by Rysa Walker
And then Aaron’s shoulders suddenly relax. “It’s them. Let’s go.”
“Are you sure? It . . . it felt like you were getting a vibe just now.”
“I was. From Taylor. She was thinking she wished it was Dacia that she’d hit with the truck.” His brow furrows. “And something else, but it doesn’t make sense.”
Deo steps out of the truck the instant Taylor pulls into the clearing. I’m so relieved to see him that I rush forward to hug him, remembering only at the very last second that I need to hold back.
Aaron tosses my hoodie into the back of the truck. Then he wipes the rifle down with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and throws it into the bushes. I crawl into the cramped back seat with Deo, sliding as far to the right as possible to give him some room for his longer legs, and reach into the middle console for the Advil we bought earlier, dry swallowing three of them.
“You were supposed to get out of here,” Aaron says to Taylor. “Get back to the main road and call the military police.”
“When you tossed me the keys, you put me in charge, and Anna said to use my judgment. I made an executive decision not to leave your ungrateful self behind.” Taylor turns the truck back to the south, away from the lake. “And as it turns out, the MPs came to us. They were parked on the other side of the path when we came out of the woods. Two guys in uniform, talking to some people in a truck, over by the lake. Fishermen, maybe?”
She twists the wheel to avoid a puddle.
“The MPs started driving toward us when they saw us run out of the woods,” Deo says. “But then that Jeep comes ripping through like a bat out of hell, and we were yesterday’s news.”
Deo has one hand inside his jacket, like he’s holding something against his side. I’m about to ask him about it, but Taylor starts speaking again.
“Dacia’s driver nearly broadsided the MPs’ vehicle, and boy were they pissed. We ran to the truck and got out while we could.”
“Do you think the police got a good look at the truck?”
“I don’t think they could have made out the tags, but they’ll know the color. Maybe the make.” Taylor glances into the rearview mirror. “It’s your turn now. Where did you get the gun you tossed into the woods? And why is there blood in Anna’s hair?”
Deo gives me a startled look. “I thought it was mud.”
“It’s not her blood,” Aaron says. “One of Dacia’s guys stayed behind. I finally managed to get the gun away from him.”
He doesn’t finish his explanation. The blood I’m wearing does that for him.
Taylor floors the accelerator as soon as we reach the clearing. Even though the bumps were larger on the trail, at least she was taking them at a reasonable speed then. I lean my head against the seat and close my eyes, praying I don’t get sick again.
When we’re just beyond Croatan Cottage, Taylor spins the wheel to the left and brakes abruptly. “Deo noticed this when we circled back around.”
She’s talking to Aaron, but I open my eyes anyway. The headlights are shining on a battered wire fence. The part that was supposed to block off the road has been flattened, probably by the people who use the area for mudding. But the section to the left is still standing, and there’s a large orange-and-black sign tacked to it, reading, Off Limits to Unauthorized Personnel. There’s a space at the bottom for additional information, and someone has written in with a marker: Overhills area closed 11/4/19–11/14/19 for live fire training.
We barely have time to read it before she reverses, spins back out onto the driveway, and we’re moving again. “So, what do you think?”
“I told you that on the phone this morning,” Aaron says. “The guy I bought the permit from said—”
“You saw the meal packets in there,” Taylor says. “The soldiers use that place when they train. So they’ll find the bodies, right? Maybe not the Clary girl, but once they find these . . .”
“Yeah. They’ll widen the search.” A sick look crosses his face. “And I’m pretty sure they’ll also be looking for anyone who had a fishing pass today.”
“But,” Deo says, “won’t they realize the bodies aren’t fresh? I mean, they usually do that whole time-of-death thing on the cop shows.”
I shrug. “The kids weren’t killed recently. But I’m pretty sure they’re going to be equally interested in the two MPs. Grady told Dacia to shoot them and dump them in the lake—or maybe he was talking about the fishermen you mentioned. We were afraid they meant you.”
“I didn’t hear any shots as we were leaving,” Taylor says.
“Silencers,” Aaron says. “At least on Grady’s gun.”
A high-pitched whimper causes Aaron to look back questioningly at Deo.
“Um . . . Deo? What the hell is that?”
