Deadly Visions Boxset

by Alexandria Clarke

  It took a moment for the statement to settle into reality. I watched as Bill’s jaw went slack and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes bunched up.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “Like I said, I was sixteen and stupid. It didn’t seem fair to me that you were alive when my parents were dead, especially after what you did to Emily—”

  “You hated me that much?”

  “I—” The tremble in his quiet tone completely threw me. He had never sounded so vulnerable before. “I hated everyone. You just happened to be the closest target.”

  “You do realize that you just admitted to attempted murder,” he said.

  I swallowed hard. “Yes, I do.”

  Bill didn’t rush me with the cart or explode with anger like I expected him to. Instead, he hung his head, stroking his beard in quiet thought.

  “You know, Bridget,” he said so softly that I had to lean in to catch the words. “I always tried to do right by people. Emily and I don’t foster kids for the extra cash or tax breaks. We started doing it because Emily always wanted children and we couldn’t have any of our own.”

  “Oh.”

  “She likes them,” Bill continued. “Hell, I like them too when they’re not bouncing off the walls or flushing toys down the toilet. The point is, when we took you and Holly in, we knew it would be hard, but we thought it was for the best. You and Holly wouldn’t get bounced from house to house like most of the other kids in the system. You could stay in Belle Dame, where the rest of your friends and family were. We saw two heartbroken girls in need of a home, and we were in a position to provide that.”

  “Bill, I—”

  “I’m not finished,” he said, holding up a meaty finger to stop me. “I did my damnedest to be patient with you because I couldn’t begin to understand what you were going through. And then the sneaking out started, and the petty theft, and the vandalism. You were a damn tornado, Bridget. You ripped apart everything in your path without thinking of the consequences.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  “And now—” Bill raised his voice to overpower my apology. “You come into town to blame me and my wife for Holly’s disappearance and to inform me, in public, that you wanted to kill me when you were a teenager? What I can’t understand is why you’ve decided to torture me like this. All I’ve ever done was try to protect you from yourself.”

  I covered my mouth, holding back a sob. Impatient tears spilled over my eyelashes, and several passing customers shot suspicious looks at me and Bill.

  Bill sighed and tightened his grip on the utility cart. He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Look, I believe that you’re here for Holly. I believe that you love her and that you would do anything for her. Here’s the thing though. I’m responsible for Holly until her eighteenth birthday. After that, she can do whatever she wants, but until then, I don’t want you anywhere near my family. Don’t come to my house. Don’t talk to my kids. Don’t come near my wife. When Holly gets home, I’ll give the two of you an hour to catch up, and then I expect you to go right back to Turkey or Greece or wherever you were before Holly disappeared. Actually, I don’t care where you go as long as it’s far away from Belle Dame. If you don’t respect my decision, I won’t hesitate to take out a restraining order against you. Understood?”

  My chin quivered as I fought against the flood of emotions threatening to burst out and leak onto the floor of the warehouse. If I opened my mouth, I would lose it, so I nodded once and kept my eyes on Bill’s boots.

  “Good.” Bill pushed the utility cart down the aisle. “God help you, Bridget. You sure as hell need someone to.”

  As his girth faded into the crowd, a short, desperate cry escaped from my lips. I clamped my mouth shut and made a run for the door, bumping customers out of the way. The sun hit me like a smack in the face. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I vaulted over the landscape border to the side of the massive warehouse, away from the front door and the dusty parking lot. I sagged against a bale of hay and lost it, crying into the itchy yellow grass.

  The phone vibrated in my pocket, buzzing against my thigh. I took it out, wiped my eyes to see straight, and checked the messages.

  Well done. One step closer to saving your little sister.

  When I’d gathered myself into one piece again—or as close to one piece as I could get—I walked back into town. My chest felt hollow, as though someone had reached in and ripped my heart out of place. Bill’s reaction confused me. All this time, I’d painted him as a villain. I should’ve known there was more to the story behind the Millers’ love of fostering. This was why I’d left Belle Dame in the first place, because it was impossible for me to measure up to the expectations of those around me.

