Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (124 page)

“I’m in on that. You know how I love me some Jane Greer.”

Early on in our relationship, I had the sense Ty was just being polite, watching those old black and white movies with me. But lately I wasn’t so sure. He seemed to be more and more into them.

I smiled and we went to bed. With his arms wrapped around me, feeling frustrated and loved at the same time, I drifted off to Robert Mitchum’s cool but sincere voice saying, “Nothing in the world is any good unless you can share it.”

***

I knew right away where I was.

The ceiling above me danced with water reflections. The smell of the room, cold and damp and sterile, filled my nostrils.

I tried to lift my arms and legs, but they wouldn’t move. They couldn’t move. Not with those straps wrapped so tightly around them, securing me to the gurney.

My heart raced.

It can’t be
, my mind screamed.
It can’t be happening again
.

But it was.

He appeared above me a moment later, his face sunken, his skin pallid, his black energy twisting around him like a tornado.

And his eyes, his eyes dancing with excitement.

Excitement over what was about to happen.

Excitement over my death.

Nathaniel.

“Here we are, Abby,” he said, his voice sending violent shockwaves through me. “Together again at last.”

My screams bounced around the large room, useless.

“Shhh,” he said, stroking my hair. “Let go and trust me, Abby. This way, we can stay together forever.”

Every muscle in my body fought to break through the straps, but it was no use. Nathaniel, his face growing paler, his eyes sinking deeper into his skull, his energy even darker, smiled at me.

A moment later, my deathbed was moving. Moving over the pool. Lowering, slowly dropping down, down, down.

Fear exploded through me like a grenade.

He was killing me. Again. But not as an experiment this time.

He was killing me so that I could always be his.

I wrestled with the straps until my wrists bled. I screamed and screeched until my vocal chords were ragged.

None of it helped. The freezing water rushed in around me anyway. Death reached for me from the bottom of the pool.

The last thing I saw before the water poured into my lungs was Nathaniel Mortimer’s black eyes dancing with delight.

***

I woke up gasping, unable to catch my breath.

“Abby?” I heard Ty say. “You okay?”

I blinked and nodded, finally feeling the air reach my lungs.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“Bad dream?”

“Yeah, but I’m okay now. You get back to sleep.”

He started to say something but then just smiled and kissed me. He pulled me close for a moment and then his head dropped back down to his pillow. I stared at the ceiling there in the dark for a few minutes until I heard him snore softly again.

I quietly tiptoed over to the window and stared out. There was already a lightness inching across the sky and I knew sleep was finished with me for the night. I walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind me.

For a long time following my rescue, I dreamt of Nathaniel Mortimer every night. But now my life and nights belonged to me again.

I poured the boiling water over a peppermint tea bag and blew at the steam.

I thought about Emily Ross. Maybe she was alive out there somewhere, alone and terrified, like I had been.

I got up from the kitchen table and found his card.

Even though it was still early, I called Detective Ellis Frazier to let him know I was in.

CHAPTER 10

The mammoth leaves drooping from the trees and blocking out the sky along the McKenzie Highway were incredible, even in black and white.

“I don’t get out this way as much as I’d like,” Frazier said as we drove. “It sure is something.”

I agreed.

I took a sip of the coffee he had brought over when he picked me up at the house. It was just right, with plenty of cream and no sugar.

“Coffee’s good,” I said. “Was that in my file, too? How I like it?”

“No, that was just good old detective work. When I stopped over at the café, I asked the man with the large hair behind the counter what you liked.”

I smiled.

“I hope it wasn’t too difficult getting off work on such short notice,” he said.

Mike and Lyle agreed to cover my shifts at Back Street. And my suspension from river duties made things even easier.

“No problem at all.”

“Good,” he said. “I wanted to get off to an earlier start, but had a few things I had to wrap up.”

We were quiet for a few minutes and then I decided to take a stab at making conversation.

“Have you always lived in Eugene?”

“I was born in Detroit,” he said. “But I’ve been all over. I started out policing in Baltimore and worked in D.C. and northern New Jersey for most of my career.  Then I came out West a few years ago.”

“How does Eugene measure up?”

“It’s generally quieter, more laid back I suppose, but there is still crime. It keeps me busy.”

Several large crows were in our lane up ahead, pecking at some road kill. They reluctantly flew away when we approached.

“You know, I was watching a documentary about crows on public television the other night,” Frazier said. “It turns out they’re extremely smart animals.”

“No way.”

“That’s what I used to think. But apparently they have a very high IQ. They’re able to make tools and use them in sequence. What I found particularly interesting was how they watch people and react to the ones they don’t like, squawking and warning one another.”

“They’ve always kind of given me the creeps.”

“I suppose that’s the traditional view,” he said. “Harbingers of death and the like.”

I stared out at the river on the left. It was running fast in the afternoon sun, full of riffles and rocks and rapids. I hadn’t ever been on the McKenzie before and wondered if Ty would want to do a trip with me before the summer ended.

“So did you ever think about going to the University?” Frazier asked.

“You mean the U of O? No, not really.”

“That surprises me. A smart young woman like you, never thought about it?”

It had been a long time since anyone had called me smart.

“Before my accident I was only thinking of colleges in terms of soccer, hoping I might get a scholarship from one of the top ones like Santa Clara or Notre Dame. And after the accident, well, college dropped out of the picture. I had a hard time in school.”

“It must have been difficult to adjust to your new life.”

“Yeah, it took a while. But I feel fine now, stronger in some ways even. And I’m starting culinary school next month.”

“You want to be a chef? That’s a fine profession. I have a cousin who owns a restaurant back in Detroit. Works all the time, but she sure loves it. What do you like to cook?”

“Risotto, gnocchi. A few basic sauces. Italian is my favorite.”

