Wide Open (24 page)

“I’m going to check in with Ole,” he said, “and then I’ll be back.”

“You don’t have to—,” Hallie began, but he was gone before she finished.

She didn’t want him here, did she? On the other hand, there would apparently be people here the whole damn night anyway.

And he’d leave if she asked him to.

That was the deciding factor. She hadn’t known Boyd long, but she’d noticed that, that he didn’t tell her what to do. He just did what he was going to do. Which could be damned irritating, but she sort of liked it.

26

Hallie was surprised that it was only a little after ten when everyone, or as close to everyone as it was likely to get, left. Two firefighters and a small tanker truck stayed down by the ruins of the equipment shed. Hallie left feed for the horses and found the yellow dog and brought him inside. He was still wary of her, but she left the door open until he came in, skirting past her and up the stairs, where he was now lying on her father’s bed. Hallie left water for him outside in the hall.

Cass called from the hospital and said they wanted to keep her father overnight, but that he’d be fine.

The phone rang again. Hallie went into the kitchen to answer it.

“What the hell’s going on, Hallie?” It was Brett, sounding very un-Brett-like. “Are you all right? Do you want me to come over?”

“It’s a long story,” Hallie said.

“I’m coming over.”

“No. Don’t come. It’s fine. Don’t you have classes tomorrow?”

“I have to be at the hospital around noon.”

“Meet me for lunch. I have to come up to see Dad anyway.”

“Is he in the hospital? Is he okay? I could stop in in the morning.”

“It’s my dad, Brett. He wants visitors like the plague.” She smiled, there and gone, though Brett couldn’t see her. “By which, I mean, he’ll be a grumpy bastard, but in his secret heart, he’ll appreciate it.”

“Ha,” Brett said. She yawned. “But you’re okay?”

“Yes,” Hallie said. “Go away. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

After talking to Cass and Brett, Hallie was wired, like something big was going to happen any minute, like she was on watch. She made coffee and made herself sit at the dining room table and made notes on everything she knew.

Martin was responsible. Hallie felt as if she didn’t quite have all the pieces yet, though she had a lot of them. The Uku-Weber building alone. Blood an essential part of it, which might explain the deaths of Karen Olsen and Sarah Hale and Unidentified Ghost Number Four. But why bury Karen Olsen here? Why bring her here? Maybe just because, because he couldn’t kill everyone in Taylor County and not have someone suspect?

And then there was Jasper. The whole town. Dell had put it on her list. She’d written
Colorado
—which had to be Karen Olsen. And Jasper. She’d thought it meant where they’d found the second body. But then, Prue had said it, too. And she hadn’t been talking about bodies. She’d been talking about the past. About—

“Everything okay?”

Hallie’s head came up with a jerk—god!—she hadn’t even heard him come in.

Boyd leaned against the kitchen doorjamb. He had a sharp smudge of ash running underneath his cheekbone.

“You don’t have to stay,” she said, though she was glad he had. She thought she was glad. In the army, people had your back automatically. That was the way the army was put together. But here … she wasn’t sure what she had, wasn’t sure what she could ask.

Boyd didn’t answer her directly. “What are you doing?” he asked.

She got up and handed him what she’d written. She started pacing, realized it would take him less time to read it than it had taken her to write it, and turned back to find him staring once more at the sideboard, at the pictures above it, and the vases on display.

“What?” Hallie asked sharply. “What are you looking at?”

Boyd shook his head as if waking. “It’s just … a decision I have to make,” he said. He tapped the paper. About midway down the page, Hallie had written three names: Dell, Sarah Hale, Karen Olsen.

“These names,” he said. “You think these others—Sarah Hale and Karen Olsen—they’re dead, too?”

Sarah Hale drifted into the room past Boyd’s shoulder. “They’re dead,” Hallie said firmly.

“They’re … here?”

She nodded.

“I—” He looked drawn and tired. Hallie wondered how much sleep he’d been getting lately. “What do they look like?” he asked.

For a moment, Hallie couldn’t remember where she’d put the box of Dell’s things she’d taken from Uku-Weber. “Hold on,” she said.

She was gone for maybe five minutes, digging up the box and the newspaper with Sarah Hale’s picture. It was in a cabinet in her father’s office. She grabbed the picture of Karen Olsen from two years ago, still on the desk.

