—but she never gets the chance.
There’s a flicker of yellow light fifty feet ahead on the road. Ella’s head snaps toward it, to find not a fire or a lightning strike, like she expects, but a man standing in the middle of the right lane, surrounded by an undulating yellow aura. A man who was definitely not there a second ago, when Ella last glanced out the windshield. A man dressed in an orange jumpsuit that looks very much like the sort of thing a person would wear in prison. A man who raises his right hand and appears to summon fire from the depths of hell.
Her mother slams on the brakes.
But it’s too late.
The last thing Ella Dean sees in the time before is a massive fireball scorching through the rain as it hurtles toward the little compact car. And then there is darkness, cruel and empty. And then there is pain, hot and searing. And then there is weightlessness, nauseating. And then she’s on the ground, in the rain, broken in more places than she can count, thoughts on the fritz, static in the brain, eyes frozen in place, staring, staring, staring at the pathetic sapling weighed down by the frigid fall downpour.
Ella doesn’t know how long she lies dying.
She blacks out and comes to, and the sky is darker. She blacks out and comes to, and there are flashing red and blue lights above her. She blacks out and comes to, and she’s surrounded by paramedics, who are loading her onto a stretcher while she screams at the top of her lungs, every inch of her body on fire as they jar her side to side. She blacks out and comes to, and she’s being carried to the top of a steep embankment by those same paramedics, then over a guardrail and onto a road.
And that’s when she sees the car.
What’s left of the car.
Ella will never understand, not even decades later, how she survived the wreck. The car is a crumpled tin can resting against the left lane’s guardrail. The entire front end is crushed, flattened all the way back to the cabin. The front seats no longer exist, the steering column and dashboard folded over on top of them. There are no intact windows, glass strewn across the surrounding asphalt. There is nothing, not the frame, not the seats, not the wheels, left untouched by fire. Everything is black as ash, small flames still spouting steam as they hiss at the touch of rain.
Ella cannot see anyone inside the car. She knows the reason why is because there’s no one left to see.
The car burned while she was lying on the ground. And she was lying on the ground for a long, long time.
Mom is not in the car. Mom is gone. Mom is dead.
The paramedics transfer Ella from a stretcher to a gurney and roll her quickly toward a waiting ambulance. Some of them speak to her, ask for her name, her age, badger her to give them a sign she’s cognizant. But Ella can’t bring herself to speak—and really, she doesn’t know if she can—so instead of opening her mouth, she simply watches. Watches the firefighters huddle around the burned-out husk of a car. Watches the cops pace back and forth in front of their cruisers. Watches the men in black, whose affiliation she cannot determine, as they stand on the curb, armed with equally black umbrellas, and observe the scene in absolute silence.
Just as the paramedics are hauling Ella into the ambulance, a black van pulls up behind the fire truck parked on the right-hand curb, and one of the mystery men turns to greet the newcomers. Ella sees his face. A younger man, late twenties maybe, with short blond hair, sharp gray eyes, and a frown that could have rivaled the best courthouse scowl of the Unbeatable Abigail Dean.
It’s a shame, Ella thinks as she slips into a deep and troubled sleep, a shame they never got to meet.
Six Months Later
Chapter One
Ella steals the file from the man in black, and then she gets hit by a bicycle.
An hour before the impromptu theft, she’s eating breakfast in her father’s cramped kitchen that smells like stale beer and old cigarettes. The table is lopsided, one leg shorter than the rest, and her cereal bowl keeps sliding off to one side, so she has to hold it in place. The cereal she’s eating is a bland shredded wheat variety she’d never have picked for herself—of course, in her old life, she never ate sugary cereals; she bought eggs and waffles at school every morning—but her dad never lets her go to the store with him. So the cabinets are always half bare and the fridge is always half empty, and the only food to consume in the house comes ready-to-serve or in microwaveable trays.
