The Haunting of Secrets (5 page)

Chapter
Seven

~ Is That a Zombie? Nope, It’s Just
Me ~

The world previously cloaked in darkness
regains light and I am once again in my bedroom. Dejana is sitting
in a chair next to my bed, her face blanketed in fear. She is
wringing her hands together in agitation. Despite my fragile state,
I want to comfort her.

“Please tell me I didn’t look like one of
those zombies on
The Walking Dead
while I was in the
memory,” I tease hoping to get her mind off what she just
experienced.

I’m fairly sure Dejana is in shock. Mary once
told me that I go limp, almost death like when I’m enveloped by
someone’s memory. It scared her so much the first time it happened
that she was on the phone calling an ambulance when I came back to
my reality. She said my lying there limp was scary enough, but
nothing compared to what happened with my eyes. The core was so
clouded over she could see nothing, no pupils or irises, only
swirls of white. She compared it to the sky coming down from the
heavens to take up residence in my once blue orbs. She admitted it
was eerily beautiful. Leave it to Mary to take something completely
wrong and make it seem angelic. Thankfully, it does not happen that
often since it still scares Mary.

I see that Dejana isn’t taking the bait.

“You were just laying there, Aimee. You were
so incredibly pale and so still that I couldn’t even tell if you
were breathing. I had no idea what to do! You told me that you
absorbed memories, that you think you’re cursed, but I honestly
didn’t believe you. And your eyes,” she sputtered. “Oh, God, your
eyes! They became white and I just froze. I’m so sorry, Aim. I just
froze.”

“It’s okay. I promise I’m okay now. Look at
me please,” I plead with her.

It took a minute for her to calm her sobbing,
but she finally lifts her face from her hands and very slowly looks
at my face.

“See. No white eyes,” I explain. “They’re
back to their normal blue. Everything is going to be fine. I
promise.”

My being in control despite the obvious
freakiness of the situation seems to calm Dejana. She stops crying
and bravely comes to sit next to me on my bed. I feel it creak as
she plops down next to me and fluffs the pillow before covering it
completely with the purple comforter that dons my bed. Despite the
sheer terror she must be feeling, she still wants to help me. With
the memory behind us for now, thankfully things are starting to go
back to normal.

“So,” starts Dejana, a bit of pep back in her
voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. Now that I can look at you
without freaking out, you want to tell me what you saw in the
memory?”

I sit still for a moment, debating exactly
what to tell her. How well will she take the news that there’s a
killer at our school? Will she freak out and finally decide to
never talk to me again? I can’t let that happen. Dejana is the only
real friend I have ever had. On the other hand, she is logical and
super smart. If I’m going to catch this guy, I will need her help.
I’m not sure how I want to phrase it, but in the end, I just decide
to tell her the unadulterated truth.

“There is a killer at our school and I have
no idea who he is,” I state as calmly as I can, careful not to
mention the exact perverseness of his methods.

For a while, Dejana doesn’t move as she sits
beside me on the bed, her eyes casting a variety of emotions. I
can’t tell what she’s thinking, but I see confusion, fear, and
uncertainty etched in every feature. I’m certain she’ll walk out at
any minute, but she doesn’t move as she has some kind of internal
debate with herself. As much as I wouldn’t wish this curse on
anyone else, I envy Dejana’s innocence. I don’t get the luxury of
being oblivious to the evil that lurks in the dark. Whether I wish
it or not, it’s thrust upon me with one simple touch. Finally, I
see Dejana’s brown eyes come back into focus and her determination
return.

“A killer? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I state simply refusing to elaborate
on exactly how he kills.

After another brief, stunned silence, I see
the determination arrive in Dejana’s eyes. “Well then,” she states,
“what can we do to help figure out what asshole is killing those
poor girls?”

That’s my girl
. I feel a surge of
pride as I realize that nothing defeats Dejana. Not even someone
like me.

“The memory was mostly in the dark,” I begin.
“So there’s nothing I could really use to identify him. I saw the
girl’s face, but I don’t know her.”

