The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  Brewster gazed into the cop’s unreadable eyes. An accident, dreams, two cops flying all the way from New York City to talk to him. His hands were getting sweaty. He didn’t have a clue where the cop was going with the story or what he was even talking about, for that matter, but the answer to the guy’s question was an easy guess. “She dreamed about it?”

  “Damn straight.” The cop frowned at his empty dish, then motioned to the last corner of pie in the tin. “Hey, mind if I finish that off?”

  Brewster didn’t trust his voice enough to try answering. He shrugged.

  The heavy, plain-clothed cop slid his plate aside, grabbed the tin, and put his fork to work.

  “Were you born in a barn, Jonesy?” his partner asked. “Use your own plate.”

  The big cop grunted and ate.

  Brewster turned to the skinny cop… Barnes. “I’m really not following this story.”

  Barnes grinned, deepening the hollows of his cheeks. If anybody needed another slice of pie, this guy was the poster child, but he’d hardly touched his plate. “Here’s what Jonesy is trying to explain in that half-assed story-telling style of his. We’re investigating a case from last year. A woman jumped, fell, or got pushed onto the subway tracks in Manhattan and—”

  All of a sudden, Brewster couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears. He was pretty sure he dropped his fork with a clang, because all three men gave him an odd look, and the piece of silverware wasn’t in his hand anymore. He’d just been with Carla, a year ago, and she’d been planning a trip to Manhattan to purge herself of a subway suicide nightmare. He told her not to go alone.

  Now he told himself not to leap to the obvious conclusion or bust out crying or lose it in any way. Nervous breakdowns were best suffered alone. He needed to keep cool, speak coherently if called upon, get these cops out of the house as soon as possible, and then collapse. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Hey, no problem,” the Northbrook cop said. “It’s your china.” That brought a laugh out of the other two, but suspicion lurked in their sharp eyes.

  The heavy cop, Jonesy, had almost finished demolishing the rest of the pie. He picked up the thread of the story. “Think the dreams are weird? That ain’t all. This chick buys it in one of the busiest subway stations in America, and there isn’t one other person on the scene at the time.”

  “Granted, the accident didn’t happen during rush hour, but still,” Barnes added.

  Something about that heightened the buzz in Brewster’s head. He placed his palms flat on the table to keep them from trembling.

  Jonesy shook his head. “The security cameras in the station went down. Some kinda malfunction. I guess we wouldn’t be here if they’d been working.”

  “But the cameras outside didn’t show anybody going into the station for a good five minutes before the accident,” his partner said. “Plenty of people came up the stairs, but nobody went down, except the victim.”

  “The cashier was on a landing one level above the platform,” Jonesy added, “so she didn’t see nothing, either. Neither did the idiotic transit cop flirting with her at the time.”

  Brewster averted his gaze from the Northbrook cop sitting across from him, begged himself not to faint, and refused to even blink for fear he’d see a sign reading We’re hiding from the butterflies the instant he closed his eyes.

  “The station drained out before the accident,” Barnes said.

  “Like rats chasing tail outta the sinking ship, only it wasn’t sinking yet,” Jonesy added. He speared the last remnants of the pie.

  “There was a bus accident a block away at the time,” Barnes added. “That drew the crowd away. I guess most people would rather look at carnage than take the subway on home.”

  The thin cop reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an all-too-familiar business card. He laid it on the table for all to see. Brewster DeLay, Words escape me. “They found this card in the victim’s purse.”

  Brewster took the card and flipped it over, praying to read a punch line—the gotcha at the end of a sick practical joke—but he came up empty and let the thing slide out of his hand. “Why—” His mouth had gone dry. He couldn’t choke out another word.

  Barnes scooped the card up and slid it into his shirt pocket. “So…we have a woman alone in a subway station, standing near the tracks.”

  Bewilderment, incomprehension, and even a vague sense of betrayal twitched one of Brewster’s eyelids.

