by Steven James
Alright.
That’s it.
He rushed Ty, who flicked out an automatic knife as soon as Daniel made his move. “Uh, uh, uh. Be a good boy.” While Daniel slowed to evaluate things, two of the other guys flanked Ty while the third pounded on the car windows, yelling for Nicole to open the doors.
Daniel’s hands balled into fists. “You really do not want to do this.”
Ty glanced toward his friends, who edged in closer to him, then eyed Daniel. “I think it’s you who doesn’t want to do this.”
Whether he got benched next week or not, Daniel was going to do whatever it took to protect Nicole, even if he had to take on all four of these guys.
From his years of playing football, he knew he could take a pounding, but Ty had a knife. Getting into a fight with him tonight might very well mean getting sliced up or stabbed.
But if that’s what it took to keep Nicole safe, that’s what he would do.
Daniel realized that if he were on his own it wouldn’t have been worth it to stick around and he probably would have just walked away, left the car, made his way home to get his father and bring him back to pick up the car.
But he wasn’t alone.
Nicole’s being here changed everything.
The boy who’d been banging on the windows stepped into the darkness and clicked on a flashlight. A moment later he said, “Aha.” When he returned, he was holding a large angular rock. “This should do the trick.”
He eyed the side window.
“Drive away!” Daniel called to Nicole. “Go!”
But she didn’t.
Time to move.
The guy with the rock seemed to pose the biggest threat to Nicole, so Daniel went for him first.
He sprinted toward him, and as he lifted the rock, Daniel tackled him hard, sending him hurtling off the road, into the underbrush.
Somehow the boy managed to hold on to the rock as they landed, and he tried to smack Daniel with it, but Daniel stopped him and was able to get it away from him.
As he was about to toss it into the woods, he felt two guys grab him under his armpits and pull him backward toward the road. He tried twisting to the side, but they were holding him with a fierce grip and he couldn’t wrench free.
They threw him onto the pavement.
Rolling to the side, he was on his feet in an instant.
Daniel held the rock high. “Whoever goes any closer to the car is going to regret it. Now get out of here before someone gets hurt.”
The boy that Daniel had tackled was climbing out of the ditch cursing, but his eyes were on the rock and he didn’t seem quite as aggressive as before.
However, Ty, who was still holding the knife, took two steps toward Daniel until he was standing only a couple paces away. His knife’s blade gleamed wickedly in the headlight beams.
Fog swirled around them both like anxious smoke.
“Nicole,” Daniel shouted. “Drive away. Now.”
She called out something to him, but he couldn’t understand the words and she didn’t leave.
Ty and Daniel each held their weapon. Neither backed down. Neither looked away.
Daniel cocked his arm back. “I can throw a football through a tire at thirty yards. I won’t miss you from ten feet.”
A flicker of uneasiness crossed Ty’s face. He screwed his mouth into a sneer. “Did you hear what they found in Emily’s notebook?”
Daniel didn’t answer.
“Word gets around.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ty shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe you don’t know. I was at the lake. I saw you there.”
“When? What? This morning?”
“Right.” But it was more of a scoff than anything else. He signaled for his buddies to follow him, and then the four of them slowly retreated and merged into the misty darkness.
Daniel guarded the car until a pickup truck that’d been pulled off the road about a hundred feet ahead of him roared to life, and Ty and his buddies sped off. Then he went for the door handle as Nicole hit the unlock.
Opening the door, he asked if she was okay. She nodded, but her breathing was rushed and ragged.
“Did you call 911?”
“I didn’t think to,” she said. “I was . . .”
“Okay. I’ll be right back.” Daniel quickly moved the pool the rest of the way off the road and then joined her in the car.
When she reached for his hand, her fingers were trembling.
“It’s alright. Let’s just get out of here, okay?” He felt her fingers intertwine with his. He didn’t pull away.
She nodded again. “Yeah.”
After a moment, he let go of her hand, pulled the car forward, and they drove in silence until Nicole asked, “What was all that about a notebook?”
“Just Ty being Ty.”
But Daniel wondered if there was some way Ty actually had found out what was in Emily’s notebook.
“What did he mean, he saw you at the lake?” Nicole asked.
“I was there this morning. I didn’t see him, but there were a couple cars in the parking lot when we got back to it. I didn’t recognize them, but he must have been there somewhere, watching us.”
“Us?”
He hesitated. “Stacy was there with me.”
“Oh. Sure,” she said softly. “That makes sense.”
“Listen, I’m not—”
“Don’t worry, no, no, I get it. Seriously, it’s okay.”
He wanted to explain everything: that he’d asked Stacy to the dance, but she’d blown him off and not shown up or even texted him to tell him she wasn’t coming, but he couldn’t find the right words.
