The First Prophet (31 page)

Why the hell did he always fail the women in his life?

The question was too painful, and he pushed it away. God knew there were plenty of
other questions just as pressing. Like the question of what awaited them in Holcomb.
A face-to-face confrontation with the other side? The ending Sarah had foreseen, her
own death?

Tucker leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Sarah. Too much depended on her.
Too much weight lay across shoulders too frail and inexperienced to carry the burden.
In the next room, she lay virtually unconscious, drained by the effort of holding
her own with another psychic, and when she woke he would have to push her to do it
again.

I’m sorry, Sarah. I thought I could keep you safe, that I
could find out who’s behind this, but it’s beyond my ken. I’m not sure I can protect
you anymore. I don’t even know how to help you. All I know how to do is watch…and
wait…and push you toward some ending I’m terrified will be final…

The sound of the bedroom door opening brought his head up, and he looked at Sarah
as she stood blinking drowsily in the doorway. For once, she had not put on a robe,
and the white sleep shirt she wore made her look very small, very young, and almost
ethereal.

“What?” she asked.

He shook his head slightly and only then realized what had happened.

“Didn’t you call me?” Her eyes were no longer as dark as they had been, the pupils
normal, and her voice was slowly losing the sleepiness.

“No.” He drew a breath. “But I was thinking about you.”

She frowned for a puzzled moment, and then her gaze slid away from his and she came
a bit farther into the room to sit down on one end of the couch. “Oh. Then obviously,
I was just…dreaming.”

“I don’t think so.”

She sat bolt upright, her fingers tangled but still in her lap, her head bent. “Don’t
you?”

“No.”

Sarah shook her head just a little. “No. Neither do I. It’s getting even stronger.
It doesn’t go…dormant…when I sleep anymore. I was asleep, not even dreaming, and…and
I heard your voice very clearly. You said, ‘I’m sorry, Sarah.’ It woke me up.”

Tucker wanted to go to her but held himself still. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

She looked at him, expressionless, but didn’t allow him to change the focus. “I’m
sorry this bothers you so much.”

“What?”

“This situation. Me. You aren’t responsible for me, Tucker. There’s no reason to feel
guilty if…if I don’t make it.”

“You’re going to make it.”

She ignored that. “And I don’t mind that I make you uncomfortable. Really, I don’t.
It’s unnerving for me to find your thoughts in my head; it must be horrible for you
to find them there.”

“Sarah, you don’t make me uncomfortable. I’ve been…caught off guard more than once,
but if I gave you the impression—”

“You keep forgetting.” Her smile was twisted. “You’re talking to a psychic, Tucker.
You’ve been very good at—at guarding yourself these last days, but I know damned well
that you’ve seen or sensed this alien thing in me. This thing that’s getting stronger
and doesn’t sleep now.”

“There’s nothing alien in you. Unusual, sure. But your abilities are a part of you
now, Sarah. We both know that.”

She shrugged. “If you say so. All I know is that I’ve made you uncomfortable. And
will again. And I want you to know that I really don’t mind if you need to keep some
distance between us. I even—” She broke off abruptly.

“Want me to,” he finished.

“Expect you to.” Her gaze was steady. “I don’t want my life or…or my soul on your
conscience, Tucker. I don’t want you to believe you could have done more, or something
different, to change what’s going to happen. I don’t want you to carry that burden.”

“What have you seen?” he asked slowly.

“Nothing new. Except…a kind of clarity. The struggle with Neil Mason seems to have
stripped something away. It all seems so clear to me now, so inevitable. I know that
what’s going to happen is going to happen soon. Very soon. And I know that you’re
going to blame yourself for what happens. You’ll think it was because of some choice
you made, some decision that you could have made differently. But you’ll be wrong,
Tucker. There’s nothing you can do to change what’s going to happen to me. Nothing.”

“Because of destiny.” His voice was flat.

“Because a sequence of events was set in motion months ago, long before I met you.
The sequence has to play itself out. You can’t stop it.”

“I can damned well try. And so can you.”

“No, I can’t. I know that now.”

“Goddammit, Sarah, don’t you give up on me. Not now. We’ve come too far for that.
You said you needed my confidence, my belief that we could change the future. I still
believe that.”

“I don’t think so.” She hesitated, then added quietly, “How can you even look to the
future when you’ve spent your entire adult life chasing the past? How can you face
one when you haven’t finished with the other?”

“Where are they?”

“Next door.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“This is as close as I could get. Can you do it, or not?”

“Yes. But it’s going to take some time.”

“Then go ahead.”

Tucker wanted to deny her accusation. He wanted to change the subject, to once more
avoid the painful memories and painful admissions he would have to reveal to her.
To push it away, turn away, as he had so many times since he had met Sarah. But somehow,
in this quiet room in the quiet hours before midnight, with so much uncertainty and
possible violence lying just ahead of them, somehow he could avoid it no longer.

“You want me to ask you about Lydia,” he said.

“I want you to tell me about her. You need to, Tucker.”

She was right. He needed to. He had never told anyone the truth, not his family, not
his best friend, and it had all been dammed up inside him for nearly twenty years.
Once he began, the words poured out of him in a fast, jerky stream.

