by Steven James
“Good. I’m good.”
“You look pale,” Mom says, reading me a little too well. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Yep.” Before she can probe, I change the subject. “So, do you know when we might be having supper? I’m starved.”
She doesn’t answer right away. “Give me a half hour or so.”
While she gets started in the kitchen, Dad heads out to work on one of his carpentry projects in the garage. I go back to my room.
I feel like I need to talk to someone about what just happened in the attic, but I figure that bringing it up with either of them might kill off my chances of going to Georgia.
After considering Nicole, but deciding that I don’t want her to worry about me, I text Kyle to give me a call when he has a chance. Only a few minutes later, he does and I tell him, “I saw something again. Another blur.”
“Of what?”
“Myself, actually. But I was dead. Then I came to life.”
“Okay. So, that would be a ten on the creep-o-meter. Let me psychobluralize you. What scared you the most?”
“What do you mean?”
“Seeing yourself dead, seeing yourself come alive, or worrying about where things might go from here?”
“I guess I’m afraid the thread will snap for good.”
“The thread?”
“The one that’s right in front of me. The one that holds things together.”
A pause. “The one that keeps you sane?”
“Yeah.”
“So basically, you’re scared that you’ll go completely crazy with no chance of turning back—that you’re on a road that leads off a cliff and there’s no exit ramp.”
“Thanks for putting it like that.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“I guess if I’m going to head off a cliff, I wish it would just happen. It’d be a lot less terrifying.”
“Than what?”
“Than realizing that’s where I’m heading, but that I can’t stop.”
“Have you figured out a way yet to tell your blurs from what’s real?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Try filming things next time with your phone. Maybe see if, when you watch it on the screen, it’s still there.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“You cool?”
I’m not sure.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I’m cool.”
“In the meantime, don’t drive off the cliff. I mean, metaphorically speaking.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Later on, when my parents are in bed, I sneak the ladder and my hunting knife down to the garage. On the way back to my room, I overhear them talking in hushed voices in the master bedroom.
“So, you’re fine with him going down there to this camp?” Mom says.
“This isn’t just about his shoulder, is it, LeAnne?”
I pause in the hall.
“I was never thrilled about the four of them going on a road trip halfway across the country. You know that.”
“I thought we agreed we could trust them.”
“I went along with it. I didn’t necessarily agree with it.”
“They’ll be alright. They’re responsible kids. And they’re staying with—”
“Yes, but . . .” Then her voice fades out and it’s too soft to hear any more.
Most people get louder the angrier they get. Not my mom. She gets quieter. So typically, the less you hear, the worse things are going to be.
I don’t take any of this as a good sign, but I don’t want to chance having them catch me eavesdropping either, so as silently as I can, I return to my room, glancing up uneasily at the attic access panel as I do.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THURSDAY, JUNE 13
11:16 A.M.
All morning I’ve been thinking about Kyle’s suggestion yesterday about me filming events to see if they’re blurs, so I keep my phone close by with the camera app open, but nothing unusual or terrifying appears.
My thoughts return to Pandora’s box.
In the story, when the girl opens the box, it unleashes all the terror and heartache and grief that had been sealed up so none of it would torment people.
It’s a myth.
But maybe, even if there wasn’t a literal box long ago, each of us has one inside us. And when we give into our temptations, when we listen to the darkness, we pry off the lid.
Metaphorically speaking.
I try writing in the journal again, but that doesn’t help and I realize that if there’s one person who might be able to understand what I’m going through, it’s my mom.
She’s seen things too.
She had sleepwalking episodes so frightening that she became concerned she might hurt someone else during them.
She might be able to help me figure this out.
However, if she gets too worried about me, she’ll never let me go to the camp. So if I talk with her about this, I’ll need to be careful to not give too much away, but still tell her enough for her to help me.
I’m not exactly sure how to pull that off, but after lunch, since she’s taking today off from work and is here at the house, I figure I’ll give it a shot.
I catch up with her in the living room where she’s making her way through a mound of clean laundry.
When I sit down and start helping her fold the clothes, she stares at me oddly. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You never help me fold the laundry, Daniel. Something’s on your mind. What is it?”
I straighten out a towel, flip it into thirds.
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with your offer to peel a potato for me the other day, would it?” She says it lightly, and that gives me the sense that this probably is a good time to talk.
“Mom, last winter you told me that you moved out because you were afraid of what you might do to me or Dad.”
“I remember.”
“Afraid that you might hurt us.”
“Yes.”
I grab a pair of my jeans, start folding them. “But why did you think that? You never gave me the details—you just said that you were seeing things.”
“You really want to discuss this now?”
