Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (10 page)

“Tell me about your dream.”

Everything stopped. Around me, inside me. Everything just … stopped.
“What?”

“Your dream,” he said again, this time so gentle it hurt to hear. “Tell me what you saw.”

I closed my eyes without thinking, tensed when I realized what I would see, what I’d been seeing continuously since Jessica disappeared.

But it was not Jessica that I saw there in the darkness, while afternoon slipped into dusk.

It was the glow of the green dragonfly.

“Don’t,” I heard Chase say, and then I felt his hand against my arm, warm, strong but oddly tender. He turned me toward him, brought his other hand to the side of my face. “Don’t shut me out.”

The dragonfly fluttered through the shadows in a slow, hypnotic dance. And then, from one heartbeat to the next, he was gone.

“Please—” Chase said, and I couldn’t stand there one second longer without looking, seeing. I let my eyes open, let myself absorb the promise in his eyes, the one I’d seen from the very start, long before I’d known about Jessica.

“What did you see?” he asked, and there was something in his voice, something thick, persuasive, that seeped through my defenses, and touched me in a way I’d never anticipated. “Tell me,” he said again. “Tell me about the dream.”

I looked from him to the trees, to the sunlight slanting through the thick canopies and falling in stark streaks against the ground, and even as I reminded myself of all the reasons to hedge, the words were already forming.

“I saw her,” I said, looking back at him, needing to see his eyes as I spoke, needing to see what was reflected there: acceptance … or scorn. “In that house, in the room upstairs where we all were. On the bed.”

The angles of his face tightened. “Was she hurt?”

“I don’t know,” I said, making myself continue. I needed to—I had to. I had to know if he would take my hand again—or turn away like my grandmother had warned. “Her eyes were open and she was looking at me, like she was begging me to help her—”

He moved so fast I had no time to prepare.

NINE

He pulled me into his arms and wrapped me tight, held me like he had in my dreams. Through his shirt, I could hear the riff of his heart—I could
feel
it.

“Just a nightmare,” he murmured against my hair. “Because of Saturday—”

I’m not sure why I struggled back, why I wrenched out of his arms. But in that moment I knew I had to, had to find a way to breathe. “It felt so real…”

Long bangs fell against his eyes, finally returning us to familiar ground. “Dreams usually do.”

I held onto his words, knew that they were true. My grandmother hadn’t liked to talk about dreams, but Victoria did. She’d told me hers, how wild they were. How real …

“Was I there?”

I blinked, refused to let the surprise touch my face. “No.”

“Am I ever?” he asked. “In your dreams?”

The question blindsided me. For a moment everything faded, the trees and the columns and the play of the fountain, leaving only me and Chase and the way he looked at me, touching without so much as lifting a hand.

The truth seemed every bit as dangerous as the lie.

“Please, Chase,” I said, looking for a graceful way out. “I don’t want to talk about my dreams.” Especially not with him.

He didn’t move, didn’t back down. “Why not?”

In the distance, toward the south, cumulous clouds bubbled up from the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes they would dump rain on the city, hard and fast.

And yet sometimes they only brought darkness.

“Because I don’t want them,” I said. “I just wish they would go away.”

That stick was still in his hands. I wasn’t sure how. “Everyone dreams,” he said.

I knew that. Everyone dreamed. But not everyone’s dreams came true. It sounded so nice, like what you’d read in a greeting card with a rainbow or sunshine, birds in trees:
May all your dreams come true.

But not all dreams were good, and not all deserved to escape the shadowy theater of the mind.

“Even nightmares,” Chase said. “We all have them.”

When I was younger, my grandmother had said the same thing. Sometimes I’d woken up crying, and she’d always been there, holding me, running her hand along my back. She’d muttered soothing words and asked me to tell her what I saw.

After Sunshine, she never asked again.

“I dream about water,” I whispered, watching the play of the fountain behind him, the spray up toward the sky, the streams sliding back along a bronze statue of leaping dolphins.

About running—and trying to breathe. “And fire.”

