Dream Dancer (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 2) (23 page)

     Writing.  I was behind the screen of my laptop every spare second I could find.  I carried it with me everywhere—even on quick trips to the store.  If inspiration hit, I wanted to be ready to capture it right there in the moment.  By the time mid-May rolled around, I had another four hundred plus page file stored safely inside it.  And there was more where that came from—a lot more.

     At that point, I had a huge decision to make—whether or not to keep the apartment in Liberty.  I still hadn’t signed up for fall classes yet and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to.  Zach and I only signed a one year lease and that time was almost up.  Did I want to stay in Ohio alone?  Or did I want to go back home to Charlotte’s Grove where I would still basically be alone?  I wanted to be near him yet I didn’t.  I wanted to be close to the old Zach not the messed up monster he’d become.

     During my conversation with Dad and Shelly that week, I finally let them convince me to come home for the weekend.  I was regretting my decision by Saturday morning but I knew they were expecting me and would be terribly disappointed if I backed out at the last minute.  Begrudgingly, I packed an overnight bag and hit the road.

     They did their best to cheer me up but my mood was dismal at best.  Nothing short of a miracle was going to get me out of this funk.  Depressed, I went to bed early without my usual call to Detective Bailey.

     I woke up the next morning at the crack of dawn, more restless than normal.  There was something about being back here in the place with all of my good memories of Zach that made me feel worse than I had in Ohio.  My mind was a tangled mess of worries and emotions.  I had to get out of that house at least for a little while.  So before anyone else woke up, I quietly made my way downstairs and slipped out into the early morning sun.

     Not wanting to wake them up with the sound of my engine, I began wandering down the lane on foot.  Walks were almost as effective at clearing my head as driving was.  When I got out to the front gate, I was about to turn around and head back to Rosewood.  Then I saw a wayward feather blowing in the breeze on the main road.  It was drifting in the direction of Silver Lake.  I hadn’t been there since the day Zach got shot.  That place held bad memories for me but I was in the mood to wallow in self-pity so that’s exactly the path I took.

     As I walked, the feathers kept coming at me.  It was never the same feather twice—but tiny multiple pieces of fluff kicked up by the breeze and leading me down to the lake.  I grew more annoyed with every step.  Stupid feathers anyway.  There weren’t any answers to be had at Silver Lake so why was I being led there?

     Annoyance gave way to pure, unadulterated anger by the time I got to the water’s edge.  That’s right—I strode boldly up to the edge of the lake without fear.  Now that I could swim, Silver Lake had no hold over me.  And I was about to show those feathers the same kind of treatment.  As an act of defiance, I picked up one of the white goose feathers lying at my feet and tossed it into the water.  Or at least I tried to.

     The same breeze that was rippling the surface of the water and making the sun sparkle brilliantly in waves blew that feather right back onto the shore.  So I tried again with a different feather.  After five times with the same results, I was seething with anger.  This time I picked up the largest feather I could find and held it out in front of me, dangling it about two feet above the water’s surface.  This feather was big enough and heavy enough that I felt confident it would win the battle with that slight breeze.

     “I’m done.  I’m sick of the feathers.  I want them all to go away.  They led me this far but I don’t see any possible good outcome if I keep letting them lead me astray.  I need to stop thinking that I can save the world by following the signs.  I’ve stayed positive for far too long now.  I can’t do it anymore.  It’s time for me to admit defeat.”

     With tears in my eyes, I flung that feather toward Silver Lake with everything I had.  Zach was gone and he wasn’t coming back no matter what I wanted to believe.  And now, Mom would know with definite certainty that I was ready to accept that.  My wild goose feather chase was over.

     But it wasn’t.  In fact, it was just beginning.  I watched as that feather turned against the wind and hung suspended in mid-air.  Motionless.  It defied all laws of gravity as we know it.  Perpendicular to the water with its heaviest part pointed down, it should have dropped like a rock.  But it didn’t.  For ten full seconds, I watched mesmerized as it stayed in place without moving.  Then, it fell suddenly down and landed—you guessed it—just on this side of the shore.

