Read Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) Online

Authors: Letitia L. Moffitt

Tags: #female detective, #paranormal suspense, #noir fiction, #psychic detective

Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (3 page)

BOOK: Trace (TraceWorld Book 1)
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Nola gave no more than a fleeting glance to Grayson Bryant, a tall man in his mid-thirties, who stepped back to let them in. The moment she entered the house and stood next to him, she felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. All the air left her lungs. Something heavy, cold, and wet pressed down on her, blotting out all light and warmth.

She felt—there was no other way to describe it—like she had fallen into a grave.

It lasted only a few seconds. Somehow she found herself standing on the other side of the room from Grayson Bryant—she must have kept walking even while her mind had nearly blacked out—and as she retreated even farther into a corner, the initial gut-punch feeling faded. She saw Grayson eyeing her curiously, so she got out a pad of paper and a pencil and pretended to be taking notes, in reality drawing seismographic squiggles and meaningless glyphs while the detectives began their catechism-like routine.
When did you last . . . Did he seem . . . Were you aware of any . . .
She tuned out the detectives’ words and tried to focus on her surroundings. The room they were in featured the usual sofa-love seat-armchair configuration in a neutral color, and in terms of décor it was the kind of room Nola liked because it was free of clutter, but despite the lack of distractions she was having a hard time clearing her thoughts. Trace usually felt no stronger than a slight breeze, and it was steady, not growing and fading like that, whatever that had been. She waited to see what, if anything, would happen next.

She didn’t have to wait long.

 

___________

 

“It didn’t happen there.”

Nola exhaled deeply and silently. She hated having to give her report to so many people, and it was only the second time she’d ever had to do this, but Dalton had deemed this a high-priority case just as he had Amy Siegel’s, and so Mutt and Jeff and she herself had to give reports.

The half-dozen detectives before her shifted in their chairs, in a way that suggested a certain degree of annoyance with the anticlimax—all that buildup for nothing. Nola breathed in and out once more before she spoke again. “There is no trace in that
house
. But . . .”

Heads lifted. Eyes met hers uncertainly. She tried to take another long slow breath, but the air seemed to shiver in her lungs.

She had to do something she had never done before. She had to step outside the rules she carefully maintained in order to succeed in the face of near-universal contempt for her work. She hadn’t wanted this melodramatic pause—she loathed theatrics—but she couldn’t help but hesitate before she spoke again.

“Grayson Bryant is involved in murder.”

If she had expected her statement to create a sensation, she would have been disappointed. Fortunately, she never expected much of anything from the detectives, didn’t care whether they believed her, responded to them only when they were too rude to let slide, which was often, but not so often that it made any kind of dent in her steely exterior. There were frowns, there were glances exchanged, there were the usual skeptical lip-curlings and nostril-flarings, even a couple of eye-rollings. Only Dalton, Matt, and Jeb showed any signs of concern. Nola had never talked about a person before, only places. One thing was no different this time from all the others, though: she sounded absolutely certain of the truth of her words.

And yet in truth, she wasn’t certain at all.

“Care to elaborate?” Of course Marshall Schultz was the first to respond, and of course he made sure to use the snarky tone he usually took with her.

“I . . . can’t. I don’t know what it means, whether he’s witnessed it or covered for it or done it—or wants to do it. Or something else entirely. I’m not sure. I just know . . .” There were suddenly so many unblinking eyes on her that she could only finish with, “That’s all I have to say.” She nodded awkwardly to Jack Dalton and dashed out of the room, out of the building, to the parking lot, where she got into her car, drove three blocks to a grocery store, and parked again. She hadn’t wanted any of the detectives to see her sitting in her car, but she was too wound up to keep driving.

Something different had happened in that house that morning, something she didn’t understand.

She had heard voices.

As soon as she admitted this to herself, she wanted to laugh hysterically. Voices! Three years it had taken her to build up the PD’s grudging belief that she wasn’t a kook or a charlatan, in large part because she made it clear that what she did was based in science and not psychosis. She was an objective observer who recorded data. That was all. Until now. Now she was hearing voices.

