Dream Dancer (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 2)

by Elbel, Joy

  What I held in my hand was the same bill Madame Ruisseau refused to take from me weeks earlier. Since I rarely carried cash, I remembered exactly when and where I’d last come into contact with it. What I never paid attention to before was the writing scrawled across the back of it.

  “Robicheaux.”

  Since I no longer believed in coincidence, I knew my other stop in Louisiana was an essential one along my path. Before the cashier could get that necklace into a box, I asked her to cut off the price tag so that I could wear it out of the store. Feathers were once again showing me where I needed to be.

  “There’s one more place I need to visit before we leave Louisiana—but I think I want to go there alone.”

  Amid protests that I wasn’t allowed to go off on my own and have fun without them, I calmly announced my destination.

  “I need to go to Robicheaux. It’s about thirty miles out of the city.”

  Shelly put on her detective face and questioned what could be so important in Robicheaux that I wanted to go there alone. Alone was dangerous, hadn’t I learned that already?

  I had a good comeback for that. “I’m going to visit my grandparents. That’s where Mom grew up and where they still live as far as I know. It’s where she’s sending me to next.”

  “Oh,” was her first reaction. “Are you sure you don’t want us to come with you? You know, just in case—”

  I knew exactly how she wanted to finish that sentence. She was thinking I would need their moral support just in case my grandparents had no interest in seeing me. I got where she was coming from, really I did. But if Mom was sending me there, it was for a reason and I really didn’t think it was so I could experience the same kind of rejection she felt from them.

  “Nope. I’m good. I figured I could take a taxi out there in the morning. Tomorrow is our last day here—it’s my last chance before our flight home. I’m sure you and Rachel are more than capable of getting into trouble out on Bourbon Street without me for the day.”

  “Yes, I’m sure we are. But be careful out there, Ruby. Weird things happen in the bayou—people go missing and their bodies are never found. When I think of the bayou, I think of alligators and serial killers.”

  I gently stroked the multicolored feathers now draped gracefully around my neck. “I’ll be fine. Trust me. I won’t really be alone, now will I?”

  “No, I guess not. But make sure your phone is fully charged when you leave. And don’t talk to strangers.”

  “Since when do I talk to strangers on a normal day? I’m more likely to befriend an alligator than I am a serial killer!”

  “True story,” Rachel confirmed without hesitation. “She likes animals better than she likes people. Even scaly ones with sharp teeth. Animals, that is. Though I suppose that holds true in reverse too. Scaly people are gross. I have this weird thing about people with bad skin.”

  That was a little known Rachel fact that I soon wish had remained a mystery. For the next half hour, she rattled on about how acne grossed her out and that flaky skin was simply uncalled for considering the wide variety of moisturizers available. Listening to her bad skin monologue wasn’t pleasant but it did serve a useful purpose. It got my mind off of where I was going in the morning. Even with the best reception, this was still going to be an awkward meeting.

  When I got in bed that night, I tried to think of the best way to introduce myself to them. “Hello, I’m the granddaughter you never wanted” was bluntly true but didn’t seem appropriate. As I lay there churning it around in my mind, something from my tarot reading popped into my thoughts. Go with the flow. There was no better advice to be had in this situation. I needed to get there first, an then let the right words present themselves at the time. Soon after that, I fell soundly to sleep.

  I felt fine all through breakfast and the taxi ride to Robicheaux but once I saw the sign for Turtle Creek Road, I almost told the driver to turn back around. With shaking hands and an unsettled stomach, I clasped the silver feathers on my necklace for strength. The house numbers rolled past one by one taking me closer and closer to the next clue in my weird little mystery. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would meet my grandparents. And my dreams were pretty wild most of the time.

  5213 Turtle Creek Road was so heavily hidden by weeping willows that the driver nearly missed it. His sudden slam on the brakes was a physical reminder that I was about to face something emotionally jarring. I paid my fare being careful not to hand him the five dollar bill that led me there in the first place. I’d started a box of souvenirs from this wild adventure I was on and that bill was going into it the minute I got home.

  The house was nothing more than a tiny bungalow at the end of a small lane engulfed by the drooping foliage of the willow trees. With only one step forward, I realized how soggy the ground here was so I walked with my head down to pick out the drier spots to walk on. That’s when I saw them. Feathers. Tons and tons of feathers lining the path. Enough feathers that I could have knitted myself an entire duck.

  As I walked, it became apparent that the feathers weren’t just leading me to the house; they were actually showing me where the driest spots were. I practically hopscotched my way through the mine field of feathers until I got to the broken down porch of the house. I took a deep breath, stroked my necklace one more time, and then gave a light tap on the weathered front door.

  After a moment of waiting and hearing no signs of movement inside, I rapped sharply against the wood until I thought my knuckles were going to go shooting straight through the rotting panel. This time a slow, quiet shuffling noise could be heard behind that door, growing steadily louder until someone was standing only inches away from me on the other side. As I watched the door knob turn, my breath caught in my throat. Of all the places I’d been, this was the scariest moment yet.

  The door creaked openly slowly, revealing a tiny old man with the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. He was barely my height and couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds heavier, either. He was much older than I expected but I could tell by his facial structure that this indeed was my grandfather.