     There was no way for me to fight it.  What was happening to me was going to continue happening until, well, who knows when.  I grabbed that feather and started to walk home, drained and defeated.  As I made my way up the gravel path, I marveled at how much weirder my life was now than it was only a year ago at this time.  How bad was it going to be a year from now?  I was depressed and devoid of all hope for the future.

     That’s when the wheels of Fate began turning at an alarming rate.  My phone buzzed furiously in my back pocket but I ignored it at first.  I was better off alone for the time being.  But when the calls or messages failed to stop pouring in, I finally pulled it out to see who was desperately trying to reach me.  And my heart skipped about three beats in my chest.

     Detective Bailey.  He never called me unless he had something concrete to tell me.  Frantically, I dialed his number and waited for him to pick up.  But with spotty cell phone coverage at the lake, my call got dropped before it had a chance to connect.  I sprinted up the path a ways and tried again.  Still nothing.   

     I took off running for the lake entrance.  If I’d run this fast during track, I surely would have broken a record or two.  But there was never anything this important waiting at the finish line of any race.  I was
this
close to an answer—all within seconds of saying I’d given up.  Patience.  That word screamed throughout my thoughts until I got to the main road.  I stopped long enough to catch my breath then dialed Detective Bailey again.  This time, the call went through without a hitch.

     “Detective Bailey!” I practically shouted when he picked up the phone.  “This is Ruby Matthews.  What did you find in Chicago?”

     “Well, I’m not exactly sure,” he said slowly with a slight southern drawl. 

     The laissez faire attitude of all these southerners was starting to drive me crazy.  Talking to them gave me slow motion sickness.  The same kind of anxiety I felt when I got behind someone going twenty in a fifty-five mile per hour zone.  Like, hurry up already.  The rest of the world has better things to do than to stare at your lackadaisical license plate poking down the boulevard like a turtle out for a Sunday afternoon joyride. 

     While biting back my impatience as best as I could, I asked him to clarify his statement.  And by clarify, I meant spit it out already.  It was well past the point of suspense—which I despise—and fully entrenched in the torture zone. 

     “I found the footage of yer fella waiting at the gate.  He wasn’t alone.  He was with another boy around the same age.  When Zach left to get food, a girl in her late twenties rushed up from out of nowhere.  She handed something to the boy then pointed at Zach’s duffle bag.  They argued back and forth a bit and she seemed panicked.  Just before Zach returned, she grabbed that boy by the wrist and forced him to drop this object into Zach’s bag.  After that, she took off running.”

     My heart rate began to sky rocket again, though this time not from physical exertion.  This wasn’t a message in a teacup or a random feather appearing out of nowhere.  This was the first bit of concrete evidence that Zach wasn’t crazy.  This was proof that whoever they were, they did something to him.  My only hope was that I was going to be able to undo the damage.

     “What did they give him?  Was it drugs of some kind?”  Zach wasn’t the type to take strange pills.  But what if he reached in for ibuprofen for his headache and accidentally took something more dangerous?  He could have gotten hooked on who knows what.  Then when the supply ran out, it did irreversible damage to his brain.  All of this because he flew out to California to live out one of his teenage dreams.  Why did his teenage dream have to lead him so far away from home?

     “No, I don’t think so.  Whatever it was, it was small and dark.  There are no close up shots and it’s only visible for half a second when the girl forced it into his palm.  But the boy definitely dropped it into Zach’s bag and left it there intentionally.  I’m going to search the manifests to see if I can ID the suspects.  You should probably go through Zach’s stuff in the meantime to see if you can find it.”

     Great.  My big lead was an unidentified needle in the haystack.  I’d gotten my hopes for nothing—again.  Yet of course I needed to at least try to find this mystery item.  I hung up with Detective Bailey and immediately dialed Rachel’s number. 

