A Deep and Dark December

  The water shut off and her gaze tracked to the window where the sun was just making its ascent, bringing a new day filled with old problems. A killer was still out there, probably planning his next move. Her father and aunt were still ill and she had only been able to hang on as long as she had because of Graham. The pain hadn’t come again since she’d fought it back the night before, but she could feel it hovering, waiting to swoop down and strike.

  There had to be a way to make it all stop. A way to find a killer with an ability similar to hers and her family’s. But how? There were precious few clues as to his identity. It wasn’t like they could put an ad in the paper or stand in the middle of town and ask passersby if they’d committed murder.

  But wait.

  That’s exactly what they could do.

  She rubbed her eyes and yawned as Graham came into the room. Everything was lighter now with full morning, but it took her a moment to realize that something had changed. Blinking his face into focus, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  “What did you do?” she asked, sitting up.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, his face set and serious. Taking her hand, he placed it on his jaw. “I shaved.”

  She wriggled closer and put both hands on his face. “You look so different.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “I’m just surprised. It’s been a while since I’ve seen your whole face.” And he was even more handsome than she remembered.

  “It’ll make my pop happy.” Resentment bled through words that should’ve held resignation.

  “Is that why you did it?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Something fierce and determined burned low and bright in the depths of his eyes. No. He hadn’t done this for his father. He’d done this for himself and maybe her too. He sat up straighter, his shoulders back, chin high, like a warrior preparing for battle. Warmth spread through her, beginning in her chest and radiating out to every point in her body. Pride maybe…or a deeper kind of recognition that went beyond affection and connection. There wasn’t a part of her that didn’t seem to know him.

  “Come here.” She pulled him forward and rubbed her cheek against his. “Mmm, nice.” He smelled of soap and toothpaste. She imagined more mornings like this, just the two of them cocooned in their own little world.

  He moved back. “Keep that up and I won’t be able to leave.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “So do I, but I have a killer to catch.”

  She leaned back against the headboard, his words causing the world to crash back down in flaming chunks around them. Although things had changed between them, nothing had changed around them.

  “Any ideas on how to do that?” she asked.

  “A few. Yes.” He swelled with new purpose. “I also got a text that some of the lab results are in. So I’ll go over those and see if anything pops.”

  She nodded, knowing as well as he did that those results would yield little information. They were dealing with a murderer who could kill without even being in the same room. The only exception was Deidre’s murder. Her murder was the only one in which he was physically present. Maybe they’d get lucky there.

  “I have to go.” He leaned in and kissed her goodbye.

  Although she knew he didn’t want to leave, she could feel his job pulling at him. A stray thought of taking a quick peek into the future lit across her synapses, stilling her for a moment. She pushed it away with a shake of her head.

  “More pain?” he asked.

  “No. Just a weird, random thought.”

  He grinned, going for light. “Weird and random would describe your thought process.”

  “Gee, thanks. Great morning after game you got there. You really know how to sweet talk the ladies.”

  “Don’t need talk when I’ve got skills.”

  “Maybe you should stay here and back up that boast.”

  “No.” He kissed her hard and quick, then rose from the bed and backed toward the door. “Stop tempting me.”

  “Yeah, bed head and morning breath are oh so tempting.”

  “On you they are.” He glanced back as though someone called to him from the other room. “I really do have to go.”

  “I know. Be careful.”

  “You, too. Call me if you need me, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  He left without a backwards glance and the room felt empty and lacking as though he’d stripped it of any purpose.

  Just a quick glimpse.

  She looked around as though someone had said the words aloud. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. If she focused on the killer, on how they’d catch him, maybe she could see him. No. She’d promised herself. Nothing good ever happened when she opened up the future.

  When her ability had begun to manifest just after her eighth birthday, no one knew what it would be. Foretelling had come first and her father had thought she might be able to manipulate or alter the future. She’d told her mother about the strange waking dream she’d had about her uncle, her mother’s only sibling. Erin had described the car accident that would take her uncle’s life three days before it happened, right down to the fire that would make his remains difficult to identify.

  Although Erin had only described the future, her mother had blamed her for causing it. Erin didn’t understand her mother’s withdrawal, then or now. Her parents’ relationship, fragile on a good day, splintered and cracked. And then came the night her mother had left and her father hadn’t stopped her. Erin began to notice the looks of the townspeople, heard the whispers. So she’d hidden her ability, had seldom used it at all until recently.

  Use it. You were given this gift for a reason…to use it.

  She gripped the sides of her head, fisting her hair. She didn’t want to use it, didn’t want to admit even to herself that she felt ugly and deformed for having it. It marked her as different. She’d tried so hard to fit in, to hide that part of herself.

  The answers are in the future.

