Inevitable (27 page)

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“So what are we doing in here, anyway?” Dana asked from behind me as we entered the spare bedroom of the old lady’s house.

I paused to straighten a picture frame on the vanity. I’d never met the owner, but I had her face memorized now. “Organizing.” I did feel more refreshed today, or maybe just drained. That could have something to do with being up at eight in the morning on a Sunday. I tried calling Lieutenant Bailey again this morning, but no one answered. I left another voicemail and hung up, feeling like I was getting the run around.

Dana lifted one brow. “You look tired, hon. Didn’t sleep well?”

I ran my fingers along a shelf, sending dust particles flying into the air. “Yeah, not so well. Too much on my mind.” Like being stalked. Every time headlights had flashed on my back wall, my eyes jerked open.

“I’m sorry about Aaron.” Dana touched my forearm.

I looked at her and blinked,  not drawing the connection between my tiredness and Aaron.

She frowned. “You’re not upset about him? What is it, then? Stephen?”

It took a full two seconds for her words to trigger the memory of last night. And then I gasped, the hurt of Aaron’s betrayal socking me in the stomach. With Libby. Already. As if he hadn’t ever kissed me, as if nothing had ever happened between us.

“That jerk!” I cried, unable to stop the anger that built inside me. “He practically cheated on me!”

“He’s an idiot, Jaynie,” Dana said, just like a good best friend should. “That he would choose that red-headed bimbo over you proves it.”

I laughed, though it came out more like a sob. “Yeah.” I pressed on my chest and shook my head. “Let it go. This is just the way it is.”

“It’s probably a bad idea to mention that prom’s next weekend, huh.”

I thought of that beautiful pink dress in my closet. “There’s always next year.” The words felt hollow.

Dana’s eyes wandered around the guest room, her hand still lingering on my arm. She let out a low whistle. “Wow, girl. You’re never going to finish this.”

“Yeah. This is worse than the master bedroom,” I sighed. Half-opened boxes of papers, kitchen ware, records, shoes, and other random knick-knacks lay scattered around the room. Somewhere under all this was a bed.

Dana knelt by a black garbage bag that lay on its side, books gushing out. “Do we keep these things?”

“Judgment call.” The owner—what was her name? Adelle?—had given permission for us to dispose of anything impersonal or older than seven years. I opened a cardboard box of papers. “If it’s got a name on it, keep it. If it’s less than seven years old, keep it. Otherwise, trash.”

She righted the bag and twisted it closed. “Well. More trash here!”

I laughed, feeling a jolt of warmth. I appreciated the atmosphere of normalcy that Dana brought with her. “Why don’t you look through it? You might find a book you like.”

“Doubt it,” she muttered. But she obliged me and sat down.

I made my own trash pile. Lots of old school papers, yellowed with age, graphite smeared across them. Essay questions about the importance of Prohibition and why the stock market failed. Interesting, but not enough to keep.

I picked up a postcard from Germany with a picturesque castle on the front, addressed to Adelle. The words on the back were brief: “Lovely countryside. Miss your beautiful hands. Join me.”

I put the postcard aside, but my curiosity was piqued. What if there were more? I sifted through the papers with more purpose, wondering about Adelle’s lover in Germany. I found folded up notes, of the variety that girls passed around in the halls at school. Apparently that began many years ago.

The notes went back in time, to her junior high days, girls asking about hair styles and making after school dates. Different, but the same. No more postcards, though.

I picked up a wadded-up pink paper and almost tossed it into the trash pile, but then stopped myself. I could see words scribbled on the other side, words that looked hurried and anxious. Curiosity got the better of me and I unfolded the paper.

“Snow falling on dirt road. Sled goes too fast. Car around corner. Collision. Girl dies on impact. Inevitable, no way around it.”

Inevitable
. The word glared at me from the paper. Goosebumps popped out on my arms. Who wrote this, and why? What did it mean? I put the pink paper next to the postcard and pulled out more papers, no longer idle in my searching. I found another one:

“Burning! Barn falls down around him. Pain! The flames! Blackness.”

I dropped the paper and took several deep breaths, feeling my heart pound. Either these were story ideas, or someone kept a very morbid account of deaths. Kind of like I did.

I started my search again. I found a paper that had been ripped into pieces. I had nearly emptied the box now, and it didn’t take a lot of time to find the other pieces. I put it together. The words were engraved into the page, as though written in fury, desperation.

“Not my son. Not my son. The fever, the anguish. I cannot live with this.”

Tears pricked my eyes as I imagined the pain she must have felt. Not just her sister, or her lover, but her child. To See his death and not be able to stop it... my heart wrenched with sympathy.

There was no doubt about it; she could See.

“You okay, Jayne?”

I blinked back tears and looked at Dana. “She could See. Adelle could See.”

“Did you think she was blind?”

I shook my head in impatience. “Like me, Dana. She could See the future.”

“Oh.” Her mouth formed a perfect “o.” “How do you know?”

I gathered up the evidence and laid it out for Dana. She pressed her lips together and studied them. “So her son died?”

“That’s what she Saw.” I tucked the papers into my jeans pocket and stood. “I need to talk to her.” I didn’t wait for Dana, though I knew she would come behind me.

“Wait! Isn’t she in the hospital?”

“Yes.” I paused at the front door, locking the house back up. Dana kept pace with me as I hurried home.

