Slice (19 page)

F
ORTY

P
aulette saw the man stagger through the dark toward Jessie's house. He moved as if he were Frankenstein's monster, lumbering among the shadows, arms stretched out in front of him. Paulette knew the man would kill Jessie if he reached her, and Abby too.

She had to save them.

But she couldn't move. Her legs seemed made of lead. She couldn't lift them. They seemed cemented to the floor. All Paulette could do was stand at the window of her cottage and watch the man get closer and closer to Jessie's house. It was a dark night, but she could see that he was tall, and dark, and very, very evil.

She tried banging on her window, hoping to make enough noise that the man might get scared away. He stopped his approach for a moment, and turned to look in Paulette's direction. But then he seemed to realize there was nothing she could do to stop him, so he continued on his way, his arms outstretched, his mouth frothing.

Oh, why can't I move?
Paulette thought.
Why can't I rush out and save them?

Because you're dreaming
, she answered herself.

And with that thought, Paulette's eyes popped open.

She sat up in bed. Her clock told it was 9:05. The sun was streaming in through her windows and the birds were chattering. She had slept later than usual. All that traipsing through the woods and the barn last night had tired her out.

That dream . . .

Paulette got out of bed and shook a couple of herbal remedies from a bottle into her hand. That dream had been so upsetting it had left her with a headache. Swallowing the remedies with water, Paulette realized it wasn't just a dream.

It was a vision.

She'd had dreams like that before. Psychic dreams. The night her sister died, in fact. She'd dreamed that Caroline had been calling to Paulette, but Paulette couldn't find her. She'd woken up and run over to her house, to find that Caroline had just passed.

And two nights before Millie Manning died, Paulette had dreamed of a woman falling from a cliff. . . . She hadn't known who. If she had, she might have been able to warn poor Millie to stay away from heights.

She hoped she wouldn't be so late in getting to Jessie.

Paulette dressed quickly. There had been another psychic dream, too, once. She had dreamed that Howard, the only man she had ever loved, had taken her to see the Fourth of July fireworks. It hadn't been Fourth of July; it had been November, but such details didn't matter in dreams. Howard had also been far, far away from Paulette at the time. He'd been in Vietnam. He'd left just the week before, and asked Paulette if she'd wait for him. Paulette had promised she would. Then she'd had the dream about the Fourth of July fireworks, and nothing had been the same after that.

In her dream, Paulette and Howard were sitting on a blanket watching the pyrotechnics explode in the sky. They were so beautiful. If Paulette had ever wondered if she dreamed in color or not, this dream proved she certainly did. Reds and greens and golds and purples all shooting through the night sky. How she and Howard had cheered in her dream. But then a stray spark had floated down from the sky and landed on Howard. As Paulette watched, the man she loved—the man she planned to marry—suddenly blew up into a million sparks of light, as beautiful and as colorful as the fireworks in the sky.

In the morning, Paulette had waited. She had sensed bad news was coming. Indeed, less than twenty-four hours later, Howard's father called her to tell her that the helicopter Howard had been riding in had been shot down over a rice field. It had exploded into a raging fireball. Paulette knew that the blaze, while horrific, had nonetheless possessed a certain terrible beauty. She had seen it in her dream.

There would never be another man for Paulette. She had told Howard she would wait for him, and so wait she would.

But she had no time to wait if she wanted to save Jessie and Abby.

Paulette threw on an old house dress and a pair of slippers and rushed out across the grass to Jessie's house. She expected she'd find her niece hunched over her laptop computer at the kitchen table.

“Jessie!” she called, hurrying up the walk to the back door.

But there was no sign of life in the house. Paulette's heart skipped a beat. Was she too late? Had the tall, dark man have gotten here already?

“Jessie!” Paulette shouted through the screen of the kitchen window.

Still no sound, no movement from the house. The curtains just swayed gently in the morning breeze.

Then she noticed Jessie's car wasn't in the driveway.

Of course
, Paulette remembered.
She was going in to speak with Abby's teacher this morning. That's where she is.

She breathed a long sigh of relief. But she knew the danger was still out there. That dream had been a warning. Someone was coming, someone dangerous, and he threatened both Jessie and Abby.

Paulette had learned to trust her dreams.

Turning to head back to her cottage, Paulette dropped her eyes to the ground. There, at her feet, was a smashed, broken rose, its petals splayed and browned. She picked it up. For some reason the rose terrified her.

It was, Paulette decided, an omen.

F
ORTY-ONE

M
rs. Theresa Whitman was a woman of indeterminate age. She might have been as young as forty or as old as sixty. She greeted Jessie at the door of her office with a smile and a firm handshake, her small brown eyes peering out from behind narrow frameless glasses.

“Hello, Ms. Clarkson. It's nice to see you again,” the teacher said.

