Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (18 page)

WHERE R U?

That was Chase. Glancing at the time, I realized it was lunch break at school.

R U OK?

Then:

COME ON. T2M.

I swallowed against the knot in my throat, and pulled up to Victoria’s.

HEY! WHERE R U? MISS U! IT’S CRAZY HERE 2DAY. AMBER IS SUCH A BITCH. WAIT TIL I TELL U! U R STILL COMING 2NITE, RN’T U? IT’S GONNA BE NUTS.

*   *   *

The courtyard looked like a shrine.

With late afternoon giving way to dusk, I followed the paved walkway past the graceful oaks and eerily tranquil fountain, to the multimedia circus unfolding at Our Lady of Enduring Grace.

Up the six steps leading to the Administration building, a Gothic-like oil portrait of Jessica, with her dark hair flowing around her face, her lipstick bloodred, stood in greeting. A collection of teddy bears and flowers spread out along the concrete, with balloons bobbing in the breeze. Candles flickered. Music drifted through the trees, something haunting and New Age.

Jessica, with her near-desperate need to be the center of attention, would have
loved
it.

And yet it made me want to cry. No matter what had gone down between us, no matter how hateful she’d been, she was a person. People loved her. Everywhere I looked, they gathered: the staff, a large portion of the student body, hoards of teens I’d never seen before, some standing in small groups, some staring up at the huge screen in front of the library, where images of Jessica flickered like slow-motion lightning.

There she was last year, on the homecoming court. And along the sideline of a football game, cheering. At the Christmas dance … draped all over Chase.

He was laughing, his arms so very, very tight around her.

The image stopped me, long after the slide show had flitted on, sharing pics of spring break and track meets, random shots of Jessica and Amber and Chase and Drew, of Pitre and Victoria, all from the year—

Before.

All from before.

Before I’d come to Enduring Grace.

Before I’d walked into their lives … into the house on Prytania.

Soon they would all disperse for the football game. But for now, it was all about Jessica.

“Hey,” came a soft, quiet voice, and I blinked before looking to my right, where my aunt stood close to my side. Beyond her, at the far edge of the courtyard, no fewer than three news crews prepared to go live. “You okay,
cher
?”

My lips pressed tight. I’m pretty sure my smile looked as fake as it felt. “Fine.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know. No one is making you be here.”

But that wasn’t true. “I need to be here,” I said, as Victoria broke from a group of three others and waved, heading my way. “If I stay away, everybody will only think the worst.”

Her hand found mine and squeezed. “What they think doesn’t matter. You know that, don’t you?”

I did. But I also knew I needed to be there, not just because of what people would or wouldn’t think, but because of Jessica. It was as if she was reaching out to me …

“Trinity!” Victoria called, closing in on me and wrapping me in a quick hug. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d be here.”

I pulled back, struck by the sprinkle of what looked to be glitter beneath her eyes. In her skinny jeans and simple black shirt, she looked somewhere between ready for a hot date, and ready for a funeral.

“I have so much to tell you,” she said, rushing, flashing my aunt a quick smile, before tugging me deeper into the drama. “You are so not going to believe how crazy everything’s getting.”

Against the giant screen, Jessica’s life kept playing. But as Victoria dragged me toward a long table draped in white, other things began to register, like the uniformed cops standing on the perimeter, watching. And the small crowd near a podium, where an older woman and the man I recognized as Jessica’s father stood with their arms wrapped around Bethany. And Chase … He was there, too.

With Jessica’s family.

I ripped away, looked away, didn’t want to risk him glancing over …

“Have you
seen
this?” Victoria asked, wedging her way between several well-dressed older folks to close in on the table. There, a line of young and old led to a large book open against the cloth, where a little girl with pigtails was writing in a guest book, and the principal was standing in greeting.

But that’s not what Victoria wanted me to see.

A computer sat off to the side, the fading light bleaching out the image on the computer monitor. It wasn’t until we stood right in front of it that the picture of Jessica came into focus—and the words in all caps across the top of the Facebook page: SEARCHING FOR JESSICA MORGENTHAL.