  “You’re Elijah Redwaters, correct?” I asked full well knowing in my heart the answer to that question.

  “Yes,” he replied with some hesitation as though his mind was somewhere other than this time or place. “I think I know who you are, but I don’t know your name.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that he would know so little about me or that he would recognize me in any way. I swallowed hard, choking back my nervousness, and then introduced myself.

  “My name is Ruby Matthews. I’m your granddaughter.”

  His lips formed into a wistful smile as he repeated my name. “Ruby. She named you Ruby. I never would have guessed. Come on in.”

  So far, so good. This wasn’t nearly as awkward as I thought it was going to be. Sometimes the monsters inside my head convinced me that bad things were always going to happen. I needed to start thinking more positive thoughts—stop throwing negative curses at myself. I smiled politely and crossed the threshold to the final piece of the puzzle known as Mom.

  It was a quaint little cottage barely bigger than my small apartment in Ohio. There were minimal furnishings inside but the walls were hardly visible behind the myriad of framed photos hanging there. Most, if not all of them, were photos of my mother. Family photos, photos of her with friends, newspaper clippings dating back to her days as a dancer. They may have disowned her but they certainly never stopped loving her.

  Elijah pointed to a small photo poised in front of the television. “Ruby, meet the other Ruby.”

  I leaned in for a closer look and found a lady who looked exactly like my mother only slightly older. “My grandmother? I asked quietly. Her name was Ruby, too?”

  “Yep,” he proudly proclaimed, “Married sixty-two days to the year when I lost my gem. Pneumonia. She was too stubborn to go to the doctor. Always thought she could handle things on her own. But she wasn’t the medicine w
oman she thought she was. Died in her sleep with her hand resting on my heart. She was all I had—until now.”

  His attempts to choke back the tears grew less successful with every word he uttered. And gradually, so did mine. When I decided to go with the flow, I never expected it to come in the form of tears.

  “Oh, Grandpa!” I said as I flung my arms around him. The frail little stranger I met only a few minutes ago was now one of the most important people in my life.

  “You look exactly like I pictured you—like Camille,” he said between sobs. “Too bad you never got the chance to meet her in person.”

  “But I did. I don’t remember her much but I did get a chance to meet her. She died when I was four.”

  Elijah dropped our embrace immediately and gave me an odd look. “She was wrong? Her predictions were wrong?”

  “Yes. Sort of. She died giving birth to my sister, not me. But I’m still kind of fuzzy on the facts here. Tell me about my mother. Tell me about the Dream Dancer.”

  We sat down across from each other at the kitchen table both clearly filled with emotion. He seemed in shock. I was more nervous than anything else. Whatever he was about to tell me related back to Zach’s situation in some way. But how were her dreams from over thirty years ago going to shed light on my present mystery?

  “Your mother was a dream psychic—she predicted future events through her dreams. From the time she was old enough to remember what came to her sleeping mind, she told us time and time again about things that were going to happen. I still remember her very first prediction like it was yesterday. She came to breakfast one morning and calmly announced that we needed to stock up on supplies because of the hurricane. At her age, she didn’t even know what a hurricane was so we were baffled when she used that word. When we asked her who told her about hurricanes, she said it was the pictures in her head. On my way home from work that night—on nothing more than sheer whim—I stopped at the market and picked up a few extra things that we didn’t really need but that would come in handy in an emergency. About an hour later, Hurricane Colleen took a drastic turn in the mid-Atlantic and swept up the gulf with very little warning. We had no electricity for a week after that. Roads were impassable for days. The only reason we didn’t go hungry was because of your mother’s prediction.”

  I sat there in awe listening to story after story of tragedies she correctly foresaw in her dreams—brand new tires blowing out unexpectedly, broken bones, the deaths of beloved pets. None of her dream predictions seemed to be about anything positive. It seemed that my mother once lived under the same kind of dark cloud I did.

  By the age of eight, she had correctly foretold a total of thirty negative events. Event number thirty-one, was the last and most potent of them all.

  “She would usually announce these negative events without emotion. Perhaps it was the lack of clarity when it came to this dream that rattled her the way it did. That day she stayed home sick from school with a fever—spent most of it on the couch drifting in and out of sleep. She woke up screaming and clutching at her stomach as though in sheer agony. When I scooped her off of the couch and tried to take her to the hospital, she refused. She said ‘I don’t hurt now. I’m going to hurt later. After I meet him.’ Her words cut through me like a knife and I had to lay her back down because I was shaking so hard. Someone was going to hurt my little girl and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.”

  The “him”, of course, was my father. My mother spent decades being afraid of the man she would later marry. Either this was more twisted than anything I’d dealt with myself or I was becoming immune to my own weirdness. It was probably the latter of the two options. Was this a good thing or a bad one? Time, unfortunately, was the only way for me to tell and Zach and I were quickly running out of it.

  I listened intently as Elijah—whoops!—Grandpa, described how this dream omen became the last one Mom would ever predict. Never again did the family have prior warning about random deaths or misfortune—her nightmares became sharply focused on the man who was going to kill her.

