Chapter 8
Friday, Before Dawn …
Mommy, … Mommy …
Reese’s voice woke Queenie from a restless sleep. Staring up at the yellowed ceiling tiles, she lay shuddering, trying to shake off the vestiges of the nightmare. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up slowly and looked around. She’d had nightmares for years after losing Reese, but things had been relatively peaceful lately. Until tonight. … His voice still whispered through her heart, leaving a deep wrenching ache.
Why the nightmare tonight?
But she knew. The arrival of the spider and the lady in the lake. She switched on the light beside her, her gaze quickly searching for any spiders lurking around. But she couldn’t see any.
Still faint in the distance were sounds of a little boy crying. Frowning, she got out of bed only to shriek and jump back. Her floor was alive with spiders. “Eww!”
“Why are there so many?” She involuntarily shook all over. “One or two I can manage but dozens?” she wailed.
Instead of crawling up the corner of the duvet lying on the floor, they mingled like they were having a damn tea party. Pushing back her revulsion, she calmed down enough to study their movements.
And heard a tinkling laugh.
It never failed to put a smile on her face. “Did you have something to do with this? Or are you enjoying these creatures and their antics?” she demanded. How like a little boy. Still it made her relax that much more.
The laugh came again, lightening her heart, making her chuckle.
“If you’d lived, you’d have loved these guys, wouldn’t you?”
She only ever saw the pinkish-lavender ball of energy and usually out of the corner of her eye. When she tried to look closer, it dissipated. No matter what she did, she couldn’t get a face or words or even a stronger image of him.
Actually it was so much more. For the longest time she’d hoped seeing his spirit meant that maybe, … just maybe, … he was alive. She’d spent countless hours trying to confirm it, only her research had confirmed the opposite. It had taken time, but finally she’d accepted it. This was what she had, and it was so much better than nothing.
For so many, death was so damn final. But not for her. She was blessed.
And she’d do anything to keep that communication line open.
Even putting up with the damn spiders.
Still, she needed to know what they wanted. “Do you know why they are here?”
The laugh whispered again, but it was fainter.
She frowned. “Don’t go—not so fast.” But, as she watched, the pinkish-lavender glow faded. “Wait …” she cried out. She didn’t like the neediness inside her. She normally didn’t have a problem when her son’s spirit came and went. It was such a joy to feel his presence. Since seeing the lady-in-the-lake vision, her life was off balance. Nothing seemed the same nor felt the same.
And the spiders were sending her around the bend.
“Tell me what you want,” she whispered to them. Of course there was no answer, but she crouched closer. There was a pinkish-lavender tinge to them too. Was that Reese’s idea?
Still, if she could see pink, then she was seeing something special. Not that she needed more proof; the dozens of spiders on the floor already said something was going on. But what? And how?
Groaning, she knew she needed to touch them. That was how her gift of sight worked. Her features curling into a grimace, she placed her palm on the floor. The spiders raced toward her. She closed her eyes and shivered at the thought of all those spiders crawling on her.
The first one ran onto the back of her hand, followed immediately by a second and then a third. With her lips pinched together, she lifted her hand gingerly with the three spiders perched thereon, and she eased into a cross-legged position and slowly opened her mind to the visions pouring toward her.
The first thing she saw was the same little boy sitting on his bed, playing with a scratched and dented toy.
“Vroom,” he muttered, moving the car along the edge of the bed.
The vision appeared to be a happy one. It was daylight, but his room seemed belowground, with one window high up. No curtains, a crack in the glass. The blanket was threadbare, but the room had a mattress and a night table. No carpet. Just a cement floor. Like in a basement.
Still, nothing was unpleasant about it. The boy was healthy as far as she could see.
But his face was downcast, looking at the floor. She couldn’t see his features clearly, and, outside of being thin, dressed in old striped PJs, she had no way to identify him.
She whispered to the spiders, hoping the vision would stay around long enough to give her additional meaning.
The little boy suddenly clapped his hands over his ears, his face scrunching in fear.
Queenie’s heart wept for him.
Just as suddenly, the boy dropped his hands, bolted from his bed and raced to the far side and disappeared from sight.
Then the vision faded.
“No,” she cried out. “Don’t go. I don’t have enough details to find him.” She leaned forward, as if that would help, but, of course, it didn’t. The vision slowly faded to a light-pink fog and finally dispersed completely.
She sagged back on her bed, desperate to retain the bits she’d seen.
Gently flicking off the spiders, she reached for her notebook and wrote down the details she could remember. But it wasn’t enough to give to Kirk. He couldn’t help if he didn’t know more. She hopped off her bed, and the spiders scattered out of her way, as if happy to see her in action after their message had been delivered. She strode with purpose to her laptop. Bringing up a new email, she quickly noted everything she’d seen. Then hit Send.
When finished, she returned to her bedroom. With the lights on, she searched to ensure no more spiders hid in the bedcovers before she crawled in and closed her eyes.
