Jay nodded to her question, her plea. She had her own ‘why’. “Yes I can, Mari.”
His acceptance eased her nerves, and a dozen or so knots unwound from her shoulders right then, relaxing her posture. “And so this morning I was on the Interstate, and I was driving along, and I saw a sign that said ‘Plainview—forty miles’. And that feeling came. It came really strong, and so I followed the signs and drove into town. I can’t explain it, but the feeling was really strong—I mean
really
strong. I thought for sure this was where I was supposed to be. The place. And I was driving down the street, looking every which way for something that might tell me that, yes, this was where I was supposed to be. Just looking, and then...”
“I came along,” Jay said, and she nodded.
“So is why you thought I was supposed to kill you more insane than that?”
He thought on that, but focusing was a little hard. The pills were just starting to kick in, and the fuzzy edges were coming back bit by bit. “Maybe a little.”
“So go ahead,” she told him. “Tell me how crazy you are.”
How to tell, he mused. How to tell. Though...
...though maybe it was best not to tell at all. Maybe he could show.
From the bed table he took the letters she had retrieved for him and handed them to her. “Read what’s in these.”
She took the envelopes and put them on her lap, cinching her sleeves back down as she looked at the address. “Why does it just say ‘occupant’?”
“Because it felt strange enough mailing them to myself. I just couldn’t bring myself to write my name on the envelope.”
She looked to him, confused. “You mailed these to yourself?”
“Yes.”
“What’s in them?”
His head eased back on the headboard, his eyes blinking tiredly at the ceiling. “Confessions.”
She puzzled at that answer briefly, then looked back to the envelopes, examining them. Both were postmarked Plainview, Missouri. He had mailed them here. To himself from right here. And the date on the postmarks was from this week, the same for both. Why? Why would he do this? And what did he mean by confession?
She decided it was time to find out, and opened the first letter.
Sunday 8/3/97 3:51 pm local
A boat near Marathon Key—it’s called the Shanker—is going to hit a rock and sink in a school of sharks. 30 people.
I’m sorry.
Jay Marcus Grady
Her gaze slipped away from the single page in her hand, thinking, remembering. There had been something about a boat of tourists sinking in the Florida Keys on the car radio. And it was Sunday night, wasn’t it? Still, what did this have to do with confession?
“Which one is that?” Jay asked, his eyes half closed as he stared at the old skin of paint peeling away from the ceiling.
“It’s about a boat sinking. This was on the radio. Why did—”
“That was a bad one,” Jay recalled, cutting her off. His words were thick and low now, each drifting from him with a hint of slur. “Sharks. Never sharks before. Never killed by sharks before. I don’t like sharks. Go ahead, read the next one.”
Her gaze came off of him reluctantly. She opened the next letter and read.
Sunday 8/3/97 11:12am local
There’s a fair near Junction City Kansas, and there’s an observation tower that is going to get hit by a motorhome. It’s going to collapse. 28 people.
I’m sorry.
Jay Marcus Grady
“Falling,” Jay said, speaking almost fondly. “Falling is nothing. That tower was only a hundred and fifty feet high. That’s nothing.”
Mari held both letters, one in each hand, her gaze shifting between them. “I still don’t understand. How is this a confession?”
Jay chuckled breathily, the Darvon fog rolling in fast now. “You know, if you were inclined to do such a thing, and you checked the times on those letters, you’d see that they are before the time those things happened. Before, sister, what do you think about that?”
“Are you saying that you...
predicted
these things?”
“More than that,” Jay said, then pointed somewhat limply toward the closet, its door half blocked by the mound of his bagged bottles. “At the back of the closet, on the floor, there’s a box. Go get it and have a look.”
Mari stood and went to the closet, pulling its door open amid a jangle of bottles sliding within the disturbed bags. She knelt and, in the dark space, found first something soft—an old sleeping bag—and then by touch alone the square cardboard box that she had been directed to. She took it in hand and closed the closet back up before returning to the bed, standing at its foot now as Jay watched her, his head lolled to one side.
