It took several seconds for Nola to realize she’d scrunched her face up in the same expression—she called it the WTF face—that other people displayed when she had to talk about trace. She hated to think she looked like Marshall Schultz, the detective most opposed to her work. She tried to look and sound more neutral. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I absorb trace energy. I don’t know how to describe it. How do you describe what you do?”
“I sense the particles of energy that emanate from a human being as they expire,” she rattled off coolly. “That’s how I describe it.”
He matched her tone. “That’s nice, but you know there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.” His dark eyes examined her face carefully. “You do know what I mean?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. And you shouldn’t be talking about it with me at all.”
“If you’re worried about someone seeing us, let’s go somewhere and get coffee. Somewhere public,” he added, a half-smile raising the corners of his mouth, probably because her discomfort was so obvious. “You’re a private citizen, Nola Lantri. It isn’t against the law for us to talk. You are allowed to talk to anyone you want, and you know that.” Left unspoken was the fact that she did want to talk to him, and he knew that. He waited and then nodded down the street. “Coffee?”
Nola wondered if all the significant moments of her life were going to be lived while either sitting in parking lots or drinking coffee. So far they had been. Thoughts of a walk in the park and a steak on the grill vanished. She was going to talk to Grayson Bryant.
4
“You read trace from me, didn’t you?”
Nola kept her face blank and again drank from her coffee cup as if it required a great deal of concentration. Grayson obviously knew something she didn’t, so she figured she might take a page from the detective handbook and allow him to reveal that something. At least she hoped that’s how this stuff worked.
“You’ve probably never read trace off a person before,” he said.
“I’ve never met another tracist before,” she blurted. Damn. So much for keeping silent. She couldn’t help it, though. She was excited. She had finally met someone who understood what it was like. She wasn’t quite so alone in the world anymore.
“Even if you had met another, you might not have gotten anything from them like you did with me. That’s because they probably haven’t absorbed very much. I have.”
“I thought you were a sports doctor,” she said, not even bothering to hide her curiosity now. “I can’t imagine you see a lot of death in that line of work unless they’re really upping the contact part of contact sports.”
“This doesn’t come from my job. This is something I . . . pursue on the side.”
“But you don’t work as a tracist,” Nola said, confused. “Otherwise I’d have known your name. There are only a handful of us officially who’ve worked with police or private detectives or lawyers. Maybe half a dozen in this state. I’m the only one in—”
“The entire county, yes, I know. And the next-nearest one is Anna Villagomez over in Albany, though she stopped working with the police a year or so ago.”
Nola set her cup down hard. “How do you know all this? Are you actually going to tell me something useful or are you going to keep throwing out these little teases?”
“I thought I’d do both,” he said with a smile. It was not returned. “All right, fair enough. I’ll start with Anna Villagomez. I know her because I was writing a book about her.” He chuckled at her look of surprise. “I guess I was riding on the success of my first writing project. I wrote about one season in the life of a Double-A baseball team. A very small press picked it up last year, and about twenty-seven people read it, most of them related to the players.”
“Is the book on Anna finished? Has it been published?” The thought of a book on tracism intrigued her.
“I wrote a complete draft but decided not to pursue the project beyond that. Anna ended up finishing it and going the self-publishing route.” He stirred his coffee for a moment and then, in a different tone, he said, “While I was working on it, I followed Anna while she worked. At first it was just for the book. Eventually it was for a different reason: I followed her so I could get trace.”
The coffee roiled in Nola’s stomach. “Why in the world would you want to do that?”
He looked steadily into her eyes. “You know why.”
How could she know? Did he just assume it was normal to go around following people? Of course, she’d been tempted to go to his house to follow him. It made her think of something her father used to say about towns like Redfort that had all the poverty and problems of the downstate metropolis but none of the cultural and social outlets: when people got bored, they got bad. “You know why, because you’ve experienced it yourself,” he said. “That feeling—that rush, like an adrenaline surge, only a whole lot more intense. The feeling you get with trace—there’s nothing else like it. That’s why.”
“It’s nothing like that,” she said, though her voice wavered. She lifted her cup to her lips but found she’d already emptied it. She dearly wished for more coffee. She felt clammily cold all of a sudden. “You mean you used to go around to all the places Anna Villagomez sensed trace and you would—take it? How can you do that? Obviously Anna didn’t, or there wouldn’t have been any left. And I don’t either.”
“You can, though. You have to allow yourself to. But more than likely you shut it off. It’s . . . it’s a bit like being in a dark room and suddenly turning on the light. You’re blinded, so you shut your eyes. But if you open them again and let your eyes adjust, you can get sight. I know it’s a hokey analogy, but trace is the same way: the suddenness of perceiving trace makes you shut that part of you off. It’s too intense at first, but that intensity can be something else entirely if you let it.”
