The Loveliest Dead (4 page)

A filthy old teddy bear appears. It has only one round black eye. A dark ribbon is tied in a bow around its neck. Stuffing dangles out of its filthy chest and abdomen.

The bear disappears. The distorted music stops. Lost again in the darkness.

A voice, whispered but throaty and gruff. It is unfamiliar, but fills her with terror. “Be a good puppy. C’mon over here and be a good puppy.”

She wants to scream but has no voice, no breath, no heartbeat.

The darkness is driven away by blinding daylight. She sees an enormous, gray, two-story house from a distorted angle, as if she is an ant on the ground looking up at it. Ivy clings to the towering walls. A dark, hulking figure rises menacingly before her, blocks her view of the house. It’s a fat man wearing a cowboy hat, and he fills her with dread. She wants to flee but has nowhere to go.

“Come here and be a good puppy, now.”

Suddenly, she is falling through darkness. As she plummets, the voice fades.

“Be a good puppy... a good puppy... good puppy...”

Lily opened her eyes to look up into the faces of her only employee, Claudia McNeil, and her client, Maggie Rydell. They looked panicky. A dull ache behind Lily’s eyes grew worse with each throb, and her mouth felt cottony.
 

“You didn’t call an ambulance, did you?” Lily asked as she rubbed her eyes.

Claudia said, “Should I?”

“No, no. How long was I out?” She licked her dry lips and groaned quietly.

“Not long,” Claudia said. “Maybe twenty or thirty seconds.”

“Can we get you something?” Maggie asked.

“Maybe some water.”

Claudia shot to her feet and hurried away.

“How do you feel?” Maggie said.

“I’m fine. Just a little headache. No, wait. Make that a splitting headache.”

“I have some Tylenol in my purse.”

“That’s okay, I’ve got something in my medicine cabinet.” Lily rolled onto her side and slowly got to her knees. She leaned a hand on the chair and stood with effort, but swayed dizzily and immediately sat down. Maggie stood beside her. “Sorry, Maggie. We didn’t get very far. This one’s on the house.”
 

“Are you kidding? What you told me about the babysitter alone was worth it. I’ll pay the regular fee.”

Claudia returned with a glass of ice water. Lily took a few sips as Claudia stood, hands on her hips, looking concerned. Claudia was twenty-eight, skinny, with short red hair, full and shaggy. She stood a couple inches taller than Lily and wore a light blue cashmere-blend sweater, a pair of jeans, and sneakers.
 

“Can you handle things, Claudia?” Lily asked. “I think I should go lie down for a little while.”

“Sure, no problem, Lily, I’ll be fine.” She looked worried. “Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor or something?”

“No, I’m okay. I just need a nap, is all. I’ll be fine. See you later, Maggie.”

Lily stood and waited to make sure the room wasn’t going to tilt again. She patted her hair, then smiled wearily. The beads clacked as she passed through them. She crossed the rear of the store, went through the stockroom and into her kitchen in the back. She went down the hall to the bathroom with her glass of ice water and got a Vicodin from her cabinet. The pills had been there since she’d had her wisdom teeth pulled seven months before—she’d taken only a couple back then. After swallowing it, she went to her bedroom, put the glass of water on her bedstand, and got a spiral-bound notebook from a drawer in her dresser, found a pen, and sat down on the edge of the bed. She jotted down a few notes about the vision, then put the notebook and pen on the bedstand. She stretched out on the bed with a long sigh.
 

As she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, Lily’s hands trembled. She realized she was afraid. She could still hear, in her mind, the warped, garbled music and the gruffly whispered voice from her vision. Lily was afraid, because she knew there would be more. Visions like that did not happen only once. They returned with increasing frequency and in greater detail, and they did not go away until she figured out what they meant, what they were trying to tell her. It did not end there, either. Once she figured the vision out, she had to
do
something about it.
 

Lily Rourke had been psychic all her life. She could not remember a time when her mind did not show her things she did not want to see, tell her things she did not want to know.
 

