I Will Come for You (23 page)

She couldn’t hear them, but as she watched expressions change their faces and the fluttering movements of their hands, reality began to dissolve behind a new image.

Alana, a teenager with long limbs and halter top, on the beach with a young man.
He had dark hair, was tanned and tattooed. Alana was babysitting them and they had gone to the beach, which was routine, but the guy wasn’t. Natalie didn’t know him. And in the brief glimpse she got, he was standing over Alana, his face flushed, his mouth peeled back, but the words shattered before Natalie could make sense of them.

It was a memory though. She was sure of it. Her memories had a different feel from her visions. They floated in her mind as they played out and then slipped into place, a perfect fit. Visions had sharper
edges, they came layered and piled up until they dissolved in real time.

The path joined another, this one curving toward the polic
e station. Natalie followed it, climbed the three stairs and then paused at the entrance. Glass doors. The station wasn’t here when Steven was killed. Natalie had been to that building, which had been closed—no windows and the door had been a slim opening of scratched wood.

The doors slide open with a soft, mechanic whisper.

Graham Marquette paused and stared down at Natalie. In the watery sunlight she noticed

how
his teenaged features had filled out. He was bigger, stronger, walked with his shoulders pressed forward. He had always been a straight line, destination determined. He had stopped long enough to make sure Lance and Steven, and even Natalie on occasion, were headed in the right direction.

“Did you remember something?” he asked.

“I was at the library,” she began. “I read a few of the articles from August 1997.”

“It’s amazing,” he said, “that we know little more now than we did then.”

“What’s your plan?” she asked. “If you do find him?”

Not every vision she had panned out. Things could change. A person’s will was often a factor.
And maybe the vengeance she’d felt didn’t belong to Graham at all. Maybe she’d  cast her own emotion into the images that had come to her.

Graham took another step, so that he didn’t tower over her. She saw the fatigue on his
face, felt his body heat almost as a burn.

“I’m going to arrest him,” he said. “What would you like me to do?”

She ignored his question. “I would like to help you do that.”

“How?
Have you remembered something, Natalie?”

Pieces.
But that’s not what he wanted to hear.

She closed her eyes and let herself fall backwards into memory. Alana appeared again. First, the way she looked today, her dark hair pulled by the wind, the collar of her red coat
flapping, but then she shifted, layers peeled away to reveal the Alana who baby-sat them, sitting cross-legged in a chair in the living room of their beach cottage, her fingertips pressed to her knees, her eyes closed, her body wavering. The Alana who had spooked Natalie and her brother. The image lingered until Alana’s eyes snapped open and chased young Natalie up the stairs. Then place shifted and it was still the teenaged Alana, but she was walking through tall grass, her arms bared by the short sleeves of a yellow t-shirt, swinging at her side, and as Natalie watched, her hand appeared in Alana’s. Eight year old Natalie walked along the bluffs above Pirate’s Inlet. Alana tugged gently at her, the sea air was damp, and Natalie was crying.

“Natalie?” Graham tried to pull her back to the present.

“Alana,” she said, puzzled with the image, with the sense of dread building behind it.

“My ex-wife,” he said, his voice breaki
ng over Natalie’s concentration.

“Our
baby sitter,” Natalie pointed out.

Graham nodded.
“But not that day.”

“No,” Natalie agreed. “The day after, though. She came for me.”

Graham shifted on his feet, pushed his hands into his pockets. Tension made his shoulders lift.

“Why?”

“We walked along the bluffs, above Pirate’s Inlet,” Natalie revealed.

“The cove,” he agreed.

Natalie looked for and found the threads of her memory. She followed it, trailing behind the image of herself and Alana, listening to their words, though they were far away and twisted by the wind.

“‘
He won’t wake up, Natalie,’” Alana had said. “‘Neither of them. I tried.’”

“She said that?” Graham pressed.

Natalie’s eyes were closed but she felt him move, descend another step so that he was standing beside her and there was only a breath of air between them.

“Natalie,” he
prompted, his voice above a whisper but no more. “You remember this?”

And Natalie looked down, to where the toes of her sandals pressed against the grass, to where inches away lay the bodies of her brother and Lance Marquette.

“Yes, she said that. She took me out there.” Natalie tripped through the last images of the memory. “She left me there.” And the last words Alana had spoken to her before today,

“‘
Can you help them, Natalie? I can’t.’”

Natalie opened her eyes and got caught up in his steady gaze
. “It doesn’t make sense. But she was like that sometimes. Distant.” She looked over his shoulder, reaching for the right words, for an image, a piece of the past. Nothing more came. “Disconnected. She wasn’t always a hundred percent, you know?”

“I know.”

“She thought I could do it. Wake them up.” Alana believed it; Natalie had heard it in the depth of her voice.

“She doesn’t do well when reality takes a nose dive into hell.”

“She was crying,” Natalie remembered. “She asked me to fix them.” Natalie felt pressure build in her throat, her voice thicken and she paused to collect herself.

“Post traumatic stress,” Graham explained. “Some people who have experienced trauma, who can’t receive the reality of more, they close their minds to it, believe the situation can change.”

Natalie nodded. “It’s not like that for us.”