She came back into the dining room to find that Boyd had made a fresh pot of coffee. He handed her a cup. “Thanks,” she said with a quick grin. She handed him the pictures. He studied Sarah Hale’s face carefully for a full minute.

“I remember,” he said. “But it never felt like—I never saw her in my dreams. I thought maybe … hoped maybe it was something else.” He looked at Hallie. “The bodies you found, these are—?”

“Yes.”

He dropped the newspaper with Sarah’s picture on the dining room table. “Why do you think—? Shit!”

He didn’t say anything more, just stood there quietly and looked at Karen Olsen’s grainy photo. After a moment, he started to raise his hand to his face, realized he was still holding his coffee mug. He set it down without looking away from the picture, so that it perched precariously on the very edge of the table.

“Boyd?”

“I tried to find her,” he said.

Karen Olsen’s ghost had drifted across the room and looked over Boyd’s shoulder. She seemed to be staring at her own photograph in the newspaper, which Hallie found a little creepy.

Boyd tossed the printed photo on the table. He rubbed his hand across his face. “I do see women in my dreams,” he said. “And sometimes I see their faces. But I never know if what I’m seeing is what happens or what might happen or symbolic of what happens.”

“You saw my bracelet,” Hallie said.

“I saw that you were dead. Or—” He shook his head. “—I saw that the person wearing that bracelet was dead. I didn’t know it was you.”

“And you saw her? You saw Karen Olsen in a dream?”

Boyd moved away, then stopped and looked at the posters over the sideboard. His head jerked sharply once to the right, like he was giving himself a hard shake.

“I came here because of her. Because I dreamed that she died outside a two-room house in Prairie City down by the grain elevator. It was detailed and vivid, more like the dreams I get when things are about to happen, not the early dreams that are so hard to figure out. So I came. And I couldn’t find the house.” He leaned against the sideboard, crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, straightened up and walked back to the dining room table. He leaned both hands flat on the table and looked across at her. “And I couldn’t find her. I looked everywhere, but I didn’t expect … there wasn’t any—”

He picked up the photo, stared at it again, then held it out, like evidence of failure.

“This picture’s from two years ago,” Hallie said. “You came a year ago, right? It was always too late.”

There was something that looked like anguish in his eyes; then, as Hallie watched, he put himself back together, his shoulders squared, his face smoothed out. “There were three things about that dream,” he said. “It was dark, and the prairie, the whole prairie was burning. She was standing alone in the middle of this circle of fire while everything else burned. She looked—I don’t know—she didn’t look frightened. She was laughing. She reached out a hand toward—I couldn’t see who or what, but I assume a person because something pulled her forward, out of my view. I was just in this dream with an empty circle and fire everywhere.

“The wind began to blow, the flames were going sideways, smoke so it was hard to see anything. She stumbled back, her hand…” He put his hand on his throat. “Everything was red.”

“Blood?”

He nodded. “Not blood in the sense that it was a dream and not that straightforward, but yes. And there were voices, but I can’t tell you what they said, though it sounded like singing or chanting or a prepared speech. Not conversation.”

“Lightning? Did you see lightning?”

“What?”

“Pete Bolluyt has a lightning bolt symbol on his belt buckle. There’s a mosaic on the floor of the Uku-Weber atrium, a lightning bolt. And Dell had—” She touched the hollow at the base of her throat. “Right there. A mark like a tattoo.”

He frowned. “No she didn’t,” he said.

“It was—” Hallie stopped. But they were laying their cards on the table, right? “I don’t think anyone else could see it,” she said. “It was only when one of the ghosts touched her.”

Boyd frowned. “Draw it for me.”

Hallie flipped over Karen Olsen’s picture, which Boyd had dropped back down on the table. She quickly sketched a jagged lightning bolt with a heavy cloud overhead. She handed it to Boyd, who studied it carefully. He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. “There’s another dream I have. It’s all fire and blood and prairie,” he said. “And I see lightning in that dream. And people. A dozen different ethnic groups, all different clothes. They wander through the dreams, no matter what else is happening. Sometimes two or three, sometimes twenty. They shout at me. Or, it feels like they shout at me, though I can’t hear what they’re saying. Sometimes if the dream goes on long enough, they start shouting at each other and there’s rain and hail and snow and sleet all at the same time and thunder drowns out their voices—which I can’t hear anyway.

