Fragile Darkness (10 page)

I shook my head and sent the room tilting all over again.

“I wasn't sure,” I said. “It was like when they gave me a tranquilizer after…” I broke off, the way Dylan looked at me telling me he knew exactly what I meant by
after.
At the hospital. After the steady rhythm of life fell silent.

“It was like the whole world slipped away,” I said, “and everything got dull and dreamlike.”

Finally he handed me my phone. “This isn't a vision.”

Dark letters blurred against the glow of white.

STAY AWAY OR NEXT TIME IT WILL BE WORSE

I stared so hard my eyes burned.

“That came about thirty minutes ago,” Dylan said. “The number is a prepaid cell.”

Which meant it couldn't be traced.

“Oh, my God,”
I whispered, trying to understand.

“Someone wanted you out of there.”

I looked up through a tangle of damp, muddy hair. “That's why it's all a blur,” I said, realizing where he'd been going all along. “Someone must have put something in my water.”

It would have been easy, too, all those people, the strobe lighting and hundreds of hot, sweaty people pressed against each other.

Dylan looked like he wanted to put a fist through the wall. “The question is why,” he said darkly, and now it was his voice that scraped. “To have a little fun?” He hesitated, a wildness I'd never seen before flickering in his gaze. “To play with you?”

While I was totally out of it.

“To get rid of you?”

“You need to be careful,”
Grace had said.
“Someone knows you're here.”

“To stop you?”

Because they could have, I realized. Someone could have done anything to me.

Why?

And then Dylan was looking at me, looking at me in a way I didn't understand, that burned and chilled at the same time.

“It's not like it was before,” he said, his voice dead quiet. “And it never will be again. People know who you are. You can't just go to places like that anymore. People with secrets … they're not going to like it when you show up.”

Because they'd think I knew stuff about them, their lives, their lies, even if I didn't.

“If someone hadn't brought you here,” he started, but stopped when the door that had been ajar pushed open, and his dad walked in.

“I thought I heard voices,” Jim said, smiling like none of this was strange. In a flannel shirt and faded jeans, with his silver hair pulled into a low ponytail and a glass in his hands, he walked over and offered me water. “Thirsty?”

*   *   *

Jim suggested I shower. I could have gone home despite how trashed my clothes were, but I didn't want Aunt Sara to see my matted, tangled hair, or the mascara smeared beneath my eyes. She didn't need that.

If she was even awake.

I could have stayed beneath the warm spray for hours, but it was late, and I didn't have all night.

And I was at Jim's house, in the bathroom Dylan used. The soap was his. I stared at the bar of swirled green and white a long time before picking it up and bringing it to my body, and for a second there, the strangest sensation slipped through me, almost like a touch.

I held the soap against my chest. When my eyes stung, I told myself it was only the water, but I pulled the bar away and built a lather in my hands.

After the water ran cold, I dried off and dressed, slipping on the huge sweatpants and baggy Tulane T-shirt that I knew belonged to Dylan.

Soft jazz drifted through the house when I emerged in a cloud of steam, leading me to the kitchen. Jim stood at the stove, stirring a dark liquid in a small iron pot.

“Better?”

The rich scent of chocolate drifted toward me. “Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Thanks.”

“Clothes are in the dryer. You want to watch TV while they finish up?”

“Sure.” Fingering the damp hair from my face, I wandered toward a huge sofa opposite the equally huge television. Both new, like almost everything else in the house he'd built after the storm.

I'd been here three times: the day we met, the day I came to ask him how my mother dealt with dreams she didn't understand, and the day I'd brought the picture from Grace's apartment, of my mother and hers. Each time we'd stayed outside. The first time I'd chosen not to go in, the second and third times he'd never offered.

Dark paneling covered the walls, even though I was pretty sure basically no one did that anymore. The furniture was big and sturdy, the electronics state of the art. A few framed black-and-white photos hung from the walls.

No woman lived here. That was obvious, except for the fuzzy, muted rose blanket at the far end of the sofa and the pair of leopard-rimmed reading glasses next to a book about the universe.

I smiled. Dylan's dad always seemed so lonely. I liked that he didn't spend all of his time by himself.

At the back of the room a big window gave an awesome view of the yard, all save for the security bars every two inches.

We moved away from the past, but some ghosts moved with us.

“You want to go outside?”

Jim passed the sofa with two big mugs in his hands. Steam rose from the whipped cream peeking over the tops.

I started to ask where Dylan was, but didn't. Whatever danger there'd been was over. He didn't do aftermath.

Outside, cool night air blew in from the river beyond the oak and cypress trees. And for a fleeting moment, memory played: the huge, snarling dogs running toward me, the one, quiet word freezing them in place, and Dylan, standing in the shadows.

Allez,
he'd said. Stop.

But so much more had started.

Curling my hands around the mug, I turned toward the snoring dogs on the far side of the porch.

“They haven't even moved,” I said.

“They know they don't need to,” Jim said. “They don't sense danger.”

Like they had earlier when the unknown car had come onto their property.

At the edge of the raised redwood deck, I sat on the top stair, taking a long sip of hot cocoa. Here so far removed from the lights of the city, nearby stars twinkled and faraway galaxies swirled, a lot like they had in the mountains of Colorado.

The crickets and toads did their thing, but that only added to the peacefulness. “It's so quiet,” I murmured. “I've always loved being outside at night.”

Jim sat beside me. “Me, too.”

“When I was a little girl, I used to wander out after Gran went to bed. She always said it wasn't safe because of the animals, but I was never afraid.” The memory made me smile. “It was the only time I could see the stars.”

With another whipped-creamy sip of cocoa, I searched the pinpricks of light for the familiar lines of Orion.

