The Truth About Toby

by Cheryl St. John

  “No!” he cried.

  “Then mind what I say.”

  She turned and left the room.

  Tears ran down Toby’s cheeks and dripped onto his knees. He cried for several minutes, then stopped himself before she came and hit him. He stared down at the shoelaces dangling on the cracked and peeling linoleum floor.

  Beside him, the faucet dripped in the rust-stained sink, the monotonous sound, his only company.

  “Mama,” he whispered.

  A sob tore from Shaine’s chest, a suffering so unbearable, she cried aloud with the pain.

  “Toby!” she shrieked, jumping from the bed as if she had somewhere to go, desperate to reach the child and comfort him.

  Orienting herself to her surroundings, she clutched her head in her hands and dropped to her knees, sobbing. “Oh, no, God, no,” she cried over and over.

  She became dimly aware of a light, and padding steps on the stairs. “Shaine?”

  Her anguished cries had wakened Austin from a light sleep, and he’d hopped into his sweatpants and stumbled into the other room. From the loft above came heartbroken cries.

  “Shaine?” he said, softly, kneeling down and reaching for her shoulder. Her slender frame shook with the force of her sobs. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “T-Toby,” she said. “It’s Toby.”

  “You had a dream?”

  She nodded.

  Awkwardly he tried to put his arm around her shoulders. He didn’t have any experience at comforting hysterical women. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he soothed.

  “No!” Her head shot up and her arm flung out, the backs of her fingers slapping across his bare shoulder. “It’s not all right.” She scrambled to her feet, her hair a wild disarray, her cheeks streaked with tears that shone silver in the light from below. “It’s not all right,” she clipped out, each word a shot. “Toby is not all right. He’s scared and hurting. There’s a woman who’s mean to him. I’ve seen her. I’ve felt what he feels.”

  Austin stared up at her, not moving from his kneeling position.

  “He’s a little boy,” she said in a tiny voice that broke. “A little boy who misses his mommy and needs someone to take care of him. He called himself ‘Beebee’,” she said. “He couldn’t pronounce his name when he was little. Even Maggie called him Beebee after a while.”

  “Shaine,” he said, wondering if this was the right time to try to reason with her. “That doesn’t prove that he’s alive.”

  Her body stiffened with anger, drawing his attention to the soft curves beneath the short nightshirt she wore. Her legs, long and slender, were the kind of legs that gave a man erotic thoughts. He tried to draw his thoughts from her curvy body and exotic feminine scent to the subject at hand.

  “Well, what does?” she asked, drawing his attention back to her words. “Last night you said yourself, the things in my dreams happen.”

  “Maybe this dream is something that already happened. In the past.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. He was never treated like that. Besides, I’ve told you, he’s older in these dreams.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything—”

  “You have a big comer-shaped desk in your office.”

  He stared at her. “So?”

  “It has two computers on it. There’s a certificate of some type on the wall.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve never been in there. I’ve never set foot in that room.”

  “Come on, you could’ve gone in there any time while I was downstairs—or out running.” Who was she trying to kid?

  She took off down the stairs. “I’ve never been in there, I swear. There’s a phone and a flat gray thing by your computer. You have a big oak filing cabinet.”

  He followed her through the main room and back into his office.

  She stood in the middle of the room in the dark. “Turn the light on.”

  He flipped on the track lighting above his desk.

  She glanced up at the certificate on the wall. “A degree?”

  “Computer science. Pennsylvania State.”

  “I never knew what it said. I saw it in my dreams at home, too. I even saw Daisy. Back then I didn’t know how those things were related to Toby. Now I do.”

  Austin sympathized with her. Really he did. But she was going to have to face the fact that her nephew was dead. She was trying so hard to persuade him otherwise. How could he convince her that the victims were rarely ever alive?

  “Where’s the fish tank?”

  That stopped him cold. “What?”

  She gestured to the empty space by the window. “Where’s the fish tank? A great big one with a blue background and an oak cabinet.”

  Austin’s mind reeled with the implication of what she’d just revealed. He stared at her. She returned his look, her eyes red from crying, her vulnerable mouth in a questioning line. An odd feeling crept in around the edges of his protective insulation. “How do you know about that?” he asked.

  “I dreamed it.”

  He moved to sit in his form-molded office chair and let the information wash over him. He’d lived with his extra sense his entire life. He’d foreseen things about his own life, and in so many other people’s lives that it ceased to amaze him. But he’d never before had anyone see things in his future. It was...weird.

  “So where is it?” she asked.

  He met her eyes. “It’s in the garage.”

  “You took it down?”

  He shook his head.

  “What then?”

  He stared at her, realizing the complexity and enormity of the sixth sense she had no idea how to control.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t set it up yet. It’s still in the cartons. And—” he pointed to the spot beside the window “—that’s where it goes.”

  Expectant silence stretched between them. Finally she moved forward and leaned her knuckles on his desk, all her desperation and urgency written plainly on her features. She met his gaze and wouldn’t let it go. A voice deep inside screamed for Austin to beware.

