“Go around me, moron.”
She looked back again. The car was still there, trailing her. The driver had actually edged over onto the shoulder with her.
Katie did not like this.
She waved the car around her.
The driver honked his horn at her, three times.
At the next corner, Katie turned, swearing at the unseen whoever-it-was behind the wheel. There was plenty of space for them to share the road. No need to act like a complete--
The car turned with her.
Then it sped up.
Katie’s heart began to race. They weren’t fooling around. They were seriously trying to chase her, in a car, right here on the streets of Twilight Ridge.
The engine revved, and she thought she could feel the bumper against her heels as she picked up her pace.
Run, she told herself. Just keep running because this bastard can’t actually be trying to kill you. It’s just somebody playing. It’s a prank. You’ll be fine if you just keep running.
She went faster.
The car lurched towards her again.
Twisting around for another look Katie jumped, literally jumped, to get away from the front end and then her feet were back on the pavement and she ran to the opposite side of the road.
The car followed her.
It was all houses here. In every single one the lights were out. Nobody was awake yet. Not this early. She thought about screaming for help and hoping--no, praying--that somebody would hear her but if they couldn’t hear that car squealing its tires and racing its engine then what chance did she have of someone hearing her?
She changed sides of the road again. The car followed.
In a panic, she set off across someone’s lawn, away from the road entirely. Panting for breath, feeling the burn in her lungs and the burn in her legs from overexertion, Katie surged forward just as fast as her body could push her.
She looked behind her.
The car drove up on the lawn, tearing up the ground as it came straight at her.
“Go away!” she shouted at the driver. “Leave me alone!”
She was watching the car. She wasn’t watching where she was going.
When her foot took another step it broke straight through a rotten board. She heard and felt other boards snapping and breaking, and then she was falling into the empty space below. A hole in the ground.
She threw out her arms and caught at the edge of the hole. It was all soil and loose stones and dry grass. Nothing to hold onto.
In front of her, across the lawn, the car came barreling at her. She had nowhere to go. She was an easy target.
So she let go.
Then she fell for real, hitting her knees and elbows and head off stones all around. It was damp here, and chill, and when she hit the bottom she plunged into water up to her chest that was so cold it froze her clothes to her skin. She gasped, and took in a mouthful of water.
She was gagging and coughing and fighting to breathe. She found her feet and kept her head above water and when she did, she found that she could see in the early morning sunlight from far above.
This wasn’t just a hole. She was inside a well. A hand-dug well lined with rough stones.
Like the contaminated one Vera had told her about.
“No, oh God no.”
Her lips were trembling, and it was hard to talk, and she could already feel herself starting to pass out from the cold. She had to get out of here. Right now.
Katie’s fingers scrabbled to find a hand hold so she could climb out but the slick stones scraped at her skin and ripped at her fingernails. She tried for a foothold and slipped, hitting her head again. A gong rang in her mind, and lights flashed in front of her eyes.
“Help me!” she tried to cry out. Her voice sounded small down here, too hollow and too frigid for anyone to hear. “Please, God. Somebody help me.”
“There’s no way out,” a whispery voice said to her.
Shivering from cold and a sudden rush of fear, Katie turned to look behind her.
A young boy floated just over the water, looking down at her. A ghost. She was seeing a ghost down here with her.
How hard did she hit her head?
He was nearly transparent, with red hair and a face that she recognized from the photo on Vera Keats’ sideboard.
This was her son, Martin.
“There’s no way out,” he said again. “I should know. I’ve been trying for years and I’m still here.”
Katie gasped and woke up.
A dream. It had all been a dream. One of those crazy ones that she had sometimes that felt so real but were just her overactive and sensitive mind trying to tell her things.
She had these from time to time, where reality mixed with her imagination and with some truths that she could only see while she was asleep. Vera had been talking about her dead son, and here she was dreaming about him. The ghost of Vera’s son was trapped. He wasn’t able to move on from this world for some reason.
Another ghost, right here in Twilight Ridge. She should be surprised, she supposed, but she found she was far too cold to be surprised.
Cold. Why was she cold?
Katie looked down, and found she really was in water. It was dark, with the morning sun barely reaching her through the rectangular top of the hole so high above.
Her hands really were torn up from trying to climb up the stones all around her. She really was in the well. She was trapped, with no way out.
“Help!” she cried out, terrified that no one would be able to hear her at all. “Help me! Please, help me!”
It was a long time before she heard voices calling back to her. Someone was up there. Someone was going to help.
Someone had heard her, after all.
She crossed her arms over herself, trying to rub some warmth into her upper body. She had to be careful of her hands because she had hurt them badly, and she was bleeding, and she knew that if not for how numb she was from the cold water then she would probably be doubled over in pain.
Leaning her head against the freezing wet stones, she just concentrated on breathing, and waiting to be rescued. She began to wonder, there in her fuzzy brain, if she had really dropped herself into this well...