Nola opened her mouth but then closed it. She looked down at the table then out the window. She didn’t know what to think, much less say. What he was talking about was . . . ghastly—that was the first word that came to mind. He was taking the energy of dead people for his own enjoyment. Looting the cemetery. Going through corpses’ wallets and pocketing the cash. It was one thing to stumble onto it involuntarily but quite another to chase after it—or at least it should have been. It was different from what she did, wasn’t it?
When he finally spoke again, he sounded so calm, so normal, that she thought—hoped—perhaps he’d been joking. “I know this is a lot to deal with all at once, and I’m sorry for springing it on you. I just thought I owed you an explanation so you could understand what happened. I’m sure it really threw you.”
“There were voices,” she said, finding her own voice at last.
Now he looked uneasy—and perplexed. “Voices?”
“Yes. That’s never happened to me before. I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone else.”
“I haven’t either, but it’s not like there’s a whole lot of information out there at the ready. Last I checked, the ‘trace’ entry in Wikipedia was only two paragraphs long.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what it means.”
She studied him carefully and then looked away again, drained. She hadn’t even gotten around to asking him about the pigeon, but now she didn’t want to ask. She pushed her chair back and stood up, not sure what to do next. Just leaving right then would look rude or, since Grayson didn’t seem like the type who offended easily, maybe just awkward. It wasn’t like she particularly wanted to get away from him at that moment; it was just that he had given her too much to deal with all at once. “One more thing,” he said. “I didn’t kill Culver, in case you were wondering.”
Of course she had been wondering.
She stood there for what seemed like a very long time before he finally got up as well and gestured toward the door. Without quite knowing what she was doing, she found herself walking out with him and continuing down the block, two people taking a stroll on a lovely aut
umn afternoon, which sounded so pleasant and so utterly disconnected from the confusion in her head.
She remembered something she hadn’t thought of in years: a day in high school, ninth grade to be exact, when Mrs. Boswell assigned Nola’s social studies class to write a report about some type of paranormal or supernatural phenomenon that interested them and then to present their reports to the class. For one whole week, students would get to bring vampires, UFOs, psychics, and Bigfoot to class. Nola chose ghosts. She had always assumed that what she’d sensed that day so many years ago had been her grandfather’s ghost, though she hadn’t given much thought to whether anyone else had the same experience with death. Obviously, people didn’t like to talk about death, so there was no reason for her to ask, especially since the moment hadn’t exactly shaken her to the core.
Because of this, she didn’t realize what a risk she was taking when she started her presentation with a description of her own ghost encounter. A few of her classmates wore smirks. One boy in the back row actually snorted. Others looked conflicted, like they believed in ghosts themselves but didn’t want to be exposed as gullible. The smirks and snorts faded near the end of her presentation when she discussed her research. Mrs. Boswell had asked them to find an article that provided a logical or scientific explanation for the phenomenon, so Nola quoted from one of her father’s Science Digest magazines about “the measurable release of energy from the human body at the moment of expiration.”
“Wow. That is amazing,” Mrs. Boswell said. “Do you think that’s what happened with your grandfather, Nola? Do you think somehow you sensed that energy?”
Funny that she hadn’t thought of it that way even after reading the article, but then she supposed that was why Mrs. Boswell was a teacher. Because of her, Nola saw the connection.
Because Mrs. Boswell was always coming up with fun assignments like this one, she was also a very popular teacher. Of course, she had been teaching for over thirty years and could afford to be a lot more flexible with her assignments than those with less seniority, but it was still a fact that this tiny silver-haired woman knew how to work a room of sullen teenagers. Seeing her genuine interest in Nola’s report, the other students became interested, too. Nola felt the threat of mockery ease as the attention of the class shifted to one student after another who claimed to have encountered ghosts as well. Listening to them, however, she realized that her experience was different. Tiffany Greenberg had seen something glowy in a dark alley, Hailey Kim had heard scary noises in the attic, and Donald Rodriguez had gotten a mysterious phone call from someone who sounded exactly like his dead uncle. None of that was at all like what she’d experienced, but none of them could understand that.
The man by her side right now understood it.
Several blocks later, she finally spoke. “What do you think happened to Culver?”
A long silence followed. He might have been seriously considering her question, he might have been trying to decide how much of his suspicions to reveal to her, or he might have been trying to think of a good lie to cover for . . . whatever he might want to cover. “I don’t know,” he finally said. He shook his head and she could see real frustration in his expression. “Culver and I were never close growing up. The age gap made it so he was too old to pal around with me but not old enough to be a sort of mentor. Plus his mother’s cancer ordeal and death made him very withdrawn for a long time. Nothing changed when we became adults. We still aren’t close. I don’t know my brother very well, though at least I’ve finally come to appreciate him.”
“In what way?” Nola asked.
“Culver is just not like anyone else—certainly not like any other rich guy. He genuinely wants to do right by people.”
“Well, he was cheating on his wife,” Nola pointed out, noting Grayson’s use of the present tense.
“I know how this is going to sound to a woman, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. He cares about both of them. He doesn’t want either of them to be hurt.”
