Resurrection

by Sara Reinke

Oh, my God! How did he find me?

  She blinked at him in mute shock. After a moment, his expression grew sheepish. “Jobeth Montgomery?” he asked again hesitantly, as if worried she didn’t recognize him and he was making a monumental ass out of himself.

  Jo knew if she didn’t say something―say anything―he would turn around and leave, and she’d never learn the truth about what had happened to her. I don’t want to know! a part of her mind screamed. It wasn’t real! It couldn’t be real! I don’t want to know what happened!

  “Well…hi,” she said, forcing herself to breathe again.

  He blinked and then visibly relaxed, the anxious tension draining from his shoulders. He smiled slightly, almost shyly. “Hi, yourself.”

  Jo started at the coincidence of the situation, and his smile widened, broaching toward laughter as he realized it, too. That he recognized the irony of their greeting only made Jo want to run toward her car. He can’t know! It was just a dream!

  “Who…who are you?” she whispered, standing her ground despite her desperate, urgent wish to flee. This man was no dream; he was flesh and blood and standing before her, and no matter her mind’s protests, she wanted to know. She needed to know what had happened.

  “My name is Jay Frances,” he said, offering his hand.

  She stared at him for a long moment and then reached out, pressing her palm against his, letting his fingers close around hers. “How did you find me? How do you know my name?” she asked.

  “You dropped this when you ran away,” he said. He drew his hand away and reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a battered, laminated tag―her hospital identification card. She had thought it lost during that peculiar, half-forgotten, half-dreamed weekend, and stared in shock at it, at the blood smeared and spattered across the words Metropolitan Hospital. She felt tears sting her eyes and pressed her lips together in a thin line, struggling to stave them. “Thank you, Jay,” she whispered, because she knew he had done something to save her. Something had happened to her in that garage stairwell, something terrible. Dream or no dream, she knew that it had―and that he had saved her somehow.

  Her tears spilled, and she uttered a helpless little gasp as her hands darted to her face. She felt his hand slip around to cradle the back of her head, and she didn’t resist as he drew her against his shoulder, holding her gently, letting her weep against his lapel.

  “It’s alright,” he whispered, turning his face down to speak softly, his breath warm against her ear. “It’s alright.”

  * * *

  Jay had been unable to breathe, much less muster the voice to call out to Jobeth Montgomery when he’d seen her crossing the hospital parking lot. He had taken the afternoon off from work, hoping for the chance to meet her. When he had that chance, he had found himself mute and rooted to the spot.

  At last, he’d forced himself to call out her name. She had turned to him, her long, auburn hair drooping out of her hastily secured topknot in long tendrils, her cheeks and nose flushed red with chill. She had taken his breath again. My God, she’s beautiful, he thought―the exact same thing he’d thought when she had rolled over to face him in her deathscape bed.

  When she burst into tears and took refuge in his arms, his heart had ached for her. He couldn’t begin to explain the effect this woman had over him. All he knew was that he had been unable to stop thinking about her for almost three full days now, and it wasn’t entirely because she was the first person he had ever fully restored―body, mind and soul―during a resurrection.

  “Daddy, is your friend, that lady, going to come and visit us again soon?” Emma had asked him that morning over breakfast. He had been lost in thought, nursing a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, while his daughter sat stirring her Cheerios with her spoon.

  Jay had blinked at her, startled from his distracted thoughts, and amazed that Emma had seemed to so accurately share his thoughts. “I…I don’t know, Em.”

  “But you want her to,” Emma again uncannily deduced. “You like her.”

  At this, Marie, his housekeeper, had cleared her throat loudly in disapproval from the kitchen. Marie thought that Jay had brought Jo home and to his bed after an overindulgent night of drinking. If only you knew, Marie, he’d thought.

  It was ridiculous, of course. He didn’t like Jobeth Montgomery. He didn’t even know her. He hadn’t been able to glance at a woman in the past two years without the image of Lucy’s face haunting his mind, wrenching his heart. That he had succumbed so easily and without a thought of his dead wife while in Jo’s deathscape―the warm bed and even warmer embrace into which she’d drawn him―left him ashamed.

