Trace (TraceWorld Book 1)

by Letitia L. Moffitt

  Jack chuckled. “Crawford’s right, though I’m glad he wasn’t the one who gave the press conference about it. I could just see some reporter—that WRFT guy, Keith Reynolds—eating it up.”

  Jen laughed, too. “‘This just in: Redfort police have sorry asses. Stay tuned!’”

  Nola and Kimberly joined in the laughter, and Nola couldn’t help noticing that Kimberly’s coldness seemed to disappear in reaction to Jen. When the moment ended, however, Kimberly’s eyes darted once more back to Nola and the chill returned. Nola didn’t dare look at Jack, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t completely oblivious to what was going on. Normally, he’d be leading the conversation—he was a natural leader and the only one familiar to each of the rest of them—but he seemed to be brooding over something. Nola dared not flatter herself into thinking that something was her, that the conversation he and his wife had been having about Nola involved suspicion, jealousy, and guilt. Perhaps the Bryant case was weighing on him; it had been several days since the missing-person report had been filed, after all, and there had been no progress that Nola knew of. The case, as Jack had noted, was high-profile. All of Redfort, indeed all of Morgan County, was watching, and what they had seen so far did not make him or the department look good.

  But if the Bryant case was what had put Jack in a somber mood, why did his wife look like she was about to hiss and claw at Nola’s face? Because she’s a bitch, Nadine would have whispered in her ear, and they’d both have to bite their lips to keep from screaming with laughter and looking like they were already tanked. Luckily, Jen Hanson came through again, possibly because she sensed the weirdness and wanted to smooth things over or simply because she was just a decent person who wanted her guests to enjoy themselves. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you,” Jen said, turning to Nola. “I hope this isn’t too personal or anything, but . . . what’s it like, feeling trace?”

  Nola hesitated, noticing that she suddenly seemed to have an audience. Jen had tactfully positioned herself in such a way as to suggest that their conversation was a personal one, but unfortunately she had spoken during one of those sudden lulls that occur at parties, and everyone had heard. Everyone, including the Daltons, turned toward them.

  “I’m sorry,” Jen quickly said. “I bet you get asked that all the time, huh? Excuse me while I pry my foot from my mouth yet again.”

  Nola smiled reassuringly at her. “No, don’t apologize, it’s fine. Yes, people who know about it do ask, and it’s not rude or personal. It’s just hard to describe. It’s like . . . well, please don‘t think I mean to be patronizing, but it’s like describing color to someone who has never had sight. You can sort of say what it’s like, but not really, and you can never even come close to what it is.” It occurred to her that this was very similar to the analogy Grayson had used to describe the way he took trace: like opening your eyes to bright light after being in the dark. Well, it was an apt analogy, Nola thought, regardless of who said it. Of course, Grayson was pretty much the only person she knew who could have said it.

  “If tracism is like sight, I’d rather be blind,” Kimberly Dalton interjected with a shudder. “I don’t even like to hear about people dying, much less feel them die. Whenever Jack starts to talk about something awful that happened on the job, I have to plug my ears.” She turned and gave her husband another look, the kind of look that was perhaps meant to suggest private, unspoken communication between a couple.

  Jack didn’t return the look.

  Jeb Crawford came over to join them and put his arm around Jen. “My parents went to Germany last summer, and one of the things they saw was the concentration camp at Dachau. My father was worried my mother might become so overwhelmed by it that she wouldn’t want to continue with their travels. She’s very sensitive to human suffering, my mother. She sometimes cries when she watches the news. But something strange happened: my father fainted. The moment they stepped through the gates, he gasped and passed out cold. The guides revived him and my mother took him immediately back to their hotel, where he told her he had felt this sudden surge of . . . horror—that was the word he used. I’ve always wanted to ask you, Nola, if you think that had something to do with trace.”

