She felt the weight of the Wyatt police captain’s gaze now and couldn’t meet it. The sense of her mother’s presence rose as distinctly as if Leeanne Gray were standing beside her. Not another word. Her voice clattered into Gilly’s mind. For God’s sake, don’t say you had a dream. Don’t give the man cause to doubt your sanity, to go looking into your background.
“Miss O’Connell?” The police captain prompted her again. “Who did you see Zoe with? How do you know it wasn’t Stephanie? Are you acquainted with her?”
Mackie’s look was intent. Gilly could nearly see his nose—his cop nose—twitching in anticipation that he had stumbled on something, a clue, perhaps the very one he needed to resolve the mystery of Zoe’s disappearance. If only . . .
“They could have met in Houston,” Cricket said, but it came across more as if she was asking. Unlike her husband, though, she sounded perplexed rather than suspicious.
“No,” Gilly tried to backpedal. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, you don’t know Zoe’s mother? Or no, you don’t know the identity of the woman who took Zoe?” Captain Mackie was all business now.
“I—I saw her yesterday. Zoe, I mean. She was here with her dad for breakfast. I made her an elephant pancake.” I told Jake where to find his wallet. “I haven’t seen her at all today.” Except in a dream, a horrible nightmare. Gilly stopped, clamping her jaw against that bit.
Mackie stared.
She looked away.
“Miss O’Connell, I’m getting the distinct impression you know more than you’re saying.”
Mackie waited for her to fill in the pause. Gilly didn’t.
He went on. “Where were you between eleven thirty this morning and one o’clock, say? Can you account for your whereabouts?”
“She was here,” April said. “All morning, from the time we opened.”
Gilly shot her a grateful look.
But Mackie wouldn’t let it go. “If you were at the school, if you saw who picked Zoe up, you need to tell me.”
“Trust me,” Gilly said, “if I knew, I would. But I don’t. Truly,” she added, meeting the captain’s eyes now. “I’ve never been to the school.”
He looked back at her, openly disbelieving, wary.
It was something Gilly hated about cops, the way they never took anything at face value. She’d once asked Carl how he could live like that—doubting everyone and everything they said. He hadn’t denied it made life, especially relationships, difficult. He’d confessed that his wife of seven years had left him in part because of his inability to trust her—that and his god-awful hours.
“You heard April. I was here all morning. She’s a witness.” Gilly glanced at April, who looked apprehensive, perhaps even regretful, now.
“Yeah, I heard.”
The silence lingered, becoming prolonged, uncomfortable.
Gilly looked past Mackie at the door behind him that led to the alley behind the café. She thought again of leaving Wyatt, driving north or west. She’d always wanted to see California.
Mackie’s phone went off and as if a reset button had been pushed, everyone moved. Cricket followed her husband out the back door that led to the alley.
Gilly followed April into the walk-in pantry. “Thanks for speaking up for me in there.”
“Sure,” April said. She was moving spice bottles around as if the activity absorbed her. Abruptly, she turned, shooting Gilly a probing glance. “You were gone awhile.”
“What do you mean?”
“Earlier, when you went to the restroom? You were gone a long time, maybe as long as forty-five minutes, from like eleven forty-five to near twelve thirty.”
“No. No,” Gilly repeated. “You must be mistaken. I was only in there a few minutes.” She remembered patting her face with a damp paper towel. She’d been thinking about Zoe, the dream—
“I don’t think so.” April was insistent. “I shredded the pork, sliced two or three pounds of chicken, a half dozen onions, the tomatoes, and grated a ton of cheese, plus took orders while you were gone—kept me busy a half hour at least.”
Gilly stared at April. She’d had blackouts before, back when she was still drinking. She’d lost time on a couple of occasions since then, too, but early in her sobriety. Was it happening again? She remembered the open window, the heavenly breeze—outside. Had she gone outside?
