Oblivion (16 page)

Tiny patch of red
.

Not again.

Tiny patch of red red red red red red red
.

I pinch my eyes closed when the pain needles my brain.

I feel John’s breath against my neck. I know he’s still talking, but I can’t hear him over the words in my head.

Have to go.

Excuse me.

Need to get out.

But I can’t speak. Instead, I stumble over John’s lap, for a
split second straddle him, and make a beeline for the stairs leading to the deck.

Elijah?

No answer.

Elijah?

He has my bag, my notebook and pens.

Elijah!

Then I see him: kissing some girl on the far side of the deck, his hand fondling a breast through her clothing.

Omigod. Slowly, I back away.

Tiny patch of red
. My feet are bare, but I don’t care. I pass through the boat’s gate and climb onto the pier, then run the maze toward shore, where the Vagabond greets me.

Someone’s following me, but I can’t hear his footsteps over my own heartbeat clanging in my ears.

Gaining on me.

I’m bawling now, sparring with the demon within me, the devil that won’t shut the fuck up. I dart up the iron spiral staircase, toward home. My hand lands on the knob, but it won’t surrender. It’s locked, and my locksmith is currently massaging a stranger’s left tit.

I’m cornered. Trapped.

Elijah’s feeling up some other girl.

I’m alone.

Cold.

Scared.

Tiny patch of red
.

I spin around to confront whoever is on my heels, but I meet only a navy horizon and silver stars winking from their distant skies. I sink to the grate at my feet and drop my head into my numb hands. I don’t have my backpack. Nothing to write on, nothing to write with.

A vicious sob escapes me, but I don’t hear it as much as feel it.

Tiny patch tiny patch tiny patch. Of red red red red
.

My heartbeat pounds in my ears, deafening me to the outside world, and my head feels as if something is squeezing around it.

Then I feel it again: the overbearing presence, the feeling of someone watching me.

The grate is vibrating; someone’s climbing the stairs.

A
silhouette appears before me. All shadows and bulk.

Just as I’m about to scream, moonlight glints off his blond hair.

My backpack lands next to me. My notebook lands in my lap. John Fogel plops down on the grate and encircles me with an arm. He’s so warm, despite the fact that he isn’t wearing more than a T-shirt on a brisk night. I inhale the scent of him—leathery musk, clean-scented hair gel—and dampen his shirt with my tears.

Tiny patch of red
.

I see the words racing over the insides of my eyelids, feel them etching into the soft tissue of my brain, as if the demon within me is embossing the inside of my head with an artist’s carving knife.

“Shh.” I feel the consolation more than hear it. “Write.” I don’t know if it’s John’s voice, or another unexplainable force echoing in my brain.

But I take the pen John offers me, and although it’s too dark on the stairs to see what I’m writing, I press the tip to the paper and let the words flow.
Tiny patch of red bleeding up from the heart.

With every word I record, I regain a modicum of my senses in return. By the time I scribble the last words—
unearth her
—I realize John’s fingertips are massaging my head in all the places it hurts.

I appreciate the comfort, let him support my weight.

He caps the pen and stows my notebook.

The ringing, buzzing, beating in my ears wanes, and after a few deep breaths, my sobs emerge from the white noise, match the trembling of my shoulders, and consume me.

“I’m sorry.” John attempts to wrangle my hair into some semblance of order, but as it’s a burgundy cloud of chaos right now, his attempts are futile. “I shouldn’t have talked to you like that. I have sisters. I know better. You
deserve
better.”

I don’t know when it happened, but I must’ve placed a hand over his heart because now I feel it pumping under my fingertips. I focus on the beat.

“It just makes me crazy to think of you with him.” His chin grazes my temple. “He doesn’t deserve you, anyway. I … uh … I saw what was happening on deck. When
you left so fast, I figured you’d need your backpack, your notebook, so I went to get it from him. I saw what he was doing.”

I pinch my eyes shut and shake my head, as if I can shake away the image of Elijah’s hands on that girl’s body.

“And if you were my girlfriend—”

With a sniffling attempt to get my tears under control, I grasp him on the back of the neck and raise my lips to his, but stop myself before I kiss him. I open my eyes; he’s staring down into them.

“Give me a chance,” he whispers.

“I wish things were different. I wish Lindsey had never set her sights on you. But it’s too late, Johnny.”

“It doesn’t have to be. She’ll forget about me sooner or later, and—”

“Even so.” I touch his lips to silence him. “Even if she forgets, you’ll still be the one who wasn’t interested, the one who got away. You’re off-limits to me. Perpetually.”

“Don’t I get a vote?” His arms tighten around me. “I mean, why would I be interested? She’s on my boat, in her underwear, kissing Marta Atwood.”

“Probably for your benefit. You should be watching.”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t do much for me.”

“Well, she’s a little drunk.”

“Yeah, her and everyone else. Except us, apparently. And Lindsey drunk is …” He shakes his head, as if weighing adjectives. “Just disastrous.”

Silence hangs in the air like smoke after gunfire.

His hands frisk up and down my bare arms to warm me.

I shiver with the contact.

“I used to live here.” I swallow the last of my tears. I want to further explain why I ran up here, but I can’t formulate words enough to describe the insanity my life’s become.

“Let’s go in,” he suggests. “Show me.”

“Can’t. It’s locked. There used to be a key hidden out here, but the police took it that night … the night after Hannah disappeared, when they found me here.”

“They found you here?”

“Yeah. I’d been here for about a day and a half. Writing all over the walls.”

“What did you write?”

“Mostly ‘I killed him.’ And some other things. Same things I write about in my notebook.”

A gradual smile appears on his face. “Just like that. You killed him.”

“I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why I wrote it … or why I write anything I write.”

