The Color of Joy (16 page)

“About four years ago,” she replied, “when she was first diagnosed. We went to the beach that day.”

I squinted to try and focus on Leah’s arm and used the tips of my fingers to enlarge the photo. “Did she have a tattoo?”

“No way,” Holly replied. “She hated tattoos.”

Trudy pointed again. “That’s the lady.”

I looked across the table at my mother, who was staring at me, openmouthed. My shock and confusion reflected back at me through her eyes.

“Maybe Leah has a look-alike out there somewhere,” Mom suggested, appearing visibly shaken by the notion.

No, that couldn’t be
… “If I told you this lady’s name,” I said to Trudy, “would you recognize it? Was it Leah?”

Trudy shrugged her shoulders.

“She doesn’t know,” Holly said, reaching for her phone. “But I have other pictures saved on here.” She opened her gallery, scrolled through, found something and showed it to Trudy. “Is this her?”

Trudy looked at it and nodded.

Holly scrolled through and found another. “What about this one?”

Trudy nodded again.

“And this?” Again, she nodded her head, then wrapped her arms around my neck.

“I’m tired, Daddy.”

“Okay, honey. I’ll take you to bed.”

My mother rose to her feet and held out her arms. “Let me take her, Riley, since we’re sharing a room.”

As I handed my daughter to my mother, Josh said, “Wait a second, Margie, before you take her. Riley, do you have a piece of paper and a black pen? Like a Sharpie or something?”

I rose and tore a sheet off the notepad by the refrigerator, then handed it to Josh along with a black pen.

He jotted something down and showed it to Trudy. “Are these the numbers you saw on the lady’s arm?”

She stared at it for a few seconds, then nodded and put her thumb in her mouth.

“Are you sure?” Josh asked.

She nodded again. I grabbed the paper out of his hands and read it.

Josh: 857-555-4820

I met my brother-in-law’s blue-eyed gaze. “What’s this? Your telephone number?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would your phone number be tattooed on my sister’s arm?”

“It wasn’t tattooed,” he replied. “I just wrote it there, with a gel pen.”

“When?” I couldn’t understand this. Not at all.

“It’s kind of a weird story,” Josh replied hesitantly.

I turned to Holly and she grimaced. “I’m sorry, Riley. It is weird. That’s why we never told anyone about it. Not ever.”

“Told anyone
what
?” I asked.

She regarded her husband warily. “We have to tell them.”

Josh nodded. “Margie, you might want to take Trudy to bed.”

“You’ll tell me later?” she whispered.

He and Holly agreed. Margie left the room and they suggested I sit down.

All I could do was pace around my kitchen while I strained to get a handle on this. “I’ve heard about these things before,” I said, “but I never knew anyone who’d gone through it.”

“Me neither,” Josh replied. “Until it happened to me. There are still days when I think I dreamed the whole thing. I was pretty out of it when I woke up from the coma.”

According to the story Josh had just related to me, after he was rushed into surgery following the shooting two years ago, his heart stopped beating on the operating table. He then floated upwards, out of his body, and was able to witness and recount things that happened during the surgery—things he never could have known from his vantage point on the table because he had been clinically dead.

“When I came to,” Josh continued, “Leah was there in my room. She said she worked in the hospital as a resident doctor and I had no reason to doubt her. I hadn’t seen her in years, not since we were kids. We talked about the past when we all used to live on the same street. She told me about what happened to you after your family moved to Boston and why you went to prison, and that’s when I wrote my phone number on her arm—so we wouldn’t lose touch again. When I was discharged, I went to your parents’ house to see Leah, but I met Holly instead.”

Holly squeezed Josh’s shoulder. “I had to tell him that Leah had passed away. That’s when we figured out that she had died on the same night he was brought in by ambulance after the shooting. We thought maybe she’d been having an out-of-body experience too, at the same time, and somehow they connected with each other in the hospital. That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

“Makes sense?” I sat down again and stared at each of them in turn. “You’re telling me Leah was a ghost and you talked to her.”

Josh slowly nodded.

“That sounds crazy.”

“We know.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” I asked Holly.

“Because, like you said…it sounds crazy.”

“Yeah, but…I wish you’d told me anyway.”

Learning that my older sister had died had been one of worst moments of my life because before that, I’d been estranged from my family for more than a decade. No one had even told me she was sick, nor had I been invited to her funeral.

But I couldn’t let myself get mired in the past. Not now, when it appeared that my four-year-old daughter had somehow had an encounter with the ghost of my dead sister—an aunt she’d never met in this life.

More importantly, I had to stay focused on what mattered most: getting my newborn baby back from whomever took her.

It occurred to me suddenly that if Trudy had spoken to Leah, then the kidnapper had never come to my home. The so-called “lead” was no good. The person we were looking for was not a brown-haired woman with a ponytail and a tattoo on her arm. It was someone else entirely.

I cupped my forehead in a hand and lamented the fact that we had nothing now.
Nothing
. The trail was cold as ice and the cops were wasting their time, searching for irrelevant biblical references when the tattoo was nothing but my brother-in-law’s phone number in Boston.

“What am I going to do?” I asked, bowing my head in defeat. “I can’t call the cops and tell them it was a false alarm—that the reason they found no prints was because it was the ghost of my dead sister who came to my house that morning, not the kidnapper.”

“You have to tell them,” Josh said. “Otherwise they’ll be running around the city on a wild goose chase when they need to be looking for other leads.”

“They’ll think I’m insane,” I said. “They’ll think I orchestrated all this.”

“Why would they think that?” Holly asked.

I gave her a look. “I already have a prison record. This won’t help matters any.” My gut turned over sickeningly.

