Lying in bed, with Blossom in between her feet and Binky on the pillow next to her, Veronica stared at the ceiling and contemplated the various items on her list of things to worry about. Daniel. Eric. Melanie. Murphy the potential terrorist and his unidentified murderer. Felsen. What did it say that each problem had a person’s name attached? Maybe she should buy a ticket to India and join an ashram for a few months. Not that Veronica knew anything about meditating. But at least she’d escape all these people for a while.
Careful to avoid disrupting Bloss, she rolled onto her side. The ashram sounded nice in theory (although a beach in Thailand sounded even better) but she didn’t want to abandon Melanie—or Daniel. She didn’t want to ruin things with him, either because of Eric or by turning down his proposal. Would Daniel want to break up if she said no?
Maybe she should have talked to Sunny about what she saw. Sunny didn’t know Veronica had visions, so it entailed broaching a whole new level in their friendship to do so, something Veronica generally preferred to avoid. But maybe Sunny would have some insight into how Daniel might react if Veronica said no. Of course, this idea was verging on the middle school tactic of using Sunny as some sort of go-between. “Please, Sunny, tell Daniel I like him but I don’t want to go steady.”
Burying a whine in her pillow, Veronica resolved to put the whole thing out of her mind and go to sleep.
That didn’t work. Instead, her mind trotted out the Eric-problem next.
She hadn’t checked her Facebook since she sent the reply to his message—on purpose. She couldn’t face his possible response just yet. The feelings it might arouse were just too troubling. How could she be in this situation? Trying to decide how to handle a marriage proposal while managing her emotions over a possible meeting with an old crush? This couldn’t be her life. In the last ten years she’d had one serious boyfriend, and that ended when he went to jail for fraud—crimes she had known about, in her own special way, but denied to herself. Melanie wasn’t kidding when she brought up Veronica’s three year dry spell, either. Did it have to be all or nothing, like this? Why couldn’t things just be simple? Just one nice, honest boyfriend, who moved at the slow pace that Veronica felt comfortable with.
Rolling back onto her back, this time she did upset Blossom, who made a little noise of kitty frustration and hopped off the bed. Veronica raised her head to see the cat and said, “Sorry, Bloss.” Her head thumped back into the pillow. Now she wished Daniel had wanted to get coffee. At least then she might have talked to him about Eric. The longer she waited, the more it felt like she was keeping the whole thing from him deliberately. She wondered if Daniel would see it that way, too.
How much should she tell him about the feelings she had for Eric? If the roles were reversed, she would feel deceived if she found out Daniel was in contact with an old girlfriend that he still had feelings for, and he didn’t specifically tell Veronica about them. But then, Eric was not an old boyfriend. Eric might not have any interest in Veronica at all, outside of wanting help getting to know Sacramento.
Veronica frowned and rubbed her eyes with both hands. She was making a mountain out of a molehill. She kept forgetting that her reaction to Eric’s message had more to do with her own silly romanticism than anything concrete. It had been over a decade since she saw Eric last, and even then, he hadn’t exactly asked her to run away with him to Cancun.
“Just stop blowing things way out of proportion, Veronica, and maybe focus on the real relationship you have,” she muttered. “Maybe figure out how to keep from destroying it when Daniel asks you to marry him and you have to turn him down.”
It was more fun, she realized, to worry about Eric than confront the problem of the proposal. Thinking about Eric brought back all the old feelings she had when she was in Paris—not just about him, but about being in France, about being young, and having all the possibilities of living in the most exciting city in the world for a year. Veronica had dreamed of Paris ever since she was a little girl, and when she set foot in the city of her dreams, it was paradise.
If she had more than $25 in her savings account, she would ask Daniel to go on a trip with her to Paris as a consolation for turning him down, she thought. But she didn’t have more than $25, so that was out. Maybe she could come up with some romantic facsimile—a dinner of snails and French wine, for instance. But would a gesture like that be enough? How could she convey to him that she loved him, but she just wasn’t ready for such a big step?
And why wasn’t she ready? That was the big question. In the five months they had been together, they had only gotten closer. She had to overcome her insecurities—was she too weird with her visions? Was she too high maintenance? Did he respect her as an equal, or see her as a damsel in distress? And he had to develop an understanding of how her visions worked, and how compelled she felt to help those she saw in them. They had both learned to communicate better, and to work as a team when it came to the things she saw. And she loved him; she knew she did. When he got stabbed she thought she might lose him, and she knew then that she couldn’t bear that. But now she had to admit, she was holding some part of herself back.
Veronica’s eyes traveled over the bare walls of her darkened bedroom, where there used to be dozens of paintings, big and small, of an angel. An angel that turned out to be her mother.
It took her almost three decades to recognize that the angel she painted over and over since she was five years old was her mother. Her mother, who left years before she died in a car accident. Who left her with an alcoholic, desperately unhappy father. A father who killed himself when Veronica was five.
I guess it doesn’t take a genius to work out why I’ve built an emotional wall, Veronica mused. She’d taken down the paintings when the truth of the angel’s identity came to light. Her anger towards her mother still burned bright enough to make putting them back up a nonissue. She had tried to find new subjects to paint, but so far nothing stuck. After almost thirty years of angels, Veronica couldn’t find a way to access her creativity in any other way, but she had no interest in painting her mother anymore.
