Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (15 page)

Still she hesitated, and Grayson saw it. He abruptly stepped forward. “You know what, let’s go for a drive instead. It’s a nice day and we won’t be getting too many more of these for a while.” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head at Nola. “Would that be all right?”

Nola could only nod. She felt that same uncertainty she always felt around Grayson, but it was starting to feel just a little less threatening and a little more intriguing.

They took his car, and Grayson drove at a leisurely pace around the outskirts of town, through the same sorts of tree-lined streets, both of them silent, though not awkwardly so. After a few minutes, Nola suddenly spoke the first thing that came to her mind. “When was the first time you experienced trace?”

The question surprised him a little—as well it should, given that it surprised Nola herself—but there was no shameful faltering as he answered. “Gibson Park, the summer when I was six. I was with my mother. There was a homeless man lying on a bench, and as we walked by, I turned to my mother and said, ‘He’s dead.’ Just like that, I knew. You know how it is. Of course, my mother said, ‘Don’t stare, it’s rude, he’s just sleeping,’ and all the usual things as she tried to hustle me away, but I insisted. ‘He’s dead. That man is dead.’ I said it maybe five times and my mother was starting to worry.” He hesitated, looking uncertainly at Nola. “As Anna would say, when you’re rich, white, and male, people listen to you, even if you’re just six years old.”

Nola laughed, and he looked relieved, a relief she privately shared. They were having an almost normal conversation. He could mention a woman he’d been involved with and there wouldn’t be any prickly weirdness between them over it. Of course, they were still talking about a not-so-normal topic, but that was to be expected. “So, what did your mother do?”

“Called 911. The paramedics showed up, pronounced the guy dead. They thanked me as though I’d saved someone from a burning building. My mother bought me ice cream. She told me I should be a doctor when I grew up. That wasn’t the moment I decided to become a doctor, though. It was the moment I knew that there was something in the world I perceived that was hidden to other people. Again, I know I was lucky to be privileged. I was treated like a prodigy and not a freak. I was allowed to see tracism as a gift.”

“It isn’t a gift, though,” Nola interjected. “It isn’t a curse either. It’s just something we can do.”

“That, Nola, is a gross understatement.”

She watched the familiar sights of the town out her window—Grayson seemed to be pointedly keeping them within her comfort zone—and then asked the next thing that popped into her head. “When did you start to use trace?”

This time there was no surprise. He seemed to have expected the question. “Medical school, Johns Hopkins. Obviously I was spending a lot of time in hospitals, so I had to figure out a way to get used to being around trace all the time. It was impossible to shut it off completely, and I quickly discovered it was better if I didn’t even try. I let myself perceive it.”

“What was that like at first?”

“Scary, but then liberating. Like I was finally myself, my true self, for the first time.”

For a while neither one said anything. They had reached the edge of town, by the very same Gibson Park where Grayson had first encountered trace, and now he pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. “Do you know I haven’t been back here since that day?” he said. “Not because it was so traumatic, though. Frankly it’s not much of a park.”

“No, it isn’t. I never come here. I doubt even homeless people come here anymore. Too much dog poop nobody cleans up. Too many dirty needles in the bushes that have been there since the ’70s.” She shook her head. “God. Sometimes I hate this town to a ridiculous degree.”

“Why don’t you leave?”

“For the same reason everyone else doesn’t leave. It’s safe. It’s familiar. It’s the devil you know, though nobody thinks to question whether it makes sense to stay with something you equate with devils.”

They watched a creased paper bag from a fast-food joint move through the parking lot in short bursts, and then they simultaneously turned toward each other, though neither spoke for a moment. It didn’t feel awkward to Nola. Perhaps Grayson was the devil she didn’t know, but how could that be any worse given everything that had happened lately?

Grayson spoke first. “Let’s go down to Manhattan.” She raised an eyebrow. “We can be there right in the thick of the night, when everything’s happening. There’s a paella place I know that has great sangria, and a bar around the corner with live music, and an all-night dim sum joint down the block. Lucky thing, too, the weather’s great for walking. You know how it is in the city: you can just walk and walk and walk, and there’s always something to see.”

