Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (11 page)

The detective, looking all cool and casual in his khakis and black button-down, answered before she could.

“A beautiful young girl is missing,” he said. “It’s my job to bring her home.” Then he glanced behind me. “You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Mr. Morgenthal?”

I glanced back to see Jessica’s father’s eyes harden. “I want my girl home.”

“That’s what we all want—” Detective LaSalle started, but the ridiculousness of us all playing hide-and-seek in some remote park while Jessica was missing exploded through me.

“Didn’t you go to the house?” I asked, twisting back toward the detective. He stood apart from us all, watching from behind dark sunglasses. “On Prytania? Like I told you?”

The detective’s jaw tightened. That was the only clue I had that he looked at me. “We did.”

“And?” I asked, shoving the hair back from my face and fisting it behind my neck.

“Nothing,” he said. “There was nothing there.”

That got me. That really, really got me. “But—”
I’d seen her. I’d seen her at the house, on the mattress.
“That’s impossible. She was…” I broke off, tried again. “Are you sure?”

“I was there myself. I walked every room, every hall. We took fingerprints, collected trash. But there was nothing to indicate that Miss Morgenthal had been there.”

“But—” I looked up, found Aunt Sara watching me very, very closely.

“I’m afraid your dream was nothing more than a fantasy, sweetheart,” he said, and I felt myself sway, even as Chase slid a hand to my lower back.

“But we did find her car,” LaSalle said.

Vaguely I was aware of Mr. Morgenthal surging forward, charging up to the detective, of questions and raised voices, words like Baton Rouge and a dorm parking lot, doors locked and sunglasses on the dash.

But I could not move, not while the world around me spun.

“LSU?” Jessica’s father shouted. “How the hell did it get there?”

It was not the detective who answered. But Chase.
“Wesley.”

They all swung toward him. “Who’s Wesley?” LaSalle asked.

Chase tried to play it cool, but I saw the way his arms tensed, even his jaw. “A guy she met in Pensacola last summer. They’ve been texting.”

“Do you know a last name? How to find him?”

Chase shook his head.

The detective shifted his attention to Jessica’s father. “Mr. Morgenthal?”

“No—I—she never mentioned—”

“Then we’ll wait for the phone records,” LaSalle said. “They’ve been subpoenaed.”

“You think that’s where she is?” Mr. Morgenthal asked, and finally, finally desperation broke through the artificially blank veneer. “With this LSU boy—that he might have her?”

The detective pulled his iPhone from his belt and slid his fingers along the keys. “Anything is possible.”

I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that was true, that what I’d seen in the darkness of my mind was as fictional as the picnic with my parents, a distorted manifestation of thoughts I had yet to reconcile. It was no secret Jessica was not my favorite person. I wasn’t proud of it, but maybe it wasn’t a stretch that bad things would happen to her in my dreams.

But as I looked from her father to Chase to the detective charged with figuring it all out, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that they were clinging to wishful thinking.

“Please,” Mr. Morgenthal said, once again offering his phone to Chase. “Call her.” The man who looked so much like his daughter frowned. “I have to know,” he said quietly. “If she’s out there, she’ll listen to you…”

Chase lifted his eyes to mine, the silent apology unmistakable. Then he reached for his own phone and thumbed out the number.

“Jessie,” he said, and I didn’t quite understand what I heard in his voice—or why it suddenly hurt to breathe.
“It’s me.”

*   *   *

Aunt Sara opened the door. I walked inside. She followed, closing up behind her, standing with her back to me as she turned the key and slid the dead bolts. But she didn’t turn around when she was done, just kept her back stiff and the palm of her right hand pressed to the thick wood.

That was my first warning that the silence from the car had merely been a prelude.

Her hair was loose, not straight like usual, but wavy from the humidity. She wore a long dress in swirls of brown and black that emphasized her awesome figure and gorgeous shoulders. I’d never really thought much about shoulders until I’d come to New Orleans and met my aunt—and Chase.

Only a single lamp illuminated the condo. Beyond the window, a thick blanket of clouds hid the stars, leaving the city warm and muggy and, despite the steady wind of earlier in the day, without even that reprieve.

