East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  “You hungry?” Tommy asked, setting the menu aside.

  Most townies ignored the menu, Dani recalled from her time as a waitress, because it hadn’t changed in twenty years.

  “I was a minute ago,” she said, setting her own menu down. “Caesar salad with grilled chicken on the side.”

  She felt a comfortable familiarity talking to Tommy. She no longer felt like she needed to impress him, or keep him at arm’s length. It helped to be sitting in the old town diner where she’d spent so many hours talking to friends or reading in a corner booth.

  He slid the menu away from him, then smiled at her. “Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face?”

  “Your face is fine.”

  “So’s yours. Except for the weird expression on it.”

  “Jill Ji-Sung said you told people to vote for me for homecoming queen.”

  Tommy looked caught, guilty. “Well,” he protested, “it’s not like I thought you couldn’t win it on your own …”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Dani said. “And you’re wrong. Lindsay Cameron would have won easily. I’m not mad at you. I was just wondering why you did it.”

  “Because I thought you were the best person in the school,” he said. “And the prettiest. From the eyes up at least.”

  “Excuse me?” Dani said.

  “That’s all I ever saw,” Tommy said. “Your face was always buried in a book.” He held a hand horizontal and flat in front of his face to illustrate. “This was you,” he said, raising his hand to cover his nose. “Book, eyebrows, top of head. I was scared of you.”

  “Maybe I was hiding. Why in the world were you scared of me?”

  “Because you were so awesome,” Tommy said. “I felt totally out of my league around you.”

  Dani wanted to ask him if he’d had a crush on her—if he’d felt the same thing on the dance floor that she’d felt, or if she’d been deluding herself— but she couldn’t decide what would be more awkward, if he said yes or if he said no. She was about to change the subject when the waitress came to take their orders.

  “Okay,” she said once the waitress was gone. “Another question. You said there was a reason you wanted to be a private eye, but that you’d tell me later. It’s later.”

  She immediately saw that her question made him uncomfortable. “Unless you’d rather not.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Tommy said. “Do you remember when my mom died when we were in eighth grade? The car accident on the Taconic?”

  “I remember,” Dani said. “We were all shocked. Didn’t she hit a deer?”

  “She wasn’t driving, but her boss did,” Tommy said, tracing the grain of the wooden tabletop with his finger. “They were at a Housing and Urban Development conference in Mahopec. She was in administration.”

  “If this is too painful …”

  “No, it’s fine,” Tommy said. “Like you said about time healing things. I was fourteen. That’s a long time ago.”

  The waitress brought their drinks. Tommy added cream to his coffee and tore open two packets of sweetener, shaking them first in a gesture that reminded Dani of how her father shook the mercury thermometer before taking her temperature.

  “So I went to the funeral,” Tommy said, “and it was pretty terrible. But afterward something just wasn’t sitting right with me. The way people were looking at me, like there was something they weren’t telling me. I don’t know. Something felt wrong. So I started doing some investigating, like I’m a big TV show private eye … like I’m Magnum, I guess. And I learned the accident happened on the northbound lane, up near Chatham. Where her boss had a vacation house. At ten minutes before midnight. Chatham is about fifty miles north of Mahopec. So why were they going to Chatham, to his country house, at midnight?”

  “Oh, Tommy,” Dani said.

  “I found some e-mails she’d written him on her computer,” Tommy said. “Part of me didn’t want to know, but the rest of me had to. It was pretty obvious they were having an affair. My dad didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Did you ever tell him?”

  “What would be the point?” Tommy said. “I deleted the e-mails. Actually, I trashed the whole CPU with a sledgehammer so he’d never find them. Or maybe he knew all about it but never let on because he didn’t want me to know. He loved her the way he knew how, but that wasn’t the way she needed to be loved. That’s the best I can do.”

  “How did it hit you when you figured it out?” Dani asked.