“Something’s happening to me. I need to understand it. I think you can help.”
“Mostly, it had to do with my sleepwalking.”
“But why would you think you might hurt other people?”
She lays her hand on the clothes pile, but doesn’t pick up anything. “You know that your father keeps a gun by his side of the bed.”
“Yes.”
“Well one night I woke up while I was opening up the end table drawer where he leaves it. Then two days later I already had it in my hand when I woke up.”
She pauses.
“Anything else?”
“Daniel, I—”
“C’mon, Mom. Tell me.”
She’s started to tap her fingers anxiously on one of our crumpled sheets, but I don’t think she notices.
“I had it with me,” she says at last. “I was halfway down the hall on the way to your room when I woke up. It was loaded. The gun was. That was the last straw. I put it back and I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. The next day I moved out. I couldn’t stand the thought of jeopardizing either of you.”
In an eerie way her story reminds me of my own sleepwalking incident last winter when I carried the knife around.
“And you had hallucinations too, right? What did you see?”
“Nothing as terrifying as the blurs you’ve told me about. I never saw anyone who’d died. Just shadows mostly. On the periphery of my vision, always out of the corner of my eye. It felt like they were after me.”
“What’s different now, though? Has all that stopped?”
“The sleepwalking stopped while I was staying at my sister’s place.”
“And do you still see those shadows?”
“I haven’t in months. I�
��ve been taking medication.”
“Did the visions start when you were a teenager?”
“Oddly enough, they did. Then they left me alone and only came back recently.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Do you know why they started in the first place?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Did anything else weird happen when you were younger?”
“Anything weird?”
“Like with me. Voices. Feeling things that aren’t there. Whatever.”
“No, but I know that my mother had some issues. She was never very forthcoming about it, but from what I was told, she met with a therapist for a while.”
“Well she must have hallucinated some pretty horrifying things—in her suicide note she wrote that she couldn’t stand seeing them anymore.”
“But we don’t know exactly what that was referring to.” She looks at me curiously. “Why are you asking me about all this now? Does it have to do with what happened when you saw that boy in the road?”
“Yes.” It’s true. It’s just not the whole truth. I don’t bring up what I saw in the attic. “What’s wrong with us, Mom? Grandma got depressed and then killed herself. Her uncle hanged himself. And then you and I have these, well . . .”
“Sometimes things like this run in families.”
“Things like this? You mean getting depressed? Going crazy? Killing yourself?”
She eyes me concernedly. “Have you ever thought about that?”
“About what?”
“Killing yourself. Suicide.”
“No—I mean, I guess everybody does sometimes. Nothing specific, though.”
“But you’d tell us if you ever had those kinds of thoughts, right? You’d tell your father or me? You can trust us you know.”
“Sure. I just . . .”
“Promise me, Daniel, that if you ever think about it, about hurting yourself, you’ll tell us right away.”
Her word choice reveals a lot: “hurting yourself,” rather than “killing yourself.”
“Yeah, okay. If I ever think about it, I will. I’ll tell you.”
We go back to the laundry pile, and even though the conversation doesn’t feel like it’s by any means finished, we don’t take things any further.
Then when we’re done and I’m putting my clothes away in my room, I hear her down the steps.
It sounds like she’s crying.
Earlier this week, Malcolm Zacharias had made sure Alysha Caruthers was settled in at the facility Sam had designed in Atlanta.
Now, he gazed out the window of the private jet as he flew toward California to pick up Tane Tagaloa in L.A.
Soon, it would be Daniel Byers’s turn, and finally, when all was set, Petra would be joining them.
Once all four were together, Sam’s plan could move forward at last.
Dr. Adrian Waxford sat at the desk in his office on the second floor of the Estoria Inn.
He had his twenty-five camel figurines, all carved from bone, in front of him.
Sometimes, he would pull them out and remind himself of the ancient riddle of the camels, the one his brother had told him all those years ago.
A Sufi master had three students and seventeen camels. In his will, he left instructions that upon his death, the oldest student would get one-half of them, the middle student one-third, and the youngest one-ninth.
When he died, since it’s impossible to divide seventeen like that, no one could figure out what to do.
But the answer was like so many things—you had to think outside the box, and when you did, it all became clear.
Sometimes Adrian gave people the riddle to see if they could solve it. But so far, not even Henrik had been able to do it.
He slid them all aside.
Thinking outside the box.
Yes.
That’s what he’d been doing lately regarding finding Zacharias and putting the right amount of pressure on the senator.
The series of events that Adrian had put into play would lead them to the agency’s director, the person who went by the name Sam, and finding him—or her—was the key to everything.
He phoned Henrik. “What do we know about Zacharias?”
