Valiantly, the whales fight, while Alysia and the female she rides try to escape. But it is not the whales that the sharks seek. They want the lovely young queen who leads them, frolicking across the azure waters.
They pummel the whale, causing her to leap and turn, trembling in fear. As she spins, she shakes her rider loose. Alysia tumbles into the ocean. She is immediately surrounded by the great white sharks, their glassy eyes all staring at her. A huge black shark with a razor-sharp smile seems to be their leader.
The scene has been a monochrome of black and white and silver. An added hue stains the dark ocean palette. Scarlet ribbons float across the surface. Blood-red life fluid spills across the moonlit waters.
Karen turned and tossed. She fought to wake up, to stop watching the picture before her. When she surfaced, she raised herself on her elbows and shook her head. She was short of breath and sweating. Her whole body felt wet and soggy, as if she had been swimming in her nightclothes.
She drew in several pulls of air, filling her lungs, exhaling with audible sighs. Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply again. She felt as if she’d been holding her breath forever. Her lungs ached and burned.
Wide awake now, she remembered the dream. Alysia! She snapped on her bedside lamp and swiveled around toward the twin bed not four feet away from her.
Alysia’s covers were tossed on the floor. She wore a jet-black cloak over her white nightgown. Her black hair swirled like strands of shadows on the cape. Across her chest was a bright splash of color—scarlet ribbons of color. Her wide blue eyes stared at the light. Her face was a mask of pure terror.
Chapter 12
Karen finally realized the screams ripping the air and bouncing off the bedroom walls were hers. But she couldn’t stop. The overhead light blazed on as Alysia’s parents ran into the room.
“Karen, what’s wrong? Oh—” Mrs. Holland collapsed beside Karen, automatically gathering her into her arms. She stared at Alysia as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.
Mr. Holland dashed to Alysia, searched her throat for a pulse. He stared at Karen and his wife, who was now deadly quiet.
“Is she—is she—” Karen couldn’t say the word.
“She’s dead.” Mr. Holland’s voice held a note of astonishment. Picking up Alysia’s phone, he dialed the emergency number, gave directions to the house, then collapsed, seated at the foot of Alysia’s bed. He touched the splash of red across Alysia’s chest. “It’s not blood, it’s paint. What happened here, Karen?”
“I don’t know.” Karen found her voice. “I don’t know. I had a terrible dream. Alysia was—she—sharks—” She started to sob. Mrs. Holland held her closer.
“Did you hear anything?”
“No, I was really sound asleep.” Because she was at the Hollands, and not alone, she had relaxed and gone to sleep easily and deeply. The idea that someone had come into the room while she slept was almost more frightening than the dream.
“Where did she get that coat?” Mrs. Holland was still sitting on Karen’s bed, staring at her daughter. “Did she go to bed with it on?”
Karen answered again. “She—she just had her nightgown on. She said she was cold, though. Maybe she got up and put it on.”
“That’s not her coat. It’s more like a cloak.” Mrs. Holland, in a state of shock, was speaking in a perfectly normal voice, sitting there talking about the way Alysia was dressed.
“The police and the ambulance should be here any minute.” Mr. Holland came and pulled his wife to her feet. He circled her shoulders with his arm and led her from the room. “Get dressed, Karen. Come into the living room. Don’t touch anything.”
Karen pulled her wool skating slacks on quickly. She kept on the pink sweatshirt top: Turning away from Alysia’s bed, she tugged on thick socks, then padded from the room without looking back. The house was quiet, too quiet.
She sank into a chair in front of the cold fire. This was not real. She was still dreaming. Alysia was not dead. She couldn’t handle Alysia’s being dead. So she wasn’t. She’d come in here in a minute and say it was a joke. But Alysia had never been a practical joker. She was serious most of the time, sometimes too serious. Karen would work to make her laugh.