Deo’s jacket is moving. He gives me an apologetic smile and is about to answer, but Taylor beats him to it.
“He was outside the fence, right below that off-limits sign, shivering. There’s no way we could just leave him there. He’s starving!”
Deo pulls a tiny pup out of his jacket. Taylor is right—he’s nothing but skin and bones, and he’s frantically trying to nurse on the side of Deo’s thumb. “I tried to get him to eat some of this cheese cracker I had in my backpack. He won’t take it.”
“But what about the mother?” Aaron says. “She’ll be looking for him.”
“Probably not,” I say, taking the pup from Deo. “I don’t think he’d be this thin if there was a mother in the picture. His eyes aren’t even open yet. I’m surprised he’s still alive.”
Aside from a few months at one of my first foster homes, I’ve never had a dog. But my hitcher Abner owned dogs from the time he was a kid. There’s this one childhood memory of his that I kind of wish was my own. He’s lying on the grass, laughing, as a half-dozen puppies crawl over him, tugging at his shirt, licking his face. They always had puppies at his family’s farm, and there were a few times they had to intervene to save a runt who wasn’t thriving.
“See?” Taylor says. “The mom is dead. We had to bring him with us.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Either dead or she abandoned him. Sometimes the mothering instinct just doesn’t kick in. It would be better if we had some milk. And an eyedropper. But . . .”
I grab a small piece of cracker from Deo’s hand and chew it until it forms a thin gruel in my mouth. The puppy balks at first when I try to get him to take it from my pinky, but by the time we’re back on Highway 24, he’s eaten a little of it.
“There’s no way we can keep a puppy in the RV, but I guess we can find a shelter,” Aaron says. “One of those no-kill places.”
Taylor sniffs. “Ooh, the Almighty Aaron has spoken. News flash: you are not the boss. We’ll put it to a vote tomorrow.”
The arguing doesn’t stop, but I ignore them and continue coaxing the little guy to eat. It gives me something to focus on aside from my aching head and worries about my new hitcher. I don’t regret picking Hunter up, but I have no clue how I’m going to deal with him. Maybe Kelsey will have some ideas.
Every few minutes, Aaron looks in the side mirror. As do I. We’re headed in the most obvious direction, back toward Fayetteville, and they know what we’re driving. I keep expecting to see Dacia’s black Jeep zoom up behind us.
But we make it across town without any sign of her. Taylor pulls into a Walmart, over Aaron’s objections, and she and Deo go in search of puppy formula while I keep the little guy warm inside Aaron’s jacket. After we pull around to the dumpster in the back and ditch my hoodie, Aaron finds a parking spot near the entrance and pushes the phone button on the dash. “Call Sam.”
“Don’t tell him about Hunter,” I say as the phone connects. “I mean, you can tell Sam if you really want, but I don’t want Magda to know yet. I think she’d want me to pressure him for answers to her twin questions, and—”
“Hey, Aaron,” Sam says. “I’m on my way back from the hospital. Needed to give your mom a break. She’s running herself ragged. We
don’t like to leave him alone. Too many studies showing that coma patients really do know if you’re there.”
Aaron shoots a frustrated look over his shoulder, aimed more at Daniel than at me. I just give him a helpless shrug. Personally, I’m fine with him telling Sam and Michele that Daniel is not actually in that body, but it’s not my call.
“So,” Sam continues, “what’s up?”
There’s a long pause after Aaron fills him in on the evening’s events, and then Sam says, “Hitch up the camper and hit the road tonight. I’ll let Magda know what’s up. Sounds to me like you’ve stumbled into the middle of a rather lethal pissing contest between Cregg’s people and some of the personnel at Bragg. Both Cregg and the military will have the same information you do, same list of contacts, so they’ll be watching for you to pop up.”
“That’s pretty much what we thought,” Aaron says. “I’m going to head to Fort Benning and see if we can track down the lead Anna got through her vision.”
As Aaron is talking, it occurs to me that Snoop could have extracted that from my head, too. Cregg’s people could already be in Georgia, interrogating the Pecks. Could already have tracked down the adept.