  An engine hummed as a squad car pulled up to the sidewalk next to me. Mac rolled down the window and leaned across the seat, frowning when she saw my pink, tearstained face. “Everything okay?”

  “No.”

  Mac drifted along as I continued trudging down the street. “Been looking for you. We got a call at the station about a half an hour ago. It was Bill Miller. He said the two of you had a run-in at the supply store, mentioned that you might be a danger to yourself and to others. I convinced Scott to let me track you down. Anything you want to tell me?”

  I counted the neat cracks in the concrete beneath my sneakers.

  “Bridget.”

  “I can’t talk here,” I muttered.

  Mac cupped her hand to her ear. “What’d you say?”

  I stepped over the grass to the curb, looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot, and bowed into the window of Mac’s cruiser. “I can’t talk here. Someone might be listening. We need to meet. Tonight, in the home team dugout at the old high school’s softball field. Two o’clock. Can you do that?”

  Mac tapped the temple of her aviators, sliding the glasses down the bridge of her nose to scrutinize me over the frames. “You gonna fill me in on what’s happening with you then?”

  “As much as I can.”

  The sunglasses went back up. “All right then. Two o’clock. What should I tell Officer Scott when I get back to the station?”

  I retreated from the window of the squad car. “Tell him it’s the same old shit.”

  At half past one, when the only people left awake in Belle Dame were the regular ghosts of the local bars, I dressed in dark jeans and a black jacket, yanking the hood over my head and cinching it tightly around my face. My reflection in the motel room window looked ready to rob a convenience store, but those days were long behind me. I took the Polaroid photo and the postcard from the motel safe and stole into the night. I left my phone in the room, just in case Holly’s captors had somehow managed to turn it into a tracking device.

  I jogged through the back side of town, jumping fences and startling cattle in order to avoid the main roads. Every so often, I looked around to make sure that no one was following me. In the open fields of Belle Dame’s rural landscape, there weren’t many places for a stalker to hide, another advantage of taking the long way.

  The old high school was practically falling over. Cinderblocks crumbled at the corners, red and black paint—Belle Dame official colors—peeled off the building, and someone had toppled the statue of the school mascot in the quad. I snuck beneath the dilapidated overhangs and past the portables to the rear side of the school, where the chain-link backstop of the old ballfield cast a cage of shadows across the infield in the moonlight. The home team dugout faced the opposite direction. I clambered over the fence, crept across home base, and sidled into the little alcove.

  Mac stood at the very back, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, eyes open and alert. I jumped at her statuesque posture. She was as still and quiet as the rest of the night, like a wolf waiting out its prey.

  “Shit, you scared me,” I said, taking a breath to steady my racing pulse.

  “Sorry.” She moved into the moonbeams and sat down on the rickety wooden bench that stretched from o
ne end of the dugout to the other. “What’s going on?”

  I sat next to her, drew the Polaroid out of my pocket, and set it in her lap. She picked it up, eyed me carefully, and examined the photo.

  “What is this?” She pointed to the center of the picture. “Is that you?”

  “Flip it over.”

  She did so, squinting at the smudged writing. “‘Want me back alive? Play along.’ Bridget, what the hell?”

  “That’s Holly’s handwriting,” I told her. “I’d recognize it anywhere. She’s still alive, Mac.”

  Even for a cop, Mac possessed an unusually keen sense of perception. “And you know this because of the photo or because of something else?”

  “I saw her. Last night, when I passed out at the bar. It wasn’t because I was drunk. I had this weird out-of-body experience. I saw Holly. I talked to her. They’re keeping her tied up in some basement—”

  “All right, slow down.” She held the photo at eye level, comparing the two versions of me side by side. “You told me before you were having auditory hallucinations. Did this vision feel the same way as those did?”

