by Sarah Wynde
“Shakespeare?” Akira hazarded a guess.
“Yep. Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 2. One of the many speeches Mrs. Martinez made us memorize. I could probably do all of ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks,’ too.”
“I never liked Shakespeare. Too confusing.”
Colin scratched his head. “Wave functions? Dead cats?”
Akira laughed. “Fair point. But do you even know what the speech you quoted means?”
“Sure,” Colin responded. “Fate versus free will. An opportunity exists—that’s fate—but taking it is up to us. Free will.”
He frowned. In a way, he’d done the opposite. He’d believed in fate, so much so that he’d given up his opportunities. He’d gotten trapped in the shallows, in a life emptier than the one he would have chosen. Damn it, if he’d known Nat’s prediction might not come true, he would have lived his life very differently. But her predictions had always come true before, always.
“Nice,” Akira said. “And pretty much what I meant. Our choices do matter. But there can also be an inevitability about the future, like the tide coming in on time every day.”
“But I didn’t die.”
“An earthquake hit,” Akira replied promptly.
“An earthquake?”
“Rose-shaped.” Akira paused for a minute and then laughed again. She must have been responding to something Rose said as she added, “All right, so earthquakes don’t have shapes. But an earthquake can cause a tsunami, changing the tides.”
“Not permanently, though.” Colin’s lips tightened. He wanted to believe he’d been given a second chance. An opportunity to live out his life and die in a peaceful old age. But if he was fated to die young…
“Sometimes permanently,” Akira corrected him. “If a quake changes the geography of the land, the tides adapt. They flow around the new surfaces.”
“So fate’s fluid? Despite’s Nat’s ability to see what the future will bring?”
“Yes.” Akira gave a firm nod. “When you run into an ange—erm… into a spirit like Rose, all bets are off.”
“Into a what?” Colin asked.
Akira put a finger to her lips and then grimaced, squeezing her eyes shut as if she were responding to being scolded. She hunched up her shoulders like a guilty little girl. “I know.” A pause. “I’m sorry. Yes, of course I heard you.”
Colin tried to puzzle out what she’d said. When you run into an angerm? An ang—erm? And then his eyebrows shot up as he realized what Akira had almost said. A what? His memories were fuzzy, but he was pretty sure Rose had looked like a normal girl to him. But then what did he know about angels?
“I know,” Akira repeated. “No halo, no wings, no harp, not an angel, got it. But Rose…” She fell silent again.
In his front pocket, Colin’s phone vibrated. As Akira continued to listen to Rose, he pulled it out and glanced at the display. Joyce. He should take it.
With a laconic, “Yep?” he answered the call.
“Where are you, Sheriff?” Joyce’s voice held an impatient edge.
“Damn fine question,” he answered her. They’d been hiking for at least four or five hours. How far had they gone?
“Damn lousy answer,” Joyce muttered. “Did you forget your meeting with the accountant?”
Colin winced. Oh, hell. He’d thought his schedule was clear. He wasn’t supposed to be on duty today, which had meant a fine opportunity to follow up on a lead he had no intention of sharing with anyone in the office. It was Tassamara so folks were tolerant of the unusual, but he had a reputation for skepticism he intended to maintain. Talking about ghosts wouldn’t do it. “Ah…”
“How fast can you get back here?” she interrupted him.
“Not fast. I’m in the middle of nowhere.” They’d headed south, deep into the forest, before reaching the trail leading along the prairie. Within minutes, if they stayed on the trail, they should be headed back into forest, this time the deep, tropical growth that flourished around the springs and lakes. A road shouldn’t be too far away. Still, he’d need to call a deputy to pick them up. Their cars were miles behind them. “At least an hour, probably more.”
Joyce’s sigh held a wealth of exasperation. “As sheriff, you have responsibilities—”
“I know, I know,” he interrupted her in turn. He could recite Joyce’s responsibility speech by heart. He heard it every time he didn’t finish his paperwork as promptly as she would like. Distracting her was the only way to defuse her. “Have you checked the hospital records yet?”
“Of course.” She sounded smug, but less satisfied when she added, “But there are no deaths fitting the description you gave me.”
“None?” Colin didn’t understand how that could be possible. It was a hospital. People died at hospitals.
“You said female, aged between twenty to fifty, deceased within the last week. No one fitting that description has passed at the hospital this week.”
Could he have gotten the wrong hospital? The wrong age? “Anyone dead on arrival?”
“Not that I was told.” There was a pause before Joyce added, “I assume the administrator I spoke with would have been intelligent enough to tell me if so.”
“Let’s not assume that.” He glanced at Akira. He could interrogate Rose again, at least to check on the hospital, but he’d rather not do so while Joyce waited impatiently on the phone. “Check the clinics, too, and forget the age range. And expand our timeline. Make it ten days instead of a week. I want to know about every recently deceased woman in a thirty mile radius since before Christmas. I don’t care how many calls it takes.”
“How about I start with one call? The local health department will have death certificates on file for all deaths that occurred at least seventy-two hours ago.”
“Good, start there.”