“Go ahead,” he urged her.
She set the box, a fairly worn brown thing that was heavy without being
HEAVY
, on the bed where she’d been sitting, the form of her rump still pressed into the mattress that had seen better days. It was the size you’d expect something like a small microwave to be shipped in, but there were no markings of any kind on its exterior. The top was four flaps folded sequentially to overlap one another in that way she had never been able to master without getting a nasty papers cut. But opening this box was easy, as the flaps had softened quite a bit from use, it appeared. She peeled back one, then two, then three, and then the last stubby flap, and she could see plainly now what the box held.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Jay asked. “Or depressive. Is that a word?”
Mari reached in and pulled two handfuls of envelopes from the box. She held each bunch up to her face, some of the envelopes fanning like a hand of cards so that she could see that all were addressed as the first two she’d read, to ‘occupant’, and all were sealed. She looked over them to Jay. “All of these?”
He nodded, his eyes barely slits now, the throb in his leg just a pulse that seemed gloriously inconsequential.
“These are like the other two?”
“Guilty,” Jay said.
‘Guilty?’ Was this what he was talking about when he said ‘confession’? “These are all things you predicted? Bad things?”
“Very bad things,” he agreed, adding emphasis.
“So you’re, what, confessing in these letters that you knew these things were going to happen?”
His sideways head shook, one cheek bumping the headboard. “No, that I made them happen.”
The letters drained by ones and twos from her grip back into the box. “This is your insane part coming, right?”
He managed a druggy smile at her quickness. “You see, I got this gift from someone. This ability to know things. To ‘predict’ things, as you called it. I used to pick stocks with it—at least I thought I was picking stocks.” His head came off of the head board and faced her straight on. “But then it changed, and I wasn’t seeing what stocks to pick, I was seeing death. Lots of death. Things like what you read, like what’s in that box. And that’s only the last six years, since I’ve been in Plainview. Before that...before that I hadn’t accepted the truth of the matter. The truth that I’d been clued into long ago.”
“What truth?” she asked, trying to follow him. A gift? Knowing? Stocks? Death?
“That seeing the future makes it real,” Jay said, recalling the way Sign Guy had put it. “Does a vision cast a coming reality in stone?” He nodded, and a sheen spread across his tired eyes. “From experience, Mari Gates, I can tell you that it does. In my damnable case it does.”
She thought on his admission for a moment, the insane part of
his
story, and though she did not know the truth of it, was his belief in it anymore crazy than her own aimless journey guided only by
feelings
?
“You believe you caused these bad things to happen?” she asked him, and his eyes closed as he nodded. One of his hands slipped from his lap to the bed and she thought he had drifted off.
But he had not, and he began rambling. “That’s why I think you were here to kill me. To run me down. You were supposed to put a stop to it. Right there, at number two five five one one. Bang. Squish. Just like the bald man, only it wasn’t him doing it this time. It was...” And his eyes opened a bit in some mini revelation. “...maybe it was me. Kind of a roundabout suicide thing, no? A little poetic justice. Kill by the tails, die by the heads. You know?” His head shook, his eyelids dropped almost fully now. “Of course you don’t. Why would you? You can’t understand it, ‘cause I can’t understand it.” His chin bobbed down to his chest, bouncing back up, the leg that had been afire now just a numbed length of damaged flesh and bone beneath its sheath of plaster. “What do you think about that?”
“I think that the medication might be making you think some things,” she said. Not that she didn’t believe him, or believe that he believed, but he was obviously right on the edge of going under, weighed down by the pills he’d swallowed. She wondered if he’d followed the directions, but resisted the urge to ask, and to look at the bottle herself. She was not his mother.
“Poor man’s truth serum,” Jay told her, his words wet and bulbous now. He slid slowly down the headboard until he was flat on the bed again, his head cradled in the pillow Mari had fluffed for him. “Makes baring the soul that much more manageable.”
She was sure now that he was losing the battle to stay awake. “Would you like me to go so you can sleep?”