A soft crack sounded between us, and I looked down to find the twig in his hands in two pieces.

“Sometimes it’s nighttime.” I made myself continue. “But sometimes there’s sunshine. Lots of it. And blue skies and a breeze so warm you could wrap yourself in it, like a hug.”

Around us that breeze blew, but somehow it didn’t touch us.

“And then she’s … there,” I surprised myself by saying. Once I’d told Gran and she’d smiled. Then she’d cried. “She’s there and she’s beautiful and she’s so real, smiling at me.”

Chase stepped closer, slid a strand of hair from my face. “Who?”

I looked up as something inside of me started to tear.
“My mother,”
I said, and even though I’d become adept at hiding it, the emotion I’d bottled away so many years before leaked through. “And my father. He’s there, too, all tall and strong and handsome; young, standing in the distance, watching us.”

A rough breath broke from Chase’s throat, but this time he made no move to touch me.

“Sometimes we’re on a picnic,” I said. “And sometimes we’re at the beach. He smiles.” And I could feel it, streaming through me as if he were really there. But he never touched me, not even in the fragile illusion of my dreams.

Only my mother did that.

“I used to love to go to sleep,” I said. “When I was little. Because I’d see them and we were together … a family.”

The oddest look came into Chase’s eyes. “And now?”

“I hate it,” I said without hesitating. “I hate going to sleep because I hate what it feels like when I wake up.” That hollow, stark realization that of all possible dreams, all the events I see before they happen, the images of my parents would never come true … were in fact nothing more than fading fantasies of the future I’d lost before I’d even learned to remember.

“How old were you when they died?”

“Two.”

His shoulders tensed. “What happened?”

It was an obvious question, a logical one, one I’d asked over, and over, and over.

But Gran had always been vague. “An accident,” I said, because that’s what she’d said: a horrible, horrible accident. But she’d never given details. “A car wreck, I think.”

“You
think
?”

“My grandmother didn’t like to talk about it.” And neither did my aunt. She’d been in her freshman year at Tulane. “I think it was too painful, that she was trying to protect me from it.”

“By keeping you in the dark?”

She hadn’t looked at it that way.

But I did. “She said life was ahead of you, not behind.”

“And you’re cool with that?”

“No.” Not in the least. It was my life and they were my parents, and I wanted to know.
Needed
to. “Being here … everything is more intense. It’s like hitting play after being paused for the past fourteen years. I look around at the people and the streets and the buildings, the river and the trees, and I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t died. If I’d grown up here, with them.”

Wordlessly Chase glanced toward the tree line, where a pink balloon bobbed in the breeze, its ribbon tangled against a high branch. I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t popped.

“Saturday night I saw a picture of my mom for the first time,” I surprised myself by saying. “And I recognized her—I have no memory of her at all, but she looked like she does in my dreams.”

For so long I’d kept it all bottled up, the hopes and the dreams, the regrets. But standing there with Chase, age-old locks fell away, and all those fragments slipped out.

“But I want more than that, more than fading images of black and white. I want the stories that go with them.
The people.
I want to know who my parents were and what they were like, how they met and what they did. What made them laugh, cry. What was my mom’s favorite color and what music my dad listened to…”

He looked back at me. “What were their names?”

For some reason I smiled. “John Mark and Rachelle.” The names felt rusty on my tongue—I’m not sure I’d ever spoken them aloud. “Why?”

His eyes were still distant, but the blue had softened. “Because you deserve better than living in the dark,” he said. “You deserve to know who you are—for those dreams to come true.”

The wince was automatic. Fortunately, it was also inside.

There was no way those dreams, of my parents, the life we’d lost, could come true.

“And now I know,” he said, stepping toward me.

“Know what?”

It was his turn to smile, a slow, lazy curl of his lips that made my chest tighten all over again. “What happens when the rest of the world goes away.”

I lifted my eyes to his, and felt the scrape clear down to my bone.

“You let go,” he said. “You relax.”

I swallowed—hard.

