Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (7 page)

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “So sorry…”

“Hang on,” I tried to whisper, but the words didn’t make it past my throat. Hang on!

“Don’t leave me here,” she cried, and her voice, thin and terrified, broke. “Please…”

I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t stand the horror in her voice one second longer, knew I had to turn, had to find some way to get to her and—

I twisted. The web broke. And my body, not ready for the unexpected release, dropped to the floor. I fell, landed on my knees, and looked up.

She was there, on the mattress, just like I’d seen over and over again. Her feet were bare. Her skin was pale. Her eyes … dark. Terrified.

Slowly they met mine, and what I saw in them chilled me to the core.

“Jessica!” I surged to my feet and lunged for her, but the ground gave way and I fell through the shadows, while the air turned thick, and the cold swallowed me …

“Trinity!”

I fought, flailed, searched for something to grab onto. Tried to breathe …

“Trinity!”

The voice came at me through the watery haze, and like a lifeline, I reached for it, grabbed it.

“Wake up,
cher
. Wake up!”

The command registered, and I made myself blink, gasp. And with the sweet rush of breath came the grainy image of my aunt leaning over me, the feel of her cold hands, one against the side of my face, the other holding my hand.

“That’s it,” she said in that thick, wonderful voice of hers, the one that reminded me of honey. “That’s my girl. Come on back to me.”

I blinked again, and this time focus returned, and detail registered. I was in my bed. The lamp was still on. My laptop was beside me, the screen dark. On the small table, green numerals on my clock glowed 5:26.

I took it all in, knew that I was safe. But my body wouldn’t stop shaking, and even though I was cold, my oversized T-shirt clung to me as if I actually had fallen through water …

“Oh, God,” I whispered, coughing on the sudden rush of oxygen. “I was there…”

“Oh,
cher
.” My aunt pulled me into her arms and held me, running her hands along my body as if it was vitally important that she touch me, all of me.

From the moment my grandmother died, from the moment I’d stepped into this strange world of New Orleans—my parents’ world, the world I’d been born into but had no memory of—I’d been trying to be strong. I’d been smiling at all the right times, doing all the right things, trying like crazy to ignore the cold mist that kept seeping deeper into my bones. If I ignored it, it would go away. If I ignored it, nothing bad would happen.

But in the chilling predawn of that Tuesday morning, there was no ignoring the dream or the shaking, or the knowledge that something bad had happened.

“It’s okay,” Aunt Sara promised, and for the first time I quit fighting, quit pretending, just sank into her arms and drank in the feel of her hugging me. “You’re okay!”

“I was there,” I said again.
“I was there.”

She pulled back and framed my face with her hands. “You’re here, Trinity. You’ve been here all night.”

I shook my head, knew she would never understand. “No.” My throat constricted on the word. “I was …
there
.”

Through the side-swept bangs, Aunt Sara’s eyes met mine. “Where, Trinity?” The question surprised me. “Where were you?”

I swallowed. Tried to breathe normally. “The house…”

“On Prytania.”

It wasn’t a question. She knew. And when she spoke again, her eyes glowed like black diamonds. “Were you alone?”

“No.”

“Did someone hurt you?”

At the time, the weirdness of her questions didn’t register. “I fell…”

“Did you get hurt?”

“Water.” That’s what it was. Water. I’d fallen through water. “… so cold.”

Against my arms, Aunt Sara’s hands began to rub. “Trinity, honey, listen to me. Whatever happened, wherever you went, you’re with me now, okay? You’re safe.”

She didn’t think I was crazy. Can I tell you how amazing that was? “But she’s not,” I whispered. “She’s hurt.”

Aunt Sara stilled. “Who, sweetie? Who’s hurt?”

I didn’t want to say the name. I didn’t want it to be true.

But I knew that it was.
“Jessica.”

*   *   *

I had to call. When she answered I was going to feel ridiculous, but I had to call. I had to know.

With Aunt Sara on the bar stool next to me, her pale hands wrapped around her jumbo
Café Du Monde
mug, I powered on my phone. The battery had been dead when Jessica returned it the day before. Now it was charged, and I made myself scroll through the call history for her number. Then I pushed the call button.

