The Gamble and the Grave (Veronica Barry Book 4)

by Sophia Martin

  “Dad?” he called.

  He could smell sewage.

  He stood still, just outside the doorway, his legs stiff.

  There was no answer. The sound of dripping water came from somewhere inside the garage, as well as an odd creaking. All of a sudden Veronica saw a flash of red, a big red five, and she knew what he would find. She wanted to warn him. She needed to stop him, but he started to walk in.

  “Dad? Are you in here?”

  Veronica wanted to call out, or just interrupt the vision, but she was paralyzed. She watched from within his eyes, as Simeon made his way into the garage.

  He looked up, and Veronica wanted more than anything to close his eyes before he would see. But she couldn’t, and he saw.

  A body drooped, hanging from a beam. It moved slightly, and the creaking noise came from the beam.

  Simeon made a choked noise and froze in place, staring.

  The man’s face was distorted, an awful color between gray and purple. His tongue poked out just slightly between his darkened lips.

  “No,” Simeon groaned. He dug his fingers into his face, pushing into the soft flesh under his eyes, yet still, he looked. “No.” His voice broke over the word and became a low keening, a strange sound that laced itself between the creaking and the dripping.

  At last he tore his eyes from the corpse and turned, running back out of the door. He sprinted across the driveway until his foot caught on something and he went down, hitting the concrete right on one of the fault lines. A sob shook from him and he lay on his side. His knees came up. He huddled, crying in his driveway.

  ~~~

  “Hey. Hey,” Daniel’s voice came through, and Veronica opened her eyes. He’d put on a light but everything was blurry with the tears that still poured from her. She grimaced and buried her face in his chest, weeping.

  Daniel stroked her back without a word at first. Then, when she didn’t stop crying, he began to whisper, “It’s okay. It’s okay. Whoever it was, it wasn’t you. You’re safe. You’re here with me.”

  Finally she regained some balance and pulled away from him, wiping her face with a hand even as he jumped out of bed and returned a moment later with a roll of toilet paper.

  “Thanks,” she murmured as she took it and went about pulling herself together.

  “No problem,” he said. He sat and watched her without speaking.

  “You’re wrong though,” she said, shuddering with another sob that threatened to send her off into another crying jag.

  “Oh? About what?”

  “It was me,” she said, her voice giving out on the last word. She began to sob again.

  “Hey,” he said, scooting closer and wrapping his arm around her. “Hey. We’ll figure it out, okay? Tell me what you saw.”

  She forced herself to take deep breaths. Her chest heaved a bit as she did, and each inhale and exhale was shaky and uneven. “I mean, you were right about it, too,” she said at last, and the look on Daniel’s face was almost enough to transmute her grief into hysteria. The laugh that bubbled up broke half formed, however, and she shook her head. “I just mean… oh, god. I’m going to have to just tell you about the whole dream.”

  She did, and when she came to the part where Simeon smelled the sewage odor, she explained about the red five. “I used to put my age on all my drawings,” she said. “I loved red, so it was usually in red. And I have this awful memory, of a drawing I did. It was of my mother’s death. When my father saw it, he killed himself.”

  Daniel raised his eyebrows. “That seems like an extreme reaction.”

  Veronica shrugged. She felt exhausted. “He had serious problems. He was a drinker,” she said. “And I guess even that young I had displayed my ability. She had left us, you know. She walked out some time before. I guess he hoped she’d come back, and that drawing…”

  “Proved she wouldn’t.”

  Veronica nodded.

  Daniel took her hand in both of his. “I’m really sorry, Ronnie. A lot of people have a bad time of it with their parents. It sounds like you had a worse time than most.”

  She sighed. “I guess. In another way, I was lucky. Cybele took me in and she was good to me. Some kids never escape the bad stuff.” She was thinking of Simeon now, but she’d also seen it too many times before, as a teacher.

