by Jenn Vakey
“Ben,” she called out again, unable to get her voice above a deep whisper.
Her eyes moved abruptly from door to door, trying to decide which to pick. Ben could be behind any of them. If she picked wrong, she might never find him. There were eight doors in total, not counting the one she’d come through. She started moving toward the first, but kept walking. She didn’t slow until she reached the end of the hall and the final two doors that stood across from each other. Something in her said it was one of these, but she didn’t know which. She looked from one to the other, hoping for any hint as to which to pick. They were identical with the exception of the door knobs. The door to the left had a simple old bronze one. The one to the right, however, was new and silver. What really stuck her as odd was the lock on it; it locked from the hallway instead of inside the room.
Rilynne looked down the hallway once more to make sure no one was coming before twisting the lock on the door to open it and stepping in.
The door closed behind her, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. She moved her eyes quickly around, but there was no sign of Ben. In fact, there were no men at all. Instead, the room was filled with young girls, ranging in age from five or six to late teenagers.
“Hi,” she said, unsure what else to say. All she could think was how shocked they must be to have her walk unannounced into their home. Not a single one of them showed it, though. The only thing that filled their eyes was sadness. Sadness and fear.
“Have any of you seen a man around here?” she asked. “I’m looking for someone I’ve lost.”
All of the girls cowered back with the exception of one. She appeared to be the oldest of the group.
“We just wanted to finish our chores early to make him happy,” she stated timidly, brushing the small brown strand of hair that had fallen loose from her bun behind her ear. “It was all my fault it broke. She was doing it exactly the way she was supposed to, but I bumped into her and knocked the plate from her hand. She shouldn’t be the one who gets punished. It was me.”
Although the girl put on a brave face, the only thing that showed in her soft brown eyes was fear. It was more than just that of a child who was going to get in trouble for doing something wrong; she was terrified for her life.
Chapter Eight
Tears were rolling down Rilynne’s face when she opened her eyes. Though she tried to stay positive and consider that something within the dream might help to point her in the right direction, the pressure and dread was simply too overwhelming. The only thing that stopped her from having a complete breakdown in the middle of the large bed was the faint light coming in from the door leading to the backyard. At first she thought it was just the sun starting to make its appearance, but when she looked at the clock, she found it was just after two in the morning. When she slinked out of bed to determine its source, she found Amber sitting on the back porch.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?” she asked when Rilynne pushed the door open and stepped out onto the hard deck. She shuddered at the pain it brought, but tried not to let it show.
“My dream woke me,” Rilynne answered. She crossed over to Amber and sat down next to her on the swing. “If that’s what it even really was. I don’t know how these things work.”
Amber nodded in a way that said she understood exactly what she was trying to say.
“Most of the time they are just dreams,” she stated. “Every now and then you'll have a flash within one, but that’s not a common occurrence. Now, that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t giving you information that you need to know. Think of it as an extension of the dreams everyone else gets. Our dreams tell us what our subconscious wants us to know. Yours go further and give you information that might be important to whatever case you’re working on at the time. They aren’t quite visions, though, because they’re abstract instead of pictures of exactly what happened.”
Rilynne let out a loud, frustrated groan and let her head fall freely back until it hit the top of the bench. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. If the universe, or whoever sends them, decided to put this thing in my head so I could figure out what happened to people, why wouldn’t it just make it easy and give me all of the facts I need instead of doing it like this?”
She could tell that Amber was trying to hold back a chuckle, but she didn’t blame her.
“It’s times like this I wish your father was still around,” Amber stated. “I only know what the two of us have figured out over the years. He seemed to have a little more understanding of it. I’m afraid his secrets went to the grave with him, though.”
“What happened to him?” Rilynne asked, turning to look at Amber.
Her mother’s eyes moved around her confused face before a sadness filled them.
“You didn’t know,” she stated, taking Rilynne by the hand. “I guess I’d just assumed Elise told you.”
Rilynne shook her head. “She told me he was like me and that he’d left us when I was young to keep us safe. With everything going on, I didn’t think to ask where he was now.”
Amber nodded tenderly. “When he left us, we believed he’d been taken and killed. It wasn’t until recently that we learned different. He was a paramedic and had flashes about some dead bodies that told him they didn’t really die of accidents or natural causes like it appeared. When he started to ask questions, he drew the attention of the assassin who was actually responsible. In order to keep us safe, he left. Last year Ben started looking into his disappearance and it brought the assassin here. Your father had been tracking her for years and followed. Unfortunately, he was killed in the process of arresting her partner.”
Rilynne sat back, unsure of what to say. She tried to remember the events her mother spoke of, but it was nothing more to her than a story she’d been told. Even with everything that had happened, though, she felt a wave of guilt for not thinking to ask where he was earlier. With her mother and sister there, it was only expected that her father should be there also.