It was cold in the living room. There were huge picture windows looking out at a mountain meadow. Karen couldn’t see it in the dark, but she could imagine it. She and Alysia used to play there. They’d run and chase each other. They’d look for the first wild flowers of spring. They’d sit very still and watch deer nipping off new shoots of grass.
The police arrived, along with an ambulance. Karen could see the light swirling when the front door opened. All those men wearing boots and parkas trooped into Alysia’s bedroom. They were going to wake her up. They’d come out and say, “She was just asleep. I don’t know why you thought she was dead. I don’t know why you bothered us in the middle of a stormy night.”
They stayed in there a long time. Karen was cold, so cold. She got up and pulled an afghan from the couch. It was brown and green and tomato red. Karen remembered when Mrs. Holland was knitting it. Alysia could knit. She liked to knit socks. She had knitted Karen’s skating socks for her last Christmas.
She curled back into the chair, shaking out one foot that had gone to sleep, then wrapped the woolly blanket around her and waited again. She was not sleepy. She might never want to go to sleep again.
“Karen.” Mr. Holland looked old. She had never noticed that he had so much gray hair. “Captain Martin wants to talk to you.”
“You were asleep in the same room as Alysia?” Martin was young and really handsome. His voice was soft, soothing. He pulled up a straight-backed chair and looked at her sympathetically. But there was something else on his face. Curiosity? Disbelief?
Karen nodded, not trusting her voice.
“You didn’t hear anything?”
They couldn’t believe this had happened and she had slept through it. Neither could she. “No. I had a bad dream. It woke me up. The dream was about Alysia.”
“Another of your dreams, Karen? This is a bit unbelievable.” The look of sympathy disappeared. “Can you relate the dream to me?” He took out a notebook.
Slowly, Karen recalled the dream in detail. It was so real, so vivid, and she remembered everything. “In the dream, Alysia was wearing that cloak.”
“Had you ever seen the cloak before?”
“No.”
“It didn’t belong to Alysia? Or Mrs. Holland?” Captain Martin studied his notebook page. “Had you and Alysia ever played dress-up in the coat?”
Dress-up? “We’re not children, Captain. I said I’ve never seen it before.”
“I know you aren’t children, Karen. I mean, years ago. I understand you’ve been friends for a long time. Maybe when you were a child you saw this cloak. It was in a trunk here someplace.”
You’re leading the witness. She had seen that on TV once. A lawyer said it. It didn’t matter. “No.”
She and Alysia had never played dress-up. She didn’t know why. They just never had. They played outside most of the time, except in the winter when they played games—Monopoly and Risk and—and—They played cowboys and Indians some, hiding in the big rocks on the edge of the meadow, riding imaginary horses through the meadow. Kerr played with them. He always liked being the Indian, so she and Alysia would be cowboys. Kerr liked painting his face and—
“The red—the red—Was that really paint?”
“Yes. I guess it was supposed to look like blood. But there were no wounds. We can’t determine how she died.”
“She was scared.” Karen said that without thinking.
“What do you think she was scared of?”
“The sharks. She was always afraid of sharks. She had to leave the room when we watched Jaws that time. She couldn’t sit through it. She got really scared, just like last night.”
“Karen, you aren’t making sense. How could you know that Alysia was scared?”
“I just know she
was.” Karen knew. “She was scared in my dream.”
“What did you talk about before you went to sleep? Did you talk about sharks or whales?”
“No. We talked about how mad Bill was.”
“Who’s Bill?”
“Her boyfriend. They had a fight.”
“Would he be angry enough to hurt her?”
“Bill? No, of course not. Bill wouldn’t hurt Alysia. He liked her. He would have apologized tomorrow. Now he can’t. He can’t ever tell her he’s sorry.”
Another policeman interrupted them. “There’s no sign of a break-in. We can’t find any way the killer got in.”
The killer? Karen became alert for a moment. “You think someone came in here and killed her?”
“It looks that way. What do you think, Karen? Can you think of anyone who would want to kill Alysia?”