  “Hard,” Tommy said. “I used to picture her boss’s face on the chests of the running backs I’d tackle. I had all this anger, and it was like I had a switch I could flip, on/off, and when I needed to hit somebody, I’d just flip it on and go.”

  “Is it still there?” Dani asked. “The switch?”

  What she really wanted to know was, had he flipped the switch the night he tackled Dwight Sykes?

  “Do I have to answer that?” he said. “It is. But I haven’t flipped it in a while. The guy had actually been to our house for dinner. He and my dad were friends. But you know, his wife and kids didn’t deserve to be hurt either. The worst part, for me anyway, is remembering all those happy moments together as a family, the three of us, and wondering if it was all a lie.”

  “She loved you,” Dani said. “That couldn’t have been a lie.”

  “I know,” Tommy said. “Can I ask you a personal question? How often do you think about your folks?”

  “All the time,” Dani said. “Every day.”

  She told him the story of how she’d lost them, the great last day they had together, and being awakened in the middle of the night by her team leader, who began, “Dani, I have some terrible, terrible news …”

  Tommy reached across the tabletop and held her hand, nothing more. She didn’t want to look at him right away. Finally she wiped her nose with her napkin and sniffed.

  “Sometimes I forget to remember them, but they always come back. And lately I’ve been having these weird dreams about them.”

  “Such as?” He leaned back to make room for the waitress to set down their plates.

  Dani told him, in as much detail as she could recall, about her dreams, all but the last one, when she’d nearly sleepwalked off the deck. Tommy listened closely, without interrupting.

  When she finished, she laughed and said, “I don’t think Sigmund Freud would be scratching at his beard over what they mean. I’m obviously trying to deal with my guilt. You know, a hundred years ago dream analysis was a huge part of any psychotherapist’s training. Now it’s barely mentioned. It makes you wonder what’s going to be considered out of date a hundred years from now.”

  “So you’re pretty sure you understand them?” Tommy asked.

  “Why?” Dani said. “What do you think they mean?”

  “Well,” Tommy said, “you’re the doctor, but I think they’re trying to tell you something.”

  “Okay,” she said. “What?”

  “Well, the image of them sitting in a tree …”

  “ Looking down on me,” she said. “As in disapproving.”

  “ Looking down is your choice of words, ” Tommy said.

  “What words would you choose?”

  “Watching over?”

  His insight took her aback. She’d never thought of that.

  “You could be right,” she allowed. “It’s not uncommon for people to think their ancestors are watching over them as protectors.”

  “No,” Tommy said. “I don’t mean in a general sense. I mean specifically. The night you dreamt your father was showing you the stone was the same night Julie was killed, right?”

  “It was.”

  “And it woke you up at 2:13. And Julie was killed on a bare rock. Was the stone in the dream a bare rock?”

  “Tommy,” she said. “I had the dream before I knew about the murder. Dreams can only reconfigure. You can’t dream about something you don’t already know.”

  “But you did.”


  “Tommy—a stone could mean … just about anything.”

  “It could,” he agreed. “But a dream about a stone that wakes you up at 2:13, on a night when a girl is killed on a stone at exactly the same time, doesn’t mean ‘just about anything.’ It probably means just what you think it means. Ockham’s razor. The simplest theory is the one most likely to apply. Your father was trying to warn you.”

  “About what?”

  “About a psychopathic killer on the loose, for starters.”

  “Tommy …”

  “What time did the ME say she died?”

  “He can’t be that precise.”

  “What did he estimate?”

  “Around two,” Dani said. “What about the dream where my parents were walking me to school and I climbed a ladder and then fell on top of my father?”

  “You tell me,” Tommy said.

  “Well,” Dani said, “the school is symbolic of my education. And the high tower is the proverbial ivory tower. Meaning with all my education, I still wasn’t smart enough, and my poor decision killed them.”

