Leaving Time: A Novel (49 page)

Serenity looks around the office, which is marginally more disarrayed than a bomb site. “It’s a wonder you can find anything at
all
in here, sugar.”

“I wasn’t looking
here
,” I argue, wondering why I am even bothering to explain the flowchart of police evidence preservation to someone who probably believes in magic, and then my eye falls on the small envelope tossed on top of the other detritus on my desk.

Inside is the fingernail I’d found in the seam of the victim’s uniform shirt.

The same uniform shirt that had freaked Jenna out, because it was stiff with blood.

Tallulah takes one look at Serenity and throws her arms around me. “Victor, this is so sweet of you. We never get to hear how the stuff we do in the lab plays out in the real world.” She beams at Jenna. “You must be so happy to have your mom back.”

“Oh, I’m not—” Serenity says, at the same time Jenna goes, “Um, not quite.”

“Actually,” I explain, “we haven’t found Jenna’s mother yet. Serenity’s helping me out with the case. She’s a … psychic.”

Tallulah makes a beeline for Serenity. “I had this aunt? She told me her whole life she was going to leave me her diamond earrings. But she dropped dead without a will, and wouldn’t you know it, those earrings never turned up. I’d love to know which one of my sleazy cousins stole them.”

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” Serenity murmurs.

I lift up the paper bag I have brought to the lab. “I need another favor, Lulu.”

She raises a brow. “By my count you haven’t paid me back for the last one.”

I flash my dimples. “I promise. As soon as this case is solved.”

“Is that a bribe to push your test to the front of the line?”

“Depends,” I flirt. “Do you like bribes?”

“You know what I like …,” Tallulah breathes.

It takes me a moment to untangle myself from her and shake the contents of the paper bag onto a sterile table. “What
I’d
like is for you to take a look at this.” The shirt is dirty, shredded, nearly black.

Tallulah takes a swab from a cabinet, moistens it, and rubs it over the shirt. The cotton tip comes away pinkish brown.

“It’s ten years old,” I tell her. “I don’t know how badly it’s been compromised. But I’m hoping like hell you can tell me if it looks at all like the mtDNA you took from Jenna.” From my pocket, I pull the envelope with the fingernail inside. “And this one, too. If my hunch is right, one is going to be a match, and one isn’t.”

Jenna stands on the other side of the metal table. The fingers of one hand just graze the edge of the shirt fabric. The fingers of the other hand are pressed into her own carotid artery, feeling the pulse. “I’m going to throw up,” she mutters, and she bolts from the room.

“I’ll go,” Serenity says.

“No,” I tell her. “Let me.”

I find Jenna at the brick wall behind the building where we laughed ourselves silly once. Except now she’s dry-heaving, her hair in her face and her cheeks flushed. I put my hand on the small of her back.

She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “Did you ever get the flu when you were my age?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“Me, too. I stayed home from school. But my grandma, she had to go to work. So there was no one to pull my hair out of my face or to hand me a washcloth or get me ginger ale or anything.” She looks at me. “It would have been nice, you know? But instead I get a mom who’s probably dead and a father who killed her.”

She collapses against the wall, and I sit down beside her. “I don’t know about that,” I admit.

Jenna turns to me. “What do you mean?”

“You were the one who first said that your mom wasn’t a murderer.
That the hair on the body proved that she had some contact with Nevvie at the site where she was trampled.”

“But you said you saw Nevvie in Tennessee.”

“I did. And I do think that there was a mix-up, and that the body identified as Nevvie Ruehl wasn’t Nevvie Ruehl. But that doesn’t mean Nevvie wasn’t involved in some way. That’s why I asked Lulu to test the fingernail. Say the blood comes back matching your mom’s and the fingernail doesn’t—that tells me someone was fighting with her before she died. Maybe that fight got out of control,” I explain.

“Why would Nevvie want to hurt my mom?”

“Because,” I say, “your dad isn’t the only one who would have been upset to hear she was having Gideon’s baby.”

“It is a fact universally acknowledged,” Serenity says, “there is no greater force on earth than a mother’s revenge.”

The waitress who comes to refill her coffee cup gives her a strange look.

“You should embroider that on a pillow,” I tell Serenity.

We are at the diner down the street from my office. I didn’t think Jenna would want to eat after being sick, but to my surprise, she is ravenous. She’s consumed an entire plate of pancakes, and half of mine.

“How long will it take the lab to get the results?” Serenity asks.

“I don’t know. Lulu knows I want it done yesterday.”

“I still don’t get why Gideon would have lied about the body,” Serenity says. “He must have known it was Alice when he found her.”

“That’s easy. He’s a suspect if the body is Alice’s. He’s a victim if the body is Nevvie’s. And when
she
wakes up in the hospital, and remembers what went down, she bolts because she’s afraid she’s going to be arrested for murder.”

Serenity shakes her head. “You know, if you get tired of being an investigator, you’d make a fantastic swamp witch. You could make a fortune doing cold readings.”

By now other people in the diner are giving us strange looks. I
guess it’s legitimate to talk about the weather and the Red Sox, but not murder investigations, or the paranormal.

The same waitress walks over. “If you’re nearly done, we could use the table.”