The room was full of shadows. The heat clicked on, water gurgled in the pipes. She shivered. She was cold, so cold. She sank down into a waking dream state. “She was scared. Alysia was so scared.”
“Carter, have Dr. Longly come in here. I think this girl’s going into shock.”
Before the doctor could come, Captain Martin asked a few more questions. “Karen, don’t you think it’s strange that three people that you know have died recently?”
“Yes, that’s very strange. Gordon was scared, too. I don’t think Jesse was. He was used to having tigers run toward him.”
“What do you mean? Why did you say that? Did you dream about Jesse the night he died?”
“I dreamed about Jesse. I fell asleep while I was beside his bed. I shouldn’t have done that. But I thought he was going to be all right. They all ran at him, but the black tiger killed him.”
“Can you tell me that dream about Jesse, Karen?”
He talked to her as if she was about five years old. She wasn’t. She was seventeen. She was a senior in high school. She was going to graduate and go to college next fall. But Jesse wasn’t going to get to go with her.
“Jesse can’t go with me. To college. Neither can Alysia now. I’ll have to go by myself. Or maybe I’ll let Kerr come with me after all. I wanted him to go to a different college.”
“Kerr is your brother?”
“Yes, we’re twins.”
“Do you think she’s hallucinating, Doctor?”
“I’m not sure. Let’s keep her covered up.”
Karen could hear everything that was said around her. She just didn’t care. She felt something cool on her arm, smelled a hospital smell, felt a slight prick on the inside of her arm.
Captain Martin asked one more question before she started to feel sleepy. “Do you know how someone got in here tonight, Karen?”
“No.”
“Do you know how someone got into Gordon Anderson’s house?”
“I told you once. Through the window.”
Voices all mumbled together. The faces before her blurred. She wasn’t going to have any trouble falling asleep tonight. Sometimes she had trouble falling asleep, but not tonight. It would be nice to get a good night’s sleep—without dreaming.
She wasn’t going to dream anymore. She didn’t like dreaming. Dreams were too frightening. She was never going to dream anything again.
Chapter 13
Alysia Holland died of natural causes.
That was the news Mrs. Holland called to relay to Karen. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone but us, Karen. Will you pass the news along at school? I know there must be gossip.”
“What—what do you mean, natural?” Karen twisted the edge of her sheets into a knot. She was still in bed on Monday morning. She hadn’t slept late, hadn’t slept much at all, but she was not planning to go to school. She’d have to tell people later.
“We let them perform an autopsy on Alysia. We couldn’t stand not knowing how or why she had died. We knew she had a heart murmur. Lots of people do. What we didn’t know is that it was anything to worry about. The doctor had told us it wasn’t. Even now he’s puzzled. He can’t believe it, but he can’t find anything else that’s a possibility.”
“Alysia had heart trouble?” That was something old people have. Old people die of heart attacks.
“All the doctor could conclude was that she died of a heart attack. But he did say the—the—” Mrs. Holland paused for a moment. “The expression on her face suggested she was frightened, and that could have caused her heart to give out.”
Karen bit her lip. She had one more question. “What about the way she was dressed?”
“Well, that remains a mystery, and we may never have the answer. The police did trace that cape to the drama department at the school. It usually hung in the costume loft.”
“But how did Alysia get it? Why was she wearing it? And the paint—what about the red paint?”
“We don’t know. How are you doing, Karen? Are you all right?”
That showed the kind of person Alysia’s mother was. It was her daughter who had died, and here she was asking if Karen was all right. “I—I think so. This is so hard.” Karen felt as though the twisted sheet were knotted in her throat.
“We have to celebrate Alysia’s life, Karen. All that she had done and been up to now. Would you like to read something at the memorial service, or say anything?”
“I don’t know if I can, Mrs. Holland.”
“Well, think about it. We’re going to wait until next Saturday. That’ll give you some time.”
Karen felt as if she’d need about a million years to accept this. Both of her best friends dead? In the space of a couple of weeks? It wasn’t right. It just wasn’t right.
