The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (14 page)

Karen smiled, but it was a sad, gloomy look she gave us. “That’s good to hear.”

I nodded at them. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but your daughter has the sight. I’m sure of it.”

Ted and Karen looked at each other and this cheered them up.

“She’s so special,” Ted said. Then he looked back at us, very serious. “The girl you met is…well, she’s very different than…that’s not the real Alison. The disease has…you have to understand…”

He began to sob. For a moment, his wife did nothing. But then, very mechanically, she lifted her arm and rubbed his back. She looked like she was touching a cactus, afraid to get pricked.

Manetti was the first to speak up. “I’m very sorry, but we don’t have much time. Your daughter dreamed about something else and we were wondering if you could take a look at it.”

Ted kept sobbing but nodded. His wife reached for the tablet.

“The clip is ready to go,” Manetti said.

Ted sat up, still trying to get himself together. Karen tapped the screen.

We watched them as they watched the sequence of the women sleeping.

Manetti said, “I’d recommend you stop it once the man shows up.”

Neither Ted nor Karen said a word as the dream played on. When the skin around their eyes pinched, I knew they’d come to the part where the man dressed in black showed up.

They continued to watch, despite Manetti’s warning. Then Karen’s palm covered her mouth and she pushed the tablet into her husband’s hands. Ted watched for another moment, his face twisted at the horror on screen, before he tapped the tablet to stop the video.

Karen had stood up and started pacing. “My poor little girl is dreaming about
that
?”

“I’m very sorry,” Manetti said. “Do you recognize either person?”

“No.”

“No.”

“How about the bedroom?” I asked and watched their reaction. They didn’t have the best marriage in the world and that cynical part of me had considered the possibility of Ted having cheated on his wife with the woman in the dream.

“No.”

“No.”

There was nothing in either one of their reactions out of sync with their answer. They had no idea who these people were.

“Could you take another look from the beginning?” Manetti asked. She knew she was grasping at straws, but straws were all we had to grasp at right now.

“I don’t want to watch that again,” Karen said. “I can’t believe this is what poor Alison is dreaming about. She can’t catch a break.”

Ted nodded at her. “When she’s awake she’s in pain, or seizing, or afraid of what the doctor’s going to tell her...she’s not even safe in her dreams.”

It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Alison and her mother had some kind of connection to the car. Or if it was, it was a helluva coincidence. So how could there be no tie to the rape?

“I hate to even ask this,” Manetti said. “But we really need to see if Alison knows either of these people.”

Karen and Ted shared a look. I’d been expecting them to reject the idea out of hand. Or give us their own, individual opinions without consulting one another. But here they were about to make a joint decision.

Ted sighed. Keeping his eyes on his wife, he said, “Karen, you say if you feel differently, but as long as she only watches the beginning I think it’s okay. The agents here were able to save lives today because of our little girl. If she can help with this, I think it…it would make her feel special. I want her to feel that way. Don’t you?”

Karen was nodding before he was done. “Yes.”

“Thank you,” Manetti said.

She gave me a look to see if I had anything else.

I couldn’t put my finger on what was bugging me exactly. From what I knew, Alison had dreamed of hurricanes, a shootout at a strip mall, a car crash, and now, a rape. I didn’t know enough about the hurricane dreams to inform my opinion about them, but with the other three, Alison had a personal connection to someone in the car crash, and the rape from what I knew was the only one that she’d dreamed in black and white. I knew somehow all this was important, but had no idea why. We’d asked her parents about the car accident and the rape, but not about the shootout.

“Did Alison know anybody at that strip mall?” I asked. “Did she know somebody that got hurt, or was there?”

The question threw Ted and Karen for a loop. They looked at each other. Manetti’s eyes stayed on me.

“What are you talking about?” Ted asked.

Manetti jumped in. “Thanks for your time.”

I wanted to smack myself. If Alison didn’t know about her dreams, of course her parents wouldn’t.

***

Back in the helicopter, we zoomed through the night air on our way to the research facility.

“Why did you ask them about the shootout?” Manetti said.

“Come on. You already know.”

“You’re looking for patterns.”

“Right. Why would she know the people in one dream but not in the others?”

“Makes sense.” She looked out the window and I could tell she was bothered. Not by the mall shootout but something else.

But I knew better than to come at Manetti head-on. So I kept talking about the case in general. “The hurricanes don’t fit that model, though. From what you told me, those dreams are impersonal, she’s not dreaming about people caught in the storm, right?”

“I don’t know.” She was still looking out the window. “I haven’t seen any of those clips yet.”

“I need to see all the video,” I said. “Shit, we need more people for this. It’s just like when I go dark at a house. I’m only onsite for a few hours. Eighty percent of our investigation happens
after
when we go over the hours and hours of audio and video. We need eyeballs on these recordings.”

“The researchers watch every minute. Zane has some grad students assisting with that part of it.”

“So they watch and pull out the highlights, like Sportscenter, only for dreams?”

“Yes.”

“I want to see all her dreams.”

“Do we have time for that? We need to find this woman.”

“I’ll find the time. I’m sure these grad students are the brightest of the bunch but they’re not looking at these dreams the same way you and I would. We need to treat them like evidence in an investigation. We should pore over these things.”

