Lance’s heart rate kicked up a bit at this. He couldn’t quite pinpoint why the man made him uneasy. Despite Lance’s initial fear, he couldn’t convince himself the man was here to question or harass him about any of his previous doings—Westhaven, in particular. But Lance was wary as he slowly stepped out onto the wooden porch and gently closed the door behind him.
The grass sparkled with half-melted frost. The dampness of the porch boards seeped through the bottom of Lance’s socks, and he wished he’d taken the extra few seconds to step into his sneakers. He pulled his hands into the sleeves of his hoodie and then crossed his arms, trying not to look confrontational. Over the sheriff’s shoulder, he saw the Crown Vic parked in the driveway. The engine was still running.
When he looked back to the sheriff, he found the man staring at him intently. His eyes focused in determination, as if Lance were a complex equation on a math test. After another long moment of silence, Lance finally asked, “Sir, please don’t take this for rudeness, or impatience. It’s purely a willingness to help.” A short pause, then, “Why are you here?”
As if whatever shroud had been covering the sheriff’s visit had suddenly been ripped away, the man raised his head and stood straight. “Actually, that’s exactly what I came here to ask you.”
“Sir?”
“Why are you here?”
“In town?” Lance asked.
The sheriff shrugged. “Sure. But more specifically, why this house?”
Lance spoke carefully. There was a hidden accusation or suspicion here, though he wasn’t sure what it might be. “I’m in town for work,” he said.
“Work?”
“I own a consulting firm.”
“So what do you do?”
“I consult.”
He wanted to take that one back, apply a little less sarcasm. But vagueness was his friend in these types of situations. That was a lesson Lance had learned a long time ago.
The sheriff only nodded and continued with, “And the house?”
“What about it, sir?”
“Why are you staying here?”
“The gentleman at the real estate office in town offered it to me as an inexpensive place to stay short-term.” This was only half the truth, but Lance suspected the sheriff cared little for the fact that Lance had felt compelled by other unseen powers to stay here.
“Richard Bellows?”
Lance nodded. “Yes, I believe that was his name. Nice guy.”
“Indeed he is. But why not just stay at a hotel, if it’s short-term? There’s some nice ones in the city.”
Lance nodded. “I’m sure,” he said. “I guess I’m just partial to small towns. Nothing quite like them, right? Plus, with the nature of my work, I’m never quite sure how long I’ll need to stay around.”
The sheriff completely disregarded Lance’s opinion on small towns and launched right into the meat and potatoes. “Son, do you have any idea what happened in this house?”
Lance looked the man in the eye. “I do, sir.”
Nothing more. No need to delve into the details. Especially with local law enforcement.
As if the sheriff had finally cracked the code, finally unearthed some sort of true reasoning behind Lance’s visit, he said, “And, let me guess, this consulting firm you own, do you happen to specialize in paranormal investigation? Ghost hunting, if you want to be blunt about it?”
Lance said nothing.
“We get kids come up here all the time, try to break in and have séances or bring fancy equipment to try and catch ghouls on video and then post it on the Internet and make a buck.” The man looked down and shook his head, a wave of that coldness Lance had felt before rushing out. “It’s disrespectful. What happened here was a tragedy and nothing else, and people shouldn’t go poking their noses in it for the sake of their own damn entertainment and profit.”
He looked up to Lance with tired eyes that spoke volumes.
“I agree, sir,” Lance said.
This seemed to catch the sheriff by surprise. He narrowed his eyes. “You do?”
“Yes, sir.”
Lance could understand the man’s wariness. Lance was fairly young, and, let’s be honest, dressed far below the business casual dress code. He didn’t look like somebody in town for work. And he was sure the sheriff really had dealt with all kinds of thrill seekers and paranormal enthusiasts in the years since the murders had taken place here. But, as far as Lance was concerned, the sheriff’s frustration, if not downright defensiveness when it came to this house, seemed to carry a personal agenda that Lance was desperate to learn more about. Somehow, the man was connected to this place. Though it occurred to Lance that the connection might only be a tired and downtrodden sheriff not fully accepting the reality of what had happened on the night of what might have been his town’s biggest tragedy.
