Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (4 page)

I stopped.

“Jessica.”
She looked … fine. “What—”

She and Amber beamed—Bethany looked away.

And in that fractured moment, another kind of flash went through me, uglier than before. And I knew. I understood.

The dare Amber had given her friend hadn’t been for Jessica at all. It had been mine. She and Amber had planned everything, long before we’d reached the awful mansion. They’d goaded me, played me, gotten me to give them my flashlight. When Jessica screamed, everyone had run, taking their lights with them. Leaving me alone.

They’d
closed the door to the secret staircase.
They’d
waited until I was inside the fake closet.

They’d
shut me in.

They’d been on the other side, waiting, knowing I was inside. In the dark. That I was scared …

“Trinity!”

Something dark and vicious took control of me. I spun toward Chase’s voice, found him emerging through the gaping darkness. “You’re okay!” he said, vaulting through the window.

I didn’t wait for him to reach me. I charged him, catching him off guard as I slammed my hands against his chest. “You knew!”

The others I could understand. But him …

“Easy,” he said, reaching for my hands.

I twisted back from him, hating the tightness in my chest. “Game over,” I whispered.

He went so very still, looking beyond me to where his girlfriend stood like a vision of saintliness. “No—” he muttered.

“Liar!”

He shook his head, eyes darker than usual. “No, I swear!”

“Bullshit!” My hands were tight fists. I wanted to hit him. “You pretended to be my friend! You pretended I could trust you!”

That he was different …
special
.

“Trinity.” His voice was softer now, lower. “This isn’t what it looks like. You have to—”

“I don’t have to do anything.” Except leave. I very much had to do that.

“Let me explain—”

“What, you think I’m an idiot? That because my grandmother homeschooled me I’m stupid?”

“No—I didn’t know—”

“Save it.” I spun and started toward the front of the house, my flip-flops crunching down on broken glass.

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have noticed if any had sliced straight through.

“Wait!”

From his voice, I knew that he was right behind me.

I kept going, didn’t turn back.

“You can’t just—”

This time I did stop, spin. “Don’t.”

From beneath a sweep of bangs I’d once fantasized about brushing from his forehead, he stared hard at me. “Let me take you home.”

I laughed. I really did. It was a hard sound, ugly. “Not in this lifetime,” I said as I noticed Jessica strolling toward him.

I didn’t wait. I twisted back around and made my way to the street. The cars we’d come in were by the cemetery around the corner.

I walked in the opposite direction.

The night settled around me, darkness broken by puddles from the streetlamps. The house on Prytania Street was deserted, but around me manicured lawns and cars parked in the street told me life went on. I wasn’t scared. Not for me, anyway. Walking down the old cracked sidewalk was peaceful in an odd sort of way. A major intersection was only a few blocks away. There I could find a taxi.

Instinctively my hand went to my back pocket, but my BlackBerry was gone.

I was so not going back for it.

Away. That was all I could think. I had to get away from them, Jessica and Amber, Chase …

My heart gave a cruel little thump.
Especially
Chase.

From that place—the ugliness.

From what I’d seen.

Because while the frantic search for Jessica had been staged, while me being locked in a small pitch black room had only been a joke, the strobe-light images I’d seen were
real
.

They always were.

I’d been seven years old the first time. It was my earliest memory. We’d been in Colorado by then, living in a nice little house on a huge piece of property. There’d been lots of trees, pine and aspen, towering up toward the always-blue sky. I’d been outside playing with our golden retriever, Sunshine. She’d run into a thicket after a pink ball—and I’d started to scream.

The flashes scared me, like a lightning storm dancing around me. I remembered falling, blinking, crying for Sunshine. Through the flashes I’d seen her lying on her side, so horribly still. I’d heard the whimper …

That’s how Gran found me, curled on my side, crying. I dove into her arms and held on tight, clung to her as I tried to breathe. I was trying to tell her about Sunshine when the big dog came bounding out of the trees, running up to slobber us with doggie kisses.

Two days later we’d found her dead.

