Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (12 page)

“Yes. I drove all the way from Albany to see you. Actually I went to see Grayson, but he said he didn’t want to talk. Worried about his brother. I knew he didn’t want to see me anymore, and I knew about you. I thought, well, he’s found someone new. So I was jealous.”

The simple, open way she made the statement seemed even more unsettling to Nola than if she’d given another mysterious, dark laugh.

“Don’t get scared,” Anna said, now back to looking condescending. “I didn’t kill the bird. It was dead when I found it. And I won’t bother you again. He has a new way to get what he needs. There is nothing I can do about that.”

The implication was clear: Grayson was using Nola just as he had Anna. Anything else she imagined happening between them was really just imagination.

Nola had the peculiar awareness that she should be angry, but she wasn’t. This woman had threatened her and insulted her, yet all Nola could feel right then was a tired sort of sadness. They had so much in common, Anna and herself, including the most important thing of all, their tracism, but Nola had a feeling that this first meeting with Anna would probably also be the last. For whatever reason, they weren’t going to stay connected. They wouldn’t be able to help each other as they walked through the world feeling life escape the living.

Nola got up to leave, but Anna did not get up to see her out. She did not even say good-bye. Nola didn’t care. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, and she certainly hadn’t expected the two of them to be friends or anything like that, but still she couldn’t help feeling disappointed as she faced the long drive home. Some part of her had hoped for—what? Understanding? A link between two people who saw life and death in a way few others ever did? That was what drew her to Grayson. After talking with Anna, she doubted that’s what had drawn him to Anna or herself.

Just as she was opening the door to leave, Nola stopped. She wasn’t sure what could possibly be moving her to do what she was going to do other than the fact that she knew it was unlikely she’d see Anna again. She half-turned her face in Anna’s direction. “Did you ever hear voices around him?”

It was one of those moments when everything was so silent and still that Nola wondered if she’d actually spoken aloud or just in her head. She turned to fully face Anna. Again her uncertain expectations about the woman were confounded. She had expected laughter or scorn, but Anna looked—there was no doubt about it—afraid.

“I did not,” she finally spoke. There was concern in her voice when she added, “Have you?”

“What would that mean, the voices?” Nola asked instead of answering.

Anna stared, all hostility gone, all masks slipped off, her face betraying a surprising vulnerability. She looked like a child. Nola wondered when Anna had first experienced trace and if it had been like her own first experience, the death of a relative. She realized she didn’t know that about Grayson either. She had always shied away from talking about trace reading, like it was something shameful. Maybe it didn’t have to be this way.

And then Anna looked away and the vulnerability was replaced with—could it be?—shame. “I don’t know,” she said. Nola knew she was lying, but the woman seemed so deflated, so strangely crumpled in on herself, that it was unlikely she would reveal what she knew or suspected. For a second time that afternoon, Nola turned away from Anna’s silence feeling as if she knew less than she had before.

___________

The fall colors along the drive had been spectacular, and Nola tried to clear her mind of its messiness to enjoy them. She would go for a few miles reveling in crimson mountainsides before finding herself gripping the steering wheel a lot harder than she needed to because she was back to thinking about everything that had happened in the last few days. By the time she pulled into the parking lot at her apartment, she felt almost as tired as if she’d been working out for two hours. As she approached her apartment door, vegging out in front of the TV had never seemed so appealing.

A sound behind her made her stop. It was coming from the Lafferty apartment, and it was unmistakably the sound of a woman crying.

Nola felt like she had fallen into a hole.
Oh no. Oh dear God no.
No other sounds came from the apartment, only steady, gasping sobs. She turned toward their door but moved no further. Mrs. Lafferty might need help. Mrs. Lafferty might want to be alone. Nola desperately wanted to be alone and was appalled at the thought of entering that apartment, trying to comfort a newly grieving widow all while being hit with her husband’s newly released trace. Where was Grayson Bryant now, she wondered grimly. The quiet sobbing continued. Nola took a step toward the Laffertys’ door and halted again.

“Angela,” said a dry, thin voice. “Shut up.”

