick, you know you want to give me some.”

Natalie was stunned. She stood mutely, watching as the nurse at the desk lifted her head and regarded her.

“That’s Peter Varney,” she said. She closed the chart she was looking at and placed it on the desk. “It’s not safe, coming out of your room after hours.”

“After hours?” Natalie asked.

“After visiting hours.
They usually end at eight-thirty. Mr. and Mrs. Tierney are a special case.” She nodded at the couple in trench coats who were paused now in front of the solid, metal door at the end of the corridor. “They drive here all the way from Catachikan to visit their daughter.”

The nurse approached Natalie, the rubber soles on her shoes
squeaking on the sanitarium-like floor.

“I needed to get out of there,” Natalie said. “I was getting cabin fever.”

“You want a magazine to read?”

Natalie shook her head. “I’d like to walk a bit.”

“We can’t let you do that,” the nurse said. “You’ll stir up the natives.” Her thin laughter wrapped around Natalie’s throat and pulled until she was working a little harder for air. She turned Natalie around with a hand on her elbow. “We have everyone tucked in now. Some of them don’t like it.”

“Tucked in?” Natalie was beginning to feel like she was given a heavy sedative. Pieces of this conversation were not making sense, and some of it was taking on frightening implications. Why couldn’t she move around?
Or, for that matter, walk right out of the hospital? She was an adult, complete with all freedoms.

     “Yes.
Down for the night. It’s where you should be, too,” the nurse chided softly. “I know you’re new here and it’s hard to remember all the rules. That’s why we start you out with just a few.”

“I didn’t know there were special rules,” Natalie said.

“Did the evening nurse miss you on rounds? I’ll check your chart, see if we can give you something to calm your nerves.”

“My nerves are fine,” Natalie insisted. “I’m just not used to sitting still for so long.”

“I’d love a week or two to just sit still,” the nurse said.

“I won’t be here that long.”

They were nearing Natalie’s room when the door next to it opened and a young woman in a cotton gown stepped out.

“I can come out if she can,” the woman said. “Dr. Ferguson says we don’t play favorites around here.”

“We don’t, Carmelita,” the nurse agreed. “And she’s just heading back to her room now.”

Carmelita eyed Natalie with hostility. “She was out of her room.”

“Yes, she was, and now she’s back in.” The nurse nudged Natalie forward, toward the threshold of her room. Natalie resisted.

“There’s been a mistake,” Natalie said. “I’m only here until tomorrow. I was on the ferry that sank, but I’m as good as new now.”

“Then you better get your sleep. Tomorrow is a big day.”

“This is a psychiatric hospital, isn’t it?” Natalie asked.

“Not the whole hospital, just this ward. Now, in you go.”

Natalie braced her hands against the framing around the door.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No one comes here on purpose.” The nurse stepped back and sighed. “I’ll make you a deal. You get in your room, and stay there, and I’ll take a look at your chart. I just came on shift
and I suppose anything is possible.”

Natalie pushed back the fear that threatened to overwhelm her, stomped on the realization that she was completely at the mercy of hospital staff; dammed up the voice in her head that was
now wondering if any of this was real. Had she been aboard a ferry that sunk? Had her brother died on this island sixteen years ago? Was her name even Natalie Forrester?

She walked into the room, seized by a quiet terror that threatened to rip her apart. She expected to hear the door slam shut behind her, to hear a key turning in the lock. That didn’t happen. Natalie went back to the pacing that did nothing for her earlier.

Was her whole life one hallucination? Suddenly, it seemed that all of her visions made sense. She was crazy. As crazy as her neighbors on this soft care ward.

But she didn’t believe it.

She felt solid. Rational. Sleep had restored her belief in herself. Even the things that had happened, that she couldn’t explain with reason, were explained by understanding her mind was in crisis. She was reacting to dramatic circumstances.

The nurse popped into Natalie’s room. She was holding a chart and smiling so big that Natalie thought the nurse’ mouth could swallow her whole.

“You’re right,” the nurse said, and her tone made it clear that she was as surprised as a dog in a tree. “Natalie Forrester. Room five-oh-three. Look,” she said and held the chart for Natalie to see. In Bold red lettering it said: ‘NOT A PATIENT OF THE PSYCHIATRIC WARD.’

“Really?”
Natalie said.

“Really.
We were short of beds,” the nurse revealed. “We had more than a hundred patients come in from that ferry accident. Seven of you took beds here.” She laughed, a light and airy sound now. “Think of that, I was ready to fill you up with diazepam.”

Chapter Nineteen

Sunday, 11 pm

Isaac doesn’t usually wait up for his father. He knows processing a crime scene takes hours and the fact that this one belongs to the King’s Ferry Killer means that his father will stay long into the night, supervising the collection and control of evidence. Isaac sits in the living room, flipping through stations on the TV, and watches the clock. He can’t call his father too soon; he’ll be busy, stressed and impatient to get off the phone. But Isaac doesn’t want to go to bed until he hears his father’s voice, until he knows for sure how his father feels about Isaac’s gift.

He doesn’t like it. Isaac is pretty sure about that. It scares his dad, that Isaac defies time and place, that he ministers to the dying. His father is most comfortable with facts. He understands the spiritual, embraces the idea that they were made by God and that when you’re troubled, He’s the One to turn to. But he means through prayer; not by tripping into another realm. His father respects the beliefs of others, but has little time for what he calls fantasy. Isaac watched his dad temper native talk of returning spirits and star-guidance with casual, noncommittal remarks. He does not think outside the box.

