“Where?”
“I don’t know. Nearby, I think.”
More than just obtaining basic facts, Matt wanted to gauge Grace’s emotional reaction to these questions. Her voice grew softer with each response.
“You didn’t see that part in your dream?”
“No. I just knew he was going to die.”
“How?” Matt asked, slowing the pace of his responses a bit so Grace wouldn’t feel like he was interrogating her.
“I just did. There was a light coming for him.”
“Anything else in the dream?”
“He was in the street, looking behind him. He was talking to someone on his cell phone. Then the light came.” She seemed almost on the verge of tears.
Matt gazed at the face in the obituary again. “And you’re sure you never met him before?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not lying to me, right? You didn’t see the obituary, then draw the picture?”
“Why would I do that?” Grace seemed offended.
Matt shrugged. “Who knows why people do a lot of the stuff that they do.”
She shook off the melancholy gripping her tone. “Hey, if you think this is somehow enjoyable for me, it’s not.” The young woman’s eyes grew even more earnest and a touch fierce. “I’m only here because I don’t want this person’s face haunting me, too.”
Matt’s eyes narrowed. “You think you could have saved Thomas Wilson if you warned him?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe these dreams are warnings from God. But I have to try, right? Why else would I be having these dreams?”
He studied the dark circles under her eyes. “You’re not sleeping much, are you?”
“I sleep enough to dream. And that’s about it.”
Matt nodded, continuing to observe Grace. She didn’t even notice. Her eyes were fixed on the desk, on the sketch of the man from her dreams.
“I’d like to help you, Grace, really I would. But this sketch isn’t anything for me to go on.”
Grace pointed to the undeveloped sketch. “This is just how it starts. If it’s like last time, every night I see a little bit more. In a few days, it will look more like the sketch of Thomas Wilson.”
“Maybe so, and you certainly are talented at this, but without a name…” he trailed off, allowing Grace to draw her own conclusions.
“Please, help me do something.”
Her hands hovered over the sketch and photo of Thomas Wilson. Matt looked into her troubled and pleading eyes, even though her gaze was still directed away from his. Something about those eyes felt familiar. If they had been blue, Matt would have sworn he had seen them before.
“Okay, I’ll look into it. But you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
Matt pushed his chair closer to the desk and grabbed a pen. He scrawled down a name and number on a post-it note in front of him.
“I want you to see this person.” He handed her the note.
“Julia Driscoll,” Grace said, reading the note. “Who’s that?”
“She’s a psychiatrist.”
Grace glared at him. “You think I’m crazy.”
“Not necessarily. But I think you’d be better off talking to Julia than me. Nice girl, my brother’s fiancée, actually.” He smiled. “She’s always trying to get me to talk about my feelings and stuff.”
Her eyes remained fixed on him. “Do you?”
“God, no. That would be a conflict of interest; I can’t talk to my brother’s future wife about my issues. But you could.”
Grace looked at the piece of paper again. “And what will you do if I go see her?”
“I’ll look into how Thomas Wilson died. If he died in a car accident in Woodside, there should be some kind of police report.”
“But it’s too late for him.”
“That might be true; but if you’re really having dreams about these people dying, maybe they’re connected. At any rate, your sketch so far isn’t anything for me to work with. So let’s start with the police report from Thomas Wilson’s death and go from there.”
“But what will you look for?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, something suspicious.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll know it when I see it. Truth is Grace, you’re grasping at straws here. And the police report for Thomas Wilson is the first straw I see to grasp at.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. “How much do I have to pay you?”
“To begin with, all you need to do is visit Julia Driscoll. I’ll see where the police report takes us.”
“Thank you,” she said, though her voice was uncertain. “We have to do this as soon as possible. I only dreamt about Thomas Wilson for a week. Once the dreams stopped, he died.”
Matt gestured toward the sketches and newspaper clipping. “Can I make copies of these?”
Grace nodded. Matt picked up the sheets of paper and carried them to his copier.
“I know someone on the Woodside Police Department. I’ll go see him as soon as you leave,” Matt assured her as the light from the copier reproduced Grace’s artwork. After he made the copies, he handed them back to Grace.
“Thank you.” She folded them neatly back into her purse.
Grace rose to leave.
“And I’ll let Julia Driscoll know that you’re calling.”
The young woman nodded then walked out of his office. Julia would be of more help to Grace than he would. But he’d look into the matter, anyway. Grace deserved at least that much.
15
The Woodside Police station was only moderately busy when Matt Harrison entered it, shortly after Grace Murphy had left his office. Like most of the neighboring villages in the upper Hudson Valley region, the medium sized town suffered few violent crimes. Most of the infractions the police investigated were either traffic violations or drug-related problems. Harrison located his brother across the sparsely populated open office area and walked over to John’s desk. John, buried in a pile of folders, didn’t see his brother approaching.
“I thought you were supposed to be home, resting,” Matt said, drawing John’s attention.