Nola froze as if she’d heard rattlesnakes behind the door. James Lafferty was still alive.
Well, that explains the crying
. The poor woman probably needed even more help now than if the man had been dead, but it was not help that was likely to be received well. Nola backed away and unlocked her door and closed it behind her as quietly as possible before sinking wearily onto the sofa.

She figured she owed Lynette a call but didn’t feel like dealing with her at the moment, so she took out her phone and sent a brief e-mail instead. She didn’t have much to report but could let Lynette know what little she’d discovered. Nola wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to say anything at all when none of this was official work and Dalton had warned her to cease and desist anyway. Perhaps she simply didn’t want to think about one more woman suffering because of a man she loved, even if that woman was Lynette, who didn’t much seem like the long-suffering type.

Anna Villagomez, spurned by Grayson. Angela Lafferty, verbally abused by her husband. The two could not be more different and yet both were unhappy in some way because of a man they’d once loved, and probably still loved. It almost made Nola glad for the silence of her small, sparsely furnished rooms. They were hers, unshared and uncomplicated. Sometimes solitude was nothing short of bliss. But it never lasted. What kind of bliss ever did?

It hit her just then that Jeb Crawford’s engagement party started in twenty minutes. Nola had twenty minutes to get into the right frame of mind to congratulate the happy couple and make it sound sincere.

11

Jeb Crawford was marrying his girlfriend of five years, Jennifer Hanson. Jeb was a cop, Jen was an elementary school teacher, and they were so cute together that they’d have been insufferable if they weren’t such genuinely likable people. Nola had to admit a stab of envy whenever she saw them, not because they were getting married, not because they were so cute, but because they were so
normal
. Of course, if she ever said that to anyone, they’d immediately say, “What’s normal? Nobody’s normal,” and give a lot of other dismissive, knee-jerk responses. Perhaps nobody
was
truly normal, but people like Jeb and Jen certainly came closer to it than she did. Did anyone’s definition of
normal
include the dubious ability to know where people had died?

Nola dreaded being the only person there alone, and sure enough, when she entered the bungalow Jeb and Jen shared, it was like dropping in on Noah’s Ark, everyone in twos but her. Sometimes she and Matt Gorsky would go to social events together, usually suggested by him in a humorous way: “Hey, Lantri, let’s keep each other from looking like big losers at the shindig tomorrow night, eh?” He knew she wasn’t dating anyone, and it was widely rumored that Matt was gay. Nola figured this was probably true even though she seldom believed those kinds of rumors and didn’t trust her own gaydar any more, especially with cops, given that the ones who were men all exuded a uniform maleness, both literally and figuratively. Matt never tried to refute these rumors; in fact, sometimes he seemed to do his best to encourage them. He was either gay or ridiculously confident of his masculinity—or, given his prizefighter physique, both. But Matt had another dinner party to go to and wouldn’t be getting to this one until late, and Nadine hadn’t been able to attend either, so Nola steeled herself for what promised to be an uncomfortable evening.

Bad enough that she was there alone, worse that after Jeb and Jen greeted her she found herself standing next to Jack Dalton, worst of all that standing next to him was Mrs. Jack Dalton. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, of course—it wasn’t as if they were rivals, after all, Nola being a Lynette to Kimberly Dalton’s Maureen Bryant. But Kimberly Dalton had never seemed like a very friendly person to anyone outside her own circle. She was an administrator at the school where Jen Hanson taught, so Jeb and Jen were in the circle, while Nola was most definitely not. Even though she and Mrs. Dalton were exactly the same height (same hair and eye color and build, too, Nadine had once pointed out, waggling her eyebrows, with the implication that Nola might also be the commander’s “type”), Nola always had the impression that Kimberly Dalton was looking down at her from a distance—when she noticed Nola at all.

She seemed to be noticing Nola plenty at the moment. As Nola turned to talk to the Daltons (she didn’t have much choice given their immediate proximity), she saw that Kimberly Dalton was staring at her. A hard stare. “We were just talking about you,” she said to Nola.