“It’s crazy,” Victoria said. “Amber created it yesterday and it already has over eight hundred fans.”

Fans. It was a sick word considering the subject.

“Look at this,” she said, pointing to a text box on the upper left side of the page.

We search for our dear friend Jessica Morgenthal, last seen Monday night, and pray our fears do not come true.

But from the tone of the most recent comments—and the so-called candlelight vigil—it sounded like most people did not expect Jessica to come home.

Prayers and hugs to the Morgenthal family! I remember Jess from elementary school. She always had such a sweet smile!

Around me, shadows slipped closer. I closed my eyes, concentrating on the small whitewashed room of my dreams, and the field, the airplane, and the white truck. Something. There had to be something else …

Nothing came.

Except the cold. The cold circled around me, seeping deep. Hating it, hating all of this,
wishing I could be anywhere else,
I made myself look back—and saw the man.

He stood toward the podium, next to the Morgenthals. Fairly young, I realized, but in that timeless way that could have placed him at twenty as easily as thirty. His reddish brown hair was long, fastened behind his neck. That’s what made him look young. His suit was tailored and dark. That’s what made him look older.

But it was his eyes that got me, narrow and piercing and … trained directly at me.

The shiver just happened. “Who is that?”

Victoria brushed up against me. “Who?”

“That guy,” I said.

But already he was gone. “He was just there, by her parents.”

“Oh,” Victoria said, already turning back to the screen. “Probably that Wesley guy she hooked up with from LSU. Can you believe he actually showed up?”

I kept looking—but saw only Chase.

“This is just so bizarre,” Victoria said, and despite the fact I would have sworn I still felt those eyes, watching me, I turned back to the computer, and started to read.

How can we go on without Jessie? The world is now a darker place.

I always wished I knew Jessica better. Even though she would never talk to me, I’m sure she was a great person.

And this, from Amber:

Once in our lives God gives us a gift. My gift was my best friend. I wasn’t ready to give her back and will now be left to wonder WHY for the rest of my life …

The entries blurred by, a virtual who’s who of Enduring Grace. Except Chase. His name was not there.

But when I glanced up, he still stood with Jessica’s family, holding a crying Bethany in his arms.

“Check this one out,” Victoria said, and the second I saw the user name at the bottom of the page, my stomach knotted.

IWUZTHERE

Then I read the entry.

You got what you deserved.

I stared. “Oh, my
God
—why hasn’t someone deleted that?”

Victoria double-clicked on the user name. “Amber did, but as soon as she did, another one appeared.”

On the screen, a profile page appeared, blank except for a black-and-white picture of the house on Prytania.

“The cops told her not to delete anything else.”

I stared so hard my eyes got dry. “Detective LaSalle?”

“IDK,” she said, and while under other circumstances her speaking in text might have made me smile, I was no longer sure I knew how.

“You don’t get to be here.”

I barely had a chance to look up, much less prepare, before Amber, dressed in total goth black, was closing in on me like an anorexic avenging angel. “You’ve got some kind of crazy nerve—”

“Amby
—
”
Victoria gasped, but I cut her off before she could say anything else.

“I know this must be hard on you,” I said, much as a parent might say to a child in the midst of a temper tantrum. “You two have been friends for so long…”

Amber wrenched past Victoria, her face twisted with so much emotion I couldn’t even begin to identify it all. Anger, sorrow, fear. “You’ll never replace her,” she spat. “You might think you can, but they’ve been together forever—”

I stiffened, felt the edge of the table cutting into the backs of my legs. “I don’t want to replace her,” I said, as unemotionally as I could.

But Amber just kept glaring at me, her eyes dark and wild. Vaguely I was aware of the crowd around us jostling, a low murmur running through the courtyard.

“All boys like new toys,” she said, “but he loves
her
.” Twisting, she got right up in my face. “Has he told
you
that?”

“Amber,”
came a low firm voice, and then Drew was there, and Pitre and Lucas, all muscling their way through the press of bodies.

“Of course not,” Amber said, when I said nothing, “because he doesn’t.”

