Last Breath (17 page)

Hearing the panic in her voice, the woman’s face softened. “Your dance is Saturday night?”

Cassidy nodded numbly.

“Well, I’ll do the best I can. If I don’t have any luck, could you use these instead?”

“Oh, no,” Cassidy breathed, “absolutely not. No way.”

“All right, then. I don’t understand any of this, but I’ll do my best. Call me on Thursday. I’ll know by then.”

Dazed and shaken, Cassidy left the store. How could this have happened? Had she really called the woman and changed the order? Could she have done that without even knowing she was doing it? Was this just another part of what was wrong with her?

It’s like some other part of me is deliberately trying to sabotage me, she thought dazedly as she made her way through the mall. A very
sick
part of me.

And what was she going to tell everyone when she got back to the dorm?

Nothing. She was going to tell them nothing. She would pray like crazy that the clerk managed to come up with the black and silver and if she didn’t, there’d be time to face the music then. But not now. She was too tired. Too tired.

And scared. She had never been so scared. Something terrible was happening to her mind, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Where was she to go for help? Who should she talk to?

She was crying quiet tears of despair as she drove past Nightmare Hall, thinking as she did so that the fall down the cellar stairs hadn’t been as bad as this, this terrifying feeling that her brain was dissolving and she couldn’t stop it from happening.

The tears blurred her vision. She reached with her right hand for a tissue just as something large and bulky darted out of the woods and into her path.

Cassidy screamed, stomped down on the brake, but too late.

There was a loud, sickening thunk and a body flew up into the air, somersaulted, and landed fifty feet away at the edge of the woods.

A
S THE CAR SCREECHED
to a halt, Cassidy’s head snapped forward, slamming into the steering wheel. But not before she’d seen the body flying up into the air.

She didn’t lift her head. She couldn’t. Fully conscious, she was nevertheless too dazed with shock to move.

She struggled to think. She had hit something? Someone? Oh, no, no, not that. She couldn’t have.

But she
had
. She had felt the impact, seen the…body…

Oh, God, no.

She should get out of the car. She should go look, see how bad it was.

She lifted her head. Something warm and sticky dripped down her cheek, teased the corner of her lip. She reached out tentatively with her tongue. Salty…but not tears. Blood. From her forehead.

She should get out. She should go look.

Had she
killed
someone?

No, no, she couldn’t have. Couldn’t have.

But she knew she could have.

She sat very still, her hands sitting limply on the wheel. She had to do something.

But she could not get out and look at that body. She could not.

Her hand reached up and threw the car into reverse, her foot came down hard on the accelerator, and in a spin of gravel and screeching tires, she raced backward until she reached the driveway to Nightmare Hall. Spun the wheel sharply right, tore up the driveway, stopped the car, jumped out, ran to the front door and began pounding with both fists, screaming for help.

Jess Vogt was the first to reach the door. Ian Banion was right behind her. “What on earth…?” Jess cried when she saw Cassidy’s tear-streaked face and blood streaming from a cut on her forehead. “Cassidy, what happened?”

“Come, come with me,” Cassidy gasped, “in my car. Hit someone, I hit someone, on the highway, come with me, please, I can’t look, I can’t…”

Without asking any questions, Jess and Ian ran to the car with her, Jess taking the driver’s seat, urging Cassidy into the front passenger seat, Ian in the back.

No one said a word.

“There!” Cassidy cried when they reached the spot, “it was right there. He’s…he’s lying there, at the edge of the woods. Is he dead? Go see if he’s dead. Oh, God, please don’t let him be dead.”

“I’ll check,” Ian volunteered and jumped out, leaving the lights on so he could see.

The two girls sat frozen in the front seat, holding hands, as Ian’s tall, lanky figure walked into the path of the lights.

He walked up the highway several hundred feet.

Then he turned around and walked back again, clearly searching the road and the edge of the woods with his eyes.

He shrugged as he turned to go over the same ground a second time.

“Why hasn’t he found him?” Cassidy whispered. Her head was beginning to ache terribly. “He was right in front of me. I never saw a thing until it was too late.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Jess said soothingly. “I’m sure it wasn’t. And maybe he wasn’t even hurt badly, Cassidy.”

