Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (8 page)

“So you’re friends?” Detective Jackson asked.

“We have a few classes together. We talk.”

“And play games?” Detective LaSalle’s stare was hard. He sat a good four feet from me, but I felt like he’d pinned me against the sofa.

Aunt Sara sat straighter and leaned forward. “Detective.” I wasn’t sure how she did it, but she made the title sound like a sugar-coated slap. “I’m quite sure you have your reasons for your questions, but maybe we should listen to what my niece has to say.”

It was an amazing transformation. Detective Steely Eyes almost seemed to melt right before me, morphing from all-business to good ole Southern boy charmer. When he spoke, even his voice was different, all soft, rounded edges and lazy drawl. “Of course, Ms. Monsour … or can I call you Sara?”

My aunt didn’t smile, although the detective sure did. “Sara is fine.”

I’m not sure why I wanted to smile, but the I’m-not-taking-any-bullshit tone to my aunt’s voice sure got everyone’s attention.

“Sara then,” he agreed. “We appreciate your efforts to help us locate Miss Morgenthal, but you need to know we were headed here this afternoon, anyway.”

Bingo.

My aunt, looking totally hot in skinny jeans and a tight-fitting black top, her hair artfully messy, frowned. “I don’t understand—”

But I did. “Look, I don’t know who told you what,” I said, starting to feel sick to my stomach, “but you need to listen to me. Jessica is in trouble.”

Detective Jackson, uncomfortably quiet through the majority of the exchange, stepped forward. With the diamond stud in his left ear and tidy cornrows covering his head, he didn’t look a day over twenty, but I was guessing that he probably was. He was tall, lean, dressed
GQ
-like. “What kind of trouble?”

“I—” The words stuck in my throat. “I heard about those other two girls. The ones that vanished last year.”

“What do you know about that?” LaSalle asked.

“Not much.” Just that they’d been young and beautiful, and then they were gone. “It’s just … Jessica is really scared. What if the same guy has her?”

“Scared,” Detective Jackson repeated. “And how do you know that?”

Oh, crap. “I just do.”

LaSalle stood. “Where is she, Trinity? Tell us where to find her.”

I saw the way they were looking at me and knew what they thought. I thought about Chase and what he thought, that Jessica’s disappearance was some big, attention-grabbing game. And man, did I want him to be right.

“There’s a house on Prytania Street,” I made myself say. “It’s deserted—”

Aunt Sara swung toward me. Her eyes were huge, dark.
“Trinity!”

The absolute dread in her voice made me feel about two inches tall. “It’s not like that,” I said, hating how my voice shook. “I-I had a dream. I saw her.”

“A dream,” Detective Jackson repeated. His eyes were narrow now. “And what were you doing in this dream? Playing another game? Getting a little revenge…”

Aunt Sara surged to her feet. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she shouted. Truly, it was a shout. My chic, put-together aunt went after him like a furious mama bear. I’d never seen anything like it. “
We
called
you,
” she reminded. “We called you because my niece is worried and wants to help, even though that girl has been nothing but a total bitch. Yet you stand here and accuse Trinity…”

Eyes on fire, she stepped toward Detective LaSalle, and I’d swear to God he took a step back. “Look at her,” she said, sweeping an arm toward me. “She’s a kid. A scared kid.”

Detective LaSalle’s features closed up, his face getting all stony and movie-cop like. “I’ve seen worse.”

Jackson came around the dainty wingback chair. “Miss Monsour,” he said—not Sara like his partner had been saying, “your niece claims knowledge of the victim’s whereabouts.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s involved.”

The two cops exchanged a quick, skeptical glance.

“If she was involved, do you really think she would come forward?” Aunt Sara asked.

LaSalle frowned, focusing on Aunt Sara like he really hated what he had to say. “All due respect, ma’am, but what better way to play innocent, than to play hero?”

“You’re wasting time.” That was me. Finally I found my voice again, and my courage. I’d been raised to respect authority, but they were all missing the point.

“Doubt me if you want, but you need to go,” I said, joining them in the center of the room. “Seriously. You need to go to that house.”