Even now, all these years later, the memory made me shiver.

The things that I saw … happened. They always, always happened.

I didn’t notice the headlights until the car was right beside me. I tensed, prepared myself to tell Chase or Jessica or whoever it was exactly where they could go.

The shiny black Lexus stopped me. One darkly tinted window lowered, and Aunt Sara looked like she wanted to cry.

She also looked like she’d rolled straight from bed. Her long dark hair, so like my own, fell softly against a face with no makeup, making her look much younger than thirty-three. I could tell her shirt was the huge New Orleans Saints Championship tee she always slept in.

“Hey,” was all she said. Maybe it was something in her voice—or maybe something in her expressive eyes—but my throat got all tight.

I don’t really know what I felt. Surprise, maybe relief.

“How did you know?” I asked.

Her smile was sad. “Chase called me.”

I hated the sudden salty sting in my eyes. He must have called the second I walked away. The Warehouse District where she lived wasn’t that far, but still, she clearly had not hesitated.

“Come on,
cher,
” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Home. I wasn’t sure where that was anymore. I stood there a long moment, looking at this stranger who was my father’s sister, my grandmother’s daughter, and though we barely knew each other, something warm swelled through me. Quietly I walked to the passenger side of her gorgeous brand-new car and pulled open the door, saw the photograph.

“I found that earlier,” Aunt Sara said. “Not sure why I grabbed it on the way out…”

But I was. Because somehow she understood. She knew. She knew how badly I needed to connect.

Numbly I picked up the faded black-and-white image, and for the first time I could remember, saw my mother.

FOUR

All my life I’d wondered. I’d dreamed. A picture, that’s all I wanted. A story, a piece of jewelry, a memory.
Anything.
Something to connect me to them, my parents. Something to make them
real
.

But nothing prepared me for the faded image.

I wasn’t sure what I expected. A stranger, I guess. Someone I didn’t recognize, didn’t know. But her …

My heart slammed so hard it hurt. There wasn’t much light in the car, only quick flashes from the streetlamps we zipped past, but it was enough. It was enough to realize that the woman in the picture was no stranger.
I knew her.
I’d seen her before, this woman with the long dark hair and haunting, wide-set eyes, the sad, knowing smile, so many times. At night, when my eyes closed and the images took over, and my parents came to visit. I’d thought they were only dreams, fantasies of the perfect childhood I’d never had.

But as Aunt Sara cruised down Magazine Street, I realized my mother had been with me all along.

“She was beautiful,” I whispered.

The lights from outside the car faded as we neared Aunt Sara’s Warehouse District condo. “She was.”

I was aware of the car turning, but didn’t look up. “Gran said…” Without thinking, I lifted a hand to feather a finger along the side of my mother’s face. “Gran said there weren’t any pictures.” I’d asked so many times. “She said they were destroyed.”

“Not all of them.”

I glanced up, saw that we were pulling into the private parking garage. “Do you have more?” I asked as Aunt Sara rolled down her window and slid her access card through the scanner.

“I might.”

Against the picture, my fingers tightened. And even though it was just October, excitement ran through me like a kid on Christmas Eve. They were my parents, but I knew little more than their names. John Mark and Rachelle had been married less than a year when they had me. Two years later they’d both been dead. Gran had acted so odd when I asked questions, that eventually I’d stopped.

“What was she like?” The question practically shot out of me. I’d gotten the occasional story out of Gran about her son, but nothing about my mother, her daughter-in-law.

The car stopped. I looked up, realized we were parked. The engine idled. The lights shone up against a dirty concrete wall. Next to me, my grandmother’s Buick waited. And Aunt Sara, well, she stared straight ahead, silky dark hair falling against her face and hiding her eyes. I saw her shoulders rise and fall.

Time slowed. It was weird. We sat in what felt like suffocating silence, even though the radio played. You would have thought I’d asked her to reveal some major secret, rather than a simple question about my mother.

It felt like forever, but it was probably a minute before she looked at me. Her eyes were dark, faraway as they met mine.

