Race Against Time

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  RACE

  AGAINST

  TIME

  A CLAIRE ABBOTT MYSTERY

  Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Copyright © 2016 Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 1963–, author

  Race against time / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.

  (Rapid reads)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0843-0 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-4598-0844-7 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-0845-4 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Rapid reads

  PS8551.N3574R33 2016 C813'.54 C2016-900467-8

  C2016-900468-6

  First published in the United States, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931821

  Summary: Small-town journalist Claire Abbott investigates a bomb threat in the local high school in this work of crime fiction. (RL 3.3)

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Jenn Playford

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  19 18 17 16 • 4 3 2 1

  For Mitch, as always

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  ONE

  Inside the school, the bomb squad tried to find a bomb that could go off at any moment. Police cars and fire trucks surrounded the building. Their emergency lights blazed in the dreary light of this winter afternoon. I shivered from cold as I waited beside the cop cars.

  The students had been evacuated. They now stood in the snow-covered sports field below the school. The kids knew someone had made a bomb threat. They were also watched over by their teachers. So I was surprised to see a teenage boy run into a side entrance of the school. He wore a red hoodie with a black skull on the back.

  “Hey, stop!” I cried. Then I turned to the nearest cop, Officer Banks. “A kid just ran inside.”

  “We have things under control,” Banks said. “All the students have been evacuated.”

  “There’s a boy in that building,” I insisted. “If that school blows, he’ll die!”

  The cop turned his back on me. When I tried to tell him again, he ignored me as if I wasn’t there.

  I tried the firefighters. “There’s a kid in there!” But they also acted as if I was invisible.

  I bolted inside the school after the kid, hoping to stop him. The rows of lockers seemed to go on forever as I raced from room to room. I had only minutes to find the boy and get out of this building before it blew.

  Yet as I turned the corner to race down another hallway, I saw a janitor calmly mopping the floor. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” I yelled as I ran toward him. “There’s a bomb. This place is about to explode!”

  The janitor looked at me blankly.

  “Didn’t you see the cops and their sniffer dog?” I asked him. “They cleared the building. They’re trying to track down the bomb before it goes off.”

  “Why are you here then?” he asked me.

  “I followed a kid inside. Did he run this way?”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Yeah, I thought, tell me something I don’t know. “I tried to tell the cops the boy was here, but they wouldn’t believe me.” I started off again down the hall. “I’ve got to find him.” I glanced back briefly as I called, “Get the hell out of here!”

  “I can help,” the janitor said, but he didn’t run after me. He just stood there in his gray uniform, holding the mop. Even so, as I turned the corner and started down the next hallway, I heard him repeat himself. He sounded as if he were right behind me. “I can help.”

  Then the boom of the explosion sounded, throwing me to the floor. A moment later a ball of fire shot down the hallway toward me. I knew in that instant, before the searing heat hit, that I would certainly die.

  TWO

  “No!” I cried, sitting upright in bed. I blinked into the dark, confused. Where was I? Only a moment ago I’d been running down the high-school hallway, trying to save a kid. Then the school exploded around me. I was so sure I was about to die.

  “What?” Matt said. “Claire, what’s the matter?” He turned on the lamp on the bedside table. We’d been dating for a couple of months. He’d slept over after our date the night before.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “There was a bomb. The high school exploded! Oh my god, Matt. There was a kid in there with me!”

  “It was just a dream, a nightmare.”

  “A dream? No, it was all so real. A boy charged into the school, like he was on a mission. I searched the school, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.” I ran a hand through my mess of curls, trying to remember. The dream was already starting to fade. “There was a janitor too.”

  “A janitor?”

  “He was in the building with me before it exploded. He said he could help me.”

  “Well, I imagine he could.” Matt grinned as he glanced around my bedroom. Clothes were scattered across the floor. “You sure could use a janitor in this place.”

  He had a point. My one-bedroom apartment was cluttered. I had very little storage space, so I ended up piling my things on the floor. I needed a bigger place.

  “Matt, the dream felt so real.” I reached for my cell on the nightstand. “I’ve got to phone my editor. Maybe she’s heard something.”

  I worked for the Black Lake Times. Carol and I were the only two reporters at this small-town newspaper. We regularly phoned each other at home if we heard about a story.

  Matt took my phone and put it back on the nightstand. “It’s three o’clock in the morning. You can’t phone Carol now. Claire, you’re taking this dream far too seriously. It was just a dream.”

  I fell back on my pillow. “But I was there. And I felt so helpless. The police wouldn’t listen to me. When I said there was a kid in the building, they ignored me.”

