Sleep of Death (Charlotte Westing Chronicles) (10 page)

Chapter
Thirteen

As soon as class is over, I’m out of my seat and dashing to the door. My eyes go right to Sophie’s locker—the spot that I was studiously avoiding just days ago—and the first person whose eye I catch isn’t Sophie …

But Linden.

Talking to Sophie.

His eyes meet mine and he looks
a little shocked as lightning sparks between us. I avert my gaze and by the time I can bring myself to peek again, he’s looking down at Sophie and laughing.

And why shouldn’t he? Actually, I admit to myself as I grip the straps of my backpack, they look good together. They’re both so tall and elegant—him total GQ and her an eclectic shabby
-chic all her own—and they look like they belong. A pang of jealousy twists at my stomach and I don’t know what the right answer is. And what kind of conclusions am I even jumping to? They’re just talking.

Right?

My eyes are glued to them—the way he inclines his head to hear her above the din, the smile he gives her that makes my insides feel like jelly. Hot jelly—maybe more like molten lava— and I shove away the urge to be angry with Sophie. It’s not her fault. It’s not even
his
fault.

It’s mine
, for being stupid enough to believe that what Linden and I had was real. I should have known better, even then.

Sophie reaches out and brushes
Linden’s arm as she speaks. Her face freezes—just for a second. She peers up at him and only then do I realize he’s not looking at Sophie.

He’s looking at me.

Sophie’s eyes meet mine next and she seems … scared, almost. She turns from me and smiles at Linden again, but it’s a little tense now, and soon he leaves her locker and heads away from her—and me—without another glance.

“I’m sorry,” Sophie says as soon as I reach her. “I didn’t know.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, and even though I try to keep the bitterness out of my voice, I don’t come even close to succeeding.

“You
and Linden. I didn’t know you two were a thing.”

“We’re not,
” I hiss, glancing around at the crowded hallway, wondering who might have heard. Who might even now be laughing at the idea that someone like
me
could be with someone like Linden.

But when I turn my attention back to Sophie she’s got a hand on her hip and an eyebrow
raised. “Well, ya
were
.”

I replay what I saw.
Sophie brushing Linden’s arm. His skin. Her skin. She got a reading right after he looked over at me. I groan and cover my face with my hands, mortified not only that Sophie saw … whatever she saw, but that Linden was even thinking about it. He must feel so stupid and taken in all over again every time he sees me. He must despise me.

“It was a mistake,” I say, and it’s all I can get out as my heart breaks all over again, trapping any further speech deep inside my throat.

“Was it?” Sophie says quietly. She reaches for my hand and I suck in a breath as something like a static shock passes between us. A memory flashes in front of my eyes—

Me
, Linden, my hair still a damp tangle from snowmobiling earlier in the day. My leg is resting across his hip and his hands are halfway up my back, under my shirt and we’re … we’re …
kissing
seems too tame a word for the way we’re devouring each other. I can taste his cappuccino on my tongue and feel the cool softness of the couch upholstery.

The scene fades and Sophie whispers, “Damn.”

“Don’t do that,” I say, yanking my hand away, feeling vaguely violated.

“You’ll always know when
I do,” she says, as though that was all that mattered. “Still want to tell me there’s nothing there?”

“Like I said,” I reply firmly, “it was a mistake.”

“That was one hot mistake,” she says, but when I don’t laugh she throws an arm around me. “Regardless, that memory means he’s off-limits to me, Char. Hoes before hotties,” she says with a squeeze.

I can’t help but let out a tiny laugh at that, but it sounds more like a sob. “Thanks,” I say, not willing to admit I wasn’t sure I could handle it if Sophie and Linden started dating.
Stuff of nightmares.

“Bad breakup?”

“The worst,” I say, feeling
honest in spite of the half-truth. I mean,
you were never actually into me; you were just being manipulated by a supernatural homicidal maniac
? Way worse than any old
it’s not you, it’s me.

“He’s not worth it,” Sophie says, her chin raised confidently.

“That’s the problem,” I whisper. “He so
is
.”

She wants to ask; I can see it in her eyes. But in what I consider an act of ultimate friendship, she closes her mouth, pulls me tighter against her, and leans her cheek against my head. “Well, you are too.”

I will not cry in school. I will not cry in school
.

***

“So,” Sophie says, all business even as she pulls her coat tight around her. We’re at our table—the one outside—and, if anything, the approach of Spring seems to have only made the weather
colder
. “Do you think we have one more night before it happens?”

I purse my lips.
“Probably?” I say, more a question than a statement. “It’s still not snowing, and that walk has to have been shoveled before they went to bed.”

“Did you see a shovel? Could be heated walks,” Sophie muses, and I give myself a mental kick.
She’s so much more
detail-oriented
than I am. “Still, no snow is no snow.”