“All right,” Joyce sounded agreeable, before she asked pointedly, “What do you want me to do about the accountant? He’s waiting in your office.”
Colin paused and thought. It ought to be a straightforward meeting. The budgets weren’t complicated. “Take the meeting for me. Let me know if there’s anything I need to know. Leave the paperwork on my desk and I’ll sign off on it when I get back to the office. You can do that, right?”
“Of course I can. I know the budget better than you do.”
“Yep,” Colin agreed cordially, ignoring Joyce’s tone. Getting her involved in all aspects of his job was one of the ways he’d prepared for his death. When the day came that he never made it back to the office, Joyce would have made the transition to a new sheriff seamless. “I’ll call when I know my schedule.”
He tapped off the phone call and stuffed his phone into his pocket. He’d been right about where Rose was headed. They’d entered the deep forest, one of the richly verdant areas scattered around the national park. Spanish moss draped from oak trees like grey shrouds over the deep green of the undergrowth.
Akira stopped. “Okay, we’re here.”
Colin looked around them. “Here?”
No distinguishing features separated this patch of trees from any other patch of tropical forest.
Akira nodded. “Rose says yes.”
Colin pulled out his phone again, calling up an app to check the GPS coordinates of their location. The numbers meant nothing to him. He frowned down at the screen, pulling up the map. Nope, still meaningless.
“Does Rose have any idea which direction Kenzi came from?”
Akira paused before shaking her head. “How did you find your way back here, Rose?”
They’d taken the ghost girl at her word that she could retrace her steps through the forest, but for much of the way, she hadn’t followed anything as obvious as a trail.
Akira blinked and her eyebrows arched upward, before pulling down as she asked, “Are you teasing me?”
Rose must have said yes because Akira smiled. “Seriously, though, how?”
“What did she say?” Coli
n asked.
Akira waved a hand. “She said she followed a rift in the space-time continuum.”
Colin chuckled.
“She doesn’t really know, though. She felt pulled here and then pulled to where you found Kenzi. She could take us there if we wanted.”
“Why did you take her all the way there, Rose? There’s a much closer road to the south.” Colin crouched, eyeing the ground for signs of tracks or indications of human presence.
“She says that’s where Kenzi needed to be,” Akira reported. “Also to look under that bush over there. That’s where she first saw her.”
Colin followed the direction of Akira’s pointing finger and stood, crossing to the bush in question. No evidence leaped out at him. He looked down at his map again, sliding to enlarge it. Which direction would Kenzi have come from? To the east lay water, one of the ponds that dotted the forest, and to the south, a road led to the town of Sweet Springs. To the west, there was nothing but more prairie until the land turned back into pine scrub, and they’d come from the north.
The best bet was probably to head for the road and check out the area. Maybe she’d come from one of the closest houses. But he found his feet turning toward the east. The undergrowth to the south was tangled and dense. To the east, overgrown saw palmettos and cabbage palms clustered close together. A small child could have walked between the eastern trees easily, unlike the path to the south.
He ducked under the sharp-edged leaves of a palmetto, scanning the scenery, looking for anything that might provide a clue to Kenzi’s original direction. Nothing jumped out at him as he walked forward. The trees were much denser than the scrub pine landscape but typical of the tropical forests found around water.
Except… His eyes narrowed.
Those plants weren’t ferns.
Oh, hell.
He stilled, putting up an abrupt hand to stop Akira. She was still chatting to Rose, her light voice clear on the cold breeze.
“Hush,” he ordered in a harsh whisper, eyes searching for signs of movement, evidence of life.
Akira took a few steps forward, joining him. “Don’t we want to let the hunters know we’re coming?” she asked in a whisper of her own.
Colin pointed. “Not hunters who might be guarding their illegal crops.” Talking would make them easy targets if one of the drug dealers responsible for the patch of marijuana plants growing around them was nearby.
The forest wasn’t quiet. Colin could hear birds, jays yelling and the musical trill of sparrows or warblers, and leaves rustling in the wind. But nothing that sounded like human beings moving through the woods.
“Wait here,” he told Akira, planning to take a closer look at their surroundings. “Don’t get shot.”
Akira snorted, a sound suspiciously like a chuckle. “Better idea,” she suggested, putting a hand on Colin’s arm before he could move away. “We both stay here and let Rose explore. She’ll tell us if there’s anyone around and it’s tough to shoot a spirit.”
Colin glanced at her in surprise, feeling his lips relax into a smile. “Ghostly reconnaissance? Handy.”
“Rose,” she said, voice hushed. “Could you—okay. She’s on her way.”
The two stood together in silence for several minutes, Akira frowning as she stared in the direction Rose must have gone, Colin scanning their surroundings in quiet tension.
Akira’s sigh of relief was the signal Colin needed.
“Good?” he asked.
She nodded. “No sign of anyone. Rose found a campsite down by the water, but she says it looks abandoned.”
Colin didn’t let himself relax. “I’ll call this in to the rangers. They’ll send a team out to clear up the site and collect any evidence.” Shelby answered on the first ring. He filled her in, providing her with the GPS coordinates, before finally closing his phone.
