by Rachel Lee
“I had some back surgery,” he went on, his voice low, tight. “Some physical therapy, even some psychological therapy. But nothing, absolutely nothing could prepare me for going home to an empty house when it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault!” The words, useless in the extreme, burst out of her.
“It will be this time,” he ground out.
Her hammering heart seemed to stop. Shock washed over her in a cold wave. Finally she managed to stammer, “Wh-what do you m-mean?”
But he chose not to answer her directly. At least not right away. “You know I went on the road. I’ve been hitchhiking all over the country. Moving. Always moving, as if I could get away from my own head. And of course, I couldn’t. I’ll never get away from my own head.”
All of a sudden she realized her fingers ached. Looking down she saw that she had dug them into the arms of her chair. With effort, she loosened her grip. She didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t. But as if she was caught in a waking nightmare, she couldn’t tell him to stop.
“I wasn’t just running from grief and guilt,” he said after a moment. “I was running from what those visions and dreams might mean.”
“How so?” But did she really want to know?
“I’ve spent a year wondering how it could be possible to see the future. And if it is possible, can we change it? Was that crash a fixed future event regardless of what I might have done? Or could I have changed something?”
He heart resumed a heavy beating, not a pleasant feeling. Some part of her wanted to stop this conversation now, while another part argued that she had to get her answers, like it or not. Apart from finding Grant sexually attractive, he had another characteristic that made her extremely uncomfortable: he could raise more conflicting feelings in her than rooting for both teams in a football game. She hated feeling conflicted, and she wasn’t sure she liked the way he was changing her view of the world. There was something to be said for the familiar, after all, but he was leading her to the edge of things she wasn’t sure she could, or wanted, to deal with.
Conflicted or not, however, she was pretty sure she was going to take this journey one way or another.
“Theoretically,” he said slowly, “these are fascinating questions. When they become personal, though, they get a whole lot tougher to deal with.”
“I’m feeling pretty much the same thing right now.”
He looked at her, his eyes reflecting an old pain. “In theory, quantum physics says precognition is possible. But in theory time can move backward. How often do we see that?”
“Not very.”
“So as a rule, you go with the way the world works. Time doesn’t move backward. Okay. But there is some experimental evidence that we can foresee probabilities in the future. Most of those experiments suggest we could look ahead three seconds max. Not enough to really count in any big way. But then you come up against something like my visions and nightmares.”
“Yeah,” she said softly, trying to turn it around in her mind. “Yeah. Hard to explain, hard to believe, hard to even imagine why.”
“Until it happens to you. Then you believe, but everything else gets harder.”
Again she felt a pang for him. He must hurt in ways she couldn’t even begin to grasp, in ways no amount of reassurance could ease. “But you couldn’t possibly have known that nightmare was anything except a nightmare.”
“True. Doesn’t help much, but true.” He looked at her. “But you see, it had an effect. An abiding effect. So about six weeks ago when I started to have more visions, I knew better than to ignore them. I paid attention. I waited, because somehow I knew that if I was envisioning this stuff, I was going to wind up exactly where the vision showed. Just the way I wound up on that plane.”
She drew a sharp breath, and fear began an icy crawl along her spine. “What? How…?” The only thing she knew right then was that she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say.
“I got to the truck stop here, and I knew. I just knew. This was the place. And when I found the bar, just as I’d seen it in my vision, I became convinced. So I started walking and I found that park bench right across the street. Just the way I had seen it.”
She wanted to yell at him to shut up, to stop, that he was scaring her and he must be insane. But all the protests died before they reached her lips as the cold fingers of fear tightened her throat.
“Someone,” he said, “is going to try to kill you.”
Chapter 6
“Are you out of your mind?” She leaped up from her chair and glared at him. “Is this some twisted kind of joke?”
His face tightened, but he said nothing. Merely shook his head, very slowly.
“You come here from nowhere, worm your way into my life, and now you expect me to believe you’ve had a vision that someone is going to kill me?” She had raised her voice, but she didn’t care. She was tumbling, tumbling fast into an alternate universe of shock, disbelief and the darkness of fear. Only, she had no way to know what exactly she should fear.
“Try to kill you,” he said evenly, quietly.
“What difference does it make? Are you threatening me?”
“God, no!”
She could see him coil as if to stand, but he didn’t. Maybe he hurt too much. Maybe he thought it would appear intimidating. As if she cared.
He spread his hands beseechingly. “I don’t care if you ever talk to me again. I don’t care if you throw me out. All I want is for you to be on the alert. And all I’m going to do is sit on that damn park bench every damn night until I’m sure you’re safe.”
Then he did push up off the sofa, using his arms for leverage. A small gasp escaped him as he straightened, but he didn’t hesitate. He took two steps away from her, giving her space, before saying, “Call me crazy, call me names. But I ignored these visions once, and I owe it to my wife and daughter not to do it again. If you have a gun, load it and keep it close.”