“Oh, yes, he was. He had to be. He hit my car so hard, and then he flew up into the air…just like my bicycle, that night by the state park.” Immediately she thought, I shouldn’t have said that. No one believes that ever happened. I don’t even believe it now.

Ian returned to the car, opened the door, got in, turned toward Cassidy. “I don’t know what you hit, Cassidy, but it couldn’t have been a person, or else they couldn’t have been hurt. Because I looked up and down the highway twice, and didn’t see a thing. There’s no one there. No one at all.”

“N
O, IAN,” CASSIDY SAID,
wringing her hands, “that’s not right. That’s not
right
! I hit him, the front of my car hit him and he flew…he has to be there, he
has
to!”

Ian shook his head. “Cassidy, I’m telling you, there’s nothing there. Nothing. Not an animal, not a person, nothing. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

And Cassidy knew that. Everyone on campus knew that Ian Banion wouldn’t lie.

It was too much. Too much. The terror of believing that she had killed or injured another human being had already sucked most of the life out of her. Now, the relief that she hadn’t done that, after all, was so overwhelming, it drained the last bit of strength from her bones.

“But the horrifying knowledge that something she had believed to be so real was just another hallucination was the most draining of all. All of those things combined sent her over the edge.

The wail of despair that came from her mouth then chilled Jess and Ian. They had expected Cassidy to be relieved by Ian’s news. They stared in horror as instead, she hid behind her hands, deep, mournful sounds pouring out of her.

“Get her to the infirmary,” Ian told Jess in a low, intense voice,
“now!”

Cassidy’s despairing wails continued as they raced up the highway to campus.

The doctor who cared for her was friendly and gentle. She bandaged Cassidy’s forehead, gave her a pill to calm her down and then sat by her side until the medication took effect, saying there were two doctors on duty and no other patients.

“Your friends tell me you’ve had a rough time of it,” the doctor said. Her plastic name tag read
Dr. Cleo Mandini, M.D.

Cassidy turned her face away. Jess and Ian had talked about her to the doctor? Probably told this nice woman that Cassidy Kirk was a basket case, ready for a padded cell. Humiliating. It was so humiliating. But true. So true.

The pill was working. Her headache was going away, and there wasn’t anything wrong with her breathing, in spite of the horror of what had just happened out on the highway. Or…
hadn’t
happened. Whatever, Cassidy thought foggily, letting the medication begin to erase her anguish.

The doctor was still sitting beside her bed.

“I see things, you know,” Cassidy said in a low, confidential tone. “Did they tell you? I see things that aren’t there. Everyone knows it. I even know it. Don’t you think that’s funny, that I know it, too? I always thought…I always thought that when you hallucinate, you don’t
know
that you did it. But
I
know. Does that mean I’m not as far gone as some people?”

“What kind of things do you see?” the doctor asked, patting Cassidy’s hand.

Jess and Ian must have told her to check me out, Cassidy thought. She’s going to play psychiatrist for me. Isn’t that nice. God knows I need one. “Well,” she said lazily, “I see essays that I didn’t really write, and I see the wrong time on my clock and wristwatch, and I see the wrong date on invitations and I see money that isn’t really there and I see stickers on doors and then there’s this car…this car…the car is the worst. Only it doesn’t really exist. I know, because I checked. It’s only in my head.”

“What kind of car is it?”

Nice of her to humor me, Cassidy thought. Well, why not? Maybe talking about the car would make it seem less real. “It’s a TransAm. Black. With dark, tinted windows that make it look like no one’s driving it. And it has these cute little red hearts, two of them, tied to the driver’s door handle.”

The room was so white, so very white, there seemed to be white everywhere. And it was chilly. Maybe she wasn’t really in the infirmary, after all. Maybe she was lying outside on the commons in the middle of a cold, white blizzard. Cassidy shivered and pulled the scratchy white blanket up under her chin.