Lance had heard Susan’s story about what had happened that night. There were holes in the story, for sure. Maybe the sheriff was desperate to fill them.
“I can assure you, sir, I’m here for neither entertainment nor profit from this house. It was a complete fluke that this is where I ended up when I came into town last night.” The part about it all being a fluke wasn’t entirely accurate, but Lance tossed this into the “white lie” category for the sheriff’s sake. “But, to be honest, I’m happy I found the place. It’s very peaceful up here.”
The sheriff seemed to be out of ammunition for his line of questioning. He was quiet for a bit, somewhat appeased, it seemed, by Lance’s answers. Then he turned and looked around behind him, back toward the Crown Vic in the driveway. Then he turned back to Lance and asked, “How did you get here?”
“Sir?”
The sheriff waved a hand behind him. “No car. How’d you get up here last night?”
“I got a ride with a friend.”
“Friend? You know folks around here?”
Lance shrugged. “A new friend, sir.”
The sheriff looked as though he was ready to pounce on Lance’s vagueness this time, but then his face softened, as if he realized he might be pushing a bit too hard without much in the way of probable cause. This was a good thing, because Lance wasn’t ready to give up Susan’s name. She was a nice young girl who’d done him a favor. Luke, as well. Lance wasn’t going to return the favor by tossing their names out to the sheriff, even if they’d done nothing wrong. To Lance, it was a matter of principle.
Or maybe the sheriff thought he’d get more in the way of truthfulness from Lance if he eased up and started to play a bit nicer. Just about justifying Lance’s assumption of this, the sheriff asked, “Everything been okay up here since you arrived? No problems with any trespassers? Haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary?”
Well, sir, now that you mention it, when I got here last night I’m almost positive somebody was here before me and left the back door wide open when they ran away. Oh, and I’m hearing voices. Other than that, everything’s peachy.
“No, sir. Got here after dinner and went to bed shortly after. I was pretty tired after traveling. Didn’t wake up until you knocked on the door.”
Lance wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to tell the sheriff about somebody potentially being in the house last night. But sometimes, and usually at the right times, he felt that keeping that sort of information to himself worked out for the best. The sheriff was already on high alert about the house. Lance wasn’t ready to dump any additional fuel on that fire.
The sheriff gave Lance another long stare. He knows, Lance thought. Whether it’s his police intuition or something else, he knows there’s more to me than meets the eye. Knows I’m here for something else. He just can’t prove it.
Finally, the man stuck out his hand. “Sorry to bother you this morning, Mister…”
Lance reached out his own hand. “Call me Lance.”
“Sheriff Ray Kruger,” the sheriff said as they shook. “Don’t hesitate to call the department if you notice anybody strange around, or have anybody bothe
r you. Somebody always shows up this time of year.”
The two men released each other’s hands, and Lance stood still, his face frozen for just a moment, but long enough for Ray Kruger to notice. “Son?” he asked.
Lance’s vision focused back on the sheriff and he quickly asked, “This time of year, sir?”
Sheriff Kruger sighed and started to walk down the porch steps. “It’s the anniversary of the murders this week. Always brings the weirdos out the woodwork.”
Of course, Lance thought. One weirdo, reporting for duty, sir.
Sheriff Kruger opened the driver’s door of the Crown Vic and then looked back up to Lance. “I’m headed back into town. Do you want a ride? Do that grocery shopping you were talking about?”
Lance wasn’t sure how he was going to get back into town, but he wasn’t sure he trusted the situation of being locked in a moving vehicle with the sheriff right now. He smiled and waved away the offer. “I appreciate it, sir. But I’ve only been awake about ten minutes. I’ll head in a little later.”
