by Lois Duncan
It’s not her business what Papa tells me. I don’t have to go inside. Mama doesn’t even know I’m home. I can take my bike and go to the river. It’s so much fun in springtime. The water’s so fast and cold, and there are so many flowers. I can go wading…
No more! Karen screamed silently. I won’t see the rest! I won’t!
She struggled frantically to thrust the images from her, but she had moved from visions into dreams. The nightmare rush of water filled her ears. Clutching desperately at the last thin thread of consciousness, she felt it slipping away. Icy currents closed upon her, and tumbling, choking, gasping, she was swept into oblivion.
When she awoke, something had mysteriously altered. The room was still bright with sunlight, and a chorus of bird voices was twittering in the elm tree outside the window, and beyond that sound there came another: the thin, sweet chime of bells from the Methodist church over on Copper Avenue.
What in the world? Karen asked herself in bewilderment. Then the realization hit her—she must have slept straight through from Saturday afternoon until Sunday morning!
Why hadn’t her parents woken her up for dinner? Or had they tried and been unsuccessful? She could tell from the aching stiffness of her body that she had not changed position all night. She was still fully clothed except for her shoes; someone had removed those, and the spread that had been on the floor at the foot of the bed had been pulled up to cover her.
For a long time she lay, listening to the distant chimes, trying to tell herself that today was simply another Sunday, that yesterday had been just another Saturday, that the soul-chilling dreams had been just that—horrible nightmares.
But the weight at the pit of her stomach told her something different. What had happened the day before had been real. She had been a part of a tragedy, and from now until the end of her life, it would be part of her.
If she had been able to force herself back to sleep she would have, but that form of escape was denied her. Although weariness lay heavy upon her, her mind was clear and functioning. Eventually, when the bells had ceased their chiming, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. To her surprise, the face in the mirror above the sink, though a little pale, was not noticeably different from the face she was used to seeing there.
She was still Karen Connors, still seventeen years old, blond, brown-eyed, acceptably pretty. On the surface, at least, she had come through this experience unscathed.
When she went downstairs, she found her parents in the kitchen drinking coffee. The morning paper was spread on the table between them so that the first thing that met Karen’s eyes as she entered the room was the screaming black headline: BODY OF MISSING CHILD FOUND IN RIVER.
Directly beneath this there was a two-column, black-and-white reproduction of Carla’s school picture.
“It was on the ten o’clock news,” her father said by way of greeting. “We didn’t see any reason to wake you up to tell you. This morning seemed soon enough for you to know.”
“They found her so quickly,” Karen said softly.
“They had help,” Mrs. Connors said. “Here, read all about yourself. You’re an instant celebrity.”
“What do you mean?” Karen asked, startled. “Rob said my name wouldn’t be given out to anybody.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t get the same promise from Mrs. Sanchez,” her mother said. “She didn’t feel any hesitancy about talking. Here’s the article. Go ahead, read it. I’m sure that by now everybody else in town has.”
Karen sat down at the table and reluctantly pulled the paper toward her. She read the story and found nothing in it that was a surprise to her. The body of eight-year-old Carla Sanchez, missing since April 20, had been found at six forty-five the previous evening, caught in a log jam in the Rio Grande, four miles east of the girl’s South Valley home. Police were led to investigate this area of the river on the advice of a young psychic, the child’s mother had told reporters. The psychic, a teenage girl named Karen Connors, had been brought to the family home by a police officer that morning.
Lorenzo Sanchez, the dead girl’s father, had phoned his former wife from Las Vegas upon hearing a report of their daughter’s death on his car radio.
“It was a terrible shock,” he was quoted as saying.
There was no evidence of foul play.
“Carla apparently decided to go wading, slipped, and was caught by the current,” said police officer Robert Wilson, who directed the search for the child’s body.
The youthful psychic, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Connors, was not available for questions, her parents told reporters.
“Reporters called here last night?” Karen asked. “How did they know where I lived?”
“They probably called every Connors in the book,” her mother said. “Newspaper people are trained to ferret out information. This is exactly what I warned you about. I wish to heaven you would listen to me just once in your life.”
“And I wish that somebody would tell me what this is all about,” Karen’s father said. “Since when is our daughter hiring herself out as a psychic?”
“I didn’t hire myself out,” Karen said. “This policeman, Rob Wilson, who was over at the Zenners’, came by the house yesterday and asked if I would help him.”
“That much I know,” her father said. “Your mother told me about it. What I don’t understand is why you got involved in a situation that has nothing to do with you.”
“I didn’t ask to get involved,” Karen told him. “Rob came to me. He asked me—”
The telephone rang.
Mrs. Connors shoved back her chair and got up from the table. She picked up the receiver of the kitchen phone.
“Hello? Yes, this is the Connors’ residence…. No, no, she isn’t…. No, I don’t know where you can reach her.” There was a long moment of silence. “No,” Mrs. Connors said, “I don’t think she can do that. Where is it you’re calling from? How could you possibly—?… Oh, I see. I didn’t realize.”