“Did you go out to the Little Acorn for some reason?” April asked. “I mean, I get it if you don’t want the cops to know, but this is a little kid that’s missing, so like if you saw something—”
“I couldn’t have gone to the school. I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t know where it is. I didn’t see anything that way.”
“That way?” April was perplexed. “What does that mean?”
“Excuse me, but I have to go. Bailey—my dog—if I don’t go home right now and walk him, he’ll make a mess on the floor.” Gilly went around April to the dayroom, where she retrieved her purse. She didn’t look at April again, but she felt April’s eyes on her right up until she left the café, closing the alleyway door behind her.
Tommy Houseman had been Gilly’s best friend—the last real, close friend she’d have—until third grade, when she told him she’d dreamed his big brother, Blake, whom Tommy idolized, was going to die in a hunting accident. Gilly had wakened from the dream, disoriented and scared, and she’d gone into her parents’ bedroom and wakened them, begging them to warn the Housemans.
Her dad was furious. “It’s three o’clock in the damn morning.”
Her mom flipped on the bedside light, squinting at Gilly in the doorway. She was clearly unhappy, too. “You have got to stop this, Gillian,” she said.
It was what she always said after Gilly had one of her dreams. Stop this. As if Gilly could control what she dreamed. “Just call them, please,” she begged. “They’re going in the morning before it’s even light outside. Tommy said—”
“I’m not calling anybody at this hour.” Her dad punched his pillow. It might have been her face, Gilly thought. He’d never hit her, but Gilly had always felt the threat of it. She thought he wanted her to feel it. Sometimes he’d stand her between his knees, cup her cheeks in his rough-palmed hands and search her eyes. She didn’t know what he was looking for. Some other little girl, one who didn’t have dreams and wild imaginings. “Go back to bed,” he told her. “Leeanne, turn off the light. Goddammit, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Gilly’s mom switched off the lamp, rendering Gilly blind. She groped her way to her mother’s side of the bed. “Mommy, please.”
“No, Gillian. Go back to bed now. Your father has to get up in the morning and go to work. He’s got no time for your drama. None of us does.”
Gilly hesitated, but there wasn’t any use pushing. She was in the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom when her mom spoke again.
“Don’t go calling over there yourself either. Do you hear me?”
Gilly didn’t call. Instead she waited in her bedroom until she heard her father’s snores, and then, walking quietly through the house, she let herself out the back door. Tommy’s house was on her right, and she went from her backyard into his the way she always did: on her hands and knees, crawling through the hole in the hedge of scraggly Ligustrums that defined the property line. It was fall, the beginning of deer hunting season, and cold out. There was no moon. Even the stars were gone. She was scared, and her heart was beating hard and fast. But she couldn’t let it go the way her parents wanted. Even if she had been wrong before when she’d dreamed stuff, she’d been right, too. Like last month, when in the split second after she’d seen it happen in her mind, a limb as big around as her mother’s leg fell some thirty feet from the pine tree in their backyard. Her mom, who had been weeding the groundcover beneath it, had just gotten to her feet when Gilly jerked her to safety. What if this was the same kind of thing? What if she could save Blake’s life?
She went to Tommy’s bedroom window, scooping a handful of dirt an
d small stones on her way. He was there immediately after she tossed the rubble at his window, as if he’d been awake and waiting for her.
“What are you doing?” he asked her through the screen. He used his normal speaking voice, and she shushed him, looking over her shoulder in the direction of her house, half expecting to see the back porch light come on, her father emerge, hands on his hips. If he found her, he’d jerk her up, maybe whip her all the way home.
“Can’t come out now. We’re going hunting,” Tommy said. “I told you.”
“I know,” Gilly said. “That’s why I came over. You can’t go, Tommy. Blake’s going to get hurt if you do, maybe killed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tommy? You dressed yet?”
Gilly recognized his dad’s voice and ducked down below the window just as he opened Tommy’s bedroom door. “Who are you talking to?”
“Gilly,” Tommy said. “She says Blake’s going to get hurt if we go hunting.”
“Gilly?”
