Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (4 page)

She read the expression he was clearly trying to conceal. “Yeah, I know how all this sounds,” she said. “I know it’s impossible to put any of this stuff on official records unless you want to be the biggest laughingstock in three counties.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he joked, though he obviously wasn’t in much of a joking mood. “No, I won’t be putting any of this on official records, but it
is
something to keep in mind. It’s useful information, Nola. Thank you.”

She felt absurdly pleased at his gratitude. At the same time, she knew he wasn’t finished with her yet and kept her smile a wry one. “But?”

Now his smile mirrored hers. “Yeah. But.”

“But don’t mess with the case?”

“Don’t be
worried
about the case. Don’t let it take over your life. I’ve seen it happen to nearly every detective. For whatever reason, one particular case gets them in its grip and won’t let go. It isn’t fun to watch, so for me, Nola, go home and relax a bit and get your mind off all this as much as you can.”

“OK,” she said, “I will, for you.” She hoped it didn’t sound too infatuated. Then she hoped it didn’t sound too sarcastic. Then she gave up, got up, and left.

3

Nola watered her ficus. It seemed to be doing well, she thought with cautious optimism, putting down the watering can and picking up her glass of Chianti. “First you drink, then I drink.
Salud
,” she said, then sighed.
Talking
to houseplants. It’s come to this.
After draining her glass, she returned to the kitchen to refill it. She was becoming one of
those
people, single and solitary on a Saturday night, drinking too much and talking to plants, or cats, or furniture. She shrugged it off. Lots of people did this. There was hardly any shame in it. And the wine was good, anyway, and about a tenth of the price of what she’d have to pay if she went out to yet another crowded bar filled with the same bunch of people, all being harshly critical of each other, all fearing themselves to be the biggest loser of them all, something she knew from experience. She’d stay in and have a big bowl of pasta with her wine and then watch some trash on TV and make sarcastic comments about it. The ficus would listen without judgment.

A neighbor had given her the plant as a gift when she moved into this apartment a year ago. Nola would never have bought houseplants herself. It wasn’t because she hated them but because she’d never had a green thumb. She used to joke about it with friends, but privately she worried. What if the ability to detect trace came with a sort of compensatory inability to sustain life? All those goldfish she’d begged for as a child going belly-up one after another mere days after their purchase. Did her connection to the recently dead give off some sort of death vibe?

Whenever she caught herself thinking this way, she gave herself a mental shaking. Lots of people failed to provide adequate care for houseplants. Pet goldfish always died on kids. They might have been made just for that purpose, genetically engineered for a short life so children could be taught certain unpleasant realities. It wasn’t just her.

She always needed to make sure she didn’t become too enamored with this “ability” of hers, lest she end up becoming one of those kooky charlatans taking money from the vulnerable bereaved. She could have done that, taken advantage of people that way. She could have combed the obituaries looking for potential marks, worked her way into their lives, told them how she could connect them to the part of the recently deceased that remained alive. But that would have been impossible for her, she knew, and not just for moral reasons. She couldn’t imagine making things up about the trace experience, certainly not to the point of comforting the bereaved. It wasn’t magical or mystical. It happened, and it always happened the same way, no matter who died.

A big reason she resisted turning her ability into something mystical was her hope that it might one day be perceived as legitimate. That, she believed, would give it meaning. What she wanted in life, she reflected now as she flipped through channels full of people demanding to be seen, was what most people wanted: to be treated with respect. To live a meaningful life. To do something that mattered—mattered to both herself and other people. She didn’t have to do tracist work, but she believed it was necessary to getting what she wanted, though she wasn’t entirely sure how it would do that. So far it might have even been doing the opposite. It set her apart from other people rather than connecting her to them. Being able to sense someone’s “life energy” might be a positive thing, but the problem was, she could sense it only after it was too late, after it had escaped the body, after that person was gone and unknowable forever. She never knew anything about these people who died except this one thing—this one terribly intimate, essential thing. She could feel what was most alive about a human being only as it ended.

