The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (15 page)

Manetti said, “I was engaged for a time.”

“Was?”

“He couldn’t handle it.”

I nodded, even more confused about my feelings than before. I wanted something more exciting than just ghost hunting, to the point where I was considering joining Pater’s team, even though that would make Sumiko unhappy. How could I even consider that possibility? When I was damned sure I wanted to marry her, and especially given my feelings earlier during the car accident. Some part of me had accepted that my life was no longer just my own. It belonged to her, like hers belonged to me.

“Sounds lonely,” I said.

“Says the guy who’s been alone forever.”

I smiled. “Going to change that soon.”

Manetti nodded. “She’s a cop. She’ll get it.”

But she didn’t. And I didn’t know how she couldn’t.

Manetti filled in the silence. “I still think we caused the accident.”

“It would have happened anyway.”

She sat forward, shaking her head. “We have to consider the possibility, Eddie. And with everything you and I have seen over the years, we know that reality isn’t always logical.” Her eyes shifted back to me in the dim light of the cabin. “You and I both know things happen that we can’t make sense of.”

She was referring to our last case together. Oregon. It had become one of those words I tried to avoid using because it conjured up all sorts of horrific memories and general unease about the nature of reality. I had been forced to kill so many people…and nobody could explain
why
. That was the scariest part of it, the piece that had eroded my worldview that for the most part, there was a reason for everything. Or at least, a definable cause. The people in Oregon had suffered from a mass psychogenic illness of indeterminate origin. For reasons beyond anybody’s understanding, thousands of people had collectively flipped their lid and turned into violent killers…

Yes, she was right. We had both seen things that would challenge anybody. I had always tried to apply reason to the world, even when I couldn’t apply it to my own life. But it was becoming more and more difficult.

Because sometimes, random shit just happened.

“You’re better with kids than I am,” Manetti said, and it was the auditory equivalent of déjà vu. Years ago, my brother had said the same thing to me. “I’ll bring Pater up to speed. You get a head start with Alison, assuming she’s accepting visitors.”

Alison was playing cards with a forty-something woman wearing yoga pants and a big, bulky sweatshirt with University of Pennsylvania written across the front. The woman had a long ponytail streaked with grey.

“My parents told me you were coming,” Alison said. Behind her thick eyeglasses, she strained to read the cards she was holding a foot from her face.

“Hi, Alison. I wanted to say sorry for earlier. And I also wanted to thank you.”

She shrugged, keeping her eyes on her cards. “Betty, this is Eddie. He’s not a federal agent, but he works for one.”

Betty gave me one of those warm, inviting smiles. The kind I used to take immediate action on.

“Hiya, Eddie.”

“Nice to meet you.” I turned back to Alison. “I’m sorry, but I need to show you the other video now.”

“He means my dreams,” Alison said. “He’s going to show me my dreams.”

“What?” Betty frowned. “I thought they weren’t supposed to…”

“Desperate times, desperate measures,” Alison said.

“But won’t that invalidate the research?” Betty said.

Alison suddenly grimaced and clutched her stomach. “Oh God…here we go again. Did I ever tell you how awesome my life is? Now I can’t even keep dinner down when I’m off chemo…fucking sweet.”

She hurried off toward the bathroom and threw the door shut behind her. Even over the roar of the fan, I could hear her retching from across the atrium.

“Poor girl,” Betty said. “Just awful what’s happening to her.”

“It is.” I nodded at her. “So what brings you here?”

“Oh, nothing as important as why Alison’s here.”

“You never know,” I said. “Research always leads scientists in unexpected directions. Einstein’s dabbling in quantum physics sort of opened the door for computers.”

She smiled. “My short-term memory doesn’t work like it should, so I have trouble forming long-term memories.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“It is what it is.” She looked toward the bathroom. “Compared to some people, I’m very lucky.”

“Me too.”

“Dreams play an important part of memory. At least that’s the theory. So they’re trying to influence what I dream about to see if it affects my memory.”

“Interesting. Are you learning a new language?”

She laughed. “I wish. They’re starting off smaller than that.”

Alison came out the bathroom, still looking green. “Betty, can you hang out for a few minutes while I talk to Eddie?”

Betty smiled. “Sure.”

***

Alison and I retreated to a quiet part of the atrium away from everybody else. Outside a wall of black stared at us through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

“I was right again.” Alison smiled. “They confirmed that Hurricane Karla is going to make landfall near here, tomorrow night.”

“Congrats.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Yeah. Big fucking deal. It’s a storm. I dreamed about it twelve hours before the weathermen announced it. What good does that do anybody?”

Before she went off on one of her rants, I held out the tablet for her. “Just watch the first few minutes. Okay?”

She shook her head. “You want my help? I’m going to watch what I want.”

“But your parents—”

“Eddie, what does it matter what I see at this point? I’ll be dead soon. If it scars me for life, we’re not talking about a very big scar.”

I saw no point in arguing with her. “Go ahead.”

She watched, eyes squinted behind those glasses. She held the tablet up in front of her face, as close as she’d held the cards. A minute passed, and another. I knew she had gotten to the ugly parts of the dream, but she didn’t react. Just kept watching intently.

Maybe she was numb to horrors at this point.

“Do you recognize them?” I asked.

“No.”

“You recognized the car earlier,” I said.

She tapped the screen to pause the video and shot me a nasty look. “So what?”

“It’s just curious, right? What are the chances you’d get a vision or whatever you want to call it about someone you knew? You could have dreamed about anything. So call it a billion to one?”

“You act like there are rules to this.” Her lips were curled into a frown.

“No, not rules. I’m trying to find the patterns here so we can make sense of these dreams. Maybe that way we can keep these awful things from happening.”

