Foretold (A Ghost Gifts Novel Book 2)

by Laura Spinella

  “Yes. In here.” From a locked cabinet, Piper produced a numbered cardboard box. “With nothing new, I was going to send it back to the PA staties. Do we have something new, Aubrey?”

  She didn’t answer, taking the lid off the box and examining the contents she’d readily recalled. “Hockey,” she said, the word floating into her ear.

  “What about it?”

  “I’m not sure.” She shuffled, irritated; the urge to squirm felt like ants on her legs. “I don’t know the first thing about hockey.” But as Aubrey said the words, her head swam with suspected hockey jargon: slap shot, body-checking, drop pass, hat trick. “Can we take a look at Liam’s personal items?”

  Piper cleared a space on her desk and plopped down an identical box. The lid opened, and a rush of cold air came at Aubrey, like the box led to the Arctic. She took a step back. “That’s really weird.”

  “For you or for the rest of us?” Piper said.

  “Uh, me. When you opened the box, I felt a rush of cold air, and not the kind that accompanies the dead. More like a physical cold, like a place.” Aubrey moved her gaze around the office. There was a flickering ethereal presence, then nothing. She looked back at the box. Taking up most of space inside was Liam’s gym bag. “Did Liam Sheffield play ice hockey too?”

  “I don’t think so.” Piper picked up the boy’s profile, flipping through. “His parents list video games and swimming. I doubt there are many ice rinks in Tucson.” Piper flipped the page. “Oh, wait. It does mention street hockey. According to his parents, Liam had recently taken an interest in street hockey. But so what?” She rested her hand on her hip, glancing between the folders and Aubrey. “Aside from a brotherly resemblance and some basics—male, white, middle-class, teenagers, equally baffling disappearances—there are no decisive facts. They disappeared two thousand miles and months apart. Sadly, I could come up with a dozen other cases bearing the same similarities.”

  But Aubrey wasn’t listening; she was unzipping the gym bag. The pungent odor of sweaty boy rushed forward, enough that Piper wriggled her nose, and Aubrey had to turn her head away for a moment. She dug into the bag, and not of her own volition, her hand burrowing into Liam Sheffield’s belongings. The motion became frantic, forceful. It was as if someone were physically pushing her. Oddly, the taste of sour apple invaded again, then vanished. If not for the relative safety of Piper’s office, Aubrey wasn’t too sure she’d be going along with it. “Here. This.” She withdrew an inventoried plastic bag. Aubrey dropped the bag onto the desk. Inside it was a roll of green tape.

  Piper rummaged through Trevor’s inventoried possessions. Seconds later, she came up with a similar roll of green tape, which Aubrey recalled seeing months ago. “Kind of interesting. But hardly like finding identical voodoo dolls, pins stuck through the same body parts.”

  “The places your mind will go . . .”

  “All I’m saying is it falls more to coincidental than suggestive. Tape does not register as even a vague indicator of their disappearances correlating.”

  But Aubrey couldn’t let it go, taking the plastic bag from Piper and picking up the one she’d dropped on the desk. They bordered on hot, and Aubrey was surprised not to find the plastic melting. She drew a breath. Instead of heat, icy cold filled her lungs. “I still say the tape connects them.”

  “Hon, you’re going to have to give me a little more to go on. I’m not even seeing a path to start down on, not based on rolls of green tape you can buy at any sporting goods store.” She took the bagged tape from Aubrey. “I think you’re understandably overwhelmed. You should go home and forget about two random boxes that happen to contain rolls of green tape. It’s not exactly a smoking gun.”

  Aubrey’s head shot up, hearing a voice that wasn’t Piper’s. “You’re right. The tape’s not worth noting.” She turned toward the dedicated agent. “Not unless you just heard a third boy telling you to pay attention to it. Not unless he’s hissing it in your head, insisting that these two boys and their disappearances are connected. That and this ghost—it tastes like the most god-awful sour green apple flavor.”

  Piper stared back, drawing her own breath and conclusion. “Well, damn, would you look at that.”

  “What?”