  “They weren’t hallucinations,” I insisted. “It’s real. Holly and I have some sort of weird connection. She said so herself.”

  “Bridget, come on.”

  “I shit you not.”

  Mac slumped against the dugout wall, humming with exhaustion. “All right, say it’s real. What’s stopping you from just asking Holly where she is? Or who took her?”

  “I tried that,” I said. “She doesn’t know. Part of me wants to tear apart every house in Belle Dame until I find her, but I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  My gaze flickered to the picture in her hands.

  “This is blackmail, isn’t it?” she asked, lifting the Polaroid again.

  “About as black as it gets,” I replied. “You can’t tell anyone at the station about this. Whoever took Holly is keeping tabs on me. That’s why I had to sneak out here in the middle of the night. If they find out I met up with you—”

  Mac heaved a gusty sigh. “I get it. Tell me about this picture. Not everything,” she added at the look on my face. “Just enough for me to know what’s going on.”

  I swallowed, trying to alleviate the pressure that felt like a hand around my throat. “You already know some of it. That picture was taken roughly three years ago at an abandoned hotel outside of Paris. I met that man—” I pointed to Fox’s exquisite face “—on a tour of the catacombs under the city. He was charming, charismatic, and gorgeous, everything you’d want out of a hot foreign fling.”

  “Fox. I remember. What happened?”

  “He had a different idea of how our relationship should go,” I said, biting down on the bitter taste on my tongue. “I worked for him.”

  Mac closed her eyes in comprehension. “You worked for him.”

  “A lot of girls did.”

  “Ugh.”

  “His network was huge,” I explained. “He had people all over the biggest cities in France. I heard he ran operations in other countries too. The people in that photo were just involved with the Paris sector.”

  Mac studied the picture with a disgusted sneer. “How long were you there with him?”

  “From the time I was nineteen to the time I was twenty-two,” I told her. “I was his favorite, so he kept me close. I went along with it. It came with certain perks, like regular meal times and staying alive.”

  Mac covered her mouth as if subduing a gag. “Oh, God. Bridget, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s over now.”

  “It still matters. How did you get out?”

  I ducked my head, drawing patterns in the dirt of the old bench. “That’s the thing. I did a lot of illegal shit in order to survive at the hotel, and then I did a lot of illegal shit to make it out of France alive. It didn’t end well for Fox’s business.”

  “You told me Fox was dead.”

  “Collateral damage,” I said with a shrug. “Fox may be gone, but his business partners aren’t. I betrayed every one of the people in that photograph. They lost everything because of me.”

  Mac fluttered the Polaroid. “You think one of them took Holly.”

  “No one else would have a copy of that picture.” I showed her the catacombs postcard. “They sent me this too.”

  She read the message on the back. “I guess this explains the incident with Bill earlier.”

  “I have to play the game,” I told her. “Holly said so, but no one ever said I had to play it by their rules. Can you check these for fingerprints?”

  Mac tucked both into the inside pocket of her jacket. “I can, but it’s unlikely I’ll find anything. This photo’s not in great shape, and you’ve been touching this postcard all day by the looks of it.”

  “Just try.”

  “I will. Is that all?”

  “For now.”

  We stood and left the dugout, in step with each other as we crossed the neglected ballfield. Mac kicked her shoe against the ground, showering home base with red dirt.

  “I’ve never seen infield clay this color before,” she remarked. “It’s weird. Rusty. Like—”

  “Like blood.”

