Ghost Trackers (21 page)

She forced a shaky smile. “Guess I dozed off.” Spread out on the bed next to her were a half-dozen pamphlets she’d picked up at the Historical Society during her visit there with Trevor. She’d been reading over them while the boys researched cleansing rituals online, more to have something to do than because she thought she’d find any useful information in the pamphlets.

She did her best to keep her tone casual, but Drew must have detected something amiss, because he frowned. “Have a bad dream?”

Trevor was frowning now, too, and both of them wore expressions of concern. She didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what they were thinking. They thought she’d had another “vision,” and they wanted to know what it was, hoped it might provide a little more insight into the bizarre events that had occurred since they’d returned to Ash Creek. At first, she was going to tell them, but she stopped herself. Did her dream qualify as a vision? Both Drew and Trevor had experienced theirs while wide awake, and theirs had both dealt with the past of the Lowry House. Her first dream, the one in which she’d been Little Eyes, fell into this category, but this latest one hadn’t had anything to do with the Lowry House in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it had been only partially based on reality. Back in high school, she and Drew had gone to the cemetery to locate and take a photo of Lucille Dessick’s headstone. But Trevor had gone with them, and they’d visited the cemetery during the daytime. There’d been no apparition of the White Lady, and while the three of them had later driven past the Dessick farm in the weird-looking aquamarine Toyota Corolla that Trevor owned, they hadn’t witnessed any manifestation of Lucille’s spirit there. She and Drew hadn’t run all the way from the cemetery to her house in a
panic, they hadn’t collapsed laughing into each other’s arms on the porch, and they hadn’t kissed. Hell, the entire time they’d known each other, they hadn’t so much as held hands.

Amber had been through enough therapy in her life to have heard that old cliché poking fun at Freudian theory: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Well, sometimes a dream was just a dream. Besides, she wasn’t comfortable telling the guys about it. Especially Drew.

She hoped her smile appeared more genuine this time.

“Nope. As a matter of fact, I didn’t dream at all.”

“You know, one
of the reasons I became a freelance writer was so I didn’t have to wear a tie.”

“Stop tugging at it,” Amber said. “You look like a little boy who can’t sit still in church.”

Trevor, who hadn’t realized that he’d been pulling at his tie to loosen it, did as Amber said. To give his hands something else to do, he picked up his knife and fork and cut off another piece of the rubber chicken on his plate, popped it into his mouth, and chewed. And chewed and chewed and chewed. He swallowed, with no little amount of difficulty, and took a large gulp of his iced tea to wash the mouthful down.

“It never fails. Whenever I attend a banquet, no matter what entrée I order, I always end up wishing I’d picked something else.”

“It’s an inalterable law of the universe that banquet food is always lousy,” Drew said. “If it’s any consolation, my fish is dry and tasteless.”

“My eggplant Parmesan is good,” Amber said. As if to illustrate, she put another piece in her mouth and chewed. She then pointed to her dessert
with her fork. “But not as tasty as that cheesecake looks!”

Trevor smiled. “Look at the three of us sitting here like real grown-ups. This is a long way from Flying Pizza, huh?”

Both Trevor and Drew wore suits—charcoal gray and navy blue, respectively—and Amber had on a lovely green dress that left her shoulders bare and had a neckline just low enough to reveal a hint of cleavage. She wore her hair up, and with the addition of earrings, a silver necklace, and understated makeup, she looked quite beautiful. More, she looked like a strong, confident woman, unlike the Amber they’d been reintroduced to yesterday. Despite their current situation and all of its dangers and uncertainties, she seemed to be thriving. Then again, maybe she was thriving
because
of those dangers. Crisis situations could create trauma, but they could also jolt people out of their old patterns of behavior. Somehow, though, Trevor doubted that Drew would recommend an encounter with a murderous otherworldly force as an alternative form of therapy.