What else from her dream might be real?
Chapter 4
When Katie awoke again, she was in a hospital.
Funny how you never mistook a hospital bed for anything else once you’ve ever been in one. It was in the crisp, almost raspy feel of the sheets. It was in the constant beeping of machinery that no one really understood. It was in the bright, sterile environment of white tiles and harsh lighting.
Also, Katie thought to herself as she opened her eyes, it was in the way the people at your bedside looked at you with concern while trying so hard--and failing--to hide it.
The moment her eyes were open, Riley was there to take her one hand gently between both of his. “Hey, there you are. Shh, it’s okay. Just take it slow.”
She was mad at him for shushing her like she was some little puppy dog barking at every little thing. Then she found that she was just so relieved that he was here with her that she just didn’t care. She tried to put her fingers through his.
But she couldn’t.
Lifting up just her head from her pillow, she looked down at herself. She was in a hospital gown, and didn’t that just raise the question of who had taken her clothes off to put this paper-thin thing on her. She found that she could wiggle her toes. She guessed that was a good sign. That was what they always did on those television shows, right? Wiggled their toes?
Her knees and elbows and ass hurt. So did her head. The fall, she remembered. Falling down that well, crashing through those rotten boards, all the stones...yeah. It was a wonder she wasn’t in a full body cast. She could stand a few aches and pains.
What was wrong with her fingers though?
When she saw the heavy white bandages wrapped around both of her hands, she started to panic. They c
overed her hands from wrist to fingertips, covering her like mittens, hiding her injuries from her so that she couldn’t see what was wrong and she knew something was wrong but she couldn’t tell what and dear God what if her hands were ruined forever...
“Whoa, whoa,” Riley said to her, letting go of the hand he’d been cradling and pressing gently against her shoulder instead. “Just lay still. Seriously, Katie, if you want to freak out at least let me tell you what’s wrong first so you have something to freak out about!”
He said it with a smile on his face, and that more than anything else was what actually got her to relax. She took a breath. She was in the hospital. She’d been in the well, she remembered that part now, and she vaguely remembered being lifted out by a bunch of firemen before she had collapsed into unconsciousness. Now she was here. Her hands were in bandages. Riley was with her.
She took a slow, deep breath. He was right. There was no need to freak out. Not until she knew if her hands were going to rot and fall off, or something like that.
“Your hands aren’t going to fall off,” he said to her in that patient way he had for her nonsense.
“How did you know I was thinking that?” Her voice was dry, and she swallowed to work up some spit in her mouth.
“I know stuff like that,” he said, “because I know you. That was probably the first thought you had when you saw the bandages, wasn’t it?”
She shrugged, and swallowed to moisten her tongue again. “Not the first. Maybe the second.”
He smiled at her from the chair he’d moved right up next to the bed, and then leaned over across the safety bar to kiss her cheek. “Stop scaring me like this, okay? I woke up in bed and you weren’t there. No note, no voicemail, you weren’t answering your cell...then the next thing I know there’s some State Trooper knocking on my door and telling me you’re here.”
“The police?”
“Yeah. So. You can imagine what was going through my head.”
Yes, she could. “Where is here? I mean, what hospital am I in?”
“You’re in Merimack County General. It’s the closest one to Twilight Ridge, apparently. Good to know, in case I ever break an arm or something.”
“Oh, hell, I didn’t break my arm, did I?”
In a panic she tried to sit up in the bed to examine her arms, her legs, and everything else. Her ass, too, considering how much that was stinging.
“No,” he promised her, “you’re fine, you’re fine...well, except for your hands and some mild hypothermia from being in that water so long. Got a few bruises from falling through that rotten well cover, too. I’m going to have to have a long conversation with that woman about that. Vera Keats. She should know better. You could have...”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but Katie knew what he meant. She could have died. She swallowed, her throat dry as dust again. He was right. She could have cracked her head off those stones on the way down, and fallen into that water, and that would have been the end of her.
“Well,” she rasped, coughing and trying again. “Don’t be too hard on Vera. I shouldn’t have been running across her back yard, either.”
“Yeah. About that. What happened? Why were you out there running and... Um. And falling? When we got you out of there you were going on about seeing some little kid. There was no one else down there with you, Katie. I’m guessing it had something to do with--you know. A ghost?”
She nodded. Before she said anything else she rolled her head from side to side to make sure they were alone. There was another bed in the room but it was empty, and she and Riley were the only ones here. “There’s a little boy’s ghost haunting that woman,” Katie told him. “Her son. I was there yesterday, in her house. When I went for my walk I stopped in to visit and she’s got cases of bottled water stacked up in her kitchen. She said the water from her well is bad but now I’m wondering if maybe there’s another reason.”
Riley’s eyes went wide. “You think the boy’s actually down there. His body. You think he’s dead in the well, and you think his mother knows about it?”
