Leaving Time: A Novel (45 page)

“So Gideon fakes Nevvie’s death, and she winds up in Tennessee in a house that belonged to her daughter at some point.” He shakes his head. “Why?”

I can’t answer that. But I don’t have to, because my phone starts to ring.

I rummage in my purse and finally locate it. I know that number.

“Please,” Jenna says. “I need help.”

“Slow down,” Virgil says, for the fifth time.

She swallows, but her eyes are red from crying and her nose is still running. I rummage in my bag for a tissue and can find only a lens cloth for cleaning sunglasses. I offer her that instead.

The directions she gave us were a teenager’s directions:
You pass a Walmart, and somewhere there’s a left. And a Waffle House, I’m pretty sure the turn is after the Waffle House
. Honestly, it’s a miracle that we managed to find her at all. When we did, she was behind a service station’s chain-link fence and Dumpster, halfway up a tree.

Jenna, goddammit, where are you?
Virgil yelled, and only after she heard his voice did her face poke through the branches and the leaves, a small moon in a green field of stars. She climbed gingerly down the trunk, until she lost her footing and fell into Virgil’s arms.
I’ve got you
, he told her; he hasn’t let go of her yet.

“I found Gideon,” Jenna says, her voice hitched and uneven.

“Where?”

“At the sanctuary.”

She starts crying again. “At first I started to think that maybe he hurt my mom,” she says, and I see Virgil’s finger’s flex on her shoulders.

“Did he touch you?” Virgil asks. I am thoroughly convinced that, if Jenna gives a positive response, Virgil would kill Gideon with his bare hands.

She shakes her head. “It was just … a feeling.”

“Good thing you listened to your gut, sugar,” I say.

“But he said he never saw my mother, after the night she was taken to the hospital.”

Virgil presses his lips together. “He could be lying through his teeth.”

Jenna’s eyes fill again. It makes me think of Nevvie, and the room that would not stop weeping. “He said my mom was having a baby.
His
baby.”

“I know my psychic powers are a little off,” I murmur, “but I did
not
see that coming.”

Virgil lets go of Jenna and starts pacing. “That’s motive.” He starts muttering, working through a time line in his head. I watch him tick off points on his fingers, shake his head, start over, and finally, grimly, turn to her. “There’s something you need to know. While you were with Gideon in the sanctuary, Serenity and I were with Nevvie Ruehl.”

Her head snaps up. “Nevvie Ruehl’s dead.”

“No,” Virgil corrects. “Someone wanted us to
think
Nevvie Ruehl was dead.”

“My father?”

“Your dad wasn’t the one who found the trampled body. That was Gideon. He was sitting with her when the medical examiner and the cops arrived.”

She wipes her eyes. “But there was
still
a body.”

I look down at the ground, waiting for Jenna to connect the dots.

When she does, the arrow points in a different direction than I expect. “Gideon didn’t do it,” she insists. “I thought that, too, at first. But she was pregnant.”

Virgil takes a step forward. “Exactly,” he says. “That’s why Gideon wasn’t the one to kill her.”

Before we leave, Virgil goes to use the restroom at the service station, and Jenna and I are left alone. Her eyes are still bloodshot. “If my mom
is … 
dead …” She lets her voice trail off. “Could she wait for me?”

People like to think that they can reunite with a loved one who’s passed. But there are so many layers to the afterlife; it’s like saying that you’re bound to run into someone because you both live on planet Earth.

However, I think Jenna’s had enough bad news for one day. “Sugar, she might be here with you right now.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The spirit world is modeled on the real world, and the real things we’ve seen. You might go into your grandmother’s kitchen and she’ll be down there making coffee. You may be making your bed and she walks by the open door. But every now and then, the edges will blur, because you’re inhabiting the same space. You’re like oil and vinegar in the same container.”

“So,” she says, her voice cracking. “I don’t ever really get her back.”

I could lie to her. I could tell her what everyone wants to hear, but I won’t. “No,” I tell Jenna. “You don’t.”

“And what happens to my dad?”

I can’t answer that for her. I don’t know if Virgil will try to prove that Thomas was the one who killed his wife that night. Or if it would even stick, given the poor man’s mental state.

Jenna sits on the picnic table and draws her knees up to her chest. “I had this friend once, Chatham, who always talked about Paris like it was practically Heaven. She wanted to go to the Sorbonne for college. She was going to stroll down the Champs-Élysées; she was going to sit at a café and watch skinny French women walking down the street, all that stuff. Her aunt surprised her by taking her there on a
business trip when she was twelve. When Chatham came home, I asked her if it was all it was cracked up to be, and you know what she said? ‘It was kind of like any other city.’ ” Jenna shrugs. “I didn’t think it would feel like this, when I got here.”

“To Tennessee?”

“No. To … the end, I guess.” She looks up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “Just because I know now that she didn’t want to leave me behind doesn’t make it easier, you know? Nothing’s changed. She’s not here. I
am
. And I still feel empty.”

I slide an arm around her. “It’s no small feat, finishing a journey,” I tell her. “But no one ever mentions that once you get there, you still have to turn around and head all the way home.”

Jenna dashes her hand across her eyes. “If it turns out Virgil is right, I want to see my dad before he goes to jail.”

“We don’t know that he’ll—”

“It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

She says this with such conviction that I realize it isn’t necessarily what she believes. Just what she
needs
to.

I pull her closer and let her cry for a little while against my shoulder. “Serenity,” Jenna asks, her voice muffled against my shirt. “Will you let me talk to her whenever I need to?”

There’s a reason people are dead. Back when I
could
be a medium, I’d only do two spirit communications at most for a client. I wanted to help people through their grief, not be 1-800-Dial-the-Dead.