  Daniel said nothing for a time and Veronica let some more tears flow, wiping her face every so often. She grieved for herself, but she grieved for Simeon as well. He wasn’t even born yet, and the life that stretched before him was full of pain. She thought of Ariana and her photo.

  “There has to be a way to stop it from happening,” she said.

  “To stop Gerry Wallace from killing himself in what—thirteen years?”

  Veronica gave her head a shake. “No,” she said. “I mean, sure, that would be good too. But I was thinking of Simeon. Of children like him. Children who suffer—you know, like Ariana.”

  “What about her?”

  “I just wish she’d never had to endure what she did. And I want to keep what happened to her from ever happening to anyone else. I mean, it wasn’t just this isolated thing,” Veronica said. “Even if it only happened to her once—once was plenty. It changed who she was. It ruined her life. I just wish I had a time machine. I’d go back and keep her from ever going to that place where Bayer cornered her.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t solve the problem of Bayer being a repeat offender,” Daniel said, but Veronica wasn’t listening.

  She covered her mouth with her hand.

  “What?” Daniel said.

  She stared at him, eyes wide.

  “What?” he said again.

  “I know what I need to do,” she said.

  “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, what?”

  “I was just thinking about other kids… I’ve seen it so many times, Daniel. Kids from the most awful backgrounds. I mean, I don’t doubt their parents tried to be good, but they fail—some of them fail so spectacularly—they hurt their children so badly. And I was thinking about the time machine, and how if I could just have a time machine, I’d go back in time and steal these kids as babies, before the worst stuff could happen to them.”

  “Uh…”

  “And then it hit me. That’s what I have to do for Simeon.”

  “Ronnie, if you’re talking about kidnapping a baby…”

  “Daniel, I’m talking about saving a child from starvation, abuse, and the discovery of his own father’s corpse!” Veronica exclaimed. “He’s sending me these visions, I know it!”

  “Simeon is?”

  “Yes! He’s not born yet. Maybe he’s a spirit right now. He’s showing me what’s going to happen to him if I don’t do something to stop it.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Daniel, don’t you see? I can’t just let his future go forward like this. He’s not going to just bounce back—I mean, it’s amazing he survived being little. You should have seen his siblings, how skinny they were? And the beating he got? And I know it wasn’t the only one.”

  “Ronnie.”

  “It’s up to me, Daniel. I can’t exactly call CPS for something that hasn’t happened yet. I have to get him away from Liz and Gerry.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Daniel demanded. “Are you talking about trying to steal him from the hospital after he’s born? That’s close to impossible, you know, and… not to mention, extremely illegal. You can’t take a child from his parents, no matter how shitty they are—not without going through the right legal channels. Maybe you wait until he’s little, about the age of your first vision. Then make the CPS call.”

  Veronica shook her head. “No. I can’t risk that not working. You know how they are. CPS is always totally overloaded. Neglect isn’t enough most of the time to have children taken out of a home.”

  “So the meth lab ought to be enough to seal the deal,” Daniel said.

  “By the time he’s eight or whatever he’ll have already suffered too m
uch! I have to act now.”

  Daniel rubbed the skin above his eyebrow as if he was getting a headache. “Okay. Okay. You have to act now. Just promise me you’re not going to do anything illegal. You’ll just get arrested and then you won’t be able to help him at all.”

  Veronica blinked. She felt amped up, not tired like before. She knew what she had to do, and she felt ready to go to any lengths to do it. But Daniel was right. She couldn’t get caught breaking the law. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” she said after a moment.

  “Look, I’ll talk to the guys on the drug taskforce tomorrow. Margie Luna might be willing to pay Gerry a visit, just check out his place. She owes me one.”