Nola could have bristled at the part about how this would sound “to a woman,” but she didn’t. “I understand that, and I didn’t say he was a bad person for having an affair. People—good, bad, men, women—have affairs. I’m just trying to see him the way you do. He did something that would have hurt his wife if she found out, so it’s hard to see that as wanting to do right by people.”
“He loves Maureen,” Grayson said simply.
Nola could see this was a dead end, so she tried new ground. “There’s his business, too. Call me cynical, but I have to believe it’s impossible to become that successful by being an altruist. What, when he buys up land does he insist on paying top dollar?”
“The man isn’t Santa Claus, Nola. Of course he’s as self-interested as anyone else, and he’ll do what it takes to make his business deals succeed. But there’s still such a thing as honor among thieves, or ethics among businessmen. It’s rare—I wouldn’t say Vincent Kirke has much of it, for instance—but it exists in Culver. He’d screw over his fellow business moguls in a heartbeat because he knows they can handle it. He would never go after anyone who would truly suffer from a financial transaction.”
As he talked, Nola couldn’t help noticing the way he moved. There was sureness in his stride. He had probably been an athlete himself in high school, maybe college, before he took up sports medicine. It took her a moment to refocus on his words. “The latest deal Culver’s working on? He bought up all that land where the old computer-parts factory used to be back in the ’70s before everything got outsourced overseas, and he’s putting in an affordable housing community—Greenbriar, it’s called. Unlike most developers of affordable housing communities, he’s insisted on top-quality materials. Everyone told him he was going to take a huge loss if he did that, but I’d be willing to bet he proves them wrong even on this. Culver makes things work.”
Nola listened quietly, trying to gauge just how much envy there might be in Grayson’s depiction of his older brother. His admiration sounded sincere; this was no Cain resentful of the glory bestowed upon Abel. As a physician in a popular field, Grayson could hardly be deemed a failure himself. However, if his portrait of Culver Bryant was accurate, the man’s disappearance and possible murder were even more puzzling than she’d originally thought. Who would want to kill someone like Culver? If he hadn’t been killed but merely abducted, why hadn’t there been demands for ransom? If he had run off on his own, what could explain the abandonment of wife, girlfriend, and business by a man who supposedly wanted to do right by everyone?
They had reached a busy intersection and, by some unspoken common impulse, turned simultaneously to walk back to Javaland. Grayson gave her a faint smile. “I take it all these questions are for your own private investigation, since the boys in blue no doubt weren’t too pleased with the false lead you gave them.”
“The boys in blue—the girls, too, for that matter—know that most leads are false ones. They’re hardly going to expect me or anyone else to be right 100 percent of the time.”
“But you do need to be right 100 percent of the time, and you know that. Otherwise they won’t ever believe you. They didn’t believe you right from the start. Correct?” She said nothing. “They don’t listen. They don’t understand.”
“And you do?” she snapped.
“Maybe. Certainly, in one very important way, I understand you better than anyone else you know.”
This was impossible to deny, even if she would have loved to deny it. All her life she had felt like part of a freak show, separated from the normal world by virtue of this one strange thing she could do, like the guy who swallowed swords or the woman who twisted her limbs into complicated knots.
They were back at the Javaland parking lot. Leaning forward slightly, Grayson seemed to be reading her thoughts again. “We are different from other people. That’s always hard. It’s hard to try to fit in and it’s hard to decide not to fit in. Either way you feel like you lose. But it doesn’t have to be
that way all the time, Nola.”
Nola knew she had to get into her car and leave now before her head exploded from everything Grayson said. Again she hesitated—what in the world could she say?
Grayson either rescued her or took advantage of the moment by speaking again. “There’s someplace I want to take you Tuesday night. It’s a special dinner party I’ve been invited to. I can’t describe it, not because I’m trying to be coy but because it’s a bit hard to describe. Honestly, I’m not all that sure what it’s going to be like myself—I prefer to think of it as an interesting experiment.”
“Dinner and experiment. Not two words I’d put together unless I was the one doing the cooking.” She was pleased at her quip, in large part because the invitation had flustered her.
He smiled but was clearly waiting for a definite answer. “I’m inviting you because I think you should come with me—I hope you’ll come with me—so you can see what I’m saying about this: you don’t have to play by everyone else’s rules.”
She had not thought of herself as a person who was especially rule-bound. After all, she did not have to be sitting here with Grayson, she had not needed to become a tracist, she could have just gone about the ordinary parts of her life very easily. But she was also suspicious of people who sneered at “the rules,” who proclaimed themselves rebels, when in fact most of the time they were merely privileged enough to escape the kinds of consequences other people had to suffer. And she was still suspicious of Grayson in general, for no reason she could put to words beyond the fact that she’d spent no more than a couple of hours with him over two days and already he seemed to have worked his way quite thoroughly into her life.
With all this going on in her mind, she simply said, “OK. I’ll go.”
Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) Page 4
