“I’m Alexa,” the girl said.
The boy nodded as if this made perfect sense, of course she was an Alexa, she looked like an Alexa. But Lance thought the nod meant something else. Lance thought the nod was because the boy clearly already knew exactly who this girl was.
“Alexa. Hey, that’s a really cool name!” the boy said. “Do people ever call you Lexie?”
The girl crinkled her face, like she’d tasted something rotten. “No way.”
The boy smiled. “Oh, thank goodness. Alexa is way better.”
The girl laughed. “I agree.”
Then the boy stuck out his hand and said, “Alexa, my name’s Quinten, but everybody calls me Quint.”
Finally, a name! With all the mystery surrounding the boy, Lance could at least start thinking of him with an actual name. One less thing to try and figure out.
“Like that fisherman guy from Jaws?” the girl asked, cocking her head to one side.
The boy—Quinten—looked over to Murry with wide eyes and actually laughed out loud, a short bark of a laugh that echoed through the room. “That’s exactly who I was named after. My mom loved that movie,” Quinten said. Then added, “Smart girl.”
Alexa giggled and shook Quinten’s hand.
And Lance saw it. Saw the handshake last a bit longer than normal, saw the quick blankness flash across Quinten’s face. Saw the boy’s features fall back into their pleasant normalcy as he broke contact with the girl and moved to stand.
And Lance thought that, despite his good-natured attempt, Quinten looked a little more somber than he had when he first entered the room.
“Hey,” he said. “Alexa, tell you what. It’s getting a little weird in here, and I know my uncle has some things he needs to do to take care of everything, so I have an idea. I’m about to go get some breakfast at this diner in town with my good friend Julie. She’s hilarious and I think you’d love her. You want to come hang out with us for a while? Best pancakes and waffles you’ll ever eat.”
Lance thought about raising his hand and asking if he could come, too. He enjoyed waffles and pancakes as much as the next guy. And he could use some coffee.
Alexa turned her head and looked at Murry, her eyes asking.
Murry, seeming to realize she was asking his permission, shot a look to Quinten and must have seen all he needed to because he quickly said, “Hey, that sounds like a great idea. I’m a bit jealous myself. I could go for some pancakes.”
Amen, Lance thought.
Alexa looked back to Quinten, smiling. “Good, I’m starved.”
“Great! Tell you what, is that your suitcase over there?” He pointed to a small rolling suitcase on the floor by the television stand, its lid zipped shut.
Alexa nodded.
“Okay, thought so. Do you have anything in the bathroom? Toothbrush, shampoo, anything like that?”
Alexa nodded, beginning to turn back around in a direction that would put her in line of sight to her dead father on the bed. Quinten reached out before she could and gently grabbed her shoulders and stopped her. Unlike when Murry had placed the hand on her shoulder earlier, Alexa did not seem to react to Quinten’s touch so much as obey it. “Tell you what, why don’t you go down to the office—my aunt Meriam should be down there—and wait while I gather up your things and bring them to you so can you get dressed and we can go? Sound good?”
And there was a look of relief on the girl’s face, like maybe she understood this was it, she’d never have to see the inside of this motel room again. “Sounds good,” she said.
And then Quinten stood and took her hand and led her out to the sidewalk. Lance was about to follow, but only a few seconds passed before Quinten was back in the room, closing the door behind him and walking right up to the edge of the bed and looking down at the dead man.
And nobody spoke. Outside on the road, a large delivery truck roared by. Nobody even glanced at it. Murry stood back with his hands clasped behind his back, watching his nephew. Waiting. Understanding on some level that this might be about more than just a man getting sick and dying.
Lance understood this, too, and was as eager to hear what the boy would say next as Murry was. More so, in fact.
After a minute, maybe two, Quinten’s eyes seemed to come back into focus. He looked to Murry and said, “We need to get rid of him?”
“What?” Murry said, not surprised, but as if he hadn’t heard correctly.
“Don’t call the police. Don’t report this. We’ve got to get rid of him and never speak about it again.”
“When you say ‘get rid of him,’ you mean—”
“Dispose of the body, yes.”
Murry waited a beat. Said, “You’re sure about this?” Which Lance thought was an incredibly calm response for a regular person who’d just been asked to improperly dispose of a corpse without notifying the authorities. But, Lance had to assume that Murry, just like Meriam, understood that his nephew possessed otherworldly gifts. Would do things and, in the case of today, ask things of others that they would not fully understand.
“You need to trust me,” Quinten said.
Murry sighed, as if the boy had played a trump card and he knew he’d lost the battle. And then, with very little conviction, offered, “We can’t just…”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“What about the girl?” Murry asked.
“You need to trust me. You’ll see.” Then Quinten rounded the front of the bed, Lance having to step back several steps in order to keep the boy from passing through him, and he made his way to room’s second bed, where he pulled the comforter off and then draped it over the dead man’s body, keeping those bloodshot eyes from staring into nothing any longer.
“What happened to him?” Murry asked. “Do you know?”
