Authors: Shiloh Walker
Tags: #Contemporary, #Romantic Suspense, #Romance Suspense
The Missing (6 page)
Her gut reflex was,
I killed them.
She’d said it before. It wasn’t a new thought. She’d woken up late that last night—the night they’d died—and she’d been screaming for Mama and Daddy, but they were gone. They’d gone out to get some dinner, see a movie, and they’d left her with the teenager who lived across the street from them in the small Mobile suburb. Taige couldn’t even remember the girl’s name now—just the look on her face as she stared down at Taige, screaming in the bed and calling for help.
I killed them.
She’d said it before. It wasn’t a new thought. She’d woken up late that last night—the night they’d died—and she’d been screaming for Mama and Daddy, but they were gone. They’d gone out to get some dinner, see a movie, and they’d left her with the teenager who lived across the street from them in the small Mobile suburb. Taige couldn’t even remember the girl’s name now—just the look on her face as she stared down at Taige, screaming in the bed and calling for help.
The girl had freaked out and called her own mother. Taige didn’t remember that woman’s name, either, though she remembered how she’d smelled. Like lotion and Ici. To this day, anything that even resembled the way that discount perfume had smelled was enough to make Taige sick. The woman had held her and tried to calm her down, murmuring some nonsense about nightmares and bad dreams.
All the way up until the knock on the door, nearly three hours later. Taige could remember the cops standing in the door, and the grim look on their faces. They’d made her leave the room, but she didn’t need to hear to know what happened. Her mama and daddy were dead.
Her voice was hoarse and rough as she answered, “They were killed by a drunk driver when I was little.” She swallowed, cleared her throat to try to ease the pressure there. “We lived in Mobile. They’d gone out. Date night, Mama called it. Somebody hit them on their way to the movies, killed them instantly.”
She kept her face averted as she wiped the tears away. It still hurt. Eight years later, it still hurt. “Mama grew up here. They found my mama’s older brother, Leon, and sent me to live with him. They never could find any of my dad’s folks.” Taige had long since stopped hoping for that to happen, although there had been years when she had been convinced that if she prayed hard enough, if she was good enough, somebody would come and get her. Somebody who loved her.
“That’s got to suck,” he said. “Mom and Dad drive me nuts, but I can’t imagine losing them like that. Being sent off to live with somebody else. Even family. They might love you, but it can’t be the same.”
“He doesn’t love me.” The words slipped out of her before she even realized it. She hadn’t meant to say that, not in front of him, but there was no taking the words back, and she didn’t want to, either. She hated pretending that her life with Leon Carson was fine, that he took care of her, that he even gave a damn about her. “He hates me. Hates having me there.”
Then she shoved to her feet, grabbed her stuff, grabbed the tote lying on its side in the sand. She shoved everything inside it, her bottled water, the book she’d been trying to read, her sunglasses. But Cullen was still sitting on the beach blanket, and she didn’t want to wait for him to get up, so she just left it. “I’ve got to get home.”
“Hey . . .”
She strode away, sand flying beneath her feet. The sand muffled the sound of his footsteps until he was right behind her. Before he could touch her, she turned around and stared at him. She lifted her chin insolently and demanded, “What?”
“I didn’t mean . . . I’m . . .” Cullen seemed to fumble for the words. He reached up, scratched his head, squinted at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry or piss you off or whatever got you so mad.”
She wasn’t mad. She was humiliated. She tucked her chin against her chest and turned away. “It’s no big deal. I just got to get home.”
“Why?” he asked bluntly.
Taige glanced up at him. “Because I want to?”
“If he really hates you, why would you want to go home?” And to that, Taige really didn’t have an answer. She stood there with a scowl on her face. He reached out and caught her bag. She tried to hold on to the straps for a few seconds, but he wasn’t letting go, either, and she wasn’t going to stand there and fight him over who got to carry it. Then he held out his other hand, wordlessly.
Slowly, Taige put her hand in his, and he led her away. It never even occurred to her to ask him where they were going. Taige didn’t care.
It was probably the most perfect night she could ever remember having. Or at least the most perfect night in years. They went into town, and they rode go-carts. They played in the arcade. They ate pizza and ice cream. And when he took her home, well past dark, he walked her to the door, and before he left her on the porch, he dipped his head to kiss her.
Light and fast, just a butterfly touch. As he straightened up, Taige felt blood rush to her cheeks. She would have been more embarrassed, except she realized he was blushing a little, too.
He walked off, and Taige turned around with a happy sigh. That lingering happy feeling stayed with her even as she opened the door and walked inside to hear one of her uncle’s recorded sermons booming from the living room. It stayed with her even as she showered and well into the night.
TWO
Summer 1994
“
I
T happened again, didn’t it?”
I
T happened again, didn’t it?”
Taige stiffened involuntarily, only to relax when Cullen reached up, his hands resting on her shoulders as his thumbs dug into the knotted muscles of her neck. “What happened?” she said, hoping she could play dumb. She hated for him to know about her issues. She hated for him to know that she was such a damn freak.
“Don’t give me that.” His hands tightened just a little, and she suspected he would have liked to shake her. He didn’t, though. Cullen never touched her like that. “I hate it when you lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” Taige hedged.
“The hell you aren’t. You know what I’m talking about. You had another one of those weird dreams.”
Cullen had found out about her dreams last summer. He’d been there with her late one night out on the beach when she fell asleep. She’d woken up choking for air. It had come on her hard and fast, and she had no time to worry about Cullen as she ran for the pool. It was past midnight, and the pools were closed, but it hadn’t kept the curious five-year-old from climbing over the gate so he could go swimming. His parents hadn’t even heard him leave, and that late, nobody had seen the little boy walking down the hallway all by himself.