It made her smile, privately and grimly, whenever someone spouted off the cliché about not knowing what you have until it’s gone.
You don
’
t know the half of it
, she wanted to say.

She heard something rustling outside her door, most likely her neighbor from across the hall, Mrs. Lafferty, the one who had given her the plant. Mrs. Lafferty was the neighbor you dreaded having—the one who got you stuck in long conversations by the mailboxes and in the parking lot about nothing even remotely interesting—and you’d hate yourself for feeling that way because she was so well-meaning and (you found out later) had suffered through so much without complaining. Mr. Lafferty, Nola gleaned, had been a hard-core alcoholic for all his adult life and part of his childhood and was now dying of it. It was only a matter of time. His liver was mush. They were only in their late fifties, but Mrs. Lafferty looked a good fifteen years older and Nola couldn’t even imagine what her husband looked like, not having seen him since the day she moved in. She got the idea that he wanted to die at home. She wished for everyone’s sake that he wouldn’t, that he’d go somewhere to get the kind of care he needed. He was running his wife ragged, and as for Nola herself, she had to admit it freaked her out to think she might have to feel his trace one day.

But Angela Lafferty was lonely and had a kind heart, and even though she could talk nonstop for what seemed like hours, she was never nosy, never asked Nola why she wasn’t married yet or why she never went to Mass if she’d been raised Catholic. And talking to her neighbor would certainly be a good way to keep from recalling what happened that morning in that house. Nola put her pasta bowl down and got up to open the front door.

It wasn’t Mrs. Lafferty. No one was in the hallway, but on Nola’s welcome mat was a brown paper grocery sack folded over at the top so she couldn’t see what was in it.

She felt as if she’d just stumbled into a dark back alley far from home.

Mrs. Lafferty would never have just left a gift for her without knocking and seeing if she couldn’t chat awhile, and Nola couldn’t think of anyone else who would have left something for her like this. She thought fleetingly about calling Dalton, calling Mutt and Jeff, calling a bomb squad.
Yeah, brilliant.
That will really do wonders for the respect they give you downtown
. The bag was most likely filled with dog turds, a prank played by kids. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with . . . what she was thinking about.

She reached for the large umbrella she kept by the door and never managed to take with her when it rained. She stepped back and gently poked the bag with the umbrella’s tip. Whatever was in it was lightweight and made no sound. Good. No live snakes or severed heads. With the precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel (an enormous one in beach-ball colors), she maneuvered the tip of the umbrella to gently unfold the crimp in the bag and open it for view.

There was an ordinary piece of paper folded in half and lying on top of something she couldn’t see fully. She stared into the bag and then suddenly knocked it over hard with the umbrella and stepped forward.

Out tumbled the body of a pigeon, the folded paper spiked through one of its claws.

In ordinary Times New Roman 12 point, which had never seemed as ominous as now, the note read, “Get off the case or the next trace will be yours
.
” That was all.

Nola took in a breath and released it. Theatrical, Nola reflected, though for some reason she couldn’t picture Lynette Veesy being responsible. By all rights, it should have been her, since she was the only one who’d recognized Nola—or admitted to recognizing her, anyway. But something about this struck Nola as calculating, methodical. It was hard to take this threat seriously, yet it was impossible to ignore. Her first reaction had been gut-level horror at the weirdness of it all. Her second reaction had been,
A pigeon? Really? They couldn’t have at least used a crow or a blood-red cardinal or something a little more dramatic?
It was almost insulting.

The manner of it was so absurd that she shuddered at the thought of mentioning it to Mutt and Jeff. She knew these guys; they would treat her like something fragile and damaged. The other detectives would certainly see no reason to change their view that she was more of a hindrance than a help. Scared by a pigeon. She could just picture the eye-rolling, the smirks, the jokes at her expense. None of that would exactly be an ordeal, but there was also the possibility that they would pull her from the case—and, if the case were solved without her help, they might decide never to use her again. On the other hand, this was, in a sense, evidence. Tossing it in the trash would be counterproductive.

