Platinum (17 page)

“Where are you?” I muttered under my breath. “I know you’re in here somewhere.”

And then, there he was—in the yearbook in front of me
and
standing beside me, looking over my shoulder.

“Not my best picture.”

I made a concerted effort at not reacting as Cade’s voice reached my ears. “No,” I said, “it’s not.” Entranced by the yearbook, I didn’t look up at the real Cade and instead stared down at the page. The photo was grainy, and he was in the process of turning his back to the camera, too cool to be caught on film.

In the here and now, Cade knelt by my side, and I resisted the urge to touch the picture.

“You killed Tad.” It was a statement, not a question.

Cade didn’t respond.

“For her?” This time, it was a question. I took a stab in the dark at the girl’s identity, based on the name I’d heard over and over again in my visions. “For Helen?”

Cade froze at the mention of her name.

“She was using you, you know.” I couldn’t help but impart some of my alpha-girl intuition on him.

He looked at me, his eyes funny and intense and dead serious all at once.
“What do you mean ‘was’?”

He’d no sooner gotten the words out of his mouth than the air around him cracked, and he disappeared back to the past. Back to the time of the picture I couldn’t bring myself to touch.

“Lilah, I texted you like four times.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, still distracted by the picture on the page in front of me. I wondered who Cade had been in 1957, who I would have been if I’d lived then.

“Do you
enjoy
driving me crazy?” Lissy asked, her tone bordering somewhere between exasperation, annoyance, and a whine.

“You found something,” I surmised. “So did I.” Without bothering to explain it to her, I carefully (and stealthily, I might add) ripped Cade’s page out of the 1957 yearbook, folded it twice, and stuck it in my back pocket.

Lissy looked duly shocked that I had violated library property. I rolled my eyes. “So are you going to give me that look or tell me what you found?” I asked.

For a moment, it appeared as though my question was going to prove somewhat rhetorical.

“Fine,” Lissy said.

I waited.

“First, I looked up John Davis. He disappeared from Emory High in the middle of the school day sometime in the fall of 1987, and his bloodied body was found several hours later, at the exact spot where he’d last been seen.”

I pictured the locker room in my mind.

“No one was ever arrested for the murder. His girlfriend was inconsolable.”

At the word “girlfriend,” I looked down at the book, where Cade’s picture had been before I had commandeered it as my own. There, peeking through the ragged edges of the torn page, was a familiar set of blue eyes, a familiar blond ponytail.

I turned the page, and as I read, Lissy did the same over my shoulder.

HELEN LANDON
:
FALL PRINCESS
.

I started flipping the pages, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Winter Queen, homecoming court, head cheerleader…

Helen Landon was everywhere in this book. And, I was convinced, she was evil.

“1957,” I told Lissy. “Tad Bradford. Helen Landon. Cade…” I trailed off, realizing I didn’t know Cade’s last name. “I need to know what happened.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Lissy said.

She was getting brave. Good for her.

“Thanks,” I said.

Lissy balked for a moment, then blew a wayward strand of brown hair out of her face. “You’re welcome.”

I closed the book on Helen Landon and followed Lissy to the newspaper archives, and in perfect respect of the “no scenes” rule, neither one of us said a single word.

17

Payback, Part 2

Apparently, I’m not the only bitch.

I wasn’t surprised when we managed to pull up the article on Tad Bradford. The newspaper writer referred to him as an “upstanding young man.” The irony wasn’t lost on me as I remembered all I’d seen of said young man beating up on anyone and everyone who was smaller, weaker, and poorer than he was
and
cheating on his girlfriend.

Needless to say, Tad Bradford was not my favorite person. And I couldn’t help but notice that he had a stupid name.

Tad’s body had been found just outside the school. He’d been stabbed. Both the suspect (one Cade Kent) and the victim’s girlfriend (another upstanding young citizen, Miss Helen Landon) were missing. The reporter never came out and said it, but it was strongly insinuated that Cade had somehow abducted Helen and run for the border.

