by Rachel Rust
“What happens when you save your eighth person?”
David looks up at the swaying tree branches overhead. “I have no idea. At the very least, I hope it erases some of the guilt. But the last seven haven’t touched it. It doesn’t feel like I’m appeasing anything—not a god, not the Moore family, and certainly not myself.”
I reach for his forearm. “David, you can’t keep blaming yourself for—” The moment my hand reaches his arm—my flesh on his flesh—my words are stolen away by a strong wind. It smacks into me, but the leaves and branches above don’t move at all. My hand on David’s forearm is stuck, as though glued.
Wind rushes into my open mouth, up my nose, into my eyes and ears, and even through the pores in my flesh. Each cubic inch of me fills with memories…but not my own. Memories of my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. Memories of Villisca in days past. Memories of David from lives past. He’s thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Never eighteen. He has short hair, buzzed hair, shaggy hair. All of his different lives. Different decades. Different last names. Different Davids, yet still the same boy sitting alongside me. My great-grandfather, grandfather, and father are telling David he’s not to blame for the deaths—they knew about David and his part in the axe murders, and his re-occurring lives. They knew like I now know. My father is begging him to be careful, right before David pulls a young girl to safety—from certain death—on the edge of a ledge not far from town, on a sharp bluff near the river. It’s his fourth save. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. I know everything. I know David as a friend, not only from my time with him, but from my entire family’s time with him.
The Carpenters are connected to David. We’ve always been friends with him. From my great-grandfather to me. It’s our place. It’s where I’m supposed to be, next to David, helping him, supporting him.
The BLT in my stomach doesn’t just wriggle this time. It lurches up into my throat. I stand quickly and turn away from David. The moment I do, my stomach muscles heave, sending me onto my knees and sending vomit into the grass.
Once I’m finished, David’s hand lands on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It freaked your dad out at first, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
I recoil from David’s touch on my shoulder. He pulls his hand away and says nothing, but I can sense from his hovering that he’s concerned, though not at all surprised. He knew what would happen the moment our skin met for the first time.
I can’t bring myself to stand up. The rush of distant, intergenerational memories still spins in my mind. I see, feel, and smell the memories of my dad and grandpas. Every single memory of theirs that I have received is about David—David throughout all his lives. Decades of memories that have downloaded into my brain. They’re a part of me now.
They’re a part of my family. Generations of Carpenters have been friends with David. They’ve known his secret. They’ve tried to help him in his quest to save eight people. And now, somehow, with the rush of memories speared into me, their stories have become my story. Their journey has become my journey.
Their friend David has become my friend David.
Around and around the cycle continues. I may not be a William, but I’m a Carpenter, and David is standing in front of me, confessing his sins, his secrets. Just as he has done for the rest of my family in years past.
“Why?” I ask. My voice cracks, and the taste of vomit on the back of my tongue nearly makes me puke again.
Instead of answering my question, David says, “Hold on, I’ll be right back.” He runs across the street to the diner. I stand on wobbly legs and spit a few times into the grass. By the time I find the bench, David’s back with a bottle of water and napkins.
“Thanks,” I say, taking the items.
He sits beside me, not saying anything about the fact that I smell like vomit. “Your family is connected to me because your great-great-grandpa was a family friend back in 1912. He lived in the same house your grandparents have to this day. He saw me with Tommy that night, and then later, he saw me again as I was running home—and he knew. Not right then and there, but the next day, when all hell broke loose and the entire town was talking about it.”
I take a long sip of water before responding. “Did he say anything to you?”
“Yeah, he told me straight to my face that he saw me in the middle of the night, rushing home, and that if I knew anything about what Tommy had done that I should let the authorities know. Of course, I had no intention of telling the police anything. Tommy was long gone, and I’d be the one left holding the bag.”
“Holding the axe.”
David shoots me a disapproving look.
“Sorry.”
“Anyway,” he says, “your great-great-grandpa was the first person I confessed everything to. He was really nice, and he genuinely tried to help me. After a couple of days, when Tommy never showed up and the police started really nosing around, he helped get me out of town. Took me as far as Omaha where I hopped the train.”
“So my great-great-grandpa was the first to try to help you,”
“Right, but I guess you could say he helped me in the wrong way. He tried to help me escape what had happened, but I really needed to face and atone for what had happened.”
“So that’s why the rest of us Carpenters are caught up in this cycle…we’re part of this, we have to help you in the right way. To atone for what my great-great-grandfather did.”
“Basically, yeah.”
“My god.” A shot of anxiety springs me up onto my feet. I walk left, then right, then left again, until I’m full-on pacing in front of David, careful not to step in the remnants of my BLT. “My relatives have always been connected to all of this. I have a connection to it, too.” I stop dead center in front of David and stare at him. “That’s why I’ve had recurring dreams about the house.”
David’s face grimaces a bit. “Yeah, about that…”
My eyes narrow. “You know something, don’t you? Spill it.”
“They all had those dreams, too.”
