Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil, Love and Hope

by Jude Deveraux

  But Darci wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that, maybe, he planned to wait until she was asleep, then go to the tunnels himself. She wouldn’t put it past him to lock them in the motel room and leave them without transportation. She knew that Adam had always been a lone soldier, and this time was no different. She couldn’t risk his trying to save everyone by himself. Snuggling closer to him, she used her True Persuasion to soothe him and make him sleep.

  But now, hours later, he had wakened her with his thrashing and his moaning.

  “Is he all right?” Taylor asked as he leaned over the bed. “Can you calm him?”

  “No,” Darci said, frowning. “I’ve tried, but he’s in some sort of deep trance, and I can’t reach him.”

  “Adam,” Taylor said, leaning across his daughter and trying to wake him. He could see that Darci was concentrating, trying to reach Adam with her mind—whether to soothe him back to sleep or to wake him, Taylor didn’t know. Behind them, Boadicea stayed silent in the other bed, not stirring in spite of the commotion.

  Adam suddenly struck out with his fist and barely missed hitting Taylor on the jaw.

  “Wake him!” Taylor commanded his daughter. “What he’s reliving must be horrible.”

  Darci had spent her life using her power in only the most superficial of ways. Making the moonshiner want to buy a dog hadn’t taken any seriously deep concentration. But now, reaching Adam inside the sleeping trance that he was in took great effort. Her head was already aching from where she’d banged it on the tree—not that she’d told anyone that—and using her True Persuasion made it hurt more. But she stamped down the pain as she reached deep inside herself and concentrated until the room seemed to disappear. She was no longer in a body but was only energy, the energy of her mind, and this energy could move where it wanted, do what it needed to do. She found Adam’s mind and entered it as best she could. Even though the pain in her head was increasing from this great effort, she pulled away from the discomfort for fear that Adam would feel her pain. Instead, she concentrated on soothing his tortured mind. She thought of a golden light covering his body and making him tranquil.

  “Darci!” her father said. “Darci! Come out of it.”

  Slowly, she opened her eyes to look up at her father. He had her by the shoulders, and he was shaking her. When she opened her eyes, he embraced her and pulled her close to him.”I thought I’d lost you. Darci, you looked as though you were dead. I couldn’t feel your pulse. You didn’t even look as though you were breathing.”

  Turning slowly, for her neck hurt, Darci looked at Adam. He was sleeping peacefully now, but she sensed that he was close to waking up.

  “Are you all right?” Taylor asked, looking at her in concern. “I’ve never seen anyone go into a trance as deeply as you just did. I think a train could have run over you and you wouldn’t have felt it.”

  “I’m fine,” Darci said, trying to smile and alleviate his worry. “But I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Sure,” Taylor said, pulling back the cover to allow her to get out of bed.

  It took all Darci’s strength and concentration not to fall down as soon as she put a foot to the floor. But she didn’t want to add to her father’s worries. The bruise on his forehead was very dark now, and he was holding his left arm closely to his side. “Really, I’m fine,” she said again. “Just. . . .” She made a gesture toward the bathroom door, and he stepped aside.

  Darci had to control herself to slowly close the bathroom door, and when she was alone, she fell to her knees and emptied her insides into the toilet. And when there was no more to come up, she gave dry heaves that racked her body, making her stomach contract until it felt as though it were next to her backbone.

  She took her time washing out her mouth and trying to clear the air of the smell of her vomit. She didn’t want the others to know that she’d thrown up. Nor did she want them to know how hard she’d hit her head on the tree branch last night. In the car, while Adam was driving and arguing that he didn’t want to go on, Boadicea had sat silently next to Darci, and she was glad that his sister’s presence had distracted Adam. He didn’t see Darci blotting blood from her head with a box of tissues she’d found in the back of her father’s car. And when they’d entered the motel room, Darci had been the first to go into the bathroom so she could wash the blood from her hair and scalp. But now, hours later, the cut was still oozing blood and still causing her a lot of pain.