  “A train comes along and almost doesn’t stop,” the thin cop continued, “because the operator has a blackout from a mild heart attack. He comes to and hits the brakes but not in time to avoid this woman who is now on the tracks.”

  “No witnesses but the operator,” Jonesy said. “And he claims at first the woman bought it without any help.”

  “But he changes his story last week, and a witness from a passing train comes forward and corroborates,” Barnes added. He gazed intently into Brewster’s eyes. “We showed them some pictures, and they both identified you as the man standing with that woman.”

  Brewster couldn’t even begin to process what he was hearing. He wanted to open his eyes and wake up. “Wait. How do you have my picture?”

  “Facebook,” Jonesy said.

  “But you say you have an alibi,” the Northbrook cop chimed in.

  Barnes sighed and broke into a gentle smile, back in the role of good cop. “Brewster, this woman’s name was Carla Summers. She had your card in her purse. You knew her, didn’t you?”

  Knew her? He still did. And that was the thing. A large part of the emotion trying to filter through his shock was grief, but a voice of logic—or denial—kept whispering that if Carla really did die a year ago, somehow she’d cheated death to interact with him after the fact, meaning she was still alive. Unless—his cup-all-the-way-empty voice argued—she’d been visiting him in her time-traveling dreams before she died, and those dreams ended the day the train took her out.

  Could he prevent that? What if he took another spin through the wormholes and told her to drop Manhattan from her itinerary? Carla had thought she could change his past and her future. Maybe he’d be the one to let the butterflies out of the jar.

  The thin cop’s friendly expression faltered into a frown. What had he asked?

  Brewster tried to focus. “I knew Carla, but I didn’t know about…” He couldn’t finish.

  “We have forensic evidence,” Jonesy said, “strands of hair on her coat.”

  Brewster reached into his back pocket. “If I give you my comb, will you guys hit the road?”

  CHAPTER 24

  Alone with his thoughts

  Brewster stared out his living room window as a spectator in what had to be somebody else’s unraveling life. The cops lingered on the sidewalk in full view of his nosy neighbors before getting into an unmarked car. All in all, a pretty good show for Emily Saunders, who still dragged a rake across the same patch of grass, bent on seeing the final act through to the end.

  Finally, the three faces of death sped away with scythes in tow.

  Brewster collapsed into a chair and turned a misty gaze to the spot in the street where Carla had appeared at the midnight hour of a magical night. Three cops had just rewritten history into a horror story, claiming she’d already been dead for a year.

  He fought the overwhelming sadness fogging his vision by using a coping mechanism honed from many stressful episodes at work. He closed his eyes, relaxed his arms on the chair rests, took deep breaths, and drifted away. Only with a calm spirit could he sift through the chaos of bewilderment, disorientation, grief, and anger setting his entire body into a jittery tingle. Every problem had a solution, every story two sides, every thesis an antithesis. He needed a new angle to rally his hope around.

  Carla had been run over by a subway train in a real-life enactment of a recurring and obviously precognitive dream. That cold piece of information had to bite the dust, and he went to work building the case for denial.

  E
xhibit A—He’d touched Carla’s face, gotten lost in her eyes, savored the spicy fragrance of her perfume, kissed her lips. She couldn’t have been dead. Wraiths didn’t melt in a man’s arms. Yes, he and Carla visited each other through wormholes that might have clamped shut when she wandered too close to the subway tracks, but…

  Exhibit B—A paranormal connection transcending the barriers of time and space brought him and Carla together, and the super being behind such a miracle had to have a plan in mind. Derailing the cosmic merry-go-round before the end of the ride didn’t fit the equation, and in any event…

  Exhibit C—Didn’t Gabriella’s comment about the butterfly effect at the Tug Hill gas station imply the past could be changed?

  He sprang out of his chair and paced the room.

  The twelve-year-old girl with thousand-year eyes tipped her hand with that sign in the window about butterflies. Clearly, she wanted the past left alone, and witnesses posed a problem for her. If a tree falls in an empty forest, it creates no sound, and fate continues its predestined course. But if others observed and reacted to an event such as Brewster’s time-traveling Tug Hill visit, the course of human history might have been altered.

