Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (155 page)

There was no more screaming, no more sobbing, just an eerie silent surrender.

And then he was gone.

CHAPTER 61

I was still in the alley, alone now with the tattoo man. He turned and looked at me.

“Who are you?” I said.

“That’s not important. All you need to understand is that these visions weren’t meant for you, Abigail. They belonged to Charles. But when he ran to you, your gift drew you in.”

There was a sad weariness to him I had never noticed before.

“You said you had been on his trail… I don’t understand.”

“Ever since he died, Charles has been on the run. From me. From the truth. I followed him from place to place, large cities and small towns like this one. We played a game of cat and mouse. But in the fiction he created, he was the cat. This was the longest he stayed in one place. You kept him here, the promise of your help. Knowing that he had attached himself to you made him easier to find.”

I thought about some of the times I had seen the tattoo man. It started to make sense. He wasn’t coming after me, he was looking for Charlie Modine.

“At the motel,” I said. “And that day at the coffee shop?”

He nodded.

“But why was he so convinced you were the killer?” I said.

“His hold on the lie was too strong. I only managed to break through to him every once in a great while, and then, only deep in his subconscious. He took those glimpses and, in the twisted labyrinth of his mind, turned me into his wife’s killer.”

My own mind tried to take in what he was saying, but each answer only led to more questions.

“Why did he kill himself?”

“Guilt. He couldn’t live with what he had done. It’s an old story.”

“So everything he told me was a lie?” I said.

“Not everything. The love he spoke of was real. But it had long since burned out. After he died, he simply chose to remember certain things and forget others.”

I nodded.

“In the beginning I looked upon your involvement as an unnecessary complication,” he said. “But in the end you were the catalyst that brought us to this place. Without you, he would still be running.”

He must have read the confusion on my face.

“When you helped Charles face the fact that he had killed himself, it triggered something. It reached him in a way I had been unable to. It was the domino that set things in motion, the thing that cracked his confidence in the fantasy. He began to doubt himself and everything he had come to believe. I was able to slip inside that crack and… Well, you saw the rest.”

I noticed the car was no longer there.

“What’s going to happen to him?”

He didn’t answer, holding my eyes until I turned away.

“Are you a ghost?” I said. “Is this what you do?”

“Goodbye, Abigail,” he said, walking away.

And with a thousand questions still rolling around in my head I fell again into the darkness.

CHAPTER 62

“Oh, my God, Abby Craig! Are you all right? What are you doing on the floor? What happened to the door?”

David was down on the ground next to me, peering into my face quizzically. I looked over at the splintered wood around the door knob, remembering the tattoo man’s entrance.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I was dreaming. I think it was a vision, actually.”

“On the floor?”

“When they come, they come,” I said, trying to get my bearings. “I want to tell you about it, just give me a few minutes.”

He helped me up and onto a chair and got me a glass of water. Then he closed what was left of the back door.

“Sit tight,” he said before running out of the kitchen.

A minute later he came back with the baseball bat. I gave him a half smile, still out of it.

“I don’t think you need that anymore,” I said. “The danger is over, and it turns out we were never even in any real danger. Not from the tattoo man anyway. He’s not the killer.”

“What do you mean, he’s not the killer?” His eyebrows shot to the ceiling. “Did you hit your head, Abby Craig? Of course he’s the killer.”

I looked over at the vegetables on the counter, trying to piece together how long I had been out.

“What time is it?”

“Ten oh two.”

The math was beyond me, but it must have only been for a few minutes.

“Come on,” I said, heading to the living room. “You’re not going to believe this.”

***

I pushed back the curtains and stared out, watching a light rain fall. Then I told David about the vision.

When I finished, he was quiet. I should have taken his picture. I was sure it was a first.

“That’s a crazy story, Abby Craig,” he said when he finally spoke.

He asked me some of the same questions I had asked the tattoo man.

“But why didn’t the cops figure it out, that Charlie was the killer?” he said.

