Blood Memories vm-1

by Barb Hendee

  If Wade had been Dominick, he simply would have picked his friend up and carried him outside. But he wasn't. The ache in his head still lingered. He didn't know what to do.

  "I need some water," he whispered. "And look for a woman. She's here. Where is that rookie?"

  "I don't know. Are you awake?"

  "Yeah, don't touch anything. Go outside and call for backup."

  "It's him, Wade. The one they wouldn't believe me about. But he looked the same. Exactly the same as fifteen years ago."

  "Do you see a woman?"

  "No, why do you keep asking that?"

  "She's here. She felt it."

  "Felt what?"

  "When that man died… it hurt."

  It more than hurt, but he couldn't explain it. Dominick's eyes hadn't cleared yet. Something about the room had him nearly hyper-ventilating.

  "Get me outside," Wade said. "I can't think in here."

  Dominick dragged him outside. The porch seemed aged and faded, waiting to crumble like a yellow leaf in November. They moved past it and sat on the weed-filled grass, staring at the burning spot on the lawn.

  "Do you smell gasoline?" Wade asked.

  "No. Did you pick anything out of his head?"

  "I didn't have time."

  "It's him. It's the same guy."

  Wade didn't know how to respond and thankfully didn't have to. Two squad cars with blaring, screaming sirens flashing red and blue lights pulled up. Uniformed men were running all around them.

  "Where's the body?" someone asked.

  "Right there," Dominick answered coldly, pointing to the burning spot on the grass.

  "What happened?"

  "You figure it out."

  Dominick looked back at the house. "We have to go back. Can you walk?"

  "Yeah," Wade answered, "but you aren't going back in that house. The cavalry's here now. Let them check into it."

  "If you won't come with me, I'll go by myself."

  "It can't be the same man. Think about what kind of a coincidence that would be. The same murderer from New York living in Portland-after you've transferred to the local police force-and you just happen to be on duty the morning he decides to cash his own ticket? I don't think so."

  "Then come back inside with me."

  Wade was exhausted, almost beyond caring. He needed to sleep this off. But something in Dominick's voice made him listen. Dom could be aggressive and high-strung and difficult to know, but he wasn't irrational.

  "One condition," Wade said.

  "What?"

  "You let me in your head the whole time. If I feel you losing it, we leave."

  Dominick's face darkened. For a moment, Wade thought he was going to hear the usual "No way."

  "Okay," Dominick answered.

  "You'll leave if I tell you?"

  "Yeah, just come on."

  For months Wade had wanted permission to read his friend's mind, explore his thoughts. Now that it was actually happening, he felt almost too drained, too numb to go through with it.

  Upon reentering the house, the first thing they heard was one of the other cops choking in the kitchen.

  "There." Dominick pointed to a large photograph over the hearth. He walked right over and put his hands on it.

  The girl in the picture was different from anyone Wade had ever seen. She reminded him vaguely of a stalk of wheat. Her age was difficult, impossible, to peg. She might have been thirteen or twenty-eight. Her huge hazel-brown eyes complemented her pale face and blond hair. She sat on a forest-green velvet couch, with shelves of leather-bound books behind her head.

  "Who is she?" Wade whispered.

  Dominick's eyes remained closed. When he didn't answer, Wade gently reached into his mind and was blocked instantly.

  "Stop it, Dom."

  No answer.

  "Hey, you guys," a middle-aged officer blurted out, running into the living room. "Hurry up. Jake found something downstairs."

  "What?" Wade snapped.

  "Loose boards and a stink you won't believe."

  Dominick opened his eyes.

  "Bodies," he said. "Jake found bodies."

  Wade stared at him. "How do you know that?"

  Dominick pulled his hands off the photo and moved quickly toward the stairwell. The first thing Wade noticed in the cellar was the smell-different, sweeter than the stench from the kitchen. Dominick dropped down to help Jake tear at the floor.

  "They're here, under the boards," he said to Jake. "You smelled them, didn't you?"

