I Will Come for You (30 page)

No one who remembers more of Alana’s calm than her craziness.             

“You walk a fine line between order and chaos.”

“I’m pretty good at it.”

“But it took practice.”

He nodded. “A lot. My father couldn’t do it.”

“It’s something you have to learn young,” Natalie agreed.
“Like becoming Houdini. Learning to disappear.”

“You can do that?”

“I think I started the day Steven died. It was easy. Before that, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my father to notice me.”

“He ignored you?”

“He reared me. Don’t ever get that confused with raised or nurtured or loved.”

“What’s the difference?”

“My father was a social psychologist. He applied all he knew about raising kids to me and my brother, and no heart.”

He pushed his hand back into hers. When she looked down at him he shrugged.

“Compassion,” Natalie said. “That’s your true gift, isn’t it?”

“I was chosen for it.”

Most people could fill a thimble with their concern for others.

“I don’t think that prowling murder scenes is going to lead u
s to the killer,” Natalie said.

“Do you have a better idea?”

She nodded and looked over Isaac’s head to where the cliffs ended abruptly and the wind

stirred
up white caps in the water. Doss’ cottage was perched on the beach, several hundred yards west of where they stood. In Natalie’s mind, all roads led back to him. It was where it started. It was where it would end.

“Follow me.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Monday, 2:55 pm

Graham finds Isaac exactly where Doss said he would be, on the bluffs overlooking Deep Bay. He is standing beside Natalie Forrester. The wind lifts her wheat colored hair, ripples through her clothing, makes the movement of her arms seem fluid. She places a hand on his son’s head, through his hair, and smiles. What he remembers best about Lance and his summer friends is this, exactly. They seemed made of the sun and sea and wind. They were happy kids, whose feet never seemed to touch the ground. They were up at sunrise, took the day by storm, and their only limitation was darkness descending.

When it came, it was profound. It never lifted. A pall was cast over the island that day and like a heavy fog, Graham moved through it not knowing what lay beyond.

Graham stops the cruiser on the side of the road, cuts the engine and slides out of the SUV. He thinks about the things Doss showed him and wonders about Natalie’s role in the capture of the King’s Ferry Killer.  She, like Graham, is more than a survivor. She witnessed the murder of her brother; Graham suspected this all along and Doss confirmed it.  But Doss made it clear that there was something more developing, that the three of them—Graham, Isaac and Natalie—would come together to defeat the killer. And that it can be done no other way.

Graham no longer doubts Doss.

The things Doss showed him. Dark, crouching images of victims, some already wounded and begging for salvation, others running, hiding, discovered by the killer. Graham watched it all from the eyes of the predator. He sensed the killer’s hunger, his corporeal need for the kill. It made him sick. He wanted to vomit, wanted to pry himself loose from Doss’ hold, wanted to cry out with every slash of the killer’s knife.

Doss showed him only what he had--murders committed prior to the KFK’s emergence in King’s Ferry. Graham didn’t recognize the victims. He didn’t know time or place. It could be as Doss believes--the victims Graham shared space with for a few agonizing moments were from decades or even centuries past.

Graham slips under the fence, ignoring the ordinance posted sign, and heads toward his son and Natalie Forrester.
The trinity will be complete
, Doss said. Graham doesn’t expect to feel the earth shake, the winds to stir up dark and shrieking with lost souls. He does expect an adjustment in the axis of the earth.

He’s been at the scene of his brother’s murder before. He never comes as a cop. The air is different here, thick enough he has to choke it down. He isn’t able to think beyond the moments
his brother knew were his last. Had he cried? Had he mourned the world that gave him so much pleasure? A kid so full of life, Graham thought it could be no other way.

Doss showed him it’s possible to enter a man’s mind.
To know his intention, his deeds. Graham knows now that evil can travel as simply as the opening of a door.

Isaac showed him that time and place are open to interpretation. That neither
are constant. That it’s possible to move in and out of each with grace.

Graham now lives in a world where really
any
thing is possible.

He is twenty yards out when Natalie feels his advance and turns.

A play of light makes her glow from the inside out. For a moment she is more sunshine than physical matter.

Isaac turns, notices Graham, and smiles.

It must be where they’re standing, Graham thinks, the way the light hits exactly at this spot, because Isaac, too, is radiant. His body is soft at the edges and blends into the landscape.

“Isaac.”

“Dad.” Isaac steps toward him. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“I know.” He places a hand on his son’s shoulder, absorbs his warmth and allows himself a moment of gratitude.  Then he
finds Natalie over Isaac’s head and says, “This isn’t an easy place for us to stand.”

“No,” she agrees.

Her gaze is steady and he can almost feel her eyes peeling through the layers that cover his deepest thoughts.

“Have you remembered more?” he asks.

“I was here,” she admits. “With them, but not. .
.” her voice fades. “I remember a voice, and I think I’ve heard it before, in different circumstances, but no faces yet. No names.” Natalie pauses, seems to search within, then says, “I want to remember more.”

“It will come,” Isaac says.

“Before he kills again,” she says. “It needs to be before.”

Isaac nods and insists
, “You’ll see it.”

“I didn’t see the other victims.”

“You weren’t in King’s Ferry.” And then Isaac reminds her, “You saw Steven and Lance.”