Before it was too late.

LaSalle looked at me long and hard, as if I belonged in a mental hospital, then flipped open a small notebook and jotted something down. I could only imagine what.

“And did you … happen to dream
why
she was there? To meet someone maybe? To find something?”

They were good questions, ones I’d asked myself. But I had no answers. “No.”

Soon after, they both left. They claimed they were headed to the house. Apparently they knew which one it was.

According to Aunt Sara, everyone did.

The afternoon crawled by. I asked my aunt about her meeting, but she was vague, simply saying that it went fine. For a while she fiddled. She rearranged picture frames, repositioned candles on the bar, even unfastened then refastened the tiebacks for the velvet drapes in the main room.

We went on that way, me trying to study, Aunt Sara fidgeting until she finally settled down at the table with her jewelry-making supplies. She made the most amazing necklaces, using crosses or fleur-de-lis, with vintage beads and buttons.

Normally I loved watching her, but as dusk brought shadows into the condo, the tension stretched tighter, as if we were waiting for … something. Every now and then I caught her staring at me, but she never said anything, and eventually she swept her supplies into their box and announced she was going to bed.

Neither of us ate.

She knew. That was all I could think. After the way she’d pulled me from that bad dream the night before, after the way I’d carried on about “being there” (really regretted saying that), my aunt knew there was something not right about me.

It was hard to go to sleep. I tried, but nothing happened. So I dragged my laptop into bed and got online, started to do a search about the girls who had gone missing last year, but wound up on Jessica’s Facebook page instead.

Immediately I wished that I hadn’t, but couldn’t tear myself away, either.

During the day posts to her wall had piled up from her legions of “friends,” all wishing her well and praying for her safety. There were offerings of candles and teddy bears and gris-gris, even an alleged voodoo chant, all turning the page into a bizarre memorial, as if she were already dead.

Help me … please!

The words blurred. Or maybe that was my eyes. I wasn’t sure.

Love you so much, Jessie! Come home soon!

Can’t sleep, my friend. Praying for your soul.

Her soul? Okay, that was a bit much.

Your beautiful smile will live forever in my heart.

That was from Amber. The sentiment was nice, but the drama of it all creeped me out.

I kept scrolling, though. I couldn’t stop, but wasn’t sure why. I scrolled through posts and pictures people had uploaded, a few inspired homage collages, until the very last post from that day, and only then did I look up from the screen, out toward the darkness beyond my window.

Over a hundred posts … but not one from Chase.

There was one on my page, though. Actually there were a couple of messages that hadn’t been there the night before.

Missed you in history today!

That was from Victoria. A few other “friends” had posted comments. And Chase. His was at the very top, five simple words next to a small picture of him on a beach, making the peace sign with his right hand. His shirt was off, revealing how many hours he spent in the weight room—and a tattoo I’d never seen before. It was on his upper left chest, below his collarbone, a series of lines that reminded me of the Japanese I’d studied a few years before.

Oh, and his post?

I meant what I said.

*   *   *

The looks started the second I walked onto campus.

At first I told myself I was being paranoid. I was the new girl, while many of my classmates had been together since elementary school. It was only natural that they be a little standoffish.

But as the morning wore on, I realized this was different. Standing in groups of two and three, speaking in hushed voices, they watched as I approached. Stepped back as I passed. In homeroom, Amber stared—and again, Chase was not there.

During lunch I made up my history test, finishing with a few minutes to spare. That left time to kill, so I headed for the shade of the courtyard as everyone else was spilling from the cafeteria.

And like earlier, everyone veered away as if I had some terrible disease.

Except Victoria. She broke from a group of cheerleaders and hurried over, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me to the edge of the cobblestone.

“Omigod!” I couldn’t tell if she was excited or horrified. “Amber says you know, but that’s ridiculous, right? Because if you knew, you wouldn’t be here. The cops would be all over you, right?”

It took a second to work through all that. “Know what?”

She glanced back toward the group of girls, where Amber stood with her arms over her chest, watching. When Victoria looked back at me, I’d swear all the blood had drained from her face.
“Where Jessica’s body is.”

