The Sign of Seven Trilogy (17 page)

He felt her give, degree by degree, even as he felt the hand he held in his go lax. The tension that had dogged him throughout the day drained away, so there was only the moment, the quiet, endless moment.

Even when he drew back, that inner stillness held. And she opened her eyes, met his.

“That was just you and me.”

“Yeah.” He stroked his fingers over the back of her neck. “Just you and me.”

“I want to say that I have a policy against becoming romantically, intimately, or sexually—just to cover all my bases—involved with anyone directly associated with a story I'm researching.”

“That's probably smart.”

“I am smart. I also want to say I'm going to negate that policy in this particular case.”

He smiled. “Damn right you are.”

“Cocky. Well, mixed with the straight arrow, I have to like it. Unfortunately, I should get back to the hotel. I have a lot of…things. Details to see to before I can move in here.”

“Sure. I can wait.”

He kept her hand in his, switching off the light as he led her out.

C
AL SENT A DOZEN PINK ROSES TO HIS MOTHER.
She liked the traditional flower for Valentine's Day, and he knew his father always went for the red. If he hadn't known, Amy Yost in the flower shop would have reminded him, as she did every blessed year.

“Your dad ordered a dozen red last week, for delivery today, potted geranium to his grandma,
and
he sent the Valentine's Day Sweetheart Special to your sisters.”

“That suck-up,” Cal said, knowing it would make Amy gasp and giggle. “How about a dozen yellow for my gran. In a vase, Amy. I don't want her to have to fool with them.”

“Aw, that's sweet. I've got Essie's address on file, you just fill out the card.”

He picked one out of the slot, gave it a minute's thought before writing:
Hearts are red, these roses are yellow. Happy Valentine's Day from your best fellow.

Corny, sure, he decided, but Gran would love it.

He reached for his wallet to pay when he noticed the red-and-white-striped tulips behind the glass doors of the refrigerated display. “Ah, those tulips are…interesting.”

“Aren't they pretty? And they just make me feel like spring. It's no problem if you want to change either of the roses for them. I can just—”

“No, no, maybe…I'll take a dozen of them, too. Another delivery in a vase, Amy.”

“Sure.” Her cheerful round face lit up with curiosity and the anticipation of good gossip. “Who's your valentine, Cal?”

“It's more a housewarming kind of thing.” He couldn't think of any reason why
not
to send Quinn flowers. Women liked flowers, he thought as he filled out the delivery form. It was Valentine's Day, and she was moving into the High Street house. It wasn't like he was buying her a ring and picking out a band for the wedding.

It was just a nice gesture.

“Quinn Black.” Amy wiggled her eyebrows as she read the name on the form. “Meg Stanley ran into her at the flea market yesterday, along with that friend of hers from New York. They bought a bunch of stuff, according to Meg. I heard you were going around with her.”

“We're not…” Were they? Either way, it was best to leave it alone. “Well, what's the damage, Amy?”

With his credit card still humming, he stepped outside, hunched his shoulders against the cold. There might be candy-striped tulips, but it didn't feel as if Mother Nature was giving so much as a passing thought to spring. The sky spat out a thin and bitter sleet that lay slick as grease on the streets and sidewalks.

He'd walked down from the bowling center as was his habit, timing his arrival at the florist to their ten o'clock opening. It was the best way to avoid the panicked rush of others who had waited until the last minute to do the Valentine's thing.

It didn't appear he'd needed to worry. Not only had no other customers come in while he'd been buying his roses and impulsive tulips, but there was no one on the sidewalks, no cars creeping cautiously toward the curb in front of the Flower Pot.

“Strange.” His voice sounded hollow against the sizzle of sleet striking asphalt. Even on the crappiest day, he'd pass any number of people on his walks around town. He shoved his gloveless hands into his pockets and cursed himself for not breaking his routine and driving.

“Creatures of habit freeze their asses off,” he muttered. He wanted to be inside in his office, drinking a cup of coffee, even preparing to start the cancellation process on the evening's scheduled Sweetheart Dance if the sleet worsened. If he'd just taken the damn truck, he'd already be there.

So thinking, he looked up toward the center, and saw the stoplight at the Town Square was out.

