No Time to Die & the Deep End of Fear

  At first I was comforted by my vision of the watch on the wrong wrist, reasoning from that small detail that the murderer hadn't known Liza. But the truth was that anyone in a hurry to escape the crime scene could have easily overlooked such a small matter.

  I knew what I needed to do—carry the hammer to the bridge tonight and see what images came to me—but I was afraid. I didn't want to feel the crushing blow. Knowing what it was, realizing that I was reliving my sister's death, I felt sickened by it long after the physical pain receded.

  As I gathered my things at the library, I realized that I had left my script at the theater. It was five-thirty when I reached Stoddard, but the back door was unlocked as usual, as was the room where we had been working. I retrieved my book from a bench.

  Emerging from the room, I thought I heard voices at the end of the hall, but they had a strange, echoing sound, as if the people and I were separated by a very long passage. Curious, I followed the hall, rounding the corner, passing Walker's office, then Maggie's. No one was in sight. The next three doors, all offices belonging to professors, were closed. Then I saw the last door in the hall ajar and strode toward it.

  I thought I was peering into a dark closet, but when I heard the voices again, I opened the door wider and saw the outline of a metal stairway. It rose inside the small, square space, four or five steps up one wall, then met the corner and turned, rising several steps along the next wall, continuing to spire up into the darkness, a murky darkness, as if there was light at the top. The steps to the tower!

  I was tempted to climb them. The platform above the clock must have been high enough to command a view of both the river and creek. But the voices above me were becoming louder and more distinct. A guy and a girl—Paul and Keri, I realized—were coming down. I didn't want to meet up with them, not when I was alone. I exited quickly and hurried along the hallway. Then curiosity won out. Were they simply enjoying a romantic moment in the tower, or were they up to something? I ducked inside the room from which I had fetched my book, extinguished the lights, and hid behind the open door.

  "You're losing your edge," I heard Keri say, as she and Paul walked down the hall.

  Paul laughed. "I'm not here to entertain you."

  "But you do entertain me," she insisted. "That little mean thing that crawls around inside your brain fascinates me."

  I pressed my head against the door, watching them through the vertical crack between the hinges.

  "Did you ever think that it might be crawling around in your brain?" Paul asked. "You don't know who I am, Keri. You keep inventing me, trying to make me into the guy you want me to be."

  "That's good," she answered sharply, "real good coming from a guy who turned a girl into a fantasy, who made her so perfect in his mind he can't give her up, not even when she's a corpse."

  Paul turned away so I couldn't see his face.

  "Do you know why Liza went out that night?" Keri asked.

  "Why don't you tell me?" he replied. "I know you want to."

  "She got a note from Mike asking her to meet him by the creek."

  I felt as if someone had just punched me in the stomach.

  "If you're trying to turn me against Mike—" Paul began.

  "I saw the note," Keri went on. "Liza couldn't wait to show me what he had written. It was poetic. He was counting the minutes til he could meet her by the water."

  "Maybe you should have shared that information with the police," Paul suggested coolly.

  "I've told you before, I don't go running to teachers or police. It's us against them. I'm loyal—unless, of course, someone gives me a reason not to be."

  Paul faced her.

  "But I find it interesting," she went on, "that a note Liza would have saved for framing wasn't found on her body or in her room. Someone must have destroyed it before the police could get their hands on it. Was it you?" She stepped close to him. "Was it?"

  "Do you want it to be?" he asked, placing his hands around Keri's neck and running his fingers lightly over her skin.

  For a moment she didn't say anything. She closed her eyes as if she hoped the tease would become something more, then she pushed him away.

  "I just want it over," she said, her voice low and angry. "Liza's dead. Why can't you bury her?"

  She turned and stalked away. I heard the outside door swing open and closed. Paul left a moment later.

  I emerged from the room, still reeling from my discovery. I had made up my mind: after curfew tonight I'd go down to the bridge. I'd find out what happened when Mike asked my sister to meet him.