  “You believe me now, don’t you?” she asked.

  Chapter 6

  Did he believe her? Hell, yes. But was that even the right question? Deliberately, Austin rethought his initial reaction. So, she’d seen something he’d been planning. That wasn’t all that surprising. It was possible to pick up on people’s thoughts. Nothing was ever out of the question in his experience.

  He’d convinced her to return to her bed an hour ago, but he’d been unable to force himself to follow suit. Idly, he’d been watching his Terminator screen saver blast cyberholes in the computer screen for the last twenty minutes. Okay. He’d finished with his last job. He’d devote every minute to working with Shaine now. The sooner he showed her how to block out the dreams, the sooner he’d have her gone and his life would be back to normal.

  Normal. If living way up here away from everyone and everything and avoiding people was normal. But this was his life. It was how he lived with himself and the things that he’d seen and learned and been through. And he didn’t know any other way.

  Austin glanced over at the pillow and rumpled blanket on his too-short leather sofa, thought about the long-legged woman in his bed upstairs and shook his head. He’d already let his libido get ahead of his thinking where she was concerned. She was right: they didn’t have much time. He needed to teach her and get rid of her before she gave him any more reasons why she should stay.

  “So, what did the doctor say?” Shaine asked Audrey over the phone the next morning.

  “He said I’m starting to dilate.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. But he told me it could still be a couple of weeks.”

  “And I’m sticking you with all the work, Audrey. I feel terrible.”

  “He said to do what I normally do. Just not to overdo.”

  “And overdo is your norm. Did the Andersen woman work out?”
she asked, mentioning the neighbor woman she’d hired to help Audrey with the work.

  “She’s a big help. She can’t come until she gets her kids off for school, so I still have to do the early breakfasts, and then she leaves to go pick the kids up at three-thirty, but I have her all the rest of the day. Can we really afford her, hon?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Tell Nick to pay her out of my account. I’m the one who’s not there to work.”

  “But what will you do? You can’t afford that for long.”

  “I’ll figure something out, Audrey. And I’ll be there when you have the baby. I promise.”

  Shaine said goodbye and hung up. Hiring someone still didn’t assuage the guilt she experienced over deserting Audrey at this crucial time, but what choice did she have? She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Toby needed her more than Audrey ever would. And in order to help him, she had to be here.

  She rubbed the nagging pain in her ankle, remembering the strange dream she’d had before waking this morning. The vision hadn’t been of anyone she knew, and it had been an odd blend of sights and sounds. She’d had the impression of stumbling through the nearby woods searching for something. She’d eaten a filling breakfast, but her stomach felt oddly empty.

  Shaking off the strange feeling, she wandered out to watch Austin splitting wood. He’d taken off his sweatshirt and, dressed in jeans, a snug T-shirt and supple-looking leather work gloves, he swung the sledgehammer, hitting the wedge and splitting the logs apart. A fine sheen of perspiration glistened on his skin. The muscles in his back and shoulders corded and flexed with each swing, and as he leaned into the action, she couldn’t help but imagine the muscles in his buttocks and thighs doing the same.

  She needed to think about something else.

  A portable radio on the corner of the porch picked up an oldies station, and in amid bursts of static, the Beatles sang “Till There Was You.”

  “Aren’t there gadgets that do that?” she asked.

  He paused, catching his breath, and looked over at her. “Sure. Have one in the garage.”

  “Why don’t you use it?”

  “What? And waste the opportunity for all this exercise? I’m a computer geek, remember? I need the workout.”

  She lowered herself to the top step and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Somehow you’re not what I imagine when I picture a computer geek.”

  His mild gaze raked the length of her legs before he met her eyes. “Really? And what do all the other computer geeks you know look like?”

  “Well, I don’t know any others.”

  “Then I’m flattered to be your first.”

  The rare smile at the corner of his lips wasn’t entirely suggestive, but his words brought a tingle of embarrassment to her cheeks and added a strange warmth to the feeling already pooled in her abdomen. Sometime between her arrival and now, the atmosphere had changed.

  She couldn’t say it had been that kiss, because he’d been so quick to accuse her of trying to seduce him. But maybe it had been. Maybe as much as he wished that was how it had been, he knew that the kiss had been as spontaneous and as welcome on his part as it had on hers. Maybe he was just into deluding himself.

  The same way he denied his gift.

  But things had changed. It wasn’t in anything they said...or necessarily did...but in the things that went unsaid and undone between them.

  They were in that formative stage where each was wondering about the other. Wondering about past loves and past lovers. Wondering about intimate things that only another lover would know.

  He bent to stack several chunks of wood before securing his grip on the wooden handle of the sledgehammer. He leaned into the task, his muscles bunching with each lift and swing. Lift and swing. Shaine watched with a mix of fascination and frustration.

  The song ended and a news update crackled over the airwaves. “....students from WSC in Gunnison....reported missing since last night....sometime around six....last seen wearing...”