  Wade had completely lost control of the situation. He'd lost control of Dominick, lost control of reality. Then he looked up from the sight of the two men pulling at the floorboards to a painting resting against the wall, a misty, ethereal oil painting.

  "Dom, come look at this."

  His friend ignored him and kept on digging like a man possessed. Wade walked over to the painting. Her face was unmistakable: the girl in the photo upstairs. Her eyes stared out at him as though she were right here and alive.

  Down at the bottom of the portrait was an unintelligible signature and a date: 1872. Was it authentic? How could this girl be the same one in the photo upstairs? Her great-great-grandmother perhaps? He looked closer. No, it was the same girl. No two people could share eyes like that.

  Jake began choking. Without turning around, Wade let his mind drift into the young, retching policeman's. He saw through Jake's eyes and found himself staring at a half-decomposed woman with red hair. He wasn't surprised.

  "Dom, please stop digging and come look at this."

  A moment later, he felt his friend standing next to him.

  "Touch it," Wade whispered. "It's the same girl, isn't it?"

  Dominick stared at the painting for a long time. Then he reached one hand out and placed it over her face.

  "What the hell are you guys doing?" Jake managed to spit.

  Wade ignored him. "Is it the same girl?"

  Dominick's china-blue eyes somehow seemed even lighter than usual. His fingers ran softly over the painting as though in a caress.

  "Yeah, it's her. I can't tell anything else. She's like a wall. Maybe the painting's too old."

  "Will you two get away from that picture and call the coroner? We've got a mess over here." Jake's voice had grown stronger.

  The room seemed small. Wade had turned to answer when Dominick's hand closed over his wrist. It hurt.

  "They aren't going to believe us, Wade. They'll say we're crazy or put us on vacation."

  Everything in Wade wanted to argue, wanted to play this horror by the book. To do otherwise would mean making decisions. But he knew Dominick was right. Captain McNickel wouldn't want to hear this, much less believe it.

  "We're on our own," Dom said.

  Wade didn't look at the bodies. He stared at a mass of painted wheat-gold hair. "Don't say anything yet. We still need the precinct computers. I saw a red Mazda parked out front."

  Dom was aggressive and high-strung and hard to know, but this time he was right. They were on their own.

  Chapter 10

  Wade pulled away from my mind suddenly and shut me out. For a second I felt disoriented. Who was I?

  "Eleisha," he said aloud.

  The past few hours came rushing back. Maggie was dead. I glanced at Wade's watch. An hour had passed. An hour, and I knew his life story-or most of it. I braced both hands against the cheap carpet.

  "Let me back in. What happened after you found the bodies in Edward's cellar? Did you tell anyone?"

  His narrow face glowed softly in the darkness. He didn't say anything.

  "What's wrong?" I asked. "Why did you push me out?"

  "I always wondered what that must feel like," he breathed. "I've read so many minds, judging sanity by what I see, but no one has ever… What do you think of me now?"

  The intensity of his question threw me. I was worried about getting William out of Dominick's reach, and Maggie's death kept flashing by like a real-life horror film. Somehow,
Wade wanted me to turn my thoughts to him, to the questions and fears that had haunted him most of his life. No, it wasn't even that. He didn't seem conscious of such a self-centered desire. But in one hour, he had poured his life-his private life-all over the floor for me to see.

  How else could he feel? Yet such concern was difficult, almost impossible for me to achieve. I was a survivor.

  Was my human life so far behind me that I no longer understood it? Maggie had told me, "I once lived with a professional baseball player for eight months." The concept had stunned me. Could she have comforted Wade? Could she have conjured up pretty words and put his mind at ease?

  "What do you want me to say?"

  He blinked. "I don't know. Say anything. Now do you understand why I've been following you?"

  "No, you shut me out too soon."

  "It hurt to relive all that. It started hurting too much, and I couldn't tell what you were feeling." His voice began to grow excited. Pale streetlight from outside the window washed over his hair, making its fine strands turn white. "It was you in the house that day, wasn't it? You felt him die, too, didn't you?"