  Petty concerns about jealousy and guilt receded as Nola considered his words, and then her own. “It’s possible. There is almost certainly still a lot of trace left in those camps. And it’s been hypothesized that everyone can detect trace to some extent. But it’s possible that your father is also very sensitive to human suffering. He was so concerned about his wife’s feelings that he hadn’t prepared himself for his own reaction. And when he was suddenly hit with the full force of that place, well, it hit him hard.”

  Jeb and Jen nodded in unison. “That’s Jeb’s father exactly,” said Jen. “Would you believe, afterward he felt terrible for not being able to complete the tour. I’ve heard him say he thinks it’s important for people never to forget the past, no matter how horrible and shameful.”

  “Especially when it’s horrible and shameful,” Jeb added. “He felt like he failed, somehow.”

  “I can see that. I can’t say I enjoy experiencing trace,” Nola began, but then once more she thought of Grayson and faltered. Recovering, she blurted, “But I don’t have a lot of respect for people who refuse to face harsh realities.” She could feel the weight of Kimberly’s stare and it occurred to her that her last remark could be perceived as an insult based on Kimberly’s assertion that she didn’t like to hear about people dying. “But, I mean,” Nola rushed on, “most people are sensitive about death. Most people have a strong reaction to it.”

  “You don’t.” Kimberly again. Now it was Nola’s turn to stare. “Jack tells me you volunteer for these cases.” Jack talks to you about me? “Obviously it doesn’t bother you the same way it would a normal person.”

  There it was: the word normal. Nola was not normal.

  “Thank goodness for that,” Jeb said quickly. “I’m always impressed with Nola’s work. She’s a professional. I respect that.”

  “I guess it’s the same for coroners, and maybe even surgeons and other kinds of doctors,” Jen piped in. “It’s your work, and you do it and do it well and that’s all there is to it. Believe me”—she leaned toward Nola with a sly look as if confiding a juicy secret—“there are times the kids at school are driving me nuts and I wish I worked with dead people!”

  Everyone around Nola laughed, and Nola forced a fake chuckle, which died instantly in her throat when Kimberly spoke again. “But it isn’t her work. She’s a volunteer. That’s my point. It’s one thing if your job is to perform autopsies and you’re an expert and people are relying on you for your expertise. It’s another thing entirely if it’s your, I don’t know, hobby or something. Don’t you think that would be kind of—”

  “Kimber,” Jack said quietly.

  Kimberly Dalton whirled around to face her husband. He didn’t look at her, keeping his eyes downcast. Nola couldn’t tell if he was angry, embarrassed, or simply giving her more private couples communication.

  This time the savior was Matt Gorsky, who chose that awkward moment to burst through the door and shout, “The stripper’s here! I was supposed to jump out of a cake but I got hungry on the way over.”

  Nola nearly jumped into his arms, she was so happy to see him and so ecstatic to get away from the Daltons. “Do not ever let me go to one of these things alone again, Mutt,” she murmured to him, pulling him away to another part of the house.

  “Damn. Sounds like I missed all the good stuff. Dish, Nola. Has Lady Dalton been calling ‘off with her head’?”

  Nola stared at him and then drained her wine glass so he could pour her some more. “How did you know this was about her?”

  “Me detective. Me smart. Plus, come on, doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes—not even the new one where Watson is a blogger—to figure it out. Jack Dalton talks about you constantly. Ever since the Amy Siegel case, he has not run out of good things to say about
you.”

  It was what she’d wanted to hear. Now that she’d heard it, she refused to believe it. “Yeah, because I helped find her.”

  “You more than helped, Nola. You solved that case. We had just about given up. We wouldn’t have found the girl if not for you.”

  “I didn’t ‘solve’ anything, Mutt. I acted in the capacity of a sniffer dog—a last-resort sniffer dog. It was only because you’d just about given up that you used my help at all.”

  “You’re missing the point, Nola. Whether you value your work or not, Dalton does. That’s why he talks about you. That’s why his wife is jealous.”

  “Jealous? Her? Of me? She’s the one who got him,” she blurted and then smacked her forehead, realizing she was as much as admitting her infatuation with their boss.

