Jack stood up behind the couch. “Steve, let’s go,” Veronica whispered, clutching his shoulder.
“Come on, Steve,” said Martin, standing. “This isn’t going to work.”
Abby sat on the couch with her arms wrapped around her knees, crying freely.
“Thank you for your time,” Martin said to Jack and Abby. “We are sorry to have upset you.”
Jack nodded silently and gestured to the hallway. They filed from the room, Jack and Abby trailing them to the front door. As they left, Martin paused in the threshold and turned back to Jack. “We are truly sorry for your loss,” he said. “If you change your mind and want to talk, we’ll be at that little hotel right by the airport, at least for tonight.”
“Thank you,” said Jack. “But we’re done here.”
It was obvious from the sigh behind him that Abby wanted to protest, but she held her tongue. Jack watched them walk down the driveway and climb back into the rented SUV. He watched as they moved out into the street, turned around in a neighbor’s driveway and then disappeared around the corner. Then he turned off the porch light, closed the door and. locked and double-checked the deadbolt before going to check on Susan. Abby blocked his way up the stairs. He sighed. “Abby, please, it’s been a long day.”
“Yes it has, Dad, for me too! Why would you do that to them?”
“Because, Abby, your mother can only handle so much. Losing your brother has nearly killed her. This . . . story, happening, or whatever you want to call it hurt her even more! And even if, by the remotest chance, what they said has any truth to it, do you think it is going to help her? Or you? Or us? Really?”
Abby waved the note in front of him, and pled, “Dad, this note is from him. I know it. I feel it. And he’s trying to tell me something, like he wants me to prepare for something. It’s like a code or something, I don’t know. But I think those people could help! Don’t you want to know?”
“No, I don’t, Honey. All I want right now is to go upstairs and take care of your mother.”
“Fine,” she said. She moved aside so that he could pass.
“I’ll do it myself then,” she whispered.
Chapter 30
On the ride back to the hotel, Veronica sat in the back seat, examining her nails. Martin stared out the passenger window. Steve drove toward the interstate, squinting in the lights of oncoming cars.
Eventually Veronica broke the silence. She leaned forward from the back seat. “Okay, well, I suppose that could’ve gone better.”
“Or worse,” said Martin.
“At least we know that Abby got it, too,” muttered Steve.
“Yeah,” replied Veronica. “She got it, but how does that help us?”
“I don’t know. But she got it.”
“And more important,” said Martin, “she believes it.”
Steve nodded grudgingly.
“Yeah,” said Veronica, “but something tells me that her dad is not going let you discuss that or anything else with her.”
Martin grunted in agreement.
“And what about the preacher?” asked Veronica, abruptly breaking the silence as she leaned forward again. “In her dreams, too, and he was here and he was in New York?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “I was thinking about that myself. Maybe he isn’t following us or at least not just us.”
“You mean like he’s in two places at once?” asked Veronica.
“I dunno.”
“How could he do that?” Veronica asked.
“I dunno. I need some time to put it together, some time to think.”
Veronica sat back against the seat. Martin yawned and stretched. “And I just need a pillow.”
Steve nodded in silence. Long moments passed. Steve exited the highway and took the street leading to the hotel.
“Personally,” said Veronica, “I just want a glass of chardonnay.”
The next morning, the threesome settled at a table in the middle of the small dining area off the hotel’s lobby, where the breakfast crowd was in full swing.
“Are you freakin’ nuts, Steve?” Veronica’s voice carried loudly across the quiet breakfast buffet at the hotel, garnering several disapproving looks from roomful of road warriors, account representatives and mid-level business execs, who peered up from their smartphones, coffee and toasted bagels. Veronica stared back until each one of them looked away. She turned back to Steve and Martin.
“Seriously Steve?” she continued, in a lower tone. “Staking out her school? That’s the plan?”
“Look, I didn’t say it was a good plan, just a plan.”
“Well, it sucks.”
“Yeah, thanks Veronica. Very helpful.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, Steve! Have you even been to a school lately? It isn’t like it used to be. They are locked down now; they have metal detectors and security guards!”
“She’s right, Steve,” said Martin. “When Maggie was in high school, they had a police officer assigned to each school. And that was in small town Virginia. No telling what they have here. This is Texas. They go big on everything.”
“I understand that, but we’ve got to talk to her. I think she can help us. I want to know what she knows about this. Maybe with all of us on it, we can try to figure out a next step. As it stands right now, I’ve hit a dead end. I don’t know what to do next.”
Martin shook his head. “All I can say is that where I come from, toast, fruit and some dry cereal do not a breakfast make. This chef should be ashamed.”
“Okay then,” said Steve, “we’ve got to find a way to get to her. We just need to talk to her, find out what she knows, and hopefully make some more sense out of it.