  “What happened that night?” Jo whispered to him in the parking lot.

  “Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” he said. “I’ll explain what I can.”

  Which is nothing that sounds sane.

  She nodded, drawing away from him, sniffling and hiccupping for breath. “Alright,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with her fingertips. She looked uncertain and afraid, and he wanted to tell her that he understood her feelings completely.

  * * *

  He told her everything that he knew and to her credit, she sat still and listened to him with a stoic expression as she held a cup of coffee untasted between her hands. They had returned to the hospital and sat together in a corner of the cafeteria. It was almost five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for lunch, but too early for the dinner rush yet, and they had the cafeteria nearly to themselves.

  He told her about finding her body in the stairwell at the mall garage, surrounded by a pool of blood, her torso riddled with stab wounds, her head bloodied and beaten. He told her about touching her, about what had happened next, when the tingling in his hands had grown too urgent to resist.

  He didn’t tell her about her deathscape, the endless bed or their lovemaking. He knew she remembered this, but it clearly embarrassed her, and he didn’t want to traumatize her more than circumstances surely had.

  When at last he was through, he reached for his coat pocket. “I found this,” he said. He offered her a small picture frame wrapped in a plastic bag. It had been in the trunk of his car with his own shopping bag, but he hadn’t purchased it and had never seen it before. “I think it’s yours.” It wasn’t until yesterday that he’d found the Easy Bake Oven, Emma’s birthday present, stowed away in the trunk. That he had carried both Jo and the shopping bags back to his car, and then driven home in the stupefied state that followed his resurrections left him helplessly aghast.

  Jo nodded, holding the picture frame stiffly between her hands. “It was a gift,” she said. “I bought it at the mall, one of those ‘Secret Santa’ gifts. We all drew names on the ward, and I got Laney’s. She just had a new granddaughter. I thought she’d like to keep a picture of her in it.”

  She looked pained, her eyes flooding momentarily with tears again. She pressed her lips together staunchly and looked away over his shoulder, a crease crimping her brow.

  “The glass is broken,” Jay said clumsily. “I may have dropped it. I’ll give you money to buy a new one…”

  Jo shook her head. “No, it’s alright,” she murmured, still not meeting his gaze. “I fell on the stairs. That’s when the glass broke.”

  She seemed as determined not to admit what had happened as Jay was to confide in her. He knew his explanations didn’t help it all make sense, and he wished now that he hadn’t come to find her. Paul had warned him against it, despite Jay’s overeager insistence.

  Jay, if you go in there with all guns blazing, telling her some story about how you’ve raised her from the dead, she’s going to think you’re a nut-case.

  And looking at her now, he realized Paul had been right. He and Jo sat together in a prolonged, awkward silence until at length, she cleared her throat.

  “Well,” she said, licking her lips as if carefully choosing her words. “That was quite a story, Jay Frances. Do you turn water into wine, too?”

  He blinked at her, caught off
guard. “What?”

  She rose to her feet, taking the frame in hand and tucking her coat over her arm. “Thank you for returning my picture frame,” she said, turning to leave the cafeteria. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your psychosis.”

  “Jo, wait―” Jay said, catching her by the wrist to stay her. She whirled toward him, her eyes flown wide. The picture frame fell to the floor with a clatter as she wildly wrenched herself loose from his grasp.

  “Get your hand off me!” she snapped, loudly enough for nearby cafeteria workers to look over curiously as they restocked a salad bar. Jo noticed their attention, and immediately lowered her voice, but her brows furrowed and she glared at Jay. “Don’t touch me again. You’re insane. Do you realize that? You did something to me―you probably drugged me somehow, brought me back to your house and raped me. Everything else is just a crazy dream.”