“A trace can’t talk,” she muttered. “A trace has no consciousness. It’s particles, energy. It isn’t a ghost.” She caught herself before she could say, “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” which would have been just too ridiculously B-grade horror movie.

But there was no escaping what she had heard:
Help me
. Over and over, a desperate cry to be saved. It wasn’t coming from any trace attached to the house. The cries were mobile, moving through space, following the man who had been standing next to her when she first entered the room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2

 

The first time she’d experienced trace was upon the death of her maternal grandfather. She hadn’t been close to him at all, had only met him once, in fact, before seeing him on his deathbed, and she’d been so young at that first meeting that she could recall nothing about it. She’d been eight when her mother took her to the hospice center. “Daddy’s dying,” her mother said in the car. Nola figured out quickly that this was about her grandfather; her mother never called Nola’s own father anything but Steven, and Nola had just seen him two weeks ago, alive and healthy in his condo on the other side of town.

Emma Lantri always gave the impression of speaking more to herself than to anyone else present, always sounding distant, looking momentarily startled at any response her words evoked. Nola didn’t bother responding most of the time, and this time was no exception. She loved her mother but sincerely hoped they didn’t have to spend too much time together doing whatever it was they had to do that morning; it got very tiresome listening to someone have a one-sided conversation.

The moment they entered the room, Nola knew: he was dead. Something seemed to brush against her skin, wispy, feather-light. It lasted no more than a few seconds, but there was no question in her mind what it had been, even if she couldn’t put a name to it right then.

“His soul was there,” she said to her mother later in the car. “Wasn’t it?”

Her mother had misunderstood this, of course, in a way so typical of her. “Thank you, Nola, that’s sweet of you to say.” As if Nola had been trying to say he wasn’t really dead but still with them, or some other consoling cliché. When Nola’s father arrived the next morning to pick her up for the weekend, she repeated her statement to him: “Grandpa’s soul was there.”

“Grandpa doesn’t have a soul,” he said. He grinned at his ex-wife, who shook her head and sighed, though it seemed far more likely that she was displeased with his new haircut than his remark. “No one has a soul,” he continued. “That’s just another bullshit story made up to get you to join the cult. ‘Wooooo!’” he moaned comically. “‘Join us! Confess your sins or your soul will burn in hell!’”

“Steven,” Nola’s mother said calmly, “the muffler is dragging again.”

This was the kind of Emma Lantri statement that made most people blink and scratch their heads, wondering if she was a spy speaking in code. Nola and her father were used to it by now. “Ooh, the muffler is dragging!” Steven Lantri shrieked. “Eternal damnation shall be mine!” He started to laugh and then stopped. Perhaps he’d gotten tired of the joke, or perhaps he realized he’d gone too far; his ex-wife’s father had just died and his young daughter had been there. “Nola, can you go get me the duct tape? Bottom drawer under the microwave, I think, unless you’ve moved it.” He said this last part to his ex-wife, and the two of them stood there in the driveway looking at each other in a way Nola was too young to understand then and still, when she thought about it now, didn’t get. She supposed she wasn’t meant to get it. It was solely for the two of them, and maybe even they didn’t understand it.

It was easier when you were a kid and didn’t understand things, though. You were used to not knowing. That first trace experience hadn’t frightened her, but neither had it filled her with some kind of reverential awe. It just happened, that was all, and she understood it instinctively without being able to explain it or even feeling the need to have it explained. It was the same way the next time it happened, and the time after that. In fact, since then, detecting trace hadn’t played much of a part in her everyday existence at all. Life went on in its usual way, often frustrating, sometimes exhilarating, frequently dreary. After halfheartedly earning a B.A. in psychology two towns over at the nearest state college, she’d discovered that her typing speed was far more useful than her degree in terms of obtaining gainful employment. She ended up getting work as a court transcriptionist. The job was mind-numbing, but it paid the bills, and she considered it a plus that she didn’t have to interact with many people. The solitude she’d experienced as the only child of a shut-off single mother was something she continued to seek as an adult.