“How?” said Veronica.
“I don’t know yet,” said Steve. “Like I said, I haven’t figured that part out.
Martin smiled, staring over Steve’s shoulder. “You may not have to,” he said, waving.
Steve and Veronica turned. Abby stood at the edge of the café, wearing oversized aviator sunglasses and a crocheted black beret into which she had stuffed her long blonde hair. Over her shoulder was a bulging backpack that looked it would be more at home on the Appalachian Trail than in the halls of a high school. She spotted Martin waving, smiled and waved back.
As she wove through the tables to reach them, Martin jumped up, borrowed a chair from a nearby table, and pulled it up for her.
“Thanks!” she said, smiling cheerfully. She took a seat. “Hey guys! Oh, coffee. Sweet! Can I get one of those? How’s it going?”
“Uh, fine,” said Steve.
“What are you doing here?” asked Veronica, smiling at her.
“Well, it’s like this. I tried to talk to my parents last night, well, my dad anyway, about what was going on. It’s not that he doesn’t believe you, but he is kinda focused on my mom right now, y’know?”
She grabbed a banana off Martin’s plate. “D’you mind? I’m starved. I was worried I’d miss you so I skipped breakfast to get here.”
“Please help yourself,” said Martin. “In fact, I am finding this excuse for breakfast to be an insult to my culinary skills. I’ve half a mind to get back in that kitchen and show them how’s it’s done.”
“Martin,” said Veronica. “Take a chill. It’s breakfast. It’s a hotel, not a five-star resort. It’s free. Deal with it.”
“Just you wait, young lady,” he said, motioning at Veronica with his fork. “I hope to get a chance to show you what a breakfast can and should be.”
Steve interrupted the bantering. “Abby, we’re glad you’re here.”
“Thanks,” replied Abby, peeling the banana. “So anyway, yeah, my dad—it was pretty clear that he’s not going to have any part of this right now. Wouldn’t you say?”
Her mouth full of banana, she continued without waiting for an answer, “And my mom, well, you guys saw how my mom is. There is no way I was going to get to talk to you about this again, and I wasn’t going to give up on something so important.”
>
“Do they know you’re here?” asked Martin.
“Here, with you?” asked Abby incredulously. “Uh, negatory. Look. . .”
She put the half-eaten banana back on Martin’s plate.
“Okay, I’d like to get started out on the right note. I am 18, a legal adult. And with all due respect, I am not interested in being treated as anything less than an equal, if we are going to figure this thing out. I made my decision. I will deal with my parents. Are you all okay with that? Cause if not, just tell me now, and I’ll get on with figuring out what gives all by myself.”
Steve and Martin stared in silence, unsure of how to respond. Veronica laughed aloud.
“Now this kid is gonna be fun!” she said to Martin and Steve. “Sorry, not kid. Will young lady do?”
Abby nodded. “That’d be fine. In fact, I don’t care if you call me kid — s’long as you don’t treat me like one.”
Steve and Martin looked at each other.
“Okay,” said Steve, “sounds fair enough to me.”
“Me too,” said Martin. “Welcome to the club, ma’am!” He tipped a fantasy hat in her direction.
“Why, thank you, kind sir,” said Abby, dipping low into a mock curtsy in her chair.
“So Abby,” said Steve, “what’s your take on all this? There seems to be no question in your mind that what’s going on is real. How can you be so sure?”
Abby nodded, “Have you ever heard about that special bond that twins share? You know, like about how close they are to each other? Like they can almost read each other’s mind and stuff? Well, Zack and I were like that. We weren’t twins, though. We were almost four years apart, but we had always been close, even as little kids. I mean, sure, we had some stupid fights.”
Her face became more animated as the memories took over. “But we were always best friends. In fact, it wasn’t until I was older that I learned that it wasn’t normal for a boy to want his little sister tagging along to neighborhood touch football games or riding bikes in the dry ravines behind our neighborhood. I never knew that most boys thought that’d be ‘weird.” His friends never gave him any grief about it either, at least not out loud. He would have stomped them if they had.
“Maybe that’s why they never said anything. Anyway, we were close, as little kids, teenagers . . . even after he left for college. He had lots of friends there, and college kept him crazy busy, between classes and football practice. But we talked or texted almost every day.”
She patted the phone in the pocket of her jeans. “Mom and dad would get updates on him from me every night at dinner. He’d help me with homework sometimes. We’d talk about college life and football and our girl and boy problems. We’d drive up, and he’d usually come home once a month. On those weekends when he was home, we’d map out movie marathons at our local theatre. We’re both big movie buffs. He’d sit through a romcom for me, although he loved to make retching noises at all the wrong times.”
She chuckled.
“And then I’d try not to get too skeezed out watching his horror flick pick. It was just . . . natural I guess. We talked all the time, sometimes just a quick “hello.” Right up until he . . . well . . . you know.”