“I guess he fooled them, like he fooled me. Like he fooled himself.”

“It must have helped that she was a prosecutor with half the convicts in the city hating on her.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure that figured into his planning. As long as there wasn’t any evidence against him, he knew he didn’t have to worry about the police. He knew he would get lost in the shuffle. And he totally got away with it, too. But in the end, the one person he didn’t account for turned him in. Himself.”

David sighed.

“I don’t understand why you got tangled up in this though. I really don’t.”

“I guess it was my lucky day,” I said, thinking back to the first time I saw Charlie Modine sitting in the Jeep. “Hazards of the job.”

We were both quiet for a while.

“Oh. My. God. Abby Craig!” David said, his mouth turning into a giant
O.
“You know what that was? You know what just happened? Why didn’t I put it together sooner?”

“What are you talking about?” I said, wishing he’d stop shouting.

“He’s an angel! You’ve had an angel encounter!”

“What? You mean the tattoo man?”

“Yes! Don’t you see? It fits. It all fits. You saw an angel! One of God’s loving and kind and beautiful helpers. A keeper of light.”

“I see ghosts, David. Not angels.”

“Not this time, Abby Craig. You’ve crossed over into something new. Something wonderful! Don’t you see?”

I didn’t see.

“It wasn’t like that,” I said after a while. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

I stood up and went over to the window again.

“Hey, I don’t get your attitude,” he said to my back. “This is a good thing. An angel, this messenger of God, came here and talked to you. And you helped him. You’re so lucky. I would do anything to see an angel.”

I was quiet. After a few minutes I sat down again. He just stared at me, waiting for me to buy in. Then he jumped up and ran over to the little table by the front door, rummaging through his man bag.

“Now where is it?” he said, dumping out the contents. “Shoot.”

He scratched at his head and then ran to a bookcase in the corner of the living room where he kept some of his things.

“Here it is,” he said, pulling out a book.

He sat back down next to me and started flipping through the pages.

“What are you looking for?” I said.

“I know it’s in here somewhere,” he mumbled. “Come on. Come on… Yes! Here he is. No, wait. It must have been a different one. Let’s see.”

He went on like that for I don’t know how long. Skimming different sections of the book, positive one minute he had identified the tattoo man, not so sure the next.

“I just don’t know, Abby Craig,” he said finally. “I mean it could be this one here. Or this one. It says he ‘
shines the light of God’s truth into the darkness of our confusion.’
Does that sound like someone we know? And listen to this part.
‘He can show us how to heal every aspect of our lives and release painful burdens and memories of the past. The angel of memory uses his flaming sword to—”

“Okay, that’s enough, David. There was no
flaming
sword,” I said and sighed. “This guy I saw didn’t have any wings. And he sure as hell wasn’t filled with light.”

“Don’t be so literal, Abby Craig. Call it gay man’s intuition, but that’s who you met tonight. You met an angel!”

I didn’t say anything.

He stopped and gave me a long stare and then pointed at a drawing in the book.

“Look at this symbol at the top of the page here. Tell me that doesn’t look a little like your tattoo. Tell me that’s not what you drew!”

I glanced down at the page. At the top of the chapter was a small black symbol. I had to admit it looked similar to the tattoo I had seen, but the letters or whatever they were didn’t match up.

The best I could do was give him a little shrug.

Regardless of what David and his book of angels said, I knew what I had seen. Whatever the man with the tattoo was, he wasn’t from the light. There was darkness in him.

David stared at me bug-eyed and waited for me to embrace his excitement. But it wasn’t going to happen. His smile faded.

“It makes for a good story, David. But that’s all. This guy, whatever else he was, he was…
dark
.”

“I don’t understand, Abby Craig. I just don’t understand.”