Ella shovels the last bite of nasty wheat in her mouth, chews, and swallows. She follows it with water because that’s the only thing in the house to drink that isn’t beer. Then she slides back her rickety chair, crosses to the sink, drops the dishes on top of the pile (the dishwasher is broken), grabs her backpack from where she left it against the wall, and heads down the hall. As she nears the front door, she glances into the living room, and finds her dad passed out on the sofa, the same place he fell asleep last night. He stumbled in around 3:00 AM, drunk out of his mind. Ella would hope he didn’t drive home, but there’s a fat chance of that.
The man already has two DUIs.
He couldn’t act responsibly to save his goddamn life.
Ella walks out the door and slams it shut behind her.
Her father’s house is a rundown one-story in a cul-de-sac that was likely nice once upon a time but got left behind when development shifted to downtown Aurora. It’s a far cry from the two-story colonial where Ella used to live, the one the bank swiftly snatched away after her mother’s death. But, really, everything is a far cry from the way it used to be, and the house she lives in now is the least of her concerns.
She walks around to the ramshackle garage, all rusting aluminum, infested with insects and mice, and climbs through the mess, around her father’s aging truck, until she reaches the far corner. Between a workbench that no one ever works on and a red toolbox on wheels sits what appears to an outsider to be an oddly shaped piece of furniture under a tarp. Ella lifts the tarp carefully, revealing her piano, the only valuable thing she managed to salvage from her old life. She traces the nicks and scratches the black-painted wood acquired when she and a few of her friends from school spirited the piano out of the house in the middle of the night, loaded it into a “borrowed” moving van, and drove off with it.
Unfortunately, after all that effort, Ella couldn’t find a good place to store it. She doesn’t make enough from her new part-time retail job to rent a storage unit. So the instrument is sitting in this shitty excuse for a garage, slowly being invaded by mold and bugs and who knows what else. By the time she gets it out of here, it’ll probably be ruined, and there’s no way in hell she can afford a new one.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a huge problem if she was starting Julliard in the fall—she could use their pianos—but that unfinished application is stuffed in a dresser drawer somewhere.
Ella absently scratches at the burn scars on her waist through her T-shirt. Two months in the hospital. Two more in physical therapy. She missed the end of her senior year, lost her chance to apply to college, and is now stuck living with her piss-poor excuse for a father while she takes makeup summer classes so she can graduate. All her friends walked the stage last week, garbed in brightly colored gowns and hats and sashes. And Ella was stuck at the back of the audience, brooding the whole way through.
The irony is that she skipped a grade in elementary school and spent her whole childhood believing she was super smart because she was on track to graduate early.
What a joke.
What a fucking joke.
Ella drops the tarp back over the piano and trudges out of the garage.
At the lip of the cul-de-sac, she catches a bus and rides it all the way to Paris Street. When she hops off, she crosses the street, enters Elaine’s Flower Shop, and buys a fresh bouquet of lilies. Flowers in hand, she walks for another half a mile, until she reaches the iron gates of the Mission Road Cemetery.
It’s the biggest cemetery in Aurora, and her mother’s family has been buried there for four generations. The latest addition is her mo
ther. It’s the six-month anniversary of her death.
A death the city news heralded as a heartbreaking tragedy. An assistant district attorney killed when her car hydroplaned and skidded off the road into a guardrail, killing her instantly. Her teenage daughter on life support in the ICU for days, a young life hanging in the balance. Drive safely, folks! Drive safely. You never know when the weather will turn on you. That’s what all the newspapers said. Every. Single. One.
Bullshit.
Ella doesn’t remember much about that day, she admits. But she remembers the man in the road, the man with the yellow aura, the man who shot the fireball at her mother’s car. And no matter how many doctors insist her memory was damaged, that she dreamed up an imaginary scenario to make it easier for her to process her mother’s death, that the whole thing was a feverish nightmare conjured up by her concussed brain in the aftermath of the crash…Ella knows, in her heart, the truth of the matter. She knows her mother was murdered. Murdered by someone not quite normal. Or perhaps not quite human.
