Eventually I returned to the sofa, too exhausted to stand an entire night watch. I dropped into a deep well of sleep and floated there until, after a while, the dream began in a pitch-black place with the sound of rushing water all around, as if I must be aboard a boat on a river in the rain.
I was lying on my left side, in the fetal position, on an uncomfortable surface, clutching something in my right fist, holding it so tightly that my fingers ached. A great fear overcame me, but of what I couldn’t say, a blind terror in the blind dark of the dream, and my heart was as loud as a felt hammer on a timpani skin, beat and backbeat all but simultaneous. The object in my hand was a penlight.
Later, I would realize that no previous dream had ever included a fragrance or a flavor, but in this one I tasted blood. My lower lip was swollen, throbbing. When I licked, it stung where split.
I was holding a penlight, for what reason I don’t know, as I never had possessed one in real life. Still lying on my side, I cried out, startled, when the beam revealed a face directly in front of mine, less than a foot away, a girl perhaps in her early twenties, dark hair wet with rain and pasted to her face, eyes seeming to swell from their sockets, strangled to death with a man’s necktie that still cinched her throat.
Thrusting up from the darkness of the dream into the lesser darkness of our living room, I came off the sofa and onto my feet, breathless for a moment, and then inhaled with a gasp. I shuddered and put a hand to my mouth, expecting my lower lip to be split and bleeding, but it was not. Because my legs were weak, I sat down at once, grateful that I hadn’t cried out in my sleep as I had done in the nightmare, hadn’t awakened my mother or the widow Lorenzo.
In my mind’s eye, I could still see the dead girl as clearly as I had seen her in sleep—and as in the dream about Lucas Drackman, a few months earlier, she wasn’t a half-imagined phantom, but instead as vividly detailed as a portrait by Norman Rockwell. Wet hair thick and glistening with rain. Blue eyes shading toward purple, the pupils wide in death. Delicate features, pert nose formed to the perfection of the finest porcelain figurine. Generous mouth. Smooth creamy skin unmarred except for a small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone.
When I’d awakened from the dream of Lucas Drackman, I had known that he murdered his parents sometime in the past, that what I’d seen wasn’t prophetic, but instead a done deed. In this case, I suspected that I’d been given a predictive vision while asleep, that a day would come when I would find myself surrounded by the sounds of rushing water, enclosed in darkness with a corpse.
As I sat there on the edge of the sofa, I caught the faint scent of roses and came to my feet. Turning, I saw a woman’s silhouette at one of the front windows, backlit by the night glow of the city. She was too tall to be either Mrs. Lorenzo or my mother. She said softly, “Fiona Cassidy,” and I knew that she had just given me the name of the dead girl in my dream.
She moved away from the window, vanishing into shadows. When I switched on the lamp beside the sofa, I found myself alone in the living room. If she had really been there, she could not have exited so quickly. Yet I had seen her silhouette, had heard her voice. I had no doubt that she’d been present, although in what sense and to what extent I couldn’t say. She wasn’t a ghost, but she was something more than I had taken her to be on the day when she had first appeared to me, dressed all in pink and promising a piano.
16
I should have told my mother about Tilton chasing me into the alleyway, but for the next two days, she occupied herself with Mrs. Lorenzo, helping the widow to arrange the funeral, contacting the life-insurance company regarding Tony’s small policy, which would give the widow only a few years of security, and packing the deceased’s clothes to take them to the Salvation Army because Mrs. Lorenzo had no heart for the job. At the end of each day, Mom was tired and sad, and I didn’t want to burden her with my worries.
By the time we returned to our usual schedule, I was hesitant to tell her what Tilton had done. By delaying, I had to some extent deceived her, which I had never done before, at least not about anything serious. Although my reason for doing so was honorable, I was concerned that she would in the future wonder what else I might be withholding from her, that this would in some way permanently change our relationship.