John looked up, unable to conceal his guilt over being busted. “I just came in for a few hours to get caught up on some paperwork and check in to see what’s been happening since I’ve been out.”
“I’m sure your law enforcement buddies have been able to handle pulling over speeding soccer moms and breaking up underage drinking parties in your absence.” Matt sat on an empty edge on John’s desk. “Does Julia know about this?”
“No. She’s at work, so she doesn’t have to know.”
“Keeping secrets from her already.” Matt made a scolding noise with his tongue.
John sighed. “I was just going out of my mind at home.”
“Out of your mind? Haven’t you been home for like three days?”
“In my house? Yes. But if you count the time I was in the hospital, it’s been over a week. I needed to get out. What do you want, anyway?”
“Me? Oh, I was just checking in on your well-being. Went to your house, but you weren’t there. Figured this was the next likeliest place I’d find you.”
John nodded, then looked down at his paper. “Well, thank you for checking on me. I’m fine.”
“It actually works out well for me that you’re here. I need a favor.”
His brother glanced up again. “So much for being concerned for my well-being.”
“Hey, how many favors have I asked you over the years?”
“Not many. What do you need?”
“An accident report.”
“This is for a client you’re working for?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of a weird one. This woman came in, said she had a dream of someone dying, only to discover he was a real person and had really died.”
John set down his pen and narrowed his eyes. “This woman—did she happen to be attractive?”
John leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, though said nothing.
“That’s not why I took the case,” Matt said, responding to his brother’s voiceless accusation.
“Then why did you? You need the money that bad?”
“No. And since when did you care why I take specific cases?”
“Because you’re asking me to help you. And I don’t want you to encourage someone’s delusions.”
Matt glared at him. “What do you know about it? You haven’t even met Grace.”
John folded his hands together and placed them on top of his head. “Maybe I have. We get people in the station from time to time like her: paranoid, losing their grasp on reality. Trust me, it doesn’t do them any good to feed into their hysteria.”
“Did you ever think that when someone like Grace comes in, that maybe they’re reaching out for help? And if they get shut down the first time they reach out to someone, they never reach out again?” Matt let that rhetorical question hang in the air. “Besides, if it makes you feel better, I told her she needed to talk to Julia before I could help her further. And all I promised to do was look into the accident report for one of the people she saw in her dream.”
Matt took out a copy of the Thomas Wilson obituary and placed it in front of John. “Pretty sure he died in a car accident in Woodside on October 6. Can you get it for me?”
As John inspected the photo, his body tensed and his eyes grew even more serious.
“Do you know this guy?” Matt asked, watching his brother’s reaction.
“No. Never seen him before.” But John still stared at the photo with a surprising amount of intensity.
“So can you look it up for me? I mean, this is public record, but I was hoping to save a little bit of time by going through you instead of the DMV. Plus, I’d like to save the fifteen dollars the DMV would charge me.”
John tried to erase any suggestion he knew Thomas Wilson from his expression. As per usual, he was a lousy actor. “Uh, yeah, sure. Let me look into the database.”
With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, John navigated onto the database. “I don’t see anything for Thomas Wilson.”
“You don’t? Can you check by date? Maybe his name was wrong in the report.”
John complied and input new data into the system. But after a moment of waiting, he shook his head. “No, nothing for that date.”
“Really? I could have sworn his accident happened in Woodside.”
John shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s not in our system.”
“Hmm.” Matt tapped his finger against his chin. “October 6. Why does that date sound familiar? Oh right, wasn’t that the day you were shot?”
John gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah, I think it was.”
“So maybe the department was extra busy that night and the report never got done?”
“If there was a fatality involved, there’s no way the report would slip through the cracks.”
“Well, back to square one, I guess. I told her it was a long shot.” Matt stood up.
“Yeah, sorry I couldn’t help.”
Matt grabbed the obituary clipping and folded it back into his wallet.
“So she saw that man die in her dreams?” John asked.
“That’s what she claims.” Matt reached into his pocket and pulled out two folded sheets of paper. “Drew this picture of him.” He placed the sketch in front of his brother. John still seemed unnerved by Wilson’s image. “Of course, she could have drawn this after she saw Thomas Wilson’s obituary.”
“Did she know Thomas Wilson?”
“She claims not to have.” Matt unfolded the second sheet of paper. “Now she’s dreaming of this guy. You recognize him?”
John studied the second sketch. “I don’t think so. But this drawing is vague enough to be a lot of people.”
“She says that every night she dreams of these people, the image becomes clearer. So I’ll see what she brings me tomorrow.”
John handed the paper back. “Just be careful. She could be unstable.”
Matt stuffed the sheet back into his pocket. “On the flip side, she could be psychic. And that might be even scarier. Well, don’t work too hard today. And if I were you, I would get home before Julia does. Otherwise, you might have to lie to her to cover up where you were, and you wouldn’t want to lose the trust in your relationship, would you?”
John bid his brother farewell without responding to Matt’s slightly accusatory rhetorical question.