“Fair point,” she said. “But how can we spend time sifting through the noise when the clock is ticking?”

“If we get no leads on the rape, then I’ll do it. Fair deal?”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Me too. But you never know what all those other dreams might tell us.”

“From what they told me, most of them are stream-of-consciousness with Alison drifting from one random thought to the next. They told me most of them are her sort of replaying the events of the day.”

“Wouldn’t hurt to take a second look.”

Manetti finally looked at me. I sensed the great shift in subject coming a mile away. “You know we caused that accident. Not the driver.”

“No.” I emphatically shook my head. “That dickhead caused the accident. Or would have, even if we weren’t there.”

“You don’t know that,” Manetti said.

“I kind of do.”

“How can you kind of know that?”

The helicopter flew on smoothly through the night. On the roads below us, the cars were just headlights and taillights now.

“Because there’s a gap between what Alison dreamed and what we witnessed.”

She started to argue but stopped short.

I said, “In her dream, the people in those cars that almost hit the truck were either killed or injured.”

“We don’t know for sure. We didn’t get that kind of detail.”

“You saw the video. The explosion was big enough to reach all those cars. If we weren’t there to pull those people out…”

She put her head back against the rest above her seat as the helicopter banked.

I went on. “So what happened was different than what she dreamed.”

“The end of the dream was different. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t cause the accident in the first place.”

“That’s why I said
kind of
. All we know is there were some differences between dream and reality so there’s a possibility we didn’t cause that accident.”

“And that we did.”

But then I had one of those rare moments of illumination. “Our presence
had
to affect what happened. She couldn’t have dreamed about us being there.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Eddie. In one breath, you’re arguing she can see into the future while in the next you’re saying she wouldn’t be able to see us in the future…”

“Look at it this way. For us to have caused the accident, everything would have to be circular and there is no cause and effect.”

“My head is now hurting thinking about this.”

“Mine too. But just stick with me here. How could Alison dream about us causing an accident in the future, when the only way we could have caused the accident was by her dreaming about it?”

“What?”

“When she dreamed about the accident, there was no way we could have caused it. Because in order for us to be there, we needed to see her dream. See what I mean? Circular.”

She gave me a slow nod. “In other words, the accident she dreamed about
couldn’t
have been caused by us.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Things changed when we got there, sure. But she couldn’t have dreamed about an accident we caused because it was her dream that got us there.”

“Said another way, she can’t dream about something that can only happen if she dreams about it.” Manetti looked out the window. “Unless she’s God.”

Despite facing certain death with this woman previously, I knew nothing of her private life. The possibility of her being religious struck me as odd, though.

“You think that girl dying of cancer and everything else is God?”

“The God? Or a god? Doesn’t that explain everything easily?”

I shook my head. “No, just more questions. Like: if God can dream about the future and see what’s going to happen, doesn’t that mean he can’t change what’s going to happen? And if he can’t change—”

“Then he’s not all-powerful. And if he’s not all-powerful…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. I went to college also.”

I had a good laugh at that. “My point is just that it raises more questions, just as many as her not being God.”

“Are you religious, Eddie?”

“I’ve seen ghosts, so you’d expect me to say yes. But I’m actually not.”

“You are a walking contradiction, aren’t you?”

“Pretty much. What about you?”

“God?”

“Sure.”

She thought about it. “How did everything start?”

“Maybe there was no start. Maybe the universe has just been exploding and collapsing and exploding and collapsing forever.”

She was quiet for a stretch. “Pater is going to ask you to join our team again.”

Before, I would have rejected the idea out of hand. After Oregon, I wanted nothing to do with this super-secret federal team. Too dangerous. Oregon had been a complete mind-fuck of a job, one I was still paying for in terms of night terrors and the occasional check-in with the shrink.

So why was I tempted now?

Because ninety-nine times out of a hundred, ghost hunting was, if not boring, at least rote anymore. It had turned into a job for me. Working with Stan and Moira certainly helped. We had a great time researching and going dark and reviewing the evidence, ever trying to find that one thing that would validate the investigation. Most of the time, we walked away with nothing. Sometimes, rarely, we found evidence of
something
but never the hard, definitive proof that pointed anybody to a yes or a no.

Working with Pater’s crew would be a nice change of pace from ghost hunting.

But how would Sumiko take it?

If this was the job for Manetti, putting herself in constant danger, Sumiko soon-to-be McCloskey would be none-too-thrilled. But she of all people should have understood. She put herself in danger on, if not a daily basis, at least on a regular basis. Sure, she was a detective in a smallish town in the middle of Pennsylvania, but they had enough crime to justify her job. Her department had almost forty cops in it as a matter of fact.

It reminded me of my earlier conversation with her. Without her coming out and saying it, Sumiko wanted me to walk away from Pater’s team in general and right now on this investigation. But I couldn’t do that. They needed my help. How could I walk away when there was a woman out there, somewhere, about to be raped, and we were the only ones in a position to stop it? How could I look myself in the eye if I did that?

“It’s tough,” Manetti said.

“What?”

“Having a relationship when you have a job like this.”

She had read my mind.