And then Dr. Cleo Mandini, M.D., said so easily, so casually, as if she were saying that it just might rain tomorrow, “Oh, I know that car. It’s not a figment of your imagination, though. It’s very real. And it’s right here on campus.”

“N
O,” CASSIDY SAID, “THE
TransAm isn’t on campus. I checked the car registrations. Students, faculty, and staff. No TransAm.”

“That’s because,” the doctor said patiently, “that car belongs to Pat Benham. Did belong to him, I should say. He died, you know. Last year. The best American history teacher we ever had here, and the man grew the most beautiful roses in this county. Cancer took him. Left his wife with three small children.”

Brenham. Three small children. The monsters Talia had talked about Ann baby-sitting? Was there more than one Professor Brenham on campus?

“Administration probably removed the car from the computer after Pat died. That’s why you couldn’t find it when you checked. His wife doesn’t drive standard transmission, and she has a little compact car of her own, so she wouldn’t have updated the registration on the TransAm. Can’t bear to sell it, though; Pat was so crazy about that car. It just sits in their garage. Every once in a while, she gets some student to take it for a spin, just to keep it in working order so she can sell it when she’s ready.”

Cassidy was struggling, through her drug-induced fog, to comprehend what the doctor was telling her. There really
was
a TransAm on campus? Black, with tinted glass and a pair of hearts dangling from the driver’s door? There really was a car exactly like the one she’d seen?

Although comprehension was slow in coming, when it did come, it was stunning.
She had never hallucinated the car. It really did exist, and she really had seen it!

She wasn’t too foggy to understand the full implications of that one, astounding realization. It didn’t end there. There was more, much more. She fought to sort it all out. If that car existed, then maybe her essay had existed, maybe the clock really had been an hour slow. Yes, that was possible. Probable, even. And the invitation really
had
had the wrong date on it when she opened it, she really
had
received the crisp new ten and twenties, the sticker really had been on the cellar door…

It went on and on.

“I’m not quite sure why you thought you had imagined the car,” Dr. Mandini said. “Why would you think that?”

And the answer to that question came to Cassidy as if it were hanging in neon lights from the ceiling:
Because someone wanted me to think it. All of it. Everything. Someone wanted me to believe that I was losing my mind.

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “It wasn’t just the car. It was a lot of things.” But it had been the incidents involving the car that had been the most frightening, the most devastating. Someone had been driving that car when it had terrified her. Someone who had access to it.

Who did she know who had access to the TransAm?

“Is there more than one Professor Benham on campus?” she asked, knowing that it was one of the most important questions she had ever asked anyone.

Dr. Mandini shook her head. “Nope. Just Leona. It’s hard for her, raising those three kids alone. Pat was a terrific father, and I know those kids must miss him terribly. Leona has baby-sitters to help, but it’s not the same at all.”

Yes, I know she has baby-sitters, Cassidy thought, feeling sick. One baby-sitter in particular. My friend. My roommate. My friend and roommate who has easy access to that black TransAm. And maybe I still wouldn’t suspect her, in spite of that, if it weren’t for one other little thing. No, not so little. My friend and roommate had to have known all along that such a car was sitting in Professor Brenham’s garage. But she never told me that even when I thought I was going insane because of a phantom car that looked exactly like it.

How could you baby-sit repeatedly for a family and not know they had a black TransAm sitting unused in their garage?

Yes, Cassidy thought, I know Leona Brenham has baby-sitters.

And one of them is Ann Ataska, my friend and roommate.

The medication was taking hold fully, turning Cassidy’s limbs to water, making her eyelids heavy. But she couldn’t sleep now. Not now, when she was so close to the truth.

The TransAm wasn’t the only thing Ann had access to. The clock, the wristwatch, the invitation, the essay, the fanny pack with the money in it. At some point, Ann had had access to all of those things. She could have stolen Cassidy’s letter to Misstery, destroyed it, and then written the phony letter of confirmation from the group. She hadn’t been at the car wash, working, so she could have been at the car wash
driving the TransAm
. She’d been at the party at Nightmare Hall, and could have put coffee in a Coke can and a sticker on the cellar door. Cassidy remembered now how Ann had made such a big deal of the stickers at the party.