Even said jokingly, this was the kind of statement that put Nola slightly on edge. That it had been said with no humor whatsoever made her want to flee the room. But, of course, she couldn’t. Jack was smiling at her. “I was just telling Kimber about your work on the Amy Siegel case.”

Kimber. How cute.

“As if I haven’t heard about that case a hundred times before.” She—
Kimber
—smiled at her husband and patted his arm. When she turned back to Nola, the smile tightened.

This can’t really be happening
. This woman could not possibly see Nola as a threat, a predator out to steal her man. As a woman with an extraordinarily attractive husband, she couldn’t behave this possessively every time a woman got near him or she’d look like a fool. At the moment, Nola was the one who felt foolish. What was she supposed to say?

Jen Hanson saved her by bringing her a glass of white wine (which she forced herself to sip instead of chug as she so desperately desired) and by staying to join their conversation. “Oh, Jeb talks about that case all the time, too. ‘Nola saved our sorry asses.’ I think those were his exact words—right, sweetie?” she yelled across the room to Jeb, who probably had no idea what they were talking about but blew his soon-to-be-wife a kiss.

Jack chuckled. “Crawford’s right, though I’m glad he wasn’t the one who gave the press conference about it. I could just see some reporter—that WRFT guy, Keith Reynolds—eating it up.”

Jen laughed, too. “‘This just in: Redfort police have sorry asses. Stay tuned!’”

Nola and Kimberly joined in the laughter, and Nola couldn’t help noticing that Kimberly’s coldness seemed to disappear in reaction to Jen. When the moment ended, however, Kimberly’s eyes darted once more back to Nola and the chill returned. Nola didn’t dare look at Jack, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t completely oblivious to what was going on. Normally, he’d be leading the conversation—he was a natural leader and the only one familiar to each of the rest of them—but he seemed to be brooding over something. Nola dared not flatter herself into thinking that something was her, that the conversation he and his wife had been having about Nola involved suspicion, jealousy, and guilt. Perhaps the Bryant case was weighing on him; it had been several days since the missing-person report had been filed, after all, and there had been no progress that Nola knew of. The case, as Jack had noted, was high-profile. All of Redfort, indeed all of Morgan County, was watching, and what they had seen so far did not make him or the department look good.

But if the Bryant case was what had put Jack in a somber mood, why did his wife look like she was about to hiss and claw at Nola’s face?
Because she’s a bitch,
Nadine would have whispered in her ear, and they’d both have to bite their lips to keep from screaming with laughter and looking like they were already tanked. Luckily, Jen Hanson came through again, possibly because she sensed the weirdness and wanted to smooth things over or simply because she was just a decent person who wanted her guests to enjoy themselves. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you,” Jen said, turning to Nola. “I hope this isn’t too personal or anything, but . . . what’s it like, feeling trace?”

Nola hesitated, noticing that she suddenly seemed to have an audience. Jen had tactfully positioned herself in such a way as to suggest that their conversation was a personal one, but unfortunately she had spoken during one of those sudden lulls that occur at parties, and everyone had heard. Everyone, including the Daltons, turned toward them.

“I’m sorry,” Jen quickly said. “I bet you get asked that all the time, huh? Excuse me while I pry my foot from my mouth yet again.”

Nola smiled reassuringly at her. “No, don’t apologize, it’s fine. Yes, people who know about it do ask, and it’s not rude or personal. It’s just hard to describe. It’s like . . . well, please don‘t think I mean to be patronizing, but it’s like describing color to someone who has never had sight. You can sort of say what it’s like, but not really, and you can never even come close to what it is.” It occurred to her that this was very similar to the analogy Grayson had used to describe the way he took trace: like opening your eyes to bright light after being in the dark. Well, it was an apt analogy, Nola thought, regardless of who said it. Of course, Grayson was pretty much the only person she knew who could have said it.

“If tracism is like sight, I’d rather be blind,” Kimberly Dalton interjected with a shudder. “I don’t even like to hear about people dying, much less feel them die. Whenever Jack starts to talk about something awful that happened on the job, I have to plug my ears.” She turned and gave her husband another look, the kind of look that was perhaps meant to suggest private, unspoken communication between a couple.