Holly started waving her hands around. “I think you’re losing sight of the facts here.”

“What
facts
?” I asked, feeling all the hope drain from my body.

“The fact that Leah was here in your house for some reason when your baby was kidnapped. If she came here to talk to Trudy, maybe there was a reason. Maybe she knows something.”

I shook my head quickly. “First of all, I’m not ready to accept that a
ghost
came here to warn us…” I stopped talking suddenly as I remembered the dream I’d had in the hospital the morning of my daughter’s disappearance—of being shaken awake by Leah after she’d knocked frantically on the window of the ICU.

“Or maybe I need to consider it. But why wouldn’t Leah just tell
me
? Why tell a four-year-old who can’t read or write or put two and two together.”

“Because you can’t
see
her,” Holly replied, almost scolding me.

“I saw her in a dream yesterday morning in the hospital. I dreamed she was shaking me to wake me up.”

“But she didn’t say anything to you? And you haven’t seen her or dreamed of her since?”

“No.” I turned my eyes to Josh and stared at him intently. “But
you
can see her when you’re awake, can’t you? You saw her when you woke up from your coma.”

He leaned an elbow on the table and rested his temple on his thumb. “Sorry. I wish I could. Believe me I’ve tried, many times over the past couple of years. That’s why I’ve always wondered if I dreamed the whole thing, because I never saw her again. Not after those first few days in the hospital when I regained consciousness. Then it was only in dreams.”

I stood up and gripped the back of my chair. “So what are we supposed to do? Call in a medium? Hold a séance? Or go buy a Ouija board?”

I was dumbfounded when Holly and Josh appeared to be considering those ideas.

“No.” I began to pace. “This is absurd. Trudy must have remembered pictures of Leah that she saw in Boston last Christmas. I’m sure Mom talked about her. She probably dreamed it.”

“That wouldn’t explain how she could see Josh’s phone number on Leah’s arm,” Holly said.

I bowed my head. “I’m sorry, Josh, but you can’t write your phone number on the arm of a ghost, no matter how badly you want her to call you. It’s just not possible. Like you said, you were pretty out of it when you woke up from your coma. You probably imagined it.”

“Then how did he know all the things he knew about our family?” Holly argued. “It was Josh who came to the house knowing you were out of prison. He gave me your contact information.”

“Did Leah give it to you?” I asked him. “Did she whisper my address in your ear?”

“No,” Josh replied. “I did some investigating on my own after I left the hospital.”

“Then maybe you heard things about me over the years that you forgot about, and it came out of your sub-conscious when you woke up. You only
thought
Leah told you.” I shut my eyes and rested my hands on my hips. “What are we doing? My baby was kidnapped out of the hospital and we’re having a discussion about my dead sister coming back from the grave to deliver clues to us. Do you know how nuts that sounds?”

I moved to pick up the phone and dialed Detective Miller’s number. Holly and Josh watched me in silence while I waited for him to answer.

“Hi, Miller? It’s Riley James. I have some bad news about the lead you’ve been working on—the woman who supposedly came to my house.”

“What is it?” he asked.

I turned my gaze to meet Holly’s. “It wasn’t anyone. It turns out my daughter thought she was talking to my sister Leah, who passed away a couple of years ago. Trudy identified her in a number of photos.”

“Wait, I don’t understand,” Miller replied. “Your daughter was talking to a ghost?”

“That’s right. Well, no…I think she must have dreamed it.”

“Are you sure your sister’s dead?” he asked.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… How did she die? Is it possible there was some kind of error, or could she have faked her death?”

“So she could kidnap my baby?” I scoffed. “No, that’s not possible.” I turned to Holly. “He’s asking if there’s any chance Leah faked her own death.”

Holly rolled her eyes, stood up and held out her hand. “Let me talk to him.” I handed her the phone. “Hi, Detective Miller. I’m Holly, Riley’s sister. Please let me assure you that Leah did pass away two years ago. She had ALS, which is a neurodegenerative disease and she was sick for quite some time before her death. I was at her side when she passed, so there can be no doubt.” Holly handed the phone back to me. “He wants to talk to you again.”

“Did your sister have a twin?” Miller asked me.

My mother walked into the kitchen just then. I turned to her and covered the mouthpiece as I spoke. “Mom, I have the detective on the phone. He wants to know if Leah had a twin.”

She shook her head in confusion. “Of course she didn’t.”

“Sorry, I had to ask.” I spoke into the phone again. “Did you hear that? No twin. You’re grasping at straws here.”

“I’m just trying to cover all the bases,” he explained. He grew quiet. “Hold on a minute, Riley…
What’s that
?” I waited while he spoke to someone else. Then he returned to our conversation. “Stay by the phone,” he said firmly. “We might have another lead. I’ll call back as soon as I can.”

Click
. The line went dead.

With a rush of alarm, I set the cordless phone into the charging base and stared at it in a fog. “He said to wait by the phone. Then he hung up on me.”

“Do you think they found her?” Mom asked, striding forward with urgency.

“I don’t know. He said they might have another lead.”

None of us spoke. No doubt we were all in shock. Or praying. We just sat or stood, staring at the phone.

I jumped when Danny appeared in the doorway. “I’m going to bed,” he said.

“Okay.” It took all my willpower to behave normally when I wanted to run outside and tackle something. “Did you turn off the television?”

“Yes. Goodnight.” He hugged all of us and disappeared into his room, closing the door behind him.

“Is Trudy asleep?” I asked my mother.

“Yes. I read her a story and she was out like a light before I got five pages into it.”

We continued to wait in the kitchen while seconds ticked by like minutes.