“There was this legend,” I remembered, “that they're not really stars at all, but an opening to Heaven, where the light of people who have gone before us can shine down.” My eyes filled. My throat thickened. I swallowed hard, but when I spoke again, my voice was barely a whisper.
“And let us know they're okay.”

Jim moved silently, gathering me against his side and holding me there. “Sweet girl,” he murmured.

Sinking into him seemed the most natural thing in the world. I'd heard so many stories about fathers and daughters, a dad being the one man a girl could count on her entire life.

This, I wondered. Was this what it felt like?

“It's Eskimo,” he said. “Your mom told me that.”

Everything glimmered, the twinkling of a million billion stars blurring into an endless haze.

“Yesterday is ashes, tomorrow is wood,” he added quietly. “Only today the fire shines brightly. That was another of her favorites.”

“I can feel her here,” I told him. “When I'm with you. And it's strange, but it always makes me feel safe.”

“You are safe.”

I was. I knew that.

“Cricket…”

Something about his voice, the gentle tone, warned me we were moving away from stars and Eskimo legends.

“It wasn't your fault.”

I stilled.

He eased back, letting the moonlight play along the shadows on his face, and somewhere far deeper.

“You're so like her. I can see it in your eyes, the guilt and the grief, just like I saw in hers. And maybe I shouldn't say anything. Maybe it's not my place, or tonight isn't the right time,” he said gruffly. “But you're young, and your whole life is ahead of you, and I can't let that son of a bitch take that from you.”

I looked back at the shifting shadows of the trees.

“People like you and your mom, it's hard for you, because you feel responsible, like you should be able to change stuff. But the things you see … it's like sitting in a theater and watching coming attractions. It doesn't matter whether you like it. You can't change what's already in the can.”

My hands tightened around the increasingly cool mug.

“With the girl last fall and your aunt, with Grace, your role was to help, and you did.”

I swallowed.

“With that son of a bitch, you stopped him. But with Chase…” He hesitated. “The decisions were
his,
and he made them.”

A fresh wave of emotion jammed in my throat.

“It wasn't your fault,” he said quietly. “You're not God.”

He was the second person to say that in twenty-four hours.

“He puts us here for a reason, and he takes us for a reason. It's not up to us to decide.” He reached for his own mug. “Can you imagine how crowded this place would be if we got to tell him no?”

It was one of those things that wasn't funny, not really, but made my mouth curve anyway.

“But I know how it feels.” He stared straight ahead, a few long strands of silver slipping from his ponytail to slide against the shadow of his jaw. “After the fire, I held you and looked into your sweet face, so full of love and trust, with absolutely no idea how your life had just changed, and all I could think was that I failed. I did everything humanly possible to keep you safe,
all
of you. But he got to you anyway.”

Damp strands of hair fell against my face, but I didn't push them back, didn't move.

“I didn't know how to live with that,” Jim muttered, hunching his shoulders. “Didn't know how to live with what I let happen.”

Haunted, I realized. Houses could be haunted. Places, empty old mansions and windswept fields where battles had raged and soldiers died. I'd seen shows about them, the feeling you got when you walked across the grass and felt the wind, how an essence remained, the spirits of those who had died.

But people could be haunted, too. If something dug deep enough into your soul, how could it not affect you?

Jim sat there, staring into the darkness, while the memory of all that he said played through his eyes.

“I drank myself to sleep every night and woke up every morning consumed by thoughts of finding the sick bastard who set fire to a little girl's life, and making him pay.”

According to my aunt, the sociopath who preyed on children and murdered my parents simply disappeared. Some thought he moved on. Some thought he died, or that justice caught up with him outside the law.

Jim turned back toward the house, and everything about him changed, that dull glassy look in his eyes burning into something stronger.

I turned, too.

 

TEN

The night deepened. Dylan stood there, in the familiar shadows of the old porch, with the same quiet intensity as the night at the Greenwood party. I had no idea when he'd come outside or how much he'd heard, but the sight of him standing there, and the realization that he hadn't left, brought me slamming right back into the moment.

“My boy,” Jim said, and something in his voice, the way it frayed around the edges, made me swing back around to look at him. “My boy was still here, but for a long time I couldn't see that, couldn't see anything, not until I almost lost even more.”

Dylan,
I realized, before Jim said anything else. Something had happened to Dylan.

Jim stared off at the trees, but I was pretty sure he saw a darkness far beyond the night. “I didn't notice he was gone at first. I woke up and drank coffee, took a shower. It was probably an hour before the quiet registered. Still, I figured he was sleeping and went back to fantasizing about revenge, until his mama started screaming.”

Around us, the cool breeze swirled softer.

“I found her in his bedroom. The window was open. And all I could think was that bastard had him. That bastard had come into my house, while I was passed out on the sofa, and taken my boy.”

Finally Dylan moved, stepping from the shadows to cross to his father. “Dad.”

“But that's not what happened,” Jim said as Dylan reached us. “My boy left by himself, to go camping down by the river, like I'd promised him we would.”

My heart squeezed.

“Because I forgot,”
Jim said, as if trying to explain something to a cop or a judge, or an even higher power, but knowing nothing he said would ever wipe away the horror of his sin. “He was five goddamn years old and he went by himself, because his daddy forgot.”

I could see him, the boy Dylan had been, with his shaggy dark hair and enthusiasm in his eyes, tromping off on his own, guided by nothing but his own internal compass.

Moving like water, like he always did, Dylan squatted by his father and put a hand to his shoulder. “I had Blackie.”

Jim twisted around, the haunted glint in his eyes locking onto his son.

“I found them by a tree,” he said. “My little man climbed a tree 'cause he wanted to reach for the stars, and fell.”

Dylan's mouth twitched, that same ghost of a smile I'd seen so many times before. “The stars were higher than I thought.”