  At eleven-thirty I climbed out the same window Liza had and followed the lane down to Oyster Creek. I didn't have the hammer with me. After Ken and Paul had left the theater, I searched the scenery and drying rooms, and even the stage, in case someone carried the tool upstairs, but I couldn't find it. I tried the tower, too, but the door had been locked.

  Now, having escaped Drama House, I rushed down Goose Lane, then turned left on Scull, which ran parallel to the water. I didn't stop walking til I reached the bridge, afraid I'd lose my nerve. As I had hoped, the waterfront was deserted. I sat down quickly on the bank of the creek, pull ing my knees up to my chest, pressing my face against them.

  "I'm here, Liza," I whispered.

  Nothing happened. My mind felt rigid like my body, locked into a protective position. I took a deep breath, rose, and walked five feet down to the edge of the water. I lay on my back beside the water and ever so slowly let go, as I had learned to do in my relaxation exercises, allowing my shoulders, my elbows, the calves of my legs to sink down into the mud and stones. I cringed when I felt the trickle of creek at the back of my skull—it felt like blood—but I continued to work through Maggie's exercises til my body and mind relaxed.

  The bridge above me was lost in darkness. I turned my head to the side and gazed at the creek, at the concrete pilings and the wavering reflections of the bridge's street lamps. The water shimmered blue. I closed my eyes and still I saw blue. I grew light-headed, so light I felt as if I were floating above myself. Suspended in the air, I looked down on a dark body and a glowing watch face. Someone in black bent over the body, drew back, then smashed the watch.

  I sat up quickly and grabbed my wrist, but there was no pain, not like there had been in the hammer vision. I felt confused and frustrated. Why couldn't I see who was shattering the watch? In the chase visions my pursuer was cloaked in black and had struck from behind, so I couldn't see the face. But why couldn't I now, when the person was bent over Liza?

  I had thought I was inside Liza's mind reliving the events—I knew I had felt the murderer's blow as she would have felt it. Then it occurred to me: when the watch was strapped to my sister's wrist she was already dead. People who have near-death experiences talk about the spirit leaving the body, hovering above it. That was why I hovered in this part of my vision, looking down on the body and the watch face just as Liza's spirit had.

  I stood up, my skin feeling clammy and chill despite the warm night. Slowly I walked toward the gazebo, running my hands through my matted hair, brushing the gritty mud from my arms.

  At the gazebo I sat on the steps to think. I wondered if this was the place by the creek where Mike had met Liza. Here or the pavilion, I thought. In the pale moonlight, the pavilion, sitting high on its pilings and surrounded by tall grass, seemed its own little romantic island.

  I blinked. Tall grass, grass high as com. I had assumed the pilings of my visions were the supports beneath the bridge, but there were pilings beneath the pavilion, too, and the creek washed through the grass and under the wooden structure just as it did under the bridge. I jumped up and ran toward the pavilion, stopping at the grass jungle encircling it. It grew thick as bamboo. I thrust my arms into it, parted the long stalks, and stepped in, then continued to push aside swordlike leaves, gradually working my way through the dense vegetation. It stopped abruptly at the edge of the pavilion floor, where sunlight would end.

  T
he moonlight ended there, too. Step by step I moved into the darkness beneath the pavilion. The ground turned soggy under my feet. I could hear the light lap of water against the pilings and small rustlings in the surrounding grass. As I moved farther beneath the structure, the water began to pool around my ankles. Mosquitoes whined in my ears. I thought I heard something and paused for a moment to listen, resting against a piling. My head buzzed and grew light. The darkness around me glinted blue.

  Behind me, twenty feet back, there was a soft thud, a sound light as a cat landing on leaves, then quiet footsteps. The person had found me.

  My heart pounded in my chest. I could hardly breathe, my throat raw, my side aching from running. I slipped behind a piling hoping to see something—if not the face, the size or gait of the person—some clue as to who it was, but I couldn't. I heard the person coming closer and closer. I debated what to do.