It was 6:30 in the morning. School started in a little over an hour. She should be awake … I knew that. Every morning, Jessica Morgenthal arrived at Enduring Grace absolutely perfect. Perfect hair, perfect makeup, perfect … everything. And there was no way she could achieve that in anything less than an hour. So she should be awake—

But her phone just rang.

I glanced at Aunt Sara. She had a day full of meetings planned, but hadn’t even showered yet. She just sat there with tangled morning hair and no makeup, watching me as if this kind of thing happened every day.

I shook my head on the fifth ring. After the sixth, I got voice mail. “Hey, y’all … it’s Jess. I didn’t answer … get a clue. If it’s important, leave a message. If not … you lose.”

I hung up.

*   *   *

I got there early. Only by fifteen minutes, but it was crazy what a difference those minutes made. Cars of all sizes and makes crowded the staff parking lot, but only a pink convertible VW sat in the student lot. Not even the buses had shown up. Our Lady of Enduring Grace still slept.

It was one of those hazy mornings, the sky gray and cloudy, the breeze soft but steady. The lifting fog left a mist hovering just off the ground, making the oaks look more like shadowy specters.

Annoyed, I plopped down on a stone bench, pulled out my history notebook, and waited. I still had that test in a few hours and kept blanking on the generals.

By the time the bell rang twenty minutes later, everyone else had arrived.

Everyone except Jessica.

*   *   *

“So where is she?”

Amber looked up from her phone. If possible, she looked even skinnier than usual. “That’s just it,” she said, and her voice shook. “No one knows.”

“What do you mean nobody knows?” Victoria asked. “She’s sick, right?”

Amber’s lips were dry. Her eyes, normally a pretty light brown, looked black. “She’s not sick.”

We’d just finished lunch. We had fifteen minutes until class resumed. For me, history was up next. We stood at the far side of the courtyard, near a climbing rose. At first, it had been only a few of us. Now a small crowd grew.

People were starting to find out. Rumors were starting to spread. Everyone wanted to know.

“Bethany texted me,” Amber said. “The police are there right now.”

“The police?” Again, that was Victoria, voicing all that I did not trust myself to say. “Why the police?”

Amber glanced at another text before answering. “Bethie says Jess went to bed early last night, said she had a headache. But this morning she didn’t come down for breakfast, so their mom went to check on her.”

I took an instinctive step back.

“… but she wasn’t there. Her purse was gone, her keys, her car.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Madison, another of the cheerleaders, said. I didn’t know her well, but she seemed more down-to-earth. “You know Jessica. She probably just needed to clear her head after yesterday. It’s not like it would be the first time.”

“Then why isn’t she answering
me
?” Amber practically shrieked. “I’m her best friend!”

“Maybe the battery is dead—”

“Or she can’t! Maybe that perv who killed those two girls last year saw Jessie and thought she was pretty…”

Around me, everything blurred, all the trees and benches and fountains and statues. I tried to latch onto what Victoria was saying, but I couldn’t get past Amber’s words:
“… that perv who killed those two girls last year…”

Help me, please!

Jessica was in trouble. I knew that. I
knew
that, even if no one else did.

And I knew where she was.

Don’t leave me here!

“I gotta go,” I said, and then I was turning away and hurrying across the courtyard, trying not to run, or scream. I had to tell someone. I knew that, too. I had to tell the police, make them go to the house on Prytania. I had to—

“Trinity!”

I didn’t see him until it was too late. I was so lost in my own panic that I barely knew where I was, much less that Chase Bonaventure had stepped into my path.

SEVEN

He reached for me as I stumbled, put his hands to my arms and held me that way until I looked up at him. Even then, I’m not sure what I saw … Chase, yes, the way he was looking at me, the threadbare remnants of something fragile and impossible in the blue of his eyes.

But she was there, too … Jessica. On that mattress.

Crying.

Begging.

“Hey—” His voice was strained. “You okay?”