Katie pursed her lips. The thought of a kid down there, decaying and alone, made her stomach turn. “Maybe. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d seen a bad death bring a ghost to Twilight Ridge, now would it?”
“No,” he agreed. “I thought it was just our Inn that was haunted. Well, the Inn and the graveyard. How deep are the secrets in Twilight Ridge?”
“Deeper than we realized.” It was the only answer she had to give. There was never any telling what people were doing behind closed doors, or what evil things they had done in their past. “Riley, I can’t stand the thought of that little boy being down in there. Wherever his body is, his spirit is trapped in that well. I can’t just leave him like that.”
“Okay, I understand that, but I don’t know what we can do about it. I mean, we can’t exactly go to the police and tell them you saw a little boy’s ghost in a dream and ask if they could please go digging around for his body.”
“No, we can’t.”
“I mean, how deep is the well, anyway?”
“One hundred feet, is what Vera told me.”
It seemed to surprise him when she said that. “Uh, okay. So we agree, then? We’re not going to try getting involved with this one? We’ll let the dead be dead for a change?”
Katie shook her head. “No. We need to do something.”
“Didn’t we just agree there was no way to get the police involved?”
With her bandaged hands, she fumbled for the bed controls, until Riley saw what she was doing and pushed the button for her to raise the top half of the bed up. How bad were her hands, she wondered? She remembered seeing them all torn apart and bleeding from the stone walls, but would they be all right?
She flexed her fingers inside the bandages. They still moved. They hurt like hell, but it was a fuzzy sort of pain. Not like they were about to fall off.
“They gave you a pain blocker,” Riley told her, correctly interpreting her thoughts once again. “Some kind of local anesthetic. The doctor said something about how your hands would be a little numb for the next twenty-four hours.”
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “He said he needed to talk to you about it first. He said not to worry, but it was a patient confidentiality thing. I got the impression he just wanted to give you the good news first,” he added quickly, trying to make her feel better.
Experimentally she pressed her hands together, palm to palm. She felt pins and needles and knew that he was right. They’d given her an anesthetic to numb the pain of whatever was really wrong.
For the moment she decided to put that aside, and talk to Riley about the ghost.
“There’s no way to involve the police yet,” she agreed. “That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. We can’t just leave him down there, Riley.”
“If that’s where his body even is,” he pointed out.
“I’m pretty sure it’s down there. I saw his ghost. Why would his ghost be down there if his body wasn’t? He said he was trapped and he couldn’t get out and why would a ghost be tied to a place like that if his body wasn’t there?”
He gave her a look. “You saw his ghost in a dream, remember?”
“So? He was in the well. That’s what drew me there, I think. Plus, how do you explain all that bottled water?”
“The water’s bad. That happens. Plus, didn’t you say you bumped your head on the way down?”
“That happened when I was already down there,” she said testily.
“Okay, fine, but can you be sure you weren’t hallucinating? With the cold and the knock to your skull, I mean?”
“Riley Harris, don’t you dare say I imagined that. This was a ghost. A for real ghost.”
“Fine, fine,” he relented. “There’s a ghost in the well. What are we supposed to do about it?”
“Funny you should ask...” she said right away. “Um. Remember how I offered your help in fixing Vera’s problems with
her well? You could just go down there and look around.”
“Katie!” he complained. “What am I supposed to do, just bring a shovel down there and start digging?”
“Don’t be mad, okay? I promised our help before I knew about the ghost. She needed someone and I knew we could help her. I was just trying to be friendly.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’ but I’m pretty sure you mean me.”
“You want to be friendly too, right?”
He rolled his eyes, because he knew all about Katie’s big heart. They’d talked before about fitting in better with the people of Twilight Ridge. They couldn’t do that by keeping to themselves.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Obviously there’s no arguing you out of this. So I’m going to fix the well cover that you crashed through, and what? Look for a dead boy while I’m at it? Katie, we’d have to drain the water out, and possibly dig into the stonework of the walls without even knowing where to look. Any idea how I’m supposed to do that?”
“You’re a smart guy.” She smiled at him and tried to take his hand before she remembered she didn’t really have the use of her own. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Sure. I’ll figure something out. Right. Glad to know you’ve got that kind of faith in me.”
“I do. Um. Can I get some water?” she asked him. Her throat was starting to feel like she had swallowed sandpaper.
He took a pitcher from the nearby rolling table and poured some into a waiting styrofoam cup for her. He had to help her hold it, and she drank greedily from the straw. It felt really good, even if it did sort of remind her of being in the well, with the water splashing up over her head and into her mouth.
Then she laid back on the bed, and listened to the quiet in the room while Riley sat with her, and talked about things that didn’t involve ghosts until she fell asleep again.
Chapter 5
Her hands were beginning to itch.
It was the next day, and Katie was still in the hospital. She was hoping to go home today. The doctors had wanted to keep her overnight to see if a slight rattle in her lungs would go away on its own or if she would need medication for it.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 62