She had been born and raised in the small northern California town of Cottonwood, seventy-five miles south of Mt. Shasta. She had a brother, Charles, five years her senior, whom she heard from every year at Christmas and on her birthday. Her father, dead for a dozen years now, had been a plumber, her mother a kindergarten teacher. None of them had understood her—Lily had scarcely understood herself early in life—but her mother was the only one who’d tried. As a child, Lily preferred solitude—being around people only filled her mind with confusing, sometimes frightening, images and thoughts. As a result, school had been a daily nightmare for her from the beginning. She had no trouble with her studies—she was an exceptionally bright, intelligent student—but she had difficulty concentrating on them when she was being mentally bombarded from all directions. Socially, she was an outcast by choice. She preferred to be alone with a book and a snack. Reading had been her favorite activity and food her only friend. Her weight had gone up early on and had never come down again.
 

Lily’s mother had died of breast cancer when Lily was eleven years old, leaving her a stranger in the house with her father and Charles. She had become even more withdrawn then. Outside of school, which she cut whenever the opportunity arose, the only place she had gone with any regularity was the small Cottonwood Library, where, at the age of twelve, she’d met the best friend she’d ever had.
 

The new head librarian, Annabelle Youngblood, was a tall, graceful, fifty-three-year-old widow with streaks of silver in her short black hair and a pair of jeweled reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck. When Lily walked into the library on Mrs. Young-blood’s first day, the woman immediately turned to her and watched her closely wherever she went. After a few minutes of the librarian carefully watching her every move, Lily began to feel very self-conscious—more so than usual, because she always felt self-conscious—so she went to the back of the library where the woman could not see her. On that day, as on every day for eight months, she’d looked for books on psychic phenomena.
 

By then, Lily had begun to understand that not only was she different from others, she had some strange ability that allowed her to know things she could not possibly know. She had been confused by the thoughts and images that plagued her until she saw her mother’s funeral the year before—she’d seen it weeks before her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. By the time it had been found, the cancer had spread and become inoperable, and Lily’s mother had died only months after being diagnosed. When the funeral took place, it was exactly as Lily had seen it in her mind, with her mother lying in an open casket at the front of the funeral chapel. Lily had never been in the funeral chapel before, but she had seen it in vivid detail in her mind months before. She even had heard the organ playing the exact same music it had played at the funeral. That was when she began to suspect that maybe she wasn’t crazy as she’d always suspected. She had worked her way through most of the library’s books on psychic phenomena, with only four left that she had not yet read.
 

That day in the library, as she looked through one of the books, a hand came to rest on Lily’s shoulder from behind, and she almost jumped out of her skin. She dropped the book she was holding and spun around to find the librarian standing behind her, smiling.
 

“Hello, Lily,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Youngblood. I think you and I have something in common.”

“We ... do? How did you know my name?”

“You know, I might be able to help you even more than those books.”

Mrs. Youngblood invited Lily over to her house that evening to make cookies. Lily did not have to ask permission from her father. Since she spent all her time in her bedroom reading anyway, he did not even notice she was gone. She climbed out her bedroom window and rode her bike over to Mrs. Youngblood’s house, eager to hear what the woman had to say.
 

As they made cookies that evening, Mrs. Youngblood had explained that she’d been just as frightened and mystified as Lily when she was that age. She had not understood her abilities, had not known how to deal with them. Just as Lily had been doing, Mrs. Young-blood had read up on psychic phenomena. Everything she’d learned about her abilities she’d learned on her own.
 

“But it would have been so much easier,” she said, “if someone else who had the gift had shared her knowledge of it with me. And that’s what I want to do for you.”
 