She spoke quietly, but she might as well have slugged me in the gut.

“But you don’t, do you? I mean, how could you?”

“Amber said that?”

“She said she overheard her parents talking, after they’d talked with Jessica’s mother. Or maybe it was her father.” Victoria paused to take a breath, grabbing at the blond hair that kept blowing in her face. “Trinity? Why aren’t you saying anything?”

I looked away from her, toward the Gothic-like administration building, where several feet up along the stone you could still see the waterline from Katrina. It was hard to imagine this beautiful old campus completely immersed in dirty swamp water.

It was even harder to grasp that this was really happening. My grandmother had warned me. From the very first time, when I’d told her about seeing Sunshine die, she’d told me to never speak of what I saw in the shadows of my mind. She’d told me people would think I was different. That I would scare people.

And that in turn, they would turn away.

Victoria was my friend. She’d been sweet from the start, welcoming me when few others did. I’d been to her house. We’d gone shopping, to movies. If things had played out a little differently, she would have been with me Saturday at the vile old house. But Jessica and Lucas had one of those fuel on fire relationships, and she thought it would be a kick to give him the wrong place and time.

Now, after walking from Amber to stand with me, she was looking for confirmation that what Amber had said wasn’t true.

That gave me a choice: (a) I could lie and tell her they were all crazy. Or (b) I could tell her the truth, and confirm that the crazy one was me.

Or maybe, (c) I could tiptoe down the middle.

“I never said anything about a body.” Technically, true.

Victoria’s eyes narrowed, as if she didn’t understand what I’d said. “But you did talk to the police?”

“Amber told them about Saturday night.”

“Omigod, they really think you might have—”

“They’re cops. It’s their job to investigate all possibilities. I’m sure they talked to everyone who was there.”

But Victoria’s eyes still burned with curiosity. “Amber said you had a dream, that you saw Jessica—”

She never got a chance to finish.

“It was just a game!” Amber said, closing in on us with her entourage. “It’s not Jessica’s fault you freaked out.”

I swallowed, couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Did she really think I was responsible for what had happened? “Look, I’m sorry about your friend—”

“You stupid bitch!” she spat, then oh-my-God, she lunged at me with her hands raised, like she was going to claw my eyes out. “I told the cops how you looked at her, all hateful like you wanted to make her go away and never come back.”

I jerked back, but that wouldn’t have stopped her if Drew hadn’t come running around the gym. He practically long-jumped the last ten feet, reaching her inches before she plowed into me.

“Amber!” he said, but she didn’t look at him, didn’t slow down, just kept twisting to try and break free. “Come on, baby,” he said, and this time there was something different to his voice, something intimate. “You don’t want to do this.”

She froze, her skinny body going completely stiff for a second or two before she went limp and he scooped her up and gathered her against him, holding her as she started to cry. “Omigod,” she sobbed. “Omigod.
Jessie
…”

I stood there in complete shock, aware of little but the need to breathe. I think that’s why I never saw him coming.

“You okay?” With the words came his touch, a gentle hand to my shoulder.

Numbly I looked up, realized how close he stood. And how badly I wanted to dive into his arms.

“Hey,” he said, and then it all just kind of happened. I’m not sure who moved first, but I really think it was him. All I knew was that one moment I was alone, and the next Chase’s arms were around me.

EIGHT

Beneath the shifting shade of the old oaks, he held me. Inside me a little voice screamed that I should pull away. This was wrong. We were at school, in a crowded, public courtyard. He’d been Jessica’s boyfriend, she was missing, and some people actually thought I might have done something horrible to her.

But there was a louder voice, a stronger one, that wanted to drown in the feel of Chase’s arms around me, his hands splayed and steady against my back. I’m not a small girl, but at five foot six, my head came right to Chase’s chest, allowing me to hear the steady riff of his heart beating against the soft cotton of his shirt.

It was the most intimately we’d ever touched.

The day before I’d pushed him away, walked away. But here, now, I was tired of pushing. I wanted to stay that way, there in the sanctuary of his arms, forever.