  But she wasn’t going to let an injury stop her from participating tonight any more than her father was going to let his arm stop him. And, even though Adam pretended he was all right, Darci knew that Adam’s ribs were injured. Of the four of them, only Boadicea seemed whole.

  When she went back into the room, Adam was sitting up in bed. “Sorry to make such a pest of myself,” he said, and she could see that he was trying to sound lighthearted.

  In the other bed, Boadicea was lying quietly, eyes open, and Darci had an idea that she was used to being quiet and listening.

  “I want you to tell us what happened to you when you were a child. I want you to tell us how you got that mark on your chest,” Taylor said. “I think we all deserve that much.” When he said this, his eyes included Boadicea in his statement, and the way she nodded made Darci wonder what had gone on between them during the night. Had her father told Boadicea about himself? About Darci? Adam?

  Whatever had gone on between them, Darci could now feel that a bond had been formed between this beautiful woman and her father. Darci wanted to ask him about what she was feeling, but her father was right: Now there was a need for a different type of information. It would help all of them, give them courage, perhaps, if Adam told the whole story of what had happened to him when he was a child.

  At first Adam protested, but one look at Taylor’s eyes and he stopped. Even after he agreed to tell, it took Adam a moment to begin because he had never told anyone the whole story.

  “When I was three years old,” Adam began, and his voice was weak, shaky, and full of emotion, “I was told that my parents had died in a plane accident, so I was sent to live in a huge house in Colorado with my noisy, prolific Taggert relatives.” He took a deep breath. “But the truth was that when I was three, I was kidnaped, and as a result of that, my parents died.”

  Here Adam had to pause, and Darci had to work to keep from saying something about how he must have felt carrying such a burden of guilt for his whole life. No, she wasn’t going to interrupt him. But she used her mind to try to comfort him, to tell him that he was safe and among people who loved him.

  “To this day, no one knows what actually happened,” Adam continued. “I’d always been an independent child who loved to play hide-and-go-seek, and I’d hidden from my mother while she was buying me clothes in New York. Later, my mother told the police that she could see my shoe sticking out from under a rack of clothes, so she’d felt safe. She could see where I was, so she kept shopping. But after about ten minutes or so, when she was ready to check out, she tiptoed over to the rack, flung the clothes back, and said, ‘Boo!’ But only my shoe was there.”

  Darci could only imagine the hysteria his mother must have felt, the terror. Reaching out, Darci took Adam’s hand in hers.

  “After an hour or so of the entire store being searched, the police were called in, then the FBI. But a couple days went by and nothing happened. There was no ransom request, nothing. No contact was made by the kidnappers.

  “But after three days of waiting, my parents sneaked out of the apartment and disappeared. To this day, no one knows why. Did they receive a message from someone? If so, who?”

  Both Darci and Taylor waited in silence for Adam to continue, both of them feeling the many years of agony that Adam had felt in so desperately wanting to know who? Why?

  “After my parents’ disappearance, everyone on the police force was questioned. A policewoman said she remembered my parents stepping into their bedroom and closing the door for a few minutes.
When they came out, she said they looked grim, as though they’d decided something. She said that at the time, she hadn’t thought anything about the incident. It was only later that she remembered the looks on their faces.

  “A couple of hours after my parents were alone in their bedroom, my father told one of the FBI men that he’d given up smoking years ago, but now, like he needed to breathe, he needed a cigarette, so he was going down to the local store to buy a pack. The FBI man offered my father one of his, but my father said they weren’t his brand. Later, the agent said that my father seemed very nervous, but that was to be expected under the circumstances.

  “No one knows when my mother slipped away. Minutes after my father left the apartment, the telephone rang and everyone jumped up and ran to it, ready to trace the call if it turned out to be the kidnapers. But on the fourth ring, when my mother didn’t appear to answer it, they found that she wasn’t in the apartment. Everyone searched for her, but no one could find her in the halls, the elevator, the stairs, anywhere. And when they went looking for my father, they couldn’t find him either.