I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, though, based on the vision. I remember feeling relieved to have that asymmetrical scrap of green paper in my hand. We’d just talked to the Pecks and we’d gotten the info we needed.
That’s another positive side about the visions that Jaden didn’t mention, and something I’d kind of forgotten over the past few hours. No matter how dangerous it seemed at Overhills, I know that we make it to Georgia. And even though I can’t help constantly checking each time I see headlights, I know that Dacia’s people aren’t going to track us down here in the parking lot and shoot us. I wish I’d remembered that when my heart was pounding out of my chest as we ran through the woods, or when Aaron and I were crawling through the mud to get away from Grady.
“What was it they scrawled at the site again?” Sam asks.
“We do it for you,” Aaron says. “We didn’t take a sample from the wall, but I’m pretty sure it was written in blood. There was certainly enough of it around.”
“Weird,” Sam says. “Almost as though they were trying to make it appear that the murders were . . . dedicated to someone.”
“Like that Hinckley guy who shot Reagan back in the eighties?” Aaron sounds doubtful.
“No,” I say. “One of the words was underlined, remember? We do it FOR you. I . . . I think Dacia wrote it. I mean, it sounds like her phrasing. Think back to what Pruitt told us. The people at Fort Bragg had been trying to keep this hushed up, to keep the Delphi kids under wraps. We know that at least two—no, three—of the ones killed were cases where the military failed. Hunter, the Clary girl, and . . . the other one . . . the one Pruitt said was a firebug. So maybe the message was that since you couldn’t handle these kids, couldn’t keep them from using their abilities, from letting people know that they were adepts . . .”
Aaron nods. “You couldn’t control them, so we did it for you.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cusseta, Georgia
November 4, 2019, 3:14 p.m.
The day is unseasonably warm and humid, with barely a hint of breeze reaching the screened porch. I’d much rather be in a T-shirt and jeans—anything would be preferable to this wool skirt and jacket. But even though Carl and Doreen Peck seem to be very casual people, I don’t think informal clothes would help sell my cover as Elizabeth Bennet, legal intern.
I stifle a yawn, partly because Carl Peck is off on another tangent, but mostly because I’m sleepy. After we finished telling Sam about what we’d found at Overhills, we headed back to the RV and were on the road to Georgia by midnight. Aaron drove until around four in the morning and then pulled off so that we could catch some sleep in a parking lot.
A few hours after we stopped, Magda called. Apparently she couldn’t wait until after sunrise our time to let us know that she’d talked to Sam and she wasn’t happy that we’d left without contacting all of the names on our list or that we’d had to abandon the rental car with the keys under the seat.
Not that Magda had any viable alternatives to suggest. Given everything we’d just witnessed at Overhills, staying in the area would have been beyond stupid. But I think what had her most upset was learning that one of the twins she was seeking is now dead. And Hunter and his sister were the only set of Delphi-affected twins that Daniel knew of aside from Magda’s daughters.
I’m really glad I told Aaron to hold off on letting anyone know that I picked up Hunter’s spirit. The kid has a major case of PTSD—although is that the correct diagnosis when the traumatic event actually kills you? Maybe PTDD—post-traumatic death disorder—is a better descriptor. At any rate, Hunter isn’t stable enough to answer Magda’s questions, and since Magda doesn’t seem to enjoy taking no for an answer, it’s up to me to protect him.
The gentle back-and-forth motion of the porch swing that Aaron and I are currently sharing isn’t helping me stay alert. Carl Peck is holding court in one of the two rockers that were once white, judging from the bits of paint that cling to the wicker backs. I sit with my legal pad in my lap, wishing the old geezer would just give us the information that we know they have. But he doesn’t seem inclined to make things easy, possibly because he likes having an audience.
“When that tree house blew,” he says, “chunks of wood went flying ever’where, some pieces with the nails still attached. Fifteen, maybe twenty, people were watching, but I don’t think more’n a couple saw what caused it. Who caused it.”
Peck stops and takes a long, slow swig from his beer. The pause is clearly timed for maximum effect. I get the sense that he’s told this story dozens of times, over many cans of beer, while sitting around the table with his poker buddies.