My mouth drops open. “You’ve known all this time what those dreams were and why I was having them?”
“Again, it’s not exactly something that’s easily explainable.”
“You could have at least tried.”
“I had to wait until you figured it out yourself. And if you’re wondering why your dad or grandpa have never mentioned the dreams, it’s because they don’t remember ever having them. Like my face, their memories of everything faded after I died.”
I run my hands down the side of my head, not knowing if I want to scream or laugh.
“Your dad believed his recurring dreams were visions of his family’s history,” David says. “Like family memories, preparing him—and now you—of what’s to come.”
I take a deep breath as the information sinks in. Every night, I see that house, sometimes new, sometimes old. Different decades, different kinds of cars. But they aren’t really dreams. They’re memories. Visions of my own fate.
“Okay,” I say, trying to regain my cool. “My family has had recurring dreams before me. They knew you and your story, and now I know your story. They were friends with you and now I’m…I mean, we’re friends, right?” David’s crooked smile is his only response. “We’re linked somehow.”
“Through decades,” he says.
“And the daydreams I’ve been having. Those aren’t daydreams at all; they’re also memories. Flashbacks from my family before me.”
David nods.
“I saw one of your funerals,” I say, suddenly remembering that wave of grief in my church daydream, and now understanding who I had been grieving for. David had been in that casket.
“I’m surprised you only saw one funeral,” he says with a slight chuckle. “I’ve had quite a few of them.”
“Not funny,” I say with sharp glance his way. The memory of that daydream twists my gut with sorrow—the thoughts and feelings of l
osing David, seeing that casket, knowing he was the one inside, is more than my brain can handle. I squint, forcing the funeral images from my mind.
He’s here now. He’s not dead. Chill out.
“It wasn’t coincidence that we met outside your hardware store last week, was it?” I ask. “We were supposed to meet because I need to help you.”
David shakes his head. “No, you do not need to help me. You don’t have to be part of this. If you want to tell me to go to hell and never speak to me again, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“I don’t think I have a say in the matter.” The memories have told me this.
I’m here in Villisca for a reason—not because my parents are getting divorced but because David needs me. I have to be here. It’s part of my identity as a Carpenter. This town in the middle of endless cornfields is part of me. Villisca is in my blood.
“My God,” I whisper, glancing at the town around me. Everything I thought I knew about my life is now gone, changed forever. The impossibility of it all washes over me, pooling tears on my lower lashes.
My summer stay in Iowa is suddenly bigger and more significant than ever. The Carpenters before me had all grown up in Villisca, mere blocks from their friend David. Those friendships had been easily forged in a small community. But I’m from Minnesota, hundreds of miles away. And yet, here I am in Iowa, friends with David. Fate found a way to bring me to him, to help him. And once again, I find myself questioning the world around me. Did I even believe in fate before all this?
David stares back at me with his brown eyes, his hair tousled by wind. He and I are connected through some kind of twisted, century-old destiny. Except I don’t think destiny has anything to do with the fact that I can’t pull my gaze away from his face, his eyes, his high cheekbones, and his jawline. I wonder if my grandpas or my dad ever realized how handsome their best friend was.
“I suppose this is like déjà vu for you, huh?” I ask, dabbing at my eyes with my fingertips. “Telling your story to yet another Carpenter.”
David smiles. “A little. I’ve been friends with a lot of Carpenters, although…” His voice drifts away and he averts his eyes from me. “You’re different.”
He’s right. It is different this time. He’s dealt with a lot of Williams throughout his lives but never a Francesca.
My lips spread into a smile. “I’m your first Carpenter friend with boobs.”
David shakes his head. “That’s not…I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Liar,” I say, watching his cheeks blush. I drink the last of the water, but still taste vomit. “I need to go home and brush my teeth.”
David nods. “Sure, whatever you need.”
The crisp blue sky peeks through the trees. It’s too sunny—too damn chipper to deal with life and death issues. David watches me, patient and kind. I really do need to brush my teeth and my overwhelmed mind needs time to process everything that’s been thrown at it, but I don’t want to let him go either.
“Meet me at the house tonight?”
David looks startled. “The house? You mean…”
“The Axe Murder House.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“That’s what it is. What else do you want me to call it?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. The Moore house.”
“The Stillinger girls died, too.”
“Trust me, I know.”
“It just bugs me that people always refer to the Moores, but it seems like those two other girls are forgotten.” I look at him. “Lena Stillinger was the last killed. Do you think your saves correlate to the order in which they died? Like the first person you saved atoned you for the first person murdered?”
He sits up and stretches a little, looking like he’s had his fill of talking about the murders. “I’ve never thought about it. Maybe there is a correlation.”
“If there is, then Lena was the last to die. She was the eighth soul taken, so she hasn’t been atoned for yet. Which means she’s the one who’s been talking to me.”
“What about the recent girl who drowned, Amelia? You saw her in your dreams, right? And you’re hearing more than one voice. Is the other voice her?”