  She wanted answers. Wanted them more than anything else. She’d been given this ability, this gift for a reason, to use it. The tension in her fingers pulled her hair tighter. The bite of pain punctured her thoughts. Wait. No. This wasn’t her. These weren’t her thoughts. The future never held answers, only pain, pain, and more pain. She pulled harder, the tautness making her scalp lift.

  Look at the future. Her voice echoed words she knew weren’t hers. The answers are there, waiting to be discovered.

  “No!”

  She threw up a wall, visualizing as she’d been taught, a mental fortress that would block her aunt or anyone else from sneaking into her thoughts. The killer. He’d found a new way to get into her head. Was this how he’d been able to manipulate Greg and Keith by disguising his thoughts as theirs? They wouldn’t have known how to block him or even be able to distinguish the difference between his words and theirs.

  The fortress shook, but held. He kept trying to get at her. She focused all her energy into the force field and soon she could feel him retreating, slithering back to his cave of anonymity. Taking slow, deep breaths, she relaxed her fingers and slid them out of her hair and into her lap. She wasn’t surprised to find strands trapped between her fingers. She took another breath and shivered, flicking off the last slivers of his control.

  This had to stop. But how?

  The idea she’d had earlier when Graham had come in and distracted her came back full force. What if she played his game? What if she let it be known that she’d seen the killer in a vision? What if she drew him out of hiding?

  Revealing her secret would bring back all the whispers and stares of the townspeople. Could she do it? Was she ready to expose her secret and give up any hope of being normal, of being accepted? No one in this town would ever look at her the same way again. She’d never fit in.

  She had to do it, had to save her dad and aunt. She had to stop this killer before he struck again.

 
~*~

  Graham stood next to Pax on the uneven pavement outside of Betty’s Buds and Blooms on Main Street and watched the tow truck driver hook up Axel Freed’s SUV.

  “And he has no idea why he drove his car through the window?” Pax asked.

  “Nope,” Graham answered. “The idea just popped into his head.”

  “Is there a full moon or something?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So many screwy things happening, like you shaving your beard. Erin make you do it?”

  Graham shot Pax an annoyed look. “No.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first guy to bend to the will of his woman.” Pax held up his palms. “Just sayin’.”

  “You get the ballistics report back on the Hallowell shooting yet?”

  “Not yet. Some foul up in the lab.” Pax turned his focus back to the SUV tail up through the display window. “Your dad’ll be glad…about the beard.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the station.” Graham gestured toward the hysterical Betty, giving her account of what happened to another officer. “You got this?”

  “Yeah. But—” Pax sidled up closer to Graham. “I gotta ask. Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That Erin has some kind of divining power.”

  “What? Where did you hear that?”

  Pax had the good sense to look ashamed. “My wife.”

  “Who did she hear it from?”

  “Her sister?”

  “And who did her sister get it from?”

  Tilting his head back, Pax looked up at the gray sky as if the answer were written there. He bunched up his face. “The lady who cuts her hair maybe?”

  Graham spun on his heels and stalked toward the sheriff’s station.

  Pax followed. “So it is true.”

  “Shut up, Pax.”

  “I’ll be damned. I just thought it was a bunch of gossipy women with nothing to do over there.”

  “Not another word.”

  “I always knew there was something off about her. Her whole family is whacked. I heard—”

  Graham halted and spun on Pax. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you get Mabel to write up that flower shop accident back there? Then you could take over for her as the biggest gossipmonger in town.”

  “Hey.”

  “I don’t know who started this stupid rumor, but it’s going to end right here, got it?”

  “Sure, Sheriff. Whatever you say.”

  Graham left Pax standing where he was and continued on to the station. What in the hell was wrong with this town? He didn’t know what Erin would do when she found out about this latest development. Stupid, goddamned small town. He couldn’t wait to…shit. Who was he kidding? He was never leaving this town. Not with his parents the way they were and now his relationship with Erin. Plus it was clear this town needed a sheriff and for some reason it had been decided decades ago that the sheriff had to be a Doran.

  He reached the top of the stairs of the front porch of the station and turned back to look up Main Street. Folks stood around, watching the tow truck operator and police do their jobs. Off to the side, the mayor huddled with his cronies, no doubt plotting their next move to get rid of him. They’d ratcheted up their recall campaign and now a few of the businesses in town sported flyers damning Graham as the worst thing to happen to San Rey since the storm that wiped out the original 1910 pier.

  He turned his gaze away from Mayor Behre and his henchmen and scanned the other faces. He knew them all… Well, most of them anyway. He watched while Mr. Pasarelli passed out samples of cake from his bakery, trying to drum up business in the slow economy. He watched the Bercher boy swipe a second sample when Mr. Pasarelli’s back was turned. The ladies from the Clippity-Do-Da talked to each other from behind their hands, no doubt passing more gossip and innuendo. A girl he’d gone to high school with passed her crying baby over to old Mrs. Gladstone who was known for her touch with fussy infants.