“Hey, Mom?” The aroma of rising cinnamon rolls greeted me, and I paused to take in a deep breath. Dana slid up behind me.

“Don’t touch anything, you’re dirty!” she scolded, turning around to face me. “It’s not lunch time yet. What’s going on?”

I toyed with the dishtowel hanging from the fridge door. “I have to go somewhere real quick. I’ll be right back. Promise.” I deposited the key on the counter. “Can I borrow my car?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “How long will you be gone?”

“One hour.” I put on my best puppy dog face. “Please.”

Mom sighed. “Fine. One hour.”

I grabbed my keys, giving Dana a triumphant smile before hurrying out the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“L
et me get this straight,” Dana said as I backed out of the driveway. “We're going to the hospital to visit Adelle, the owner?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“And what is it you think she’ll be able to tell you?”

I faltered. “Well. About my Sight. Maybe she knows how I can change the future.”

It took only moments to find Adelle Gregory at the hospital. My heart sank when we entered the oncology ward. This woman wasn’t just sick. She was dying.

“I hate the smell of hospitals,” Dana whispered beside me, as uneasy as I’d ever seen her.

I stopped outside room 551. I gave a light knock on the door and poked my head in. The old woman on the bed with curly purple hair snored quietly, her mouth gaping open.

I sank into a chair next to her, itching to ask my questions but not wanting to wake her. Dana sat down beside me and picked up a magazine from the bedside tray.

After twenty minutes, she put down the magazine. “Jaynie, it’s almost eleven. We’ll have to leave soon. Maybe you should wake her.”

Oh, I felt like an awful person for doing that. Still, we hadn’t come here for nothing. I stood up and shook her shoulder gently. “Adelle.”

She snorted and smacked her lips, but didn’t wake.

I tried a little harder. “Adelle.”

She groaned and tossed her head, but still nothing.

I counted to ten, then shook her as hard as I dared. “Adelle!”

Her eyes snapped open, large and unfocused. Her pupils scanned the room and came to rest on me. A smile slid across her face. “Declare.”

Except it wasn’t exactly “declare.” My memory had deceived me. “What?” I leaned in closer. “What did you say?”

But her eyes were closed again, soft snores escaping her mouth.

Dana sighed. “I’m sorry, Jayne. We’d better go now. You’re mom only gave you an hour, and I need you to not be grounded anymore. We’ll try again later.”

I nodded, feeling defeated, and followed Dana out of the room. “What did she say, Dana? Did you hear her?”

Dana wrinkled her nose. She reached into her purse and pulled out two Dum-Dums, offering one to me. I shook my head.

“No,” she said. “It didn’t make much sense to me.”

I sighed. I wasn’t anywhere closer than I’d been.

We checked in with Mom to get the key. Warm cinnamon rolls sat on the counter, and she turned off the hand-mixer when we came in.

“Just in time,” she said. “Want a snack? Help me ice these and you girls can have some.”

Dana was already on the move. “Cream cheese icing? I’m there.”

The gears turned in my mind as we returned to Adelle’s house. “I’ve got to figure out what she said,” I murmured, tapping my chin. “The other woman said it too.”

I unlocked the house and Dana stepped in behind me. “What other woman?” she asked.

“Oh.” I’d forgotten to mention that part. “There’s this girl I see after every vision. At first she just seemed to be watching me, but lately I think she’s trying to tell me something.”

“She’s
always
there?” Dana stared at me, her blue eyes wide. “That’s like impossible. Unless she’s like stalking you. Or a ghost.”

A ghost. I sank down onto the beige carpet. No one could see her except me. She appeared and disappeared at will. She walked in the air. Was she dead?

“Okay, let’s start over.” Dana sat cross-legged in front of me. “What has she told you?”

“Well, that word. Declare.”

She shook her head. “It didn’t sound like ‘declare’ to me. It sounded like something in another language.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Well, that’s just extremely non-helpful.” I stood up. “Adelle knows the answer. I’m sure of it. I need to find her journal or something.”

“Right.” Dana stood as well. “I’ll take the next room over.”

I worked faster without Dana to distract me. I organized each corner of the room, cleaned out drawers, pulled junk out from under the bed. Nothing that resembled a journal came my way.

Dana rejoined me, pushing her blond curls off her forehead with both hands. “I didn’t come across a journal anywhere. Anything for you?”

“No.” I gave a quick shake of my head. “It’s okay, though. I think I’ve found a way to beat this thing.”

“Yeah?” Dana bounced on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest. “How’s that?”

I stuffed all the junk and homework papers into a giant trash bag. “You know how I Saw Aaron dumping me?”

“You actually saw him breaking up with you? It wasn’t just a fizzle out?”

To be honest, I couldn’t quite recall. But my plan depended on that, so I said, “Yes.”

“Okay.”

“So, I’m going to do it first.”

“Do what?”

“Break up with him.”

Dana blinked. “Wait, that makes no sense. If you break up with him, don’t you get the same outcome? I thought you wanted to change things.”

“This does change things. It totally mixes things up. There’s no way for me to see the consequence of me breaking up with him.”

Dana gave me a pitiful look. There’s no other way to describe it. “Jayne, honey, I think in his mind, you guys are already through.”

That heavy ball rolled around my stomach again. “But we never broke up.”

“Did you ever officially go out?”