I tried to bring him into focus. Tried to
breathe,
to think about anything other than the way his hands felt against my flesh. Warm. They were so warm. And I was so cold.

“Yeah. No—I…” Words and thoughts jumbled. “I gotta go—”

“No,” he said quietly. So very, very quietly. “You don’t.”

I stilled, looked up at the glint of pure steel in his eyes.

“Pretending I don’t exist doesn’t make it true.”

The quiet words wound through me, tightening like a strong, punishing cord. I wanted to deny them, deny that I’d been doing something as silly as turning left when he turned right, but the truth hovered in the shadows between us.

“Maybe I don’t have anything to say—”

“Then listen,” he said, and something cruel and ragged pierced deep. I’d listened before. That was the problem.

“I heard about Jessica—” I started, but he did not let me finish.

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

I swallowed hard, didn’t understand. Their relationship highs and lows were legendary around school, but they’d been together a long time.

“It’s okay,” I said. “What happened Saturday doesn’t matter anymore—whatever you want to say doesn’t need to be said. I know you’re worried—”

“About you.” His words sliced through mine like a soft, gentle knife. “Because it does matter,” he said. “
She
made it matter.”

I stood there in the mist that had never fully lifted, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “I don’t understand…”

The lines of his face tightened, bringing shadows that had not been there before. “Jessica doesn’t know when to stop. She’s
never
known when to stop. When one game fails, she tries another one.”

“Game? What are you talking about? She’s missing. She didn’t come home last night—”

His eyes went flat cold. “But she did drive away. She drove away, Trinity. No one made her. She told her parents good night, then crawled out her window and drove away—just like she did the last time we broke up.”

That stopped me. “You broke up?”

“Two weeks ago,” he said. “That’s what Saturday night was about, what all of this is about: her attempt to punish us—”

Us?

“No.” I stepped back as the breeze slapped hair against my face. Just … no. I’d seen her. I’d seen her in the house on the bed. I’d heard her cry out. “
It’s not a game!
She’s in trouble.”

Chase frowned. “Trinity—”

I took another step back, knew there was no point trying to make him understand. Because he wouldn’t.

“I have go,” I said again, and this time I didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. I spun around and headed toward the water-soaked angel towering up against the gray sky. My history test would have to wait.

I had to talk to the police.

*   *   *

“When was the last time you saw Jessica Morgenthal?”

In the movies, you could tell a cop a mile away. They either had that hard-ass look that warned everyone to keep their distance, or they were all tough and edgy—and sexy as sin.

Detectives Aaron LaSalle and DeMarcus Jackson didn’t fit into either of those camps, though neither was what my grandmother would have called hard on the eyes. They were younger than I’d been expecting, and they both looked like they could blend into any crowd, anywhere, and no one would think twice about it.

And it was strange, because even though I’d had Aunt Sara call them, the way they kept looking at me made me feel like they would have showed up at the condo sooner or later anyway.

“Yesterday at school,” I said. We’d spent the first ten or fifteen minutes on casual chitchat, all phony getting-to-know-you kind of stuff. They’d asked me a lot of questions about Colorado—and what I thought about New Orleans. And the Saints. All this time after they’d broken an alleged curse to win the Super Bowl, people still talked like the game had been yesterday.

Aunt Sara was great. She sat right next to me on her shabby-chic sofa, not quite touching me, but definitely positioned between me and the detectives. LaSalle sat. Jackson didn’t.

I had the distinct feeling he rarely did. There was an edginess about him, a raw energy like an animal constantly on guard.

“She gave me back my cell phone,” I added. “I’d lost it Saturday night.”

“When you were out together,” LaSalle clarified.

“Yes.”

“And how would you describe your relationship with Miss Morgenthal?”

It was a good thing I hadn’t just taken a drink of the water Aunt Sara had handed me. I totally would have spewed. Miss Morgenthal … it sounded so prim and proper.

“We just met,” I said, impatient. My nerves jittered. I’d had it with the small talk, but didn’t know how to blurt out what I needed to tell them. “We go to the same school.”