  Veronica nodded. “That’s good. What would be really helpful is to find out if Liz is living with him, too.”

  Daniel eyed her. “Planning to start stalking her?”

  “I don’t know,” Veronica said honestly. “I just know I have to do something.”

  Chapter 9

  The next day Veronica barely made it through her classes. She was so distracted the students took advantage and got wild. She knew she should send one or more out to talk to a VP but she couldn’t bring herself to do it in either period. It was a bad precedent. They’d be hard to rein in the rest of the year if she ever sorted out the multiple messes she was juggling and actually focused on teaching again.

  When the last class left she breathed a sigh of relief and let herself sink into the chair behind her desk. She pulled a notebook over and made a list of everything she needed to deal with in one column and everything else that whirled in her mind like a tornado but she couldn’t do anything about in another.

  The first column read: “The last two ghosts from Holy Cross. Miguel being mad at me. Helping him find the deed. Ariana’s assault and stopping Thad Bayer. The grave robbery. Find Liz and save Simeon.” As an afterthought, she added, “Break Eric and Felsen up.”

  The second column read: “Melanie. My mother yesterday. My father’s death. All the other kids.”

  Writing it down did help to make it all seem more manageable.

  There was a time when she would have gone home and painted. Since embracing her psychic gift she hadn’t painted much. It wasn’t that she felt the one excluded the other, but rather that she’d realized that the subject of most of her paintings, her whole life, had been her mother. Over and over, she painted the same angel, never letting herself realize that the angel was her own mother.

  Seeing her mother again at the cemetery the day before had reopened the wounds of her childhood, as well as renewing the shock she’d felt when she saw her spirit that night in February almost a year before. It also reminded Veronica of loss of her art. It felt like her mother took it from her by turning out to be the angel. Which, Veronica realized, made no logical sense. But still, some of the anger she felt toward Alcina Barry came from that; Veronica felt incomplete, not really herself, since she gave up trying to paint last spring, after the incident in the woods and its revelation.

  A large part of her fascination with Miguel came from the fact that he painted. She loved to talk to him about his process, the few times the subject had come up. It was as if she hoped that some of his inspiration would infect her.

  She added, “Start painting again” to the first column.

  With a deep breath she folded the paper and slipped it into her purse. She couldn’t deal with painting right now. She didn’t know how to approach Miguel—in fact, she didn’t know if he would ever speak to her again, which was a loss in and of itself, but would also make helping him find the deed and solving Ariana’s mystery harder. Two mysteries, she corrected herself—the rape and the grave robbery. Unless the two were connected.

  Veronica frowned.

  “Why would Thad Bayer want to dig up Ariana’s remains?” she asked aloud.

  The empty classroom made no reply.

  He couldn’t possibly be under the impression that the photo she took was buried with her. And even if it had been—what, in her phone? Who would bury a person with their phone?—why bother digging it back up? What was buried with Ariana would probably have stayed buried forever. Surely there was no reason for Bayer to want anything to do with her remains.

  She got the list out again and unfolded it.

  So. No way to deal with Miguel right now. No way to figure out how to stop Thad Bayer. She didn’t have any ideas about Liz, either. Not right now, anyway. The trick would be to figure out where she was living, but Veronica didn’t even know her last name. Maybe Daniel’s colleague would help somehow. And she had no way to solve the grave robbery—she’d done everything she could the day before—with the help of all of those ghosts. Which brought her to the one thing on the list—besides her scheme to introduce Eric to Khalilah, scheduled for four thirty that day—that she could work on. The remaining debt she owed to the two ghosts.