Her last thought was of her son. She whispered to the pinkish-lavender energy, “Thanks, baby. I’m trying to help him.”
*
Friday morning Kirk pulled up outside the sheriff’s office and parked. He hopped out and stretched. It was a decent drive, but it had been hectic at the police station before he’d left. He told his coworkers where he was going; they were a team after all. There’d been some raised eyebrows as he explained what he was doing. That was hardly within the parameters of his current list of priority cases, not when a sheriff was willing to go out on his own search. But, after hearing the bits and pieces from Queenie, Kirk wanted to see for himself.
He walked into the sheriff’s office and stood, looking around. It was like taking a step back in time. Everything was made of wood, the floor scuffed and faded from years of wear. Of course there was only so much money to spend on small departments, and things like refinishing floors wouldn’t have a very high priority on the list.
As he stood there, a woman seated at a desk on the left side of the room smiled and asked, “May I help you?”
He nodded. “I’m here to see Sheriff McArthur.”
She picked up the phone and presumably called the sheriff. Within seconds a door opened in front of Kirk, and a big burly man came out, wearing a cowboy hat. His face was plump. His barrel chest stuck out well over his belt, but he didn’t look to be all that fat. In fact, he looked like an aging linebacker who had had a tad too much beer and comfort food.
The sheriff walked toward Kirk, holding out his hand. “James McArthur.”
Kirk introduced himself and smiled. “Are you ready to hit the lake?”
“I am. Are you?”
The two men chuckled.
“We’ve already got the boat loaded,” the sheriff informed Kirk. “We were just waiting for you to show up. We do have a bit of a drive, although it’s not too bad.” The sheriff led the way to his truck, the boat hitched on a trailer behind it.
It was a nice Zodiac with some decent horsepower on the back end. Kirk didn’t question what they would do if they found a body because that probably would necessitate bringing in a dive team.
Because of Queenie’s touch, he knew a body would be there, but that didn’t mean he’d have any luck in finding it himself. It also didn’t mean she had the exact location. As he knew from the heavy cost each of them had paid in the last case they had worked together. He thought back on the strange email from her waiting for him when he got up. The tone had been a little chaotic, but then a nightmare had woken her up, so that was to be expected. She’d seen the little boy again. She’d also made a point of mentioning it wasn’t her son, and she wasn’t losing her marbles.
On that note he’d filed her latest email into his special Drafts folder and had carried on.
Now he and the sheriff headed out of the small town—barely a blip on the radar, as far as Kirk was concerned, particularly when compared to Seattle, which had sprawled so far inland. He couldn’t imagine where Seattle’s growth would be in another fifty years. “What’s the population here?”
“Twenty thousand roughly,” the sheriff said. “Swells to about thirty, thirty-five in the heat of summer.”
“Tourists. Gotta love ’em, and, at the same time, gotta hate ’em.” Kirk laughed. “I’d be one of the tourists myself. But I could certainly see retiring here.”
The sheriff gave a sage nod. “Absolutely. That’s why most of us are here. We did our time in the big city, Seattle or wherever, and we couldn’t stand it anymore. You wake up one day and say, I’m done. At least that’s what happened to me.”
And the funny thing was, Kirk could see the exact same thing happening to him. “You still have to have a job and an income though, unless you happen to wake up rich one day,” he joked.
“I was lucky enough to get elected sheriff. It’ll do me until I retire.”
It was just the two of them heading up to the lake. “Anybody else still looking for Bonnie?”
“No. I had to pull them off for a couple accidents we had overnight. Bunch of drunk yahoos—some superwealthy punks out of the Seattle area—were racing and crashed a couple sports cars on the highway.”
“Street-racing on the highway?”
The sheriff nodded. “They get the idea into their heads, We want to avoid the cops. So they come up here, thinking they can do it on a couple flat stretches we got. But what they forget is, some really dangerous corners are here. And, going the speed they’re going, those corners hit hard and fast. Mother Nature is incredibly unforgiving when it comes to stupidity.”
“Any fatalities?”
“No, at least not yet.” The sheriff’s tone was full of frustration yet sad at the same time. “But it’s possible. One’s in serious condition. He was airlifted to Seattle last night. We’ve got another in the local medical clinic with a broken leg, and the female passenger—it’s hard to say how she’s doing. There was talk of shipping her to the big hospital too, but I’m not sure if that ever happened.”
“It’s tough when you’re young, and you have more money than God, and you don’t know what to do with yourself.”
“Never had that problem,” the sheriff said. “I always worked for my dollars. And worked damn hard.”
Kirk understood. He’d been the same. No money to inherit from family. What he had, he’d worked for. But it wasn’t the same for so much of the world, with millionaires popping up between YouTube and Bitcoins. Of course Seattle itself was well known for its moneymaking tech sector, some incredibly large amounts made without even thinking about it. Seattle had similar problems as what the sheriff had talked about. Street-racing was a bad deal in a lot of cities.