She drifted into silence and took the last bite of her banana, suppressing a sniffle. After a moment, Veronica gently prodded. “Last night, you sounded pretty convinced that the message was genuine.”
“Absolutely,” said Abby, nodding.
“Why are you so sure?” asked Steve.
“Well, for one thing, he called me Gabbsalot in the note. That was like this teasing nickname he had for me when we were kids, ‘cause I talked all the time apparently. But that was not something that was well known. And he stopped doing it a while back, so nobody else even knew about it, except my parents.”
She pulled the folded note from her hip pocket, opened it and scanned the content yet again. “And secondly, look near the end there,” she said passing the note to Steve and pointing to the bottom of the page. “See that phrase in the middle of the third paragraph, ‘madness abounds’? Well, Zack always had these colorful catch phrases that he used to annoy me with. His senior year in high school, he could not leave the room without saying ‘I’m off like a prom dress.’ At first, I thought it was funny. But after a month or so, it got old—really old. But by the spring, it was funny again, because I had to laugh at him for being stupid enough to try to get so much use out of an already-tired joke.”
A grin played around the edges of her mouth as she continued, “When he was 15, he and all his friends took to calling each other things like Skunkbag, Toejam and Turd Bucket at any opportunity. It annoyed my mom and me to no end! Some of their names for each other I didn’t understand, and I had to go look them up online!”
She stuck her finger in her mouth with a fake retching sound.
“I’m sorry. . .did you say “Skunkbag?” asked Martin.
Abby nodded sagely.
“Anyhow, I am big into literature,” she continued. “Shakespeare, Tennyson, the classics. Last year Zack claimed to have read an obscure writing from Shakespeare in which he used the phrase “madness abounds.” He told me that if I could tell him where that was from, he’d give me a hundred bucks! I searched and scoured, even asked my teachers, but I couldn’t find it. So, all year he teased me about it, working it into the convo whenever he could. Although he never told me for sure, I think he made the whole thing up.”
“But that was the bet—a secret bet. Not even the ‘rents knew about it. And the most important thing is, I just know it was Zack. I have this gift for sort of knowing things. My dad calls it intuition on steroids. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s just like. . .I know things.”
“When we got to your house last night, you said you knew we would come,” Martin said.
Abby nodded. “Yeah. But don’t freak out on me. It’s not like I can read minds or something, but I can just kinda get an early lock on things, ya know? So, yeah, that’s how I just know the letter is his. I feel it.”
“So that’s why your mom was so upset then?” asked Martin. “Because you were so certain about it?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Abby shrugging. “In the last couple of years, she has started to treat me with a lot more respect. I mean she always listened to me, but now . . . it’s like, she knows I am an adult. When I make a statement, she doesn’t dismiss it. She doesn’t always agree with it, mind you, but she gives things a lot more thought when I give her my opinion.”
“And your father, too?” asked Steve.
“Well, my dad is a little different. He has always, always, always had my back. Between him and Zack, nobody ever messed with me. And yeah, he trusts me like my mom does, but Zack’s dying changed us. My dad is generally the strong silent type. He’s always had our respect and our love. In his mind, his job is to support us, all of us, in whatever we want to do. He is always there, at our backs, coaxing, encouraging, teaching, protecting.”
Abby paused and cleared her throat loudly. “Zack dying on some stupid football field a hundred miles away was not something he knew how to process. In some crazy way, I think he believes Zack’s death was his fault, like he wasn’t there to protect him. Like he should’ve known Zack’s football helmet was gonna come back down like it did and hit him so hard. It’s crazy. It messed him up. So now he does a lot more to protect us, especially my mom.”
Steve saw the tears that welled in her blue eyes.
“You know what’s funny? The thing is, when I get to feeling all sad about losing Zack, I think about my mom and dad and what it must be like for them. And then I feel very, very selfish and ashamed about missing him so much.”
Martin didn’t know if she were crying for Zack or for her parents. It didn’t matter. He put his hand on Abby’s shoulder. “Sweetie, you can’t be ashamed about that. Grief is a tremendous burden to bear. Believe me, I know. We all do.”
He looked around those gathered at the table. “But don’t let that e
at you. Don’t ever let yourself think you aren’t entitled to miss him as much as anybody ever missed anyone else in this world.”
“Yeah, I know.” She sniffled and wiped her face. “I know that, deep down, I do. It’s like you said . . . it’s just hard to bear sometimes.”
Steve nodded.
“So, Martin, last night,” Abby continued, “you said something when I told my parents about the note and how I knew it was from Zack. Did you get that kind of proof when you heard from your daughter too?”
Martin didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I had a nickname for my daughter: Snugglebug.”
On Tenterhooks Page 17