I Will Come for You (19 page)

“I don’t want breakfast.” She lifts a hand and presses it against the window pane.

“
No saner words have ever been spoken. Not on this floor,” the nurse replies, and stops in the middle of the room. “I have something better than breakfast.”

Graham steps forward before the nurse can continue. “Natalie, I’m Graham Marquette.” His voice travels slowly, snagging on objects in the room. “Lance’s brother.”

Natalie turns around. “Lance,” she says and smiles. “My hero. They both were, you know.”

Graham nods. “I know.”

“They liked that.”

And Graham feels it. Her smile for sure, because it’s real and warm and captured within it are memories they both share.
But also how right she is. The boys loved playing heroes.

“I’m here for them,” she says.
“For Steven, but there was no separating them.”

“No,” Graham agrees. “They were best buds.
Sunrise to sunset.”

Natalie nods and folds her arms under her chest. “Why are you here?”

“I saw your name on the ship’s manifest,” Graham says. He steps closer. He can’t escape the impression that Natalie Forrester is ethereal, more light than substance. She was like that as a child, too, had that quality of drifting, never weighted by words or tied to place. Her brother and Lance were her only playmates back then, and she existed on their peripheral, content to observe and absorb.

“And you were in no hurry?”

Her smile this time is slightly chiding and it makes his skin burn. Her gaze is a direct hit. This is a bravado he doesn’t remember. She was a timid child and he doesn’t think she ever said more than two words to him those summers on the island.

He shifts on his feet.
A nervous gesture. An amateur response to the tension building between them. It makes his jaw tighten, his blood thin and his heart beat faster. The truth is, something about Natalie rubs sinuously against his skin. He feels it as a physical touch, as bold as two bodies entwined. It enters his pores, the way sponge seeks moisture. For him, she’s a danger, a quick but uncertain fix. And he’s been waiting for her, knowing the whole time that any kind of reunion would be explosive.

The
survivor’s connection. It has to be. He read plenty on it. He knows the perils of getting too close to another ‘left behind.’ And yet he’s drawn to Natalie, attracted to her the way darkness chases light.

Graham turns to the nurse and asks her for a few minutes of privacy. He waits for her to clear the door before he turns back to Natalie.

They know each other through loss, its complicated geography. There’s no escaping the intimacy and yet he shies away from its serrated edge.

“I’ve be
en busy.” He clears his throat, which is suddenly patchy. Swallows, but almost chokes on the emotions lodged there, because losing Lance is staring him in the face. A living, breathing memory of it. “I’m Chief Constable in King’s Ferry now. I run the task force charged with apprehending the man who killed Lance and Steven.”

But Natalie already knows this.
“And seven others. Or is it eight?” She waves a hand toward the television, which is on but muted. “It’s all over the news.”   

Graham nods. “The killer’s back,” he confirms.

“And you’re no closer to catching him.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“He leaves very little of himself behind,” Graham says. “He
knows the island well, slips on and off easily—”

“He’s a shadow,” she says.
Her hands flutter, as pale as the wings of a dove, and settle on her arms, rubbing them through the thin cloth.

“Feels that way.”
A dark, menacing shadow. “We’ve tried not to involve you in the investigation. You were so young. You couldn’t remember anything back then, or even a few years later—”

“But I do now,” she says.
“Small pieces.” She shrugs. “Maybe nothing yet.”

Her voice is thin, her words wall
ow in uncertainty, but he pursues them anyway. “What have you remembered?”

He steps cl
oser, into her space, and doesn’t stop until he’s wrapped in the halo of her body heat.

“Flashes.
Light and sound. The tall sea grass and the wind. It’s howling. But the day Steven and Lance died was sunny. Too bright. And the ocean was calm.” She tips her head back and meets his gaze. “It doesn’t make sense. Yet. But Steven is there, and so is Lance. And we’re not alone.”

“We need more than that.”
A face or a name. “We need something concrete.”

“And that’s what you came for today—my memories.”

Her lips tremble and Graham watches, fascinated, as his fingers lift and trace the shape of her mouth. “Don’t cry, okay?”

Touching her creates a static
hum in his fingertips. The air is thicker. His muscles tighten. His physical response to her shouldn’t be a surprise. Attraction among survivors is a natural development but leads only to increased anxiety. Another tidbit he picked up from grief counseling. Survivors grope for the life-affirming, sometimes anywhere they can find it.

B
ut understanding his primitive reflexes doesn’t do anything to dampen his arousal. He steps back, stuffs his hands in his pant pockets, and watches her thoughts become expression on her face.

“You said that to me before.”

Outside the local market. When she was seven or eight and was left behind when Lance and Steven took off on their bikes.

“And you didn’t.”
Although she wanted to. Her lips trembled then, too, and her blue eyes filled with hurt.

“I won’t now.”

Because nothing hurts as much as losing Steven.

“I need your
memories, Natalie,” he confesses. He hates himself for it. He would walk through fire before he chased the unraveling ribbons of his connection to his brother. “There is no other way.”

“I want to help.”

He nods. “Then keep working on it.”  

“I think I’ll remember more when I get back there, to King’s Ferry,” she says. “The

closer I get to Steven the more I remember. The more alive he becomes.”

“You can’t bring him back,”
he warns. He already traveled that road, looking for Lance. “And you can’t stay there with him.” There’s no life in it.

“But I can let him go
,” she says. “That’s what I came here to do.”