Lance, along with Murry, was waiting for an answer. He had been staring at the vague outline of the dead man’s body beneath the comforter when Murry had asked the question, trying to put the pieces together himself as to what exactly had happened to cause the man to die, and what exactly had happened between the man and his daughter, when the silence that had followed had suddenly grown much too long.
Lance looked up and found Quinten standing just a few feet away, staring directly at him.
And Lance was hit with a rush of both fear and excitement. Fear because he didn’t know what it meant for Quinten to be able to see him—was he supposed to be seen? Would this somehow change the past, alter history? Was this all part of the Universe’s plan?
Excitement because if the boy could see Lance, there was a chance he might be able to hear Lance, too. And if he could hear Lance, then maybe he could answer some questions. Lance didn’t even know how to begin such a conversation. Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m … well, I think you and I are very much alike. I have special abilities, too. Oh, and I’m from the future.
Quinten’s eyes were focused on where Lance was standing, but there was a lack of focal point all the same. Maybe he wasn’t seeing him at all. To test this, Lance started waving both his hands in the wildly in the air, like a half-drunk fan at a basketball game trying to catch a t-shirt being shot out of an air cannon.
Quinten moved closer, slowly, as if his mere disturbance of the air might ruin whatever it was he was working toward. Lance stopped moving. Waited to see what would happen.
“Quint?” It was Murry, sounding concerned. “Everything okay?”
Quinten ignored him and then did something that sent Lance into panic mode. He raised his right hand and started to reach out, fingers mere inches from Lance’s own chest. He moved to take the last step, the step that would force his presence into the space that Lance occupied in some time and dimension that wasn’t truly this one.
And Lance quickly stepped to the side and the boy’s hand reached out and hit nothing but the television.
Lance couldn’t help it. Passing through doors was one thing. He wasn’t ready to have a human being pass through him. The thought of it creepe
d him out.
When his fingers hit the darkened television screen, Quinten seemed to snap out of whatever trance he’d fallen into, quickly turning back around the finding his uncle staring.
“Sorry, what?” the boy asked.
“Everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah. I just … I thought I. Never mind. It’s hard to explain.”
Murry sighed. “Usually is, huh?”
“You asked me something, didn’t you?”
Murry nodded. “Yes. I asked if you know what happened to him?” He pointed to the body shape under the comforter.
“Not entirely. At least, not in a way I can understand yet. But I’ll just tell you this: he got what he deserved.”
Murry didn’t seem to like this answer very much. “Is any man really to judge another man to be deserving of death?”
Quinten shook his head. “Maybe not, Uncle. But there are greater things than man that do the judging.” He reached down and grabbed Alexa’s suitcase, started for the door and then stopped. “Oh, and Murry, this guy was a cop. I imagine people will start looking for him sooner rather than later, so we need to come up with something good.”
And then the boy slipped out the door and left Murry and Lance with the dead man on the bed and a room full of unanswered questions.
18
(1993)
He did not keep the room locked, but he did have a password on the computer.
Alexa sat in her father’s office chair in the back bedroom, facing the computer screen and watching the cursor blink blink blink at her, waiting for an attempt.
He’d never specifically forbidden her to come in here on her own, but Alexa could feel the guilt—no, that wasn’t quite right; it was anxiety—begin swelling in her chest as she’d made her way down the hallway and grabbed the doorknob and turned it and pushed through the door and made her way to the computer desk. Each step had increased the beating of her heart.
Because, even at twelve years old, Alexa knew she was on the verge of something. She was about to go poking around in the life of not just an adult, but her own father, and something tugging at her gut, like a string being pulled just behind her belly button, made her think that whatever she might discover in this room would be an enlightening moment of a grand scale. Like finally being able to pull back the curtain on some tremendous secret and peer into the truth for the first time.
She was excited. Yes, there was definitely a sense of giddiness mixed in with the anxiety.
Excited for the secret. Anxious that she might get caught. And what would that mean, if he caught her? What would that do to their relationship? Would he be mad? Would he ever trust her again?
It was a gamble, going into the office and powering up the computer. But Alexa had to roll the dice. Something had changed in her. For so long she’d been able to go along with her father’s vagueness about his job as a policeman and accepted his answer—which, now at twelve years old, she’d started to recognize as avoidance—about hunting monsters. She figured that like most adults, her father thought that this type of dismissive answer was for her own good. Adults always acted like that. Like Alexa and her friends were still just little kids running around in their diapers and had to be shielded from anything other than cartoons on the television and could be placated with nothing more than a cookie and a juice box. The adults had their own world, and the sign on the door read No Kids Allowed.
Which, for the most part, was fine with Alexa and her friends. They lived in their own world, too. Alexa had secrets of her own. Like the fact that she had kissed two different boys this year at school—one at an afterschool dance with the lights turned down low and the teachers’ backs turned just long enough for his lips to find hers, and the other at Allison Varney’s thirteenth birthday party, where they’d all been gathered in Allison’s basement with cups of soda and music playing and hormones ripping across the room like an F5 tornado.