  Instinct took over. I bolted, then felt the sudden movement, the rush from behind. I wanted to pull out of the vision. I wanted it to stop now. But I had to turn around, had to reach for the face of my pursuer, to feel the shape I couldn't see.

  I tried to and tripped, falling facedown in the water. Scrambling to my feet, I was too terrified to stop now. I raced forward. A hand grasped me and clamped down hard on my shoulder, fingers biting into me. I screamed and screamed. Another hand clapped over my mouth. The person pulled me back against him so violently the breath was knocked out of me. The blue light faded. The person laughed close to my ear, his moist lips touching my cheek.

  Paul.

  "Going somewhere?"

  I struggled against him, but he held me all the tighter. "Let me go!" I shouted, "Let me go!"

  "Not yet."

  I kicked backward, striking him in the shin.

  "Don't make me get rough," he said.

  "Let go, Paul. Now!"

  "Not til you tell me what you were doing."

  I continued to struggle.

  "tell me!" Paul jerked me around, lifting my whole body, making it clear who was in control.

  "I was taking a walk."

  "In a swamp?" he replied. "I don't think so."

  I stopped struggling, deciding to save my energy for the instant he relaxed.

  "I was walking through the park," Paul said, "and saw you duck under here. What a surprise"—his voice mocked me—"our best little camper, sneaking around after curfew! It's not like you, Jenny, being out late like this—it's not like the dear little Jenny we all know and love."

  I didn't respond.

  "Come on, talk! Are you making a pickup? Did someone leave something down here for you?"

  "Nothing much," I said. "And I couldn't find it anyway."

  He looked around, loosening his grip. I seized the chance to pull away from him, racing forward, then glimpsing lights through the grass, lights on poles as they were in an earlier vision-dock lights. I crashed through the grass and into a clear area, running toward the college boathouse. From a distance behind me I heard his laughter. Paul wasn't bothering with the chase. Still, I didn't stop until I reached the racks of sculls. Crouching in the shadows, I gazed back toward the pavilion.

  Paul emerged from the grass surrounding it and walked toward the street. I didn't know whether he was leaving me alone or setting a trap. He knew the route I'd take back. But if he had wanted to hurt me, he would have done things differently, I reasoned; he would have kept himself hidden so I couldn't accuse him later. And if he had wanted to kill me, he would have done it under the pavilion. I could have lain there for days before anyone found me.

  It was an ideal place to murder and dump a body. And I was sure from my visions that my sister had been struck down beneath the pavilion. But that wasn't where the serial murderer liked to do his killing. If the police had discovered her body beneath the pavilion, they would have searched for a different killer, someone from the town or campus. And if they had known about the hammer I found in the theater, they would have focused on the people connected to the camp. I could no longer deny the probability that Liza's killer had known her.

  If that person wanted the police to think the serial killer was responsible, then Liza's body had to be transported to the bridge without leaving a trail.

  Given that her death was bloody, the job seemed more than one person could handle. If so, there could be two people in Wisteria who knew the truth about Liza's death.

  I intended to find them.

  Chapter 14

  So what do you think, Jen?" Tomas asked me the next morning as we waited for rehearsal to begin. "You don't like it," he guessed, fingering a bolt of filmy blue fabric.

  "tell me again. I wasn't quite listening."

  He patiently explained a second time how he was going to create a sky for the set by stretching his semi-transparent fabric between the thirty-foot-high catwalk that ran across the front of the stage and the eighteen-foot ridge and waterfall that formed the set's back wall.

  I struggled to follow what he was saying, uneasily aware of Mike and Paul standing nearby, as if they were waiting to speak to me. I wondered if Paul had told Mike about last night's incident. It annoyed me that I had let Paul see how afraid I was, though I would have been an idiot not to have feared him in that situation. "So what do you think?" Tomas asked again. I glanced down at the fabric. "It's beautiful. When the lights shine through, it will shimmer like a summer sky. "

  Tomas beamed.

  "Just one question. Who's attaching it to the cat-walk—besides me?"