She sat there until mid-morning, alternating between thinking and trying not to think.
On Saturday night Mrs. Holland had covered Karen with some blankets and left her asleep on the couch in the Holland living room. Mr. Holland had brought Karen home late Sunday morning. She felt ashamed that she had slept until eleven o’clock, but it was because of whatever the doctor had given her. She would never have slept that long otherwise.
The rest of the day, she had sat or lain in her bed, locking her bedroom door. She wouldn’t talk to any of her family. Kerr had tried to get her to come out a couple of times. She’d just shouted, “Go away.”
Today the house was quiet, blanketed with fresh snow. The outside world was overcast, and soft flakes fluttered down intermittently. There was a part of Karen that was sure the sun would never shine again. Then, despite the circumstances, she began to get hungry. It would be all right to eat, she knew. Alysia would have wanted her to keep going.
She slipped quietly down to the kitchen, prepared a tray and took it back to her room: a pot of tea, toast spread with raspberry jam, an orange she had peeled while the water boiled. She had placed two cocktail napkins on the tray. They pictured tiny, white clouds, a colorful rainbow on a backdrop of turquoise blue. Cheerful napkins. She stared at the soft folded paper. The design reminded her of a more typical Colorado sky.
Eating slowly, she stared out the window, watching each flake float past the glass square, then disappear. The jam was sweet on her tongue, the orange juicy and chewy. The tea in its fragile china cup was the color of winter grapes, not quite brown, not quite burgundy. It was just the correct temperature, warming her inside as it slid down her throat and into her stomach.
After she ate, she pulled her journal from the drawer in her bedside table. She felt she had to write down some facts. There was some connection between Gordon Anderson’s death and Alysia’s. The thought had come uninvited—or perhaps not. Maybe she was sitting there waiting for it. Yellow paint, red paint, the way Alysia was dressed, Gordon was not dressed. What did it mean? And Jesse—was there a connection of these two deaths to his? She tried to think about this objectively, as if she didn’t know any of the people involved. Jesse shouldn’t have died. Alysia had a heart murmur, but she shouldn’t have died of it. What did that mean?
What did the three people who died have in common? Two were clo
se to her, but certainly not Gordon. Gordon had no friends. He was close to no one. She wondered if he was close to his mother or father? It seemed a shame for a person to go through life with no friends.
Karen had no friends left.
She let go of that thought quickly. She had Kerr, even though they hadn’t been as close this year. Other people liked her. No one had liked Gordon.
All the people who died had been in the special gifted and talented class, the psychology class. The class taught by Dr. McArthur for college credit. The class they had elected to take, in addition to their other school work.
They had been talking about dreams in the class. Karen had dreamed about each person who died, just before he or she died. Those three dreams were the only dreams she had remembered during the whole class study.
Did Dr. McArthur have anything to do with the deaths? That seemed absurd, but she couldn’t rule out anything.
The phone rang. Should she answer it? It might be Mrs. Holland again. Slowly she picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Karen, this is Captain Martin, Evergreen Police Department. I’d like to come over and talk to you, unless you would rather come down to the department.”
What did he want? To ask more questions? She had no more answers. She didn’t want to go out. “I—I guess you can come over here.”
By the time she had gotten dressed, Captain Martin was there. Her mother had let him in. Kerr came into the living room the same time she did.
“Why do you want to talk to my sister again?” he asked. “She’s very upset. You’ll just upset her more.”
“I’ll try not to, Mr. Newton,” Captain Martin said. “I feel it’s necessary to find out as much as I can about this case. If you’ll excuse us.” Martin dismissed Kerr. “But I may want to talk to you later, so don’t leave the house.”
Kerr hesitated, as if he wasn’t going to leave Karen alone.
“Go ahead, Kerr. It’s all right.”
“I’ll be upstairs. Will you call me if you need me, Karen?”
“Yes, Kerr. I promise I will.”
“You two are very close, aren’t you?” Martin observed.
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