  She didn’t believe that. He could see it plainly in her face, but she was terrified of the truth; the truth was simply too unbelievable to deal with rationally. “If you come here again,” she said, reaching down and snatching up the fallen frame. “If I ever see you again, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail.”

  She started to march smartly for the door, her voice choked, her face flushed.

  “What we said outside, the way we greeted each other―that’s how it happened before,” Jay called after her, drawing her to an abrupt halt. He could see her entire body tense with stunned surprise. He hated to say more, but had no other choice. “That’s why you started to cry. Because you remember it―you remember everything, and so do I.”

  She didn’t move. She remained rooted in place, trembling slightly. He could hear her breath fluttering with tears.

  “You told me I was beautiful,” he said, and her shoulders hunched all the more. “It was an enormous bed that went on and on in every direction. There were brown silk sheets, and we were both naked.”

  He went to her, standing just behind her so that he could lean forward and speak softly against her ear. “We made love,” he breathed. “For what seemed like hours, you let me make love to you. And then you touched my face when we were through and I asked you to come back with me.”

  Jo turned to him, stumbling, her eyes wide, her face ashen. She looked ready to swoon and he slipped a steadying hand against her waist.

  “It’s not possible,” she whispered, stricken, shaking her head. “It…it was just a dream. It has to have been just a dream.”

  He smiled at her sadly, sympathetically. “It wasn’t a dream, Jo,” he said.

  He eased her into her seat at the table once more. “My brother is a police officer. I want you to talk to him. I want you to tell him what happened to you that night.”

  She blinked at him. “What? No, no, I…I can’t talk to the police. He’ll think I’m crazy. He’ll never believe me. Hell, I don’t believe it myself…!”

  “Paul knows about me, about what I can do,” Jay told her. “He’s known since we were kids. He’ll believe you, Jo. I promise. I told him about your crime scene, the way you were killed. He thinks you were attacked by someone he’s been investigating―a serial killer called the Watcher who’s killed three other women.”

  “The Watcher,” Jo repeated, and Jay nodded.

  “He stalks his victims for months sometimes before he attacks,” Jay said. “That’s how he got his name―he watches people. If it was him, Jo, he’s been watching you, too, and if he’s still watching you, he could try to hurt you again.”

  Her eyes widened again with sudden fear. She looked about, her gaze darting unconsciously around the cafeteria.

  “Please, Jo,” Jay said, slipping his hand against hers. “Talk to my brother. He can keep you safe. And you’re the only person who might know who this guy is, who has seen him.”

  She sat there, shivering for a long moment and he worried that she still didn’t believe him, didn’t realize the danger she could still be in. But at last, she folded her fingers against his hand and nodded once. “Alright,” she whispered. “I’ll talk to him.”

  He nodded, reaching for his cell phone to call Paul before she changed her mind, but she caught his hand and stayed him. “Will…will you be there, too?” she asked softly.

  You like her, Emma had told him, with the sort of innocent frankness only a child could manage. With these three words, his five-year-old daughter had summed up what he himself had been struggling not to admit for days. Something had happened to him in Jobeth Montgomery’s deathscape; something far more than sex. He had felt it ever since, andsuddenly, as he sat holding her hand, Jay realized that―no matter what she said to the contrary―Jo believed in what had happened to her. She felt it, too.

  “Will you stay with me?” Jo asked, her eyes swimming with a gloss of tears again.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll stay with you, Jo.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jo trusted Paul Frances almost immediately. The police detective had a quiet, unassuming manner about him that put her at ease nearly from the moment of their introduction. She felt uncomfortable going to police headquarters to speak with him so Jay arranged for them to meet at Paul’s house.

  The three sat around a small table in Paul’s kitchen. Paul was six years older than Jay, and had she not been told they were brothers, she would never have guessed. Where Jay had a full head of dark hair and dark eyes to match, Paul had thinning, sandy-colored hair and blue eyes. He explained that his wife was still at work, and though his teen-aged daughters were home from school, both would be preoccupied with talking on the telephone or playing on the internet, and neither would disturb them while they spoke.