“I went to Italy once, the north. Spent a week in Bologna. I ate the best lasagna of my life there.”

“Maybe when this is over you can tell me what you think of my
ragù
alla Bolognese
.”

“I would like that very much. I’ll bring the wine.”

He put his coffee down and sat back a little more in the seat.

“I’m glad you’re here, Abby.”

I was glad too, even though I was still nervous about it. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure if anything would come to me. And I knew that as time went on, Frazier would want something. Anything.

“I can’t promise this will work,” I said. “Most of the time, I don’t really have control over what I see and what I don’t see. I’ve tried looking for ghosts in the past with no luck. But like you said, maybe there’s a small thing I can pick up on that might help. Though I’m a little surprised that the Eugene PD is willing to use someone like me.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“I guess I should have made that part more clear. You see, I’ve brought you in on my own. You’ll just be working with me. It’s nothing official, what we’re doing here.”

“Oh.”

It didn’t bother me. In fact, I liked it better this way.

“My partner knows you’re coming. And you might end up meeting a few of our other detectives, although nothing has been planned. They’ve all been through a lot over these last months. It’s quite a thing to work on something like this. It’s the kind of case that wears you down, and as time goes by and nothing develops, that’s when it can really start haunting you.”

He let out a sigh.

“Have you worked on a lot of missing person cases?”

“I have. I suppose it’s become my specialty.”

“Are there ever any happy endings?”

“Not enough.”

I took a sip of coffee.

“In most other areas of police work, you can feel a certain satisfaction in catching the perpetrators. But with this type of crime, that takes a back seat. Your focus is on finding the victim. Before it’s too late. I brought a file for you to take a look at. It’s on the seat back there, whenever you’re ready.”

“You think that’s what we’re looking at here? That it’s too late?”

He ran his right hand slowly over his head.

“I don’t know, Abby,” he said after a while. “I like to try and stay positive until something tells me otherwise. I’m hoping that someone like you might see something we’ve missed, maybe see the case from a new perspective.”

I reached behind me and grabbed the file, but kept the folder closed on my lap.

CHAPTER 11

We pulled into the ranger station and Frazier turned off the engine.

“They have nice bathrooms if you need to use them,” he said.

“No, I’m good.”

“Okay. I’ll be back.”

He got out and I watched as he walked into the building. I had a good view of his energy swirling around him as he passed by the front of the car and I saw that the black hole on his left side was still there. I wondered about it, wondered if he might have an illness like cancer or a heart condition. I had never seen anything like it before.

I took a deep breath and opened the file.

Her photo was the first thing in the folder. She was 21, but she looked younger. It was vaguely familiar. I had seen the same shot somewhere before, probably on the news.

Emily Ross was smiling at the camera. She had dark hair that touched her shoulders and bright, inquisitive eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was, but there was something in her expression, something that wasn’t in most people’s faces. There was a kindness coupled with a slight vulnerability.

I looked out the window before continuing.

Just a few hours after the disappearance, Emily Ross’ mother had phoned from her home in Medford insisting that something was wrong. She hadn’t been able to get ahold of her daughter and wanted the police to look for her.

The officer who took the call informed her that there was nothing the police could do at that point and told the woman to call back the next day if she still hadn’t heard anything from her daughter. After he hung up, he noticed that a patrol car was at Emily Ross’ apartment complex on an unrelated matter and radioed the officers to check in on her.

The roommate confirmed that Emily Ross was not home and also thought it was strange that she hadn’t heard from her.

The mother called the authorities again the next morning. She said she knew something was wrong.

I looked up and saw Frazier walking back to the car. When he got in, he glanced at the open file on my lap.

“Anything jump out at you so far?” he said after we were a few miles down the road.

“Why was her mother so worried?” I asked. “I mean, so soon.”

“It was the mom’s birthday. Emily always called. She was sure that Emily wouldn’t have missed that. They were a very close family. She said she could feel something had happened to her daughter, that she had the same dark feeling when her nephew was killed in an auto accident the year before.”

“Is this a recent photo?” I said, holding up her picture.

“Yes, I believe that was taken last autumn. Why?”

“No, nothing. It’s just that she looks so young.”

He looked over at me but didn’t say anything.

“What was she studying?” I said.

“She loved animals. She was studying to be a vet.”

After a while we passed the little Christmas store by the side of the highway. As kids we got our ornaments there sometimes. I was happy to see that it was still open for business. I smiled when I saw the giant wooden Santa by the tiny parking lot.

“Old friend?” Frazier said.

“I guess you could say that. My mom used to bring my sister and me here.”

“It sounds like you had a good childhood.”

“It was. It was really good, for a while anyway.”

We passed through a small town named Blue River.

“Did she have a boyfriend?” I said.

“Well, an ex. Gareth Campbell,” he said. “They split up about a month before she went missing. According to the roommate, Emily was the one who broke it off. But he tells a different story. His version is that he grew tired of the relationship and told her it was time to go their separate ways. His photo is in there, toward the bottom of the stack.”

I dug it out and looked at it. There was nothing unusual about Gareth Campbell’s face, except for his eyes. There was an eerie, almost dead quality to them. He wasn’t smiling.

“How long were they together?”

“Almost a year.”

“Does he have an alibi?” I said.

“He claims he was studying alone in his apartment during the time period we think Emily was taken. We don’t have any witnesses corroborating his side of it. On the other hand, we don’t have any witnesses suggesting he committed a crime either.”

“You think he did it?”

“I’m not convinced of that, but he’s hard to warm up to. That much I’ll say. Something’s not quite right with him. He’s here on a student visa from the U.K., so part of it might be cultural differences and that certain things get lost in translation. But I think it goes deeper than that.”