Waking Hours

by Wiehl, Lis

  Dani explained who she was and who Tommy was, and that she was with the district attorney’s office, and told the mortician’s assistant that she wanted to see the body of Amos Kasden. Dennis asked her to wait a moment and went back to the office to check a list on his clipboard. When he returned, he shrugged apologetically.

  “Sorry,” he said. “He’s cooling down in number two. I was just about to rake him in.”

  “Can we see the remains anyway?” Dani said.

  “Sure,” Dennis said, a puzzled expression on his face. “But there’s really not much to see. Can I ask why?”

  “We’re not sure why,” Dani told him.

  “We just want to be sure,” Tommy said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good enough for me.”

  He led them down the hall and opened the door to the crematorium. It was even hotter there. Dani saw a pair of ovens into which bodies could be conveyed via racks of steel rollers. She could hear the gas jets roaring in oven number one. Oven number two was quiet. Exhaust hoods above the ovens vented the fumes.

  Dennis explained the process. He’d leave the body in the fire for an hour, slide out the tray holding the body, stir the pieces around to make sure everything was burning evenly, break the larger chunks into smaller pieces, and then slide the tray and the body back in for another hour at 5,000 degrees. Once the ashes cooled, he’d rake what was left into metal bins marked with the name and identification number of the deceased, and then he’d fill the urns provided by the funeral home or by the family.

  Dennis donned a pair of thick asbestos gloves, opened the door to furnace number two, and withdrew the tray containing the ashes of Amos Kasden.

  “Well, that’s odd,” he said.

  He stepped aside so that Dani could see.

  In the middle of the tray, as if someone had drawn in the ashes with a finger, Dani saw a familiar symbol:

  45.

  Tommy drove Dani home, neither of them saying much. When she opened the door to her kitchen, Arlo came running to her and meowed happily, weaving between her legs. She picked him up and stroked his fur, then set him down. She surveyed the kitchen.

  “They did a good job cleaning,” she said. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” Tommy said. “We can shop for a new kitchen table tomorrow. It’s on me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Is that what we do? Just go about our business as if nothing’s changed?”

  “For now,” Tommy said. “Get some sleep and we can regroup in the morning. And pray for guidance in the meantime. That’s my plan, anyway.”

  “Sounds like a good one,” Dani said. “See you tomorrow.”

  But her eyes said she didn’t want him to leave.

  He crossed the kitchen floor, took her face in his hands, and kissed her gently. She kissed him back.

  He broke it off. “I’ve wanted to do that for a very long time,” he said, gazing into her eyes. “I’m going home now, but I want to tell you something. I know you’re scared. I can’t say there’s nothing to be afraid of. But wherever this is going—I’m with you. We’re in this together. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He drove through town, past the diner and The Pub, both closed now, and headed out Gardener Street to where it met Atticus Road. The rain had stopped. Moonlight shone down through the spaces between the clouds to dapple the landscape with its impartial light. It was cold enough that Tommy guessed there would be ground frost in the morning. He turned left past the country club and took the turn on Keeler Street to Bull’s Rock Hill. He parked at the end of the gravel road and walked the rest of the way to the top.

  There was no police tape, no evidence that anything evil had taken place here, just the sky and the moon and the lake below and the town asleep.

  “Put yourself in the victim’s shoes,” one of his criminology professors at John Jay College had advised. “Try to see what the victim might have seen. Feel what the victim felt.”

  He decided to take the advice literally and lay down atop the rock shaped like a sleeping bull where Julie Leonard had lain on her last night in this world. It had been two weeks since the murder. The stars shone brightly in the moon’s absence.

  He spread his legs and his arms. He imagined looking up to see someone with a sharpened cleaver.

  But Julie wouldn’t have looked up.

  She would have closed her eyes.

  Perhaps she’d rested her hands on her chest, like so . . . or on her stomach, like this . . .

  He tried to picture the symbol they’d found on her body. Then he tried to trace it with his fingers. To better trace it, he took off his gloves and unzipped his jacket. He used one hand, then two.

  Two!

  The symbol was perfectly symmetrical, and perfectly simple to draw, using two hands.

  And then it was obvious.

  She’d drawn it herself.