Until then, Lily had been unable to walk through a room full of people without being deluged with dizzying psychic input that made no sense to her. Over the next four years, Mrs. Youngblood taught her how to turn down the volume of that input, how to deflect the incoming information so she could think clearly and concentrate on her school work. She taught Lily how to sift through all the thoughts and images and single out specific information, how to make sense of it. Most of all, she made Lily understand that there was nothing
wrong
with her, that she was not crazy. She simply had been born with a gift that few shared. Mrs. Youngblood always referred to it as a “gift.”
 

“A lot of people
claim
to have the gift,” Mrs. Youngblood told her one evening. “Most of them are frauds. Those who really do have it tend to keep it to themselves, because it can’t be used as easily as those frauds claim to use it. You can’t pick and choose the information you get so easily—what comes, comes. If you know what you’re doing, you can make sense of it, but not always. While you can manipulate the gift, you can never completely control it. For instance, you can’t go to Las Vegas and make a fortune with it, or use it to play the horses at the tracks. Sometimes, no matter how well you try to block them, things will come through. Sometimes these things will be so powerful, so overwhelming, they will make you physically ill. And when you have visions like that, you’ll find you have to act on them.”
 

“What do you mean, act on them?” Lily had asked.

“The gift comes with a certain responsibility, Lily. You may receive information that could help someone, perhaps save someone from harm or even death. When that happens, you are obligated to act on that information. At least, that’s the way I see it. Have you gotten any religion in your life, Lily?”
 

“We used to go to the Methodist church every Sunday when Mom was alive.”

“Well, I am of the opinion that this is a gift from God, and God does not give gifts without reason or purpose. There will be times when you
must
use this gift to help others, whether you want to or not.”
 

Lily did not fully understand what Mrs. Youngblood meant until years later.

When Lily was fourteen, Mrs. Youngblood introduced her to a friend named Dolores Reeder, a plump, gray-haired woman’ in her early sixties who dressed flamboyantly and wore a lot of clattering jewelry. Mrs. Reeder and her husband, Clay, owned a metaphysical bookstore, The Crystal Well, in the town of Mt. Shasta. The Reeders had a lifelong interest in the paranormal, and while neither of them shared Mrs. Youngblood’s gift, they were aware of it. With Lily’s permission, Mrs. Youngblood told Mrs. Reeder how strong Lily’s gift was, that it was the most powerful she had ever encountered, even stronger than her own.
 

The summer after Lily graduated from high school, Mrs. Youngblood moved to Colorado to be near her daughter and grandchildren. Mrs. Youngblood knew how unhappy Lily was at home. By then, Charles was working with their father in his plumbing business, but he still lived at home. Lily’s father and brother, while unaware of her gift, knew there was something odd about her and no longer even tried to hide their discomfort around her. They made no effort to understand her, and sometimes Lily even sensed they were a little afraid of her. Lily had a job at a bookstore. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, although she had a deep interest in writing, but she knew she did not want to go to college right after graduating—she needed a break, some time to herself. Before leaving Cottonwood, Mrs. Youngblood suggested Lily move up to Mt. Shasta and work at The Crystal Well for a while. She had already discussed it with the Reeders, and they offered to let Lily live in the apartment behind their bookstore, once occupied by their niece, who had married and moved out three years before. Lily eagerly accepted the opportunity to get out of Cottonwood and out of her smothering, uncomfortable house.
 

She settled into the apartment in back of the bookstore and approached her new job with great enthusiasm. The Reeders were not very organized, but after a few months, Lily had things running so efficiently that Mrs. Reeder expressed regret that she had not come to work there much sooner.
 

Fourteen months after moving to Mt. Shasta, Lily was on her knees putting some new books on a low shelf when she began to see flashes of electric blue in the periphery of her vision and was overwhelmed by the smell of bananas. She stood and looked around, expecting to see that someone had come in with a bag of groceries, including a bunch of ripe bananas, but no one had entered the store. The flashing grew worse, and Lily went to the register, where Mrs. Reeder was poring over that day’s edition of the
Redding Record Searchlight.
Mrs. Reeder said Lily didn’t look well and told her to sit down. But before Lily could get to a chair, she blacked out and fell to the floor.