  Suppose someone had seen and interacted with him? The encounter would have created ripples. A brief pause for conversation at the gas pump could have prevented some stranger from reaching a predestined point farther down the road at the proper time to discover his soul mate, thus triggering a chain reaction of sweeping consequences. A marriage might have been erased, a child unborn. As Gabriella said, a single butterfly can flutter its wings and change the course of weather forever. Or history, for that matter.

  But no, he had it all wrong. Gabriella couldn’t have cared less about the ripples in other people’s lives. Her only concern was the possibility a random bystander might slow him enough to prevent his appearance at the right place and time—parked on the side of the road when the love of his life came along to celebrate the snowstorm.

  Carla had been the victim of his butterfly wings, the woman needing to be stalled. She’d been on her way to Manhattan without him, but first the snow squall slowed her and then he did, delaying her arrival on the subway platform to just the right moment—the instant a train operator suffered a heart attack, blacked out, and barreled into the station too fast. By flinging Brewster into Carla’s path, Gabriella committed murder as surely as if the little bitch had pushed the woman onto the tracks herself.

  And that wasn’t all. The puppet master framed him. The train operator and another witness said recent dreams refreshed their memories regarding a certain man standing beside the victim.

  Brewster balled his fists. But with anger came confusion, a host of questions without clear answers. Why frame a man with an alibi? Surely a little vixen able to plant dreams into minds could have poked around in his head and learned he’d been somewhere else the day Carla fell to the tracks.

  And why frame him at all?

  Above all, why did she want Carla to be killed?

  Brewster stopped pacing. He refocused his gaze out the window at the very spot where Carla first entered his life. They were meant to explore the world hand in hand, as soul mates, kindred spirits, two peas in a pod, Romeo and Juliet—no, that ended badly—Prince Charming and Tinker Bell, two butterflies fluttering their wings as one.

  He couldn’t let destiny slip away without a fight. Battle lines were forming, storm clouds brewing, and puppet masters could go to hell. He’d suit up in the armor of love and determination, find his way back to the past again, and make a few changes.

  Big ones.

  Because he could never, ever let Carla go.

  His cell phone rang. He ripped it out of his shirt pocket and flipped it open, ready to roll. “Yeah?”

  “Where the hell are you?” Heather’s voice came at him in a near screech, from the office, in the real world, where business transactions still happened whether or not the rest of his existence had been turned upside down.

  But couldn’t they happen later? “Didn’t you get my email about coming in late today?”

  “No. I haven’t been granted access to my computer yet.”

  That didn’t make any sense. Among her many duties, Heather acted as the supervisor who controlled system access at Crestview for everyone, obviously including herself. “What are you talking about?”

  “The holding company went down.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Charlie Hanson committed some kind of fraud. The banks are taking over every company Parker Investments owns, including ours. Their auditors are crawling through the files right now.”

  He tightened his grip on the phone.

  “So, we need you here, Brewster, and—”

  “Wait. Let me think.”

  Something about those files triggered a half-formed germ of an idea, but it couldn’t quite work its way through the turbulence in his mind. He swept his gaze around the living room. When he settled on the snow globe Carla had given him, the idea came closer to finding a voice. He bent to the coffee table, took the sphere in his hand, and shook it. The snow puffed up in a cloud, then settled back down on the little cottage—insulating Carla’s safe haven beneath a pristine blanket of white once again.

  Brewster needed to dream his way back and talk her out of that Manhattan trip. But he couldn’t count on a wormhole assist by Gabriella this time. She’d done him wrong once already. The task of harnessing the amazing, time-and-space-bending energy of dreams rested on his shoulders alone.

  Only he didn’t have a clue how to tackle the problem.

  And yet, he’d recently met someone who wore dreams right on her wrist. Somnium. And who knew Gabriella.

  The time had come to join forces.

  “Heather?”

  “Are you coming?”