“Well, squab, I hope you enjoyed your life, because right now
you
are more trouble than you’re worth,” she muttered. Holding the bag open, she leaned over to push the small grey carcass back inside with the umbrella and then stopped and leaned closer.

The bird’s tiny head was bent back as far as it could go. It was attached to the body by only a tiny bit of flesh. Its neck had been sliced cleanly open with a knife or a razor. The bird had either been caught and killed this way or found dead and its neck slit afterward. Nola wasn’t sure which was worse. It hardly mattered. Mission accomplished: she felt threatened.

___________

The next morning, Nola fussed around the apartment, made lists of things to do, struggled through a workout DVD, and then made up her mind. She would keep the note (and, for no particular reason, the paper bag), but she picked up the pigeon with barbecue tongs, dropped it into a plastic bag, and flung the bag down the garbage chute. She felt a stab of sadness for the poor bird, having suffered such an undignified death, but she wanted the carcass gone and gone quickly. That settled, she grabbed a jacket and purse and headed to her car with no particular destination in mind, just needing to get out.

In the car she sat for a moment with her keys in her hand, once again not quite sure what to do next. It was mid-morning of a lovely weekend in mid-autumn. She should be eagerly making plans, maybe going for a drive to the state park and taking a walk, perhaps buying something to throw on the patio grill for dinner, or at the very least looking forward to relaxing with a book and some music. Somehow all of that seemed tiresome right now, none of it much more than a dreary déjà vu of weekends past. Whatever she did would feel like going through the motions, acting like someone doing normal weekend things, rather than being someone genuinely enjoying those things. She now understood Dalton’s warning about not letting a case obsess her; she could see how easily that might happen. The adrenaline rush you got, even when you were dealing with unpleasant situations or sinister people, even when you started to believe there really was such a thing as pure evil—well, after that it was difficult to go back to thinking that ordinary life was anything other than a veneer, a pointless façade masking what was real. Even dealing with death made her feel more alive sometimes than her life did.

A shadow fell over her. Once again someone was standing outside her car, watching her sit there lost in thought. The sun was bright behind the figure’s head, but she knew, even before the face became clear, who it was: Grayson Bryant, the man from the brick house.

When they’d first met, she of course made it a point to ignore him as much as possible, even after The Incident, as she had taken to thinking of it, capital letters included. It was how she worked, and she was so used to it that being forced now to look at this man was as much of a shock as it would be to a coroner if the corpse sat up for a chat.

An apt analogy. Trace didn’t come from living people. Yet there it was again, unmistakably, that gut-punch sensation, slightly less intense but still knocking the air out of her lungs. She wanted to start the car that instant and zoom away, tires squealing, like people always did in the movies, so she wouldn’t have to hear those voices again.

She put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the car. Instead, she cracked open the window and stared at Grayson Bryant.

There was only one voice this time—his. “I’m sorry to surprise you like this, but I’ve been hoping to talk to you.”

She kept her voice flat and cool. “You need to leave. I’m part of the investigative team on your brother’s missing-person case and we shouldn’t be—”

“Don’t you want to know what happened yesterday morning at my house?”

She continued to stare at him, saying nothing. He was younger than she’d initially thought, probably a good seven or eight years junior to Culver Bryant, and he struck her as a man you might not notice right away in a room full of people, but once he spoke, you suddenly started paying attention. You noticed him like she was noticing him now. She found herself comparing him not with his brother but with Jack Dalton. Superficially, they looked similar—hair and eye color (brown), height and build (tall and fit)—though Dalton
was
a man you’d notice right away in a room full of people. But if Jack Dalton was attractive, Grayson Bryant was . . . compelling, somehow, without being too creepy. He should have been creepy. This meeting should have been far more threatening than finding a dead bird in a paper sack on her welcome mat—which Grayson Bryant may very well have put there, since obviously he knew where she lived. Though with an unusual name like hers, she imagined, it would be easy to find out all sorts of information via Google, including her address and phone number.
OK
, she admitted,
this is creepy.