He stepped closer, his eyes on mine. He didn’t touch, though, not with his hands. But I could feel him. Really, really feel him. “Don’t be scared.”

I felt my mouth go dry. “I’m not—”

But we both recognized the lie.

He stopped only inches away, but still did not lift a hand. “Then what’s that I see in your eyes?”

The urge to blink was automatic, to glance away like when you saw something shocking, something you were unprepared for. Instinct made you look away. Before curiosity brought you back.

But it was something even stronger that kept me from moving. I’m not even sure I breathed.

Until something shifted against the tree line beyond Chase’s shoulder.

The moment broke, and my eyes narrowed before going wide the second I caught sight of the man not thirty yards away.

I must have made a noise because Chase swung around. “What is it?” Then he stilled.
“Mr. Bryce.”

The name meant nothing to me.

The man was tall, with wide shoulders and thick dark hair. He wore a gray suit with an unfastened red tie against his white shirt. There was something in his hands—a book? Stepping from the anonymity of the old oaks, he approached us slowly, his steps wary, as if
he
was the one who’d been caught off guard.

Chase slipped in front of me. “What are you doing here?” he asked, but there was no fear in his voice, none of the crazy adrenaline rushing through me.

The man stepped onto the concrete of the promenade, pausing by one of the columns. That’s when I saw his eyes, and felt my breath catch. He was a total stranger, but the eyes I knew, the shape, the color—everything.

“I was waiting for you at the school,” he said in a voice as flat as his expression was blank. It was as if every emotion had been completely smeared away. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Maybe I should have stepped back, but instead I stepped closer to Chase.

“I already told the cops everything I know,” he said. “The last time I saw her was after school—”

It all clicked then, the eyes, the dazed look on his face—the stack of white clenched in his hand.

Posters, I realized, focusing on the provocative picture in the center, the wide, mocking eyes and long dark hair, the knowing smile. And the words:
MISSING
centered along the top,
REWARD
along the bottom.

And I knew. Without another word, I knew the man wrapped so tightly inside himself was Jessica’s father.

I’d heard about him, knew that once he’d played football for LSU and was now a successful doctor, that he doted on his oldest daughter.

That the word
no
was not part of his vocabulary.

“Mr. Morgenthal—” I started, but he didn’t so much as glance my way, never looked from Chase. It was as if I wasn’t even standing there.

“I know she treated you badly,” he said, a hint of a parent’s worst nightmare finally leaking into his voice. “I know she made bad choices. But that’s Jessie,” he said, and a trace of a smile touched his eyes, so dark and persuasive, exactly like hers. “You know that,” he said.
“You know her.”

“Mr. Bryce, you know I would never hurt—”

“I know that, son, and I told the police that—but that doesn’t mean you can’t help.”

“Help?”

“Bring her back,” he muttered. “Tell her you’re sorry.”

Chase stiffened, but before he could say anything Bryce Morgenthal was stepping toward us and thrusting his phone at Chase. “Just call her. Tell her you didn’t mean what you said.”

I could only see Chase’s profile, but it was enough to discern the wince. “Mr. Bryce—”

“Please,”
Jessica’s father said. “If there’s a chance … I’ve tried. I’ve called her. I’ve begged. But this isn’t about me. It’s about—”

“Her,” Chase said. “It’s about her.”

From his voice, I could tell it was always about her. And from the way Jessica’s father talked, even he seemed to think she’d left of her own free will.

The sound of twigs snapping came from behind me. Twisting, I squinted against the whitewash of early evening—and saw my aunt hurrying toward me.

Behind her the once locked gate hung open.

By her side, Detective Aaron LaSalle matched her step for step.

“Trinity!”
she called, and really, I glanced around, half expecting to find Amber or Victoria crouched behind a column or tree. So much for being alone.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked, hating how freaked out the question sounded. “What’s going on?”

She hurried up to me, lifting a hand to my shoulder as if seeing me wasn’t enough. “Detective LaSalle called me, told me some man was seen following you—”

I stepped back, shaken by the realization of how many eyes had been trained on us. “He’s watching us?”