  “The cops would never do that.” Matt leaned on his elbow to face me. “Look, your mind is just working through these visions you’ve been having. You know the cops never take your mom’s visions seriously. You’re scared they’ll judge you too.”

  Matt was right, of course. My mom had made a habit of telling the police about her visions. She’d think she knew where a lost child was, or where a body would be found. But she was often wrong. The child or the body would be found in another place.

  The police were polite to Mom at first. Now they wouldn’t take her calls. They thought she was crazy.

  The trouble was, over the past winter I’d suddenly started having visions too. That was how Matt and I had ended up together. Matt was the search-and-rescue manager f
or our area. I’d told him about my vision of a girl named Amber Miller. I was sure she wasn’t just lost. She had been kidnapped. In the end, it turned out I was right.

  At first Matt thought I was crazy, but I won him over. We ended up dating after that. Well, after I broke things off with a certain firefighter. But all that was history now. I had definitely fallen for Matt. I felt a thrill run through me as I looked at his handsome face.

  “You know what’s strange about my visions?” I asked.

  Matt laughed. “That you’re having them?”

  I shook my head. “My mom only ever has visions of the present. She holds an object that belongs to a person and sees a vision of what’s happening to the owner right then.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “When you and your team were searching the forest for Amber Miller, my visions were taking place in the present too. When I saw those fires that Trevor set, I saw visions of the past.”

  Matt held back a yawn. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “Now I think I’m seeing into the future.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I do. Someone will set a bomb in that high school. Matt, if I don’t stop him, I’m sure the school will explode.”

  “Why are you so certain?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know why. I just knew.

  “I’ve got to warn the cops,” I said, reaching for my cell again.

  Matt put his hand on mine to stop me from phoning. “And what are you going to tell the police? That you had a dream the school would blow up? Claire, you know what they’re going to say.”

  “That I’m as nutty as my mom.”

  He nodded. “You’ve built a reputation in this town. Don’t ruin it like your mom ruined hers.”

  “But Matt, what if I’m right? What if someone is planting a bomb in that school? Think of the kids, all those lives in danger. What if I could prevent the explosion from happening?”

  “And how would you do that? Do you know who will set the bomb?”

  I thought back to the dream. I had seen the kid running into the building. Then I saw a janitor washing the floor. I felt the boom of the explosion as the flames rushed toward me.

  “No,” I said. “But that boy ran into the school just before it exploded. He was up to something. I suppose he could have been the bomber.”

  “Do you know the kid?”

  “No.”

  “Come here.” Matt wrapped his strong arms around me. “It was just a dream, a silly nightmare.”

  I nestled into his muscular chest. I felt so safe in his arms that I could almost believe he was right.

  “You’ll forget all about it by morning,” he said.

  I sighed. Morning couldn’t come soon enough.

  THREE

  I stumbled into work early, carrying a cup of coffee. I hadn’t slept after that terrible dream, though Matt snored the rest of the night. I kept rolling what I remembered of the nightmare over in my mind. Was the kid in the dream the bomber? Was the janitor? Why did the janitor tell me he could help me? Why had Officer Banks ignored my warning?

  Little about the dream made sense. Yet I knew from my familiar gut feeling that I was right. I had dreamed of the future.

  I set my coffee on my desk and fell into my chair, cradling my head in my hands. If I phoned the cops about the dream, I knew they would laugh at me. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Rough night?” Carol asked.

  I looked up to see my editor at her desk. “You could say that,” I said. Lost in thought, I hadn’t seen her when I entered. Carol was chubby, and her hair was frizzy from bleaching, but she had a kind face.

  “Did Matt keep you up all night again?” she asked.

  I grinned sideways at her. “Only until midnight.”

  “Huh. I find that hard to believe.” She looked over the rumpled dress shirt and slacks I’d pulled from the dryer. I hadn’t had time to iron them that morning. “You look like you didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

  I glanced at the small mirror on the wall beside my desk. My curly hair was a tangled mess. I hadn’t been able to tame it that morning. My brown eyes were ringed with fatigue. Usually I looked younger than my age, thirty-one. Not this morning.

  I sighed. “I had a nightmare and couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  Carol sat forward, interested. “What kind of nightmare? Was it one of your visions?”

  I had told Carol how my visions helped me catch a kidnapper and a firebug. But I knew I couldn’t trust what I thought I saw in these visions. I was often wrong, jumping to conclusions. I had got an innocent kid arrested.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said, waving a hand. “Nothing but a silly dream.”