  He sat up and tried to picture it. Amos had poured the blood he’d taken from the other kids at the party on Julie, but Julie had drawn the symbol herself. She was trying to leave whoever found her a message. Had she started at the top of the curves and ended at the horizontals, or was it the other way around? Did it matter? Was she drawing a map?

  What was she trying to say?

  Omega.

  The end.

  The final chapter.

  “Closing the book,” someone behind him said.

  Tommy turned and saw a man standing ten feet away, wearing jeans, Harley boots with a buckle at the ankle, a black shirt with a blue jean vest over it, tattoos, a silver chain around his neck, with long hair and a beard.

  “Closing the book?” Tommy asked.

  “Tommy,” the man said. “Think, man—what book? The insight you just had—wouldn’t you call it something of a . . .”

  Tommy thought.

  “Revelation,” he said.

  “Religion for two hundred, Alex. Revelation 2, verse 13,” the man said, touching a finger to the end of his nose. “Chapter and verse, dude—look it up.”

  “Charlie—wait,” Tommy said.

  But the man dissolved, absorbed by the night.

  When he got home, Tommy opened his Bible to the final book, Revelation. He turned to chapter 2, verse 13. After he’d read it twice, to make sure he understood it, he knew he needed to call Dani, even though it was late. He looked at the clock and was not surprised to see the digits turn from twelve minutes after two in the morning to—

  His phone rang.

  “Dani?” he said.

  “I have some news,” she said.

  “So do I,” he said. “I figured out why you’ve been waking up at 2:13. And what the symbol on Julie’s stomach meant.”

  “Tommy—”

  “Just hear me out,” Tommy said. “I saw Charlie. He told me where to look. The symbol is for omega. The end. In the beginning was the word, so what’s the word at the end? The final book? It means the book of Revelation.”

  “Tommy, I really need to—”

  “Revelation, chapter 2, verse 13,” he said. “ ‘I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is; you hold fast my name and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.’ ”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  “You hold fast,” Tommy said. “That’s what Charlie said the night Abbie came to my house.”

  “What does ‘the days of Antipas’ mean?” Dani asked.

  “John the Apostle made Antipas bishop of Pergamon, a town in what’s now Turkey,” Tommy said. “He was killed and martyred in AD 92, which is why they made him a saint. Guess how he was killed?”

  “How?”

  “Burned on a bull-shaped altar,” Tommy said. “Which was used for casting out demons. So guess what demon they worshipped in Pergamon?”

  “What?” Dani said. “Or whom?”

  “Baal,” Tommy said. “Satan’s number-two guy. The Duke of Hell. Whose power, by t
he way, is strongest in October. Commonly depicted as a bull.”

  “How do you know all this?” Dani asked.

  “Wikipedia,” Tommy said. “Also my Bible. I think I know what your parents were trying to tell you. You remember when we talked about the ten plagues of Egypt?”

  “Lice and locusts and all that,” Dani said.

  “Yeah, except I miscounted,” Tommy said. “I left one out.”

  “Which one?”

  “Water turning into blood,” Tommy said. “Exodus 7, verses 17 and 18. ‘I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood. The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink; the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water.’ ”

  “Okay,” Dani said. “But how is that a sign? The other things you’ve mentioned actually happened. Water only turned into blood in my dreams. It didn’t actually happen.”

  “Right,” Tommy said. “I think God is trying to warn us about something by talking to us in our dreams. Or to you, anyway. The one that didn’t happen is a prophecy. Just because it didn’t happen yet doesn’t mean it won’t. Abbie Gardener handed me a frog and said, ‘This is going to happen to you.’ And then the frog dissolved.”

  “Are you saying God is going to put something in the water?” Dani asked.

  “Not God,” Tommy said. “But if Satan is the great deceiver, it would make sense for him to try and destroy the world and make it look like God did it. I’m not going to try to guess what God or Satan is up to right now. All I know is, it has something to do with water. And blood. Which is mostly water. I think that’s interesting.”

  “It’s more than interesting,” Dani agreed. “What about the stone my father was trying to show me?”

  “It could be a lot of things,” Tommy said. “But right now I’m thinking that Satan’s throne is made of stone. ‘I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is.’ That’s what your father was trying to tell you. Where Satan’s throne is.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Here,” Tommy said. “Where we dwell. In East Salem.”

  “Where in East Salem?”