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” Jessie replied.

“No problem at all. The children are coloring at the moment, watched over by my able assistant. Your message sounded urgent, so of course I'd make the time.” She gestured for Jessie to come in and sit down. “May I get you a cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you.” Jessie sat in one of the two chairs positioned in front of Mrs. Whitman's desk. The teacher poured herself some coffee, then settled down to look over at Jessie kindly.

“I'm aware that this has not been an easy few weeks for Abby,” Mrs. Whitman said. “She's a delightful girl, well-behaved, and obviously very bright.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” Jessie said. “Is she ever trouble in class?”

“Never. Always cooperative, always pleasant.”

Jessie smiled. “She's that way at home, too,” she told the teacher.

“Then what's the problem, my dear?”

“I wanted to make you aware of something that happened last night. Abby went to bed at her usual time, and I was downstairs working in the kitchen. At one point, I heard something . . . and when I checked, I saw the front door was ajar. Naturally, given everything that has happened, I was concerned.”

“Of course you were.”

“So I went upstairs to check on Abby. She wasn't in her bed. I looked all over for her and she wasn't in the house. I became hysterical.”

“Oh, my dear, where had she gone?”

“Her little friend, Aaron, had come by. She told me later that he'd called to her through the window, and that she snuck downstairs to meet him outside. She told me he encouraged her to do this. I'm not blaming him for my daughter's misbehavior, but Abby has never acted out like this before.”

The teacher had set her mug of coffee down on the desk and was cupping it with her hands as she listened intently. “Where did the children go?”

“To an old, dilapidated barn in the middle of the woods on our property. Abby said Aaron called it his secret place. Clearly he's been playing there on his own. Well, he enticed her to climb a ladder and walk across a beam with the purpose of jumping into a haystack. That's where I found her, up on the beam. I had to gently coax her down.”

“Oh, my!”

Jessie could feel the terror of last night returning as she told the story. “Even worse than that, if Abby had made the jump, there were old lawn mower blades under the hay. She could have been impaled!”

Mrs. Whitman's face had turned white.

“I don't know how Aaron escaped harm, but miraculously, he did so. Abby said he had jumped first, and he wasn't hurt.”

“Do you think he was . . . intentionally trying to hurt her?”

Jessie sighed. “I can't imagine a five-year-old boy wanting to do such a thing. I think he just managed, by sheer luck, to avoid the blades. But who knows if Abby would have been as lucky?”

“Thank God you got to her in time,” Mrs. Whitman said.

“Yes. Thank God.”

“Did you speak with the boy's parents?”

“No.” Jessie leaned forward across the teacher's desk. “That's why I'm here. Abby didn't know Aaron's last name, or where he lived, so I thought I should come to you.”

“Me?” Mrs. Whitman looked perplexed. “Why me?”

“Because you can tell me that information. Has he been a problem for you in any way in class?”

Mrs. Whitman's brow furrowed. “I'm sorry, Ms. Clarkson, but there's no boy named Aaron in the kindergarten class.”

“But . . .” Jessie was at a loss for words for a couple of seconds. “But Abby says she sits with him every day. That he's her friend. She's been so much happier coming home from school since making friends with Aaron.”

Behind her glasses, Mrs. Whitman's eyes looked as if they might cry. “Oh, dear, Ms. Clarkson, I'm so sorry to have to tell you that, despite my best efforts to encourage greater fraternization among the students, Abby still tends to be a loner. Unless I deliberately sit her with others, she usually ends up sitting by herself.”

Jessie blinked, unable to respond.

Mrs. Whitman hesitated, then continued. “But I must say . . . I often see her laughing and chatting . . . with an imaginary friend.”

Jessie's blood suddenly ran cold.

“Did you see the little boy Abby said took her to the barn?” Mrs. Whitman asked.

“No,” Jessie said, her mind reeling. But suddenly she looked across at the teacher intently. “But Mrs. Gorin did! She said she saw Abby and a little boy earlier that night, walking toward the barn. She said she'd seen the little boy before, too. She figured he lived in the new houses on the other side of the woods at the end of Hickory Dell.”

Mrs. Whitman made a face. “Do you mean Gert Gorin?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Ms. Clarkson, I've known Gert all my life. I wouldn't put an awful lot of stock in what she says she sees. She's always showing up at town council meetings claiming to have spotted bears or bobcats, and arguing for the town to bring in hunters. Or she's thinking someone is having an affair with someone else. She's really a . . . well, as my mother used to say, a busybody.”

“I know that,” Jessie said. “But why would she make something like this up?”

“Maybe she doesn't make it up. Maybe she's just a bit . . . overimaginative.”

Jessie sighed. “But Abby was so clear about Aaron sitting with her at snack time, and helping her carry her books. . . .”

Mrs. Whitman smiled. “I'll tell you what. Come with me. We'll go into class, and ask Abby to point out her friend to us.”

“Good idea.”

They both stood.

“Maybe she's gotten his name wrong,” Jessie suggested as they left Mrs. Whitman's office and headed down the hall to the classroom. “Maybe it's a boy with a different name.”

“Maybe,” Mrs. Whitman said, though she didn't sound convinced.

The classroom, when they entered, smelled of chalk and crayons. The walls were covered with photos of flowers, kittens, puppies, and waterfalls. At the front of the room, above the blackboard, the alphabet was inscribed in big, red letters. About twenty children sat at tiny desks, coloring a line drawing of a robin on a tree branch. A few of them looked up when Jessie and Mrs. Whitman entered, but most remained intent on their work. The young teacher's assistant, an Asian girl with long black hair, gave Mrs. Whitman a smile.

Jessie spotted Abby off to the side, at a desk beneath the photo of a kitten. She looked up and spotted her mother. “Hi, Mommy,” she said, a broad smile filling her face.

“Hi, Abs,” Jessie said.

She stooped down so that she was eye-level with her daughter.

“Abs,” Jessie whispered, “would you show me which one is Aaron?”

Abby looked at her.

“He's not here today,” she said after a short pause, and went back to her coloring.

Jessie stood. “Are there any students absent today, Mrs. Whitman?” she asked.

The teacher shook her head. “All present and accounted for.”

That was when the fear really took hold of Jessie's throat. She was barely able to speak for the rest of the day.

F
ORTY-TWO

P
aulette was picking daisies on the side of her cottage when something drew her eye over to Jessie's house. Had she seen movement in an upstairs window? Or had she just sensed it?

All morning long, she'd been on edge. Her dream had really rattled her. She kept an eye on Jessie's driveway, waiting to spot her car rattling back up the hill. Could she have missed Jessie's return? Could that have been Jessie she'd just seen—or sensed—upstairs? She set the daisies down on a table and made her way across the yard back toward her niece's house.

She heard the slam of a door.

“Jessie?” she called out.

But by now she was close enough to see that Jessie was still not home.

The fear bubbled up again, the dread caused by her dream. The slam she'd heard was the front door. Paulette was sure of it. So she
had
seen someone upstairs in the house!

She hurried around to the front but saw no one there.

Her attention was drawn back to the driveway, where she heard the sudden crunch of gravel. Jessie was home.

“Hello, sweetheart!” Paulette sang out.

She didn't want to panic her right away. She knew Jessie was still upset about last night, so first she asked how it had gone with Abby's teacher. When she learned that there was no Aaron in the girl's class—that her companion last night, despite Gert Gorin's insistence to the contrary, might have been imaginary—Paulette's terror only deepened. They were dealing with things here, she realized, that they couldn't explain.

Walking with Jessie up the front walk, Paulette finally told her about her dream. About the dark man who threatened her.

“Look, Aunt Paulette,” Jessie said, “I'm already freaked out enough. I respect that you believe your dream was some kind of sign . . . but I just can't take that in right now.”

“But it's a real danger, Jessie. I feel it!”

“Aunt Paulette, stop!” Jessie put her hands to her ears. “I can't! No more!”

She hurried up the front steps. Paulette watched as she unlocked the door.
So it was locked
, she realized. Then how could anyone have come out of it?

Maybe she had been wrong. . . . Maybe she hadn't seen or heard anything.

Or maybe locked doors were immaterial to the dark man she feared. . . .

Paulette followed Jessie into the house. “I'm sorry, honey,” she said. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

“It's okay, Aunt Paulette. I know you meant well.”

“I'll make you a cup of tea.”

Jessie smiled. “Thanks. That would be nice. I'm just going to run upstairs and change into shorts.” The day was getting warmer, and she'd worn wool pants to Abby's school.

Paulette smiled and turned to the stove. Lifting the teapot, she carried it over to the sink and filled it with water. She still believed in heating water over a flame. None of this microwaving for her. She set the teapot back on the stove and turned the burner to high. Yes, a nice cup of tea. That would make them both feel better.

That was when she heard Jessie scream.

Dear God,
Paulette thought
. The man is still upstairs The dark man got her!

“Jessie!” she shouted, bounding up the stairs after her.

Paulette found her niece standing in the doorway of her room, her mouth in a frozen O. Clothes were strewn everywhere. Every drawer of Jessie's bureau had been pulled open and overturned onto the floor. Bras, panties, and slips were tossed all over the place. Her closet was wide open, with skirts and blouses pulled off their hangers, lying in scattered clumps and piles. Jessie was too stunned to speak.

“Dear God,” Paulette gasped.

So she
had
seen someone up here!

The tall, dark man.

What had he been looking for?

And had he found it?