“Eventually the thunder gets so loud, I wake up.”

“So, blood and lightning bolts,” Hallie said.

“Karen Olsen died before Martin Weber moved back to Taylor County, right?” Boyd said.

“She died in Colorado,” Hallie said. “He brought her back.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s important that what’s happening happens here? Because it’s important to him? There’s something about Jasper, too,” she said. “That town over on the Seven Mile that was destroyed back in ’94. Something happened back then. I think. It would have been when Martin was a kid, though. So—”

Hallie thought about Jennie Vagts, about the mark she’d seen on Jennie’s neck after the funeral. She wished she’d done a better job of tracking Jennie down. Because if something happened to her on top of everything else—she dug the cell phone out of her pocket and dialed Lorie’s number. “Call me,” she said when she got Lorie’s voice mail, because Lorie ought to have found something out about Jennie by now.

“It all goes back to Uku-Weber,” she said, “back to Martin.”

“Hallie, you need to let me—”

“Don’t say, let me handle it. Don’t.”

Boyd rubbed a hand across his face again. He stood and walked into the kitchen, leaned against the counter with his coffee mug in his hand, like he’d gone out there to refill it, then forgotten why he’d come.

“I write all my dreams down in a notebook,” he said after a minute. “Sometimes I make charts. And I keep hoping that I’m wrong. That my dreams really don’t mean anything, that it’s all just illusion or delusion or hope or even idiocy, that I’m crazy. I hope, sometimes, that I’m crazy. Because if I am, then there’s the chance the dreams will go away or I’ll be able to stop, to … stop.”

While he talked, he opened cupboards and the refrigerator, pulled out bread and cold cuts, lettuce and milk. He found plates and knives and—

“What are you doing?” Hallie asked.

He stopped. “I—”

“Don’t be so goddamned helpful,” she said, knowing she should be grateful because he took the time and tried to do something and because he was there, but it just pissed her off. “Don’t take care of me,” she said.

“Look—” There was a snap to his voice that Hallie hadn’t heard before. “This is what I do.”

Hallie looked at him,
You have no idea, do you?
Then she sat down at the kitchen table, set her coffee mug down, and leaned on her elbows. The tired she was feeling right now went bone deep, like back on long watches, like she’d never come home at all.

Boyd brought the coffeepot over to the table, refilled her mug and then his own, taking a seat himself across the table from her.

Hallie grasped the mug tightly, holding on like if she held on tight enough, the world would turn the way she wanted it. “There’s something else,” she said.

Boyd looked at the battered surface of the table, which Hallie’s mother had painted red years ago. Dirty greenish blue and yellowed ivory showed in nicks and scratches, particularly along the edges and the base of the legs, but no one, not her father or Dell or Hallie herself, had ever offered to repaint it.

He waited.

“There’s this symbol on the floor when you come into Uku-Weber,” Hallie said. “Like I said, it’s a big lightning bolt, all jagged, not a symbol of a lightning bolt, but like a—a portrait of some real lightning bolt. Lots of strands, sharp and jagged. It’s like the mark on Dell, like the belt buckle Pete wears. Almost exactly like.

“You can’t see it unless you’re standing on the second floor looking down. When you’re on the ground, on the floor itself, it looks like some abstract, I don’t know, weird art or something. But here’s the thing, blood hits it, it lights up, the whole thing flashes, like—” She had to think. “—like you’re inside lightning.

“So that has to mean something, right? Some kind of power that requires blood and … sacrifice. Right?”

“Sacrifice,” Boyd said, like he was distracted. “Yeah.”

“There are symbols, too,” Hallie said. “All along the strips between the windows and the fountain. There’s, I don’t know—” She tried to remember. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she’d been there. “—there was a buffalo, a stag, a pentacle, something that looked like a fu dog, you know one of those Chinese guardian dogs, an eagle, well, several kinds of birds. There was one … it was centered—an ax crossed by a hammer and sword. There was—”

“Wait. Wait.” Boyd had straightened, looked sharp and interested again. He pulled a small notebook and a pen out of his back pocket. “Tell me those again,” he said. “Everything you remember.”