Her visions. She told him she sees the dying. Only the dying. And he thought, hoped, it was a result of losing Steven. Now he needs her gift, will rely on its direction. He ignores the discomfort it brings and asks the questions that need to be asked, “How much warning will we get?”

“
Sometimes only minutes.”

“That’s all we’ll need,” Isaac says.

“When did this start?” Graham asks. “When did you start to see?”

Natalie
tells him about the man she stumbled upon in the woods, about her father who appeared before her in ghost form, about the ferry that may have sunk with help not at all of the natural world.

“It’s all connected,” she says.
“To King’s Ferry, to my brother. To Lance.”

“I don’t see how,” Graham says. “Your father, I get his connection. And there’s enough crazy going on around here it’s becoming the norm.
So the ferry, maybe. But the man in the woods? How is he related?”

“I had my first vision—the first I remember—when I discovered him,” she says. “I thought I was seeing him, when he was alive. But I realized this morning, when you walked into my hospital room, that I was wrong. I didn’t see him. I saw you.
”

“What was I doing?”

“You were holding a gun. You fired. And the man you killed, it was Robert Doss.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Monday, 3
:15 pm

“Robert Doss?”

He didn’t seem
surprised. Or disturbed. If her vision came to pass, if Graham killed Robert Doss, it would be because there was no other way. She saw the certainty of it on his face.

“
Is he the King’s Ferry Killer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we? When is this going to happen?”

“His cottage,” she said. She remembered the look and feel of his living room.

“When?” Graham pressed.

“My visions don’t come with a date stamped on them.
”

“You have to do better than that
.”

“I have no control over what I see
,” she pointed out.

Frustration thinned his lips. Then he changed direction, “Tell me more about the man in the woods. How did he die?”

“He was shot,” Natalie said. “I think he was left so that I would find him.”

“How would the killer know you were going to hike that trail on that day?”

“I hike Jackman Trail the first day of spring and the last day of summer every year.”

Graham nodded
. “Who knows that?”

“My mom.
Our neighbors. Some people in town. Guests at the Inn.”

“Great.
A needle in a haystack.” He rubbed his eyes.

“Saul Doss,” she said.
“Maybe.”

That got his attention. The look in his eyes became intense.
“How?”

“He’s been in contact with my mom. I don’t know for how long, but he knew I was going to be on that ferry. He told me so.”

“Has he ever visited? Have you ever seen him in California? At your house?”

“No.
Never.”

He thought about that and then changed direction,
“Who was the man in the woods?”

“The police don’t know.
At least, not the last time I spoke to me.”

“And the murder is unsolved?”

Natalie nodded.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter who he was,” Isaac suggested. “Maybe it’s about how he died.”

“Or how he lived,” Graham said.

“I was starting to remember,” Natalie offered. “Up here.
Earlier, before Isaac showed up.”

“A vision or a memory?”
Graham asked.

“It was a memory,” she said, “But you need to trust my visions.
Soon. Isaac’s life will depend on it.”

She watched the struggle on his face
; he wanted to call her a liar but knew better.              “What did you see?”

“Steven and Lance, just the backs of their heads.
They were walking up here. I must have been following them. And there was someone with us. I feel him behind me, but I’m afraid to look at him.”

“You’re sure you were up
here?””

“Yes.” And as she spoke, more details unfolded, more became clear. “They were in trouble. But they weren’t afraid. Not yet.”

She moved deeper into her memory and began to hear their voices. Her brother’s voice. It was sweet and thin and patchy with fear. “Steven said, ‘You’re wrong. We weren’t looking at her.’”

She felt her insides cramp. “And then it’s his voice. He told them to shut up. He knows what he saw. He said, ‘You want to talk to someone, you knock on the door. You don’t look in their bedroom window.’”

“Whose window?” Graham asked.

“Lance spoke up then. ‘We weren’t looking, honest. We
wanted to talk to your father.’

“They thought they were going home. They worried about what our parents were going

to say. I see their faces, bunched up with fear.”

“What happened next?”

“We weren’t going the right way. Steven asked about that. We were far into the bluffs by then...it gets patchy. We stop. And he’s everywhere. He hit Steven. I can see him swing, my brother’s face take the blow. Steven fell into the grass and then the killer,  he turned on Lance, picked him up and killed him. That’s it,” she says.

Graham’s face was as closed as a fist.

“No,” Graham said. “There’s more. I think maybe you blacked out then. You couldn’t bear to watch and your mind shut down. But not your ears. Do you remember what you heard?”

“No.”

“Try.” He stepped forward and took her hand. She felt his calloused palm, felt anchored to the present and so safe enough to wade deeper into memory.

“Crying.
And Steven. He told me to run.” And she caught a glimpse of his face, tear-streaked and crumbling under his fear, but he shouted at her to run. ‘Fast, Natalie! Run!’”

She didn’t. She remembered wanting to. She remembered her blood was so hot with fear it seared her veins. But she didn’t run.

“I couldn’t,” Natalie admitted. “And he didn’t kill me.” She felt the tears on her face, hot and dripping over her chin. “He said to me, ‘You’re a good, girl.’ I think he walked away then. I did, too. I don’t know where I went. I don’t know how I got home.” She didn’t remember Steven again until the next day. She woke up thinking it was a dream, but when she came downstairs, her brother and Lance were still missing and she went out to find them, letting her feet move without telling them what to do. “I knew where they were the whole time. But I didn’t remember what happened to them until now.”