He nods, but knows there’s no escape.
She’ll carry Steven with her like an extra piece of luggage for the rest of her life. Sometimes carry-on; sometimes a trunk so heavy it will take more than one to lift it. There is no other way.

“You haven’t been able to do that.”

“No,” he admits.

“And that’s our bond.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

Graham
turns toward the door, that bond she mentioned pulling at him like a bungee cord. But there are other pieces to work, other leads snapping at his fingertips. “When are they letting you out of here?”

“I’m waiting for the doctor,” she says.

“Come see me.” He holds the door open and looks back at her. “When you remember.”

“When I have something concrete,” she clarifies.

“When you have anything.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Monday, 10:35 am

Natalie followed the black ribbon of Highway One around a hairpin curve and then pressed the accelerator a little too hard. The rental car jumped into warp speed and Natalie’s head jerked back against the seat. She wasn’t used to driving a vehicle as powerful as the BMW; her Dakota was good for hauling the tools of her trade, not for going zero to sixty like she’d entered a time machine. The BMW was the only car available at the lot on such short notice. It cost double the price of the compact she’d asked for, but then she wasn’t the one paying the bill. She’d called her insurance agency that morning and they would file a claim with the ferry company to cover the expense of her truck and its contents. They would also pay for the rental.

After a sleepless ni
ght on the psychiatric ward at Victoria’s Queen’s Hospital, during which she’d conducted an exhausting search through her mental state, the scenic drive was comforting. So were the conclusions she’d arrived at just before dawn.

She would not let it bother
her, that she saw things others didn’t.

So what if she now had a prophetic gift? It was having a profound impact on her life, yes. It meant changing the way she saw events. But it didn’t mean she had to shelter herself from humanity. She was not going to become one of those fugitives from society, who lived in a cabin
in the woods and ordered her groceries over the internet.

The Bible was full of prophets, and while some took journeys into isolation, they always
surfaced into a sea of humanity where they found a comfortable, even esteemed existence.

Natalie didn’t plan to announce herself to the world, but she decided if she embraced who she had become she would live a lot easier inside her own skin. Anything was better than doubting her sanity.

She accepted that Michael had come to her after death. He had spoken. Warmth had emanated from his body and he had been very real. She decided Michael had appeared in a manner in which her mind could accept him. And his message had been clear: Natalie was here with a purpose.

She wondered if every supernatural event she experienced was connected to King’s Ferry and her brother’s death. If so, who was the dead man in the woods?

And how did the ferry’s sinking fit with all the other pieces?

She slowed the sports car as a flashing caution sign
announced an upcoming intersection.
Entering Sidney.
According to the directions given to her by the clerk at the car rental shop, this marked the halfway point on her way to King’s Ferry. She continued north, with the Pacific Ocean thundering ashore to her left and towering pines and firs crowding the sky on her right. The coastal freeway wound around marinas where white boats bobbed at their moors and gulls swooped and plucked breakfast from the water. Her body recognized the feel of the island and she found herself relaxing into its rhythms before she reminded herself that the calm she sensed was not to be trusted. Not everything was as it seemed.

Not even Graham Marquette. He had come to her wanting help, with a gentle manner despite his urgency, but that conflicted with the vision she
’d had of him in the woods that day, when staring at the dead man. There was no mistaking it. Graham Marquette fired the gun, a white-winged bird flew from the muzzle, and another man lay dead. Natalie sensed menace in

t
he vision. She felt the intent.

Graham Marquette didn’t w
ant justice; he wanted revenge. And he wasn’t going to stop simply with the capture of the man who had killed their brothers.

S
hortly after Graham left her hospital room the future had spoken again, with a collection of images dark and violent in nature.

Vengeance wa
s blinding. In his case, it seemed others would die. Natalie among them. She didn’t completely understand the vision—it was hard to look at yourself dead, the focus wasn’t sharp—but she knew it was coming.

Nor did she understand
her response to Graham Marquette. He had touched her and awareness bloomed. She’d felt each callous on his fingertips, the heat of his breath. He had stood close to her and she’d
known
the size and shape of his body. It was recognition on an elemental level, but more about where each of them had been than where they were at that moment. And Natalie had wanted to stay right there, where she knew the terrain. Where she found a soul of similar circumstances and a
knowing
no one else could give her.

But she wasn’t here for that. She had a purpose. And the closer she got to Kin
g’s Ferry the stronger her determination to unearth answers and bury Steven.

She pulled into the turn lane for Malahat Drive, which would connect her to the heart of King’s Ferry, and waited for the light to change. Her to-do list was on the passenger seat and she let her eyes linger on it. The first several items were completed. She had clothing and cash and she no longer need to seek out Graham Marquette. When she arrived in King’s Ferry she would get breakfast and then
find Saul Doss. If he was alive. She hadn’t seen him floating in her vision. She hadn’t seen him at all after that last look upwards, when he’d stood on the second after deck.

She no longer had his business card. She had shoved it into her pocket, but of course it

was a clump of semidry scraps by the time she’d pulled it out of her coat at the hospital. She would have to look through the local directory. And if that didn’t work, she’d ask around.

She wouldn’t rely entirely on Doss for help. She didn’t trust him. After Doss, she would
search the archives at the public library. She remembered few details of her brother’s death; newspaper coverage could fill in what she never knew and jar loose memories that were deeply hidden.