Power down, Cal thought, and that was a problem. He quickened his steps. He knew Bill Turner would make certain the generator kicked on for the emergency power, but he needed to be there. School was out, and that meant kids were bound to be scattered around in the arcade.

The hissing of the sleet increased until it sounded like the forced march of an army of giant insects. Despite the slick sidewalk, Cal found himself breaking into a jog when it struck him.

Why weren't there any cars at the Square, or parked at the curbs? Why weren't there any cars anywhere?

He stopped, and so did the hiss of the sleet. In the ensuing silence, he heard his own heart thumping like a fist against steel.

She stood so close he might have reached out to touch her, and knew if he tried, his hand would pass through her as it would through water.

Her hair was deep blond, worn long and loose as it had been when she'd carried the pails toward the little cabin in Hawkins Wood. When she'd sung about a garden green. But her body was slim and straight in a long gray dress.

He had the ridiculous thought that if he had to see a ghost, at least it wasn't a pregnant one.

As if she heard his thoughts, she smiled. “I am not your fear, but you are my hope. You and those who make up the whole of you. What makes you, Caleb Hawkins, is of the past, the now, and the yet to come.”

“Who are you? Are you Ann?”

“I am what came before you, and you are formed through love. Know that, know that long, long before you came into the world, you were loved.”

“Love isn't enough.”

“No, but it is the rock on which all else stands. You have to look; you have to see. This is the time, Caleb. This was always to be the time.”

“The time for what?”

“The end of it. Seven times three. Death or life. He holds it, prevents it. Without his endless struggle, his sacrifice, his courage, all this…” She held out her arms. “All would be destroyed. Now it is for you.”

“Just tell me what I need to do. Goddamn it.”

“If I could. If I could spare you.” She lifted a hand, let it fall again. “There must be struggle, and sacrifice, and great courage. There must be faith. There must be love. It is courage, faith, love that holds it so long, that prevents it from taking all who live and breathe within this place. Now it is for you.”

“We don't know
how
. We've tried.”

“This is the time,” she repeated. “It is stronger, but so are you, and so are we. Use what you were given, take what it sowed but could never own. You cannot fail.”

“Easy for you to say. You're dead.”

“But you are not. They are not. Remember that.”

When she started to fade, he did reach out, uselessly. “Wait, damn it. Wait. Who are you?”

“Yours,” she said. “Yours as I am and always will be his.”

She was gone, and the sleet sizzled on the pavement again. Cars rumbled by as the traffic light on the Square glowed green.

“Not the spot for daydreaming.” Meg Stanley skidded by, giving him a wink as she pulled open the door of Ma's Pantry.

“No,” Cal muttered. “It's not.”

He started toward the center again, then veered off to take a detour to High Street.

Quinn's car was in the drive, and through the windows he could see the lights she must've turned on to chase back the gloom. He knocked, heard a muffled call to come in.

When he did, he saw Quinn and Layla trying to muscle something that resembled a desk up the stairs.

“What are you doing? Jesus.” He stepped over to grip the side of the desk beside Quinn. “You're going to hurt yourselves.”

In an annoyed move, she tossed her head to flip the hair away from her face. “We're managing.”

“You'll be managing a trip to the ER. Go on up, take that end with Layla.”

“Then we'll both be walking backward. Why don't you take that end?”

“Because I'm going to be taking the bulk of the weight this way.”

“Oh.” She let go, squeezed between the wall and the desk.

He didn't bother to ask why it had to go up. He'd lived with his mother too long to waste his breath. Instead he grunted out orders to prevent the edge of the desk from bashing into the wall as they angled left at the top of the stairs. Then followed Quinn as she directed the process to the window in the smallest bedroom.

“See, we were right.” Quinn panted, and tugged down a Penn State sweatshirt. “This is the spot for it.”

There was a seventies chair that had seen better days, a pole lamp with a rosy glass shade that dripped long crystals, and a low bookshelf varnished black over decades that wobbled when he set a hand on it.

“I know, I know.” Quinn waved away his baleful look. “But it just needs a little hammering or something, and it's really just to fill things out. We were thinking about making it a little sitting room, then decided it would be better as a little office. Hence the desk we originally thought should be in the dining room.”

“Okay.”

“The lamp looks like something out of
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
.” Layla gave one of the crystals a flick with her fingers. “But that's what we like about it. The chair is hideous.”