  I sipped my coffee, hoping Carol would drop the subject. Matt was right. I had to be careful what I said about the dream. I wasn’t about to tell Carol I was now dreaming of the future. If word got out about that, everyone in town would be asking me for lottery numbers.

  Carol eyed me a moment, then sat back. “Well, I need you to pull yourself together and get up to the high school right away.”

  I stood, alarmed. “The high school?”

  “Some kid tweeted a bomb threat against the school this morning.”

  “Oh my god,” I said. I felt sick. Was my nightmare really happening?

  “What was that boy thinking?” Carol asked. “He’s scared all those kids at that school, not to mention their parents. And for what? The thrill of seeing the fire trucks arrive with their lights on? The cops with their sniffer dog?”

  “So you don’t believe there really is a bomb.”

  “No, of course not. There’s been a wave of bomb threats across the country. In almost every case, a kid made the threat on social media. It was always just a prank.”

  “I think there may be a bomb this time,” I said.

  “Why? You hear something? You know who made that bomb threat?”

  “No, this is the first I’ve heard of it.” Sort of, I thought.

  “Then what?”

  I hesitated. “In that dream I had, the school exploded.”

  Carol smiled, but not unkindly. “The school won’t explode.”

  “I can’t shake this feeling that it will,” I said. I grabbed my camera bag. “Maybe I can stop it from happening.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt the emotion catch in my throat. “But I have to try. I must have had that dream for a reason. If I don’t find a way to stop that bomber, a lot of lives will be lost.” Including my own, I thought.

  FOUR

  When I reached the school, I felt I had stepped back into my nightmare. Police cars and fire trucks surrounded the school. The cops had already evacuated the students. The kids waited with their teachers on the snow-covered sports field.

  Instead of trying to warn Officer Banks as I had in my dream, I went straight to Fire Chief Wallis. Jim was a family friend. My visions had helped him catch a firebug. I thought he might believe me.

  The chief stood next to one of the fire trucks, dressed in full firefighting gear. “The kids should be farther back,” I said. “They could be hit by debris if a bomb goes off.”

  “You telling me how to do my job again?” The chief elbowed me in the ribs to let me know he was joking. “They’re fine, Claire. And I doubt there is a bomb.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  He lost his grin. “You know something I don’t?”

  I paused. “Maybe,” I said.

  “You had another one of your hunches?”

  “I dreamed the school exploded.”

  “Damn.” He turned back to the school. “Well, there’s nothing you can do now. The cops are in there with the sniffer dog.”

  “But the bomb would be well hidden, right?”

  “The dog is trained to smell explosives. If there is a bomb, the officer and his dog will find it.”

  “If they’re not too late.�
�

  Just then I saw the boy from my dream run into the side entrance of the school. He wore a red hoodie with a black skull on the back. “That’s him!” I cried. “That’s the kid I saw in my dream.”

  “What kid?” Jim asked. He clearly hadn’t seen him.

  In my dream, I had wasted time trying to convince the cops and firefighters to follow the kid inside. Instead, I ran toward the school right away.

  “Claire!” Jim called after me. “What are you doing?”

  I turned briefly. “I’ve got to stop that kid.”

  “Claire, stop! You can’t go in there!”

  But I was already pushing open the side door to the school.

  I sprinted down the hallway, looking into each classroom. I felt certain the bomb was about to go off any minute, as it had in my dream. I felt that eerie feeling like I had lived this moment before. I had, in my nightmare.

  As I turned the corner, I saw a janitor mopping the floor. He was the same man I’d seen in my dream. When he saw me he looked as surprised as I felt. He stopped to lean on the handle of his mop as I ran toward him. “Can I help you?” he asked me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “There was a bomb threat.”

  Again I felt a shiver run through me. This conversation was strangely like the one I’d had with him in my dream the night before.

  “The cops said I could go ahead and wipe up this mess.” He pointed at the boot and dog tracks that muddied the floor. “The sniffer dog didn’t find a bomb. They’re going let the kids back in shortly.”

  “They can’t do that!” I turned to look down the hall. “Did you see a boy run this way?”

  “One of the students? He shouldn’t be in here, not yet.”

  Yeah, I thought, tell me something I don’t know. I started off again down the hall. “I’ve got to find him.” I glanced back briefly as I called, “Get the hell out of here!”

  The janitor didn’t turn to leave. He just stood there in his gray uniform, holding the mop as he stared after me.

  I realized that in the dream, this was the moment the bomb went off. This was the instant I died.