“I can sleep without you going,” Jay muttered, then added disconnectedly, “I wonder why I didn’t die?”
She looked down at the box on the bed, at the gathering of confessions within, at the record of deeds he believed he had wrought. “Jay?”
He bubbled up from sleep. “Hmm?”
“Can I read through the letters? Can I open them?”
He waved a hand at her, his whole arm flapping like the dead appendage of a marionette. “Doesn’t matter now. No more tails. God, no more tails please. Open away. Open away.”
She took the box from the bed and sank into the embrace of the wingback chair, putting the letters at her feet. It was quiet, a very still quiet but for the whir and the tick of the fan, and the deep breaths of the man who believed she was supposed to kill him. And despite thinking cool, she was not, the bulk of her sweatshirt trapping the stale heat of the room against her. But she could live with it. Besides, there was a window to let in some air. She stood and went to it, working the twist lock atop the lower sash, and pushing upward. Hard upward, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Doesn’t open,” Jay said from behind her. She turned. His eyes were shut, but he was not quite gone yet. Just way, way out of it. “Never has opened. So how could you just leave your home like that?”
The question caught her off guard, like his query about her roasting had, and she wanted to talk about this as much as that. “There was nothing there for me.”
“No family?” Jay asked woozily.
“No,” she said, and pulled her sleeves down to her palms. His head moved in a small way, maybe a nod, and then he was gone again.
Mari sat and thought cool, and took several letters from the box and put them on her lap. She expected no answers in them, mainly because she believed one of her questions had been satisfied. Her journey, the feelings that drove her, guided her, they had brought her here. To a man whose life was no less torn than hers. Maybe a little more, as he had suggested. But here she was, striking him down with her car, and was sitting in his room about to delve into the depths of some torment that had brought him to believe that he was responsible for the deaths of...(and she glanced at what lay on her lap, and what remained in the box)...countless people. And amongst all the strangeness that no ‘traditionally sane’ person could ever comprehend, she realized that one truth, that one answer, because the feelings were no more. There was no urge to move on. This was where she was supposed to be.
But that begged the question,
Now what?
Jay sucked a deep, loud breath, and Mari looked to him, wondering not on that new question, but on the possibilities of what he believed.
She looked down at her lap and picked up one of the envelope and peeled back its flap. And then she began to read.
Jay stirred just past nine, not waked fully, and glanced toward Mari. She was not in the chair now, but on the floor, her back rested against it. Two neat stacks of envelopes straddled her, one opened, one unopened. One spanned the valley between her crossed legs, the single page it usually contained in her hands as she studied it.
“Which one is that?” Jay asked, and she looked up from it.
“A ferry is going to sink,” she said, his glassy eyes upon her. “I remember this from the news. It was three years ago.”
Jay nodded. “Up in Maine. It was going to an island, but it hit a fishing boat and they both sank.” He looked away from her, to the ceiling again. The fog had parted only briefly, and was curling tight around him once more. “Seventy two people died. Water filled their lungs. It was cold but it burned.”
She folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, then moved onto the next as he seemed to drift off again.
“Don’t sleep in your car,” he said from the deepening fog.
“What?”
“If it gets late, there’s a sleeping bag in the closet. I used it before I got the bed at the Salvation Army store. It’s closed now.”
“I don’t want to impose,” Mari said. It had been a long time since she’d slept under a roof not made of metal and hanging upholstery.
“The floor’s not bad,” he told her, then he was Darvon’s guest once more.
He settled into a sleep and she read on. Treaded death’s record into the night. Twenty confessions, thirty, forty, past midnight, past one, his breathing slow and steady, the lamp she’d set on the floor to read by burning soft white light on each letter. Fifty, sixty, in no true order, not arranged for convenience, death here and death there, fires here crashes there, past two in the morning to three, past seventy letters until there was one that Mari Gates opened that she could not move past. She read it. Then read it again.
Then she looked up to the bed with blue eyes afire.
Thirty