She looked up at Mr. Houseman, framed in the window. She couldn’t see Tommy.
“Your parents know you’re here?” he asked, not unkindly, but the edge of annoyance in his voice was unmistakable, like a pinch.
She shook her head.
“You have one of those dreams?”
She nodded. She could tell from the way he spoke that he thought as little of her dreams as her parents did.
“We talked about this, right? Dreams don’t tell the future. No one can do that.”
“I saw Blake, though. I saw him fall in the woods; blood was on him. He screamed—”
“What the hell is she talking about?”
Gilly heard Blake’s voice. He was twelve, four years older than Gilly and Tommy, and he thought he was superior, smarter and tougher than they’d ever be. But once when her foot had gotten tangled in her bike chain, Blake had loosened it and then carried her home six blocks, because it hurt too much to walk on it.
“Language,” his dad admonished over his shoulder. He turned back to Gilly. “You get on back home, okay?”
“You won’t call my parents?”
“You need to quit making up all this dream crap, okay? You scare people.”
Gilly wanted to tell him it wasn’t crap. She wanted to say she was scared of herself, too, that she did everything she could to keep from sleeping, even splashing cold water on her face to stay awake. But all she said was, “Yes sir,” and when he asked her to promise, she agreed it was the last time his family—Tommy or any of them—would hear “any bogus dream prediction about their future” out of her.
“I think she’s just starved for attention.” Gilly heard Mrs. Houseman say as Mr. Houseman was closing Tommy’s window.
She’d heard her mom say a similar thing to her dad during arguments they had about her, about what to do with her.
She only makes up this terrible stuff to get your attention, her mom would say.
You let her get away with it, her dad would say. And don’t give me that horseshit about her having a vivid imagination. We both know she flat-out lies. She invents shit on purpose just to rattle folks and scare them. She gets some kind of rush from it.
The kid’s mental.
She needs a shrink.
Gilly had overheard her dad say it a dozen, a hundred times. If he was fed up with her and the dreams before Blake, he was off the deep end after.
Because Blake didn’t die that day, but after that, everything else did.
Gilly and Tommy were never friends again. His folks had forbidden it, and the following month, Gilly’s dad packed up and left, and her parents divorced. Her mom said it had nothing to do with Gilly, but Gilly knew better. She knew her dad had left because she was a freak, and he couldn’t handle it. Her mom couldn’t handle it either, but she’d made the best of it, out of obligation. She was that sort of person. She wouldn’t abandon her child. She overlooked a lot. She had a gesture—a habit of fluttering her fingers in front of her face if something disturbed her, and Gilly’s dreams, the prophetic ones, did disturb her. They set Gilly apart. Made her too different. She would never have friends, or not the sort she would want, meaning not the sort her mom wanted for her. It had turned out to be true—the friends part. Gilly was never really close to anyone after Tommy Houseman.
Until Brian came along.
But now Brian was gone, and Gilly’s brain was weird again.
April had said Gilly had been gone a half hour or more this morning. At least thirty minutes of her life had passed, unaccounted for. Minutes Gilly couldn’t recollect.
Bailey greeted her as soon as she opened the door, all doggy smiles and rump-wriggling joy, and Gilly went to her knees right there on her kitchen floor, gathering him into her embrace, burying her nose in his wiry fur, fighting tears. Moments later, when she’d gotten control of herself, she snapped on his leash and walked with him through the neighborhood to the small park six blocks from her house. He was well behaved, trotting along beside her, matching her brisk pace. Brian had undertaken his training. Watching Brian with Bailey, Gilly had known then, if she hadn’t before, that Brian would be a fantastic dad.
“Gilly? What’s wrong?” her mother asked, reading the emotion in Gilly’s voice.
Gilly had fought calling her. She had intended to go to the grocery store to buy the makings for tomorrow night’s dinner with Liz. But instead, after walking Bailey, she’d changed the sheets on her bed and done a load of wash. She’d brought chicken salad home from the café, and she’d made herself a sandwich for dinner, but she’d been unable to eat more than a bite. She’d left it sitting on a plate in the breakfast nook and gone outside into the backyard with Bailey and her phone. It was after eight, and the last of the daylight was gone, but she could see him, sniffing intently at something only he could smell along the fence line.