  “Smoke from a gun.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  With a bestseller behind her and Ink on Air in its fifth season, money was not one of the problems Aubrey and Levi faced in their present-day lives. They could have easily moved to a fancier neighborhood but had felt settled in the house on Homestead Road. Together, they’d remodeled the kitchen and added a spacious master suite. When things were good between them, Aubrey and Levi had done the obvious, like buy new cars, invest in Pete’s education, and generously support several favorite charities. They occasionally toyed with the idea of buying a summer place on the Cape. Even then, they had enough to buy Charley a seaside home in a North Shore retirement community. They were all decisions the two of them had made together.

  As Aubrey pulled into Charley’s driveway and Levi got out of his car, “together” was not the word popping to mind. While she’d taken Piper’s advice and asked Levi for his help with the letter box, it was downright weird to arrive at the same place apart.

  “I should have called you,” he said, walking toward her. “We could have carpooled.”

  Carpooled. The word came out coolly, as if Aubrey had been an afterthought regarding school pickup. “I suppose I’ve gotten used to it, coming here alone.”

  “I’ve been by.”

  “I heard. Charley said you met the roofer here last month, made arrangements for the repair it needed. That was good of you.”

  “Look, just because you and I . . .” Levi stopped, adjusting his glasses. “No matter where we are, I have no intention of abandoning your grandmother.”

  So it’s just me, then . . . good to know . . .

  “Why, um . . .” Aubrey pointed to the front door. “Why don’t we just go inside? See what this letter box is all about.”

  On the way in, they talked briefly about Pete, Levi saying that he needed to be home by four thirty. That was when basketball practice ended. Over her shoulder, Aubrey uttered a curt, “I know.”

  Yvette ushered them inside. She was helping Charley get to the box, which she kept in a deep walk-in closet. She left Aubrey and Levi in the living room, saying they’d be right back. Aubrey sat at one end of the sofa, Levi sitting in a chair across from her. She glanced at the empty seating for two beside her.

  “I just prefer the chair,” he said.

  Aubrey shot him a narrow-eyed glance. “Sit anywhere you like. Seriously, Levi, I got your message the day you moved out.”

  “And I thought we’d calmly reasoned through that. Everybody needed space. We wanted a better environment for Pete. Not one where he felt like the catalyst for every argument.”

  Aubrey ran a hand through her hair, looking out a window that took in a garden view. “Rest assured, there’s plenty of damn space now.”

  They fell silent as Yvette wheeled Charley into the room. In her lap was the letter box she’d described—a large leather thing, shallow but long. Seeing the box made Aubrey’s mind reel back the memory of a high closet shelf in her parents’ bedroom. “Charley, years ago, did the box arrive from Greece with my parents’ other belongings?”

  “Actually, your father sent it to me a few months before they passed away.”

  “Did he?” she said, curious. “I remember the box in Greece. I remember after they died, when a trunk and some crates arrived. We were in the rental house in New Mexico. There were books and pictures, a little of my mother’s jewelry. But you’re right. I don’t remember the letter box, not then.”

  “Indeed. You wouldn’t have.” As Charley spoke, Yvette parked the wheelchair midway into the room.

  “Did he say why he sent the letter box?” Levi asked.

  “Only that he wanted it somewhere safe. It was one of the last and most lucid conversations I had with
him. By then,” she said to Aubrey, “your mother did most of the talking during phone calls. Peter was often heavily medicated, and when he wasn’t . . .” With crooked fingers, Charley stroked the box’s lid. “My son certainly wasn’t himself.” Silence settled over the room. “The dining room table would be better if you want to look through it. As you’ll see, the box is quite full.”

  They all moved toward the adjacent dining area, Aubrey saying to Levi as she strode past, “By all means, you decide where you want to sit first.”

  They ended up side by side, just circumstance—Charley’s wheelchair naturally fit best on the open side of the table—and Yvette busied herself as hostess, ferrying glasses of iced tea to the group. But as Aubrey stared at the box, trepidation rose.

  “You okay?” Levi tugged at the leather tie, a thin strap wrapping around it twice.