Then he limped toward the door.
She stood frozen, angry and stunned. Wanting to grab him and make him take it all back. And afraid, so very afraid, that he might not be crazy at all.
The front door closed behind him.
“Lock it!” she heard him yell from outside. Then, moments later, the car he had arrived in sped off.
She locked the front door. She ran through the house and locked every window, checked every door, all the while telling herself that Grant had been pushed over the edge by the loss of his family, that he couldn’t possibly mean what he was saying, and even if he did he couldn’t possibly know anything about the future….
And then she collapsed on a chair in her office, wrapped her arms around herself, and began to rock back and forth, unable to believe, unable to disbelieve him.
Eventually something nudged her leg gently. She looked down and saw the nameless dog. He gave an uncertain wag of his tail, looking up at her hopefully. Helpless to do anything else, she scooped him up into her arms and held him close for comfort. Apparently, he liked that enough to lick her face with a soft tongue. Just a couple of tentative licks, as if testing the relationship.
Trying to let go of her knotted emotions, she buried her face against his soft, furry neck and rocked gently in her chair.
She should call Gage about this. But then she knew she couldn’t. For the same reason that Grant had had so much difficulty telling her, for the same reason he hadn’t merely come into town and headed straight to the sheriff’s office with his story.
Who would believe his vision? And if you didn’t believe him, there was only one other conclusion to reach: he was insane.
And if you reached that conclusion…
She sighed and eased her hold on the dog. He used the opportunity to give her another tiny lick, then burrowed himself in close against her shoulder.
“I need to name you,” she said, hardly aware of the words escaping her, not even really thinking about them.
She had read plenty about Grant Wolfe
on the Web. Plenty. All of it showed him to be a responsible citizen, a brilliant man, someone who had suffered a tragedy beyond imagining. Did she want to be responsible for adding to his problems by passing along a story that might get him into trouble?
Even as horrified and angry as she felt by his prediction, if you could call it that, she wished the man no ill.
Gently she put the dog down. “Tad,” she said, though she had no idea where the name had come from. “You’re Tad.”
He wagged his tail as if he liked it.
Then she went to do the only thing she could: she got her dad’s shotgun.
Bonehead! That was probably the nicest name Grant applied to himself in the next hour. After dropping the car off at the rental place—a garage, really, where they had a handful of cars to rent—he limped back to the motel and dropped onto the bed like a six-foot slab of stone.
What had he been thinking?
But of course, that really wasn’t the question. Unsure of his own ability to successfully intervene in the vision that plagued him, he’d made the really boneheaded decision to tell Trish so that she’d be on guard. That’s what he had been thinking.
Had he even for one deluded moment believed she would accept that news as if he’d just remarked that it was a nice day? Of course not.
In fact, right now he wouldn’t be surprised if the sheriff showed up again, this time to tell him to get out of town. That would make things easy; he’d be driven off and wouldn’t—couldn’t—drive himself nuts with this feeling of responsibility. Hah! Sure. You bet.
But part of him had hoped Trish wouldn’t totally sunder the tentative relationship they’d begun, because he really felt it would be best if they could work together somehow.
Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, he was actually enjoying making a human connection for the first time in a long time.
But if that was so, what the hell was he thinking, racing headlong into the one thing he could have told her that would cause her to never want to see him again?
Had he become self-destructive?
Possible. Entirely possible. He had thought he’d moved past the days early on when he had sometimes contemplated suicide as an antidote to the grief that had been tearing him apart. But maybe he’d just moved to a different phase.
The sheriff didn’t knock, of course. Even if Trish had called him, Grant doubted that anyone had the authority to throw someone out of town. That was for Gary Cooper and John Wayne, for movies, not for reality.
Instead, he lay there waiting for night to come, waiting for his mission to resume. Turning his memory of his visions around in his mind as he sought any possible new clue.
The visions were scattershot. First he had seen someone in a darkened house with a silenced gun, stalking a woman who had turned out to be Trish, reaching her room, then raising the gun, pointing it toward the bed in the shadows….
Nothing.
Then he’d seen a man sitting at what had turned out to be Mahoney’s bar. He’d gotten a clear vision of the clock over the bar showing the time—twelve-fifty—as the man got up and walked out into the night.
Then the park bench.
Then the outside of Trish’s house. The sight of a hand cutting a wire. He assumed a phone line, but he didn’t know for certain.
And he’d gotten the clearest vision of Trish. He’d known her before he clapped eyes on her.
Gradually, over the past month or so, a picture had emerged, enough that he had been able to piece together a sense of what he needed to do. Knew the instant he reached the truck stop across the highway that this was where he needed to do it.
So every night he walked into Mahoney’s bar and waited until the hour at which the gunman was supposed to leave. Waited to see if some stranger arrived, then left on time.
But he was the only one who arrived and left at that time. So far.
