18 Thoughts (My So-Called Afterlife Book 3) (29 page)

My heart pounded faster as I fumbled for the light switch inside the cabin. Breathing a sigh of relief that Sean’s parents kept up payment on the electric bill for this place, I dropped my backpack to the floor and tucked the flashlight in its front pocket.

After about twenty minutes that felt like two hours of looking around, Nate turned to me. “We can’t put it off any longer.”

The only place we hadn’t looked was Sean’s parents’ bedroom, all alone in the back of the cabin. The floorboards creaked as we made our way to the closed door. On the handle hung one of those
Privacy, Please Keep Out
signs people used at hotels. With every fiber of my being, I wished I could do just that. But nothing could keep me from entering now. Unless I heard a strange noise. Then I’d probably break the record for world’s fastest sprint.

Pausing, I prayed silently that nothing but answers greeted me beyond the door. Then after a final deep breath and a quick look over my shoulder at Nate, I flung the door open. Coldness and dust greeted us as we entered. I gritted my teeth, forcing away the urge to run. A sliver of light shone from the moon in the curtainless window, but there wasn’t a lamp anywhere in sight. Nate stretched his arm back and flicked on the hallway light, giving the bedroom a feeble brightness, but I still found myself wishing I hadn’t set down my flashlight earlier. The thought of going back for it crossed my mind, but I didn’t think my stomach could handle the walk back to this room again, and I didn’t want Nate to leave my side, either. Thankfully, there weren’t many places to search. The bedroom was small, just green-painted walls, an open closet,
praise God,
a bed, and a nightstand. Then my gaze landed on a wooden statue standing on top of a trunk in the far corner. It was in the shadows, just barely out of the reach of the light coming from the hallway.

I’d never noticed any witchcraft-like items around Sean’s cabin or his house before. I crept closer, the hairs on my arms rising as my fingers brushed against the cold wall in the dark. For a moment, I couldn’t muster the courage to pick up the statue. His sadistic smile made me uneasy, like the doll knew what I was looking for even if I didn’t necessarily know myself.

“Looks like an African Voodoo doll,” Nate said from beside me.

The statue had brown skin stretched around a small head with empty eye sockets. His hands were posed in prayer, but as I ran my own trembling fingers across its rigid surface, I didn’t think it was God who he expected to answer.

“You can’t hurt me,” I told the statue, even as I fought the impulse to hurl it across the room, afraid it might. The whole experience was getting to me, the room feeling like an echo of something dark.

“Come on, Olga. There’s nothing here. Let’s go.”

I nodded, but when I went to set the statue back down, I noticed it’d been standing on top of some file folders. Breathing in deeply, I tasted fear on my tongue as I opened the first one.

I gasped. Inside the folder was an autopsy report for Conner, as if he were already dead. I scanned the page, reading the report with horror.

“Aside from the medical jargon being all Greek to me, none of this report makes sense, right?” Nate asked, rubbing the back of my neck.

“Right.” I swallowed a vast amount of saliva. “Conner never died; he’d lapsed into a coma for eighty days.”

I picked up the other two folders, then slowly made my way back down the hallway. Nate followed silently, turning off the light as we passed. I stubbed my toe, immersed in rereading Conner’s report instead of looking where I walked. But the pain was distant compared to the real migraine forming as my mind played the what if game… What if Conner did really die? A yoke of heaviness choked off my air supply as Nate and I sat down at the kitchen table to look at the second file. I froze. My breath tucked itself away in my chest, refusing to come out, refusing to believe. The autopsy report claimed I died a week after Conner on April ninth from a drug overdose in an apparent suicide.

“What the heck?” Nate looked like everything around him was suddenly unfamiliar.

My eyes crossed from trying to comprehend it all. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to read the last file, not surprised this time to see Nate’s name at the top. His date of death was May 18, 2012, from a car crash.

“No autopsy this time, though, just my death certificate. Why?”

I tried to think about things logically. “Well, death from a car crash wouldn’t need an autopsy report. But Conner could’ve died from the lightning strike or drowning or hypothermia, any number of things, and his parents would want confirmation. And if I committed suicide, my parents would want closure on how I did it, too, I guess.”

Could all of that really have happened?

Then I noticed words scrawled very lightly in pencil at the bottom left-hand side of each report. On Conner’s, the word
Juvie/Camp Fusion/Leo
. On mine and Nate’s,
Limbo/Grand Haven/Judith Newton.

My stomach clenched with the distinct feeling of needing to throw up.

“Dr. Judy’s last name is Newton.” Nate’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away. He stared into space rather than at me.

I nodded slowly. Even though I never called her by her last name, I remembered seeing it on her door.

“Why would her name be on your autopsy report and my death certificate? And what’s Limbo?”

Limbo.
I turned the word over in my mind. “Actually, I had a memory. I didn’t know what it meant, but the word floated to the front of my subconscious after my first counseling session with Dr. Judy.”

Suddenly, I felt teary and more unsure than I had before coming to the cabin. I didn’t understand any of it. The only thing I did know was I needed to get out of this place. Swallowing hard, I spun back toward the front door with the files in hand.

“Let’s go.”

I hitched my backpack over my shoulder and in a trancelike state, watched Nate flick off the light switch, lock the door, and replace the key in its fake rock. We ran down the porch steps to Dad’s Ford in record time. Like banshees hunting a graveyard, the wind shrieked, grabbing at my hair and trying to ensnare me. I pulled my jacket closer, burying my face in the fuzzy collar as I threw my stuff in the cab and hopped in. The darkness was beyond imagining while we drove down the dirt road stretching three miles before reaching the highway. Even then, home seemed impossibly far away.

“So, why did you want to see me together today, Nate and Olga?” Dr. Judy leaned back in her chair, a pad of yellow paper on her lap. She wore a silver blouse with navy pants, her hair up in a tiny bun.

