“Are you cold—do you need a blanket?” she asked.
He grunted. She couldn’t decipher the intention of the grunt. She grabbed a blanket from the bed and laid it over him. It fell to a puddle on the floor. Hector tilted his head to the side, his eyes glazed over. It hung there like he didn’t have the will or the energy to prop it back up again. This man was probably a formidable detective in his day, and the image of him now saddened her.
“I heard you used to be a great detective.”
What was she thinking? Clearly his lights upstairs had been off for a long time. She slumped to the floor, muttering to herself. “I wish you could talk to me. You might be the only one who can help me. You worked on a case a long time ago. A young actress, Roxanne Rafferty, disappeared in the fifties. No one ever found out what happened to her. I thought you might know something. That’s why I came here tonight. I think someone killed her. Someone right here in this town or in this city. And I don’t know why. All I know is I can’t prove it, and I don’t know where else to turn.” She glanced up at him. There was no change. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Dobbs, and I’m even sorrier for what’s become of you. You don’t deserve this. No one does.”
With one swoop of his hand, he reached forward, narrowly missing Addison, and toppled over in the process. His body smacked on the ground with a large thud. Shocked, Addison bent to her knees, clutching onto him with the one good arm she had left. It took several attempts to help him off the floor. When she got him to his feet, she slung her uninjured arm around him. Together, they walked over to the bed. She lifted the covers and he dropped down like an oversized sack of flour.
“I never meant for this to happen. I shouldn’t have come. I’ll leave now.” She didn’t know why, but she bent down and hugged him. Somehow she knew he needed it.
Hector reached out again. He placed both hands on her arms and squeezed. “Gray…Gray…Grayson Manor,” he stammered.
Addison nodded. “Yes, Grayson Manor. That’s where I live.”
An intense look of trepidation showed in his eyes. His head swiveled back and forth uncontrollably.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked.
“She.”
“She who? Roxanne?”
“She…murdered.”
CHAPTER 34
Addison attempted to elicit more information from Hector, but once he’d uttered those two little words, he fell back into a dazed stupor. Nothing Addison did or said could shake him out of it. She slipped out a side door and met Luke at the car, their chosen rendezvous point.
“She murdered? What do you suppose that means?” Luke asked.
“Who knows—at his point, it could mean everything or it could mean nothing. Hector was completely out of it. I’m surprised he said anything.”
“So you don’t believe he was trying to tell you something?”
Addison drew a long breath. “I’m not sure.”
“What if he knew something? Something he couldn’t prove.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe he was trying to tell you Roxanne was murdered by a woman.”
“Or maybe he was saying she was murdered. He said she, paused, then said murdered. A man stole the dress, not a woman.”
“What about Marjorie? You still going to see her tomorrow?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I don’t like it. You know nothing about her, and you don’t owe her anything.”
It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice. It was lower, deeper; he wasn’t exactly yelling, but he managed to get his message across all the same.
“My father said she knows things about me. Maybe she can tell me why I see things. I have to find out.”
“You said yourself, he never really knew her. It could be a trap. I don’t care how old she is.”
She looked at him, knowing he might be right. But it was something she had to do.
***
That night Addison had a dream. She was back on the wooded path she’d been on the day before. This time, she wasn’t on her bike, and she wasn’t walking. She wasn’t even on the ground. She was high up in a tree, so high she didn’t know how she got there. She felt light and airy, weightless. The branch she sat on was thin, too small to hold her. So why wasn’t she falling?
She looked around. What she saw shocked her. Even though it was dark, she had a strange kind of binocular vision. It was similar to her own, but different. She could turn her head, but her eyes didn’t move in their sockets. On the ground below her, she saw a person lying on the ground. A woman. She wasn’t moving. Not at first.
A few minutes passed. The woman began to tremble like she’d been left out in the cold. Only it wasn’t cold. Addison felt warm inside. The woman’s eyes flashed open. She looked around. She looked up. She looked at Addison. She was Addison.
It isn’t possible. How can I be in the tree and on the ground at the same time?
She stared at the mirror image of herself in disbelief.
What’s happening?
The Addison on the ground tried to sit up, a feat she didn’t conquer at first. She pressed one hand against the ground, forcing herself to a sitting position. She took the same hand and rubbed her arm. The same arm that was bandaged later that day. She braced against the tree and tried to stand. It didn’t work. Frustrated, she pressed both hands flat on the ground. And that’s when the Addison in the tree saw something she couldn’t believe: a bright light. The area surrounding her counterpart on the ground lit up like a full moon on a clear night.
CHAPTER 35
Addison bolted up in bed and ran a hand across her comforter, feeling around for her cell phone. She grabbed it and dialed Luke’s number. “How fast can you get here?”
“I’m on my way now,” he responded. “What’s wrong?”
The bathroom shower knob down the hall squeaked and then switched off. “I’ll meet you outside. Don’t come in when you get here.”