Then he limped down the street to the park and Trish’s house, and he waited. Waited because someplace deep inside he knew the killer wouldn’t approach from the front. Knew that his presence on the bench wouldn’t prevent what might happen.
He knew, somehow, that every night he was following the killer’s intended path until the point where he reached the house. Right before that, except for the vision of the gunman in her bedroom, everything splintered.
Maybe because everything wasn’t fixed in cement. That was the only hope he could cling to. That something he might do, that something Trish might do, could keep that man from shooting her in bed.
That between them, one or both of them would do the critical thing to shift the probabilities just enough to save her life.
He had to believe that. Even before he had met Trish, he had had to believe that.
Because he couldn’t stand the thought of living in a world where the future was fixed. Couldn’t even begin to believe in such a place.
But now, there was something he couldn’t stand even more: the possibility that Trish might die.
With a groan, he rolled onto his side and pounded the mattress just once with his fist. The theories that had fascinated him for so long had become more than theories. They had become a living hell he couldn’t seem to escape.
That night Grant was on the park bench again, and just like every other night, he left after about twenty minutes. Only then did Trish go to bed.
The next morning she ran errands and tried to stay out of the house, taking the dog on a long walk in the countryside and finally returning home in the late afternoon, tired and somehow more frazzled than she’d been earlier.
The smell of gun oil hit her nose the instant she entered the kitchen, and carried her back to the days when she and her father had often used the shotgun on critters in the field behind the house. They hadn’t really wanted to kill anything, just scare them away.
“Trish,” he’d said to her on more than one occasion, “birdshot is really all you need. And I wouldn’t load anything more powerful into this gun unless I decided to go hunting big game. It’s enough to scare the birds, and inside the house it’s the safest load for self-defense. Inside of twenty feet, it’ll hit as hard as buckshot. Do we have anyplace in the house big enough to need more than that?”
She still didn’t have any place in the house to need more than that. What’s more, she didn’t want to be shooting anything that might go out her window and into a neighbor’s with deadly force.
The birdshot she loaded into the gun had been purchased recently. Her dad had always told her to keep fresh ammunition, so she regularly bought a new small box and donated her old stuff to the local gun club.
The trip back to childhood made her close her eyes. Her mom had died when she was ten, bled out on the kitchen floor from an ovarian cyst while no one was at home, and then she’d lost her dad to a heart attack just after she graduated from college. The last time she had seen him alive, he’d been beaming from ear to ear at her graduation dinner. Then she had flown to Boston to join her new firm, only to come home a month later for a funeral.
But her dad was still with her, especially as she held his old shotgun. She could still see his work-hardened and gnarled hands holding it, showing her how to treat it with respect and caution.
How he would say, “I know plenty of folks who say guns don’t kill, people do. To some extent they’re right. But guns can also kill in the hands of people who don’t know how to handle them. So you’re going to learn how to handle this, Trish. You never know when you might need it.”
So out they would go to some isolated place on their small ranch and shoot away for an hour or two. It had been fun, actually. Lots of fun. Maybe because it was time with her dad when they weren’t busy with chores. Maybe because target shooting was just a fun pastime.
And in the weeks immediately following her mother’s death, target shooting had even felt therapeutic.
Birdshot is just as good as buckshot within twenty feet. She checked the load yet again, five rounds, and closed the chamber. Then she flicked o
n the safety.
And wondered briefly if she was nuts to even be doing this.
No, she decided, this was not nuts. No more nuts than making sure she always had fresh ammo on hand, as her dad had taught her. This was just caution, plain and simple. It didn’t mean she believed Grant was right, it didn’t mean she believed someone would actually try to kill her. It merely meant that if something bad did happen, she’d be ready.
That was most definitely not nuts.
Sighing, she looked down at Tad, who was lying patiently on her feet on the linoleum. He seemed to be a singularly content young dog. She probably ought to take him for another long walk, but after Grant’s announcement yesterday, she was absurdly skittish about going outside, even if Grant did seem to think the threat would come in the middle of the night.
Like most people, she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to kill her. But the thing was, the world was littered with innocent victims who’d never done a thing to deserve such an attack. There didn’t have to be a reason. If you let yourself really think about it, that was the scariest thing of all.
So people didn’t think about it, herself included. Until today.
She thought once again about calling Gage, but she could just imagine how he’d react if she told him about Grant’s vision. Hell, he would probably be even more annoyed and disbelieving than she was herself. No, that wasn’t the route to take. Not unless something more happened.
She took Tad out back to do his business, then returned inside, where she discovered she no longer felt entirely comfortable. Grant had done that to her. The safety of home no longer seemed inviolable.
That alone should have been enough to make her furious with him. Instead, now that the first shock had passed, she was feeling sorry for him. If he’d really had those visions before he lost his family, then she could understand why he was so obsessed now. Guilt. Atonement. Maybe a type of sad mental disconnect, an attempt to recreate an awful event in order to ease his guilt.