Heart Of Darkness

by Maggie Shayne

  “Good, grab the one from 1988. The boys who set that fire are part of the sophomore class that year. Mom was a senior. She gave me their names, said everyone knew, even though they were too young for the press to make them public. It’s a small town. And best of all, she said one of them still lives there.”

  Sara pulled the book from the shelf, then walked to an overstuffed blue chair. She leaned over to turn on a lamp before sinking nearly out of sight in the soft, snuggly seat. “So I’m looking for sophomores?” she asked as she opened the book. But she didn’t hear the answer, because she’d frozen on the very first page. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Jesus, Nikki, what the hell?”

  “What? Honey, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  Sara could barely see now for the tears that had flooded her eyes. The very first leaf of the yearbook sported a full-page photo of a dark-haired teenage girl, obviously of mixed heritage, with bronze skin, like her own. She had very large, dark brown eyes that looked as if they were lined with kohl, and thick black lashes, just like her own. She had long, perfectly straight, perfectly black, shiny hair, just like her own.

  In fact, she looked enough like Sara to have been her own sister. Maybe even a twin sister.

  It took her several moments to realize that Nikki was shouting at her from the telephone, which had apparently fallen from her numb hands into her lap. Shaking herself, Sara picked it up. “First page of the yearbook, Nikki. It’s a photo of…her. It reads, ‘In Loving Memory of Sierra Terrence.’”

  “Oh! Is that all? God, I was scared. So, what’s she look like?”

  Sara took a slow breath. “She looks like me. She looks…just like me.” God, she didn’t need this. Not now, when all she’d wanted was to rest, regroup, prepare. And now this? Hell.

  “What am I supposed to think about all this, Nikki?”

  “I don’t know. I just…I don’t know. Worse, I don’t even want to think about what Cami’s going to make of this latest revelation.”

  “Maybe…maybe she has a point.”

  “I never heard of a ghost that could make you look like an old photo of her,” Nikki said. “Look, why don’t you just lay low at my mom’s for a few days. I’ll come out Wednesday and we’ll dig into this then.”

  Sara drew in another breath, closed her eyes slowly. “I’ll think about it. But first, why don’t you give me those boys’ names so I can look at their photos. And then I promise, I’m going to get some food and some sleep before I do another thing.”

  “I have your word on it?”

  “Yes, you do. I’m beat, and I can’t take any more shocks tonight.” She cast her eyes around the room in search of a pen, and not seeing one, opened the drawer in the end table and smiled at the accuracy of her guess. A pen and pad lay in wait. She took them out. “Go ahead with those names.”

  She proceeded to write them down as Nikki recited them to her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SARA DIDN’T KEEP THE PROMISE she’d made to her roommate.

  She tried, she really did. She put her things in Nikki’s old bedroom, which was right where Nikki had told her it would be. But not exactly the way Nikki had told her it would be. She’d said it would be exactly as she had left it. Purple paint on the walls. Cheerleading uniform hanging on the outside of the closet door, flanked by pompoms, boy band posters everywhere and her orange beanbag chair underneath the window.

  It wasn’t. It was a charming, neat-as-a-pin guest room. The walls were pale blue, to match the blue and yellow pattern of the curtains and bedspread. The colonial-style four-poster bed, matching dresser and nightstand all looked like a deep cherrywood, and all of the drawers were empty, as if awaiting guests.

  She smiled and decided Nikki’s parents were dealing far better with her being away from home than she thought they were. Far better.

  She left her two bags, one big, one small, on the bed, and headed back downstairs to find something to eat. The fridge was fairly empty, as she’d expected. People didn’t leave perishable stuff around when they went on vacation. But the freezer was well-stocked, and the cupboards were, too. She settled on a personal-size frozen pizza, popping it into the microwave. Some juice, with ice, because it hadn’t been refrigerated, and she’d be good to go.

  To sleep. She thought.

