He’d seen things over the years, things most people didn’t even believe existed. He’d probably never had a chance of avoiding it, having been born and raised in an area of the country where people seemed to carry the past in them like a genetic trait. Sometimes he’d been able to use the...people he saw.
Because he hadn’t been involved. Because he could say, Hey, it’s all in my mind, but it’s working, so just go with it.
Except for Melissa. Except for her face in his window, her voice in his head.
But tonight...
The things he saw were real. Dead, but real. And at least in his experience, they weren’t out to do harm, as they supposedly had been in the days of the witchcraft trials. Hell, if the accused really had been witches, they could have pulled out their wands, whipped them through the air and shut up the likes of Cotton Mather.
Then he told himself to pull back. The “witches” he had known growing up were no more bizarre to a kid growing up in a Congregational church in New England than a Hindu or a Buddhist. They couldn’t magically will themselves down from a hanging tree. But that didn’t mean the so-called “other world” wasn’t real.
He’d seen Mina Lyle tonight. As clearly as he had seen Devin. And he knew that he’d approached Jackson Crow in hopes of joining the Krewe of Hunters for reasons other than Melissa—though the fact that the memory of her had haunted him for more than a decade was the main factor.
He looked out his window for a long time before he went to bed. And in his heart he willed her, Come back to me now. Now I can help you.
He turned and headed to bed. He needed sleep.
He prayed that he wouldn’t dream.
But he did.
The three dead women were there. And in the deepest regions of his mind, where REM sleep ruled, and the subconscious mingled with the conscious, they were caught in the breeze beneath the moon.
They wore white shrouds that whipped around their bodies and they had come to him where he kneeled over a grave. He looked at the headstone and realized that it was Melissa’s grave. She reached out to touch him.
“Old friend,” she said softly. “Now we are three.”
When he woke up, he recalled the dream and thought he should be feeling off in some way, as if the dead had given him a hangover of remorse.
But instead, he found himself feeling more determined than ever. He headed straight for the police station and started setting up for the Krewe members who would be arriving later that day. He set up whiteboards where he wrote out time lines and set down the facts regarding each victim. When he stood back and studied his handiwork, he was more convinced than ever that the current killer was not a copycat. There were too many little things that a copycat simply couldn’t know. The way the fingers of each victim had been stretched out, as if she were reaching for something. The way the silver chain that held the medallion had been carefully curled. The way the feet had been pointed out, as if replicating the points of a star.
And he wondered once again why each victim had gone to the woods completely unsuspectingly.
Not a single defensive wound had been found on them.
Either they had been with a friend, someone they trusted, or they had gone there to meet a friend.
He was mulling that point when his cell phone rang. It was Devin.
He was surprised by the way his heart leaped.
“Everything all right?” he asked her.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. But I’d like to see you.”
She hesitated, and he realized that she was whispering even though she was in her own house and the only person who might hear her was...
“I know you saw...what you saw. And Auntie Mina saw a woman in the window. That night, I mean. You asked me how I knew to go into the woods. I heard someone crying. But Auntie Mina saw her. And it wasn’t the woman I found. She didn’t tell me before because she didn’t realize they were different people, but now that she’s seen so many images...anyway. It was someone else. And I think she was murdered, too.”
*
Devin was on edge. Maybe it was something she should have accepted all her life.
That sometimes she could see the dead.
But she hadn’t accepted it. She’d gone into journalism, for God’s sake. Facts and figures.
But now an FBI agent as cool and stoic as the GQ man she’d initially compared him to was sitting in her parlor—along with her dead aunt. And they were all talking as if this were a perfectly normal conversation. Rocky was interviewing Auntie Mina with sober consideration, listening to her words as if she were a living witness.
“The victim’s picture is in the paper, you see—and of course, on the television,” Auntie Mina said. “I do love television,” she told him. “Why, when I was a girl, it didn’t even exist.”
Rocky grinned. “I love TV myself. Especially The Big Bang Theory and reruns of Frasier.”
Auntie Mina was delighted. “Excellent shows.”