It was at the courthouse that she got her “big break” as a tracist. On a lunch break one morning, she overheard someone standing nearby—Jack Dalton, as it turned out—talking to a man from the DA’s office about how another county had taken to using psychics to help them with missing-persons cases. The DA man said something sarcastic she didn’t catch, but she did hear Dalton’s reply: “Psychics, not a chance, but tracists are the real thing.”

It was as if he’d suddenly called her name. He knew what a tracist was. He knew that it
was
tracist and not tracer. She hated when people said that; maybe they thought the proper term sounded too much like
racist
, but it was still correct nonetheless. “Problem is,” Dalton continued, “they’re damn hard to find.” If she had been given to drama, she would have stood up and exclaimed, “You found me.” Instead she finished her coffee and her chicken sandwich, went back to work, and called the Police Department the next day.

Three years later, she sat in the Giant Supermarket parking lot, heart beating hard. What had happened that morning in the plain brick house?

She realized that she could be back at that house in a couple of minutes—it couldn’t have been more than a couple of miles away, and she remembered the address. She knew this was about the worst thing she could ever do—unprofessional, for starters, and weird and stalkerish as well. No good could possibly come of it, which, of course, was no deterrent to her wanting to do it all the same.

She was almost ridiculously relieved when her feverish thoughts were interrupted by another car’s headlights shining at her. The driver pulled into the space next to her and Nola quickly pretended to search her purse for something.
No, I wasn’t sitting here contemplating anything illegal. I was looking for my shopping list. Move along. Nothing to see here.

She sensed that the person who got out of the car next to her was not, in fact, moving along—was staring into her window. Unwillingly, she looked up.

It was Jack Dalton. She stared dumbly at him for a second before she hit the button to lower the window—and then realized she’d turned the engine off, so the window remained up.
Smooth, Nola.
She opened the door and got out. It was a chilly evening for early October, but she controlled any shivering—any movement at all—and faced him in silence.

“Hello, Nola,” he said and grinned faintly, as if embarrassed by his own awkwardness. “I’m not stalking you, I promise. I stopped to get some things for dinner and I saw your car.”

She smiled back—she couldn’t help it. She often thought Jack Dalton could have been a politician if he’d had fewer scruples. He exuded warmth without weakness, intelligence with compassion, and charm that wasn’t smarm. He was also tall. That certainly didn’t hurt his image, though it cricked her neck to make eye contact with him. It also made her feel a bit swimmy. If he hadn’t been married (happily, it seemed, damn it all), she would have been lost.

“I know this isn’t how we normally work,” he said while she searched for something non-stupid to say, “but I’d like to talk to you about this case. To be precise, I want to hear what you think about it so far.”

Still no non-stupid responses came to her. Her tongue was a lump in her mouth. She nodded dumbly at him.

“Now? Over some coffee at Javaland? Unless you have plans, of course.”

“That would be fine. Let’s go,” she blurted. And then, so she could stop looking at him, she shut the car door and began marching in the direction of Javaland across the street. Dalton had to scurry to get to her side. And to think she used to wonder why the guys at the police station thought she was such a cold heartless bitch.

After they’d ordered and he’d paid, they sat and made pointless small talk about fall colors (lovely), the weather (pleasant), and Jeb Crawford’s upcoming engagement party (was she going? yes, was he? oh yes). At some point they met each other’s eyes and Jack grinned. They both knew this was, in fact, pointless small talk.

“Pretenses dropping . . . now,” Nola quipped on impulse.

“Fair enough,” Jack said. “You said ‘involved in murder.’ You didn’t say
this
murder. I take it that was on purpose.”

Nola sipped her coffee at length to buy herself some time. Finally, she put her cup down. “It was, but that doesn’t mean I can clarify it for you. All I know is what I said: Grayson Bryant has something to do with murder.”

He had a habit of looking down and away from whomever he was questioning, as if he himself were the one who needed confidence and encouragement to continue talking. It wasn’t a strategy that would work for everyone, and it probably wasn’t even one he used in every situation, but it worked when he did use it. By mirroring the way the other person felt, he somehow managed to build a sense of trust. She could see him doing it now, looking down at his coffee as though he were the one struggling with something unfathomable. “This doesn’t give us much to go on,” he finally said.

BOOK: Trace (TraceWorld Book 1)
12.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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