Akira stood by, waiting for him to finish. When he did, she gestured toward the water. “Can we go take a look at the campsite or would that be like disturbing a crime scene?”
“Any dead bodies down there?” Colin asked, only partially serious. He hoped Rose would have mentioned anything along those lines before he called for help.
Akira shook her head.
“I think we can take the risk, then.”
The two of them walked through the marijuana plants, Akira in the lead. Colin would have preferred to be on point himself, but since he couldn’t see Rose, he took rear guard, inspecting the territory around them and behind them as they moved.
The plants were tucked under the trees, relatively far away from the water. The patch wasn’t huge, only thirty-five or forty plants. The growers might not be pros, just locals taking advantage of the forest’s relative safety. Growing pot in national forests was big business, but Ocala historically had less of that activity than other regions. Meth labs were sadly more common.
Colin paused at the edge of the field. Examining the sandy soil without touching it, he kicked at the ground until he found the irrigation system he expected. The growers were using a simple hose set-up to shunt water from the pond to their field. Nothing elaborate, but effective enough in the Florida climate.
Hurrying to catch up to Akira, he paused at the edge of the campsite Rose had found. He understood immediately why she’d decided it was abandoned, instead of simply unoccupied at the moment. Something about it reeked of desolation. Maybe it was the two-person tent, ties flapping in the wind, middle drooping like a tired old man. Maybe it was the scattered trash and personal belongings. Or the lone sock caught in the roots of a tree, as if someone had rushed to pack up without looking behind them when they left.
“Do you think Kenzi was living here?” Akira’s eyes were troubled.
Colin rubbed his chin, thinking. Slowly, he shook his head. “She makes her bed. She sets the table. She eats what’s put in front of her. If she was here, it wasn’t for long. She’s not a kid who’s been living rough in the woods.”
Akira looked reassured, but there was a queasy feeling in the back of Colin’s throat. A memory itched at him, a thought he couldn’t quite grasp.
Marijuana growers.
A lost girl.
Could they have something in common?
Chapter Eleven
Natalya worried. She hated it, but she couldn’t seem to help herself, and she hated that, too.
Seeing the future had never been as useful as one might imagine. Oh, sure, she’d probably saved a few lives with her gift. When a seemingly healthy patient walked into the emergency room complaining of a headache, the knowledge that she’d be scrambling to lower his dangerously elevated blood pressure in the near future meant she moved him to the front of the line. But that incident and others like it led to uncomfortable questions and odd looks.
And the silly stuff never worked out. She didn’t know the lottery numbers, probably because she never won so they weren’t important enough for her to remember. She still forgot to bring an umbrella on rainy days. Sports were boring when the winner was never in question and card games lost all their appeal when every turn of the deck was predictable. Not to mention no one she knew would play with her.
No, her precognition had always been more of a curse than a blessing. But losing it left her feeling like she was standing, blindfolded, at the edge of a chasm, where one false move would send her tumbling over the edge.
She stared at the blank canvas in front of her. The underpainting was done and dry, waiting for her to start sketching. A sampling of her drawings of her father was pinned to the wall. The blinds were up, letting in the clear natural light of a wintry Florida day. She had no reason not to get to work.
But her studio didn’t feel right.
Nothing felt right.
It wasn’t because her studio had become Kenzi’s bedroom with startling rapidity. She didn’t mind that she’d had to put most of her paints into boxes to make room for a small dresser to hold the clothes the little girl was accumulating. Or that she’d had to do the tone coat on t
he canvas outside, so Kenzi wouldn’t have to sleep surrounded by the smell of linseed oil. And sketching while Kenzi played contentedly with the over-the-top dollhouse Grace had brought by that morning ought to be easy. Kenzi was peaceful company most of the time.
But the feeling of foreboding was like ants crawling on the back of her neck, a prickling sense of danger, danger, danger. Without conscious thought, her hand started to move. Quick, light strokes. Fine lines, shading, charcoal angling smoothly across the burnt sienna surface of the canvas. Darker lines, deeper, heavier, almost a scribble of black curves until the charcoal snapped from the pressure and she stepped away from her easel. What the hell?
She glanced at the sketches on the wall. In them, she’d caught her father’s warmth, his lively curiosity, the quality of focus he gave to his conversations as if nothing could be more important to him than the person he was with. It was in his eyes.
This man’s eyes were cold.
She hadn’t drawn her father. But who had she drawn? She’d never seen him before.
“What. The. Hell.” She spoke aloud, oblivious of the little girl a few feet away.
Behind her, Kenzi yelped. It was a squeak of fear, and the first vocalization Natalya had heard her make.
Natalya spun as the dollhouse crashed to the ground, toppling over from the weight of the little girl scrambling over it in her rush to the door.
“Kenzi, no,” Natalya called out to the girl’s back. “I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”
She sighed and said in a voice she knew the girl couldn’t hear. “I wasn’t swearing at you.”
She set down the charcoal, wiping the dust off her fingers and onto her paint-splattered shirt. She should have been more careful. She didn’t think her tone sounded angry, but Kenzi didn’t handle anger well. And then Natalya’s eyes narrowed. She glanced from the easel to the door and back again.