This was his fire.
I stood right next to him, but he didn’t see me. I could hear him breathe, saw the smirk on his face. Waves of happiness flooded his body as he stared up into his creation. “This is mine, this is mine,” he said in his head, over and over again. It’s so beautiful, he thought.
Sirens blared in the distance. The arsonist looked in the direction of the fire trucks turning down the street. Three huge engines pulled up to the house, firemen ran to the blaze.
Then I saw another car pull up behind the trucks.
Kate.
She wasn’t alone. She was with Dr. Mortimer.
They got out of the car and Kate started talking to people while Dr. Mortimer stared at the burning house. I shouted and ran up to her. I was sure she saw me, but she walked past me and started talking to a woman standing close by. She didn’t see me at all.
I walked around. The flames were hot, and I was dripping in sweat. Why was I here? Then I saw it. A darkness in the trees, still and ominous, close to where we stood. He was there. The killer.
I walked towards him, saw that the arsonist was in the woods too and the killer was following him.
I didn’t want to follow anymore, I wanted to run back to the fire, but I couldn’t. Something was making me watch. The killer caught up to man, threw something over his head and after a brief struggle they both fell to the ground.
This time, I screamed. But it didn’t stop him, didn’t stop anything. The killer was focused, and I knew the arsonist was dead. I backed away, away from the trees, away from the splintering wood of the house burning down to ash.
And then I was in Kate’s soft bed again.
Alone.
CHAPTER 17
I was drenched in sweat and started shaking uncontrollably. I knew I had to get into a hot shower and forced myself up. It was after 4:00 now and Kate still wasn’t home. The feeling of the vision lingered, the killer and his darkness, the arsonist and his pride.
And Kate. Kate had been there. I pulled out my cell phone and got her voice mail. I could only hope that she was okay.
I stood under the hot water for a long time warming up, trying to wash it all off. At least I didn’t have a headache. When I came out of the bathroom, Kate was there by the door.
“Abby, are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, wrapping my hair in a towel and pulling my robe tighter. I sat down on my bed and she sat next to me. “I had another one. What’s happening?”
I started crying. For years I never cried, and now I always seemed to cry. This wasn’t who I was.
“It’s okay, Abby, it’s okay. I’m here now,” she said, wrapping a fleece blanket around my shoulders. She smelled like the thick smoke of the fire.
“You got my message, right? I called earlier but you didn’t pick up.”
“No, what message? Where have you been?”
“I was on a story,” she said, looking serious. “But tell me about your vision. Everything.”
“There was a terrible fire.”
“Oh, my God!” she said. “You mean you saw the fire? There was a big house fire on the south side of town tonight. That’s where I was! I was covering that story. Tell me what you saw.”
“I saw you. At the fire. I was right in front of you, yelling. But you didn’t see me.”
She stared at me with large eyes.
“What? You saw ME in your vision?”
I nodded. I knew it sounded insane.
“This is unbelievable,” she said. “What else?”
I told her everything else. The arsonist. The killer lurking in the woods. The murder.
“And you’re saying that the killer murdered the man who started the fire? They didn’t report a body. I just came from the scene. There were no injuries or fatalities.”
“He’s in the woods somewhere. I followed them. He killed him and then I started screaming and woke up.”
Kate got up and checked her phone.
“What was Dr. Mortimer doing with you?” I asked. I had to ask.
Kate looked shocked, then embarrassed.
“Oh, he came along when I got the call. He thought he could help if there were any victims,” she said. Her cheeks went a shade darker.
She sat by my computer and leaned back in the chair, eyes swirling around, thinking and trying to figure it out. I could tell she didn’t want to discuss Dr. Mortimer, which didn’t surprise me. I had caught her and she wasn’t expecting that. She wasn’t ready to tell me anything.
But she saw I was waiting.
“So you saw both of us in your vision?” she said. “That’s amazing. These visions of yours seem to be getting more and more detailed.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, sighing. I waited another minute, but she didn’t say anything as she looked at her messages.
“Kate, it’s not like I’m not happy you’re together,” I said. She kept fiddling with her phone, ignoring me, or maybe just thinking. She looked like she was about to call someone.
“Matt dropped by earlier,” I said.
“Matt was here? Shoot,” she said. “He called about a zillion times tonight. I don’t know what I was thinking, I should have just called him back. Sorry, Abby, that must have been uncomfortable. Look, nothing has happened with Dr. Mortimer. Relax. We were just talking, that’s all. I’m not going to tell Matt that because he’ll jump to conclusions that aren’t there yet.”
I shook my head.
“But I do think I have some feelings for him,” she whispered. “Maybe. He’s really great. Isn’t that what you have always told me? But I still am very attached to Matt. Nothing is changing at this moment. I’m just trying to figure it all out first.”
I had never heard her use the word attached before when talking about Matt. That word didn’t bode well for him winning out. But I wasn’t going to say anything. And I was happy that Kate was falling for Dr. Mortimer. I just wanted Matt to know. I didn’t like lying to him and that’s what it had felt like.