When I was good at this, when I had Lucinda and Desmond to protect me from the spirits that needed me to do their bidding, I knew how to put up walls. That’s what kept me from being awakened in the middle of the night by a conga line of spirits who needed to get a message to the living. It let me use my Gift on my terms instead of theirs.

Now, though, I would trade my privacy if it meant that I could connect with spirits again. I would never do a fake reading for Jenna—she deserves better than that—so there’s no way I could possibly give her what she wants.

But all the same, I look her in the eye and say, “Of course.”

•  •  •

Suffice it to say that the trip home is long, hellish, and silent. We wouldn’t be able to get on a plane without permission from Jenna’s guardian, because she’s a minor, and so we wind up driving through the night. I listen to the radio to keep myself awake, and then Virgil starts talking, somewhere around the Maryland border. He glances back first, to make sure Jenna is still fast asleep.

“Say she’s dead,” Virgil says. “What do I do?”

It’s a surprise conversation starter. “You mean Alice?”

“Yeah.”

I hesitate. “I guess you figure out for sure who did it, and you go after them.”

“I’m not a cop, Serenity. And now it turns out that I probably never
should
have been.” He shakes his head. “All this time I thought it was Donny who fucked up. But it turns out it was me.”

I glance at him.

“I mean, it was a clusterfuck at the sanctuary that day. No one knew how to secure a crime scene when there were wild animals roaming around. Thomas Metcalf was off his gourd, although we didn’t know it at first. There were missing people who hadn’t been reported as missing. One of them was an adult female. That’s all I was looking for. So I made an assumption, when I found an unconscious body that was dirty and covered with blood. I told the paramedics that it was Alice, and they took her off to the hospital and admitted her under that name.” He turns, looking out the window, so that his profile is traced by the passing headlights of other cars. “She didn’t have ID. I should have followed up. Why can’t I remember what she looked like when I saw her? Was the hair blond or red? Why didn’t I pay attention?”

“Because you were focused on getting her medical attention,” I say. “Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t
try
to mislead anyone,” I point out, thinking of my own recent career as a swamp witch.

“That,” he says, “is where you’re wrong.” He turns to me. “I buried
evidence. That red hair that was found on Nevvie’s body? When I saw it in the ME’s report, I didn’t know it belonged to Alice—but I
did
know it meant the case was more than an accidental death. Still, I let my partner convince me that the public just wanted to feel safe, that a trampling was bad enough, but a murder would be even worse. So I made that page of the ME’s report disappear, and just like Donny had said—I became a hero. I was the youngest guy to get promoted to detective, did you know that?” He shakes his head.

“What did you do with the page?”

“I put it in my pocket the morning of my detective ceremony. And then I got into my car and drove over a cliff.”

I jam on the brakes. “You did
what
?”

“First responders thought I was a goner. I guess I flatlined, but apparently I managed to fuck that up, too. Because I woke up in rehab, with a shitload of OxyContin in my veins, and enough pain to kill ten men who were way stronger than me. Needless to say, I didn’t go back to the job. IA doesn’t look too kindly on guys who have a death wish.” He looks at me. “So now you know who I really am. I couldn’t stand the thought of pretending to be the good guy for the next twenty years, when I knew I wasn’t one. At least now when I tell people I’m an alcoholic loser, I’m not lying to them.”

I think of Jenna, hiring a fraud of a psychic and an investigator with secrets of his own. I think of all the mounting evidence that Alice Metcalf is the body that was recovered from the sanctuary ten years ago, and how not once was I able to sense that.

“I have to tell you something, too,” I confess. “Remember how you kept asking me if I could communicate with Alice Metcalf’s spirit? And I said no, which probably meant she wasn’t dead?”

“Yeah. Guess your Gift might need recalibrating.”

“It needs more than that. I haven’t had a syllable of psychic communication since I gave Senator McCoy the wrong information about his son. I am used up. Done. Dry. This stick shift has more paranormal talent than I do.”

Virgil starts to laugh. “You’re telling me you
are
a hack?”

“It’s worse. Because I wasn’t always.” I look at him. There is a
green mask around his eyes, a reflection from the mirror, as if he is some kind of superman. But he isn’t. He’s flawed, and scarred, and battle-weary, just like me. Just like all of us.

Jenna lost her mother. I lost my credibility. Virgil lost his faith. We’ve all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole.

We cross into Delaware. “I don’t think she could have picked two worse people to help her if she tried.” I sigh.

“That’s all the more reason,” Virgil says, “to make it right.”

I did not go to Georgia for Grace’s funeral.

She was buried in a family plot beside her father. Gideon went, and Nevvie, of course—but the reality of running an animal sanctuary meant someone had to stay behind to take care of the animals, no matter how pressing the reason to leave. In the horrible week that it had taken for Grace’s body to wash ashore—a week when Gideon and Nevvie still held out hope that she was alive somewhere—we had all been pitching in to cover for her. Thomas would interview for a new caregiver, but that wasn’t a hire that could be made quickly. And now, with our staff below half capacity, it meant that Thomas and I were working round the clock.

When Thomas told me that Gideon had come back to the sanctuary after the funeral, I was not presumptuous enough to believe that he had returned because of me. I did not know, really, what to expect. We’d had a year of secrets, a year of bliss. What had happened to Grace was the punishment, the payment due.

Except nothing had
happened
to Grace. Grace had been the one to make it happen.

I did not want to think about that, so instead I buried myself in cleaning the barns until the floors were sparkling, in creating new enrichment toys for the Asian elephants. I cut back the brush that had begun to overgrow the fence at the north end of the African enclosure.
That would have been Gideon’s job, I thought, even as I wielded the hedge trimmers. I kept myself moving, so that I could not think about anything except the task in front of me.