She pressed the end button on her phone and glanced around the room, selecting a worn-out pair of rubber-soled slippers and a coral zip-up sweatshirt. She thought about grabbing her jacket. There wasn’t time. She stepped into the hall just as her dad exited the bathroom, dressed and ready for the day. Their eyes met. He looked her up and down. “Where are you off to dressed in your PJs?”
“I was looking for something. I think I left it in my car.”
“Let me get it for you,” he said. “I was just going downstairs anyway.”
“That’s all right, Dad,” she called, already halfway down the stairs. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Luke’s truck lulled to a stop a minute later. Addison was outside standing next to her car, waiting. He exited the truck, leaving the door open. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Did you see something last night?”
“Yes and no. I didn’t see Roxanne, but I saw something else.”
“What? Where?”
“In a dream.”
Luke crossed his arms in front of him. “I’m listening.”
“I was up in this tree, and here’s the crazy part—I think I was an…”
She hesitated, considering how lame she would feel when she said it out loud. It didn’t matter. She had to.
“A what?” Luke asked.
Even though it was cool outside, Addison felt her cheeks increase in temperature. “An…owl.”
The fifteen-second silence between them seemed to stretch into eternity until Luke laughed. And not just any laugh—the kind that started deep down inside someone’s gut. “What was that like?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t in my own body until I tried to move my eyes. They wouldn’t move. It was like they couldn’t. My head swiveled though, and I could see what was happening on the ground.”
“What was going on?”
“I saw myself.”
“I thought you were in the tree?”
She huffed at him, frustrated. “It was a dream. Do yours alw
ays make sense?”
He shrugged. “Go on.”
“It’s like I was two people. The first was in the form of an owl, looking down from a branch on the tree. The second was my physical body lying on the ground in the exact spot where I tripped and fell yesterday.”
“Did you remember anything?”
“I remembered everything. The whole experience came rushing back to me all at once.”
“So…what happened?”
“The ground where I fell was glowing. It was like light had reflected off the sun and beamed its rays right on the spot I sat in. Only, I wasn’t aware of it—I mean, the me on the ground wasn’t aware of it. And there’s no way I could have missed it. It was the brightest light I’d ever seen, uh, me the owl.”
Luke opened his mouth to reply and at the same time, Addison’s front door opened. Her dad stepped out. “What are you two doing out here?”
She glared at Luke who stared at her father. “Mind if I borrow your daughter for a minute?” he asked.
The request seemed to please her father very much. He waved both hands in front of him. “Don’t mind me. I’ll see you two…well…whenever I see you. Take your time.” Grinning, her dad walked back inside the house.
“You were saying?” Luke said.
“I was telling you about the light.”
“Is it possible whatever memory you had was somehow magnified—like whatever happened didn’t actually happen? In the dream you were an owl, and obviously that’s not true.” He winked. “Or is there something else you haven’t told me about?”
She shoved him. “I’m being serious.”
“So am I,” he joked.
“To me, the owl in the tree represented something I needed to see.”
“Which means?”
Addison leaned in close. “Do you have a shovel?”
CHAPTER 36
Luke had many items in the long toolboxes in the back of his pickup. A shovel was not one of them. He walked with Addison back to the place she had fallen, and they both surveyed the area. It looked plain and ordinary, almost like nothing had happened in that spot since the day the soil settled on the ground.
A plan was made. Addison and her father would go meet Marjorie. In the meantime, Luke would return with a shovel and do some blind-faith digging. She was perplexed at his continued belief in her. He didn’t question it, he didn’t doubt it; he just went to work.
An hour later Addison was behind the wheel of the car she purchased when she arrived in New York, a Mazda MX-5 Miata convertible. She’d always wanted a convertible. When she’d taken it for a spin during the test drive, the reedy salesman made his pitch, enunciating the words “liquid silver,” as if the color gave the car special power. Either way, she couldn’t resist. Her father, on the other hand, seemed ill at ease inside the small two-seater. With one hand, he gripped the side of his seat. With the other, he took hold of the door handle like it was some kind of emergency safety latch he could pull in case of an emergency evacuation. To put his daughter at ease, he whistled the tune of an old Beatles song, soft and low, acting like nothing at all was the matter. She wasn’t fooled. It was another thing he did when he was nervous.
The more she thought about it, the more odd quirks her father seemed to have. She wondered if he was even aware of them, or if they were like a window into his soul that only others could see. She’d heard about something like this on her first day of college and hadn’t ever forgotten it. The speaker had said everyone had parts of themselves only others could see. How many did she have yet to recognize about herself?
The address Marjorie had given Addison’s father was 1051 Delancey Street. It was at this exact spot that she realized something was wrong. The structure at 1051 Delancey Street wasn’t a house, a condominium, or even a high-rise apartment building. It was a mom and pop coffee shop that also served soup, something Addison considered to be a unique combination.
“This can’t be right,” she said, driving past the coffee shop and turning around.
Her father stretched a yellow Post-it note out in front of her. “See?” he said. “’Fraid it is.”
“Do you think she gave you the wrong address on accident or on purpose?”