As Matt left the station, he ran into the tall, lean form of Chief Joseph Johnson.
“Well, Matt Harrison, I haven’t seen you in awhile,” Johnson said, smiling.
“Hi, Chief,” Matt said, shaking the older man’s hand. The chief was a friend of the family and instrumental in bringing John back from New York City to join the Woodside PD.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” the chief asked, gesturing toward John sitting at his desk.
“I don’t know. He’s stubborn.”
The chief shook his head. “He’s been through a lot since he’s been here. Lost his partner in a shooting, gets shot himself, but he’s tough.”
Matt nodded. No cop in Woodside—and few cops anywhere—had ever experienced the string of luck John had since joining the force. And even though lightning wasn’t supposed to strike the same spot twice—and definitely not three times—that fact made Matt nervous.
“I’ll keep an eye on him here, you do the same when he isn’t here, okay?” the chief asked, reestablishing eye contact with Matt.
Matt nodded. “Okay. I’ll do my best.”
“And maybe one day you’d like to join us? I could use someone like you, Matt. You’d be a great addition to the force.”
Matt returned a half-hearted smile. “Thanks, Chief. I’ll keep that under consideration.
After saying goodbye to Chief Johnson, Matt tried to recall any other moments when his brother had blatantly lied to him. John had stonewalled him or ignored his questions before but had never outright deceived Matt. This new lie was inconvenient, at the very least. It meant Matt couldn’t trust his brother going forward. And it also meant Matt had to visit the DMV. He wasn’t sure which consequence was worse.
16
Grace sat in her cubicle drawing an eyeball for a medical diagram. But her mind kept wandering to the only eyeballs that concerned her at the moment. She couldn’t shake Thomas Wilson’s green irises. Grace set aside the sketch she was working on. Her productivity had suffered during the last few weeks, mainly due to pure exhaustion.
Once again, Grace took out the sketch and the obituary clipping. Two other people had seen these different depictions of Thomas Wilson. But neither Amy nor Matt Harrison seemed to be shaken by the striking similarities. Maybe that was because they hadn’t experienced the dreams and couldn’t know if Grace really knew the man in her drawing or not. Or maybe their minds weren’t blown because no matter how good a sketch was, it couldn’t capture a person the way a photo could.
A third possibility lurked. Perhaps the similarities between the two images weren’t as striking as she believed. Maybe she had imagined or extrapolated the face from the dreams to match the face in the photo. She checked the images again. This time, instead of comparing the sketch to the photo, she closed her eyes, trying to recall the exact way the man in her dreams looked before she had translated his features into graphite and paper.
“Grace, are you okay?”
The question interrupted Grace’s meditation, forcing her eyes open. She turned to see her supervisor, Andrea, standing behind her. Andrea’s head was tilted to the side, her graying hair leaning to the right.
“Yes, I’m fine. I was just trying to figure out something,” Grace said, embarrassed her boss had caught her spacing out again.
“How’s the diagram coming?”
Andrea stepped closer to Grace’s desk, searching for signs of productivity. Grace sw
ept away the sketch and newspaper clipping and pushed the diagram of the eyeball to the left so Andrea could see it. Her boss silently examined the work.
“It looks good, but we just need a little bit more progress,” Andrea said finally.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said, bowing her head slightly. “I’ll try to work faster.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Andrea asked, her expression sympathetic. The woman was about the most supportive and least threatening boss that Grace could imagine. “It just seems like you’ve been falling behind lately. And that seems really out of character for you.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been having a really hard time sleeping the last few weeks.”
Andrea looked into Grace’s apologetic eyes and smiled. “Do you need to leave early? Maybe you should take a day off and just rest.”
“No, it’s fine. I can finish this,” Grace assured her supervisor. Andrea’s offer was certainly generous but what point was there in taking a day off? Grace needed to sleep, but late hours of working hadn’t prevented her from being able to sleep through the night.
“Okay. Just take care of yourself,” Andrea said before letting Grace get back to work. Grace placed the sketch and clipping back into her purse and resumed her work on the eyeball diagram.
For the rest of the day, Grace gutted through her work, mostly finishing the diagram. But even as she made progress, Grace wondered how long she could continue with such a paucity of sleep.
Later, Grace sat in her car in the parking lot. This time when she reached into her purse, she pulled out the post-it note with the psychiatrist’s contact info that Matt Harrison had given her. She dialed the number.
A pleasant female voice answered. “Hello, Julia Driscoll’s office.”
“Hi, can I speak to Dr. Driscoll, please?” Grace ran her pendant between her thumb and index finger, imagining what her mother’s face would look like if she overheard this conversation.
“Speaking.”
“Oh, hi. I wanted to come in and talk with you. Matt Harrison referred me to you.”
“Matt Harrison? Hmm, interesting. How do you know him?”
“He’s a private investigator working on a case for me.”
“Oh, okay. When would you like to come in? Someone just canceled, so I have a slot open tomorrow afternoon, at 3:30 p.m.”
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