“It’s still with me,” I said. “This feeling. I can feel it running through me right now, sitting here. I can taste it in my mouth. It’s real. It’s a horrible feeling, David. It’s like when…”

I closed my eyes, trying to focus on something else, something good. I tried to picture Ty and his face, his eyes. But it was no good.

“When what?” David said.

“It feels like when I was in the lake. When I drowned in all that darkness. When I lost those 44 minutes. That’s the feeling I have right now. That’s what he felt like. From that time, from the water I breathed in. When I died.”

He took my hand but I could barely feel it.

The rain fell harder against the glass, the drops exploding on impact as the darkness wrapped all around, squeezing me tighter and tighter until I could barely breathe.

CHAPTER 63

The storm was heading east, having dumped almost an inch of rain in the last hour alone. I stood outside on my break, under the eaves of the café, sipping a coffee and watching the clouds roll by and the lightning off in the distance. Winter was officially behind us, and it was a good feeling knowing that the sun was out there somewhere, waking up like a big Sochi bear coming out of hibernation.

I looked through the windows and caught a glimpse of Mo, talking to the cop who had helped find her attacker. They had arrested the man, a drug addict, last week.

Officer Ben Mulrooney had been stopping by a lot lately and raving about the coffee. But even though I shared his enthusiasm for the beans, I didn’t quite buy his new devotion to our Guatemalan roast as the sole reason for his visits.

I turned away, smiling. Those two would make quite the team. Maybe not exactly on the scale of Lyle and Paloma, but a real odd couple nonetheless.

***

As I started to feel like myself again, I tried to process everything that had happened, the truth about Charlie Modine and what he had done. Like the ghost in that alley, at first I couldn’t quite believe it. But when it slowly started to sink in, I felt used and betrayed. And I felt bad for Sarah Modine. It was one thing to be run down in the street by a stranger. It was another to be killed by your husband.

I realized I would probably never understand it, not fully anyway, never be completely at peace with it. The darkness I brought back that night was still with me. It wasn’t as strong as it first felt, but I wasn’t sure if that was because it had begun to lift or if I had just gotten used to it.

Jesse had tried to help.

I saw him on the first day of spring when I was doing a little work out in the backyard.

“You gonna start a veggie garden out here, Chef?” he said.

“That’s not a bad idea, but right now I’d just be happy with fewer weeds.”

“Sorry I can’t help you with that.” He had a big grin on his face.

“No you’re not,” I said, throwing a big clump of roots at him. “But it’s still good to see you.”

“You too, Craigers.”

I stood up and hugged him.

“Still thinking about it, huh?” Jesse said after a while.

“Yeah, it’s left me wondering about a lot of things. I’m still not sure about the Tattoo Man. David thinks he was an angel, he keeps talking about keepers of light. But if anything, this guy was the opposite of that.”

“Well, you could see how that would be. I mean, if your thespian friend is right. Dealing with all the Charlie Modines of the world, seeing only the evil in humanity. It’s bound to take a toll. Even on an angel.”

“You mean like a cop?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

He reached up to pluck a twig off an overhanging tree branch and I saw his arm, where he had that mark he had gotten when he rescued me from one of my other bad ghosts. He usually kept it well hidden, pulling down his shirt or turning away, but he didn’t seem to care this time. It was different than the Tattoo Man’s, but there were some eerie similarities. Almost like they had been done by the same artist.

Jesse smiled.

I wondered if there was something he knew that he wasn’t telling me.

“I’ve been trying to see the light in all this darkness,” I said. “But I haven’t had much success. I mean, what was the point of the whole thing? I’m not sure what purpose I served. Except maybe helping send Charlie Modine to Hell.”

“Well, he did come to you for justice after all. And maybe that’s what he got. I don’t know. As far as your part in it goes, you did your best. It wasn’t your fault that the truth was his undoing. He created that truth, not you. You just helped him to see it.”

I shook my head.

“He was so sure of the lie.”

I remembered the feeling and passion Charlie Modine had in his voice when he talked about his wife and how real his love for her seemed.