Sheriff Kruger nodded once and got into the car, doing a three-point turn in the yard before driving away. Lance stood and watched the Crown Vic grow smaller and smaller before finally disappearing, then he turned and went back into the house.
Wondering what exactly he’d just seen when he’d shaken Sheriff Ray Kruger’s hand.
10
Instant downloads. That was what Lance had grown to start calling them.
Just another of his unexplainable, uncontrollable gifts.
For as far back as he could remember, Lance had been able to snatch glimpses of other people’s lives with just the briefest of touches. These glimpses could be montage-like snapshots of a person’s entire life or circumstance, or sometimes a more specific scene, a random memory or event from a person’s past.
Though Lance knew they were never actually random. What he saw when he received these instant downloads almost always played a role in something Lance was involved with. Sometimes as a direct source of information, often an indirect push or reassurance. They were helpful hints from the Universe. If life were a video game, these glimpses would be a cheat code.
Which was why Lance found this particular gift so incredibly frustrating to live with. He had no ability to control which person’s memory he was allowed to peek inside. No sense of when or where this ability would kick in or what answers it would provide. How much easier this would all be if he could simply pick out a target, bump shoulders with them in the supermarket and then get all the answers he needed.
Sometimes he felt the Universe just liked to make him work harder than he needed to. A cosmic joke. Always tested.
Or maybe there was only so much he, as a mortal, could handle. There had to be limits to his abilities, sure. He understood that, if nothing else about who he was and what he could do.
But the Reverend and the Surfer…
They were more. They were stronger.
And that was why they terrified him.
Lance stood on the front porch of the farmhouse and leaned against one of the splintering banisters. His eyes looked toward the end of the driveway and the mountain forest beyond, where the sheriff’s car had just driven out of sight, but his vision was unfocused. He was recalling what he’d just seen. When he’d shaken Sheriff Ray Kruger’s hand, he’d been expecting nothing, too focused on the strange conversation he’d been engaged in, but instead of nothing, he was hit with a flash of memory of
A young girl, maybe six or seven years old, and a boy maybe a year or two older. Outside. A backyard. A small vinyl-sided house in the background. Simple porch with two patio chairs and a child’s plastic picnic table. The boy and girl were both wearing bathing suits. The boy’s a solid blue pair of trunks. The girl’s a matching blue one-piece that tied around the back of her neck. They both had globs of white sunscreen on their noses, running through the grass in a chorus of giggles and squeals as they headed toward a small round inflatable pool. A dull green garden hose snaking from the house, through the yard, and then climbing up the side of the pool and resting inside, filling the plastic with ice-cold city water. It was summer. The sun was hot. The water would feel good. They jumped in and splashed and giggled some more. There was a plastic submarine from the bathtub and a rubber frog that would squirt water from its mouth. They played for what seemed like hours, until the water was warm and the sun was getting too hot on their bare backs and the boredom set in and they grew annoyed with each other, as kids tend to do. The girl splashed the boy and water got in his eyes. He didn’t like it and splashed her back. She yelled at him not to splash her and she splashed him again, this time with more effort, more water finding his face. The boy, a kid with a temper, lunged forward and grabbed the little girl’s head and pushed it under the water. Not long, just enough to scare her. Two seconds. But it was enough. When the girl’s face resurfaced, there were tears and cries of anguish. She slapped at the boy’s arms and chest and scrambled over the edge of the pool running on wobbly legs back toward the house crying out, “Mamma! Mamma! Ray tried to drowneded me!” The cries and the looming fear of his mother’s anger sparked his temper again, and he lashed out, not thinking of further consequences. He grabbed the nozzle of the garden hose from the pool and lifted it, grabbing the hose with both hands. He watched the girl’s feet run through the grass, closer and closer to the patio, and then, timing it perfectly, the boy yanked on the hose, drawing it taut, creating a tripwire in the yard. The hose snapped up at the girl’s ankles and her feet tangled, and that’s when the boy realized he’d been too late. Saw what was going to happen and suddenly wished more than anything he could go back in time, just a few seconds, and do things differently. Because the little girl had gotten too close to the porch, and when she fell, she fell forward, going down down down, her knees hitting first, thankfully, before her chin cracked on the concrete edge of the patio. The boy was running then. Running before the piercing cry of pain, a wail of agony only a child can produce, hit his eardrums like a siren. He reached the little girl at the same time as his mother, who’d just come running through the back sliding glass door. His mother had swooped the girl up in her arms and the boy had seen it at once. The split in the girl’s chin, just to the left of center. The blood that had begun to pour. So much blood.
