I Will Come for You (26 page)

“I was here before,” she said. “I saw Steven here his last day.
Him and Lance.”

“They were transcending,” he said. “That scared you.”

“They hung in mid-air,” Natalie said. “And they weren’t really here. I mean, their bodies were, but—”

“Their spirits had traveled,” he said. “That’s right. How much do you know about that?”

“Only what I felt when I stood on your porch. I know Steven was here, in your dining room, but I didn’t
feel
him here. Everything that was my brother was gone.”

Doss nodded. “You have good insight,” he said. “You should trust that.
Always. This will be important, with what’s to come.”

“Was he already dead?”

“No. I don’t have the ability to raise the dead, Natalie.”

“But you have a gift,” Natalie guessed.

“Yes. And I was very good at it,” he said. “So good that your father came to work with me. And others, too, from all over the world. But it didn’t last. I stopped believing. And that’s why things went wrong. Terribly wrong.”

“What is your gift?” Natalie pressed.

“Did you know that the human mind is a library full of memories that influence every moment of our lives? Few people are ever fully conscious of this. Less than ten percent of the human population knows enough about memory to utilize it at half its capacity, and even less have the discipline required to sustain advantageous memory.”

“Memories warm the heart.”

“Or terrorize the soul.”

“The choice is ours.”

“In a healthy person,” Doss agreed. “Then I started working with patients at the psychiatric hospital, those who seemed so mired in bad memories they were unable to rise above them. Those who would live otherwise happy, productive lives if they were just able to get past the bad.”

“That’s how we came upon lobotomies.”

“A brutal, primitive practice no longer acceptable in western medicine,” Doss assured her. “But the ability to enter into another person’s mind, to sift through their memories, erasing those that do more damage than good, now that’s an improvement on the quality of life.”

“That’s playing God,” Natalie insisted.

“Or a gift from Him.”

“And something went wrong.” Natalie felt it before he spoke again.

“Yes.” Doss rubbed his face with both hands and then turned those odd color eyes on her. “Back to not believing. To doubt. When I was a believer I had no trouble. The lives I was able to turn around. Just watching those people surface from years of emotional torture. It was amazing. Joyous.”

“You erased the bad,” Natalie said. “You broke into the minds of helpless individuals, wiped out lovers, parents, brothers, sisters, children,
whomever had been lost through betrayal or death or destruction, and left a clean slate.”

“A chance to start over.”

“A robbery,” Natalie insisted. “As much as I loved Steven, and my father, as much pain as their memories give me, I wouldn’t want them taken from me.”

“You’re able to balance the good and the bad,” Doss pointed out. “If you weren’t, could you honestly say you wouldn’t give anything to wake up in the morning not remembering? I don’t think you could.”

“Did my father know about your gift?” Natalie asked. “Was my father working with you?”

“Your father was a practical man. I don’t think he believed in my gift and I didn’t even tell him about it at first. I
disguised it as meditation therapy. I asked him to come to the island to work with me because he was a leader in social reentry. I needed his expertise, to guide my patients. Even though the bad was erased, I couldn’t, in good conscious, release them without some built-in supports. Your father came to the island and counseled those who were ready to resume their lives.”

Natalie nodded, though she felt that Doss was holding back information and that it had something to do with her. “What happened?” she asked. “What went wrong?”

“I tapped into the mind of a murderer.” He seemed to tumble back in time, mentally arriving at the moment he had connected with the killer. “Terrifying. I was stuck in there, inside his mind. His memories were so horrific, they blinded me. I couldn’t feel my way out. No. I stayed in there a long time, cowering among the victims he had slaughtered, hoping he wouldn’t find me.” He sought and connected with Natalie’s gaze. “I forgot that my gift held me out of reach. I forgot, and made myself a prisoner inside this man’s head. I doubted, for just a moment and at a time when the battle was full-drawn. That’s what happened. By the time I found my way out, he had already escaped.”

“What does that mean?”

“His spirit,” Doss explained, “escaped. He found another body and took it for himself. Not a week later, he murdered. Everything I learned about his crime matched what I had seen when inside this man’s mind. The victims were different. Time and place, all different, but method and the drive to kill were the same.”

“He killed Steven and Lance,” Natalie said.

“Yes.”

She wasn’t buying his host theory yet. And who’s to say the spirit didn’t just jump into the first available man--Saul, himself?

“Do you know who the man is?”

“No.”

“Maybe it’s you?”

“I thought so, too. But I can account for myself, and not just place and time for one or two victims, but for every one who was murdered by the King’s Ferry Killer.”

She wasn’t sure yet what it meant to transcend, but she had another suggestion and she wanted to see what he would do with it.

“Maybe you transcended.
Maybe you were “in spirit” for each of the murders.”

“Transcendence is available only to the purest of hearts.”

Natalie let that sink in. Doss didn’t deny the ability to transcend. He didn’t deny his responsibility in setting loose the evil that was claiming lives. He’d reduced his world to black and white. Good and evil.

“Why did the ferry sink?”

Doss shrugged but didn’t meet her gaze. “Old metal.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“It’s not the first ferry to sink, Natalie.”

“I know enough now to count on everything being connected.”

He nodded. “For every action there’s a reaction. For every positive a negative. This can be proven scientifically. But what do I believe?” he paused. “That for every good that transpires, evil is fast on its heels.” He sighs. “That’s an observation, based on sixty-eight years of living.”