I nod.

“I think we should get a script together and call tomorrow. We want to call in the morning so it doesn’t get swept under the table with end-of-day stuff. Seriously,” she tacks on before I can argue. “We don’t want to call after school at three-thirty. The nearest child welfare office is in Dry Bend, so they’ll need time to get here. I doubt the local juvie officers are going to be much help.”

I nod slowly. “You’re right. We’ll probably only get one shot at this
—if that—and we want to get actual experts into the house to see how Daphne’s parents are making her live. And the people from Dry Bend will be experts, right? They’ll be trained to see if she seems to be abused even when everyone’s hiding it?”

Sophie nods. “That’s the idea. Now, I think we should pretend to be Mrs. Welsh’s cleaning lady. That gives us a reason to know these kinds of details that only someone with a degree of intimacy could be aware of.”

“How do you know she has a cleaning lady?”

Sophie rolls her eyes “Rich bitches in big houses always have them. But even if she doesn’t, the
details
are the important part. If they decide it’s a big enough deal to go out and inspect things, they won’t stop at the door just because Mrs. Welsh says she doesn’t have a cleaning lady. In fact,” Sophie says, leaning forward on her elbows, “if she denies it, it’ll probably look more suspicious.”

“Damn, that’s smart.” This isn’t how I would have
approached the problem at all, but Sophie’s good. The plan makes sense and I think it has a decent shot at working. It might not stop the murder but at least we can make sure that kidnapping is off the table. One thing at a time, doing the best we can do with what we know, just like Sophie said. “Are you sure we can’t call today? Like, right now?”

“
Not without one of those pre-purchased cell phones,” Sophie offers. “They can trace landlines instantly, and personal cell phones aren’t much better. That leads to uncomfortable questions. Any chance you could ditch second hour tomorrow?”

“I don’t have to ditch,” I say. “I just have to be late. And I kind of have a built-in excuse.”

“Really?”

“For years I’ve told people I have severe migraines that come on really fast
. To explain the trances when I have visions.”

She’s
stares at me for a moment and I wonder what I’ve done wrong until she laughs. “That’s brilliant. Freaking brilliant. Alright, so let’s make a list.”

“
Okay,” I say, tingles running up and down my spine. “Time to save some lives.” Sophie grins at me and, with a sparkle in her eye, she looks as healthy as I’ve ever seen her.

Chapter
Fourteen

But having a plan doesn’t help me sleep. I go to
bed
at ten, then lay there, tangled up in my comforter, staring at the ceiling for hours, hardly able to even close my eyes.

Without Sophie’s reassuring confidence, it’s easy to slip ba
ck into second-guessing myself—to worry about Daphne’s parents now that we have a plan for getting Daphne to safety. Just because Mrs. Welsh might be abusive doesn’t mean she deserves to be murdered in her bed. And for all I know, getting Daphne safely away won’t change anything at all; I never saw her in my vision to begin with. Just an unlocked front door, cleared walks, and no sign of forced entry.

Could be
there’s someone watching them—stalking them—who tries the door every night, waiting for someone to slip up.

And one of these nights, s
omeone will.

I feel like my room is
unusually bright and my sheets uncomfortably warm as I toss and turn, trying in vain to get some decent rest, poring obsessively over the problem from every conceivable angle. It would be more productive to look at things from my supernatural plane; at least then I’d be getting some physical rest. But first I’d need to fall asleep, which seems increasingly unlikely as the late night grinds into the early morning.

After pulling my covers on and kicking them back off for perhaps the millionth time, I roll out of bed and shamble to the bathroom for a quick drink.
As I stumble back to my room I realize that the brightness wasn’t my imagination; an unusual amount of light is seeping through my window.

In a panic, I rush
over and peer through the blinds, already knowing what I’m going to see.

Snow.

Falling from the sky, blanketing the ground, brightening the night with the steady, reflected glow of streetlamps—
snow
.

The Welshes are
in bed. They
have
to be. Who shovels snow at two in the morning? Not rich people, that’s for sure. And even rich people with heated walks wouldn’t leave them heating all night long …

Would
they?

I resist the urge to text Sophie. No sense waking her up, assuming her phone is even on. I
have to do something—but I can do it myself. It’s not like I was getting any sleep anyway.

I tiptoe down the hall past my mom’s bedroom and then carefully out the front door.
Already the snow is falling less heavily. If it stops completely,
this
could be the night. For the first time in my entire life, I’m glad we don’t have a garage. A garage door opening would for sure get me caught. Still, I pop the car into neutral and roll down our driveway, then coast into the street before I even have to hit the ignition. I drive down the street in stealth mode for half a block before turning on my lights and heading for the highway, resisting the urge to speed on freshly fallen snow.