Tired of thinking about her mother, her father, and everyone else, Veronica put her pillow over her head and tried to clear her mind. Maybe I ought to learn meditation after all, she thought. It took a long time before sleep finally found her.
Chapter 8
The sun beat down on the parade, making trumpets and tubas flash and shine. The marching bands from Eleanor Roosevelt and at least two other high schools played Yankee Doodle and between each formation of uniformed high school musicians a large float drifted. On one, decorated with red and blue plastic streamers, men and women in revolutionary garb waved to the crowds. On another, a huge blow-up eagle with a blue starred neck and red and white striped wings overshadowed children tossing candy. Behind this float marched veterans in uniform. Some held rifles, some held flags, and some rolled along in wheelchairs.
Behind the lines of people several restaurants sprayed misty water into the air in an effort to help people cool down. Some people were even passing out bottles of water, walking quickly into the lines of the veterans to hand them out. The crowd cheered and blew whistles and foghorns. Children and adults waved smaller versions of the same American flags that decorated the floats and that the veterans held high. Children sitting on parent shoulders held ice cream cones and popsicles, with balloons tied to their wrists that bounced and floated over their heads.
The image of all of the people’s faces seemed to waver, and soon blurred so badly Veronica couldn’t see. She blinked several times and her vision cleared, but in the parade, several people clutched their throats, and then the vomiting started. Everywhere—in the parade, among the bystanders—people became violently ill. Children started screaming, soon joined by some adults, and they pushed and shoved each other in panic. An aging veteran in uniform clawed at his throat while another younger man collapsed at his feet. A terrible smell filled Veronica’s senses—the people weren’t just vo
miting now. Everywhere people’s bowels were in full revolt. Her hearing became overwhelmed with the sounds of choking and retching. Her nose drowning in the awful smells of vomit and excrement. Her vision clouded over.
~~~
Veronica woke up.
“Hell,” she gasped. She touched her cheeks after a moment of hesitation, then her ears, nose and eyelids. Everything was normal.
She looked at her hands in the dim morning light, then brushed them over the skin of her arms. She was clean. The smell was gone. Nothing wrong.
She burst into tears. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Binky stand up and stretch, Halloween-cat style. He sat and began cleaning his face. Wiping her eyes, she stroked his soft fur, from head to back, which interrupted the bath because Binky couldn’t resist walking in circles with pleasure.
Sniffling, Veronica dried her eyes with the edge of her sheet. Just a nightmare. But what a nightmare.
Her phone lay on her nightstand. Speed-dialing Daniel’s number as she sat up in bed, she continued petting the purring Binky. It soothed her.
“Hey,” Daniel said, sounding groggy.
“Sorry it’s so early,” she said, only now glancing at the alarm clock. Six twenty-three.
“No, it’s okay. What’s up? Dream?”
“An awful one, Daniel. I think the Murphy guy was a terrorist. And I think his murder was just the beginning.”
~~~
“A July Fourth parade,” Daniel said, tapping his fork against his lower lip thoughtfully.
They sat across from each other in the diner on K. Veronica had ordered a coffee and a bagel, but so far her appetite was MIA. Daniel’s appetite, however, was present and accounted for—he had demolished the bacon and eggs on his plate and he’d even eaten the fruit they added as a garnish.
“It was awful, Daniel. I don’t know if it was supposed to be literal. I don’t think so. I don’t think anything can really do that, on that scale, like that. At least, I hope not.”
“Well, off the top of my head, maybe mustard gas?”
Veronica’s gorge rose. She pushed the bagel away and tried not to look at the remains of eggs on Daniel’s plate. “I can’t understand why people would ever do that to each other.”
“Did you see any kind of explosion? Anything that looked like a gas?”
Veronica shook her head. “No. They all just started screaming and choking and vomiting out of nowhere. I can’t get the images out of my head.”
Pressing her fingers to her eyes, she moaned. Daniel caught her hand in his, gently pulling it from her face, and she opened her eyes again.
“I’m sorry, Ronnie. That really sucks.”
“We can’t let it happen, Daniel. Whatever it is. I don’t think it’s really going to do what my dream showed. It didn’t feel—or look—real that way. I think the spirits are just trying to let me know that something really bad is going to happen at that parade. And message received, thank you all very much,” she added pointedly to the air around her. “No need to repeat it.”
“Okay,” Daniel said. “Let’s see what we know. If you’re right, we’re looking at some kind of terrorist plot to attack a Fourth of July parade. Did you notice where it was? What city?”
Veronica moaned again and squeezed her eyes shut. Reluctantly, she tried to remember what she’s seen, especially before everything went to hell in the dream. “I can describe the floats. Oh wait, of course. It’s here. Here in Sac. Because I recognized the uniforms on one of the high school marching bands. They were from Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“It actually might be really useful to know what the floats look like. We can rule out this year if they don’t match up.”
“Rule out this year?”