  The words cut like a sharp edge into my eyes. "Yes."

  "What was he? What are you?"

  "I can't tell you. I came here to kill you so you wouldn't follow us anymore."

  "Us?"

  "Stay away from me, Wade. I mean it."

  "This isn't happening like I'd planned." The pain in his words almost moved me.

  "What do you mean, ‘planned'?"

  He suddenly turned away and sat half facing the bed. "I took the painting with me when we left the house that day. That's why I shut you out. I didn't want you to see that part of the memory. The painting was physical evidence, and I took it."

  "Why?"

  "Because I couldn't stop looking at it. I kept asking Dom to touch it and tell me things about you. The girl in the painting had to be the same presence I felt inside the house, even if the painting was a hundred and thirty-six years old."

  I stood up suddenly and started backing toward the window. "What do you want?"

  He looked at me helplessly, the tiny lines in his forehead crinkling. "Someone to see inside my head… for once."

  "Why?"

  Maybe he really didn't know, because the helplessness on his face turned to misery. Moving back over slowly, I crouched down next to him. "Dominick knows more than he's telling you. He knows what I am. He knew what Maggie was."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He knew how to kill her."

  "He shot her in the back."

  "Yeah, and then he cut her head off."

  Wade's expression shifted to confusion, as if he struggled to remember. "She attacked him."

  "You were so out of it you don't know what happened." I paused, determined to learn the rest of his story. "What did you do after finding those bodies in Edward's cellar?"

  He blinked and then looked down at the floor. "Once all six victims were recovered, we turned in the license-plate numbers on the Mazda and a few other cars, but Dom didn't think we'd get much out of that. So that night, we just started driving around. By then he believed me… that I'd felt someone else at the house, and he wanted me to try and pick up your location psychically. But he was talking crazy… He was so worked up that I just went along." Wade stopped and took a few loud breaths. "We looked in restaurants, bars, alleys, stores…" he said. "We just happened to walk into Mickey's-pure chance. My knees almost buckled. Nobody'd ever pushed into my head before."

  "Why do you keep saying that? I didn't push into your mind."

  "That's what it feels like."

  I thought about that for a minute. Maybe Wade and I couldn't help getting tangled up in each other's thought patterns. Maybe there was some mental magnet between us that we hadn't learned how to control.

  "But how did you know to come here?" I asked. "Why would you come to Seattle? I didn't leave a trace."

  "How did we…? Oh, that. Yes, you did. The next morning we checked back on the Mazda's registration, along with a few other cars, and decided to check out some addresses. When we got to twenty-seventeen Freemont Drive, Dominick… he got agitated. We went up to the house, but no one answered the door, so he picked the lock-I told him not to-and we found a lot of British antiques inside. He touched a hairbrush in the bathroom and went into convulsions."

  That was almost too much for me. The thought of Dominick breaking into our house and digging through our things made me tense up. "Nothing in that house would have clued you in to looking for us in Seattle."

  When I said «us» again he glanced over curiously but didn't push it.

  "No." He shook his head. "I dragged Dom back outside… By then he seemed to be having waking nightmares. We hadn't slept in two nights, and I was getting dizzy. We went back to the precinct, and I ran a check on all the airlines out of Portland. I caught two tickets to Seattle charged on a MasterCard registered to a Shelby Drake at twenty-seventeen Freemont Drive…" He faltered, looking up at me.

  My stomach lurched. How could I have been that stupid? I led them right to Maggie. It was my fault.

  He went on. "Dom was never the same after we left your house. He told Captain McNickel and our sergeant everything… They put him on suspension pending psychiatric investigation."

  "McNickel did that? To Dominick?"

  At the time, neither Wade nor I found it strange that I spoke of Captain McNickel as if I knew him. The visions from Wade's past were as real to me as they were to him.

  "Dom just sounded crazy, even to me, and I believed him. The next day he quit and told me he was driving up to Seattle to look for you."

  "And you quit, too?"