“There aren’t any patterns…I think this just stuff just comes to me. So what if I dreamed about a car I’d been in before? It doesn’t mean I have to be connected to everything else I dream. Why would it?”

She was asking good questions. She was also putting her teenaged defensive walls back up.

“You just don’t want this to be real,” she said. “Your brain can’t cope with the possibility that someone can see into the future. I can see it now.”

I held my palms up. “Whoa, Alison. I’m not coming in with any bias here. All I’m trying to do right now is just stop some bad things from happening.”

She squinted even harder and her eyes bore into me. “I don’t believe you.”

I decided to change tacks. “What about the shootout?”

“What shootout?”

I made a face. “Come on. The shootout at that strip mall nearby. Did you know anybody?”

“Did I dream about that?”

I watched her intently to spot the lie, but found none. She didn’t remember her dreams, or at least, she didn’t remember
that
dream.

“I’d need to know who died, who was shot, to be able to answer that.”

“Okay, I’ll try to get my hands on that.”

She lapsed back into silence, watching the rape play out on the tablet. Her face betrayed zero emotion, which creeped me out. She watched with robot eyes and a sociopath’s lack of empathy.

When it was over, she handed me the tablet. “Don’t recognize them. Sorry.”

She didn’t sound sorry.

“What about the room?”

She shook her head. “It just looks like any bedroom…I don’t know.”

“Do you have any aunts?”

“It’s not either of them,” she said dismissively. “Aunt Jennifer is a fat cow. She came out to visit me at the hospital once, like four years ago. She’s
too busy
. Aunt Corinne doesn’t look like that.”

“Uncles? Cousins?”

She shook her head. “No uncles. The only cousin I have is six years old.”

The man in the video looked to be mid or late twenties, which put him outside her already limited social reach.

Social reach, though, got me thinking. In terms of social media. These days, people were “friends” with a lot more people than before. You could connect with anybody and everybody digitally. Maybe that was the link. Some tenuous digital tie.

“Are you on Facebook?”

“Yeah.”

“Have a lot of friends?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Kind of, I guess. A lot of sympathizers. Early on I joined some support groups but I got sick of all that crap.”

“Can you log on so we can take a look at your friends?” I held the tablet out for her.

“I can feel one of those nuclear migraines coming on, Eddie. I need to lay down.”

“Just log on, and I’ll do the searching. I can compare their profile pictures to what I have from your dream.”

She hesitated. “Uh, I don’t know.”

“I’m just checking out your friends.”

“Uh, I don’t want you messing with my profile or posting.”

“I would never.”

She started to log onto Facebook but stopped before it was done. “I’ll do this on one condition.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me the truth now. Do you think I can see into the future?”

It was difficult to answer that. I felt myself not wanting to. All the evidence pointed me to yes, but yes was impossible. She couldn’t see into the future, could she? People couldn’t do that. I needed more evidence first, more to back this theory up.

“That’s a no,” she said.

“The truth? That’s an
I-don’t-know
. The jury is out.”

“Even with the car accident today.” Her lips formed a thin line. “Even with the hurricanes and the shootout. You just can’t bring yourself to believe.”

Maybe she was right. But I had to be obstinate, coldly rational. “I’ve only been on the ground less than a day. I haven’t had time to absorb everything, Alison. Something like this, it challenges your worldview. It takes people a long time to process that.”

“I read about you today. Eddie McCloskey. Ghost hunter.” She gave me a mocking smile. “You’ve seen things nobody else has dreamed of. You of all people should be open to this.”

She was right. But still I held back. I was a stubborn son of a bitch.

“I need people like you to believe in me.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because of all the normal people out there. Think of how much they’ll struggle with this. They need somebody with credibility to stand up and say, yes, this girl could see into the future.”

“You’re very worried about what people will think of you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s an observation.”

“Eddie, I have nothing to look forward to. By the time I’m dead, I won’t have accomplished anything significant
except for this
. So excuse me if I get pissed off when someone challenges this. It’s all I have.”

“I’m not here to challenge you.”

“Stop lying to me.” She shook her head. “You know what you’re doing right now. It would be like telling a priest there’s no God.”

“Alison, what I saw today was unbelievable. I’m still trying to get my head around it. Do I think you can see into the future? Maybe. That’s all I have for you now. Because until twenty four hours ago, I had spent thirty-six years thinking such a thing was impossible bullshit. So you’ve moved me, skeptic par excellence, from a firm and resounding no to a thoughtful maybe. All in one day.”

She looked at me for a long time. I could tell she wasn’t satisfied by that answer, not one bit. She wanted me to join the cult of Alison, to worship at her feet and spread the word of her gospel far and wide. She wanted people to believe in her. I understood why. In her position, I’d want the same thing. I’d want my life to make sense and serve a higher purpose.

“Fine, Eddie. If you don’t want to believe what’s right in front of your eyes—”

“Look, kid. I’m
assuming
for the sake of argument you have the vision. That’s why I’m here right now. I’m assuming this rape is real and this woman is about to be violated in the worst possible way. I want to keep that from happening. Will you help me?”

“I see how it is. You come to me for help but you don’t believe in me. That’s awesome.”

“You do realize by helping you could make believers out of everybody.”

“Fine.” She typed in her user name and password and logged onto Facebook and handed me the tablet back. “I haven’t been on here in forever.”

I took it from her and examined her page. The profile pic was maybe a year old and showed a young, vibrant girl, full of life. She had a tan and her eyes were bright and missing the glasses. She looked like she had a full life ahead of her. I doubted I would have made the connection between the girl in front of me and the girl in the pic if I didn’t know they were one and the same.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was pretty hot.”

“You’re a beautiful girl, Alison.”

She shrugged like the compliment meant nothing and walked off. She made a pit stop at Betty’s table and exchanged some quick words with her before heading for the elevator that would take her back up to her room.