  At that moment, Jeb joined them. “V-8?” he said to Nola, provoking a groan from Matt. “Sorry. It had to be said.”

  “No, no it didn’t. I was just telling Nola how the boss’s wife is jealous of her.”

  “Mutt, for chrissake,” Nola sputtered.

  “It’s true,” Jeb said simply.

  “Look, I know you’re both just trying to make me feel better, and I appreciate it, but—”

  “We are trying to make you feel better by giving you some insight into the situation,” said Jeb. “Kimberly Dalton said those things to be hurtful. It’s foolish to take them as truth.”

  “But aren’t the most hurtful things often true? They hurt because we don’t like to admit them to ourselves. Denial,” she said, quoting one of her father’s favorite quasi-aphorisms, “is more than a river in Egypt.”

  Matt grinned. “You have never struck me as someone who wades in that particular river.”

  “Agreed,” Jeb said. “Don’t let Kimberly Dalton or anyone else get to you. You’re always saying trace isn’t good or bad, it just is. Well, you may not see yourself as heroic, but you aren’t a freak either. OK?”

  Nola nodded. “OK.” But privately she knew it wasn’t quite so simple. It was easy for Jeb to make these pronouncements. Normal people, people who fit in with the world in certain basic ways, had the leisure to support or condemn those who did not fit quite so easily. They could be generous like Jeb or petty like Kimberly according to their own whims, and either way it was all the same to them: they pronounced judgment, and those being judged had to live with it. If she played nicely with the normal people and went along with their rules, she would be deemed acceptable, a Rudolph whose glowing nasal deformity proved useful to the world. If things went otherwise, she’d be stuck doing the work of a machine, invisible and inconsequential.

  She watched the two men confer with each other on another subject for a moment. Matt Gorsky understood what it was like to be outside the “normal” world—it could not have been easy dealing with the rumors, whether founded or otherwise, that he was a gay cop—and so understood perhaps a little better than others did how Nola felt. But Matt somehow wasn’t bothered by his status as outsider; he seemed to shrug it off in a way Nola envied but believed would be impossible to achieve herself. Maybe it helped that Matt, if he really was gay, wasn’t alone; like anywhere else, Redfort had a well-established gay and lesbian community, and being gay was something most people understood even if some of them still did not accept it. Almost no one understood tracism.

  But Grayson Bryant did. She thought about him when she finally was able to leave the party, figuring she’d been there long enough, not feeling much like sticking around any longer. For all his privileges, his education, his wealth and status, Grayson defined himself foremost by the one quality that put him on the fringe. He was right: he and Nola understood each other in a way few people ever would.

  This time she managed to get out of the car and halfway up the stairs before her cell phone rang. She figured it would be Lynette, but it wasn’t.

  It was Jack Dalton. She nearly fell back down the stairs.

  “Hello . . .” Sir? Jack? What was she supposed to call him? She weakly added, “. . . there.”

  “Nola,” he said and then paused.

  Tracists were not psychics, but Nola already knew from the tone of his voice that this was not going to be a declaration of his undying love. “Culver Bryant has been found?” she asked.

  “Culver Bryant’s body has been found.”

  12

  Nola hated to admit it to anyone, but she had learned most of the scientific aspects of trace from her college boyfriend, Rawley. Despite having a name that made her picture a furry mutt, tail wagging and tongue lolling, Rawley had a streak of morbidity that he began to see as leading him to his calling. Death fascinated him, or so he claimed, in the way of certain intense young men in college whom quiet, studious girls might fall for temporarily because at least they weren’t draining a keg every night and waking up head in toilet every morning. Rawley was also in med school at the time, though he seemed vastly indifferent to everything involved with becoming a doctor save visiting the morgue. He wanted to do research, not deal with sick people, and Nola supported his decision wholeheartedly, even though a part of her sank, thinking about all the god-awful blather she was going to have to listen to for however long they stayed together. If her roommates knew just how avidly Rawley enjoyed describing postmortems when she and he were post-coital, they might not remark so frequently on how lucky Nola was to “land a future doctor.” When one night the blather began pre-coital, Nola found herself wondering just how dense—or pervy—a man would have to be to think that this kind of talk was in any way a turn-on.