  “Or,” Tommy said, “the problem isn’t that your education let you down. The problem was that you let go. There was nothing wrong with the tower. Or the ladder. One faulty rung and you let go. Your parents led you there, and they encouraged you to keep climbing. And your father was there to catch you if you slipped up. Literally, if your hand slipped. Maybe they want you to keep going.”

  “Keep going where?” Dani said. “Back to school? What about the water? The waterfall turning to blood?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tommy said, wiping his mouth with his napkin and pushing his plate away. “I had a doozy water dream the other night.”

  He told her the dream he’d had of sitting high on a hillside, watching as New York City was flooded with water, and of people fleeing the city in white trucks and vans and cars, and people committing suicide by jumping from tall buildings, and finally he told her how he’d dreamed of someone racing up a river in a speedboat.

  “I’m thinking Noah’s ark,” Tommy said. “Did you know the Bible says Noah was five hundred years old when he fathered three kids? I wonder how old his wife was.”

  “Probably twenty-two,” Dani said. Without a word, she reached into her briefcase and took out the piece of paper upon which she’d written down the details of the dream she’d had … the exact same dream as his.

  Tommy read, then looked up. “What are the odds of two people having the same dream?” he said. “And I don’t mean three kids and a big house in Connecticut.”

  Dani didn’t know what to say. “I’ve never put a lot of stock in coincidence,” she finally said. “Or premonitions.”

  “What does that have to do with having the same dream? At the risk of seeming too … forward, I don’t know how you can write this off as a coincidence.”

  “What do you mean by ‘forward’?”

  “I mean there’s a reason why you and I met again. We were meant to meet again. It wasn’t accidental. There’s a reason why you and I are right here, at this moment.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’re supposed to do this together,” he said. “Someone wants us to do this together.”

  “Someone?”

  “God,” he said. “That’s how I would understand it, but put it any way you want. Fate. Destiny. Just don’t write it off as coincidence.”

  She didn’t say anything right away. Then, “So you’re saying God wants us to be together?”

  “Maybe forward isn’t the right word,” Tommy allowed.

  “You let me know when you think of what the right word is. And I’m not writing it off as coincidence. I’m just not writing it in as something else. Not until I’ve had more time to think about it. Do you know what a false positive is?”

  “Do you mean like when your doctor performs a test that says you have something, but actually you don’t?”

  “Exactly. They’re just as dangerous as false negatives. Some say more because it’s human to want to think you can rely on the test. A negative means you still don’t know the answer, but a positive means you do, and it’s really easy to settle for that, even when there’s a chance that the problem is with the test and not the result.”

  “In other words, you don’t trust your own intuition.”

  “It’s not …”

  “What?”

  “You’re right. It’s exactly that. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The chief characteristic of self-deprivation is the inability to tell you’re sleep-deprived. You go two or three weeks on three or four hours a night and you think you’re doing fine, maybe a little tired, and then you open your refrigerator and find your bowling ball and you can’t remember why you put it there, but you know you had a good reason at the time. In other words,” Dani said, “this is really freaking me out.”

  “Is that your professional diagnosis? Because it’s freaking me out too.”

  “It’s not in the DSM-IV,” Dani said. “I don’t understand how this is possible.”

  “I don’t either,” Tommy said. “Not rationally, anyway. Maybe when we weren’t paying attention, we both drove past a billboard for a movie, or … we saw something on TV …”

  “You’re reaching,” Dani said. She looked around the diner, at the faces of the people there. “I’m scared,” she said. “To be honest.”

  “Then you probably don’t want to hear what else I have to say,” Tommy said.

  “I probably don’t,” Dani said. “What is it?”

  “You said there was a puddle on the deck, and that you saw wet footprints that matched yours leading to the edge of the deck. Except that it didn’t rain that night. So where did the water come from?”

  Dani saw Tommy look up as if someone were standing behind her. Someone was.

  Phil Casey smiled and gestured to an unoccupied chair. “Mind if I join you? Stuart told me I could find you here.”