“Maybe. But I don’t understand how she fits into all this. I get my connection to the house and the axe murder victims, but not to her.”
“Maybe she was a dream, nothing more.”
I shake my head. “She was more than a dream because I dreamt of her before I even knew who she was—before I saw the newspaper article about her death.”
David’s shoulders slump a bit. And I get it—nothing makes sense. No matter how much I try to figure things out, nothing quite measures up. I pick at the loose wrapper around the water bottle and decide to concentrate on the matter at hand—the axe murder victims and saving David’s eighth person.
“Lena must’ve fought back against Tommy,” I say. “She was the only one with defensive wounds.”
David’s jaw muscles clench at Tommy’s name. “She shouldn’t have had to. If I only knew…if I had stopped him.”
I sit and place my hand on his arm again. This time there is no wind or memories rushing through me, only the tense ridges of David’s muscles against my palms. “You had no idea what was going to happen inside that house. And you didn’t swing the axe.”
“But I could have stopped the axe.”
I remain quiet, unsure of what to say. Technically, he’s right. He might have stopped it had he known it was going to happen. But hindsight is twenty-twenty and foresight is pretty damn blind. And trying to stop Tommy with his axe may have added a ninth fatality that night—David himself.
I hate the idea of David, decades later, still beating himself up over what he didn’t see coming. It’s not fair. And it seems to me that reincarnation and having to live over and over again in the same town as the murders is punishment enough.
I give his arm a quick squeeze. “Meet me at midnight.”
Chapter Twenty
Grandma and Grandpa head to bed around ten thirty, after the local news. Snoring commences fifteen minutes later. I click around Netflix until eleven thirty—until my restlessness forces me to step outside and pace on the front porch. The old house stares at me. It knows I’m coming over.
Just before midnight, I rush across the street. A flick of a lighter shows in the far left window as I approach the front steps. I find the door unlocked again. The floor squeaks slightly as I step inside. “David?” I whisper into the dark, dank air.
“In here,” he says from the next room over. He doesn’t whisper. He’s not afraid.
But I am and tiptoe through the kitchen into the living room space, as if walking normally is going to set off some kind of supernatural uproar.
David is sitting in the corner on the living room floor. The zippo clicks on once again, but this time instead of closing it, he inserts it into a metal lamp of some type. Immediately, a bright glow illuminates from the lamp—so bright at first that I have to turn away and close my eyes. And when I reopen them, a white spot has been burned into my vision. He lights another lantern, then places them on either side of himself.
“Kerosene,” he says. “I used to use lanterns like these all the time. Didn’t get electricity until my second life.”
I make a face. “That means no air conditioning.”
He laughs. “I didn’t get that until the seventies.”
“God, the twentieth century must’ve sucked,” I mutter, making him laugh again.
The two lanterns hum quietly, filling the entire living room with a steady yellow light. On the floor in front of David sits a stack of papers, nearly a foot high. For a moment, I forget where I am—in the house of doom and gloom—and rush forward to the documents. I sit cross-legged across from him on the floor, eyes on the papers.
“What are all these?” I grab the top one. It’s a photocopy of a newspaper article from 1956. The headline reads: Local Authorities Receive Anonymous Tip on Villisca Murders.
&nbs
p; “Two summers ago, I spent weeks looking at old newspapers and archived records, gathering as much information as I could on the murders.” He flashes a crooked grin. “I was feeling pretty gung-ho about it. Thought if I could hammer enough information into my brain, I could find some kind of loophole to my connection with it.” He flips his hands palms up. “Clearly, it didn’t work.”
“We still have time to save you.” I grab the next photocopy. Its headline is from 1924: A New Lead in the Moore Murders? “Whatever happened to Tommy?” I ask. “Did he come back to town?”
“Not that I know of. There’s no mention of him in anything I’ve ever read, but in a town like Villisca, not everything that happens becomes public record. Gossip has always ruled this town, and it’s hard to say what people knew back then. And in the years following the murders, by the time I turned thirteen in my second life and remembered the night of the murders, a lot of the folks who were around in 1912 had moved or died, or just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
I nod and begin reading the next article.
“I bet you wish you had never come here this summer,” David says.
I look from the paper to him, then back to the paper, unsure how to answer. “I don’t think any of it was up to me. I’m supposed to be here helping you. I’m a Carpenter, it’s what I need to do. Plus, all the crap with my parents and—” I cut myself off. I’ve said too much.
Concern crosses David’s face. “What’s wrong with your parents? Are they okay?”
I nod, but the movement is wrong. They’re not okay. Nothing’s okay.
“You can talk to me, ya know.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I say.
“Chessie, please tell me what’s going on.” He scoots closer until one of his knees touches mine. “It’s pretty obvious you’re not in town all summer just to see your grandma and grandpa. So what’s going on?”
I shake my head and don’t reply. A burning sensation grows behind my eyes, and despite clenching my muscles to stop it, hot tears well in my lower lids.