“And what do you think, based on your gift?” Natalie persisted.

His voice grew deeper with warning. “It wasn’t an accident. As strong as the force calling you here, is the darkness that would do anything to keep you from uniting. The good are clearly marked, Natalie, as are the evil. And both want to survive.”

Doss kept returning to this idea of unity.

“What did you mean when you said we were assembled?”

“The Holy Trinity
,” Saul said. “It only makes sense that it would take the unification here

on
Earth of those with pure intent to wipe out the evil.”

“
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Natalie repeated his words.

“Yes. The father and son have been here. We were just waiting on you.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Monday, 1:15 pm

Isaac leaves his bike in the street and rolls to the curb. The impact with the black top wasn’t jarring. In fact, he doesn’t remember making contact at all and he wonders if he passed out. He pushes himself up, with his palms flat against the road, pressing into gravel and natural debris, but he doesn’t feel that either. He stands, willowy on his feet and lightheaded. The wind moves through his hair, brushes against his skin, but Isaac doesn’t feel this. His only evidence is the ripple effect it has on his t-shirt. The only thing he does feel is the pain in his chest and he studies it, follows it from the ache in his rib cage, to the burn under his sternum, ending in his lungs. He is not out of breath, just working harder for it. The pain is sharper at inhalation, as though his lungs are held between the fingers of a contracting hand. He decides to sit it out on the curb and pulls his knees to his chest. He tries to take long, shallow breaths, which are easier on his lungs. He wonders what’s happening to him.

He doesn’t believe one of the dying passed illness to him. He is not a filter but an aide.

It’s probably a cold. He hasn’t had one all winter. In fact, he hasn’t been sick since his mother lived with them more than four years ago. He’s due for a few bad days.

He thinks he probably refused to get sick, knowing that his mother wasn’t around to

change
his sheets, heat soup, test his forehead with hers. He’d miss her more sick than healthy, more when he’s sad than happy. Maybe that’s why he refused to dive into all that high-strung emotion, the what-about-me a lot of the kids at school moan about. Isaac’s parents aren’t the first to split up; Isaac isn’t the only kid at Langston Middle School  who was left behind. He
is
the first kid he knows about whose mother fell off the deep end, though. In a town as small as King’s Ferry, and when your father is chief constable, everyone knows about it, no one talks about it, not to your face, anyway, and there’s no changing history.

It is what it is.
             

Isaac waits until his heart is beating normally, until his lungs expand with only the memory of pain, before he gets up, grabs his bike and starts pedaling again. He pumps slowly, knowing the bluffs aren’t going anywhere. The bluffs where his uncle’s body was found along with that of another boy, both cut at the throat and left to die.

Isaac rounds a corner and dips into a series of slow, twisting hills that will bring him to the cliffs over Deep Bay. He can see the ocean from here, sparkling under the sun. Sail boats tack out of the bay; farther out trawlers bob on the current, harvesting catch. He pauses, inhales deeply to test his lungs and settle his mind. He has to live in the moment, focus on feeling out the KFK, and he can’t do that if he’s swamped with sadness about his mom. He knows he can rely on his perception, if it’s not colored by emotion. He’ll pick up on changes in the environment, if the air grows darker, heavier with present evil, he’ll know he’s close. If it turns suffocating, he‘ll know he’s not alone. If it lays like a patina over the sea grass and sand, he will know that it passed through the area, but a long time ago.

Isaac starts forward. The numbness is fading. He feels his hair stir as he faces the wind. The thin cotton of his t-shirt stretches against his skin. It’s like the slow wearing off of Novocain; he doesn’t have full feeling yet, but he will soon.

A two lane ribbon of black top separates the cliffs and the ocean from houses built into the hills like lookout towers. Isaac passes turnouts where tourists can stop their cars and take photographs, and several public access parking lots before the land turns primal, thickly covered with sea grass as tall as he is. Erosion causes abrupt departures in the jagged line, where the drop to the sand below can reach as long as seventy feet.

Isaac stashes his bike and immediately encounters a wood fence in the style of old western horse tie and a sign that
warns in words and symbols that exploring beyond this point of safety could be hazardous. He pushes past them.

He’s walking ten minutes, parallel to the water, when the quality of the air shifts. It grows heavier. A haze seems to drop upon the area, dimming the strength of the sun. Goose bumps break out on Isaac’s skin, but he pushes forward, into a growing darkness that casts undulating shadows over the wild sea grass.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Monday, 1:45 pm

Graham is at the white board again, staring at the words until they blend and become nonsense. He drew a circle and planned to write Alana’s name in it, but once he did that suspicion would be cast and something like that had the tendency to leave a milky film over a person, even after they were cleared of the crime. He wasn’t ready to do that. Not to Alana. Definitely not to Isaac. So he makes a mental list of all the people with whom Alana had ties. He limits it to men. To characters who are shaky at best. The trouble is, Graham didn’t know Alana back then. They were separated in high school by a year, with Alana graduating before him. He remembers her as a dark, willowy beauty who seldom showed up to school. Graham spent his time on the field or in the batting cages. When he was in class he was in the books. He had girlfriends and attended football games and dances and he tries to remember if he ever saw Alana at one. And if so, who was she with?

He doesn’t start when the door opens. He doesn’t turn
. He and Carter separated in the parking lot, after returning from Oakes’ autopsy, with Carter muttering something about carrying the stink of the dead around like after shave.