“Doug was only able to tell you a little about your gift before he was killed, and Elise has been able to fill in a little more,” Amber went on. “I’m afraid there are still a lot of questions we just don’t have answers to at this point.”
“If it means finding Ben, why can’t I tell Matthews and the others what I saw?” Rilynne asked. “It wasn’t much, but I might see more that helps to give some hint to where he is.”
Amber sighed and pushed the swing back gently with her foot. “I know it feels like the best thing to do now, but think about it for a minute,” she said. “If you were in their place and someone who’d just had a traumatic brain injury came in saying she was having visions telling her where her missing husband could be, what would you say?”
“I’d think she was crazy,” she admitted. “I’d either think they were just memories coming back or that something had been knocked loose.”
“Exactly,” she responded. “No one would take you seriously. Either that, or you could say something that would make someone believe you had something to do with what happened to him. It wouldn’t get you anywhere you needed to go, and it would risk the life you have here.”
She was growing more and more frustrated with her situation. Both her amnesia and Ben missing were difficult situations to deal with, but them happening at the same time was more than she could handle.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “I can’t just sit back and do nothing. From what everyone keeps telling me, this is the kind of thing I’m good at. The problem is, I can’t remember anything. The first instinct I have when thinking about him being missing is to call the police. I’m afraid I’m going to do something wrong if I try to do this myself, and it’s going to cost me everything. I’d never be able to forgive myself if I did something that made this all worse than it already is.”
Amber put her arm around Rilynne and pulled her close. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said softly. “You aren’t going to have to do this by your
self. I’ve been helping you make sense of your flashes for most of your life, and your sister grew up with your father. She has the experience of deciphering the visions, and the ability to process anything you need in the lab. Between the three of us, we can figure this out. The key thing is just going to be deciding exactly what to tell the station. Then you work with them to find him. You can do this.”
Amber seemed so sure, but Rilynne wasn’t. Part of her expected people to jump out of the bushes and tell her that it was all a joke and the flashes she’d been having were simply just her memories coming back. She was even willing to accept the night’s dream as simply just a show from her imagination, but something deep within her said that wasn’t the case.
“I’m going to go back to bed,” she responded after a few quiet minutes. “Maybe I’ll have another dream that gives me all the answers we need to get this figured out. If not, at least I can try to get enough sleep to fully convince myself that I’m not completely crazy.”
Amber didn’t argue with either her choice to go to bed or her statement about being crazy. She just gave a warm smile as she stopped the swing to let Rilynne off.
After muttering a quick goodnight, Rilynne stood and walked back through the sliding glass door leading to her room.
Chapter Nine
When her eyes opened again, Rilynne just stared at the ceiling fan spinning above her head. She didn’t want to get up, or even move from that spot. Even if her head wasn’t still reeling with the state she found herself in, every muscle in her body was pleading with her to stay in place. It wasn’t until she took in a whiff of the aromas coming through the cracked bedroom door that she managed to talk herself into sliding off the bed and venturing out.
Both Amber and Elise were in the kitchen. Before she could even get a word out to greet them, she heard a thundering coming toward her as a giant Siberian Husky tore through the house.
“Marti!” Elise yelled. The dog paid her no attention as she rushed to Rilynne. She braced herself for an impact as the dog grew closer, but she stopped just before reaching Rilynne’s feet. “Sorry, I had the guys take her to my place while you were in the hospital. I went and picked her up this morning, because I thought you could use someone to cuddle with. As I’m sure you can tell, she’s also been missing you.”
“Hi there,” Rilynne said, dropping down to greet the excited animal. As she raked her hands through Marti’s fluffy coat, she pressed her wet nose lovingly into Rilynne’s side. “Aren’t you a pretty thing? Is she mine?” she asked, hoping more than anything in that moment that she was.
Elise smiled and nodded. “Ben got her for you last year,” she said. “He goes out of town often enough for speaking arrangements, and he didn’t want to leave you here all by yourself. He’s always so afraid you will go out for a run and get hurt and no one will know you’re missing. Although, I don’t know what good a dog will be to you if that ever happened. It’s not like she could call for help.”
A sense of irony filled her as she thought about it. He was worried about something happening to her, and he was the one who’d been missing for two days.
“So what’s on the agenda today?” she asked, gently pushing the dog aside so she could make it the rest of the way to the kitchen. Marti didn’t go far, though, staying no more than a step behind Rilynne the entire way.
“We’re going to eat, then we’re going to sit down and talk through everything you’ve seen and what we know so far,” Amber said quickly. She picked up a small stack of pancakes and dropped them on an empty plate before handing it to Rilynne. “If we can’t come up with anything, we can also try a little game you and Ben like to do to help make sense of things on cases.”
“And if that doesn’t work, maybe someone can just hit me in the head again,” Rilynne joked. “That might knock something loose.”
A soft chuckle echoed through the room, though Rilynne was only partially joking. Part of her considered it as an option if they weren’t able to get anywhere. If a blow to her head took everything away from her, maybe another would bring it back.