“You don’t know anyone, you silly girl,
‘cause you spend all day sulking by yourself,” teases Dejana. “But
maybe I do. Can you describe her? I could draw her. It’s at least a
place to start. If we can get a good enough picture maybe we can
find her in some kind of database or something. That’s what they do
on CSI.”

Renewed with energy, Dejana jumps from the
bed, almost kicking me off in the process and goes to grab her
pencils and drawing paper from her bag always close at hand. Dejana
is an amazing artist. She’s won so many awards for our school that
I lost count. She, of course, hasn’t. She reminds me every chance
she gets. But I don’t mind, I would kill to be able to draw like
her. Especially since I can’t even make stick figures look like
actual human beings.

Having retrieved her sketchbook from her bag,
Dejana runs back into the room, her cheeks flushed from running to
her car. She grabs the chair she was in earlier and pushes it as
close to the bed as she can. The dark brown shirt she’s wearing
brings out the sparkle in her caramel eyes, giving away the
excitement she gets every time she has a chance to draw.

“So,” begins Dejana, putting her pencil to
paper clearly ready to go, “what do you remember about her?”

“Based on the first two memories, both girls
are light haired,” I begin. Immediately Dejana begins scribbling
and asking questions as she goes. Clearly, she is in the zone.

“Give me as many details as you can. Were
they skinny girls? Did they have rounder or more angular faces?”
asks Dejana.

Since I’m not an artist, I really don’t have
any idea what she’s talking about. But I do my best to help her. I
think back on the memories, trying my best to focus beyond the
ugly, red marks on their wrists and ankles from being bound and the
blood soaked bed. They were both so young, so innocent; their only
mistake was trusting the wrong guy. Neither of them deserved what
happened to them. I can’t imagine the horror and pain they must
have endured. I could see terror reflecting back at me through
their eyes as they looked at the killer they never knew existed
among them. It was a horror I couldn’t help save them from. Just
one of the many heinous things I endure as part of my curse. I do
my best to push past my own feelings, to see the girls as they were
before they were so viscously murdered.

“They were skinny, taller than your average
teenage girl, and I’m pretty sure they both had long hair,” I
finish, proud from remembering something normal from those
nightmares of memories.

Dejana shakes her head and mumbles ‘uh huh’ a
few times as her pencil flies all over the paper.

I take advantage of relative silence to think
of anything else that would help identify the girls. In the first
memory before my coma, the girl was already fairly beaten up; most
remnants that made her identifiable were long gone. Their eyes
still haunt me with their piercing looks of desperation and
betrayal. Yet, I sense something more...something I had missed up
until now. Gasping with excitement, I make a connection. Why hadn’t
I seen it before? I sit up in bed and grab Dejana’s hand, desperate
for her to see I remembered something important.

“That’s it, Dejana, I remember!” I said my
breath coming in shallow puffs.

Dejana pushes her sketchpad aside and leans
closer, clearly enthralled to learn the juicy bit of info. If this
were a movie, she would be rubbing her hands together expecting a
big treat.

“They each had blue eyes, Dejana. Blue! That
must be his type: tall girls with light hair and blue eyes. Do you
see how important this is? If we know his type then maybe we can
predict who he might go after next!” I am elated by turn of
events.

Pensive, Dejana leans back in the seat,
clearly not as excited as I am about the news. She has that look in
her eyes, the one where she is about to throw a rock at my perfect
glass house.

“What?” I demand, offended by her lack of
enthusiasm.

“Well, just knowing his type does help, but
it doesn’t exactly tell us who is going to be next. We go to the
biggest school in the southeast with well over three thousand kids.
There is no way that we will be able to narrow down a list to every
girl that is tall with light hair and blue eyes. There must be at
least a hundred of them,” Dejana says with a forlorn tone in her
voice.

As much as I hate to admit it, Dejana is
right. There’s no way to predict who will be next and catch the
killer. Plus, I want to try to identify the ones we know are gone
so we can give their families a sense of closure. Otherwise, what
was the point of my absorbing the killer’s memories? I may not be
able to change the past, but I can make up for it somehow. Maybe
that’s the purpose of my curse-cosmic justice. The ability to right
the wrongs that others have committed. I can use my curse to help
the families of those murdered girls find peace. Without closure,
those poor girls are just gone. That’s more tragic than any curse.
My purpose solidified, I decide we need to come up with another
plan to catch him.