I hadn’t seen her since my follow-up appointment in September, so I decided to come right out and say it. “I found my autopsy report last night.”

“What?” she exclaimed, aghast. “How would you have an autopsy report if you’re alive?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

She crossed a leg over her knee. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Really?” Nate’s usual carefulness was gone. “Because we figured you’d know something about it since your name was on her file, not to mention my death certificate.”

“Me?” she asked soberly, trying to wave us off. “There must be some mistake. First of all, you’re not dead—”

“No. We’re. Not.” I emphasized each word. “So why don’t you tell us exactly what’s going on here?”

Dr. Judy looked from my face to Nate’s, her usual warm expression on edge.

“I don’t know who you are.” I looked her up and down with a cold stare. “But I’m going to find out. You counseling me, Conner, and Nate was no accident, was it?”

Her face turned ashen, pallid.

“Yeah,” Nate interjected. “It’s not like you’re the only therapist in this town. How’d we all end up with you?”

She shrugged. “Not to sound presumptuous, but I come highly recommended. It’s called word of mouth.”

But I didn’t buy her contrived explanation. Her voice rang with alarm.

There was a long pause, me looking at her quizzically while Dr. Judy undid the top button of her blouse.

Finally, she broke the silence. “Olga, Nate, I don’t know what to say. Maybe someone is playing a joke on you or trying to turn you against me. Can you tell me where you found this curious report?”

I smiled. Everyone thought I was so naïve. And maybe I had been. After all, I once jumped into a pile of poop because Conner told me to. But that girl was gone, and the new girl in her place would lie and cheat to get answers if she had to. Desperate times called for desperate measures. “You know, before Conner left on New Year’s, the spirit inside him told me the most interesting story.” Conner had continued to see Dr. Judy when he was himself, so his parents had informed her about his newest disappearing act. “He told me Conner had died the night of the lightning strike. I died of a pill overdose a week later. And Nate died in a car crash on the last day of school. He told me about Juvie and Leo. More importantly, he told me about Limbo and you.” The thought Dr. Judy could somehow be behind all we’d experienced made me shiver.

Dr. Judy leaped out of her seat, slamming her notebook on the desk in front of her. “I think you two should leave.”

“Why did you become a therapist, Dr. Judy?” I squelched the desire to grab her by the shoulders and shake her.

She froze. “I wanted to help others, of course.”

“That’s what I thought. But what I want to know is how can you expect to help people when you withhold information they need to know?
Conner
is
missing
.”

“I know,” she whispered. “But I don’t know how to find him. I can’t answer any of the questions you have.”

“But you do know the answers to our questions, don’t you?” Nate dug his fingernails into the arm of his chair, waiting, hoping.

She shook her head. “I honestly don’t know what’s going on right now. But I will say I don’t think you’re crazy. There are evil spirits at work on a daily basis. I see them getting inside the mind of my patients all the time. Clearly, one is targeting you. But I am not the enemy. Whoever’s living inside Conner, whoever’s sending you on a wild goose chase, that’s your enemy.”

I forced myself to remain calm. “So what you’re saying is we’re on the same side.”

“Yes, exactly.” She grinned, as if to reassure us.

Nate let out a long breath. “But you still won’t tell us anything.”

She sighed. “I’ll tell you that you’re right in thinking that me being your therapist along with Conner is no coincidence. Do you believe in angels and demons?”

The standoff was starting, and I didn’t like it. “I didn’t use to, at least the demon part. But how can I not? Not after everything that’s happened, after everything I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

“Okay, then.” Dr. Judy pushed a pen around her desk. “Do you also believe in divine intervention?”

I didn’t understand why she asked me this. “Yes.”

“Wait.” Nate clenched his teeth, then unclenched them. “Is that like when God uses a miracle to stop someone from getting hurt?”

Dr. Judy walked to the one window in her office and stood there, looking down at the street. At least, I hoped it was the street. I began to sense unseen spirits in this room, and it creeped me out. “Divine intervention is so much more than that. People are always shaking their fist at the sky, asking why God doesn’t intervene. But the truth is, he does. He places people like you and me in the right place at the right time to be a catalyst for someone in need, for each other. Many times, we aren’t even aware we’re taking part in a divine plan.”

“Are you saying you believe God put you here for us?” Nate finally asked.

“It’s a humbling thought, isn’t it? To think there are seven billion people in this world and the God of the whole universe has thought of you and what you need in a particular moment.”

I recognized the beginnings of an admission in there somewhere. “Does God ever change his mind?”

Her whole body tensed. “Why do you ask?”

Hesitating, I wound my long red hair into a bun like hers. “What if Conner, Nate, and I really did die? But the results were so catastrophic that nothing but an act of God could change the situation for better, so he changed his mind. I mean, God isn’t limited by time and space, right? He could turn back the hand of time.”

Dr. Judy pinched the bridge of her nose. “You really are a smart girl, Olga. I suppose if you get Genesis One, where God created the Heavens and the Earth, then you understand anything is possible.”

My eyes lit up. “So you agree that’s the best possible hypothesis. And now an evil spirit… a demon, is possessing Conner because someone is mad about the whole thing. Maybe Conner was sent to hell, and the demons feel robbed or something.” I hesitated, noting how insane this sounded. “Do you have anything to add?”

“No,” she muttered.

I scoffed. “You know, Mom and Dad always told me not telling the whole truth was still a lie.”

Crossing her arms over her chest, she tucked in her bottom lip. “Please, Olga, trust me on this. No matter what you believe, I do have your best interest at heart.”

“Trust you? I barely even know you!” My gaze bounced from her to the framed picture of the pier behind her. “Or do I?” Adjusting my glasses, I waited for a confirmation she would never give.