“This is how it started,” I said, more for Lissy’s benefit than my own. “With Tad and Helen and Cade.”

“Your Cade?”

I paused for a few seconds too long. “He’s not my Cade.”

Lissy gave me a look, which I ignored. “Helen and Tad were the golden children. She was the homecoming queen; he was the quarterback. They both came from wealthy families….”

“They were upstanding young citizens,” Lissy finished for me, dryly. She knew as well as I did that the pretty, shiny people of the world weren’t exactly known for their kindness in the face of adversity. In fact, most of the time, they
were
the adversity.

“And then there’s Cade.”

“Your Cade.”

“I could have sworn my lips were moving,” I said, and I tapped my chin thoughtfully with my finger. “Yes, yes they were, which seems to indicate—tell me if I’m wrong here—that I was talking. And when I talk…”

“Yes?” Lissy gave me another look, marginally less attractive than the first.

“You listen.” At her “whatever” expression, I continued. “Cade was the bad boy. The rebel. He had it rough—no money, big family, dad in jail, that kind of thing.” As I talked, the details became clearer and clearer in my mind. It was weird—I’d seen the past, and I’d read about it in the newspaper, and now I just knew. “Cade had it for Helen,” I said. “Bad.”

“Methinks I sense a love triangle coming on here,” Lissy said.

I nodded. “It wasn’t much of a triangle, not at first, but then Tad, upstanding young man that he was, started fooling around a bit, and Helen…”

Blond ponytail, sickening smile.

“…Helen didn’t like that at all. And so she brought Cade into it. She got her claws into him, and then boom, Cade and Tad were fighting.”

How many times had I seen the fight playing out against the backdrop of my mind?

“Tad started it. He came after Cade.”

“And Cade stabbed him?” Lissy asked.

I couldn’t imagine Cade, my Cade (I blamed Lissy for making me think of him that way), pulling a knife on someone.

“So Tad dies,” Lissy said. “And Helen and Cade disappear. Everyone figures they’ve run off, but really they get stuck in some sort of freaky time loop….”

I waited.

“That’s about all I’ve got,” Lissy said.

I sighed. “We could so use a Truth Seer right now,” I muttered. Had this whole debacle been a movie, Lexie would have popped out of nowhere right about then, but thankfully, my life hadn’t become that predictable—yet.

“But what does Tad have to do with John Davis?” Lissy asked.

I didn’t need to compare the two newspaper articles, but I did anyway. “Same wounds,” I said. “Same high school.” I thought of my visions, and Lissy, with one squinty look at my aura, plucked the thought from my head.

“Cade,” she said. “Whatever he did to Tad, he did to John Davis.”

“And not just John Davis,” I said. “Look at the dates on these papers. October 19, 1957. October 19, 1987.”

It didn’t take us long to find the remaining two boys from my vision. Teddy Call, a basketball hottie with dark hair, blue eyes, and a hell of a left hook, had died on October 19, 1967; Joseph Amity a decade after that.

“Ten-to-one odds says there’s another one from ’97,” Lissy said.

I made the executive decision that we didn’t need to look for the proof. Every decade, on the same day, like clockwork, a popular, good-looking, upstanding young man died.

“He’s the one,”
Cade had told me, looking at Brock.

Brock, who hated it when any other guy looked my way.

Brock, whose tongue had taken up temporary residence in my best friend’s mouth.

Brock, who had told me he loved me the day before.

“It’s Brock.” When I said the words out loud, they became real.

“What’s Brock?”

I got the sense that Lissy was deliberately playing dumb.

“He’s the one.” I repeated Cade’s words. “Lissy, think. Once every ten years, the hottest guy in school disappears, leaving behind a super hot girlfriend who sobs when he’s found dead.” I paused. “Who’s the hottest guy at our school?”