  Dani nodded, and he sat down. She exchanged glances with Tommy and did not feel the need to tell him that what they’d been talking about was just between them. For now. To be continued.

  “I’ve been meaning to check this place out,” Phil said. “What’s the soup d’ jour?”

  “That’s the soup of the day,” Tommy said.

  Phil turned to Dani without cracking a smile. “They say when he played, he was the king of trash talk,” he told her.

  “Still got it,” Tommy said.

  Phil handed Dani a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket and told her they’d been searching Facebook and found a photograph of Logan Gansevoort, taken years earlier at a Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby event.

  “Logan was a Cub Scout?” Tommy said.

  “Kicked out for smoking. Guess who the other kid in the photograph is?”

  “Amos Kasden,” Dani said.

  Phil nodded, then told the waitress all he wanted was coffee.

  “Did you read the letter I forwarded to you?”

  “I did,” Phil said.

  “Tommy thinks somebody coached him when he wrote it,” Dani said.

  Phil turned to Tommy.

  “It seems dumbed down,” Tommy said. “To us.”

  Dani appreciated being included, even though it was Tommy’s idea, not hers.

  “Have we made any progress bringing Logan in?” she asked Phil.

  “We’re being stonewalled. The wheels are turning, but slowly.”

  “I might have better luck,” Dani said. “The family lawyer asked me to meet with him tonight at the country club.”

  “I made an appointment to go to the nursing home to talk to Abbie Gardener,” Tommy said, looking to Dani for what she assumed was permission.

  She shrugged to say, Why not?

  “Good luck. We got nothing from her,” Phil told him. “Maybe you can win her over. You have more charm than I do.”

  “I’m lowering my expectations even as we speak.”

  “I also left a message with a friend of my grand
father’s,” Dani said. “A man named Ed Stanley. He retired to Montana, where he met Grandpa Howard, but before that he worked for the State Department and lived in Moscow for over twenty years. My grandfather said if anybody could get information about the orphanage that Amos came from, Ed Stanley could.”

  “To what end?” Phil asked. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but what difference does it make?”

  “Maybe none,” Dani said, “except that to understand a fellow human being in full, you need to start at the beginning. If you can’t get a good picture of the first formative years, you can’t get a clear picture of the grown-up.”

  “I think you’re right about the letter,” Phil said to Tommy. “It’s a little too perfect.” He finished his coffee, stood, and threw a five-dollar bill on the table.

  “Coffee’s only a dollar,” Dani said.

  “I know,” Phil said. “This seems like the kind of place where sooner or later everything that goes on in this town gets talked about. I want the waitress to think well of me the next time I need to ask her a few questions. It’s an old cop trick. Plus it’s deductible.” He turned to Tommy. “Works for PIs too.”

  “You told him?” Tommy said once Phil was gone.

  “He’s all for it,” Dani said. “He said he’d teach you everything he knows.”

  “Yes!”

  Dani fished in her bag for her wallet, only to have Tommy tell her it was his treat. When she insisted, he said he’d already had the cashier run his credit card before he sat down.

  “Let me know what the lawyer says,” he told her. “Maybe you’d learn more if you just went home and took a nap and dreamed.”

  Dani smiled. “Is this case freaking you out too?” she asked. “Maybe a little?”

  “You mean they aren’t all like this?”

  “For now,” she told him, “I’m writing off the similarity of our dreams as coincidence. Pending further study.”

  “Call it what you want,” Tommy said, “but I think somebody is trying to tell us something.”

  23.

  Tommy rode his motorcycle to High Ridge Manor, a single-story assisted living community where he’d delivered flowers from time to time when he’d worked for his dad in high school. He was pleased to see Carl Thorstein’s unmistakable gray Volvo in the parking lot, the rear bumper and trunk plastered with stickers that said WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER and A MIND IS LIKE A PARACHUTE—IT ONLY FUNCTIONS WHEN IT’S OPEN and HATE IS NOT OKAY and simply WWJD?