  But then an odd thing happened: the blather started to become interesting. A month before that night, Rawley had witnessed the death of a woman in ICU, and it was all he’d been able to think about since. This particular night, he described the project he had thought up because of that incident: he wanted to measure the energy released at the point of a human being’s expiration. “There is a release of energy. I’m certain of it. It’s as real and measurable as an earthquake.” He babbled on about the possibility of inventing a sort of Richter scale for human death—the Rawley scale, he joked, though it was obvious he liked the sound of it.

  Rawley hadn’t been in on the research that named it, alas. As far as she knew (they broke up the day she graduated), he was still in med school hanging out with the cadavers, boring even them with his endless death chatter. During their time together, there had already been legitimate trace studies in the works. It was all still very new, of course, seen by many as something akin to astrology or alchemy, and the equipment to measure it accurately was still a work in progress. None of that was her problem, though. She wasn’t a research scientist who needed to sound legitimate enough to secure grant money. She was a person with an unusual sensitivity to trace, and she was trying to make use of this to make her life more meaningful.

  At the moment, she was failing spectacularly at it.

  “Our initial observations indicate that Culver Bryant committed suicide.”

  Suicide. Not murder. And obviously not in any way involving Grayson. This should have been a relief to her, but she’d already begun to believe Grayson had nothing to do with his brother’s disappearance. All she could think now was that this was probably the last time she’d be sitting in this room listening to Dalton give a briefing.

  It was the morning after the body had been found, and they were assembled once again in that dreary windowless room, Nola and all the detectives who had been present at the initial briefing. Jack Dalton did not like people to have partial information. Obviously, there were situations that required “need to know” discretion, but he hated shutting anyone out midway through an investigation, which explained why Nola was there. While she appreciated being included, she found herself increasingly wishing she could disappear from the room. She didn’t belong here. She was dead weight. She had contributed nothing to this case, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Now it was starting to look like she’d given them a whole lot of false leads.

 
; Nola tried to focus, tried to put away her self-pity and concentrate on what was being said. She’d discovered too many peculiar little things about the people in Culver’s life for them not to matter in some way. Surely there had to be more than Dalton’s calm tone of voice would suggest.

  The next thing he said was exactly the “more” she had wanted. “His body was found in his car in the garage of one of the new houses being built at Greenbriar.”

  Immediately her mind flashed back to her visit to Greenbriar, and Vincent Kirke’s curtailment of her tour.

  “He was found by Mrs. Patricia Braxton, an employee in the Greenbriar office. Mrs. Braxton said she was showing one of the model homes to a potential client. As they were driving by, she noticed the garage door of one of the houses was shut when all of the others had been left open.”

  Vincent hadn’t shown her all the models and hadn’t taken her the whole way around the grounds. If he had, they might have gone by that particular house. An odd memory came to her—the image of a row of half-constructed houses—along with the strange feeling that she was playing that kids’ game where you look at a picture and circle things that are out of place. In that moment before Vincent had hustled her away, something had registered in her mind as not fitting. In retrospect, she could assume it was the one closed garage door, but it didn’t help much to realize that now.

  “The coroner made a preliminary identification at the scene. The body was taken to Delacroix Hospital, and the fingerprints matched with those on file for Culver James Bryant.”

  Why would Culver do it there? He had to know it would be unlikely anyone would find him there for a while. Why would a man who supposedly cared deeply about the people in his life make them suffer by not knowing what happened to him for nearly a week?

  “A note was found next to the body, apparently handwritten by Bryant. The handwriting is being assessed. The content of the note indicates that Bryant was distressed that his wife found out about his infidelity. Most of the note is an apology written directly to her.”