And that’s too bad, Isaac thinks. Because the only way to get the King’s Ferry Killer, the only way to make the island safe again, is to think and move in a realm his father refuses to believe exists.
The realm in which this evil thrives. A realm not too unlike their own reality,

where
good and evil coexist and the innocent are prey.

Except that his father saw, with his own eyes, Isaac caught between parallels of time.

Isaac can help him, if his father will let him. If Isaac can find the courage to face evil, to fight it, to either finish it or lose his life to it.

He may never get a good look at the killer’s face, he may never be able to pick the guy out of a line-up, but Isaac has a feel for him. When in his presence, the world is still, silent; the air is heavier, almost no oxygen at all, but the sudden evaporation of it. If Isaac doesn’t sense him when he’s out among the citizens of King’s Ferry, there may be a way to track him. The killer waited for Isaac,
then he lured him upstairs and into the nursery. He used innocence, and Isaac’s calling, to get him up those stairs. Maybe Isaac can play evil the same way, maybe he can bait and hook the KFK. Maybe he won’t have to wait until they meet again over the body of another victim.

Isaac is always too late.

He wants to do more than usher the dead into the world beyond. It’d be nice if he could stop a few from making that journey too soon.

Jeremy was only a few years older than Isaac. He didn’t even have the chance to graduate from high school.

On the TV a commercial segues into the start of the late night news and Isaac sits forward on the couch. He presses the mute button and frees the audio. The King’s Ferry Killer is top priority, though reporters don’t know yet that he struck again. But they suspect it:

    
“. . .the home is flooded with police and just moments ago the coroner arrived. This doesn’t look good, King’s Ferry.”

Live footage of the house takes up the full screen. Police cars are parked in the gravel

drive way; a black van, from the forensics lab, is perched on the front lawn. Reporters press against the police barricade. All the windows in the house are lit from within, a clear, yellow glow that Isaac will always associate with the color of fire; the color that burned his eyes when he tried to look directly at the evil salivating over the baby’s crib. That thickness in the air returns; he breathes slowly, sure he swallowed a butterfly; its wings flap in his throat. His skin flushes with heat. When he returned from the house he had Jeremy’s blood on his hands.

He looks at them now, as stained as they were when he knelt beside Jeremy. The blood is back. Isaac washed his hands after his father left his bedroom, then left the house, calling over his shoulder that he was on his way to Deschuetts Road. He washed them with soap and hot water. He watched the blood flow down the drain until the water ran clear and his hands were clean.

He stands up, deciding to wash at the sink in the kitchen, and begins walking towards the back of the house. He feels again, that sensation of someone sifting through his mind, peeling through layers of memory, searching. 

Saul Doss is spying on me, Isaac thinks. The old man found a way into his mind, but not into his active thoughts. Not yet.

Or maybe it isn’t Doss. Maybe it’s the KFK. Just thinking about the killer could have brought him here. They communicated that easily in Callen’s Cross, with Jeremy’s body still warm in the room downstairs.

Isaac tries to shake the feeling. It’s too much like his mother. Towards the end, before her diagnosis and medication, his mother’s best friend was paranoia.

That’s not what I’m feeling, Isaac thinks. I’m not scared. Creeped out, yeah. Anyway, he senses a presence inside his head the same way he knows evil has arrived before it shows itself.

That’s real.

He pads over the ceramic tile in his bare feet. At the sink, he turns on the taps and squirts dishwashing liquid into his palms, but his attention is caught by his reflection in the window. He looks the same. The same as he did when he woke up that morning: hair a little too long, freckles that make him look like a preschooler. He lets his eyes fall from his face to his shoulders, to the collar of his flannel shirt which is open and reveals his neck and a terrible gash that should be life draining. He’s wearing the wounds of Jeremy Kroeger.

Chapter Twenty

Monday, 6:20 am

Graham is standing in the foyer when the medical examiner wheels out the body of Jeremy Kroeger. The black bag conceals the work of the King’s Ferry Killer, but Graham won’t forget how death settled slowly on the boy. On discovery, perhaps thirty minutes after Kroeger died, his skin had a bluish tint and the puddle of blood around him was purple. The next time Graham stepped into the room, the teen’s skin was white, glazed and almost translucent, even his lips and nail beds appeared bleached. The boy’s hazel eyes were flat from loss of body fluid. An hour ago, rigor began its steady pursuit of small and large muscle, fixing the boy’s stare and freezing his mouth in an open, quizzical manner.

Graham thinks about Isaac. His son appeared before this boy, remained at Jeremy’s side until his last breath was drawn, and then Isaac returned, with the victim’s blood on his hands and an explanation that challenged Graham’s tenacious hold on reality.

If he was thinking like a cop, Graham would have swabbed Isaac’s hands, gotten a sample of the blood to compare to Jeremy’s. Not because Graham thinks Isaac might be involved in the boy’s death, but because Graham would like to prove that it wasn’t Jeremy’s blood after all. That Isaac was nowhere near Deschuetts Road at the time the KFK took his tenth victim.

Isaac was home when Jeremy Kroeger was murdered. He did
his homework, ate dinner and showered. And Graham is his alibi.