“We were high school sweethearts. Went steady all during our senior year. Lydia had
been raised by her mother and an aunt; her father had died when she was just a baby.
Her mother had invested the insurance
money wisely, so there was plenty for college; we were both planning to go to UVA.
We…made a lot of plans.

“A few months before graduation, her mother became ill. Very ill. Lydia was spending
a lot of time at the hospital, but her mother insisted she stay in school and graduate
with the class. With finals coming up, I helped her all I could. She’d go to school,
then to visit at the hospital, and every night we were together at my house or hers,
studying. Or trying to. We were both under a lot of stress and we…weren’t as careful
as we should have been.”

“She got pregnant.”

Tucker barely heard Sarah’s quiet voice, but nodded slowly. “She told me right after
graduation. And she was…so happy about it. So full of plans. We’d get married right
away. She’d put off college, use the money to get a little apartment near UVA, furnish
it, bank the rest for living expenses. And medical expenses. I could go on to college,
maybe change my major to something a little more practical than English lit and, anyway,
maybe that book I was working on would sell. Her mother might live long enough to
see her first grandchild and her aunt would surely help out…Christ, she was so happy.”

“And how did you feel about it?” Sarah asked.

He looked at her and, as vividly as if it had been yesterday, felt the shock and panic,
the wild urge to run. Resentment and anger rising in him like bile, choking him…

“I felt…trapped. As rosy as she painted the picture,
I knew reality would be different. Neither of us had medical insurance and babies
are expensive, so the money wouldn’t last long at all. I’d have to get a job before
long, and even if I managed to finish college, I’d have to take some practical courses,
just like she’d said, aim for a job that would support a family right away. Everybody
knew writers didn’t make much money, and a degree in literature isn’t much good for
anything. I could see my life laid out all neat and tidy ahead of me, a job I hated,
a wife I resented, a child I didn’t want…and all my dreams in pieces behind me.”

“And Lydia knew. Saw it in your face.”

He nodded. “It had never occurred to her that I wouldn’t be as happy about it as she
was. All she’d ever really wanted was to be a wife and mother, to have a little house
she could take care of. She’d planned on college mostly because of me, because I wanted
it, figured she’d major in child psychology or development, something like that. She
didn’t want to teach. She just wanted to be a good mother.”

Tucker drew a deep breath. “I’ll never forget the shock on her face, the way she backed
away from me as if I’d turned into a stranger.”

“You couldn’t let her go thinking that.”

“No. I…told her it was just surprise, that she’d imagined the rest. She believed me.
She wanted to believe me.” He focused on Sarah’s face and was vaguely surprised to
find no condemnation there. But she hadn’t heard the worst, of course.

Then, gazing into her eyes, he realized that she didn’t need to hear him say it. She
knew. She knew what he’d done. Sarah had known for a long time. And there was still
no condemnation in her face.

Hoarsely, forcing the words out because he needed to, he said, “We made plans to elope
the next week. Nobody’d be surprised, with her mother so ill. We’d just do it and
then come back and tell everyone.” He swallowed. “I told her everything would be fine.
I promised her I wouldn’t let her down.”

Sarah waited silently.

“I meant what I said. I had every intention of meeting her at her house as planned,
and going to get married.” He looked away from Sarah and fixed his unseeing gaze on
a lamp. It was so hard to say the rest, admit the rest, but he had to. “Then the days
passed and…and it was suddenly time to do that. And somehow, instead of packing to
meet Lydia, I packed to head to Florida with a buddy for a couple of weeks of sand
and sun. I didn’t tell Lydia I wasn’t going to marry her. I just didn’t show up.”

“You were eighteen,” Sarah said, not in an excusing tone, but matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, well, my father was eighteen when he married my mother, and nineteen when I
was born. He was responsible, worked his ass off, and as far as I can see, never regretted
any of it. I was old enough to be a father, so I was damned sure old enough to be
responsible for the child I’d helped create. Some things can’t be excused by youth.
I was a cruel, selfish bastard to run out on her
like that. And without a word, without even telling her I was sorry or that I’d help
with the baby even if I couldn’t marry her. Nothing.”

“You came back a few days later,” Sarah said.

He nodded. “I wasn’t having much fun down in Florida; all I could think about was
the way I’d run out on her. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and came home. But
it was too late. Lydia was gone. She’d left a note for her aunt, taken her college
money and her car. Her mother was in a coma by then, and never knew what had happened.
Her aunt was devastated. She showed me the note. Lydia hadn’t mentioned the baby,
or blamed me in any way. She just said she couldn’t watch her mother die, that she
had to get away, start a new life somewhere else. And to tell me…she was sorry, but
that I’d be better off without her.”

Tucker returned his gaze to Sarah’s face. “Her mother died a few weeks later, her
aunt less than a year afterward. Lydia didn’t come home for the funerals. She never
came home again. I started looking for her that summer, and kept on every chance I
had. I hired a couple of private detectives in those first years, but they got nowhere,
so I taught myself how to search. But I got nowhere myself. It was as if she’d dropped
off the face of the earth the day she left Richmond. I spent endless hours searching
birth and…death records, newspapers, tax rolls, every kind of public record I could
access, beginning in Virginia and working north and south, then west. But I never
found a single hint of her existence. By the time I left college the first time, I’d
realized that I wasn’t going to find her that way.”