They drove in companionable silence for another few minutes, and then the sheriff took a turn-off. A brown public park sign showed them the way. “Is this a popular camping spot?”
“It is. Bonnie has the property right beside it. When she went missing, I wondered if there had been some foul play. But I couldn’t find anybody staying at the campsite right now.”
“And would you consider that normal for this time of year?”
The sheriff frowned, giving it some serious thought. “Well, I’d have expected it to be pretty damn full with the long weekend coming up, but it is just May and isn’t as popular as it will become in June, July and August. Kids are still in school. Families are still waiting for the summer holidays to hit.”
“Makes sense. If you found no sign anybody has been staying there, I presume there’s also no sign anybody went missing from there.”
At that, the sheriff turned and gave him a sharp glance. “Meaning, there might be somebody out on a rampage?”
“Not necessarily but it’s quite possible that maybe Bonnie saw something she shouldn’t have and had to be taken care of, so to speak. Or happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The sheriff nodded. “I hadn’t considered that,” he announced. “Hate to as well.”
“I hear you,” Kirk said. “But, when people go missing, particularly a female in her age group who lives alone, you have to wonder just what went wrong.”
They drove up the road, and Kirk saw a large turn-off to the campsite. But the sheriff kept going. Another driveway appeared after one more mile. The sheriff pulled onto that and drove one hundred yards to a small old clapboard cabin and one of the most incredible views of a lake that Kirk had ever seen.
He stared. “Wow!”
The sheriff nodded. “Right? I’d buy her place just for the view.”
“And that’s something to keep in mind too.”
“What’s that?”
“Her daughter told me that Bonnie refused to sell the place, even with a million-dollar offer,” he said. Then remembering Queenie’s words, he added, “Maybe … somebody decided they had to have it anyway.”
Maddy sat at the little boy’s bedside. She’d done what she knew to do, but that black energy wouldn’t shift. She’d tugged. She’d pulled. She’d wrapped it up in love. And still the black energy persisted. The boy’s energy had surprised her, but, even with his energy paired with hers, she hadn’t been able to make the black energy shift.
She’d worked on the little boy physically and in spiritual form. She didn’t understand. But she needed to. Otherwise Timmy would die.
No luck? Stefan murmured.
No, she whispered back, her tiredness echoing in the one word. I don’t understand.
I might.
She straightened. What? What am I missing?
The energy is being masked.
How? I can’t see a foreign energy.
Yes, but I can from farther away. He’s masking the funnel and feeding the energy as you take it away.
Shocked, she jumped out of her body. Show me.
But he didn’t need to. As they pulled farther back, she could see where the cord disappeared into the air. Only now, even farther back, she could see where that masking energy was inside the little boy—integrated so deep into the boy’s system as if they were one.
She severed the cord at the point where it disappeared. Then she dove inside the child and poured love into his system, filling his bones, his muscles, his veins with healing energy.
When she pulled back, drained, yet more exhilarated than she could believe, and settled into her physical form, she heard the little boy asking, Mommy, where am I?
*
“What the hell is she up to?” the Watcher said to himself.
He stared at Queenie as she headed out of the tent after yelling at her boss. The carnival boss appeared to be the one person Queenie didn’t get along with. The Watcher didn’t know how he felt about her having the friends she did. While everybody needed somebody, these guys were really more caricatures than real people. Some of them were downright ugly. And Queenie, with her stupid fake hat over her head, looked pretty ridiculous herself. Of course she only wore it when she was giving out messages.
Now she looked like a lost young woman, as if the world had been too hard, too tough, and she was done. He could see from her energy that she was down in some way, just not sure what exactly was happening.
Even going about his own day, doing his own job, he’d always been drawn back to Queenie, wondering what she was up to. He knew who she was and what she was to him, but she didn’t know who he was and what he was to her. That was really disappointing. He wondered if he could leave her little clues. He’d left her one in the lake, but she wasn’t getting the message. He might have to do it again.
He thought about all the other cases he’d worked on, wondering if he should imitate one or find a new unique way. He prided himself on his creativity. He wasn’t much for following other people’s ideas or methodologies. But he wanted her to know who he was. And yet, somehow he had to do that without letting the cat out of the bag. Because the only thing more dangerous than playing the game was getting caught.
Just then a vacuum-like suction hit his energy, one of the many threads he’d been playing with. The pressure was intense. He fought to control it, only to suddenly be released, his energy cut, the thread disconnected.
With a precision-like skill, his victim had been freed, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Pissed, he dove in to reconnect, only to slam into the equivalent of a stone wall in ether form. He couldn’t see in that direction nor could he move in that direction.
And that just pissed him off more.
He’d finally found someone with better skills than he had.
And that made him seriously angry. That was not allowed.