I lie back onto the pillows on my bed and a
sigh of defeat escapes my lips. It feels so hopeless. No matter how
well intentioned we are, Dejana and I are not detectives. We’re
just ordinary teenagers—well, at least one of us is—with no
experience on how to solve a crime. I cradle my legs to my chest,
letting the hopelessness overcome me. I wish for the thousandth
time that my touch was not a direct route to the past. The past is
a path no one ever wants to go down. I cradle my head in my hands,
willing a resolution to present itself when it all of a sudden, it
hits me. The answer was there all along; I was stupid not to have
seen it. We certainly aren’t detectives, but no one said we had to
do it alone.

I sit up in bed so abruptly it jolts Dejana
out of her extreme concentration zone she gets in when she draws.
She gasps at the sudden change and throws her pencil at me.
Surprisingly, it is a direct hit to my head. Where did that girl
get her aim?

“Dammit, Aimee! You just about gave me a
heart attack!” exclaimed Dejana. “What in the world is wrong with
you?”

“Are you still friends with that girl that’s
a computer whiz? The one I always see you with in computer science
class?” I ask barely able to contain my excitement.

“You mean Leah? Sure. What do you want with
her?” Dejana asks with a confused look on her face.

“She can help us! She could take the
information we have and narrow down a list of girls that fit the
description of our victims. We need help Dejana. We need
her,
” I finish, desperation leaking out in my voice.

Dejana gives me a quizzical look as she turns
her head back and forth for a bit, having some internal debate
before finally nodding in apparent acquiescence to my idea. “Not
bad. Not bad at all. We should be able to trust her. You’re right
that we need help and if we need information, she’s the person that
can get it for us. I can’t see one problem with your idea. I’ll go
call her now,” says Dejana before stalking off downstairs to her
car to get her phone.

“Wait!” I yell to Dejana, who stops just at
my door and turns her full attention to me. “She can’t know about
me. We need her help, not for her to run for the hills screaming to
everyone I’m even more of a freak than everyone thinks.”

“Of course. It’s okay,” responds Dejana
softly before disappearing down the hall.

With a plan in place, I start to feel much
more optimistic about the future. I cuddle down within my sheets
and feel the warmth surround me, settling my mind and body for some
much needed sleep. I don’t fight the exhaustion as it takes over.
My final thoughts are shaky, but optimistic that we will find the
killer and bring him to justice. I should have known better.

Chapter
Eight

~ Is This The Love Boat or The
Titanic? ~

I hadn’t been sleeping long before the sound
of rocks hitting my window wakes me. For a brief moment, I panic,
thinking the killer has found me. I put my hands to my chest in an
attempt to calm the runaway train that has become my heart. I hear
another rock hitting my window before I get out of bed and
cautiously make my way across the bedroom to see who it is. I open
the curtain just a sliver and look out into the darkness. A figure
is in my front yard by the big willow tree but I can’t quite make
out who it is. When the figure waves, I decide to open the window.
Tentatively, I poke my head out, hoping the moonlight would show me
a bit more of the visitor’s face.

“Who is it and what do you want?” I ask
without preamble to the dark figure lurking under the tree.

“It’s me, Logan. Step back, I’m coming up,”
he says without even asking for permission.

I debate for a second if I should close the
window and just go back to bed. If it was anybody but Logan, I
would. But he is the only one that has never teased me. That act
alone deserves better behavior from me. Besides, he’d probably just
jump through it anyway. It still begs the question, why in the
world is he here?

Logan makes the slow climb up the willow tree
and tells me to stand back again seconds before he does a flying
leap into my bedroom. His head hits something hard in the darkness
in a failed attempt to stop the momentum from his leap. I stifle a
laugh as I turn on the lamp on my bedside table. Light floods the
room and I see Logan on the floor beside my dresser decked out in
jeans and a t-shirt holding his head in his hands. A giggle
escapes, but I put my hands on my mouth to stop it so it comes out
more like a cough. He isn’t fooled.