  Shaine drew her legs up and straightened. The hazy dream image of the night before encompassed her thoughts, blocking out everything else. A young man in a red plaid flannel shirt, a dark green backpack on his shoulders, lay on a pile of dry leaves. His ankle throbbed inside his hightopped boots. The pain blotted out most of his thoughts, but he was afraid. She sensed fear and pain. And guilt.

  She stood.

  All those frightening forest sounds came to life. The young man shivered with the cold and rubbed his hands together, afraid to start a fire for fear of the wind coming up and fanning the blaze out of control. Bone-tired weariness stole his energy. Merciless pain throbbed in his ankle until he wanted to cry aloud. But he didn’t. He was keeping up a brave front for someone.

  “Shaine?”

  She heard Austin’s voice and glanced over at him.

  “What are you looking at?” He squinted into the woods.

  “That guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “That guy on the radio. He’s out there.”

  “A deejay in the woods?”

  “No, the student they said was missing.”

  Austin laid down the sledgehammer and pulled off his gloves, wiping his sweaty palms on his thighs. He stepped close to her.

  “You’ve seen him?” he asked, realizing it wasn’t a sight she’d seen in the physical, natural realm.

  She nodded.

  “A dream?”

  “A dream, yes. But then just now, when he was talking—” she waved toward the squawky radio “—I felt him.”

  “Damn,” he said under his breath. Some poor dead hiker was lying out in the timber. He could just imagine animals getting to the body. “Well, let’s call a ranger.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She came down the steps toward him and circled his wrist with her cool fingers. “Okay, let’s call, but you know these woods, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Then we’ll just go get him.”

  “Just go get him! Shaine, we’re in the middle of a forest, in case you haven’t noticed. A search like that has to be done methodically.”

  She shook her head. Then she released his arm, took a half step away and seemed to be listening. After a minute, she pointed. “There. That direction. There’s a clearing with a natural windbreak. His ankle is sprained, or broken maybe, and he’s dizzy and out of breath, like I was—no, worse than I was that first day.”

  “I don’t doubt your sense of direction. I don’t doubt any of the details you just gave me.”

  “Good—”

  “Except your use of present tense.”

  She frowned up at him.

  “You’ve surely seen it all just as it happened. But by now the guy is dead. Or will be by the time someone gets to him.”

  “No. He’s not dead.”

  “Shaine, he is.”

  “Stay here then. I’ll go.” She ran into the house.

  Austin followed and called up to the loft. “You can’t barge into the woods by yourself. Let’s just call the rangers and let them handle it.”

  She hurried back down, pulling on her denim jacket. “Call the rangers. But I’m going.”

  “I won’t let you go alone.”

  She turned and faced him. “What are you going to do, sit on me?”

  He glared at her, tempted.

  “Come with me, then,” she said.

  “Fine.” He snatched a hooded sweatshirt from its peg by the door, pulled it on and paused briefly to place the call.

  He’d accompany her. Maybe she had to see once and for all. Maybe it would take something this awful to convince her that there was nothing she could do about her nephew. Stuffing a few items in a knapsack, he followed her out the door.

  She pointed out the direction they needed to travel, and he asked for a description of the surrounding area. He led her down a sloping deer trail to the south of the cabin, often checking their di
rection against her internal compass. Daisy darted in and out of the brush, recurrently running off and returning later. They hadn’t been out half an hour before Shaine stopped, both hands in the air before her.

  “Here,” she said. “Right here.”

  Austin inspected the ground and the surrounding area. Slipping between some willowy young trees, he discovered a spot where someone had camped. The nearby foliage was just as Shaine had described it, with the clearing and the windbreak. He dug up a patch of freshly disturbed earth and found two empty cans.

  Someone had definitely been here. And not too long ago. But where was he now? There was no sign of blood or animal tracks that he could make out.

  “This way.” She moved off, in the opposite direction of his cabin, and sedulously he followed. She went as fast as the undergrowth would allow, finally breaking into an awkward run among the fallen and decayed limbs.

  Daisy barked and led the way.

  Austin saw the red flannel shirt on the ground ahead just after Shaine did. He reached out to stop her, but she hurried forward. To his utter amazement, a second person sat beside the one in the flannel shirt, a girl with a blond ponytail and an oversize sweatshirt. Tears streaked her dirty cheeks, and her eyes were opened wide.

  “Tommy! Tommy!” she cried, shaking the shoulder beside her. “Someone’s here! Look!”

  The figure on the ground moaned and sat up, his youthful face distorted in a grimace of pain.

  Shaine knelt beside the two young people. “Are you all right?”

  “Thank God you found us,” the girl said with a hoarse voice. “Tommy hurt his ankle and he can’t walk. We’ve been lost since yesterday.”

  “How did you find us?” Tommy asked.

  Shaine glanced back at Austin, an expectant look on her eloquent face. Austin tried to come to terms with the fact that she’d envisioned this, and that the young man sat on the forest floor, very much alive. His surprise stole every coherent thought.

  “He’s familiar with the woods,” Shaine said, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder toward Austin. “He lives not too far away.”

  Her explanation hadn’t told them anything, but they obviously didn’t care.

  “How are we going to get Tommy out of here?” the girl asked.