  “Excellent question,” Tommy said. “Do you realize what it means if we’re right, Dani? How serious this is?”

  “The end of days,” Dani said. “The end of the world.”

  “It doesn’t get more serious. And Julie Leonard’s murder is just the beginning. She was trying to warn us.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the connection.

  “Dani?” Tommy said.

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m glad you called.”

  “I didn’t call,” Tommy said. “You called me.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dani remembered.

  “You said you had some news.”

  “I did,” she replied. “I got a text message from Phil. Connie and Kara Leonard were killed tonight in a house fire. Apparently a leak in the propane tank outside their house. The bodies were not recoverable. They think it was an accident.”

  Tommy paused. “Right,” he said. “And pigs fly.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If you are reading this now, then thank you for taking a look at Waking Hours. Thank you to Dr. Dale Archer, for his advice on all things psychological. Thank you, O’Reilly, from Wiehl. And Roger Ailes, who always told me “love what you do.” And to Dianne Brandi. And Deirdre Imus.

  Thanks to my mom for reading all the drafts and giving support and constructive criticism. Now, finally, I really do appreciate your correcting my grammar.

  Thank you to Pete’s lovely wife, Jen, and son, Jack, for all their patience.

  Thank you to the amazing team at Thomas Nelson, including Allen Arnold, Senior Vice President and Publisher (a man with amazing vision and spirit); Ami McConnell (Senior Acquisitions Editor and friend); L.B. Norton (with an amazing eye); Amanda Bostic, Acquisitions Editor; Natalie Hanemann, Senior Editor; Becky Monds, Associate Editor; Jodi Hughes, Editorial Assistant. In Marketing, thank you, Eric Mullett, Marketing Director; Ashley Schneider, Marketing Specialist; Ruthie Harper, Publicity Coordinator; Katie Bond, Publicity Manager (with whom I’ve shared more frantic emails than just about anyone, and that’s saying a lot); and Kristin Vasgaard, Packaging Manager (who is a creative genius). Your spirit and enthusiasm is inspiring and humbling.

  Thank you to our book agents, Todd Shuster and Lane Zachary of the Zachary, Shuster, and Harmsworth Literary Agency. We couldn’t have done this without you!

  All of the mistakes are ours. All the credit is theirs. Thank you!

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1. Each of the kids attending the “passage party” has a different reason for wanting to obtain a brief glimpse into heaven by using a drug to produce what modern medicine refers to as a “near death” or “out of body” experience. If such a thing were possible, would you do it, and if you did, what would your reason be?

  2. Dani and Tommy experienced a moment on the dance floor at prom that both thrilled and frightened them. What do you think that moment meant, and why do you think it was frightening? Have you ever experienced a moment like that with another person, the overwhelming feeling that something huge was about to happen?

  3. Why does Dani feel guilty about her parents’ death? What would you say to her if you were trying to counsel or help her? What does it say about her personality, that she feels this way?

  4. Tommy has not let his fame go to his head. Why do you think he managed to avoid the pitfalls of fame that other famous athletes sometimes fall into?

  5. Do you agree with his decision to quit football? What do you think you’d do in his position?

  6. In what sense might athletes qualify as “heroes?” Compare them, as heroes, to policemen, firemen, or soldiers.

  7. Dani’s function as a forensic psychiatrist includes, among other responsibilities, evaluating or assessing the mental states of criminal suspects who might be declared “innocent by reason of insanity.” Men of great evil are often called “mad men”—where do you think the line might be drawn, on a scale of criminality or depravity, between sane and insane?

  8. Do you think it’s possible to dream of something you’ve never perceived while awake? Can a blind man dream in color? Have you ever had the kind of dream Dani and Tommy have, a dream that might be described as apocalyptic? Dani comments that in Freud’s day, dream analysis held a much higher place in psycho-analysis than it does today—how meaningful do you think dreams are?

  9. Have you ever gone through extended periods of little sleep, and if you have, how did it effect you?

  10. Can you find any clues in the seemingly crazy things Abbie Gardener says?

  11. If you could somehow interact with the fictional characters of Tommy and Dani and send them a message via Twitter to warn them or advise them, what would you say, in 144 characters or less?

  “Crime novels don’t come any better!”

  – BILL O’REILLY, ANCHOR, FOX NEWS

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