“No,” he agreed. “I’ve neve
r been able to distance myself,” he admitted. “But I want to now.” His face grew somber. “This thing between us—” he lifted a hand between them, “this awareness. It’s not good.”

“I know.”

“We can’t follow it.”

“No argument
here,” she said, but heard the breathless quality of her voice.

“But you feel it.
” He lifted a hand and caught a strand of blond hair from the wind. “It’s seductive, the closer I stand to you, the more alive I feel.”

“Yes,” she agreed, because that was it, the word she
’d been looking for. As though, through Graham Marquette, Natalie could experience a rebirth. “And I want it. You. But I know we’re not going there.”

And that it wasn’t re
ally life he offered but death.

He nodded and tucked the hair behind her ear, the tips of his fingers learning the curve of
that soft shell. It caused Natalie to tremble and the breath to catch in his throat.

“You’re r
ight. We’re not.”

“So stop touching me,
” she said.

He took a step back and Natalie regrouped, inhaling deeply an
d running a hand through the hair he’d just held.

“I was never smart about these things,” he admitted.

“Relationships?”

“Or anything close to it.”

“Maybe it’s part of the survivor’s syndrome.” She’d never had luck with love, either.

“So you’ve done some reading, too.”

“And some therapy. When I was younger.”

“Did it do anything for you?”

“For some of us, it’s hard to choose between life and death.”

He nodded his agreement, but then said, “I have a son.”

“And so that makes it easier?”

“It makes staying grounded the only choice.”

“Maybe I should try that then.” But it wasn’t something she ever really considered. And

wasn’
t that unusual, at the age of twenty-four, to never have thought about children of her own?

She
returned to the subject of their brothers, their deaths, their pursuit of closure.

“How did Alana
know our brothers were on that bluff?”

Graham shifted,
but didn’t immediately follow her lead. For a long moment he watched the emotions at play in her expression, confusion and doubt among them. And then he said,

“The police questioned
her, back then. Mostly about where she thought the boys could have gone and then, after they were found, about anything suspicious she might have seen.” He shook his head. “She never mentioned it. By now she’s probably forgotten it. It’s easier that way. For her.”

“So we’ll never know?”

But Graham disagreed, “Sometimes talking to Alana is like talking to a small child. She’ll go around the subject, repeat things, but little pieces fall out. And sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes the pieces make sense, when we look at what we already know.”

“Which is?”

He expelled a long breath, but his eyes didn’t waver from her face. “There have been ten victims, Natalie. You know that now?”

She nodded. ”The news programs are pretty thorough.”

“We have a theory,” he said. “But Lance and Steven, they don’t fit into it. Not yet.”

“But they will.”

Graham nodded. “All the others do,” he confirmed.

“But it troubles you,” she said.

“They were kids.”

“And what could they have done?” Natalie agreed. “It
doesn’t make sense.”

“Violence never does,” he pointed out. “And our brothers, included in this group of people, under this theory, I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.”

“And you’re not going to share that theory?”

“Not yet.”

“I want to know why.”

“Maybe you already do
. Maybe it’s up here.” His hand hovered beside her head. The wind picked up and streamers of her hair tangled in his fingers.

Natalie nodded. “I’m trying.”

“That’s why you’re here,” he agreed. He retreated another step, breaking the tension that touch had placed between them, and pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat. “I’ll talk to Alana.”

Natalie pulled the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder.  And she would talk to Doss. He was right when he told her she would seek him out. He had answers. She believed that.

“Saul Doss,” she said and watched Graham’s face tighten.

“Do you remember him?” he asked.

“Yes. He came to the house, after our brothers were found. My father wouldn’t let him

in
.”

“We investigated him,” Graham admitted. “But there was nothing connecting him. No way
he could have been in two places at one time.” But his tone fell short of confidence.

“You don’t trust him,” she said.

Graham shook his head and then changed direction, “Do you remember anything else?”

Natalie felt the urgency behind his words
.

“About Doss?
No.”

“About anything?”
Graham pressed. “You remember now seeing the boys dead—when was the last time you saw them alive? What were they doing? Who were they with?”

Natalie raised a hand between them and took another step back. His words ha
d picked up speed and caused a play of images that were spiraling inside her head.

“Slow down,” she said. She felt the warm, soft tissue of memory behind her and sank into it, wading in a few inches at a time, searching. But memories are slippery and she didn’t surface with much. “They were headed to the beach. They always were,” she admitted. “They had their bikes and swords. It was still morning and they were zigzagging down the street.” She smiled with the memory. “A truck came upon them and stopped. I couldn’t hear them. But the boys stopped too and said something to the
driver, they laughed and then pedaled away.”

“What did the truck look like?”

“Two tone, blue and white. Not new.”

“And the driver?”

Natalie shook her head. “Too far away.”

“Male or female?”

She tried to listen again to the voices, drifting just out of reach, but the tones were soft, light.

“Female, but I’m guessing.”

“This is all good.”

“Being on the island is helping.” Her words were slow as she hesitated over the earlier memory of Alana and the man she had stood with in the surf when she should have been watching them.

“What?” Graham asked.

“There is something else,” Natalie said. “But I don’t know if it’s important.”

“Tell me.”