“You,” she said, and her smile was soft. Kind.

Sad.

“Your mom was a lot like you.”

It was weird how I jerked. They were words that should have made me feel happy. My mother, this stranger who sometimes appeared in the darkest vestiges of my sleep, was more than just a figment of my imagination. We were alike.

Connected.

But I felt like someone had thrown rocks at me. “Me?”

Aunt Sara killed the engine, plunging us into near total darkness. “There were ten years between me and your dad,” she said. “I was your age when he brought your mom home.”

Which meant she’d been nineteen when they died.

“But I always liked her,” she said. “She was good to me.” An odd sheen moved into her eyes. “Sweet, kind of quiet.”

Through the dim lighting, I squinted at the faded picture of the woman in the gauzy sundress, standing next to one of those massive old live oaks that sprawled all over town. I’d never seen anything like them in Colorado. But here … they stood like living statues, surviving for hundreds of years. It was weird to see the huge trees thriving in areas where the storm had destroyed everything else, almost as if they were …

Eternal.

The word jammed into my throat, and just like at the awful old house, I shivered. It was still pretty hot outside. I knew that. But even when Aunt Sara opened her car door, the warmth didn’t touch me. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was stepping into a Colorado night.

Numbly, I climbed from the car and followed my aunt through the dimly lit garage, where there were more open spaces than those occupied. New Orleans was recovering, but Aunt Sara said a lot of people had yet to return.

Through the shadows I was aware of the echo of our footfalls, of the brief wait for the elevator, of stepping inside and waiting while Aunt Sara entered her access code. All I could think was … what if? What if my parents had lived? What would it have been like if I’d been raised by them? Here? In this town?

The answer was easy. Tonight would never have happened.

The elevator opened and we crossed the short distance to Aunt Sara’s condo. A hundred years before, the brick building had been a factory, then a warehouse. For a long, long time, it had sat empty, abandoned like the house on Prytania. Even now, despite the luxury condominiums on all six floors, the exposed brick hallways felt cold.

In the heat of summer, that was probably a good thing.

At the door, Aunt Sara fiddled with a series of dead bolts, which seemed odd to me, considering you had to have a code and key to get inside the building in the first place.

“How did they die?” The question blurted out before I could stop it.

With the door partially open, my aunt stilled. I appreciated that she didn’t play games or ask who. “You don’t know?”

Her hair shielded her expression, but I heard the caution in her voice. “Gran never liked to talk about it.”

She stood still for a second or two, then shoved open the door and breezed inside. She threw on a few lights and tossed her purse on a small table, as if I wasn’t waiting for an answer. So much for that appreciation I’d had a moment before.

“You don’t want to tell me, either, do you?”

She kicked off one flip-flop, then another. “It’s not that,” she said, still brisk and matter-of-fact. “It’s just…” She turned, and before she even spoke, I saw the change—and knew there would be no more answers tonight.
“Trinity.”

The way she said my name made me feel like someone had pointed one of those big police searchlights at me.

“Don’t you think it’s time to tell me?”

Automatically, I felt my throat tighten. “Tell you what?” I asked, but had a bad feeling I knew.

She frowned. “It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. Chase calls me and tells me—” She broke off, sucked in a sharp breath. “Do you have any idea what I thought—” She squeezed her eyes shut, obviously struggling for control. “He asks me to come get you. So I do. And I find you walking by yourself. Do you even realize—”

The coldness bled harder, and with it came guilt. Here she was, this beautiful, successful, single woman with whom I’d had little contact for fourteen years, and suddenly she’s responsible for me. She didn’t ask for this.

She didn’t ask for
me
.

“My God,” she whispered, and then she was closing in on me, lifting a hand to my—

I stepped back and lifted my own hand.

“You’re bleeding,” she whispered.

Tentatively my fingers found the stickiness at the side of my forehead.

I saw it all register in her eyes, through the soft light of an old Tiffany lamp: the filth on my jeans and the tear at my knees, the copper splotches on my flip-flops. And my hands, the nails broken and palms scraped raw.