Carl Peck is not especially handsome, even for a man in his seventies. His belly strains at the buttons of his chambray shirt, and he has more hair on his face than on his head. He is, however, picturesque. The colors of the Coors Light can are an almost perfect match for the streaks of silver-white in his beard, the blue of his shirt, and the red of the baseball cap, now hanging from one rail of his rocking chair. He looks like something that Norman Rockwell might have painted if he woke up in a really pissy mood.
“And here’s why no one saw who caused it,” Peck continues. “Most of them was lookin’ at the boy. What was his name, Doreen?”
Doreen, nine years younger than Peck, according to info Sam sent us, leans against the frame of the open porch door. A bead of condensation hovers at the bottom edge of her glass, where only a few thin brown lines of tea now rest between the melting crescents of ice. She’s been staring dully into the backyard while her husband talked, her eyes fixed on the dilapidated jungle gym. Doreen Peck is either bored with this story or bored with her husband. Maybe both.
“His name was Tomás,” she says, eyes never moving from the jungle gym. “After Miranda’s dad. But they usually called him TJ.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Anyway, it was the birthday boy’s big day, and the grandmas and uncles and so forth all had their cameras pointed to’rd him as he made his way up into that new tree fort. Too bad no one was takin’ a video. That would have gone viral damn fast.”
Peck leans toward us at this point, blue eyes twinkling. “Me, though? I was lookin’ at Peyton, his little sister. She’s a cute little bug when she gets mad, and she was sure as hell mad right then, ’cause her daddy had just told her she was too little to go up in that tree house. Maybe one day, he’d said, when she was bigger. Even a three-year-old knows that means a damn long wait, and Peyton was used to followin’ her big brother around like a puppy. Once her daddy walked off to help the boy up the ladder, Miss Peyton parked her tiny butt on the concrete, bottom lip stickin’ out and starin’ at that tree house with lasers comin’ out of her eyes—”
“You mean, like . . .” Aaron hesitates, glancing at me and then back at Peck
. “Do you mean beams of actual light?”
“No.” Peck’s tone suggests that he would have added the word dumbass to the end if he’d known Aaron better.
I bite back a laugh, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if Peck had said yes. A few weeks ago, I’d also have been reluctant to believe that people could stop machinery or set things on fire through the power of their minds. Are laser-beam eyes really that much of a stretch?
“She was just a little girl, not an alien or a demon or what-have-you,” Peck says. “What I meant is that she was starin’ at the tree house with the intensity of a laser. Focused, you know?”
“Yes, sir,” Aaron says.
“Anyway, it’s while Peyton is starin’ at it that the damn tree house explodes, almost like a tornado hit it. The boy—Thomas, TJ, whatever—fell out. Broke his arm. Lucky it wasn’t worse. Like I said when you first showed up, I told his daddy that thing was too high up for a kid his age. But he was one of those types always thinks he knows better. That’s the tree right over there.” He jerks one thumb toward a tall oak in the yard next door. “The lowest branch is ten feet up, and that ain’t a safe height for no eight-year-old’s tree fort. Shoulda picked one of the other trees.”
Aaron nods agreeably, then asks, “Did anyone else notice the girl?”
“Someone sure did,” Peck says. “Miranda—that’s the kids’ mama? She definitely noticed, and she swooped the kid up and ran inside. I’m sure most people thought it was to get the little girl out of harm’s way, but I was close enough to hear what she said.”
He pauses, waiting for his cue.
“What did she say?” Aaron finally asks.
“She said, ‘No, Peyton! Bad, bad girl!’”
I’ve kept quiet for most of the interview, partly because Peck seems like the type who sees women as peripheral. But I’m not sure Aaron will ask, and I want to know.
“How did the girl react when she found out her brother was hurt?”
Peck gives me a little smile, which makes me think this is another cue he was waiting to hear. “That’s a good question, young lady. Because you’d think she’d have just been sad, right? Like I said, she was crazy about her big brother. No matter how mad she was about him gettin’ that tree house, she wouldn’t wish him no harm. And she was sad, just like you’d expect. She was bawlin’ her head off when they carried the boy out to the carport to take him over to the hospital. But she was also tellin’ her mama and daddy that she was sorry. That she wouldn’t do it again.”
