I Will Come for You (20 page)

The traffic light changed and Natalie moved slowly through
the intersection. She kept to the posted speed limit and let her eyes dwell on the scenery. A revitalization had moved through this part of King’s Ferry. The buildings were short, weathered structures with new paint and cheerful trim. Windsocks and kites were suspended in the air outside a novelty store, some rainbow colored, some with the carved faces of ancient ancestors whipping overhead in limited fury, tied, as they were, to rooftop pegs.

When Natalie was here as a child she and Steven had been beach bums. They had flown kites and dug for treasure, snorkeled the inlets, peering through masks at the rocky bottom and the shadows of what they knew had to be old shipwrecks.
Steven had found a ship’s compass in the murky bottom of the bay. He had surfaced with it in his hand, waving it above his head, because it’d been a trophy. Their first and only piece of real treasure.

Natalie felt the shadows shifting in her mind, a little light seeped into forgotten moments. Kite flying and windsocks and wind chimes made out of seashells. She reached backwards for the memory and the image of a single face bloomed in her mind’s eye, grew larger until it exploded, its torn pieces cascading through the air like fireworks. Saul Doss. Not so weathered, his hair black and thick and straight and all the way to his shoulders. And now Natalie realized that they had met more than once. On the ferry he had been testing her memory, and he had
lied to her.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Monday, 11:00 am

Natalie stopped for breakfast at the OK diner in King’s Ferry. The sky was pale gray and misting. She remembered from her summer trips that day had started early on the island and lasted long into the evening.
That the light didn’t wane before nine pm. And that the morning fog, if it was going to burn off, did it by noon so that the sky became the clear blue of tumbled stone. She’d loved her summers here--right up until the last one.

The diner was located on the main strip of town. There were art galleries and touristy gift shops, seafood restaurants and a trendy coffee shop popular in the states. Natalie sat at a booth next to a window and looked at the traffic bunching up at the intersection as she waited for her order. She remembered this street, though some of the shops were new; others were remodeled to keep up with the façade of a quaint coastal village.

She knew differently. King’s Ferry wasn’t the destination families craved when they thought of quality time together, building memories and experiences. King’s Ferry was dangerous, dressed to look innocuous, but underneath evil hovered. It never really left.

She now believed that the man in the
woods, murdered and left for discovery—
her
discovery—was connected to this place. Finding him had revealed her gift and moved her in the direction of King’s Ferry months before she’d made the conscious decision to return.

It was when she’d stood in front of his corpse that Natalie had her first vision—
Graham Marquette had fired his gun and the wings of a dove had opened.

It didn’t make sen
se. She’d felt vengeance in the vision, but the dove was a symbol of peace. She’d felt urgency in Graham when he’d visited her earlier. She’d felt compassion and the buzz of an attraction better left ignored. But no darkness. 

The man in the woods was murdered in a manner very different from the way Steven had died. She wondered about that.

Could there be two killers involved?

According to the news, a total of ten people had become victims of the King’s Ferry Killer. Had they all died the way Steven had?

A cut throat and grass the color of wine. The image is sudden, the clarity sharp. Steven’s body lay in the tall grass above the ocean, his Power Rangers t-shirt torn and his life drained.

She had stood over him, so absorbed with fear it had made her body useless. The loss swelled up inside her again, became
a heaviness in her throat. She gasped for breath.

Was she with Steven when he died? Or was the memory of finding him?

She sat back, pressed her fingertips to the edge of the table, and drew a long breath that caught in her throat.

She came for that reason—to find out. To finally know what happened to her brother. She
wouldn’t leave until she had at least that.

“Here you go.”

The waitress slid a plate in front of Natalie. An ocean omelet—stuffed with crab meat,

spinach
and cheese. Two days of hospital food had made her feel like a starved cat, but remembering Steven squashed that. She nudged her fork with her fingertips, looked up at the waitress and smiled, though she felt a small tremor in her lips.

The waitress placed a bottle of ketchup on the table. “You need a refill?”

Natalie considered her glass, half full with Coke.

“I’ll take a coffee.”

“I’ll bring cream,” the waitress said. “You sound like you’re from California. Usually, you want cream. Sugar substitute, too.”

“Real sugar,” Natalie corrected. “I don’t do the fake powder. If I’m going to take up a bad habit, it’ll be smoking, or drinking myself into oblivion.”

She laughed, but it sounded rough.

“I hear you on that,” the waitress agreed. “We could all
use a few drinks around here.”

Natalie watched as the waitress moved toward the coffee station, grabbed a ceramic mug from a rack and filled it with the brew. Then she turned her attention to the omelet she’d ordered. The cheese had melted and was oozing out the sides. Her stomach spoke up, begging for a bite. She took three by the time the waitress returned with coffee, cream and a sugar bowl.

“You’re here at a bad time, you know,” the waitress said.

Natalie nodded. “I saw the news.”

“This is no place to be if you don’t have to,” she said and pulled at the white dish towel hanging from her apron. “Don’t be going out at night by yourself,” she warned. “Don’t go anyplace there aren’t other people. You ask me this town should be under curfew, at least the next few days anyway. You know, they should have locked this island up real tight when Miss

Iverson turned up dead.”

The waitress walked away, the towel slapping the side of her leg.

“She’s right.”

Natalie looked up. A woman hovered at her table, literally wavered, and Natalie wondered if it was a trick played on her by the lighting. The gloomy sky was casting its pall through the windows and the interior lamps, suspended from the ceiling, were dull.  She examined the woman, from her dark, curly hair, over the quilted, red trench coat she wore, down her jeaned legs. She was shifting on her feet. No play of lights; the woman seemed nervous. Natalie looked into the woman’s face and noticed her eyes. They were large and soft; Natalie saw sympathy in them and recognition.