Not that Drew’s mind was on professional matters at the moment. Despite their earlier decision to stick together, Amber had kicked him and Trevor out of her room when it was time to start getting ready for the banquet. Drew had protested, but Amber insisted that she wasn’t about to get
dressed with the two of them around, and besides, they needed to return to their own rooms to put on their monkey suits.

Trevor had doubted that she had come over all shy around them—after all, she could have gotten ready in the bathroom and kept the door closed. He figured that Amber hadn’t wanted Drew to see her until the banquet started. Trevor was hardly a man of the world, but he knew enough about women to know that they liked to maintain a bit of mystery about them and that they liked to control the first impression they made on a man after they’d spent a significant amount of time making themselves look good.

Her efforts had paid off. Drew had been nervous that something bad might happen to her while the three of them were separated, but when she walked into the banquet hall—arriving later than both Drew and Trevor, naturally—the stunned expression on Drew’s face, which he, of course, had attempted to cover, proved that she’d succeeded. He had barely taken his eyes off her the entire meal. And she was doing an excellent job of making him think that she didn’t notice. Trevor never failed to find it funny that Drew, a trained observer of human behavior, was so often clueless about Amber’s feelings for him.

He wasn’t jealous of his two friends. He was a red-blooded, hetero male and recognized how attractive Amber was, and he cared deeply about
her but in a brotherly way. Ever since the three of them had met as kids, she and Drew had only had eyes for each other, and that was fine with him. He just wished they would acknowledge their feelings for each other and get on with it. Of course, if they did, that would give him one fewer thing to tease them about. He smiled.

“You find something amusing?” Drew asked.

The two of you
, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Just wondering what the kids we used to be would think of the adults we became. That we
all
became.” He glanced around. The three of them were the only ones sitting at their table, but most of the rest of the tables in the hall were filled. There’d been a good turnout. Their graduating class had close to two hundred people in it, and at a quick guess, it looked to him that around eighty or so had come this weekend. People were eating and talking, but quietly, their voices hushed and expressions subdued. “Why is everything so down? Do they miss being teenagers
that
much?”

“It’s not that,” Drew said. “Word about Sean’s and Jerry’s deaths has gotten around, and it’s cast a pall over the proceedings. People are already prone to contemplate the passage of time at events like these, which in turn leads to thoughts of mortality. The deaths only serve to strengthen those feelings and bring them even closer to the surface.”

“I wish the alumni committee would’ve canceled
the rest of the weekend,” Amber said. “All these people together in one place like this . . .”

“It’s like fish in a barrel,” Trevor said, “just waiting for someone, or in our case, some
thing
, to come along and start shooting.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Amber said.

Speaking of the alumni committee, they all sat at a table toward the front of the room, near a large drop-down screen that displayed a looped presentation of a collage of yearbook photos. When the banquet began and the presentation started, it was accompanied by the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” which Trevor found an odd choice, considering that the song had come out a couple of years after they’d graduated. It seemed a little downbeat for a celebration, but then, maybe that was why it had been chosen, for it seemed to fit the melancholy mood of the evening. He was thankful that the song had only played once and didn’t continue playing while the presentation proceeded along its endless course.

Greg sat with the members of the alumni committee, all of them—not counting him—former big wheels in high school: captain of the football team, head cheerleader, band field commander, valedictorian and salutatorian . . .

“Never thought I’d see Greg Daniels hobnobbing with the in-crowd,” Trevor said.

“Things change,” Drew said with a shrug. “People change.”

“Maybe so, but that much? Besides, isn’t the stereotypical dynamic of events like this that people revert back to type? I mean, look at that table. The cool kids are still sitting with the cool kids, like this was the high-school cafeteria instead of a banquet hall. The only difference is that Greg is sitting with them.”

“I told you about our conversation in the lobby,” Drew said. “How he struck me as having at least some of the features of a sociopathic personality. Sociopaths are masters of manipulation. They can make you like them and think it was all your idea.”

“Well, right now, he’s not making me think he likes
us
,” Trevor said. “He hasn’t so much as stopped by our table to say hi.”