She hadn’t been able to hide it from Cullen any longer when the paper ran the story the next day on the front page, along with a headline, “Local Psychic Saves Another Child.” It had listed several of the other times when she had either helped save some kid from drowning or found them when they wandered off and got lost. Worse, it had listed some of the more grisly things that Taige would rather nobody know. The times when she found the bodies of murder victims, three different times, three people she hadn’t been able to help. Those were the ones that really made her feel like a useless freak.
After he found out, Taige had been ready for him to either laugh at her or just walk away, although they’d spent most of that summer together. But he hadn’t walked off. He hadn’t laughed. And when he showed up at her house the next day, he’d walked in when Leon was having one of his outbursts, yelling at Taige and calling her devil spawn. Cullen had punched Leon, knocking the older man into the wall and then grabbing him and slamming him back so hard that the back of Leon’s head knocked a hole in the drywall. “I hear you talking to her like that again, and I’ll make you damn sorry,” Cullen had shouted while Taige bodily separated them.
“She’s seduced you. The devil’s harlot. You’ll burn in hell with her if you don’t repent! God will see to it—He will pass His judgment over you, and you will burn in hell.”
Cullen had sneered at Leon and said, “If God is going to send anybody straight to hell, it’s going to be you.”
Then he had taken Taige’s hand and led her out of the house, to his car, but instead of climbing inside, he had leaned against it and pulled her against him.
Taige had already had a bad feeling that she loved him, but after that night, she knew it was true. She’d fallen in love with some rich white boy from Atlanta—and she couldn’t have been happier about it.
“You in there?” he murmured, leaning forward to kiss her shoulder. Exhausted, she’d ended up falling asleep instead of fishing with Cullen and his dad. The sun’s rays were white hot, but the touch of his mouth on her made her burn even more.
“Hmmm.” She lowered her head briefly, pressing her face against his neck. His arm came up and curved around her shoulder, and Taige sighed, relaxing into the hard length of his body.
“You want to tell me about it?” he asked softly.
She slid his dad a nervous look, but the older man was standing out hip-deep in the waves, too far to hear them or really even see them. Her voice was soft, almost hesitant when she finally replied, “There’s not much to tell. I didn’t see much. Just a girl’s face. She’s lost. Or she will be.” It would be so much easier to deal with her bizarre ability if it operated with any kind of sense. Sometimes she saw what had already happened. Sometimes things as they happened, and then sometimes, days, months, or weeks before it happened. Not always in time to change things and not always in time to help.
“Is she okay?” Cullen’s hand was warm on her neck, and he rubbed the tight muscles there. He did that a lot, sometimes without even realizing that he did it, Taige thought. He liked to touch her, and it wasn’t always just because he was trying to cop a feel. Although Taige had no problems when he was doing that, none at all. Unlike the guys who had tried to get her in a similar situation, she liked it when Cullen touched her. She liked it a lot. His touch did something strange to her deep inside. Logically, she knew what it was. He turned her on, but that in and of itself was odd for her. He was the only guy who could touch her and not make her want to cringe away. He was—restful. As lame as that sounded, it was the only way she could describe it. Even when he was kissing her, touching her through her clothes, or when she was touching him, even when she was so damned hot from all those touches that she couldn’t stand it, it was restful.
It never came with the bad vibes or whatever worries and thoughts he had going on inside. When he touched her, she didn’t have to worry she was going to pick up some random emotion or a memory flash, and that let her relax and just enjoy it. She leaned into his hands and tried to pull something else out of that short blip of a dream. Something besides the girl’s face, but there was nothing. “I don’t know, Cullen.”
“Isn’t it usually clearer than this?”
She gave him a wry glance. “Not always. Doesn’t come with an owner’s manual or a remote where I can rewind and watch through it again.” She pulled away from him, hoping that maybe if she wasn’t touching him, her brain might function a little better.
He was quiet for a minute. He slid a hand down her arm and linked her fingers with his. “Are you going to be able to help?”
Taige shook her head. “I don’t know. If I’m supposed to help . . .” Her voice trailed off. It was hard to explain, and Cullen was the first person she’d ever attempted to explain it to. The first person she’d ever cared enough about to try to explain it so he could understand. But she didn’t really have the words to explain that she would just know. She’d be walking to the restaurant to help Rose and Dante, or she’d be swimming or riding her bike along Fort Morgan Highway, and she would just know. She would feel it. Whether she would be in time, that part would have to play itself out. “I’ll just know. It’s almost like there is some kind of magnet, and it will pull me in.”
Cullen pulled her up against him, and she cuddled in close. His calm, simple acceptance was nothing short of amazing, and Taige didn’t know if she’d ever get used to it. She didn’t know if it would last or not, either. She worried about it sometimes, late at night when she was thinking about him or over the past winter while he was back in Georgia. They wrote, and he called her a lot, always over at Rose’s or at the restaurant. Never at home. Taige had all but moved in with Rose as it was, spending only one or two nights a week in the small, depressing bedroom in the house where her uncle lived. Rose had offered her Dante’s room after he had moved in with a girlfriend, and Taige knew as soon as she turned eighteen, she would do it.
Not yet, though. Not until her uncle had no more legal hold over her. He was mean enough to try to make Rose’s life a living hell just to hurt Taige. Once she was eighteen, the bastard couldn’t do anything. Another couple months. She still had her senior year to get through in high school, but she could do that just as well living with Rose.
“You thought any more about college?”
“Nothing to think about,” she said softly. She wasn’t going. She didn’t have the money, and although she knew she could get a grant, maybe even a scholarship or two, she wasn’t cut out for college.
“You just going to keep working at the restaurant the rest of your life?” He shifted around, facing her.
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