“Brock.” If Lissy had been a little more with it, she would have known not to answer so quickly when she was talking to the girlfriend of the guy in question, but at this exact moment, I didn’t care.

“And what’s tomorrow’s date?” I threw out the next question, even though it was the one whose answer I least wanted to hear myself.

“October 19,” Lissy said. “2007.”

So now I knew. I knew the meaning behind Cade’s cryptic warnings. I knew what the fists I’d seen flying meant. I knew that in less than twenty-four hours, my boyfriend was going to become victim number six, unless I could figure out how exactly this was happening, and why Cade was killing these guys when I could tell just by looking at him that it was the last thing he ever wanted to do.

Our library trip had provided me with plenty of information. Great, mystery more or less solved, but the one thing it hadn’t given me was a single clue as to how to stop it.

“You know, right about now, I really could use some direction,” I said out loud, and at that exact moment, my life decided to become a full-out movie drama.

“Direction!”

It was just one word, but despite that fact (or maybe because of it), I knew exactly who I would find standing behind me when I turned around.

“Grams,” Lissy said, sounding about as thrilled as I was.

“Come,” the grandmother in question said, sticking to her one-word commands.

Lissy shrugged. “At this point,” she said, “why not?”

I had at least three dozen answers to that question, but Caroline Nowly stopped me in my tracks.

“There are answers to your questions,” she said, “whatever they may be. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourselves into, dearlings, but there are things you should read.” She paused. “Things you should know. The First Seer does not take visitations lightly, and neither do I.”

I looked at Lissy, and the silent question passed between us. How had her grandmother known about my dreams?

“You made me promise not to tell Lissy,” a cheerful voice said next to me. “You didn’t say anything about not telling Grams.”

I tried to glare at her and failed miserably. It was certifiably impossible to glare at Lexie James.

“I thought that was implied,” I said under my breath. “And I thought I told you to stay out of this.”

“No,” Lexie said, still smiling. “You didn’t. You just stopped talking to me and stopped picking me up from school and whatnot.”

Obviously, from her tone of voice, Lexie hadn’t taken any offense.

“So I figured you were trying to keep me out of it, which meant that it was dangerous, which meant that you needed help, which meant…” Instead of finishing her extraordinarily long run-on sentence, Lexie gestured toward Grams.

“You’re still staying out of it,” I told Lexie, in my best “I rule the school” voice.

Lexie batted her eyelashes angelically. Beside me, Lissy groaned.

“Come,” Grams said for the second time. “It’s time I gave you girls your books.”

I glanced at Lissy first, then at Lexie.

“Our books?”

Our exit from the library was most definitely what I would define as scene causing. Caroline “I Always Wear a Muumuu” Nowly was utterly incapable of stealth. As I drove on autopilot to Lissy’s house (apparently, good old Grams had been preparing for this day), I fiddled with the radio controls, trying not to think about the fact that, though our trip to the library had been as much of a success as I could have hoped for, it had objectively (according to the rules I had outlined) been a dismal failure.

Caroline Nowly, in addition to being the most conspicuous person ever born, was incapable of speaking in anything short of a booming yell. By the time we’d left the library, everyone within a thirty-mile radius had heard me referred to as a dearling. Talk about scenes.

Lexie may have been riding in her grandmother’s car, but she was so totally with Lissy and me in spirit. She’d never stopped smiling, and I knew better than to think that Miss All Sight, All the Time didn’t have a plan of her own.

And now, I was on my way to the James residence to get a book. Like there weren’t enough of those at the library. And yet, despite myself, I was intrigued. My skin hummed as I drove closer and closer to the house, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was standing on the edge of something bigger than big.

Three girls holding hands over an open grave.

The oldest, hair dark like their mother’s, staring off into the distance; the youngest, an almost comically solemn expression on her pixie face. The middle sister’s expression fell somewhere between the other two, and somehow, it seemed too big for her face.