And also the fact that she’d gotten her period. Though this secret she’d only kept from her dad, mostly out of embarrassment. It was one of only a handful of times in her life she’d wished that her mother had not left them, that there was another female in their house. She’d gone to Maggie’s mom instead, and Trish had helped her, gotten her what she needed and explained what to do—all with Maggie giggling and snickering at Alexa’s side. Alexa had made Trish swear she wouldn’t tell her dad. Trish protested at first but eventually agreed. And Alexa knew she’d kept her word, because something like that … her dad would have definitely talked to her about.
And that was the thing. Her father loved to talk about her, loved to attempt to have Alexa tell him everything about her life, paint him a complete picture of her every waking day. He’d backed off a bit as she’d gotten older, realizing that along with her age there had to come some sense of privacy, but she could tell it bothered him. But…
But he never talked about himself.
He was her provider and her protector. He was her father.
But Alexa had suddenly come to realize she had no idea who he was.
It was the press conference that had finally pulled at the thread of this realization until it completely unraveled and exposed itself. A crowd full of people that seemed to know much more about her own dad than Alexa did. And when she’d try to ask him about it … same old answers, same old change the subject.
He’d made her do what she was about to do. She deserved more.
So after school, she’d ridden the bus home instead of heading to Maggie’s, and after searching every other room of the house—she knew it was silly, but the anxiety had already been creeping in— to make sure her father wasn’t hiding from her, she walked straight back to the office and booted up the computer.
She was good with computers. They had computer lab once a week at school, and she could type faster than most of her classmates. And instead of playing the games like the rest of her friends, she liked to go clicking around on the screen, exploring all the different applications and features.
And she was ready to go exploring now.
Except she hadn’t thought about there being a password.
In hindsight, she should have. If her father worked so hard to keep things from her in the rest of his life, why wouldn’t he have protected any information that was just lying around the house?
Alexa had been staring at the cursor for what felt like an eternity. Blink, blink, blink. She’d tried typing in PASSWORD and of course that had been wrong. Blink, blink, blink. She’d tried the numbers for her dad’s birthday and that had been wrong, too. Blink, blink, blink. And then she’d tried her own birthday, which had also been wrong, but had also given her a spark of inspiration. To listen to her dad talk, whether to her or to other adults, Alexa was his pride and joy, the apple of his eye, his reason for living, all the sappy things any parent will say about their own children.
She was the person always on his mind.
She typed ALEXA and hit the Enter key.
It was wrong.
Blink, blink, blink.
Alexa felt her excitement begin to wane and she suddenly wanted to cry. Cry because she had failed. Cry because all she wanted was for her own father to be honest with her, and instead she had to go snooping around like a thief.
A single tear escaped and began to slide down her cheek.
Don’t cry, baby girl. She heard her dad’s words in her head, the same thing he always said when he saw her with tears in her eyes. It’ll all be okay. Don’t cry, baby g—
Alexa sat up hard in the chair, using the back of her hand to quickly wipe away the fallen tear. She typed BABYGIRL and hit Enter.
She was in.
All the anxiety was erased, the excitement winning the battle and taking over. She was in. She’d cracked the code and she was in. She was proud of herself, floating on a cloud of achievement. Her hand found the mouse and she began the hunt, clicking into folders, her eyes scanning the file names and looking for anything that would give her answers. She didn�
��t know for certain that her dad did any police work at home on this computer, but if he did, she was going to find it. If he didn’t, she’d find whatever else he had stored on the hard drive, any shred of evidence of the man he was.
What she found stunned her into absolute stillness, her hands freezing over keyboard and mouse. Her breath hitching in her chest. Her eyes unblinking.
She’d found a folder named FAVORITE CASES, which had instantly excited her. Finally, she’d thought. I’m going to see what he does. And these are his favorites!
Inside this folder had been several others, all with folder names consisting of random numbers. Case numbers, she’d thought. Though she had no idea if that was an actual thing. It had just made sense at the time.
She clicked inside one of the folders and found it full of picture files. She recognized the file type because it was the type of files they saved at school when the teacher told them to draw something in the Paint application. She clicked on the first picture file and waited for it to open.
And then it did.
And that’s when she froze. Unable to breathe, unable to think.
It was a picture of a girl, maybe around Alexa’s own age. Maybe a bit younger. She was in a bedroom. The walls painted pink. She stood at chest of drawers, pulling out a shirt.
She was completely naked.
Alexa, when her body finally released itself from its prison, quickly closed the image. Her mind reeling as it processed what she’d just seen.
She clicked the back arrow at the top of the window and then stared at the list of folders again. They can’t be, she thought. They all can’t be.
She opened another folder, found that it too was full of image files. She forced herself to open one and then gasped when she saw it was a picture of a young boy. He couldn’t be any older than ten at the most, and he was also not wearing any clothes.
She closed this file so fast the mouse nearly slid from beneath her hand. She clicked the back arrow again and was back at the list of folders.
Alexa’s head was swimming, her heart racing. Her mind was a blur of questions and confusion and…
The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4 Page 32