  “Later, the FBI tried to piece what had happened together. My parents went into the bedroom and my father went down the fire escape to my cousin’s apartment, where he called a helicopter company he sometimes used in business. When it was time for the helicopter to arrive, my father left the apartment, supposedly to get cigarettes. The FBI figured that he took the elevator upstairs to the roof, then called his apartment from the phone in the elevator. The second the phone rang, the FBI people ran toward it, while my mother slipped out the front door and ran up the stairs to the roof. She and my father were aloft in the helicopter by the time the FBI realized she was gone.

  “It was easy enough to find out that the helicopter landed in upstate New York at a small airfield where my father kept his own four-seater plane. The helicopter pilot, who had no idea anything was wrong, waved good-bye to them as my father taxied down the runway and took off.

  Adam closed his eyes for a moment. “My parents were never seen again.”

  “What about you?” Darci asked. “How did you get away from the kidnaper?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam said. “Three days after my parents disappeared, a woman in Hartford, Connecticut, called the police. She was very upset, saying she’d found a little boy wandering in the woods behind her house.”

  “You,” Darci said, squeezing his hand in both of hers.

  “Yes. Me. I was naked and covered in deer ticks, and later I had the high fever of what was probably Lyme disease.”

  Darci and Taylor watched him in silence, waiting for him to continue.

  “I remember nothing about what happened while I was kidnaped. I know children aren’t supposed to remember much before their third birthday, but I do. In fact, I remember so much about my parents and our life together that, years later, the shrink I ended up going to didn’t believe me. He called my cousin to verify what I’d told him.”

  “But you were right,” Taylor said softly.

  “Every word. I remember—” Breaking off, Adam took a deep breath.”Let’s just say that if my parents walked in that door right now, I’d recognize them.”

  “What did the FBI find out when they investigated your disappearance?” Taylor asked.

  “Nothing. They think my parents somehow received a message that hinted at my whereabouts. It probably said, ‘Tell the cops and the kid is dead,’ that sort of thing. They can only speculate because they don’t know. They can’t even figure out how a secret message was sent to them.”

  “Where did your parents go after they got into the plane?” Taylor asked.

  “No one has any idea. The FBI thinks the plane went down over water. No one saw anything or has ever found anything, not so much as a piece of wreckage that could be from their plane.”

  “And what about you? You were so very little,” Darci said. Lifting his hand, she held it to her cheek for a moment.

  “I was a . . . mess,” Adam said. “I was cold, hungry, dehydrated, and running a high fever when I was found. And I had an oozing sore on my chest that had become infected. At the time I was found, there were hundreds of people searching for both me and my parents.” He looked at Taylor.”The FBI had managed to keep the kidnaping quiet, but when my parents disappeared, all hell broke loose and the media picked it up.”

  “So, after their disappearance, you were sent to live with relatives,” Taylor said, disgust in his voice. “And it would be my guess that your family decided that it would be better for your peace of mind if they told you nothing.”

  “Yes. I’m sure they meant well. They thought I was young enough that I’d forget everything, especially if I didn’t continue to live in a place that would remind me of my parents. And I was considered too young to have an opinion about where I wanted to live.”

  “But you did, didn’t you? Even at three you had an opinion,” Darci said fiercely.

  “Oh, yes. I remember crying and saying that I wanted to get on a boat and go look for my mom and dad.”

  Me too, Darci thought to him as she held Adam’s hand tighter. I used to want to go look for my mother. My real mother. The one who loved me madly. When Darci saw her father looking at her in curiosity, as though he was wondering what thoughts she was sending to Adam, she cleared her throat and released Adam’s hand. “So you went to Colorado to live?”

  “Yes. I lived with my cousins the Taggerts in an enormous house built in the 1890s. A beautiful house.”

  “But you got lost,” Taylor said.

  “I got lost,” Adam said. “There were eight kids in the family, none of them haunted by grief. Their mother, my cousin Sarah, tried to make me part of their family, but she couldn’t. No. That’s not fair. I wouldn’t allow myself to become part of them. I know that most people consider being an only child lonely, but I didn’t.” He gave a little one-sided grin. “I loved having a hundred percent of both my parents’ attention.”