There was another pause, more extended than the first one.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Karen’s mother said at last. “That just won’t be possible. The story was incorrect. The mother was under terrible stress at the time she made the statement…. Yes, I’m sure you are… Yes, I can imagine what that must be like. I am sorry. I hope they find her soon. Good-bye.”
She replaced the receiver on the hook and turned back to the table.
“That call was from New Jersey. The story’s been picked up by all the news outlets. People on the East Coast are reading about it over lunch right now. In another hour, the ones in California will be reading it over breakfast.”
“What was the call about?” Karen asked.
“The man on the phone has a fifteen-year-old daughter who’s been missing since February. Her boyfriend disappeared at the same time, and they think the two kids are together. He wants to know if the psychic in our family can tell him where they are.”
The phone began to shrill again.
“That thing’s been ringing ever since I woke up this morning,” Mr. Connors said. “In fact, that’s why I woke up. Either we leave it off the hook, or I’m going to the office.”
“But it’s Sunday,” Karen’s mother objected. “And you weren’t home yesterday at all.”
“So what if it’s Sunday? There’s always paperwork to do.” He turned to Karen. “Go ahead and answer it. You know it has to be for you.”
“We could just let it ring,” Karen said tentatively.
“No, we can’t,” said her father. “If you don’t pick it up, they’ll hang up and dial again. It’s been that way since dawn.”
The call was from Tim.
“Gary just called me,” he said. “He was talking to Lisa. She says there’s a story about you in the paper.”
“It’s not about me,” Karen said. “It’s about a little girl who died in a drowning accident. My name is mentioned in it, that’s all.”
�
�I guess it must be! Gary said it makes you out to be some sort of medium who finds dead bodies and hauls them out of rivers. Jesus, Karen, what happened yesterday?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Karen said. “I never saw the little girl. I wasn’t there when they found her.”
“But the paper says you told the police where to look for her!”
“It was like with Bobby,” Karen told him. “I just had this feeling.”
“You had a feeling some Mexican kid was drowned in the river?”
“It does sound crazy,” Karen admitted.
“How could you know a thing like that? What were you doing out there anyway? Were those people friends of yours?”
“No,” Karen said. “Look, Tim, can we drop it? It was an awful experience. I’d really like to forget it.”
“Forget it!” Tim repeated incredulously. “After that newspaper story? That part about you being a psychic? Gary kept asking me if you really do that kind of stuff.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said, no, of course not; that the paper must have gotten your name mixed up with somebody else’s.”
“That was the right thing to say.”
“What do you mean by that?” Tim demanded. “Is it true or isn’t it? You’re not trying to tell me you really have psychic powers, are you?”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t want to talk about it,” Karen said.
She hung up the phone.
CHAPTER 9
The rest of the spring was hideous. It should have been lovely. It was the prettiest spring that Karen could ever remember. The early rains had done their job well, leaving lawns glistening vibrant green like hundreds of miniature golf courses and pansy faces smiling up at the edges of walkways. As if on cue, on the first day of May, forsythia bushes in what seemed to be every yard in town exploded into golden glory and bright splashes of tulips burst forth in front-yard gardens. And the prom was coming, and graduation… and letters.
The letters began arriving three days after the story appeared in the paper. Each day’s load of mail was heavier than the day before. Karen couldn’t understand how, in a world filled with so much beauty, there could be so much pain.
Each afternoon when she arrived home from school, she was greeted by a mailbox full of desperation. She could almost feel the agony of the contents burning her hands when she handled the unopened envelopes.
“How can there be so many missing children?” she exclaimed incredulously to her mother. “Why aren’t the police out there finding them?”
“Some of them undoubtedly don’t want to be found,” Mrs. Connors said. “A lot are probably runaways.”
“But what about the preschoolers? What about the babies? Where do they go? One letter yesterday was from a woman who said her ten-month-old son disappeared out of a cart in the supermarket. She turned her back for a minute to pick out some melons, and when she turned around again, he was gone. She wants me to come to Montana. She says she’ll send me plane fare, and if I find the baby, she’ll sell her house and pay me everything she gets for it.”
“Poor woman!”
“I can’t go,” said Karen. “I can’t face such a thing.”
“Of course you can’t,” her mother said firmly. “You’d be crazy even to consider it.”
“If it happened again, like it did with Carla, if I did find that child and something terrible had happened, I couldn’t bear it.”
“Write back and tell her it was all a mistake,” Mrs. Connors said. “Tell her the reporter got the information wrong.”
“That’s what I was planning to do.”
She answered that letter as she did the rest of them, in short, apologetic sentences that soon became a standard form letter she just saved on the computer to print out and sign each day. The phone calls were harder to deal with. Those came complete with live human voices, some frantic and edged with hysteria, others heavy with worry of such long duration that it had settled into dragging despair. All were sparked momentarily with hope, however, as they questioned eagerly, “Are you the girl I read about in the Herald Tribune?” or “in the Daily Press?” or “in the Observer?”