  ~~~

  One was a man who died at the age of 67 of a cardiac arrest. From what Veronica had pieced together, he had co-founded a hotel chain in Nevada that had spread to northern California. His name was John Cooper. She had never heard of him, nor had she ever noticed any of his hotels—they were called Hotel Alegria. Since Veronica hadn’t done a lot of traveling in the regions where they were located, however, she supposed that wasn’t so surprising.

  What John Cooper wanted was simple enough. He needed to tell his partner that he had a secret safe in his ski lodge, and he needed to give him the combination. However, he refused to provide Veronica with the latter information without the partner present. She would have happily mailed it off like she had with the other notes. It crossed her mind not to let a ghost bully her into doing something she didn’t want to do, but Cooper had been the spirit who had shown her the best view of the two men who dug up Ariana’s grave, and she owed him.

  She went home for a quick lunch and change of clothes. Her teacher clothes today consisted of a denim skirt and cable knit turtleneck. Very nice, but if she was going to drive all the way to Vacaville, where Cooper’s partner’s office was, and try to get herself seen without an appointment, she was going to have to pull out her best interview suit. She hadn’t worn that in years, and she hoped it still fit.

  Veronica refilled the pet dishes, checked on Harry out back, and gave the cats each a couple of strokes on the head. Then she delved into the closet she shared with Daniel. Her suit would at least have the advantage of being warm, as it was red wool herringbone. She put on a white cotton blouse and hose and then, holding her breath, slipped on the skirt. It zipped up. She released the breath in relief. Okay, it was a little snug, but as long as the zipper held, she was in business.

  After slipping on some low pumps she hurried out the door. Vacaville was a about a forty-five minute drive. She figured she’d have just enough time to get there and see Cooper’s partner, as long as that didn’t take more than an hour, and then be back in time to meet Khalilah at four.

  The drive was uneventful and the traffic wasn’t any worse than any other day on I-80, which meant it was still pretty bad. By the time she arrived in Vacaville it had been just over an hour. Veronica chewed her lip as she exited the freeway. She hadn’t factored traffic into her time estimate and she’d be leaving around three if all went well. Rush hour would begin then. She hoped she would make it back in time for her coffee dates, but she probably ought to leave Vacaville before three if she really wanted to make that happen.

  She’d googled Hotel Alegria’s business offices and she followed the streets to a large block of commercial buildings. Once she’d parked, she hurried in, checking a gilt board with black lettering for the right floor. Sure enough, there was Hotel Alegria, on the third floor.

  As she stood alone in the elevator Veronica felt the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck prickle. “Mr. Cooper?” she whispered.

  I’m here.

  “Good. I have to do this quickly. You have to get me in to see him. What should I say?”

  Carson City. The wi
ne convention, two years ago.

  “Uh, okay,” Veronica said. The doors of the elevator opened and she didn’t want anyone to see her talking to herself, so she said nothing else as she walked to the double doors that were labeled Hotel Alegria. She pushed through on one side and approached a low, wide desk with a woman behind it. She had a headset on connected to a phone switchboard and was typing on a computer. Behind her was a room with six cubicles. Veronica wondered what the people who worked in the cubicles did, but now was not the time for a crash course in hotel management. She smiled at the woman, who returned the smile but held up a finger. The woman nodded, her eyes on her screen.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s right, the twenty-seventh. No, I’m quite sure. Alright then. Thank you very much, I’ll be sure he gets the message.”

  Veronica waited, her hands clasped together in front of her.

  The woman punched a button on the phone and turned to her. “May I help you?”

  Veronica took a breath. “I need to see Mr. Dietrich,” she said.

  The woman raised an eyebrow and tapped on her keyboard, consulting her screen.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” Veronica said. “He’s not expecting me.”

  The woman turned back to her. “Well, I…”

  “Tell him it’s regarding the wine convention two years ago in Carson City.”

  The woman’s face, already skeptical, became incredulous. She rocked her head to the side and punched a button on the switchboard. “What name should I give?”

  “Veronica Barry.”

  The woman responded with a short nod. “Mr. Dietrich? I’m sorry to bother you. A Ms. Veronica Barry is here to see you. She says it has to do with—” The woman stopped and looked at Veronica inquiringly.

  “The wine convention in Carson city, two years ago.”

  The woman repeated the phrase.

  There was a long pause.

  “Sir?” the woman prompted at last.

  After another pause, she hit the button on the phone again. She looked up at Veronica with her eyebrows raised. “He said to send you right in.” She indicated a passage through the cubicles. “It’s straight through to the door in back.”