     She answered the call excitedly claiming that she simply knew that I had good news for her.  Ever since Queen Elva informed us of the sacred powers of twins, Rachel kept reminding me that I wasn’t the only one with special talents every chance she got.  At least one of us was happy being abnormal.

     We formed a quick plan to search the Mason home for anything out of place.  He’d spent more time at home than he had in Ohio so it made sense to assume that the cursed object was right here in Charlotte’s Grove.  But we all know what happens when you assume.  It made an ass out of both Rachel and I not to mention how furious Diane was going to be when she came home and found damn near everything out of place.  There wasn’t time to put things back together, though.  With no luck here, we hit the road for the only other possible destination—Liberty.

     Hours later, the apartment, too, was in a shambles yet we’d found nothing out of the ordinary.  A search of both vehicles yielded no strange objects either.  Exhausted, we flopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling in silence.  I was prone to keeping my mouth shut in moments of complete despair but Rachel wasn’t.  Yet tonight, there was an unspoken pact of defeat between us.  Zach truly was doomed.

     I burrowed so far into my own thoughts that I lay there in a trance-like state almost forgetting that I wasn’t alone.  So when Rachel let out an excited yelp, I jerked back to reality like I’d been hit by a bucket of ice water.

     “In all of our searching, what didn’t we find, Ruby?” she blurted loudly into my ear.

     Ugh.  She was having another one of her blonde moments.  It was pretty obvious—at least to a non-blonde like me—what we hadn’t found.  We hadn’t found
it
—whatever
it
was.  I was about to go bat shit on her when she shouted out the three words that changed everything.

     “Zach’s duffle bag!”

     She was right.  I was so busy concentrating on finding what was dropped inside of it that I didn’t notice that the bag itself was nowhere to be found.  There was only one other place it could be—in the psychiatric wing of the hospital somewhere.  After his first suicide attempt, all of his personal belongings were taken away from him.  We had to get that bag back.

     So once again I found myself flying down that interstate on the way back to Charlotte’s Grove.  By this point, I could make that drive with my eyes closed.  From start to finish, this adventure had taken me places I never thought I would go.  But in all of it, I learned one thing for certain.  Every road led me back home—eventually.  Sure there were twists and turns and back roads I never knew existed but they always brought me back to the same place in the end.  Back…to him.

     I kept my eyes on the highway and barely listened as Rachel called Shelly to see if Dad could get us access to Zach’s belongings before we even got there.  My mind was on other things.  My mind was on feathers and the grand design of the universe.  I knew what needed to happen but the devil was in the details.  Or more accurately, the devil was in that duffle bag.

     Dad and Shelly were pulling into the hospital parking lot as we rounded the last turn.  Anxiety welled up inside of me.  What if his doctors refused to hand over his bag out of some silly patient confidentiality law?  I’d sworn my days of breaking and entering were over after that stunt on the Halloween of my senior year.  I was lucky Mr. Raspatello didn’t bust me when he figured out who smashed out the window in the cafeteria hallway.  Breaking into a hospital would be a lot harder to pull off.  But I had to admit, my mind was already working on churning out a plan to sneak in if I had to.  I’d come this far—I wasn’t going to give up now.

     I paced the visitor’s waiting lounge like an untamed beast that was primed to explode at any given moment.  When Rachel tried to speak to me, I stopped pacing long enough to flash her what must have been a wild, demonic eye for she fell silent before finishing her sentence.  My thoughts were a brewing storm. 

     A few minutes later, my dad stepped out of the elevator with Zach’s duffle bag in his hand.  “I may have to face a hospital board review for this move, but here you go.  Act fast.  I didn’t exactly follow protocol on this mission.”

     As I reached out to take the bag from him, my hands began to tremble.  If I found nothing, not only would I be heartbroken but my dad could possibly be in trouble for nothing.  Shaking for so many varied reasons, I stuck my hand in the front pocket of the bag where Detective Bailey claimed the item was originally placed.