This is bullshit, because the diner is half empty. I start to argue, but Serenity waves her hand. “The hell with them,” she says. She takes a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket—enough to cover the bill with a three-cent tip—and slaps it on the table before hoisting herself out of the booth and walking outside.

“Serenity?”

Jenna’s been so quiet that I’ve almost forgotten about her. “What you said about Virgil being a good swamp witch. What about me?”

Serenity smiles. “Honey, I’ve told you before that you probably have more actual psychic talent than you think. You’ve got an old soul.”

“Can you teach me?”

Serenity looks at me, and then back at Jenna. “Teach you what?”

“How to be psychic?”

“Sugar, it doesn’t work that way—”

“Well, how
does
it work?” Jenna presses. “You don’t actually know, do you? You haven’t had it work, in fact, for a really long time. So maybe trying something different isn’t a bad idea.”

She faces me. “I know you’re all about facts and figures and evidence you can touch. But you’re the one who said that sometimes when you look at the same thing a dozen times, it takes try number thirteen before what you’re looking for jumps out at you. The wallet, and the necklace, and even the shirt with the blood on it—all that stuff’s been waiting for a decade, and no one managed to find it.” Then she turns to Serenity. “You know I said last night that you were in the right place at the right time whenever we found those things? Well, I was there, too. What if those signs weren’t meant for you, but for me? What if the reason you can’t hear my mom is because
I’m
the one she wants to talk to?”

“Jenna,” Serenity says softly, “it would be the blind leading the blind.”

“What have you got to lose?”

She barks a frustrated little laugh. “Oh, let’s see. My self-respect? My peace of mind?”

“My trust?” Jenna says.

Serenity meets my gaze over the kid’s head.
Help me
, she seems to be saying.

I understand why Jenna needs this: Otherwise, it’s not a complete circle, it’s a line, and lines unravel and send you off in directions you never intended to go. Endings are critical. It’s why, when you’re a cop and you tell parents their kid was just found in a car crash, they want to know exactly what happened—if there was ice on the road; if the car swerved to avoid the tractor-trailer. They need the details of those last few moments, because it is all they will have for the rest of their lives. It’s why I should have told Lulu I did not want to go out with her ever again, because until I do, there will still be a sliver of hope in the door that she can wedge herself into. And it’s why Alice Metcalf has haunted me for a decade.

I’m the guy who will never turn off a DVD, no matter how crappy the movie. I cheat and read the last chapter of a book first, in case I drop dead before I finish it. I don’t want to be left hanging, wondering what will happen for eternity.

Which is kind of interesting, because it means that I—Virgil Stanhope, the master of practicality and the Grand Poobah of proof—must believe at least a tiny bit in some of the metaphysical fluff Serenity Jones peddles.

I shrug. “Maybe,” I say to Serenity, “she has a point.”

One reason infants can’t remember events when they are very small is that they don’t have the language to describe them. Their vocal cords simply aren’t equipped, until a certain age, which means instead they use their larynxes for emergency situations only. In fact, there is a direct projection that goes from the amygdala of an infant to his voice box, which can make that baby cry very quickly in a situation of extreme distress. It’s such a universal sound that studies have been done showing that just about every other human—even college-age boys who have no experience with babies—will try to provide assistance.

As the child grows, the larynx matures and is capable of speech. The sound of crying changes as babies turn two or three, and as it does, people not only become less likely to want to help them but actually respond to the sound with feelings of annoyance. For this reason, children learn to “use their words”—because that’s the only way they can get attention.

But what happens to that original projection, the nerve that runs from the amygdala to the larynx? Well … nothing. Even as vocal cords grow up around it like heliotrope, it stays where it was, and is very rarely used. Until, that is, someone leaps out from beneath your
bed at right at sleepaway camp. Or you turn a corner in a dark alley and a raccoon jumps into your path. Or any other moment of complete and abject terror. When that happens, the “alarm” sounds. In fact, the noise you’ll make is one you probably could not replicate voluntarily if you tried.

Back when I was good at this kind of thing, if I wanted to contact someone in particular who had passed, I’d rely on Desmond and Lucinda, my spirit guides. I imagined them as telephone operators connecting to a direct office line, because it was so much more efficient than having an open house and sorting through the hordes to find the individual I was hoping to speak to.

That’s called open channeling: You put out your shingle, open for business, and brace yourself. It’s a little like a news conference, with everyone shouting out questions at once. It’s hell for the medium, incidentally. But I suppose it’s no worse than putting out feelers and having no one show up.

I ask Jenna to find me a place that she thinks was special to her mother, and so the three of us trek back to the elephant sanctuary grounds, hiking to a spot where a giant oak with arms like a titan presides over a patch of purple mushrooms. “I come here sometimes to hang out,” Jenna said. “My mom used to bring me.”

It’s almost ethereal, the way the mushrooms create a little magic carpet. “How come these don’t grow everywhere?” I ask.

Jenna shakes her head. “I don’t know. According to my mom’s journals, it’s where Maura’s calf was buried.”

“Maybe it’s nature’s way of remembering,” I guess.

“More like it’s the extra nitrates in the soil,” Virgil mutters.

I shoot him a sharp glance. “No negativity. Spirits can feel that.”

Virgil looks like he’s about to have a root canal. “Should I just go over there or something?” He points off into the distance.

“No, we need you. This is about energy,” I say. “That’s how spirits manifest.”