  But she didn’t go to sleep. She couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned in the quiet guest room. It drove her crazy, being so close to the town that held all the answers. Why sleep and wait? Why risk the repetitive dream of dying in a fire, returning to torment her yet again?

  Or the other dream, the one she hadn’t told her friends about.

  The one where she was in the arms of a beautiful man—a man she’d never seen before. And loving him with everything in her. The emotion of it had come through her so powerfully that it felt as if it remained there, heavy on her chest, for the entire next day. And for a week now, she’d felt on the verge of weeping for a man who wasn’t even real.

  Indeed, why sleep and risk another dream?

  Sitting up in the bed, she opened the yearbook, careful to avoid the page where her own face seemed to stare back at her. Instead, she flipped to the pages she’d marked, where the sophomore class were in a big group shot up top, and then in individual headshots below and on the facing page. For the tenth time that night, she skimmed those faces, dragging her forefinger over them and pausing on each of the ones whose names she’d written down.

  She wondered if she would have been able to pick them out without the names. When she heard them, they hadn’t seemed any more familiar than their faces. She’d felt that odd chill up her spine only once—and she felt it again now, when her finger and her gaze came to rest on David Nichols.

  He was a gorgeous young man. His hair was unruly, curling and light brown, blond bits here and there that probably got blonder in the summer and browner in the winter. Eyes all streaked with brown and green. When he smiled, there were dimples in his cheeks. Deep ones that were going to be there forever.

  The image blurred and wavered before her eyes, and then as she blinked it clear again, she realized that the photo was in black and white. Not color. And yet, she’d been seeing it in color. Furthermore, he wasn’t smiling in the photo. Only in her mind. At her. With some deep sort of emotion in his eyes. She’d been seeing him as if he were real—not a photograph. Something else. Something that felt an awful lot like…like a memory.

  “David,” she whispered, trying the name out on her lips, wondering if it would elicit anything more.

  But there was something more. A very real resemblance between the boy in the photo and the man in her dream.

  David Nichols wasn’t in town anymore. According to Nikki, he’d moved away long ago. And besides, he was twenty-two years older now. Still, she couldn’t quite explain the odd yearning in the pit of her stomach, the feeling that she had to meet him, to see him, to talk to him.

  Maybe the one who was still in town could give her some answers. Maybe Mark Potter would even know where David Nichols was, how to reach him. Maybe. She would talk to Mr. Potter first thing in the morning, at his grocery store in town.

  But in the meantime, she had to see that house—the old Muller place.

  Giving up on sleep well past midnight, she decided there was no time like the present. She got out of bed, dressed warmly, donned her parka and walked into town. She didn’t want to drive; it was too clear and crisp a night, and besides, she’d been driving all afternoon.

  The village of Port Lucinda was less than a mile ahead, and as she moved through the silent, darkened streets, over well-maintained sidewalks, past shops that looked as if they were preserved from the previous century, she felt waves of déjà vu so many times that she stopped counting them. They came with every steamy puff of air she breathed.

  Potter’s Grocery was dark. Empty. She saw from the sign that they opened early, though, and she imagined Mark Potter would be there even earlier. So she would try to catch him on the way back.

 
But for now, her goal lay beyond the town of Port Lucinda. All the way on the other side, in fact. She walked on, leaving the village and its shops behind and following the winding road northward another half mile until, at last, she saw it.

  The house rose up before her, the starry blackness of night its backdrop. There was no moon, and despite the stars, she thought it seemed the blackest night she had ever seen, anywhere. And there was that house, that very same house she had painted over and over again, standing in the midst of it.

  There was no question it was the same building. Oh, it had been repainted, and it had been restored—but it was the same. Those round balconies, the turret, the scalloped siding that made the turret sort of birthday-cakelike. That had been clinging in bits and patches in her paintings of the place. The maple tree was the same—only it was bigger. Older than she’d depicted it.