“We have word that he might be on his way to California.”
“Anything more on the office complex in Philly?”
“Not much. We’re looking more closely at an offshore holding company and a nonprofit foundation that are both located in the building he likes to visit. So far, nothing specific though.”
“Your people are ready to move on the young woman?”
“Yes.”
“Do it tomorrow night. And make sure the senator gets the message that he needs to act on Monday evening at nine o’clock. It’s vital that things happen before that Senate hearing on Tuesday morning, but not so early that anyone suspects anything.”
“I understand.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
FRIDAY, JUNE 14
10:22 P.M.
No blurs since Wednesday.
No reason yet to use the camera on my phone.
However, Mom’s questions about suicide have been bothering me.
Was it possible that I’d run out in front of that truck because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to take my own life, like Grandma had? Like that distant uncle of mine had?
Mom mentioned that things like this sometimes run in families.
That’s not something I want to consider, not even remotely.
Though my parents are clearly not on the same page as far as being cool with me going to Georgia tomorrow, this afternoon Mom finally gave in and I agreed to be extra careful with my shoulder and ankle.
Nicole’s dad has the most reliable car, so he’s letting us use that for the trip. We’re scheduled to leave their house at seven in the morning.
I toss my clothes and my journal into my duffel bag.
When I lie down to go to sleep, I turn on my side so I’m facing the wall with Nicole’s sketches rather than the place on the floor where that pool of blood collected on Wednesday afternoon.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
11:41 P.M.
Petra Amundsen had just left work at the hotel where she usually stayed late on Fridays balancing the books, and was on her way to her car when it happened.
She’d parked under a streetlight just like her father had taught her to do five years ago when she was first learning to drive.
It was closing in on midnight, so the street was basically empty. A dog somewhere down the block barked and someone yelled for it to Shut up! Other than that, and the sound of a few cars on a nearby road out of sight, it was quiet.
Okay, so the hotel wasn’t in the best part of town, but since graduating from college in the spring, Petra had wanted some independence.
So, although she didn’t by any stretch of the imagination need the money, she’d taken the job. The trust fund she’d received when she turned eighteen was great, but she would rather use that to make a difference in other people’s lives than just indulging herself. Added bonus: the accounting allowed her to pursue one of her biggest interests: math.
As she came to her car, she noticed that across the street, a woman in her late twenties with sandy-colored hair was standing beside a minivan, holding a bundle of blankets, shushing it with baby talk.
Petra couldn’t hear the child crying, but the woman looked extremely upset.
As soon as she saw Petra, she called out, “Please, can you help me? I locked my keys and my phone in my car. I need to tell my husband we’re okay and see if he can come get us. I was supposed to be home by now. He’ll be terribly worried.”
“Oh. Um, sure.”
Petra crossed the road and drew her cell phone out of her purse.
“Can you hold my baby while I make the call?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
The woman carefully handed the bundle of blankets to Petra and accepted the phone, but wh
en Petra looked down, she realized that it wasn’t a real baby wrapped up in the blankets after all. Just a doll.
“What’s going—?”
But before she could finish her sentence, a man threw open the side door to the minivan, leapt out, clamped his hand over her mouth, and dragged her backward.
Petra tried to scream, but his thick hand muffled her cries.
Struggling to get free, she dropped her purse and the doll, then clung to the edge of the door, but he yanked her back hard enough to break her grip and get her inside.
The woman picked up the items and closed the door.
There weren’t any seats in the back of the minivan so there was room for him to wrestle her to the floor. Then he whipped out a roll of duct tape, and covered her mouth with a strip of it.
After making sure she couldn’t call for help, he ripped off more tape and bound her hands behind her.
Frantically, she tried rolling to the side to get out from under him, but it was useless.
He wrapped the tape around her ankles and then around her legs just above her knees, securing her so that she could barely move.
When he was done, he leaned down and peered closely at her face in the dim streetlight that filtered through the window. She attempted to turn away, but he pressed her head roughly against the floor.
His chiseled face was all creases and shadows, and he had only a thin slit for a mouth.
When he grinned at her, his rancid breath made her feel like throwing up, but with that tape over her mouth, she didn’t dare, so she gulped and tightened her throat and managed to hold back.
He brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Daddy’s little girl. The famous Brad Amundsen’s only child. Well, let’s see how valuable to him you really are.”
He patted her cheek twice, climbed into the driver’s seat, rolled down the window, and called to the woman, “Get rid of her car. I’ll meet you at the house.”
“Alright. I’ll see you there.”
Then he started the engine and guided the minivan onto the street.
Petra tugged against the duct tape, but it seemed like the more she struggled to get free, the more constricting it became.