  "Arthur's getting an extension ladder," he said. "Someone will volunteer. I don't think I'd better—you saw me on the boat."

  Mike stepped forward. "I'll help."

  "Terrific," Tomas replied. "I'll see if I can find one more person."

  He headed off quickly, perhaps wanting to sidestep an offer from Paul.

  Gazing upward, Paul surveyed the the length of the high, metal walkway. His face warped into a smile, as if something amusing had occurred to him.

  Then he turned to me. "Need some coffee this morning, Jenny?"

  "No."

  "You look tired," Mike observed.

  Paul grinned. "That's the price of climbing out your window after eleven P.M. Yes," he added, noting Mike's surprise, "our own little Jenny."

  "Why did you go out that late?" Mike's tone was disapproving.

  "Someone sent me a note," I replied, "asking me to meet him by the river."

  The light in Mike's eyes darkened. The muscles in his jaw tensed, hardening his face. I gave up the scrap of hope to which I had been clinging—he knew what I was referring to. He had sent the note to Liza.

  "You ought to be more careful," he said.

  "Yeah, you never know who you're going to meet out there," Paul added.

  From across the stage Maggie called out, "Jenny. May I see you a moment?"

  "She's on to you, girl," Paul whispered.

  I ignored him and crossed the stage.

  "How are you doing today?" Maggie asked, resting a hand on my shoulder.

  "Good. Ready to go."

  "Then what do you think of rehearsing with the stage lights up twenty-five percent and the house lights down about the same? Think you can handle it?"

  "I'd like to try."

  "I want everyone who is not in your scene to be sitting in the audience. Is that pushing you too hard? We can cut the scene immediately if you start to feel ill."

  "Let's cut the scene only if I give you a signal," I proposed. "I might turn a little green, but I want to try to get through it."

  Maggie smiled. "I knew from the start you'd be a great kid to work with. I'll tell Walker."

  Walker wanted to run the same scene as yesterday since he thought it best to "get back on the horse you were riding when you fell off." The lights were adjusted and kids settled into their seats in the audience. Paul and Keri, as Oberon and Titania, stood in opposite wings, waiting for their entrances.

  Katie and her fellow fairy entered from stage left, I from stage right,
vaulting, spinning, landing lightly on my feet. "'How now, spirits, whither wander you?'"

  My voice came out strong—not with as much expression as I'd have liked, but I was in control. The fairies gave their speech about how they served Queen Titania and I began my account of Oberon and his feud with the queen—the speech that I had blown yesterday.

  As I spoke my lines and worked on the balance beam, I became increasingly sensitive to the stage lights in my eyes. It was like watching a sunrise and suddenly having to look away from the brightness. I paused, took a deep breath, then continued on, "'And jealous Oberon… And jealous Oberon'… Line."

  "'Would have the child,' * Brian said softly.

  "'Would have the child, Knight of his train to trace the forest wild.'" I knew where I was again and carried on, a little shaky, but determined.

  The fairies spoke the next ten lines, leading up to my favorite speech, in which Puck tell s of all the mischievous tricks he likes to play. We had woven lots of gymnastics into those lines. My first stunt was a cartwheel on the balance beam.

  "'Thou speakest aright,'" I began, "'I am that merry wanderer of the—'"

  My right hand had just touched the beam. The stage lights flickered. A beat later my left hand touched. The lights went out. Total darkness. My left leg came around to find the beam but missed it. I slid off, banging my arm against the wood.

  "Arthur!" Walker shouted.

  "Jenny, are you okay?" It was Brian's voice.

  "Fine. Fine." I was angry, not hurt. I should have been able to complete the wheel in darkness. It was a loss of concentration, my own fault.

  "Be still. Everyone be still til we get the lights on," Maggie said.

  "Arthur!" Walker hollered again. "Brian, get him."

  Kids giggled.

  "This is nothing to laugh about," Maggie said sternly. "These pranks are dangerous. Someone could get hurt."

  The nervous laughter was stifled. Kids whispered. I heard Brian's footsteps crossing the stage.