“I can’t see why she’d lie about it—she seemed determined to meet you.” He shrugged. “I can try the phone number she gave me.” He dialed the number. It rang. No one answered.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Addison groaned.
Her father smiled. “Well, we’re here. Let’s go in and get some coffee.”
She didn’t want coffee. She wanted answers. Something she wasn’t likely to get.
They parked the car and crossed the street together. Addison stopped in front of the coffee shop and sent a text message to Luke on a phone he loaned her, asking if he’d found anything. His reply? Not yet. The entire day was turning out to be a bust.
The coffee house/soup kitchen was buzzing, mostly with a wide variety of twenty-somethings who tap, tap, tapped on the keyboards of their laptops while sipping various forms of pricey frappes. Not one soul in the entire joint looked up when they walked in. No one could be bothered with what anyone else was doing; they were too involved in their own affairs to care. A boy in the far corner wearing a burnout T-shirt and a YOLO cap swirled his head around in the air like Stevie Wonder. The tabletop served as his piano, and his cup as the microphone. With his eyes seamed shut, he lip-synched the tune to whatever was blaring through the black Beats by Dre headphones he wore on his ears.
“He seems happy,” her father laughed, bending a finger in the boy’s direction.
They ordered and sat down. Addison was too disappointed to order. Her father, on the other hand, was perfectly content with his special-of-the-day, mint-flavored coffee the lady behind the counter said tasted like the popular cookies the Girl Scouts made each year.
“We wasted our time coming here, expecting to find her. I thought she always wanted to be in my life. What a joke.”
He took a sip of his drink and then quickly set it down. “It’s far too sweet for me. You want to try it?”
She shook her head. She wanted to leave, but couldn’t. She was waiting for Luke to text her to let her know what he found or didn’t find. Until then, she was to keep her father occupied. She sat back, seriously considering ordering a bowl of soup, when the door made a dinging sound to indicate another customer had entered.
Unlike the other self-absorbed patrons, Addison did look up and watched her grandmother walk inside. Well, not walked as much as waltzed, the way one did when they expected all eyes to be on them—even after all these years. They weren’t, though she didn’t notice. Even in a slenderizing pair of jeans and a zipped-up, nylon windbreaker, she crossed the room with grace and elegance. Even without the fur coat or the heeled shoes, one thing hadn’t changed: her lips. They were still painted a deep shade of red. She looked left, then right, lined Addison up in her sights like a hunter aiming his rifle, and charged.
“You look like me,” Marjorie said when she reached the table. “Did you know that before now?”
Whatever happened to “hello” or “nice to see you after all this time” or “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”?
“Hello Marjorie,” her father said.
“Bill,” Marjorie answered without even glancing in his direction. “A moment, if you please.”
“With me?” Addison asked.
“Of course,” Marjorie replied. “But first,” she said, finally setting eyes on Addison’s father, “there’s a bookshop around the corner. Could you occupy yourself there for a while? I need to speak with my granddaughter alone. You understand why. I expect this is not a problem?”
He stood up like a wind-up robot. Addison blinked in disbelief. At first he looked like he was going to comply without even giving a response. Then he said, “After I’ve had my say.”
“Dad,” Addison said, grabbing his arm. She looked at him as if to say: You’re not going to leave me alone
with her.
He leaned down and whispered into her ear. “Don’t worry. I’ll be watching.” He tapped the flap of his pants pocket with his hand just enough for her to see something was inside. Binoculars?
An impatient Marjorie rolled her eyes and flicked her hand toward the door. “Let’s get on with it.”
The two of them walked outside. What followed was like watching a bizarre movie scene with an unseen twist. What was going on? And why was he doing exactly as she asked? What’s more—why had Marjorie put the coffee shop as her address?
The banter between father and grandmother went on for several minutes. They both looked irritated. They bickered, neither relenting at first until her father nodded, then sighed. Not a good sign. He then turned and walked away. What did he know that she didn’t?
Marjorie walked back in, placed a flat hand on both sides of Addison’s cheeks, and smiled. “At long last. Now then, I’m sure you have a lot of questions. Get them out of your system so we can discuss the real reason you’re here.”
“Why did you choose a coffee shop?”
“I’ll explain later. Next question.”
Addison wasn’t satisfied. And unlike her father, she wasn’t about to let up. “Why couldn’t we meet at your house? Do you even have one? Do you live here?”
Marjorie removed the grey, leather gloves from her hands and flopped them down on the table. “Is this really what you want to ask me? I hoped for so much more. How disappointing.”
Addison leaned back in the chair and folded her hands over her lap, unsure of what to say next. Did she dare ask?
The prolonged silence didn’t suit Marjorie’s personality. She locked eyes with Addison. “How long have you lived in the manor?”
“How did you know I was there?”
She snickered the way a person did when they were privy to something the other person couldn’t possibly understand. “I could see you coming.”
“What do you mean—see me? You saw us in the car when we were parking?”
She shook her head. “No, dearest, I saw you in my mind. You really don’t know anything, do you?”
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