“Are you hungry?” He brushes a kiss over my temple. “Let’s go downstairs for a bite.”

I shake my head. “The kitchen’s closed.”

“Come on. I want to be alone with you for a while.”

We’re sitting across from each other in what used to be my booth at the Vagabond. Sounds of classic rock pipe in
through speakers hanging from the walls on rudimentary hooks. Billiard balls crack into one another, and although the place is fairly populated, a somber hum of general silence depicts the quiet discontent of the patrons. Tonight I identify with the crowd and take comfort in blending in, despite my satin attire and dirty, bare feet.

John’s drinking coffee—black—to my hot cocoa. My feet are perched on the bench on which he’s sitting, and his warm hand presses against my cold toes.

I sip from my mug, feel the warmth of the cocoa spreading through my insides. It’s all the encouragement I need to broach a difficult subject. “You think Hannah Rynes is dead.”

His eyes widen, and he coughs over his coffee.

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked so bluntly, but the lack of sleep, Elijah’s public infidelity, and, well, everything else is wearing on me. Besides, I don’t know when we’ll have another chance to discuss Hannah. We’re never alone if we aren’t sneaking out at all hours of the night. And we can’t keep doing that. I continue:

“I don’t know why you’d be digging for her, if you thought she was alive.”

He shrugs, but isn’t looking me in the eye. He turns his mug on the tabletop, as if screwing it into invisible threads.

“Do you think she’s alive?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I hope she is, but after a year without a trace of her …”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“So why does a seventeen-year-old guy go digging for a body, when no one knows if that’s all that’s left of her?”

He shrugs again. “Can I trust you?”

This time I tell him what he wants to hear: “Yes.”

“I did a Google search on you,” he says.

My gaze involuntarily snaps to meet his. “Why?”

“Too many coincidences. The mystic … the rosary … I wanted to know how you fit into this mess.”

“What, are you a detective or something?”

He shrugs a shoulder. “Let’s just say I’m interested.”

“Why?”

“Look, I know it sounds crazy, but I’m sort of obsessed with missing kids. Hannah in particular, obviously, because it happened so close to home, but given everything the mystic said … I searched your name.”

“What did you find?”

“Not much.”

Good. I start to breathe.

“Found a missing persons file with your name on it.”

I freeze.

“It took some digging. Your name’s been removed from just about every article I read. The early ones, in the first twenty-four hours … you’re mentioned in those, but later articles recant, say an anonymous girl—you—had been found, listed as a runaway, unsure of your relation to the case.”

My heart is beating like crazy. My fingertips tingle like mad.

“Did you run away that day? Is that why you were gone?”

I had run away before, when Palmer had taken to flogging me daily for my preoccupation with Andrew Drake, but … “No.”

“But the fact remains. You were missing the same time as Hannah. Were you with her that day?”

I shake my head, fight the images pouring into my brain. Something about the fountain situated at the center of the labyrinth … I feel the cold marble edge against my back, feel the rush of holy water against my face. “Look, I don’t know what happened to her. I wish to God I did, but I don’t know anything but what I write—”

“Is
that
why you write the way you do?”

“—and none of it makes any damn sense to me.” I glare at him in frustration. “It doesn’t make sense to me, and it doesn’t make sense to the cops. I can’t possibly explain it to you, simply because you’re
interested
.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Whatever you went through that night, or even before that night, you came out of it with a voice.”

“It’s a voice I can’t use,” I say. “I don’t remember what happened.”

“You’re using it, Callie. Every time you write. Every time those poetic words flow from your fingers.”

Maybe it’s just poetry to him; I’m glad, as I wouldn’t
wish this hell on anyone. But I’m starting to think that every word, however confusing, is about the day Hannah disappeared, which means every word could potentially save Hannah Rynes’s life. It could also be good for nothing. “I don’t remember. No matter how much I write, I just can’t remember.”

“Maybe you will one day.” A hint of a smile appears in his lips.

“Maybe I won’t. Will you still be interested, even if I never remember?” I raise a brow.

“I have a cousin—my godfather, my dad’s brother’s son—who went missing fourteen years ago. No one’s seen or heard from him since. No trace of him. No leads to follow. Which isn’t the case with Hannah. They’ve got a lead with your father. They’ve got one with you, and—”

“But I don’t remember anything.”

“—and they have one with this mystic.”

At this, my eyes widen.

“I … I know it sounds crazy,” he says, “but the mystic … she draws a line between Hannah’s case and my cousin’s. She told me it was going to happen.”

“She knew Hannah’d go missing?”

“Well, not Hannah, exactly. But … okay … she was reading my aura.”

I feel a smile coming on. It’s a mystic’s parlor trick. Hook potential readings by describing the target’s aura. “What color was it?”

“I don’t know, blue? Bluish purple? To be honest, I wasn’t paying much attention, until she told me she’d seen my watch a hundred years ago. Of course, I hadn’t been wearing it that day, because we’d been on the lake, but she described it to me down to the inscription on the back.”

I trade glances between his watch and his navy eyes. “Wait.”

“She knew it was a family heirloom, she knew—”

“Wait.” Pictures of the watch around another man’s wrist flash with intensity in my memory bank. I close my eyes and massage a temple. “I remember this.”

“How—”

“Shh.”

He shuts up.

It’s coming to me. I focus on the memory of his watch. Smell the lake. I concentrate until I feel the watch in my grasp, trail my fingers over the words.

“Only you,” I whisper. “Only you.” I open my eyes.

John’s lower lip descends a fraction.

I press my lips together and shrug.

“How’d you do that?” he asks.

“I just saw it.”

“How?”

I shake my head. “I … I don’t know. I mean, it’s possible I might’ve overheard your reading.”