She did know, though she’d been to the city only a handful of times. It was less than four hours away, yet she seldom remembered this when faced with a planless weekend. Now she was nearly jumping out of her seat with excitement to get going. All that life, all that energy, and they could be right in the middle of it, together, in just a little while.

A hazy memory came to her: spring break during her junior year of college, she and two friends going down to Manhattan for St. Patrick’s Day. They caught some of the parade and then headed downtown to hit the pubs. Nola wasn’t a big drinker (though she was proud to have inherited her father’s impressive tolerance for alcohol); she just wanted to wander around the city for a bit and enjoy the sights. After a lunch of fish-and-chips and a couple pints apiece, they left their first pub in search of another, preferably one with live music. They hadn’t gone halfway down the block when Nola teetered, wobbled, and fell to the sidewalk. She felt like she could barely catch her breath, like she’d been running for a long time very hard. People who saw her just thought she was stumbling drunk like every other kid on the street that afternoon. She wasn’t, and her worried friends knew it. Everything was OK, she assured them, just a little dizziness from some cold medicine, perhaps. She urged them to continue and not let this spoil the fun. But the fun had been spoiled for Nola, even if she didn’t show it. She knew what had happened. And sure enough, that night when she scoured the online news for crime reports, she found it. A man had been stabbed and killed at that very spot three nights before.

The hazy memory was suddenly becoming sharp, and with it a sharp coldness ripped into her happy mood. Was it the life and the energy Grayson sought, or the fact that a city that densely populated teemed not only with life but also with death?

Grayson continued to look at Nola, seeking her answer. They could get out of Redfort right then and there. She could leave behind frustration and futility for at least one night. She wasn’t bound to one location. She could be free, even if it was just a temporary freedom. “OK,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He smiled, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot. He drove at a leisurely speed, and Nola appreciated it. They could take their time. Time moved at an agonizing pace when you felt trapped, but now that she could escape the trap, there was no hurry.

A few blocks later they stopped at an intersection and Grayson gestured at a teenage boy on a bike waiting to ride across the intersection. The boy nodded and proceeded. Grayson took the opportunity to turn to Nola again. She smiled. He leaned over and kissed her.

Tires squealed next to them. Something thudded against pavement. It was the boy on the bike, now sprawled in the intersection. The Lexus that had suddenly appeared next to them had hit him.

Nola leaped out of the car and was the first to reach him. “Oh shit, shit! Are you OK? Don’t get up just yet. Be careful.” Behind her the hazard lights of Grayson’s car flashed and he got out and knelt next to her.

The boy sat up surprisingly quickly and grinned at Nola, though he did look a bit shaky. “Yeah, I’m good, no worries. I’ve taken worse spills than this.”

The driver of the Lexus, a paunchy man in a dark suit, approached cautiously and stood several feet from them. When he saw that the boy seemed all right, he straightened up. “The hell you think you were doing, flying into the intersection like that?”

Nola looked up in disbelief, as did the boy. “Hey, asshole, you almost fucking
killed
me! I could have died
right here
. Understand?” He looked back at Nola and exchanged disgusted looks with her.

Next to her, Grayson was silent.

When they determined that the boy was in fact fine, nothing broken or twisted, the Lexus driver got back in his car without another word and drove away, the boy flipping him off as he went. He thanked Nola and Grayson for stopping and then got on his bike and sailed off as if nothing had happened. There was nothing left for the two of them to do but leave as well.

There could not have been a more awkward silence in the car. Several hour-long minutes passed before Grayson finally said in a quiet voice, “Say what you’re thinking.”

She knew he already knew what she was thinking. There was no point in saying it, but no point in trying to conceal it either. “You wanted it to happen.”

“Since you’ve already decided that’s true, there’s no reason for me to deny it.”

“Since it doesn’t matter to you that I might think such a thing, you must not feel that it’s wrong.”