“Natalie Forrester.” She reached a hand toward Natalie’s face, almost close enough to touch the crescent shaped scar under Natalie’s eye with her fingertips. “I told you not to
play too close to the jetty.”

When Natalie was seven years old she’d tried to follow the boys as they hunted treasure on an old, abandoned jetty. She’d fallen and it had taken seven stitches to clean up the damage.

The woman stuffed her hands in her pockets and asked, “Do you remember me?”

She hadn’t, until the woman had spoken. Now she felt memories shift in her head.
Sunshine and shadows. Incredible warmth and a chill so determined it charged down Natalie’s spine.

     “I baby-sat for you and your brother,” the woman prompted.

     “Lanie,” Natalie said. She had stayed with them at night, when Natalie’s parents went out to dinner. A few times, Lanie had watched them a full weekend, when Natalie’s mother and father traveled to another part of the island. She had let them stay up late, rushing them into bed when they heard a car pull into the drive way, telling them to pretend sleep just before she closed the bedroom door and took the stairs two at a time. She had sat on the floor with them and played long games of Clue and Sorry. But Natalie also remembered that Lanie had occasionally shown up different. Distant, but something more than that, really. She would not talk to them. She’d sat for hours in the living room without moving. Sometimes she fell asleep sitting in a chair, her legs curled up under her, her hands gripping the arm rests. She and Steven were so spooked they’d climbed the stairs to the bedroom they shared during the summer months and locked themselves behind the door, never speaking above a whisper for fear they’d wake her up. Lanie had never hurt them, but her behavior was so odd, they’d wondered about the ghost stories they’d heard on the island and if Lanie could be one of them, one of the after dead.

Natalie almost laughed aloud. She and Steven had had wild imaginations.

“That’s right,” the woman interrupted Natalie’s thoughts. “You do remember. It’s Alana now. I’ve grown up. So have you.” She nodded at the booth. “Can I sit?”

“Sure.”

Alana seated herself across from her, then folded her hands on the table and stared at Natalie.

“You haven’t really changed much,” Alana said. “Your hair got darker. You and your brother looked like angels.
Pale, pale hair, like sunshine.”

Natalie heard tears gather in the other woman’s voice,
then Alana shook her head. She curled her hands around the edge of the table.

“I’m really s
orry about Steven. I never got the chance to tell you that. I wanted to tell you. I went by the house a few days after he was found, but you were gone. You never came back.”

“There are only bad memories here,” Natalie said.

“Really?” Doubt flickered through Alana’s eyes. “You and Steven had a lot of fun those summers. There was a lot of good here, too.”

Natalie nodded. “It’s hard to see beyond losing Steven. My parents were never able to. They never considered coming back here.” Her mother started running when they were still on the island, when Steven’s body was wrapped and packed into the simple wood box for travel home. She didn’t look back. And Natalie’s sole reason for returning was to find closure, to
figure out what had happened that last day, and to get justice, if it was to be had. She wanted to look forward, too. “Miss Iverson was a school teacher?”

Alana’s lips twitched and then her mouth opened in nervous laughter. “My son had her for the fifth grade, you know.”

“She was murdered,” Natalie said.

“She raised ladybugs in an aquarium in the classroom and in the spring the kids set them free. She was delightful.”

“She was a victim of the King’s Ferry Killer,” Natalie tried again. “Why?”

“I try not to focus on the ends of things,” Alana said. “That’s totally negative. It erases everything the person was. It reduces them to ashes, really. If I let the endings have value, then what would I think about my marriage, my inability to properly mother my son? Why think about f
riends in the past tense?”

Natalie wished she could think about Steven alive, running through the tall sea grass, the wind pulling at his hair, his laughter like music. She wished she could completely forget that he had ceased to exist and pretend that he was still with her. She knew memories did that, when they were allowed to. They kept the person close, breathing. Warm.

“But why her?” Natalie pressed.

“There have been a lot of murders here,” Alana said. “You’ve been gone a long time, Natalie, but the killer never left.”

“I just want to know why.” Natalie sat back in her seat. “But no one seems to have that answer.”

“That’s right. You always were a good listener,” Alana said. “I used to watch the way you listened to a person, hearing what wasn’t said. It’s kind of sneaky, really.” Alana slid to the end of the booth and stood. “You’re right, you know. No one has that answer. Not even my husband—ex-husband—the great
constable.” Alana laughed. It was sharp and shredded her voice. “But for sure, Steven wasn’t the end. He was the beginning.”

“I know that now.”

“You knew all along.”

“But I did
n’t—”

Alana’s face softene
d again and her voice dropped, “I know you’ve forgotten, and I don’t blame you,” she said. “But they weren’t alone in the end, Natalie. That should comfort you. It does me.”

Alana’s voice drifted slightly out of reach as Natalie fell backwards in time.
They weren’t alone
. Not alone. Natalie had always known this. She didn’t know how, but she believed it the way she believed in sunrise. She searched for a memory, would welcome a vision, but nothing came.

Alana turned and wove through the tables. When she got outside, she moved close to the window where Natalie sat and smiled. It wasn’t a gesture full of menace, as Natalie expected, but an expression of sheer joy. She lifted her hand in a small wave and then strolled down the street,

her red coat pushed back and flapping in the wind.

She recognized that something was off with Alana but didn’t try to puzzle it out. She was more concerned about what Alana had revealed.