I told her about his new painting and she seemed to wince when I mentioned that he had stopped by The Bugler with his homemade muffin looking for her.
“I should just talk to him, he must sense it’s coming to an end,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt him. God, I hate breakups.”
She threw herself on the bed.
“But back to your vision. So do you have any idea where the body is? I’m going to call James Baker. He’s on duty tonight and he won’t mind looking around if I give him a good tip.”
“The body’s not far, I could still see the flames,” I said. “Unless he moved him. And Kate, I’m sure that he was the man who set the fire. When you pulled up, he was alive and standing in the crowd and I stood right next to him.”
She nodded.
“Well, that will be fairly easy to prove. He probably has evidence on his hands and clothes. They’ll be able to determine if he did it,” she said.
“Good,” I said. At least it was something. Some sort of real proof.
“Boy, he sure did quite the job on the house,” Kate said. “It’s completely destroyed. But it was vacant. Right now, the police think that a group of men were squatting inside at night and someone accidentally set the house on fire with one of those small camping stoves. With the real estate market the way it is and houses sitting empty, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. But they’ll be able to tell if it’s arson. It’s not so hard.”
It would be pretty easy to break into the empty houses that were for sale around town and sleep in them at night. I wondered if that’s what Matt was doing.
“Where did Dr. Mortimer go, by the way?” I asked, remembering that he had disappeared in my vision.
“We said goodbye right after we got there. I had interviews to do and since there weren’t any victims in the house, he got a ride back home from the ambulance guys.”
Kate cleared her throat.
“You never see him? His face, I mean. The killer?”
<
br /> “No,” I said.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I couldn’t tell if I was cold or scared, but that familiar fear was churning around inside me like a washing machine. I was suddenly exhausted. It was late and these visions took it out of me, like I used to feel the night after a real tough soccer game. Maybe Jesse and Kate were right. Maybe I shouldn’t be so caught up in any of this. Maybe I really needed to focus on myself. If the police didn’t care so much, why was I bothering?
“You okay, Abby?” Kate said, her gray eyes big.
“It’s a terrible thing to watch people die,” I said, releasing more tears. “Please, Kate, help me stop it.”
“I will,” she said. “Promise.”
CHAPTER 18
As I walked to class, I wondered why I had never seen his face.
Kate was right. The visions had become sharper and in this last one I saw so many details. I had seen Kate and Dr. Mortimer, the smirking arsonist soon-to-be murder victim, the raging fire. But I never saw the killer’s face. Was it because I was too scared to look, or was it something else?
Amanda and her friends were standing next to their lockers, backs glued to metal as they eyed the kids walking by. They got all quiet as I passed, but I heard their hissing whispers soon after. My stomach dropped as I felt those sharp comments sting like darts on my back.
Amanda seemed to hate me more and more as the year moved along and I still had no idea why. From what I was able to piece together through pictures and old soccer videos, at one time we were really good friends. In fact, it looked like we were best friends. But since the accident, she hated me. She never came to the hospital and had stopped by the house one time to see me with the coach and team. She called a few times, but it was forced. I could tell even back then.
The only logical reason I could think of was that it must have had something to do with me not being able to play anymore, that I had let the team down. I had not only ruined my own chances for a soccer scholarship, but ruined her shot as well. It made no sense though. I wasn’t up for dealing with it, but I knew that I’d have to confront her eventually.
In history, Mr. Collins gave me back my test, a C+, and that was okay lately. I’d take it. Actually, it was an improvement.
“Better! Keep it going!” was written at the top in red and circled. I sighed. I was pretty sure that was the kind of note teachers wrote to the idiots in class.
I made it through the day. None of it was too exciting. But I was pleased with myself that I was able to do it, sit and pay attention, take tests, get Cs. That would be enough to pass, to graduate in June and get my diploma. It was afterwards that made my blood run cold. I had no idea what I was going to do.
Jesse was absent again. Dude was flipping out, I concluded as I dropped off my English paper. It made me kind of mad, actually. Here he was, super jock, grades that put the honor students to shame. He had everything and his future was golden, laid out perfectly. But he didn’t seem to care about any of that anymore.
Jesse didn’t like to talk about serious things and I knew that me nearly dying last year had hurt him. Maybe he felt like he couldn’t leave me next year, that I would fall to pieces if he went off to school, that my recovery would take a nose dive. And maybe he was right.
But just as I was heading out the double doors and had written him off, there he was, walking to the gym with the team. He ran up to me, smiling, dribbling his basketball on the floor.
“Hey, Craigers,” he said. “Think fast!”
I caught the ball and threw it back.
“She shoots, she scores! Arrrrrrr, the crowd goes wild,” he said, running around me and jumping up.
“Hey, could you give me a ride after practice today?”
My heart was doing that strange fluttering thing it did now whenever I saw Jesse, especially if I hadn’t seen him in a while.
“Sure, I’ll swing back after Dr. Krowe,” I said. “I’m happy to see you. I bet Coach is too.”