  She hesitated. “Yes. Of course.” Along with the reply, she moved her hands in a flighty fashion, finally knotting them in her lap. Levi swung open the lid, and a burst of air rushed out, the dank smell of timeworn paper permeating the room. This much was pedestrian, the sights and smells anyone would sense delving into a sealed old object. Aubrey focused on separating ordinary effects from those apparent only to her. Unknotting her fingers, she moved her hand forward, covering Levi’s. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Aubrey cocked her head and gripped her hand harder into his. “A buzzing. It’s very distant. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the hum of people talking . . . yelling.” With her other hand, Aubrey swiped at the bead of sweat that had gathered above her lip. A prickle moved like Morse code up her spine, and she shuffled in her seat.

  “Do you want me to stop, close it?” He asked this, she realized, because her fingers were clamped around his.

  Emotions converged on Aubrey, most of them emanating from the box. But it was all too surreal and vague, like some of her own ghost gifts. She let go of Levi’s hand. “No. Don’t close it.” She focused on the mosaic displayed in front of her—scraps of paper of every pigment, shape, texture, and size. It wasn’t completely new. Her gaze moved back and forth; she remembered looking inside the box, if only a handful of times. “I . . . keep going, but I don’t want to touch any of it.”

  A practiced Levi took charge. “Fair enough. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Levi took a moment, rubbing his hands on his pant legs. From there, he segued smoothly into reporter mode, and the hunt began. Aubrey hadn’t experienced this part of Levi in some time; it was curiously comforting. He needed to make sense of the box as much as she did. On the surface, the contents challenged his orderly nature. At a glance, matchbook covers and business cards were visible, a plethora of notepaper, and even the shorn corner of a pizza box sticking out from the top layer. A few minutes into his search, Levi stopped to retrieve a fresh legal pad from his car. Some rules of order were nonnegotiable. He returned, going about the task of detailed note-taking.

  He withdrew the papers one at a time—a fishbowl of prognostication. He read each one slowly, allowing everyone time to absorb the information. As he began, a white tablecloth patterned in lilies and butterflies dominated. Over the next two hours, the cheery print vanished, with Levi converting the potpourri of paper scraps into a filing system. He stopped several times and murmured, “This is just . . .”

  “Amazing,” Aubrey said, finishing the thought. “Just amazing. Even for somebody who is used to everyday conversations with the dead.”

  At one point, Levi withdrew a candy wrapper. It’d been torn open at its seams, making for one flat piece of shiny cellophane. A smile broke into his serious mood.

  “What?” Aubrey said, looking at the dark pink wrapper marked “Cadbury.”

  “English chocolate.” His tone had shifted to wistful. “On our annual pilgrimages to London with Pa, it was a game. How much candy could Brody and I get our hands on without him catching on? We’d gobble it down the second Pa’s back was turned, under the covers at night. I haven’t thought of it in years. And this wrapper . . .” He shook the crinkly paper. “This was a coconut Cadbury. They only produced it for a short time. Anybody who’s English associates a dark purple wrapper with the chocolate, but I remember this one.” He turned it over. Wistfulness vanished as he read the message on the reverse side. “Jesus . . . ‘Harrods’ . . . ‘1983’ . . . ‘detonation’ . . .”

  “A department store bombing, right?”

  “Yes.” Levi shook his head. “My father was called in to consult. I remember him talking about it afterward.” He placed the outrageous prediction in its chronological location, which surely conflicted with the logical thoughts in Levi’s head. “My God, Aubrey, this is a treasure chest of history before it ever happened.”

  She scanned the table, the lilies and butterflies nearly obscured.

  “So tell me.” Charley’s query was filled with far less fascination than her guests’ observations. “Aside from amazement, what is it you’ve determined?”

  Yvette took the seat beside her wheelchair, looking on as well.

  Levi lightly tapped his knuckles on the legal pad, glancing between his notes and the prediction-filled papers. “My initial thoughts, based on simple sleuthing . . . some rudimentary organization of information, if we look at the predictions on the whole—”

  “Levi,” Aubrey said, hearing the tip of an oration.