Rilynne ate in silence, half listening to the small talk between Amber and Elise. There was a ringing in her head, perhaps a side effect of the amnesia or caused by the pure exhaustion she still felt, that left her almost numb with no desire to be social. If the stakes weren’t as high, she might have given into it and withdrawn even further inside her head. That wasn’t an option, though.
“How does this flashing thing work?” Rilynne asked after finishing her last bite. “Last time it just kind of happened. How to I control it?”
“You can’t always,” Amber said. She grabbed the empty plates and sat them on the kitchen counter before motioning them into the living room. “The key thing to do is just to relax. Try closing your eyes and taking a few slow breaths while you think about what you want to see. Think about Ben. Concentrate on the pictures from your wedding, and try to think about how happy the two of you are together. Just think about him while you breathe.”
Rilynne nodded, but she felt a little foolish as she leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. She followed Amber’s advice and took several slow breaths, trying to remember Ben’s face. As the picture of them dancing at their wedding became clear in her mind, she thought of nothing else.
“This isn’t working!” Rilynne groaned frustratedly after several minutes. She pushed forward and dropped her elbows down on her knees. “It’s pointless! We’re wasting time concentrating on me. I tried as hard as I could and I wasn’t able to see anything.”
Amber reached out and rubbed her hand gently over Rilynne’s back. “You’re putting too much pressure on yourself,” she said calmly, not appearing to be even a fraction as worried about her daughter’s lack of a vision as she was. “Let’s try something else for now. You’re not going to be able to force anything to come. Why don’t we start going over everything you’ve seen so far, and we can try to tie some things together with what Elise was able to learn at the station.”
Rilynne was still frustrated, but she was relieved they weren’t adding to the pressure she was already feeling. She knew that no matter how hard she tried, there was nothing that was going to be able to relax her to the point that she needed. When she finally admitted that to herself, the layers of pressure started to drift away.
“I heard back this morning that the male blood found on your clothes does belong to Ben,” Elise said. She twisted her fingers around nervously, but didn’t wait for them to respond before continuing. “The good thing is they didn’t find anything other than his blood, meaning that there isn’t a sign at this point of a fatal injury.”
Rilynne didn’t know what other things could have been found on her clothes, but she knew she didn’t want to ask. At this point, she would just take Elise’s word that it was a good thing.
“What about the female sample?” Amber asked. “Were you able to find out who it came from?”
Elise shook her head. “That one is even more vexing than Ben’s. There is a spray pattern that indicates a traumatic injury, but we don’t yet have enough for anything more specific. Summers is still looking. We’ve also been running it through the database, but no match has been found to tell us who she is. No women have been reported missing, so it’s just a waiting game for now.”
Rilynne wanted to know what they had learned from Ben’s blood on her clothes, but she couldn’t force herself to ask. She didn’t honestly know how she would take it if she heard Elise use anything similar to traumatic to describe it.
“We also know of two stores so far that the two of you stopped at,” Elise went on. “The latter was still four hours before you turned up at the hospital, so it doesn’t really help to limit the search area at all. You did mention that you were planning on going to the grocery store, so the guys are searching through the footage of the three you were most likely to go to. Either we will find you somewhere on the tape and it will tell us when and where you were last, or we won’t.”
“What happens if you don’t?” she asked, not understanding the significance.
“Well, if that’s the case, we’ll have some idea of where you could have been heading when this happened to you,” Amber answered. “The grocery store would have been one of the last places you went.”
“That doesn’t really mean anything then, does it?” Rilynne asked. “There could have been several stops we needed to make before hitting the grocery store. That could have put us on the completely opposite side of town when this happened.”
Both women nodded in agreement. “That’s true, but we need to work with what we have right now. Hopefully the guys will have some luck when they work through all of your credit card transactions,” Elise answered. “We don’t want to wait before getting started, though.”
“Alright,” Rilynne resigned to the fact that they knew more about the process than she did at the moment. “What else do we have?”
“We can start sorting through everything you’ve seen so far,” Amber stated. “You’ve told us what you saw in the hospital, but I think we should go over every detail of it. Then we can start to pick apart the dream you had last night.”
Rilynne leaned back in to the couch and started to think back to that first flash she’d had. She had been so freaked out by the experience that she had given little thought to what she had actually seen.
“I think I need to see a photo of the man who killed Ben’s fiancé in college. Matthews was telling me he was looking into him. I had a dream that night in the hospital and I saw a man that I don’t recognize, and it could be him,” Rilynne stated.
When she looked up at her mother and sister, both looked completely shocked and confused. Neither apparently had any idea what she was talking about.
“Matthews said he was released last month and he’s only four hours away from here,” she explained, her face burning red at the thought of revealing something Ben might not have wanted them to know about. “It’s possible he could have been the person responsible for this.”