She knows.
And she’s damn well going to discover who killed Abigail Dean.
But today, Ella will place flowers on her mother’s grave, then eat at her mother’s favorite restaurant, then visit the mall filled with her mother’s favorite stores. Tomorrow, she’ll resume her investigation. After all, she’s got two more weeks before summer school starts. She has the time to snoop, and snoop she will. At the DA’s office. At the crash site. At any other relevant location she uncovers. Oh, yes. Ella Dean will snoop to the ends of the Earth to uncover the identity of the man with the yellow aura.
Ella strolls along the footpaths winding through the cemetery until she reaches the turn in the sidewalk that leads to the north corner. There, she pauses. Because visible past a squat tree, standing among the Dean family graves, is a man dressed in black. Ella wouldn’t find this weird—black is a typical cemetery color—but the style of his clothing shakes loose a detail from a half-forgotten memory. What is it? she thinks. What’s familiar about this guy?
Stepping off the concrete walkway, she sidles up to the squat tree and crouches to get a better look at the man past the thick leaves. As she does so, the man abruptly moves away from what Ella realizes is her mother’s grave, the headstone still shiny and new, sticking out among the older, worn stones of late Dean family members. Sitting at the base of the headstone is a bundle of fresh hydrangeas, which the man in black must’ve placed there.
In the months since the funeral bluster died down, Ella hasn’t seen anyone but her grandparents (and herself) place flowers on her mother’s grave.
So who is this man, and why is he here now?
Ella gets her answer when the man spins around to retreat onto the sidewalk.
She recognizes him instantly. From a vibrant flash of memory preceding days of darkness.
It’s the blond man from the crash site, the one who was standing off to the side with a black umbrella, who turned to greet a bunch of people driving up in a nondescript van. Ella had almost completely forgotten about him and his colleagues, the only people at the scene she couldn’t identify as law enforcement. She was so badly injured after being flung from the car that she lost huge swaths of her memory for several weeks. Most of it eventually returned, but a lot of it, especially the days leading up to the crash, are still a jumbled mess.
The memory of the blond man had been bouncing around aimlessly in that mess.
Now it’s crystal clear.
He was there, and he knows something—Ella is sure of it.
The blond man stands silently before Abigail Dean’s grave for another two or three minutes before he nods deeply, a respectful farewell. Then he marches off toward the Belmont Street exit of the cemetery. As soon as he’s a reasonable distance away, Ella creeps out from behind the tree, jogs over to her mother’s headstone, places the lilies alongside the hydrangeas, and races off to catch up to the blond man.
Forget her remembrance plans.
If she can solve the mystery of her mother’s death today, she will.
She trails the blond man at a distance of roughly thirty feet, far enough behind him to split if he notices her. He exits through the Belmont gate and walks up to the Greenaway Road intersection, loitering at the edge of the sidewalk until the walk light turns green. When he continues straight down Greenaway, Ella quickly jaywalks across Belmont, plants herself flush against the display window of a lingerie store, shuffles up to the end of the block, and peers around the corner.
The man, half a block ahead, ambles up beside a black van parked in a two-hour street-side space. There’s no one in the front seats of the van, but the back is blocked off from the cabin by a metal grate, and the glare from the midday sun is too bright on the windshield for Ella to see through the screen of tiny holes. She considers the odds that someone is: one, in the back of the van, and two, staring through the grate like some sort of lookout. Not impossible. But not likely either, she thinks.
The blond man doesn’t seem alert enough to be in the middle of some secret surveillance operation. He pauses next to the van, checks the time on his watch, unclips a pager from his belt, and spends the next couple minutes scrolling through his messages. When he’s finished, he sticks the pager back on its clip and unlocks the passenger-side door of the van. He doesn’t climb in though. He picks up something on the seat, a manila folder, and flips through the printed pages inside, perusing a few passages of whatever is written.