  “Right. Sorry. First off, did you know there was a pattern?”

  “A pattern?” Yvette said. “In that mess?”

  “Yes.” Aubrey had noted the same thing. “My father begins receiving or at least collecting the messages when he’s fifteen.” She pointed to the papers filed farthest left. “This would be the year. Right, Charley?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s correct.”

  “So from here to about here.” Levi reached across the table, his index finger landing on the wingtip of a monarch butterfly. “These all are past predictions, and all disastrous. Like you told us, there was the earthquake in Turkey, the girls’ names from the Cape Cod murders . . .” For a moment they all looked solemnly at the heart-shaped papers Charley had described. “The department store bombing and about two dozen worldwide events in total. It’s just . . . staggering.”

  “And correct me, Levi, if my assumption’s been wrong all these years,” Charley said, “but if not for your unique perspective, you wouldn’t believe a word of it.”

  “That’s a fair statement, for me. For any ordinary person who might look through this box.”

  “But we do have a different perspective.” Aubrey continued to stare at the now-organized papers. “Almost as important, seeing all this clarifies the intensity of my father’s burden. I can’t even imagine how it felt to know all this, the encumbrance.”

  “Indeed again.” Charley pointed a crooked finger. “And this pattern. Explain what you’ve learned, please.”

  Levi pointed to the far end. “Like Aubrey said, from the time Peter was fifteen, there are multiple predictions every year, several tragic, a few—for lack of a better word—that appear frivolous. The things you mentioned the other night, Charley—sporting events, a couple of more complex predictions that have to do with earning potential.”

  “Could you be more specific?” Charley said.

  Levi picked up a sheet of ordinary computer paper. “This one jumped out at me.”

  Charley raised her chin and squinted, reading: “‘Lisa project. Buy into it.’ The crayon drawing of an apple. I’ve always wondered about that message. It seems more like . . . gibberish than some of the others.”

  “The Lisa project,” Levi said, “was the codename Apple computers used during its developmental era, back in the early 1980s. It was the name of Steve Jobs’s daughter, but it also stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture.”

  All three women stared at him, Aubrey saying dully, “And people find my base of knowledge inexplicable.”

  “The point is, had Peter or anyone decoded this prediction in r
eal time and invested, they would have made a fortune.” Levi held out the paper. “It’s a lottery ticket.”

  “Okay, so we’ll add that one to the positive prediction pile,” Aubrey said as Levi moved the paper. “But then there’s a break. Starting in the mid-1990s through present day, the good forecasts fall off. You never noticed this?”

  “Not that I recall. Years ago, Carmine and I spent time focusing on the predictions, but—”

  “Charley, hang on a sec,” Levi said. “Besides Carmine, who knew about the predictions? I’m curious.” Aubrey sat up straighter. That question hadn’t occurred to her, though she knew the real answer differed from the one her grandmother would give.

  “Only Yvette, Carmine. Peter’s wife, of course. My late ex-husbands. Peter’s father passed before any of this started to manifest itself. That’s it.” Charley looked over the sudden organization applied to her son’s chaotic life. She looked at Levi. “Why do you ask?”

  Levi pointed to the table full of predictions. “Just another piece of information that needs to be factored in.”

  Aubrey ran her fingers over the earrings that trailed down her lobe and was quiet as the conversation continued.

  “And here’s another. Carmine and I did draw one inference,” Charley said. “Although perhaps I was only giving myself permission to put the box away, stop looking at the messages.”

  “What was that?” Levi asked.

  “While Peter was given future predictions, perhaps he was never meant to prevent the tragedies attached to them.” She looked to her granddaughter. “It’s Aubrey who took this curious gift to the next level, offering messages of closure. Asking Peter to prevent such larger calamities from happening . . . it seems a little Herculean for one man.”

  “Or makes him a descendant of Nostradamus,” Levi said.

  “Unfortunately, I can only quote our family tree to the early nineteenth century. As for my son, I’m afraid he was as much a victim as every person whose life he couldn’t save. As I told you both, I did consider burning the box after Peter’s death—again a few times after that. The urge to preserve it always won out.”