  Just a normal town full of normal people in the middle of the most extraordinary and horrifying events of their lives. Between their neighborly smiles and nods of recognition, their brows knit in anxiety and confusion. What was happening to their town, their home? When would it end? Who would make it stop?

  He would.

  Graham pulled in a slow breath and squared his shoulders. He would. He would make it stop. He’d catch the asshole who was manipulating these good people to do strange and terrible things. And life in San Rey would go back to normal. A nice, boring normal where the worst thing that could happen would be that they’d run out of shortcake at the Strawberry Festival.

  This was his town, his home. There was no way in hell he was going to let them down.

  Word was definitely out if the glances and stares Erin was getting while shopping the aisles of Goldman’s Drug Store were any indication. Mabel had done her job. Erin hoped her plan would work or else she’d exposed herself for nothing.

  “…disgusting little weirdo, just like the rest of them.”

  Erin turned from perusing toothpaste to find Emily Talbot and Morgan Davies glaring at her.

  “What are you looking at?” Emily sneered.

  “She thinks she’s so much better than us,” Morgan said. “You use your woo-woo power to get the sheriff to screw you?”

  “She’d have to. No other explanation for why he’d touch a freak like her.”

  Erin grabbed a box of toothpaste, threw it in her basket and bolted. The women’s laughter reached out after her, scratching at old wounds. Her mother had used that word.

  Freak.

  She stumbled two rows over and grabbed onto an end-cap shelf. She’d expected curiosity, maybe even standoffishness, but aggression? No. None of that.

  Hurrying toward the cash registers at the front of the store, she kept her head down, hoping to evade Emily and Morgan. She put her basket on the conveyor belt and waited for the man in front of her to finish paying. Mr. Felix, her third grade teacher, the man who had encouraged her in the months after her mother had left, now turned to look at her with a mixture of suspicion and revulsion.

  She backed out of line right into Candy. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Sorry? You’re sorry? Watch where you’re going!”

  Erin sucked in a breath at the hatred coming off her friend and hairstylist. Suddenly the whispers were everywhere, the stares fixed and accusatory. Weirdo. Freak. Monster. Erin brushed past Candy, bumping into a display and scattering it. Then she ran, passing face after face twisted in hatred. Their loathing followed her like a rabid dog.

  She dove into her car and slammed the door, her breath harsh in the quiet. Her worst nightmare had come true. They were all against her. The whole town. She’d never fit in now. All her life she’d only wanted to fit into the town she belonged to and now…now that wish would never come true. What had she done? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Her phone rang, startling her. She fumbled around in her purse until she finally located it.

  “Hello?”

  “What did you do?”

  Graham. Oh, God. Not him too.

  “Why did you tell Mabel about your ability?” he demanded.

  “What?”

  “Why, Erin? You had to know she’d tell everybody.” He let out a heavy breath. “That was the point, wasn’t it?”

  She dropped her head back against the headrest. “We have to catch him.”

  “We don’t have to do anything. You work for a property management company, not the sheriff’s office. Goddammit. What if he came after you physically like he did Deidre?”

  She wasn’t an idiot. She’d considered the probability that the killer could come after her the way he’d come after Deidre. He’d already attacked her and her family mentally and it was clear he wouldn’t stop. She didn’t like hearing the fear in Graham’s voice, but what choice was there? How else were they going to stop him?

  “He might,” she said, closing her eyes against that thought.

>   “And what? You don’t care?”

  “He’s already come at me, into my head.”

  “That’s not the same as coming at you with a gun. You can’t fight off a bullet with a little mental gymnastics.”

  “I just want my dad and aunt back.”

  He gentled his tone. “I know you do, Babe. Where are you?”

  She glanced around at the parking lot of the strip mall. People came and went, going about their day as though nothing was wrong. “Shopping.”

  “Come to the station.”

  “Why? So you can yell at me some more?”

  “Erin, just come. Please.”

  “No more yelling at me.”

  “I can’t promise that, but I’ll try.”

  “All right.” She clicked her phone closed with a sigh and tossed it into her purse. At least Graham hadn’t turned against her. She had one person on her side. The most important person.

  It was a short drive to the station and in no time, she parked and went inside. Jessica had the phone pressed between her ear and shoulder while she filed her nails. Mabel had called in to stay with Erin’s father, which was where Erin had found her that morning when she’d spilled her secret about her ability. If only she could go back in time. But then what was the alternative?

  Jessica hung up the phone. “Well, if it isn’t Witchy Woman. Now I know how you managed to land Graham.”

  “I don’t have that kind of ability.”

  Jessica rose from her chair and came around the desk. “He’s not going to want you when he finds out what you are, you know.”

  “He already knows.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s busy.” Jessica planted her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you go practice your voodoo on someone else?”