“Yes,” Karen would tell them, “but the story was misleading. I can’t do anything to help you. I’m not what you think I am.”
But the voices would not be silenced. The people who owned them plunged stubbornly onward, pouring out their stories in torrents of uncontrollable emotion. They needed to talk, to share their agony, to ask again and again as though they had not heard or were unwilling to comprehend the meaning of her response, “Where do you think my boy could be?” or “If this were your little sister, where would you look for her?”
“I don’t know,” Karen told and retold them. She said the same thing at school. It seemed that the entire student body had either read the article or seen the report on television. Even her teachers seemed fascinated by the subject. Her English teacher, Mrs. Ellsworth, held her after class one day to ask whether there could be “any truth in that incredible story,” and the principal, Mr. Daugherty, stopped her in the hall to inquire in an amused voice what it was like to find oneself “an overnight celebrity.”
“Just awful,” Karen said. “It was all a big mistake.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t. Have you heard the term ‘yellow journalism’? Some reporters will write anything just to cause a sensation.”
Most people did believe her, or, at least, appeared to. Tim was the exception.
“Don’t give me that,” he told her.
They were parked in front of her house after a movie date. The setting was romantic. The night air smelled of flowers, and the sky, viewed through the front windshield of Tim’s Honda, was deep and clear and studded with stars.
Tim’s right arm lay along the back of the seat, and his hand cupped Karen’s shoulder, but his voice was gruff with irritation.
“Look, I’m not some weirdo stranger with a missing kid. I’m the guy you’re going out with. We’re supposed to be honest with each other.”
“How honest?” Karen asked. “What is it exactly that you want me to tell you?”
“The truth,” Tim said, “not this fake story about how it was all just a mistake. On the phone you said it was ‘like with Bobby.’ So how was it with Bobby? How did you know he was in my car?”
“I heard the trunk lid slam.”
“Bullshit!” Tim exploded. “I know you didn’t hear anything. You were back in the kitchen with the baby.”
“Why are you bringing this up now?” Karen asked him. “At the time it didn’t seem to matter to you. That next Monday at school, you didn’t ask me about it.”
“All I cared about right then was whether or not the Zenners were going to press charges. They could have, you know; their kid almost suffocated. Now, though, I’m thinking about the rest of it. And it happened again. There’s another kid missing, and this one is dead, and her mother says you’re the one who found her. Can you blame me for wanting to know what’s going on?”
“No,” Karen admitted reluctantly. She paused. “The truth is, I don’t know myself, exactly. I honestly don’t know how I did it. It just seemed to happen.”
“Like how?” Tim prodded.
“It was like seeing pictures,” Karen told him. “That time with Bobby, I saw him in a sort of box. I smelled sweat and grease, and then I felt motion. Suddenly it came to me that the box must be a car trunk.”
“That’s crazy!” Tim exclaimed softly.
“So ‘crazy’ I thought I was losing my mind. But the feelings kept getting stronger. Mr. Zenner got angry. He was upset enough, he said, without having to listen to premonitions. Then I told Rob Wilson.”
“That cop?”
“Yes, and he believed me. He’d seen this sort of thing before, he said. He has a friend who’s a…” The word did not come easily. She forced herself to speak it. “He has a friend who’s a psychic.”
“This is incredible!” Tim shook
his head in amazement. “Why are you trying to cover it up? This could make you famous! You could charge money for this, or sell the rights to have a movie made about you!”
“I don’t want to be famous,” Karen said. “It was horrible finding out what happened to Carla. It wasn’t as if I could do anything to save her. It was already over. I had to watch and know that. I had to feel the things she had felt and share what she’d remembered.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’ve heard about how people’s lives flash before them when they’re drowning? I used to wonder if that was true, and, if it was, how anybody would know it.” She shook her head. “Well, I know it now, and it is true. I never want to drown, Tim. It’s a horrible way to die.”
She could feel his bewilderment. The arm around her shoulders had stiffened, and his hand had begun to move gently up and down her arm as though it were stroking an overexcited kitten.
“You were pretty upset,” Tim said. “And why wouldn’t you be? Stuff like this would upset anybody. But what you said just now about experiencing that girl’s memories—I don’t see how that could happen, Karen. That’s not the same as just knowing where people are. You probably just imagined that part.”
“I did experience them,” Karen insisted.
“You were under a ton of stress. You could have hallucinated. That’s possible, isn’t it?”
She knew she wasn’t going to win this argument.
“It’s possible, I guess.”
“Still, you’ve got to have some sort of psychic ability, or you wouldn’t have known where she was. You hear about people like this on TV all the time. The police call them in to help with investigations. It’s kind of hard to believe that police believe in this stuff.”
Karen shifted position. Her shoulders were beginning to ache under the weight of his arm. “I’d better go in. We’ve got school still, and finals are coming up.”
“Do you have to remind me?” Tim muttered. “I’ve been trying to pretend that they’re already over. You know, seniors shouldn’t have to do finals. You’d think that eleven and a half years of torture would have earned us that much.”