I swallowed hard, knew better than to say anything. Because there was nothing. Absolutely nothing to say to that.

But when I glanced beyond her, through the haze I saw the giant screen where the slide show still played, and Jessica, in an absolutely killer dress, stood wrapped in Chase’s arms.

“This isn’t helping anything,” Drew said, and then he was at Amber’s side, pulling her back from me and into his arms, pressing her face to his chest as he looked over her head toward me, mouthing two simple words, but giving them no voice.
I’m sorry.

Pitre and Lucas cleared space around us. “You okay?” Pitre asked.

“I will be.”

But the look in his eyes said he didn’t believe me. “You weren’t at school today.”

“I-I’m … okay,” I detoured as Drew dragged a hysterical Amber toward the back of the courtyard.

“You can’t let her get to you,” he pressed. “Everyone knows she’s spewing lies. Dreams are just dreams.”

“Or are they?” Lucas smirked. “Seeing anything else …
interesting,
Trin-Trin?”

I hated when he called me that. And I wasn’t about to give him anything to use against me. I just didn’t get what Victoria saw in him. Annoyed, I glanced toward the screen just as Chase looked up.

The moment crystallized around us, the fall of shadows and the whisper of a flute, more than a hundred people separating us. But I felt him.

I felt him.

Even as to my right, images of his relationship with Jessica continued to shine through the growing darkness.

And then someone was grabbing my hand, squeezing and urging me back, away.

Disoriented, I swung around, found my aunt. Her face was ashen—her eyes were wide, dark.

I followed her without speaking, weaving away from the table toward the edge of the steps of the Administration building, where one of the news crews was reporting live, while a second was packing up.

“We have to go,” she said, tugging me to keep moving.

“No—I—”

She stopped. “Aaron called.”

That made me stop.

“There was a hit-and-run,” she said quietly. “A white truck,” she added. “A few miles from the airport.”

*   *   *

I wanted to wake up. I wanted to wake up and stretch against the warm cotton sheets, to roll over and look out the window, see the snow-capped mountains in the distance. I wanted to sit and reach to the foot of the bed, to bury my hands in soft fur and feel the kiss of Sunshine …

But Sunshine was dead, and there were no mountains in New Orleans, only the sticky heat of a fading day, interrupted occasionally by an equally sticky breeze—and the roar of a jet soaring into the reddish swirls of twilight.

In the distance, men moved in a straight line, close to fifty of them, walking slowly, flashlights aimed in front of them. Dogs raced along ahead. Overhead, a helicopter circled.

Near a skeletal bald cypress several car lengths away, Jessica’s parents and sister huddled close. By my side, Aunt Sara stood with my hand in hers. She had not let go since we’d arrived.

She’d barely spoken, either. “Is this it?” she’d asked. “The field from your dreams?”

The question had sounded so nice, innocent, but rather than conjuring images of waving grass and sunshine and butterflies, it had chilled me to the core. Because yes. This was the field of my dreams.

And I didn’t know what was worse, for them to find something—
find her
—or for them to find nothing at all. The former meant I’d seen a glimpse of Jessica’s future, or her past.

The latter meant I was out of my mind.

Both meant I was walking a thin, dark line.

“This is seriously messed up,” Victoria whispered from my other side. She’d caught up with me as I’d slipped into my car at Enduring Grace, insisting on coming with me. Aunt Sara had driven separately, meeting me for the vigil after a long afternoon of meetings.

“I wish they’d tell us what was going on,” she said, continuing the mostly one-way dialogue she’d initiated the second she’d climbed into my car an hour and a half before.

“I’m sure they will,” I murmured, choosing my words carefully. What else was I supposed to say? This wasn’t what I signed up for, to be a voyeur of my own life. And so many others.

Gradually, as minutes became hours, the crowd grew. By the time we’d arrived, the local news stations had already been set up. Jessica’s family arrived shortly after we did. Countless other police and search personnel joined the group combing the field. I could only imagine what would happen after the football game ended and word of the search leaked to the student body.