Chase had wanted to bring me home, but my aunt had said no. The detective had offered to follow, but again, my aunt had said no. Only Mr. Morgenthal had said nothing, walking past me like I didn’t exist.

The second warning came a heartbeat later, when my aunt turned toward me, exposing me to the most scorched eyes I’d ever seen.

Wordlessly she let her chic little purse slide from the bend of her arm. But she didn’t set it on the table, as she normally did. She let it slip to the hard wood of the floor.

Then she broke more than the silence. “It was more than a dream, wasn’t it?”

The question came at me like a swift punch to the gut. My first instinct was to deny, pretend. To lie. That’s what my grandmother had taught me, to keep it all inside, to never let anyone know what I saw behind closed eyes.

But standing there in the glow of a single lamp, looking at harsh lines on my aunt’s face, I realized I didn’t want to pretend anymore. Not with her.

And even if I did, it wouldn’t do any good. She already knew.

“Yes,” I whispered, and her face twisted. I would have sworn it was pain. “But I swear to God I had nothing to do with what happened,” I said, and I could feel myself starting to shake. “I … I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened. I just know what I told the cops was true—”

“Because you saw her,” my aunt whispered.

Quietly I nodded.

The breath left her, like a beautifully resilient balloon visibly fading away. Closing her eyes she looked down, as if in prayer. All the while I stood there, frozen, wishing I was anywhere else. Anyone else.

Then she looked up. And started to move. Her eyes, no longer piercing, no longer horrified, were on mine. I saw her getting closer and knew that she moved, but rather than walking with her typical catwalk style, her movements were robotic.

I’m not sure why I wanted to run.

At the hall leading to my bedroom, she stopped. “There’s something you need to see.”

TEN

The trunk sat beneath the window in the room where I’d slept every night since arriving at Aunt Sara’s. It was old, definitely antique. Pine, I thought. Nicked up, leather straps torn, hinges rusty, big clunky nail heads and a bulky lock.

I’d seen it countless times but never given it much thought. Aunt Sara used it as a table. A beautiful old hurricane lamp sat next to my glass dragonfly and a vacant-eyed nun doll, with my grandmother’s Rosary draped over a black-and-white photo essay of New Orleans cemeteries. I’d looked inside a few times, found it beautifully haunting.

But I’d never looked inside the chest, never thought about it as anything more than a random piece of furniture.

Now my heart jackhammered like crazy as Aunt Sara cleared everything from the top. From underneath, she retrieved a skeleton key. A few seconds later she had the lock undone and was lifting the lid.

I swallowed. Twilight had given way to evening, leaving darkness beyond the window. Light glowed from the lamps on either side of the bed, but not overhead. Aunt Sara didn’t like those, didn’t even keep bulbs in any of the fixtures.

I watched her slow-motion movements, and as she lifted the top, I knew my life was about to change.

I wanted to look inside. I wanted to see, touch.

To know.

But something I did not understand would not let me move.

With the sweep of dark hair concealing her face, Aunt Sara kneeled beside the open trunk for what seemed like forever. When she finally twisted back toward me, her expression was completely unreadable.

“This belonged to your mother.”

The words knocked the breath from me. My mother. The trunk belonged to my mother. It had been in my room all this time. All I’d ever had to do was look.

“It’s time you knew the truth,” she said, and instinctively I glanced toward the dragonfly on the rug, so beautifully yet infinitely fragile. One false move, one careless action, and it would shatter.

“Mama thought she was protecting you.”
Gran.
“She thought if she could take you far enough away, keep you away, then you’d be safe.”

That bad feeling got a whole lot worse. “Safe?”

“That’s all she wanted for you, for you to be safe, to live a normal, happy life.”

“I was happy.” It was the normal part where things got complicated.

“But I always thought she was wrong,” Aunt Sara said, “keeping you in the dark like that.” She glanced inside the trunk, then back at me. “You have to be able to protect yourself,
cher,
and you can’t do that unless you know who you are.”

Who. I. Was. The thought made everything inside of me tingle. “Then tell me.”

I’m not sure I’d ever wanted anything so badly.

Aunt Sara extended a hand. Numbly, I took it, barely registering how cold her skin was. Somehow I made it to the floor beside her, joined her on my knees in front of my mother’s trunk.