  "What else could I do? He's my friend, and he was right. They're all too blind to look for the truth."

  "That's Dom talking, not you."

  He winced, and I sat there watching the streetlights from outside reflect off his cheekbone. I didn't hate him anymore. Maybe I couldn't feel like Maggie. Maybe I couldn't understand his nature or comfort him, but I felt that I knew him, and I wouldn't hurt someone I knew.

  "You have to stop tracking me, Wade. If Dominick finds me, he'll kill me."

  "But what are you? Tell me what you are."

  "I can't."

  His fingers dug into the carpet. I watched the blue swirl of veins under the flesh on his hands. "You're so perfect… The images I pick up from you don't match. I can't even follow some of your thoughts. So cold. They aren't human."

  Did he even know how close he was to the truth?

  I stood up. "Wade, please. If you care about Dom, you'll get him to stop tracking me, or I'll kill him. Don't let him know about this. Just pretend you can't find me. I'll find a way to disappear, and you'll never see me again."

  "Is that what you think I want?" he asked harshly, sounding frustrated. When I didn't answer, his voice lowered. "So none of this, none of the trip down my memory lane, means anything to you?"

  What did he want?

  I walked to the door. "Just keep him away from me. I didn't ask you to quit your job and come here. I didn't ask to see your life. Remember that."

  Before he could answer I slipped out the door. But his narrow, intelligent face lingered in my mind, his troubled expression.

  What did he expect me to do?

  In the back of my mind, a very small part of me wanted to know.

  Chapter 11

  The next night, I sat in a chair by the fire at Maggie's, watching William dodder around the room. Reflections from orange flames flickered off dark mahogany end tables and danced down the wall beside me.

  "I can't help it, William. We have to find someplace else."

  "No, no, no. Just got here. Maggie will be home soon."

  "Maggie isn't coming home."

  "Call Julian. Time to call Julian."

  "We can't."

  His attitude concerned me. What if I couldn't get him to leave with me? Not that I blamed any of this on him. He'd lived ninety-six yea
rs in the same house. I'd dragged him out on a moment's notice and taken him to a strange place, only to tell him we had to move again. It was too much.

  And I'd told Wade I would disappear… but now I wasn't sure where to go, even if I could get William out the door.

  Would we have to fight it out here?

  Maybe not. Could Wade be trusted? Thinking about Maggie, a part of me almost hoped Dominick would come hunting us again.

  I got up and walked down the hall into Maggie's bedroom. Her cream lace bed draping smelled softly of floral perfume. Something white lay on her cherrywood nightstand. I picked it up and read a list of things-to-do, written in her perfect script.

  1. Have dry cleaning dropped off.

  2. Get William a new bedspread.

  3. French-braid Eleisha's hair.

  "Maggie."

  She was gone. I'd led them right to her. Lying down on her satin comforter, I closed my eyes to the sight of Edward jumping off his porch again. How many weeks ago? Edward, Maggie, Dominick, William, Philip, Julian… they all kept spinning around inside me until my stomach tightened in sharp rebellion. And what about Wade? He occupied my thoughts almost as much as William. It amazed me that someone so intelligent couldn't recognize insanity in his own partner. Mortals always use pretty euphemisms like "caught in an obsession" to sugarcoat realities like madness.

  "What do I do?"

  I didn't know and there was no one to tell me. In a rare moment, Edward had once whispered, "When we die, our maker will feel the pain halfway across the world. The pain of their children will always reach them."

  If that was true, Philip already knew about Maggie's death. If I had taken the time to sit down calmly and write out a list of all the reasons for us to flee from this house and get as far away as possible, we might actually have made a decent run for Canada or New Zealand or maybe even China. But I wrote no such list, and I was tired of running. I'd told Wade we would disappear, and yet… if we ran now, we'd never stop. This house was perfect. It had been Maggie's, and now it was mine.

  I got up off the bed and walked back out into the living room. William paced back and forth between the fireplace and the dining room, muttering bits and pieces of "Rapunzel," which Maggie had read him almost every night.