He pouts while he’s reading, teeth nibbling on his bottom lip, and Ella is struck with the feeling that, had she seen this man in a movie or a music video anytime in the past five years, she’d have taped a poster of his face on the wall in her old bedroom, along with those of her other favorite actors and male singers. He’s got that Hollywood heartthrob look about him: prominent cheekbones and a strong jaw with just enough left of his youthful baby fat to give him a delicate edge.
In other words, the blond man is cute. And Ella wants to smack herself for thinking so. She’s trying to uncover the truth about a murder here, not drum up gossip about boys. This isn’t the high school lunchroom. Back on task, Ella Dean. If you can decline dates to make room for more piano practice, you can ignore Pretty Boy McGee over there long enough to find the psycho who killed your mom.
She shuts down all thoughts about the blond man’s good looks and focuses her attention on the manila folder. There’s no way she can read the contents from this distance, but if the man leaves the folder on the seat again, maybe she can inch her way closer and—
Black figures crop up in Ella’s peripheral vision, and she looks under the awning of an Italian eatery on the other side of Greenaway to find four people dressed like the blond man emerging from the restaurant, arms laden with takeout bags. At the head of the group is a gruff-looking white man sporting salt-and-pepper hair and a winding scar that trails from his left ear down to the curve of his jaw. To his left is a black woman with short, curly hair, and to his right, an Asian man about the same age as his blond colleague. Bringing up the rear of the group is a redheaded woman with a perpetual smirk who’s about half a foot shorter than everyone else.
As Ella watches, the group crosses the street, joining the blond man. They chat too softly for Ella to hear, but she gets the gist of their conversation when the black woman points to a small park, complete with picnic tables, a couple blocks farther down Greenaway. The group must be making plans to sit down and enjoy their pasta and subs before they resume working on…whatever people dressed in long black coats in late May do for a living.
The blond man waves the manila folder in the air while he says something to the older, grizzled man, who Ella suspects is the leader of the group. The grizzled man shakes his head, then gestures for the blond man to put the folder back in the van, presumably because he doesn’t want to risk its contents getting lost, stolen, or ruined during lunch. With a shrug, the blond man complies, tossing the file back on the passenger seat. He relocks the door and f
ollows the rest of the group as they all head off to the park.
Ella waits at the end of the street until all five members of the group vanish behind the skinny trees at the park entrance. She rounds the corner onto Greenaway, walking at a leisurely pace so she won’t draw the attention of any passersby. When she nears the van, she double-checks that there’s no possible vantage point from which the people in black could see her from the park, and sets her backpack against the front tire of the van. She sinks to one knee, pretending to tie her tennis shoe as a woman with a stroller passes behind her. As soon as that lady is gone, Ella Dean gets to work.
Unzipping her backpack, she digs out a slim jim she may or may not have stolen from the Dodson Mechanic Shop while pretending to flirt with Riley Dodson, a junior at her high school. Ella didn’t know what places or things she might have to break into to obtain clues about her mother’s death, so she covered all the usual bases. She learned how to pick door locks and car locks, crack safes, and decipher building blueprints, and sank her teeth into all the other delightful skills you see felons use in crime flicks. It’s almost funny, in a way—the daughter of a dead attorney committing crimes in order to find out who committed the crime that led to her mother’s death.
If you like your humor morbid as hell.
Ella grips the slim jim tight in her hand, wondering if her mom is watching her from somewhere beyond and shaking her head in disappointment. Abigail Dean was never the religious type, and she passed that trait onto her daughter, but even so, Ella can’t help but imagine her mother’s spirit in some brightly backlit afterlife, observing her daughter’s less-than-legal actions with that astute, uncompromising frown she always wore in the courtroom.
Of course, even if she is watching, Ella’s not going to stop.
Unless her mother’s ghost returns to the material world and identifies the man with the yellow aura straight to her face, Ella is going to march forward on this crusade until she uncovers the truth.
Dream Snatcher Page 2