She’d been lucky, finding a house with a nice yard to rent in a town as small as Wyatt. Especially one where she was allowed to have Bailey. Ruth Rendell, the realtor Gilly had worked with, was her landlord. Ruth had inherited the house, she’d said, from her aunt Tildy, who had died not long ago. Gilly had felt odd about taking possession of it, saddened in a way, but Ruth had assured her that her aunt had lived a long and satisfying life. Ruth had hinted that she’d be open to the idea if Gilly wanted to buy the house, but Gilly wasn’t sure of her plans long-term. She’d been here six months and had yet to unpack the boxes except for the most essential items. She couldn’t seem to deal with it—the future.
If Brian were here, he’d snap it up, the house and the small-town life. He and Gilly had talked about it. Before his death they’d been working on a drawing of a white clapboard farmhouse with four bedrooms to accommodate the three children they’d planned. They’d pictured it on acreage somewhere in central or south Texas.
“Two story,” Brian had said, quickly penciling a basic outline.
“With dormers and a wraparound porch,” Gilly had said, and she’d added those details when he’d passed the drawing to her. “We’ll have a swing.” She’d looked at him.
“Absolutely,” he’d said, grinning. He took back the drawing and outlined a bench swing. “It’ll be big enough for all five of us. Our land should have water, a small lake or a pond, where we can fish.”
“And have picnics,” Gilly had said, and the vision of their shared dream had seemed to float from the page and shimmer in the air between them.
Tildy’s house wasn’t exactly in the style or the rural location they’d dreamed of, but Gilly thought Brian would encourage her to buy it. The yellow clapboard bungalow was on an oversize lot in a pretty, tree-studded subdivision called Lacey Oaks. It was as much property as Gilly felt she could adequately handle on her own. The morbid irony was that because of the benefit paid to her through the life insurance policy Brian had taken out shortly after they married, not only could she afford it, she could pay the full asking price and own it outright with a generous amount left over. The amount
on the check she’d received embarrassed her. She wondered how anyone could put a dollar amount on someone’s life. She wondered why it wasn’t called death insurance.
“A little girl is missing,” she said to her mom now.
“Where?” her mother asked. “There in Wyatt?”
“Yes.”
“You know her?”
“Yes. Not well. I make her pancakes when she comes to the café with her dad on Wednesdays.”
“Oh, Gilly.” Disappointment and a harsher note of alarm threaded her mother’s voice. “How long has she been gone?”
“Since around noon today. I had a dream about her last night, and I saw who took her. Not clearly. Just enough that I know it was a woman driving a blue car.”
“Gilly, your car is blue.”
“Yes, but it’s an SUV. The car in my dream was a sedan, and the color was lighter than mine, more a silvery blue. Metallic.”
“Your dream could be wrong.”
Of course her mom would think that, Gilly thought.
“It wasn’t—”
You. The word hovered between them, not quite an accusation.
“No,” Gilly said. “No, of course not.”
“You’re sure you didn’t—?”
“No! Mom, why would you even think such a thing?”
“You know why, honey.”
She meant there was a history. Gilly had done it before.
8
Jake was only doors away from his house when he spotted the Wyatt patrol car parked in his driveway behind his mother’s MINI Cooper, and he floored it, reaching his house in seconds, mindless when the truck jumped the curb. “Zoe?” he shouted, bailing out of the cab. “Zoe?” He screamed her name, running across the yard.
The front door flew open, and his mother appeared. Clint Mackie was silhouetted in the light behind her.
“Zoe?” he said from the bottom of the porch steps, and he knew before she shook her head that his daughter wasn’t here. “You found her, though. You know where she is.” Jake persisted even though he knew from his mom’s expression, the slump of her shoulders, there was nothing new.
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