“But comfortable,” Quinn inserted.

“But comfortable, and that's what throws are for.”

Cal waited a beat as both of them looked at him expectantly. “Okay,” he repeated, which was generally how he handled his mother's decorating explanations.

“We've been busy. We turned in Layla's rental car, then hit the flea market just out of town. Bonanza. Plus we agreed no secondhand mattresses. The ones we ordered should be here this afternoon. Anyway, come see what we've got going so far.”

Quinn grabbed his hand, pulled him across the hall to the room she'd chosen. There was a long bureau desperately in need of refinishing, topped by a spotted mirror. Across the room was a boxy chest someone had painted a murderous and shiny red. On it stood a Wonder Woman lamp.

“Homey.”

“It'll be very livable when we're done.”

“Yeah. You know I think that lamp might've been my sister Jen's twenty, twenty-five years ago.”

“It's classic,” Quinn claimed. “It's kitschy.”

He fell back on the standard. “Okay.”

“I think I have Danish modern,” Layla commented from the doorway. “Or possibly Flemish. It's absolutely horrible. I have no idea why I bought it.”

“Did you two haul this stuff up here?”

“Please.” Quinn tossed her head.

“We opted for brain over brawn.”

“Every time. That and a small investment. Do you know how much a couple of teenage boys will cart and carry for twenty bucks each and the opportunity to ogle a couple of hot chicks such as we?” Quinn fisted a hand on her hip, struck a pose.

“I'd've done it for ten. You could have called.”

“Which was our intention, actually. But the boys were handy. Why don't we go down and sit on our new third-or fourthhand sofa?”

“We did splurge,” Layla added. “We have an actual new coffeemaker and a very eclectic selection of coffee mugs.”

“Coffee'd be good.”

“I'll get it started.”

Cal glanced after Layla. “She seems to have done a one-eighty on all this.”

“I'm persuasive. And you're generous. I think I should plant one on you for that.”

“Go ahead. I can take it.”

Laughing, she braced her hands on his shoulders, gave him a firm, noisy kiss.

“Does that mean I don't get ten bucks?”

Her smile beamed as she poked him in the belly. “You'll take the kiss and like it. Anyway, part of the reason for Layla hanging back was the money. The idea of staying was—is—difficult for her. But the idea of taking a long leave, unpaid, from her job, coming up with rent money here, keeping her place in New York, that was pretty much off the table.”

She stepped up to the bright red chest to turn her Wonder Woman lamp on and off. From the look on her face, Cal could see the act pleased her.

“So, the rent-free aspect checked one problem off her list,” Quinn went on. “She hasn't completely committed. Right now, it's a day at a time for her.”

“I've got something to tell you, both of you, that may make this her last day.”

“Something happened.” She dropped her hand, turned. “What happened?”

“I'll tell you both. I want to call Fox first, see if he can swing by. Then I can tell it once.”

 

H
E HAD TO DO IT WITHOUT FOX, WHO, ACCORDING
to Mrs. Hawbaker, was at the courthouse being a lawyer. So he sat in the oddly furnished living room on a couch so soft and saggy he was already wishing for the opportunity to get Quinn naked on it, and told them about the visitation on Main Street.

“An OOB,” Quinn decided.

“An oob?”

“No, no. Initials, like CYA. Out of body—experience. It sounds like that might be what you had, or maybe there was a slight shift in dimensions and you were in an alternate Hawkins Hollow.”

He might have spent two-thirds of his life caught up in something beyond rational belief, but he'd never heard another woman talk like Quinn Black. “I was not in an alternate anything, and I was right inside my body where I belong.”

“I've been studying, researching, and writing about the paranormal for some time now.” Quinn drank some coffee and brooded over it.

“It could be he was talking to a ghost who caused the illusion that they were alone on the street, and caused everyone else out there to—I don't know—blip out for a few minutes.” Layla shrugged at Quinn's narrowed look. “I'm new at this, and I'm still working really hard not to hide under the covers until somebody wakes me up and tells me this was all a dream.”

“For the new kid, your theory's pretty good,” Quinn told her.

“How about mine? Which is what she said is a hell of a lot more important right now than how she said it.”

“Point taken.” Quinn nodded at Cal. “This is the time, she said. Three times seven. That one's easy enough to figure.”