“Let’s spell it out. You’re accusing me of wishing that boy had gotten killed so I could get my trace fix. Is it a slippery slope from there to doing my own killings?”

“Grayson, I know you had nothing to do with Culver’s death. I just—”

“How do you know that?”

The question baffled her. “Culver killed himself at Greenbriar. No one else was involved. You weren’t even in the state when it happened. What are you . . .” She cut herself off. Something seemed to be stirring in her brain, as though through murky water.

“Yes?” Grayson said mildly.

“Maybe he didn’t die at Greenbriar,” she said slowly. Grayson did not respond. “Maybe he died somewhere else.”

“And where might that be?”

“Your house.”

“And that being the case, why didn’t you pick up his trace when you came to my house with the police?”

“If he had died in your house, I wouldn’t have known, because you would have absorbed the trace.”

“That is correct.”

“Someone would have moved his body to Greenbriar.”

“Also correct.”

She wasn’t sure which of two questions she should ask next. She feared the answers to both. “Did you move him?”

“And why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why anyone would move him if it wasn’t murder.”

Then he answered the other question. “As far as I know, it wasn’t murder.” He locked his eyes on hers. “I didn’t kill Culver. I didn’t find his body. I didn’t move his body. But I know he died in my house, because I got his trace. I felt it the moment I entered the house. And somehow I knew it was him, even before I’d heard about his disappearance.”

It was a lot to absorb, but Nola forced herself to keep a clear head and continue pressing him for answers. “So you didn’t move him. Then someone else did. Who? Grayson, don’t you want to know who and why?”

“Culver is dead. He isn’t coming back. None of this mucking around with forensic reports and autopsies can change that essential fact. I don’t know who moved him, I don’t know why they moved him, and I don’t care. I haven’t cared to know the details of Culver’s death ever since I knew he died.”

Now she had to ask a third question, for he had set her up for it, it seemed. “You knew he was dead. You knew he died in your house. You . . .” She swallowed even though her mouth was dry. “You got his trace.” He nodded. “Why didn’t you say anything to the police?”

He looked as if he were trying not to laugh, though there was nothing lighthearted or comical in his eyes. “Did they listen to you when you tried to tell them? There wasn’t any other evidence. No blood. No weapon. The only ‘evidence’ was his trace, and only I could get it. Since I had nothing to do with his disappearance, I didn’t care if the cops suspected me, but no way in hell was I going to have them look at me like some kind of freak. You know that look, Nola. I
know
you know what I mean, even if you refuse to admit it.”

Of course she knew that look, but not everyone was like that. Mutt and Jeff certainly weren’t. Neither was Dalton. Or was he? Dalton had hardly looked in her direction at all during the briefing. There was a time when he might have listened to her, but not anymore. And it wasn’t as though she had listened to Dalton, either. She was appalled at Grayson’s seeming indifference to the situation, but couldn’t she herself be accused of seeming
too
involved? She’d pursued this “case” even when she had no real reason to do so.

Nola realized abruptly that they had stopped, and she looked up. They were back in front of his house, her own car just ahead. Obviously, Manhattan was not going to happen.

As she was reaching for the car-door handle to let herself out, Grayson spoke, sounding tired but steady. “Culver deserved a dignified death. At the very least, I could give him that. And corny as it sounds, in a way he’s still with me.”

Nola wished she could believe that Grayson really meant those words. They were corny, yes, but they would give a real poignancy to the events, make them seem less sordid—and make
him
seem less solely self-interested. She was not convinced. Most of all, she felt as tired as he sounded. She let herself out without another word or look.

14

It was already past 10 p.m. Nola drove home slowly, this time with the slowness of weary resignation. The case was over, at least according to the police, her connection with Grayson probably over as well, her career as a tracist almost certainly over. She didn’t need to concern herself with Culver Bryant ever again, though she had no notion at all of what would concern her going forward. She couldn’t think about that. The future seemed like a big blank nothing.