  Darci didn’t smile. She knew about loneliness, both as a child and an adult. “So what happened to you?” she asked. “After you went to Colorado, I mean?”

  “Nothing. I grew up. My cousins soon learned to leave me alone. I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t a team player. In fact, too many people around me makes me . . . well, nervous. And small spaces....”

  Adam took a moment to quiet himself. “Anyway, when I was twelve, I began to have nightmares. They were . . . pretty bad. I used to scream so loud that I woke the whole household, and when Sarah—I could never call her Mother—tried to hold me, I fought her, kicking, clawing. She once had a bruise from here to here,” he said, running his hand along his jaw. “After that, only the men came when I started screaming. And when the dreams wouldn’t stop, I was sent to a psychiatrist.”

  “Was he able to help?” Taylor asked.

  “Not really. He tried to hypnotize me, but I wouldn’t go under. But he did make my relatives tell me the truth about the kidnaping and tell me what little they knew about my parents’ disappearance. But that made me feel worse. If it hadn’t been for me, they wouldn’t have died.”

  Taylor wanted to stop Adam from these thoughts; he could hear the anguish in Adam’s voice. “So what happened with the psychiatrist?”

  “After a year of trying, the man gave up. He couldn’t get anything out of me because I didn’t—and don’t—remember what happened after I was taken. And the nightmares stopped as abruptly as they’d started.”

  “So you went back to your family and lived a normal life,” Taylor said, smiling at his own jest.

  “Not quite. I never told anyone—until now, that is— but after the dreams stopped, I was haunted by memories of my parents. I seemed able to remember my every moment with them.” Adam closed his eyes for a moment, and Darci could feel that he was fighting back tears. “And I missed them. I missed my mother’s laughter and the way she used to—”

  He took a deep breath. “Anyway, I missed them, and I—”

  “—wanted t
o know what happened to them,” Taylor said.

  “No, not then I didn’t. During those years, I . . . drew into myself.”

  “You realized that you were different from other people, so you created your own world inside yourself,” Darci said softly. “You wanted to avoid the outside world.”

  For a moment Adam looked at her in silence. She was blocking her mind from sending him any thoughts, but he knew what she was thinking: Like me. Adam didn’t have power, or a “gift,” as Taylor called what Darci could do, but the horror of Adam’s early years made him as different from others as she was.

  “Yes. Exactly,” he said after a while. “I went to college, and while my relatives were becoming doctors or lawyers or majoring in business, I studied ancient history. I didn’t know what I was going to do with such a degree, but I was drawn to read about civilizations of long ago. Then, after I got out of school, I drifted. I was offered a couple of teaching positions thanks to family connections, but what I really wanted to do was. . . . Does it make any sense to say that I wanted to disappear? I wanted to run away from myself.”

  “Yes, very much,” Darci said before Taylor could speak.

  “I have family money, but I didn’t touch it. In fact, I didn’t tell anyone where I was or where I was going—not that I knew. I took jobs wherever I could find them. I was a deckhand on a tramp steamer for four years. I worked on a ranch in Argentina for a couple of years. I just wandered around the world, living here and there, but not really living at all. For a while I thought I wanted to write, but what I put on paper seemed to tap into some black part of my soul that I didn’t want to look at, so I stopped that.”

  “What made you start this? This looking for evil. And involving yourself in witches’ covens?” Taylor asked.

  “One of my Taggert cousins spilled a cup of tea on me. Ironic, isn’t it? I traveled all over the world seeking ...I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I know that I didn’t find it. Then I was on one of my rare return visits to Colorado, and several of us were outside by the tennis court. They were laughing and talking, but I was just sitting there watching them, there but not with them. All of us had cold drinks, but my cousin Lisa drank hot tea all year round. She stood up to cheer her brothers on in a tennis match, and the hot tea spilled down the left side of my chest. It was nothing really, but Lisa made a big fuss about it and had me take off my shirt so she could see if I was injured.”