He lay there for a while, resting, thinking. He didn’t sleep. She did. Deeply and apparently dreamlessly.
He tossed everything he knew around and around in his head. He would talk to Joe on the way to Boston, even though Joe was, like Rowenna, in denial.
Joe didn’t want to believe that someone local, someone he knew, maybe knew well, maybe even had known all his life, could be a psychotic killer.
But someone was.
Jeremy didn’t think he could sleep, didn’t think he did.
But there, in the misty shadows, he saw Billy. Billy, alive and well, a typical kid in jeans and a T-shirt, hair a little tousled. He was grinning, and Jeremy got the feeling he liked Rowenna, approved of her. He wanted to deny that Billy was there, told himself he was just seeing Billy in his mind, imagining him. That if he tried to touch Billy, get up and walk over to him, he would disappear.
He closed his eyes and remembered the feeling of the kid’s hand in his. It was almost as if he could feel it again, as if it were real. As if Billy had lived.
But Billy hadn’t lived.
Billy had died.
He opened his eyes.
And Billy was gone. Misty daylight was creeping in through the drapes. He shifted Rowenna carefully to his side and rose.
As Rowenna began to awake, she stretched a hand across the bed, seeking Jeremy’s warmth.
She touched…nothing.
She jerked up in a panic, remembering all too clearly she didn’t want to be in the house alone. Jeremy’s strange behavior had spooked her. She leaped up, then tiptoed to the door and looked out into the hallway, listening. The house was quiet.
“Jeremy?”
No answer.
Had he already left for Boston? Without waking her up to say goodbye?
She swore out loud and moved back into the bedroom, took a deep breath, remembered that her purse with her change of underwear in it was downstairs and swore again. She ran into the bathroom and fumbled with the faucets in a rush to shower as quickly as possible, then get dressed…and leave.
But as she stepped beneath the spray, a strange sense of calm suddenly descended over her.
Soap in hand, she smiled to herself.
Billy. Jeremy had been talking to Billy in his dream. At least, if Jeremy was seeing a ghost, it was a good ghost. The ghost of a little boy he had tried to save, someone to whom he had shown the best of human nature.
She reminded herself that she didn’t believe ghosts existed, not really. And they didn’t haunt this house.
But if they did exist, in more than mind, in more than memory, then Billy would definitely be a good ghost.
She had raced back upstairs, wrapped in a towel, after running down to collect her purse, when she heard a knocking at the door. She struggled into her clothes and hurried back downstairs, looking through the peephole before opening the door.
It was Brad.
Jeremy had obviously taken her suggestion last night and asked Brad to spend his morning playing bodyguard for her.
“Hi,” she said, as she opened the door to him. “Thanks for agreeing to hang around with me this morning.”
“No problem,” he said solemnly. “And…I’m sorry. I was a little drunk last night. I didn’t mean to be so…to scare you.”
“You didn’t scare me,” she lied. Besides, in morning’s light, all kinds of creepy things seemed to fade away.
“Are you up for breakfast?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she assured him.
They went to Red’s, where, once again, the missing persons poster was on display in the window. And inside, the snatches of conversation she overheard made it clear that Dinah Green was very much the topic of the day.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come here with Brad after all.
But then, people knew who he was by now. Those he hadn’t met had seen him around town or on the news pleading for help, or seen his face in the newspaper.
Several turned away to whisper when he walked by.
They sat at a booth and ordered omelets. Trying to talk about anything other than what was uppermost in his mind, Rowenna asked him about working with Jeremy.
“He was the best partner ever,” Brad told her. “I miss him. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with the guy I partner with now. He’s good—you have to be to make the squad. It’s not like diving in the Caribbean, where the water’s clear. The river can be pure murk. But there was just…something about the way Jeremy worked. He never saw it, but it was like he had a sixth sense, you know? He could home in on things.”
“You were with him when the kids were found?”
“It was a bad day, bringing up those little corpses. Hope is a hard thing. It’s great when it pays off. But when you hope for something and it doesn’t come through, then hope becomes vicious.”
Hope. He was hoping and praying that his wife was alive.
They finished eating and had second cups of coffee, then he walked her down to the History Museum. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked him.
He’d paused outside to look at one of the window displays, one that was new since yesterday.