  “As a teenager, she remained withdrawn in hopes of never meeting him. She took to home schooling to avoid public high school and spent time with no one other than Josette. Josette’s family lived next door and they had been best friends since before pre-school. Josette took dance classes every other night and then would come back and teach Camille the new moves she’d learned. Dance became her only way to express her emotions. She wanted nothing more than to be like other girls her age but she knew she was different and could never escape that.”

  “Until the day she had a different kind of prophetic dream. Her dreams had always predicted bad things—not good ones. But one night when she was about seventeen, she came crashing into our room in the dark of night. We assumed she’d had a nightmare like so many nights before. This time we were wrong. She was screaming like always but when I flicked on the light I could see a smile on her face. The girl who never wanted to leave the house was now begging us to send her to a dance academy in Philadelphia of all places.”

  “We didn’t argue with her at first. After all, she had no formal training and we didn’t think she would ever be accepted on what Josette had taught her alone. So we let her apply and even made the eighteen hour drive there for her audition. If nothing else, she was finally happy about something. But when we found out she was accepted, we told her she wasn’t allowed to go. We tried to explain that we were only trying to protect her.”

  “’Protect me from what?’ was always her reply even though she knew exactly why we were fearful. The day of her eighteenth birthday she packed her bags and left for Pennsylvania in the dead of night. She left us a note explaining that she’d stopped having the dreams about the bad man. Her love of dance had somehow changed the course of her future. Going to Philadelphia was her destiny and the only way she would be safe. That, obviously, wasn’t the truth.”

  “For years, she continued to tell us that lie and we almost started to believe it. She separated herself from the past every way she could. She legally changed her last name to Rogers; she stopped isolating herself from the world. She made tons of friends. Yet she never quite seemed happy but refused to talk about it. Finally, Josette broke the news to us. Camille’s dreams had progressed. She had met the bad man she’d feared her entire life and knew exactly how she was going to die. And why.”

  I knew the how—obviously, considering that even though I was incredibly young at the time, I was around at the time of her death. But why? That’s something Josette didn’t tell me. And the letter my mother left behind for me didn’t explain that part either. What could have been so important to her that it was worth dying for?

  “Camille discovered that she wasn’t going to be murdered like we all originally thought. No, as you must have already guessed, the pain she was feeling was that of childbirth. She knew that she would die giving birth to you but she insisted on getting pregnant anyway. We were relieved to find out that her tragic death was preventable. We begged her to stay away from your father or at the very least to have herself sterilized. If she wanted children bad enough, all she had to do was adopt. But she was headstrong, stubborn, and believed that once the signs were given to her, that she had no other option but to follow them wherever they led. Even if that meant certain death.”

  I sat there dumbfounded and feeling like the apple that fell closest to the tree. And wondering if there were options right in front of my face that I wasn’t seeing simply because I didn’t want to see them. Just like Mom, I’d undertaken a grand, romantic adventure without stopping to think that maybe I was getting swept up in the idea of sacrifice and not looking at things logically.

  “Ruby and I were heartbroken that she was willing to throw herself to the wolves merely because that’s what her dreams told her to do. We said our goodbyes through what we called a living funeral. At the end, she had one dying request that she begged us to fulfill. She asked us not to track you or your father down. S
he said that if we did, it would ruin the grand design that Fate had laid out for her. That in order for her death to not be in vain, we needed to move forward with our own lives as though she had never existed until the moment you came for us. Now here you are. The circle is coming to a close.”

  Now I was even more confused than I was before. So much of what Mom predicted had come true but there was one glaring oversight here. Miranda. Mom didn’t die giving birth to me—she died giving birth to my sister.

  “So you don’t know anything about her life after that? You know nothing of what she did after I was born?”

  Elijah’s face contorted into an expression of pure shock. “Are you saying she didn’t die? Is your mother still alive?”

  “No,” I said sadly, feeling bad for having gotten his hopes up for even the slightest second. “But she didn’t die when you think she did. She died the way she predicted she would but four years later—along with my sister, Miranda.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Her visions were never wrong. What happened? Where did her second sight get off track?”

  “I don’t know. And at this point, there’s no way we will ever know. I’m just glad that I got to know a little more about her and that I found you in the process. At least she was still right about that part—eventually, I did seek you out.”

  “And I’m glad you did. Can you stay for a little while longer? I want to hear more about you. What’s your father like? Is he a good man?”

  We spent the next few hours talking, laughing, and occasionally crying. I told him everything I could think of about me—including the weird link I had to the other side. When he heard about the feathers, he instantly agreed that they were signs from my mother. Where exactly they were leading me still remained a mystery.

  I waited until the last possible moment to call a taxi to take me back to the hotel. We exchanged phone numbers and promised to stay in touch with each other. I hopscotched back down that soggy path feeling, well, almost as light as a feather. I didn’t have all the answers yet but I knew I would in time. I had faith not just in my mom but in myself as well. If Elijah could wait patiently for eighteen years to meet me, then I could wait a little longer to solve my own mystery. The real question wasn’t about how much time I was willing to invest though—it was how much time did Zach have left before he was lost forever to the stranglehold evil had on him?