  “Yeah, but listen. Has Igor Tesfaye signed his new loan documents yet?”

  “Who the hell cares?”

  “If the bank is running the company now, we need his paperwork in the files before they have a chance to renege on the deal.”

  “You’re always the Good Samaritan, aren’t you, Brewster?” Heather’s voice was getting ever more shrill. “People are worried about their jobs at the moment. Why not try focusing on that instead of some trucker?”

  He took a deep breath. “Actually, the man’s a poet.”

  “Are you sitting at home sniffing glue? I need help here.”

  “Calm down. We’ll work something out with the bankers. I’m on my way.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  “Meanwhile, get Tesfaye down there and tell him to bring his girlfriend along as a witness.”

  “She doesn’t need to come. Any one of us can—”

  “Just do what I said, Heather.” Brewster ended the call and hurried out of the house.

  He got into his car and backed out of the driveway without shooting a second glance at the police cruiser parked just outside the cul-de-sac. Parents had been complaining about speeders lately, and the cops had responded by increasing their presence on neighborhood streets. When this one pulled out and started following him, Brewster’s main concern was to stick to the speed limit and avoid cheating at stop signs. Not until after he’d driven from Shermer to Willow, then east to the Edens Expressway and onto the southbound entrance ramp did his hands start getting sweaty. The cop had tailed him all the way.

  Once on the highway, Brewster cut across three lanes of traffic from the far right to the far left. The cop tagged along, gliding from lane to lane until settling between him and another car. A mile later, Brewster switched back to the right lane but failed to shake his new friend. His grip on the steering wheel had gone white-knuckle. Then, two separate police jurisdictions executed a perfect tag-team maneuver at the Touhy Avenue exit. The Northbrook squad car peeled off the highway, and a Chicago cop swung on.

  Brewster wasn’t a mere citizen caught in the ticket-quota sights of a local cop anymore. Somehow, he’d become a hyperventilating,
high-profile person of interest throughout the county.

  So this was the game now, huh? Those New York City cops hadn’t called on him for a touchy-feely interrogation topped off by coffee and pie. They’d had every intention of arresting him on the spot and plenty of cause to do so. Wacky circumstances or not, two separate witnesses put him at the scene of a possible murder, and a business card in Carla’s purse suggested a relationship with the victim. If he hadn’t had an airtight alibi, he’d probably be sweating it out under a bare light bulb at the nearest holding pen. He’d earned a reprieve, but the cops couldn’t be expected to let him out of their sights until they checked out his story.

  He pulled off the highway at the Foster Avenue exit, headed west toward his office, glanced in the rearview mirror, and still saw the tail. He tried talking himself off the ledge with the assurance the cops were sure to stop following him as soon as they confirmed his alibi—most likely a matter of placing a few phone calls or calling on a person or two. Deep down, though, he knew better.

  In the heat of the earlier moment, Brewster had seen no problem in producing his comb as evidence of his innocence. He hadn’t been with Carla at the accident scene, and in fact, he’d never been in a New York City subway station in his life. But that comb now looked like a boomerang fully capable of flying back at him with the opposite of his intended result.

  Disassociation had been the problem. Twice during his police interrogation, he’d failed to think of the Tug Hill incident as a real event. First he told the cops he hadn’t been out east, and later he forgot the forensic evidence he’d left in his wake. Hairs on Carla’s coat? They’d hugged, leaned against each other, shed hairs all over each other for sure. When the police mined his comb for a DNA sample or whatever, they’d learn without any doubt their person of interest had been with the victim shortly before her death. What then? His inadvertent lie about not traveling east would have guilt written all over it.

  And how strong was his Seattle alibi, really? Brewster shrank deeper into his seat. Nobody out there could confirm for certain they’d met him, presuming they remembered anything at all a year after the fact. The clerks at the airline, hotel, and rental car counters, the attendees at the writers’ conference, and even the agent had never seen him before. An accomplice could have gotten away with posing as a writer and flashing forged identification whenever necessary.