A few minutes later they arrived at Nicole’s house, and Daniel waited until she was safely inside and had texted him that the doors were locked before he backed out of her driveway and headed home, all the while wondering about what exactly might be in Emily’s notebook.
And why Ty might have been at the lake this morning too.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Inside the house, Daniel’s dad was sitting in the living room on the couch. A CNN news show quietly droned on in the background from the television mounted on the wall. He asked him how the dance had gone.
“Okay.”
“You’re home a little early.”
“Things wrapped up sooner than I thought they would.”
“But you had a good time with that new girl, Stacy?”
Daniel couldn’t think of any reason to hide the truth from his dad. “Actually, she never showed.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
So am I.
I think.
“Yeah.”
Daniel decided not to bring up driving Nicole home or the confrontation with Ty and his friends. “So when do you think you’ll hear from the FBI lab?”
“Depends how many tests they end up doing. I told them to put a rush on it, but I’m not really expecting to hear anything until the middle of the week at the earliest.”
Ask him. Go ahead. What could it hurt?
“Hey, did you hear anything about Emily’s notebook? The one from school, the one that was found in her locker?”
Now his father muted the TV and gave Daniel his full attention. “I don’t know anything about a notebook.”
“Okay.”
Daniel headed for the stairs, but his dad called, “Hang on a second.”
When he turned to face him, he saw that his dad’s expression had hardened.
“What’s going on here?”
“What do you mean?”
“All this interest in Emily and her death.”
I keep seeing her appear to me . . . .
“I just . . . She knew how to swim.”
“She knew how to swim?”
“Yeah. I talked to her brother at school the other day. He told me.”
“Her brother told you.”
“Yes. Everything points to her not drowning by accident.”
His father took a deep breath. “Listen, I don’t want you poking around this anymore. If the FBI finds anything unusual we’ll handle it, but I don’t want you doing any more snooping around.”
“I’m not snooping.”
“Yes. You are.” He leaned forward. “I want you to promise me you’ll leave this alone.”
“Dad, I—”
“Promise me.”
Daniel was quiet.
“Daniel?”
He remembered the words he’d heard as he was waking up on the football field yesterday: Stay on this. Seek the truth. Learn what happened.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I promise.”
“Alright. Good. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
As Daniel headed to his bedroom, he berated himself for lying to his father.
No, he couldn’t leave this alone, not when Emily—or her ghost or whatever—kept appearing to him. Somehow he had to make it all stop.
And now, apparently, he needed to do that in a way that wouldn’t attract the attention of his dad.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Daniel got ready for bed.
Who would know what’s in that notebook?
Ty did, or at least he thought he did.
One other person came to mind—Ronnie, Emily’s twin brother, the boy Ty and his friends had shoved into the locker the other day at school. He would probably know.
Daniel didn’t have Ronnie’s phone number, but he found his Facebook page, clicked to the message link, and stared at the empty text box that popped up on his screen. All he had to do was leave a question for Ronnie and he could untangle this, finally get some answers, finally nail down what was going on.
As he was trying to figure out what to write, his phone buzzed with a text.
He checked the screen.
Kyle: he had something he needed to talk to Daniel about and asked if they could get together tomorrow; lunch at Rizzo’s?
They agreed on noon.
Even though no notifications were showing up on his phone’s screen, Daniel checked again for any messages from Stacy.
Nope. Nothing.
Okay, well, that relationship looked like it was over before it had even begun. If he didn’t hear from her tomorrow he would try to find out what was going on when he saw her at school Monday, but honestly, that was one conversation he was not looking forward to having.
His thoughts shifted back to Nicole, to those brief moments when she’d held his hand after Ty and his friends took off.
Nicole.
Stacy.
He was starting to feel caught in the middle of something that was going to end up hurting someone no matter how things turned out, and he didn’t like that prospect one bit.
Going back to the message box on Ronnie Jackson’s page, he tried to decide what to do, whether or not to contact him.
As he evaluated things, he reviewed what he knew.
At the funeral, Emily had told him that Trevor was in the car, but that he shouldn’t have been. Later, he realized that Trevor was her dog. But since that information had appeared in an article in the paper, it was something that he might have been aware of, at least subconsciously, before the funeral.
She’d told him to find her glasses, which he ended up locating near the spot where she died.
Broken. Away from the water.
She knew how to swim.
From her casket, she’d grabbed his arm and left a mark. If Nicole was right about ghosts not having flesh and bones, that you couldn’t touch them, then it wasn’t likely he’d encountered a ghost.
But if not that, what?
The next clue, if that’s what these apparitions really contained, was Emily’s necklace. Sure, she was wearing it in some of the photos, but why would she have held it up to him during the game? Was she trying to tell him something?
And if so, what?