  Paul fixed a pot of coffee, but as at the hospital cafeteria earlier, Jo settled for cradling a steaming mug between her hands without really sipping at it. It surprised her how readily details of her attack returned to her as she answered Paul’s questions and described what had happened. She had tried to force memories of the event from her mind, and certainly hadn’t spoken of it with anyone. But the more she spoke, the more she remembered. Details came unbidden, from the way the man smelled…

  “Like soap, hand soap or dish detergent,” she offered, but then she frowned and shook her head. “No, it was different than that. Stronger.”

  …to the way he was built.

  “He was tall and thick,” she said, her eyes distant and down-turned toward her coffee cup as she remembered. “Taller than either of you, and heavier set. But it wasn’t muscle, even though he was strong. He was sort of fat.”

  Jay reached for her, draping his hand against hers, and she curled her fingers about his without even thinking about it. It felt comfortable and welcome, holding his hand. It felt as though it was something she had done every day of her life when she had found herself in need of support.

  “He hit me in the head from behind with something. The lights were out on the landing, but I didn’t really think anything about it when I was going up the stairs. I heard something behind me, and I started to turn around. That’s when he hit me.”

  She touched the back of her head, just behind her ear, toward the base of her skull. “It knocked me out for a minute or two. I fell down. That’s when the picture frame in my pocket broke. He was wearing surgical gloves. Heavy duty latex. He kept getting frustrated because he couldn’t pull my pants down with them on.”

  She recounted the entire assault as Paul and Jay listened quietly with neither comment nor interruption. By the time she finished, she was clutching Jay’s hand so tightly, her knuckles nearly blanched, as if she clung to a lifeline.

  “I never saw his face,” she said quietly, looking at Paul. She knew that was what he hoped for; that she could put a face to her assailant, help them put together a sketch of him or pick him out of a line-up. “Only his eyes. I saw light shining in his eyes.”

  “It’s alright,” Paul said. He didn’t press the matter, which surprised her. He looked ready to say more, leaning forward to speak, when a girl around twelve or thirteen years old c
ame into the kitchen.

  “Daddy,” she said, addressing Paul, but blinking between Jay and Jo with shy fascination. “M.K. won’t get off the computer, and I need to use it for homework.”

  “You guys are supposed to share that thing in the afternoon, Beth,” Paul asked. “If it’s her turn, it’s her turn.”

  “You said homework comes first,” the girl, Beth, protested. “And she’s not doing homework, Daddy. She’s looking up pictures of Orlando Bloom.”

  Paul glanced at Jay and Jo, hooking his eyebrow and the corner of his mouth simultaneously in amusement. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, rising to his feet. He left the kitchen, but his daughter remained, lingering shyly in the doorway.

  “Hi, Bethany,” Jay said to the girl.

  She smiled. “Hi, Uncle Jay. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “Thanks, honey. Me, too,” Jay said. He noticed the direction of her attention, that she had spied him holding hands with Jo. “This is my friend, Jo Montgomery. Jo, this is my niece, Bethany.”

  “Hi, Bethany,” Jo said. Bethany’s smile grew somewhat uncertain, and she shrank back toward the corridor.

  “Hullo,” she said, offering a flip of her hand in a wave before turning and ducking after Paul.

  Left alone in the kitchen for a moment, Jo and Jay sat in silence. At last, she became aware of just how fiercely she was clutching his hand and, feeling foolish, she released him altogether, folding her hands in her lap. “Sorry,” she said, feeling color stoke in her cheeks. “I suppose I should let you get some circulation going again.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t mind. Do you want some more coffee?”

  She shook her head, looking down at the now-tepid cup she hadn’t even touched in the first place. “No, thank you.”

  Silence again. Jo was aware of a clock on the wall for the first time, its tick-tocking punctuating the heavy quiet that had descended over the kitchen. She began to tap her fingertip against her coffee cup in time with its rhythm. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick