Waking Hours (28 page)

“She loved you,” Dani said. “That couldn’t have been a lie.”

“I know,” Tommy said. “Can I ask you a personal question? How often do you think about your folks?”

“All the time,” Dani said. “Every day.”

She told him the story of how she’d lost them, the great last day they had together, and being awakened in the middle of the night by her team leader, who began,
“Dani, I have some terrible, terrible news . . .”

Tommy reached across the tabletop and held her hand, nothing more. She didn’t want to look at him right away. Finally she wiped her nose with her napkin and sniffed.

“Sometimes I forget to remember them, but they always come back. And lately I’ve been having these weird dreams about them.”

“Such as?” He leaned back to make room for the waitress to set down their plates.

Dani told him, in as much detail as she could recall, about her dreams, all but the last one, when she’d nearly sleepwalked off the deck. Tommy listened closely, without interrupting.

When she finished, she laughed and said, “I don’t think Sigmund Freud would be scratching at his beard over what they mean. I’m obviously trying to deal with my guilt. You know, a hundred years ago dream analysis was a huge part of any psychotherapist’s training. Now it’s barely mentioned. It makes you wonder what’s going to be considered out of date a hundred years from now.”

“So you’re pretty sure you understand them?” Tommy asked.

“Why?” Dani said. “What do
you
think they mean?”

“Well,” Tommy said, “you’re the doctor, but I think they’re trying to tell you something.”

“Okay,” she said. “What?”

“Well, the image of them sitting in a tree . . .”

“
Looking down
on me,” she said. “As in
disapproving
.”

“
Looking down
is your choice of words, ” Tommy said.

“What words would you choose?”

“Watching over?”

His insight took her aback. She’d never thought of that.

“You could be right,” she allowed. “It’s not uncommon for people to think their ancestors are watching over them as protectors.”

“No,” Tommy said. “I don’t mean in a general sense. I mean specifically. The night you dreamt your father was showing you the stone was the same night Julie was killed, right?”

“It was.”

“And it woke you up at 2:13. And Julie was killed on a bare rock. Was the stone in the dream a bare rock?”

“Tommy,” she said. “I had the dream
before
I knew about the murder. Dreams can only reconfigure. You can’t dream about something you don’t already know.”

“But you did.”

“Tommy—a stone could mean . . . just about anything.”

“It could,” he agreed. “But a dream about a stone that wakes you up at 2:13, on a night when a girl is killed on a stone at exactly the same time, doesn’t mean ‘just about anything.’ It probably means just what you think it means. Ockham’s razor. The simplest theory is the one most likely to apply. Your father was trying to warn you.”

“About what?”

“About a psychopathic killer on the loose, for starters.”

“Tommy . . .”

“What time did the ME say she died?”

“He can’t be that precise.”

“What did he estimate?”

“Around two,” Dani said. “What about the dream where my parents were walking me to school and I climbed a ladder and then fell on top of my father?”

“You tell me,” Tommy said.

“Well,” Dani said, “the school is symbolic of my education. And the high tower is the proverbial ivory tower. Meaning with all my education, I still wasn’t smart enough, and my poor decision killed them.”

“Or,” Tommy said, “the problem isn’t that your education let you down. The problem was that you let go. There was nothing wrong with the tower. Or the ladder. One faulty rung and you let go. Your parents led you there, and they encouraged you to keep climbing. And your father was there to catch you if you slipped up. Literally, if your hand slipped. Maybe they want you to keep going.”

“Keep going where?” Dani said. “Back to school? What about the water? The waterfall turning to blood?”

“I’m not sure,” Tommy said, wiping his mouth with his napkin and pushing his plate away. “I had a doozy water dream the other night.”

He told her the dream he’d had of sitting high on a hillside, watching as New York City was flooded with water, and of people fleeing the city in white trucks and vans and cars, and people committing suicide by jumping from tall buildings, and finally he told her how he’d dreamed of someone racing up a river in a speedboat.

“I’m thinking Noah’s ark,” Tommy said. “Did you know the Bible says Noah was five hundred years old when he fathered three kids? I wonder how old his wife was.”

“Probably twenty-two,” Dani said. Without a word, she reached into her briefcase and took out the piece of paper upon which she’d written down the details of the dream she’d had . . . the exact same dream as his.

Tommy read, then looked up. “What are the odds of two people having the same dream?” he said. “And I don’t mean three kids and a big house in Connecticut.”

Dani didn’t know what to say. “I’ve never put a lot of stock in coincidence,” she finally said. “Or premonitions.”

“What does that have to do with having the same dream? At the risk of seeming too . . . forward, I don’t know how you can write this off as a coincidence.”

“What do you mean by ‘forward’?”

“I mean there’s a reason why you and I met again. We were meant to meet again. It wasn’t accidental. There’s a reason why you and I are right here, at this moment.”

“Which is?”

“We’re supposed to do this together,” he said. “Someone wants us to do this together.”

“Someone?”

“God,” he said. “That’s how I would understand it, but put it any way you want. Fate. Destiny. Just don’t write it off as coincidence.”

She didn’t say anything right away. Then, “So you’re saying God wants us to be together?”

“Maybe
forward
isn’t the right word,” Tommy allowed.

“You let me know when you think of what the right word is. And I’m not writing it off as coincidence. I’m just not writing it in as something else. Not until I’ve had more time to think about it. Do you know what a false positive is?”

“Do you mean like when your doctor performs a test that says you have something, but actually you don’t?”

“Exactly. They’re just as dangerous as false negatives. Some say more because it’s human to want to think you can rely on the test. A negative means you still don’t know the answer, but a positive means you do, and it’s really easy to settle for that, even when there’s a chance that the problem is with the test and not the result.”

“In other words, you don’t trust your own intuition.”

“It’s not . . .”

“What?”

“You’re right. It’s exactly that. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The chief characteristic of self-deprivation is the inability to tell you’re sleep-deprived. You go two or three weeks on three or four hours a night and you think you’re doing fine, maybe a little tired, and then you open your refrigerator and find your bowling ball and you can’t remember why you put it there, but you know you had a good reason at the time. In other words,” Dani said, “this is really freaking me out.”

“Is that your professional diagnosis? Because it’s freaking me out too.”

“It’s not in the DSM-IV,” Dani said. “I don’t understand how this is possible.”

“I don’t either,” Tommy said. “Not rationally, anyway. Maybe when we weren’t paying attention, we both drove past a billboard for a movie, or . . . we saw something on TV . . .”

“You’re reaching,” Dani said. She looked around the diner, at the faces of the people there. “I’m scared,” she said. “To be honest.”

“Then you probably don’t want to hear what else I have to say,” Tommy said.

“I probably don’t,” Dani said. “What is it?”

“You said there was a puddle on the deck, and that you saw wet footprints that matched yours leading to the edge of the deck. Except that it didn’t rain that night. So where did the water come from?”

Dani saw Tommy look up as if someone were standing behind her. Someone was.

Phil Casey smiled and gestured to an unoccupied chair. “Mind if I join you? Stuart told me I could find you here.”

Dani nodded, and he sat down. She exchanged glances with Tommy and did not feel the need to tell him that what they’d been talking about was just between them. For now. To be continued.

“I’ve been meaning to check this place out,” Phil said. “What’s the
soup d’ jour
?”

“That’s the soup of the day,” Tommy said.

Phil turned to Dani without cracking a smile. “They say when he played, he was the king of trash talk,” he told her.

“Still got it,” Tommy said.

Phil handed Dani a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket and told her they’d been searching Facebook and found a photograph of Logan Gansevoort, taken years earlier at a Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby event.

“Logan was a Cub Scout?” Tommy said.

“Kicked out for smoking. Guess who the other kid in the photograph is?”

“Amos Kasden,” Dani said.

Phil nodded, then told the waitress all he wanted was coffee.

“Did you read the letter I forwarded to you?”

“I did,” Phil said.

“Tommy thinks somebody coached him when he wrote it,” Dani said.

Phil turned to Tommy.

“It seems dumbed down,” Tommy said. “To us.”

Dani appreciated being included, even though it was Tommy’s idea, not hers.

“Have we made any progress bringing Logan in?” she asked Phil.

“We’re being stonewalled. The wheels are turning, but slowly.”

“I might have better luck,” Dani said. “The family lawyer asked me to meet with him tonight at the country club.”

“I made an appointment to go to the nursing home to talk to Abbie Gardener,” Tommy said, looking to Dani for what she assumed was permission.

She shrugged to say,
Why not?

“Good luck. We got nothing from her,” Phil told him. “Maybe you can win her over. You have more charm than I do.”

“I’m lowering my expectations even as we speak.”

“I also left a message with a friend of my grandfather’s,” Dani said. “A man named Ed Stanley. He retired to Montana, where he met Grandpa Howard, but before that he worked for the State Department and lived in Moscow for over twenty years. My grandfather said if anybody could get information about the orphanage that Amos came from, Ed Stanley could.”

“To what end?” Phil asked. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but what difference does it make?”

“Maybe none,” Dani said, “except that to understand a fellow human being in full, you need to start at the beginning. If you can’t get a good picture of the first formative years, you can’t get a clear picture of the grown-up.”

“I think you’re right about the letter,” Phil said to Tommy. “It’s a little too perfect.” He finished his coffee, stood, and threw a five-dollar bill on the table.

“Coffee’s only a dollar,” Dani said.

“I know,” Phil said. “This seems like the kind of place where sooner or later everything that goes on in this town gets talked about. I want the waitress to think well of me the next time I need to ask her a few questions. It’s an old cop trick. Plus it’s deductible.” He turned to Tommy. “Works for PIs too.”

“You told him?” Tommy said once Phil was gone.

“He’s all for it,” Dani said. “He said he’d teach you everything he knows.”

“Yes!”

Dani fished in her bag for her wallet, only to have Tommy tell her it was his treat. When she insisted, he said he’d already had the cashier run his credit card before he sat down.