  The only difference she could see was the sign on the front lawn. Sierra House—Teen Crisis Center. The white wood sign hung from a post, suspended by iron S hooks that creaked as the wind blew.

  She dragged her gaze away from the sign, and found it riveted to a window on the second floor—and for the barest instant, she could have sworn she saw her own face staring back down at her from that window.

  “So you’ve come back.”

  She gasped and turned to see an old woman, brown-skinned and mature, though beautiful. Her silver-streaked raven hair was wound into a tight bun and pinned to the back of her head, and she wore an ordinary sundress with a heavy peacoat over it, but she seemed as if she would be more at home in a brightly colored sari.

  “Do you know me?” Sara asked.

  “I know who you were. Perhaps not who you are. But you look the same.”

  “As…who?”

  The older woman smiled. “Her,” she said, and she pointed toward the exact window at which Sara had just been staring. “It happens that way sometimes. When there are things unsettled. But now you’ve come back. You’ll work it all out.”

  Sara frowned even harder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing’s unsettled.”

  “Something is, or you wouldn’t be here. I never did feel the entire story was known. Oh, Sierra, you’ll work it out. You will.”

  “My name is Sara.”

  “It’s all the same.”

  Sara was still shaking her head. “Who are you?”

  The woman smiled mysteriously. “I’m an aunt. I saved my money. Came here to take care of you. But I was too late. You were already dead.”

  The woman’s voice was warm, her face sincere, but Sara thought she was probably a little bit demented.

  “Look, you might have been an aunt to Sierra, but I’m not her.”

  “You are,” she said. “And you will be, until it’s all worked out. You can’t move on until it’s settled. But you have to come to that in your own time.” She patted Sara’s shoulder and then stretched her arm, pointing a crooked finger up the road. “I live that way, near the trailer park where you grew up. Your father’s still there, you know.”

  “No. No, I don’t have a father. I was raised in foster care.”

  She smiled. “My house is yellow. It’s the only yellow one on the block. When you are ready to know who you are, Sierra, you come to me. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “My name is Pakita.” Again the hand patted her shoulder. And then the woman turned and walked away, up the sidewalk, toward that yellow house that must not be too far.

  So Sierra—the dead girl who looked like her, and who seemed to be haunting her dreams—still had family here. This slightly loopy aunt, and a father. Two things Sara had never had.

  Shaking her head, she decided she’d had enough of this place—she didn’t like it. She didn’t know why anyone would. Turning, she headed back toward town, and when she made it there by five a.m., she figured Mr. Potter would show up to open his store in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. So she found a comfortable place to sit at the end of the alley between Potter’s Grocery and the drugstore-slash-soda shoppe, where she was more or less out of sight. An upturned plastic milk crate made a great seat, and she took it, and she waited.

  Mark Potter arrived about an hour later. He pulled his Cadillac into a spot along the roadside, and, taking his keys from a pocket, walked to the door to unlock it. Delivery trucks had begun rumbling over Main Street, their noise signaling a firm end to the quiet of a Port Lucinda night.

  She studied the man as he bent to the lock. He had changed quite a bit. He was bigger, of course, but he still had the same dark hair and striking, wide jawline that he’d had in the high school photo.

  She said softly, “Excuse me. Are you Mark Potter?”

  And the man turned his head slowly, a big smile on his face until his gaze fell on her. Frowning, he reached inside the now open shop door, and flipped a switch. The store’s lights came on, and because she stood now right in front of the big window, they spilled on her. She shielded her eyes and backed up into the shadows again.

  But he’d had a good look at her, and now his eyes widened.

  “Are you?” she asked. “I think you are, but you’re older now.”

  “I…I…” He held up a hand.

  “I know, it’s probably a shock to see me. I know I look like—wait!”

  He didn’t wait. Before she finished the sentence, he’d turned, his face having gone white, and just ran, just lunged really, headlong across the sidewalk and right into the road, even as yet another delivery truck rumbled by. It hit him instantly. He ran so directly into its path that given another microsecond, he would have hit it.