He gave me a thumbs up and ran off to catch up with the other guys heading into the gym.
As I drove, I thought about Dr. Krowe. I thought about talking to him. Really talking. Maybe it was the anniversary that was coming up. Or maybe I just was tired of keeping everything bottled up inside. It seemed like the more I made it through the school year, the more lost I was becoming.
I sat in the leather chair across from him and inhaled slowly.
“It’ll be one year soon,” I said. He put his pen on the pad and held his chin in his hand.
“How you are feeling about that?”
I stared at him for a minute. I wondered if he missed his kids. He had told me when we started that he was a divorced dad with two boys and that they lived back east somewhere. I wondered if that was why he only worked with teenagers.
“Fine, I guess,” I said. I was nervous, worried that once I began, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And I didn’t want to get all flustered and start talking about the visions. I was going to listen to Jesse’s advice on that.
“Frustrated, actually,” I said, crossing my legs and sitting up in the chair. “It’ll be a year and nothing’s changed. I’m not really moving forward. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going and I’m sick of everybody thinking I’m such a freak.”
Fat raindrops splattered against the window. I stared at them for a moment, trying to hide my wet eyes.
“Good,” he finally said.
“Good?” I asked, sarcastically.
“Good, because that’s the first real thing you’ve said since we started.”
I nodded.
“Pick one thing. One thing you really want to discuss and we’ll go from there.”
I picked Amanda. I was honest about everything, about how she was always blowing me off and seemed angry with me and I had no idea why. And how it was really bugging me, but I was too afraid to talk to her.
“It seems to be getting worse,” I said.
“Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe she lost out because the team is no good anymore. Maybe she was riding on your coattails a little bit and now she has to do it on her own. Do you know if she has any colleges lined up for next year?”
Then I remembered. Something. It came from nowhere, just slithered back into my mind like it had always been there the entire time.
And it was big. Before the accident, Amanda and Jesse were dating.
“Oh, my God, it’s about Jesse,” I said. “It’s not about soccer. It’s about Jesse!”
“What about Jesse?” he asked, scribbling.
“Amanda was totally in love with him. I remember! I remember!”
It happened. The first lost memory had found its way back. A memory had returned. And then a few more filled my mind as I closed my eyes.
They came back in waves, more and more as I talked with Dr. Krowe about Amanda. We were in a car, her car, and she was driving. We were headed to the mall when she started talking about Jesse and then nervously asked if it would be okay to go out with him. I remember laughing. “Of course, Jesse and I are just friends.” I told her that even though there was a small tug at my heart. I was all about Conner then and we had just started dating. “You guys should go out, really.” I remembered feeling happy that my two best friends would be together, that Jesse found someone he was interested in. Then I remembered seeing them together, in the hallway, holding hands during football games.
Of course she hated me!
I told Dr. Krowe everything, even if it was painful realizing what I had been doing, I felt thrilled. Thrilled to have those memories back.
“Excellent,” he said as he wrote in his notepad. “This is a tremendous breakthrough. And it’s just the beginning. You’ve taken the hardest step here today, Abby. This has been a very good session.”
I stood up. It was the fastest hour since I had started seeing Dr. Krowe.
“See you next week,” I said.
“You have my number. Call if any other things come up. I’m alway
s available.”
I smiled. My life was coming back to me.
CHAPTER 19
I decided not to mention the specifics of my memories to Jesse, especially about Amanda, until I was ready. It felt great to understand things, why Amanda had turned on me. But there were still mysteries, things I didn’t know. Like why weren’t they still hanging out? I hadn’t seen them together since I had come back to school. I felt stupid suddenly about how I had told him I loved him. No wonder it was too late. Of course it was. He was with Amanda.
When I picked him up, I told Jesse about the great session with Dr. Krowe and that some memories came back. I was still flying high. I was so excited.
“That’s awesomo, Craigers!” he said as we drove. “See, Doc Mortimer was right. It just takes time. You’ll have it all back soon.”
“Yeah,” I said. “For the first time in a while, I believe that.”
“You should go ahead and apply to a few colleges. Write an essay about your death experience, they’ll love that. You might be ready by September.”
I smiled. College. I hadn’t even thought about that. That still seemed a ways off, being that I hadn’t even passed my last algebra test.
“Well, one step at a time,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Seriously, that’s great.”
“Let’s do something this weekend,” I said. Even with the new knowledge about Amanda, it was an old habit, hanging out with Jesse, and one I didn’t want to give up. I bit my bottom lip. Damn.
“Name it, I’m there,” he said.
“Well, only if you have time. I mean, if you have plans with other people, that’s okay. I’m totally cool with that.”
I said it even though I really didn’t feel it inside. It was good to have the memory back about Amanda and Jesse, but I couldn’t stop these feelings I had for him. They were swelling up in me like a river after a storm.
“Gotta be at night because I’ve got some serious burger serving to do up at the mountain all day Saturday and Sunday, plus I’ll need time for my free runs. Hey, you should come up! The mountain misses you!”
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