  4

  Do Not Pass Go

  The remaining dark hours of the morning passed in a combination of insomnia and nightmares. Whether I was awake or asleep, dingy basements and abandoned hotel rooms and stacked skulls haunted the black screen of my eyelids like a broken rendition of a horror movie marathon. For a while, I tried to contact Holly again. Apparently, there were no rules to whatever connection linked her mind to mine. No matter how much I attempted to recreate the strange buzzing feeling that filled my head each time Holly contacted me through brainwaves or whatever shoddy science that linked us, the experience fell flat. There was nothing to find out there in the ether. It was as if Holly was the one who needed to initiate the psychic phone call. Either that, or we both had to be reaching out at the same time. It occurred to me that Holly may not be strong enough to get ahold of me. After all, she was tied up in a basement. Who knew how long it had been since she last ate or drank. The mere thought made me shake with anger.

  After hours of trying, I’d only succeeded in giving myself a hammering headache, so I pulled the cool bedsheets over my head and dozed until mid-morning. Experimentation clearly wasn’t the answer. I needed concrete research on the possibilities of a telepathic link between sisters, but that sort of thing was difficult to come by when the science behind it was more fantastical than, well, scientific. It would be simpler if I could talk to someone with similar experiences, yet I doubted a visit to the local palm reader—whose store always smelled faintly of marijuana and lavender incense—would do me much good. No, I needed something real to hold on to. Someone who—

  I sat straight up in bed, the epiphany hitting me like an anvil to the head. I knew someone who heard voices. Aunt Ani, my mother’s sister, had been declared unable to care of herself after my parents’ deaths. She’d claimed that she heard my mother calling out to her from beyond the grave. No one believed her. They told her that she was suffering from emotional trauma as a result of her sister’s death. Then they pumped her full of antipsychotics until she stopped functioning like a human being. Now, she resided in the assisted living facility meant for Belle Dame’s elderly residents, but she wasn’t as unresponsive as the staff thought. She and Holly had spoken through coded messages, and once I discovered their methods, I’d broken through to Ani too.

  I rolled out of bed and tugged open the dresser drawers, where my clothes were piled in messy heaps. I desperately needed to take advantage of the motel’s laundry room, but there was no time. I sniffed at a T-shirt, blanched, and found one that smelled less repulsive to pull over my head. Then I braided my hair back, put on my shoes, and headed out, but another postcard had been shoved under the door sometime during the night.

  The glossy picture showed the Statue of Death, a grim reaper dressed in white robes t
hat stood in the courtyard of the University of Medicine in Paris. Death’s open mouth laughed at passers-by, reminding everyone that we would all meet at the end someday. On the back of the postcard was another message, and a surge of relief rushed through me at the sight of Holly’s writing. At the very least, she was being kept alive to keep the game going.

  Get Emily on your side, the postcard read. You know how.

  I swayed on the spot, deliberating, then deposited the postcard in the motel safe before leaving the room. For once, the sun didn’t beat down on the pavement. It was a rainy Sunday morning. Puddles gathered in potholes, lying in wait for unsuspecting drivers to splash through them. The steady drizzle pattered on the overhang of the motel hallway as I walked toward the reception office at the front of the parking lot. Gray clouds washed out Belle Dame’s usually vibrant colors. The gloomy day matched my solemn mood, so the damp shoulders of my T-shirt bothered me less than they should have.

  I hopped over a puddle and pulled open the door of the reception office. I’d already made the acquaintance of Grant—the stringy recent high school graduate that manned the front desk—when I’d checked into the motel a couple weeks ago. He snoozed in a rolling chair with his muddy boots propped up next to the motel’s computer.

  “Grant,” I said. “Hey, Grant!”

  He snorted and came to, his boots thumping to the floor. “Welcome to the Star Motel, where we make you feel like a star.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s just me, you dork.”

  “Oh, Bridget.” Grant rubbed his eyes. “What can I do you for?”

  “Do you have access to the security footage from outside my room for last night?” I asked him, drumming my fingers on his desk. “The motel has to have cameras, right?”

  “Yeah, we got cameras,” he said. “I don’t have access to the tapes though. That’s more of a manager thing. Why? Is something missing from your room?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” I told him. “I had a visitor that I’d like to identify. Can you ask if it’s possible to get those tapes?”