  But it hit him instead. The impact was brutal, and she covered her mouth and averted her face, but her eyes couldn’t turn away. She saw the man airborne, then crashing down onto the pavement. People came running, the truck driver, other shop owners, a jogger just passing by. They gathered around him, blocking her out, calling for help.

  Sara thought she was going to vomit. She backed even farther into the alley, emerging into the wide paved areas behind the buildings, and walked toward the southern end of town, and Nikki’s childhood home.

  As she walked, she dialed the cellphone. And when Cami answered, her voice sleepy, she said, “I’m pretty sure I just killed a man.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT,” Nikki said. “You’ve had a day to recover while I found out what was what, and now you’re showered, you’re sitting, and you have some of that chamomile tea Mom keeps in the teddy bear cannister?”

  “I’m clean, I’m sitting, I’m sipping. What have you found out, Nikki? Is that poor man dead?”

  “I’ve talked to Mom, who phoned the town gossip, Nellie Camaroon, who is also the organist at the Methodist church.”

  “You didn’t tell her why you wanted to know, did you?”

  “And what would I have told her, Sara? That there’s a ghost haunting my friend? Or possessing her, or…whatever the hell this is?”

  “Past life.”

  “Huh?” Nikki asked, then she said, “Cami, come here. I’m putting her on speaker. Okay, Sara, say again?”

  “Look, when I was out there—out at Sierra House—”

  “When were you there?”

  “About four in the morning yesterday, before I went to see Mark Potter and got him killed.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Thank God.”

  “He’s not far from it, though.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Get back on topic, Sara. You went to Sierra House in the dead of night. And what happened?”

  Sara took a breath and sighed. “Most notably, an old Indian woman approached me. She called me Sierra, claimed to be my Aunt Pakita and said I had come back to work things out.”

  She heard Cami’s swift intake of breath, and Nikki whispering the word, “Reincarnation?”

  “I think that’s what she was getting at. Turns out Sierra’s father still lives here.”

  “You have to see h
im!” Cami shouted.

  “Uh, don’t think so. Look what happened to the last guy!”

  “Maybe you could wear a disguise. Or even talk to him by phone.”

  “Maybe. But back to the subject, okay? What did you find out about Mark Potter, and the others?”

  “Mark’s injuries are pretty serious. Word is that he’s been asking for the other guys—the other four guys. I know one of the nurses at Port Lucinda General, and she says they’re all arriving this morning.”

  “They’re coming here?” Sara swallowed hard. “All of them?” And in her mind’s eye, she was seeing David Nichols. Those intense eyes, that warm smile. And her stomach was tying itself up in knots. She was feeling his powerful arms closing around her, and tasting his desperate kisses the way she’d been doing in dreams, night after night, since before she knew his name.

  “Yeah. Randy Madison’s family own a place out at The Heights. I can give you directions up there.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, you’re there to find out what this is about. If you don’t talk to them, don’t talk to Sierra’s father, don’t even want to talk to this old woman who apparently wants to help, then what’s the point? You might as well come home right now.”

  She drew a breath, sighed. “I know you’re right.”

  But Cami jumped in. “No, she’s not. Don’t do one thing if you’re scared. We’ll be with you on Wednesday and we can be the ones to talk to all these people for you. Okay?”

  “If I haven’t managed it by then, sure,” Sara said. “I’m gonna take a nap, I’ve been up all night for several nights in a row now. Maybe I’ll know what to do when I wake up again.”

  “Keep us posted, hon,” Nikki said.

  “I will.”

  SARA TOOK THE NAP. And then she returned to Sierra House, by car this time, intending to look for the old woman, maybe talk to her, perhaps even get a phone number for Sierra’s father. But the old woman wasn’t at home, the trailer was in a park full of them and she didn’t know which one to approach, and she found herself walking back up the road and staring at Sierra House again.