I almost turn
around twice.

Now
that I’m actually on the road—streetlights flashing across my face intermittently—I’m not sure exactly what I think I’m going to do in the early morning hours at the Welsh house. Burst in completely unarmed and see if maybe, just maybe, there’s a murderer in the house who doesn’t mind being frightened away by a sixteen-year-old girl? Not likely.

I think
it’s the thought of Daphne sleeping in that empty room, bolted in from the outside. I hate that. It’s so unfair. And they must think they’re pretty damn safe, to have that hook installed so obviously, at eye-level, on the outside of the door. Not to mention the bars, strategically facing away from the street. A red hot hatred toward these parents who I thought I was supposed to
save
burns inside me until, by the time I pull onto their road, I’m determined to do something.

Not that I know what that something is.

I stop the car in the same place Sophie and I parked yesterday—right over the top of our previous tire tracks, actually, half buried in powdery new snow—and pull my coat tight around me as I nudge the car door closed without making more than a dull thud. It’s dark, and only when I’m about twenty feet from the car do I realize I really should have brought a flashlight. But the snow has stopped falling and there’s a half moon showing through the thinning clouds, its silvery light sufficient to guide my steps.

I want to slap my forehead—
the moon
. If I’d looked for the moon in my vision—assuming I could see it at early sunrise—I could have known when the murder would happen. Within a couple of days, anyway. Would that be a narrow enough window? Regardless, if the Welsh family is still alive in the morning, I’ll definitely go back to my vision and look for the moon.

I step onto the pathway we walked up yesterday and a chill of premonition
rolls through me. It
looks
freshly shoveled even though it was snowing less than an hour ago. Damn those heated walks. Another point for Sophie. Glad she’s on my team.

My breath gets shorter as I force on
e foot in front of the other, hands clenched into fists and shoved deep into my pockets. Here, tonight, I’m not immune to physical harm like when I’m in a vision. I’m not exactly defenseless, but I’m definitely not invincible.

I’m here; this is real.

And if someone comes out with a knife they’ll be fully capable of slicing me to ribbons. So what do I do? Ring the bell? Walk in and see if anyone’s home? If tonight
isn’t
the night, neither of those things is going to be easy to explain.

Having come this far, I find myself completely out of ideas
in the moment when I need them most.

Stalling, I turn around, surveying the property.
There aren’t any cars in sight except mine, no footprints that I can see. But someone could be killing them
right now
and I’m just gawking like a tourist and—

On the
short railing that runs alongside the steps that lead from the porch to the garage, there’s a dark, wet stain. I walk toward it slowly because I know that if I let myself move fast, I’ll lose control entirely and flee to my car in terror. Tentatively I extend one finger to touch the stain even though I’m certain I already know what it is.

Blood.

My face whips back to the front door. Should I go in? Try to save them? How much good am I going to be chasing an armed killer, anyway? Besides, I know that if things happened the way I saw them in my vision, the two parents upstairs are beyond anyone’s help, and Daphne’s already been taken from the house. Where—

There’s another splotch.

Maybe at the end of this trail is where I’ll find Daphne.

Or
the killer.

Or both.

I shiver, but continue to creep along, blinking in the moonlight, following drops of blood like breadcrumbs through a fairy-tale forest. They lead around the side of the house and, once they diverge from the heated walk, I have footsteps to follow as well. Much easier. These go straight to a large shed in the back yard, one that looks appallingly like the shed where Nicole was butchered in the future I prevented three months ago. But every time I remember
that
horrible scene it turns my stomach, and facing a similar shed in real life is even worse.

A
flimsy rake is leaning against the door, half-buried in the snow, but it’s all I’ve got. I reach over and grab it, gripping it like a baseball bat, two hands ready to swing. A clump of snow falls off of it and bursts behind me and I feel incredibly foolish—not to mention helpless—but I can’t leave.

My heart
is pounding and I take half steps to the door that sits a few inches ajar. I’m almost within arm’s reach and I’m not breathing at all; my chest is too tight to force any air in. I give myself one second to remember how much bravery it took to rush in and put myself between Clara and her attacker at the train station last year and I summon that feeling again as I throw the door open and clench both hands on the handle of the rake.

The rake falls into the snow with a
muffled
crunch.

“Daphne?”

Inhumanly wide eyes stare up at me from where the little girl is crouched in the corner of the tool shed, covered in blood. To be honest, I’m shocked she managed to get out her house without leaving
more
of a trace than the droplets I followed. She must have been running on pure adrenaline, barely touching the ground with each step. The front of her nightgown is soaked and looks black in the darkness. On her cheeks, where she’s been wiping tears away, are smears of red—a macabre finger-painted mask.

And clutched in one
small hand is a huge, bloody butcher knife.