It was like they were all things that he didn’t consciously remember, but afterward realized were lodged in some secret part of his brain like those memories of his grandmother’s kitchen were.
And then there was the notebook and Ty’s comment the other day about Kyle and Emily.
Honestly, Daniel had no idea how all this fit together, except that it was looking more and more like Emily had not died by accident.
Also, it seemed like she wanted something from him, and he had the sense that it was a lot more than just having him find her glasses on the beach.
Yes, he’d promised his dad that he would stop looking into this, but how could he do that, how could he leave it alone, when there were so many weird things going on, so many coincidences that couldn’t possibly all be coincidences?
At last he decided he needed to go ahead and take a specific step to resolve things, even if it was just a small one.
He slid the cursor into position in the message box on Ronnie’s page and typed, “I have a question for you. Can you text me tomorrow?” Daniel left his name and number and hit send.
Tomorrow morning he could spend some time sorting through everything, then meet up with Kyle for lunch and find out what was up.
Hopefully, he would also hear from Ronnie and Stacy.
And he could begin to resolve the things that were going on, the things that felt like they were ripping though the fabric of his sanity.
The fabric of your sanity?
Another phrase that sounded like something Kyle would have come up with, not Daniel.
Just like the one about the vultures picking away at your dreams.
He needed to get a grip on himself.
Yes, he did.
Before the fabric ripped all the way through.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Daniel dreamt of death.
He knew he was only dreaming, that it wasn’t real, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. When you’re awake, you can close your eyes to the horrors of life. You can turn away, run, hide, change the channel.
Not so when you’re asleep.
Even if you know you’re sleeping, you’re still at the mercy of your dreams. People who are asleep can’t simply decide to wake up. Nightmares don’t let you off that easily. They hold you in their clutches until they decide, in their own good time, to let you go.
And so.
The dream.
It’s sunset and he’s pulling into the parking lot at the lake. The oil-dark water is rimmed with pines, the sky is streaked with the muted colors of the dying day.
It’s only when he gets out of the car that he realizes he’s not alone. It’s a dream, and dreams work under their own set of rules, so it doesn’t surprise him. A girl he hadn’t noticed before is in the car with him, and now she steps out to join him.
Emily.
But she doesn’t look like she did the last few times he saw her in the waking world. Now her hair is combed and clean and not tangled with weeds from the lake bottom. Her skin is normal-colored, not grayish blue. Her neck isn’t bloated. Her eyes aren’t glazed over and pale with the washed-out color of death.
She’s wearing her necklace, the one with the heart-shaped locket. She has her glasses on.
He hears a scuffling sound from inside the car and notices that her dog is in there now, in the backseat. Maybe he was there before, maybe he just appeared, it’s impossible to tell. She wants to bring Trevor along, but he convinces her to leave the dog there. “We won’t be long,” he tells her. “This way he won’t run off.”
“He’ll be good,” she protests. “He won’t run
away.”
“We won’t be long.”
They crack the window open, lock the doors, and then the two of them walk together toward the beach near the base of Windy Point.
All goes well until they reach the stretch of sand near the inlet. They begin to argue.
It’s a dream and it doesn’t need to make sense: They argue about something stupid, it’s not even clear what. Something that happened at school. Something to do with the locket.
They’re near the woods, near the fire pit. He grabs her arm. She tries to pull free, to fight him off, to wrestle away, but he’s stronger and he’s able to drag her toward the water. She screams but they’re too far from any homes. No one can hear her.
He entwines his hand in her hair and thrusts her head forward, holds it under the water.
She thrashes.
Yes.
And tries to pull away, tries to get her mouth to the surface, but soon enough, her struggling stops and she becomes limp in his hands.
He lets go, his heart racing with fear and a horrible realization of what he has done. He backs up and turns to rub away the evidence of their scuffle, to draw his foot across the sand to erase the drag marks from when he pulled her to the water.
There on the sand he sees a glint in the moonlight, because then it is night, and it’s a dream, so somehow that makes sense.
The glint is a lens from her glasses.
Knowing that it’s a dream, he tries to wake up. He tells himself that this isn’t real and wills himself to open his eyes, but the nightmare just wraps more tightly around him like it’s never going to let him go.
He picks up the small rounded piece of glass and searches for the frames but can’t find them in the dark. Even using his phone as a flashlight he doesn’t see them and finally gives up the search.
Her body lies motionless and facedown in the water.
He unclasps her necklace, removes it, pockets it, then tugs her deeper, to where the current will carry her away.
No one will ever find out. No one will know.
No one.
Will ever.
Know.
Daniel woke up shaking, staring at the ceiling.
Waking up this morning wasn’t like it was sometimes for him—a slow transition from the dreamworld, the images fading one by one into the murky realm of his unconscious.