That’s what Lance had pulled from Sheriff Ray Kruger with a quick handshake. A memory from what had to be the man’s childhood (“Mamma! Mamma! Ray tried to drowneded me!”). But the relevance was lost on Lance.
He knew it meant something. The downloads always did. But Lance was smart enough to know he wasn’t going to piece it all together standing on the front porch any longer. He filed the memory away, and when his stomach grumbled he remembered he had no food in the house.
It was time to go back into town.
Lance stood in front of the upstairs bathroom mirror and brushed his teeth. Traveling light had proven not to be much of an issue for him over the past few months, which he attributed to the simplistic lifestyle he’d been raised in. Pamela Brody had never been much for possessions. Books and family and pie and tea. Walks to the park. Farmers markets and friends and the feel of a fall breeze rolling in. These were the things that mattered most to her.
They’d never needed much to be happy. And Lance didn’t need much now. Aside from the few thing’s he’d kept in his backpack in general—the things that had come with him when he’d been forced to flee his hometown the night his mother had died—he’d been traveling from town to town for the past couple months with nothing but a few changes of clothes, his small toiletry bag (a purchase he’d made at a small drugstore on his first stop after Westhaven), a first aid kit that was really nothing more than a couple Band-Aids, a small roll of gauze and a tiny tube of antibacterial ointment, and his cell phone and charger. He picked up items now and then that might serve some purpose to him—a small butane lighter, a pair of cheap sunglasses, some hand sanitizer. Normal things people might carry around with them. He al
so always tried to keep a few snacks and at least one bottle of water in the backpack as well. For emergencies.
If he was being honest with himself, despite the tragedy that had unfolded that awful night in Hillston—the night that officially ended the longest chapter of his life and started another—Lance was proud of how he’d been doing since leaving home. He wouldn’t go so far as to consider himself sheltered—he’d attended public school and lived a fairly normal adolescent life (aside from, you know … the ghosts and the visions and everything else completely not normal about him)—but his world had been confined to a fairly small geographical location. Any trips outside of this area had been brief and infrequent. The night he’d stepped onto that bus in Hillston, he’d essentially stepped into the rest of the world.
He finished brushing his teeth and put his toothbrush back in the toiletry pouch. The bathroom was spacious enough, with the sink and vanity, toilet, and a standalone bathtub with showerhead against the back wall, just beneath a window that overlooked the backyard. The fixtures were grimy with soap scum and mildew, and cobwebs hung from the corners and along the tops of the windows, but again, if the place were cleaned and fixed up a bit, it would be perfectly suitable. Lance didn’t need much. He leaned over and rinsed his mouth with cold water from the tap. It was cool and clean-tasting, likely water from a well this far outside of town. He dumped out the travel-sized bottle of shaving cream and his disposable razor and lathered his face. But when he looked up from the sink to the mirror hanging on the wall, he froze.
Something was different.
He’d stared at himself in the mirror as he’d been brushing his teeth and decided that he’d needed to shave, and while the image of himself now looked the same—except for the white beard of foam on his face—he couldn’t shake a sudden tingling at the base of his skull that told him there was more to the mirror now than there had been before.
He kept staring. Looked into his own eyes for a full ten or fifteen seconds, waiting for something to happen. He couldn’t say what, but a sudden expectation filled him. He looked at the reflection of the room behind him in the glass. It likewise seemed unchanged.
Lance Brody Omnibus Page 41