“Your mom saw things, too,” my aunt said. Her voice was low, strained.
Haunted.
“She knew things.”

I felt myself go glass still, even as I stared at all the little boxes and jars and rocks neatly arranged inside.

“Her mama did, too,” my aunt said as I kneeled there, and stared. Listened. “And so did her mama.”

My mouth was dry, my throat tight. I almost didn’t want to ask the question. “What kind of things?”

“All kinds of things—people, places…”

“Death?” That question came out before I could stop it.

Aunt Sara glanced toward me, and slowly she nodded. “Death.”

It was a lot to take in.

“She was the most incredible person I’d ever met,” my aunt said in a soft, faraway voice, as I worked up the courage to reach inside. I didn’t know what to touch first. “They all were. I was just a kid, but sometimes your mama would take me with her to see her grandmother.”

To the left, little white boxes sat in neat rows, each carefully labeled in block letters: Amethyst, Peridot, Rose Quartz, Black Opal, Turquoise, Larimar. “Was she … like my mom?”

Aunt Sara’s eyes darkened. “The firstborn daughter, of the firstborn daughter, of the firstborn daughter,” she said. “Your mom said it was in the blood.”

Deep inside, something started to hum. For so many years I’d wondered. For so many years I’d lived in the dark. I’d never understood, had actually wondered whether I simply saw things before they happened—or if in seeing them, I
made
them happen. Now I knew.

I was my mother’s daughter, her mother’s granddaughter.
It was in my blood.

“My mother wasn’t happy when she found out about our trips. She’d been raised devoutly Catholic. She believed in miracles and the power of prayer and the Rapture, but had no use for dreams or psychic phenomenon. They scared her. Your mother scared her. For me to be with her, I had to create all kinds of excuses, like going shopping or to the park. Once I said we were going fishing.”

Trancelike, I reached into the trunk and slid my fingers along a beautiful turquoise-blue stone. “Did she scare
you
?”

“Just the opposite,” Aunt Sara said. “I always felt safe around her, her people. Really, really safe and peaceful. Whenever we got together there was this amazing energy.”

I glanced up. “Energy?” I was familiar with the New Age term, but I’d never heard my aunt speak of it.

“Vibrations, your mom always said.”

Pretty much summed up how I felt at the moment.

“You have it, too,” my aunt said. “The strong vibration. The first time I touched you, if I’d had my eyes closed I would have thought I was touching your mother.”

Breathing hurt. I concentrated on the blue of the larimar, the most pure and amazing blue I’d ever seen, like a tropical sea nestled against a bed of cotton.

“She called it the Atlantis stone,” my aunt said as I picked up the oblong and cradled it in the palm of my hand. “Your mother used it when you were sick.”

Running my finger along the smooth stone seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

“I’ll never forget,” Aunt Sara said through sudden laughter. “One night you’d been running this high fever, so Mom and I stopped by to check on you. Rachelle was in the shower, so your dad told us we could slip into the nursery and peek at you, if we wanted. So we go in there…” She was really laughing now, almost too hard to talk. “And there’s candles everywhere, all lit and flickering, giving off some amazingly intense smell, like they used down at the cathedral.”

The image made me smile—until I remembered the candles at the house on Prytania.

“And then we see you”—Aunt Sara laughed—“all sprawled on your back in your crib, naked except for your little diaper, completely surrounded by rocks.”

I felt my eyes go wide. “Rocks?”

“Larimar,” she said, nodding toward the stone in my hand. “Turquoise and moonstone. Your mom had each stone placed about half an inch apart.”

The visual made me laugh.

“So my mom goes totally nuts. She marches over and starts grabbing the rocks as your mom comes in wearing nothing but a towel, her hair dripping wet and hanging in her face.”

“Uh-oh,” I said. My grandmother had been a practical woman. We’d lived in the mountains, but she’d never allowed rocks into her home. Her insistence had seemed silly to me, but rather than try to change her mind, I learned to sneak them in and keep them in places she never looked.

“Yeah, big uh-oh,” Aunt Sara said. “Your mother ran over and positioned herself between your grandmother and the crib, and my mother is all freaked out, going on about evil spirits and the devil and curses. I can still see her making the sign of the cross over and over.”