Drew smiled. “Feeling neglected?”

“Hardly. But we need to talk to him about the night the Lowry House burned down. And as much as I’m enjoying sitting here with you two and trying not to choke to death on this god-awful excuse for chicken, we can’t ask Greg any questions if he’s sitting all the way on the other side of the damn room.”

“If he doesn’t come over before the meal’s finished, we’ll try to catch him before the dance starts,” Drew said.

Amber had been silent for the last several minutes while they’d been talking about Greg, but now she spoke. “Is it really that important that we talk with him?”

Trevor and Drew turned to look at her. Although she’d only gotten three-quarters of the way through her eggplant, she pushed it aside and began working on her cheesecake. She kept her attention focused on the dessert and spoke between bites.

“We’ve been over this before, but we all remember that he didn’t go with us to the Lowry House, and he wasn’t there when the emergency crews arrived. I don’t see how he could have anything important to tell us.”

Trevor detected a studied casualness in her tone, as if she was working hard to make it seem as if what she was saying wasn’t that big a deal, when in reality it was. The question was
why
it was a big deal.

She went on after another bite of cheesecake. “And if that’s the case, why drag him into this mess if we don’t have to? What if by talking to him, we cause the force, entity, whatever it is, to notice him? We might end up putting him at risk. Just because we’re desperate for answers doesn’t give us the right to place other people in danger.”

Drew frowned as he looked at Amber, and Trevor could guess what his friend was thinking. She made a good point, but it was the way she was making it. She didn’t look at either of them as she spoke, and she didn’t look in Greg’s direction.

“I’d say talking to him was a calculated risk,” Drew began, “except that we have so little data about what’s going on that we can’t gauge the danger. We could be putting him at risk by not talking to him.”

“And none of us spoke with Sean or Jerry,” Trevor pointed out. “But that didn’t keep either of them alive.”

“Is there some other reason you don’t want to talk with Greg?” Drew asked. Now it was his turn to speak in a calm, casual manner, and Trevor wondered how often his patients had heard that same tone of voice.

Evidently, Amber recognized Drew’s tone for what it was, for she dropped her fork into her plate with a clatter loud enough to make people at nearby tables look in their direction. Amber turned to glare at him.

“Are you suggesting I’m lying?” she asked.

Drew sidestepped the question. “The dream you had about the massacre, the one in which you were Little Eyes . . . Greg was in it, too, wasn’t he? It was a disturbing dream, and it would be natural for you to associate him with it, not just the events of the dream but the emotions it evoked. You could find talking with him uncomfortable for that reason.”

Drew sounded both rational and empathetic, but it was clear from the angry expression on Amber’s face that instead of reassuring her, his words were
only making her angrier. Trevor decided to step in before things got any worse.

“I’ve been thinking about your dream, Amber. At first, I assumed it was the result of some sort of psychic contact, some connection you made with the past. And then, when Drew and I had similar visions that dealt with the history of the Lowry House, I figured we were following in your metaphysical footsteps.”

She still looked angry, but her attention was on Trevor rather than Drew now, and she appeared to be listening.

Trevor continued. “But there are some important differences. The most obvious is that you were asleep during your vision, while Drew and I were awake. And you were a different person in the dream, the Native American girl named Little Eyes. Drew and I appeared as ourselves in our visions. The final difference is that Greg showed up in your dream. He looked like someone from that time and place, a British hunter, but he spoke to you as himself. He even told you it was a dream you were having.”

“What are you saying? That my dream was just a dream, after all, and nothing more?”

Drew had been listening as Trevor spoke, and now he looked thoughtful. “We haven’t found any evidence that proves that a massacre such as the one you dreamed about occurred on the land where the Lowry House would be built. Whereas
the visions Trevor and I had were based on historical fact.”

“So, my dreams aren’t important?” she said. “Why is that? Because I have a history of depression?” Her voice rose on this last word, once more drawing the attention of people at surrounding tables.