“Yeah, there’s always a chance the spirits are jumping the gun, right? Showing you something that might happen ten years from now? Did you recognize any of the students in the band?”
“No,” Veronica admitted. “But that’s not so significant—I don’t have that many students in my classes, compared to the whole school. Why would the spirits send me a dream about something so far off?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, Ronnie. I don’t think they experience time like we do.”
Veronica pondered this. “Okay, but when it really matters, when it’s something big, they’ve never shown me anything from way in the future or anything like that.”
“There was that time they showed you Cybele getting injured in one of her performances, and then you remembered that the program said it was 2017.”
“And I’m going to have to set an email reminder so I warn her in four years.”
“Absolutely. But come on, that’s not the only time they’ve shown you something a little early, shall we say?”
Veronica bit her lip. Melanie’s preterm labor probably qualified. She hadn’t told Daniel about any of that yet, though. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she conceded.
“Okay, so I’m going to make some calls about the floats,” Daniel said. He pulled out his notepad. “What did you see?”
~~~
A few hours later, they were back on the phone. “Eagle float, check,” Daniel counted off. “Founders float, check.”
“So it’s this year’s parade,” Veronica said. She was walking Harry through McKinley Park. Even though it had to be at least ninety degrees out, her hands felt cold.
“And you’re sure you didn’t see or hear an explosion? No airplane or helicopter overhead dropping some kind of mist?”
“The only mist was that kind the restaurants spray out to cool people off.”
Daniel exhaled loudly. “Okay. So we’re probably dealing with some sort of metaphor. The spirits don’t do that very often, do they?”
“No, they don’t.”
“So why now?”
“Maybe they can’t really show me what’s really going to happen for some reason.”
“Well, it’s not like they were trying very hard to spare you a traumatic vision this time, though.”
Veronica nodded. “True enough. They definitely wanted me to know how bad this thing could be. It wasn’t realistic, though, in a way. It was like a bad horror movie.”
Harry stopped at a bush and commenced deep-sniffing investigations.
“So what’s the message?” Daniel asked. “Something bad is going to happen at the Sacramento Fourth of July parade. It will lead to many deaths?”
“Maybe the choking is part of it. Maybe the deaths will be… by choking?” Veronica finished lamely.
“I’ve heard of terrorists gassing people in enclosed places, but in the open air like that, I don’t see how it could really work.”
“I don’t know, Daniel. It just seems like they could have shown me everyone dropping dead without all the special effects if the choking wasn’t important. And the vomiting and… everything else. We can’t rule any of it out as unimportant.”
“Maybe they wanted to emphasize suffering for some reason.”
“That seems likely,” Veronica agreed. Harry pulled ahead, leading her towards the duck pond. “So, lots of suffering and death. But why not show me the real way it’s going to happen?”
“Maybe it’s not going to happen at the parade,” Daniel said.
“Then why show me the parade?”
“Maybe it starts at the parade. Maybe it’s a biological agent.”
Veronica sucked in her upper lip, biting it and releasing it. “Like anthrax or something?”
“Something infectious. Maybe they release it at the parade, and then lots of people will suffer and die.”
“Oh, god.”
“Yeah.”
“How would that work?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. Like I said, a parade is in the open air. It’s not the best way to infect people with something airborne. Ingestion would only work on people eating something. You did say the kids had ice cream?”
“Of course. And popsicles. It’s a Fourth of July parade, Daniel. I bet there’ll be ho
t dogs, too.”
“And water bottles, and sodas, and beers…”
“But it was everyone, Daniel. Everyone was melting, not just the kids with ice creams or the adults with beers.”
“Maybe a super flu? Captain Trips?”
A pair of little girls approached Harry and looked to Veronica, miming petting him. She nodded at them and turned away to answer Daniel. “Captain who? Never mind, I don’t want to know,” Veronica said. “Is there any way to find out if some super flu’s gone missing from a lab or something?”
“But how would they infect so many people with it? You can’t infect a whole crowd by touch, and we’ve already ruled out an airborne infection.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have ruled it out,” Veronica said, then flashed a smile at the girls, who were cooing over Harry.
“There’s just too many possibilities and no clear way that they’ll do it,” Daniel said in frustration. “We need more information.”
“I don’t want to have that dream again, Daniel,” Veronica said in a low voice.
“I know. But for now, we have to set it aside. All it does is tell us there’s a serious threat, and that we have just under two weeks to get to the bottom of it.”
“No pressure,” Veronica said.
“Look, don’t worry. There are other leads to follow up on. Now that I know my hunch about Murphy was good, I’ll be looking into him more closely.”
“That’s good.”
“I think it’s going to be all about old-fashioned police work for now, Ronnie. Maybe tomorrow you can come by and get Marissa to draw the perp you saw, but otherwise, you don’t have to deal with it anymore.”
“Not unless I get another lovely dream.”
“Or vision.”
“Or vision,” Veronica agreed.
“Call me if you do,” Daniel said.
“Yeah. Call me if there’s anything else I can help with.”
“Hey, I want to have dinner tonight, okay?”
The Plane and the Parade (Veronica Barry Book 3) Page 8
