Deadly Secrets

  Chapter 20

  It was Monday afternoon during a late lunch at work that I received the call from Kelly. I grabbed my cell, saw her name and number, and excitedly answered the call. “Hi, Kelly!” I managed to get out around my mouthful of sandwich.

  Kelly laughed, “I guess I caught you at lunch. That’s great news because it means you have time to talk!” Kelly paused for effect; she is another Missy in the making. “I found her, Miranda.”

  I squealed, “You found Cara? How?”

  I started checking records for passenger ships that traveled from Ireland to New York City around the time that our Cara would have made her voyage. I found her aboard a ship named The Dawning, or rather I found Jacob Kennedy plus sister.”

  “That’s him,” I cried. I know that’s him, so it must be her. It has to be her because Claire did not make the trip, only Cara. I still can’t believe you found the ship so fast! How did you do it? There had to be hundreds of ships that sailed that route even back then. Not to mention the fact that the records would have been sketchy at best.”

  Kelly gave a weak laugh. “There were a bunch, but I got an unusual tip last night about which ship they might have sailed on. I checked it out this morning, and sure enough there they were, Jacob Kennedy and sister.” My nose twitched, which was a sure sign that there was more to the story.

  “Just who gave you the tip?” I asked already fairly sure about the answer.

  Kelly groaned. “I was afraid you’d ask me that. Uh um…Well, all right, if you must know…it was Jacob.”

  I should have been shocked, but I wasn’t. Somehow over the course of the last fews days, I had become an active believer in the dream world. “Well, I guess he gave us both a visit over the weekend then.”

  Now it was Kelly’s turn to rapid fire questions. “What! He came to you too?” I could hear the disappointment in her voice, and I recognized it immediately. Kelly had considered her dreams of Jacob important…personal….special, something that they alone shared. Crazy though some people would think us both to be, I understood.

  She thought of Jacob in the same way that I thought of Cara and Douglas. “Yes, he visited me in my dreams Saturday night. He was holding a little girl with long, dark hair in his arms. They did not speak to each other or to me, but they looked at me, just as you described before. In that moment, I knew with certainty I was looking at Jacob and at Claire.”

  Kelly inhaled sharply, “You saw Claire! What do you think this means? Why are they appearing to us? At first it was just Cara and Douglas for you. It was Jacob for me and well still it has only been Jacob for me, but now you are seeing them all.”

  I felt her excitement through the phone, and it matched my own. Whatever was going on was real, and it was important. “I don’t think Jacob and Claire met a happy end like Cara.” I hedged.

  Kelly’s face fell, and she visibly paled. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  I rubbed my hands quickly over my face as I tried and failed to wipe away the memories that this conversation evoked in my mind. “In my dream, they died or were dying. I’m not sure which.”

  In a whispered tone that spoke of her distress, she asked, “Please, tell me what you mean, Miranda. I can take it, really I can.”

  I sighed, “The dream was short. I saw Jacob and Claire just as I described them to you a moment ago, but then blood began to stain their chests. It ran until both their chests were covered in blood, but their faces never changed. There was no pain in their expressions. I’m not sure what that means, maybe a warning or a clue?” I ventured.

  Kelly, though she was still pale, seemed to have recovered her composure. She shook her head in confusion, “I’m not sure I follow your logic, Miranda. A clue maybe, but why would you think it could be a warning?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, in for a penny in for a pound. “That wasn’t my entire dream. There was more; it was personal - a message for me.”

  “What kind of message?” Kelly asked hesitantly as though she feared the answer.

  “Jacob and Claire vanished, and I was in an old building filled with shadows. A man was there; it turned out he was the man that I have been dating. In my dream, he looked not as I know him but cold and cunning.”

  Kelly rubbed her arms to warm them, “Wow! That would freak me out too. So you think Jacob and Claire were warning you that this man is not the right man for you?”

  I rubbed at my temples to ease the tension that built there. “I don’t know. In my dream the lights suddenly came on in the building, and I saw myself with my chest stained with blood.” I raised my eyes to hers, “I was dead at his feet.”

  Kelly looked like she was going to pass out. “Oh, my God! I totally get the warning part now. Yes. Yes. Yes, I think it is a warning. You should stay away from that man.”

  I nodded. “I know, and I will. But Kelly, the sad part is that I still want to believe in him.” I pulled myself out my musing and returned to the topic at hand, “Did you find out anything else?” I asked.

  Kelly hesitated as if she wanted to discuss my dream further, but the changed her mind. “Well, I also started looking through the local village records. There were several villages near the port from which The Dawning launched. It sailed from a small port that would today be near Shannon in County Clare.”

  Again Kelly paused, and the air hung dead between us. It pulsed with the unsaid. “Kelly. Kelly, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Miranda.” Kelly inhaled deeply and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. I’m getting upset. I mean, I know they are dead! I know that in my head, but in my heart they feel alive. Seeing the reality is hard; it’s harder than I thought it would be.”

  My own throat was thick with emotion. My stomach fell down to my toes. I managed to find my voice, but it was weak even to my own ears. I asked in hushed tones, “What did you find?”

  Kelly sighed, “I found death records for Jacob and for …” her voice trailed off again.

  “For whom” I prompted, “Claire.”

  “No.” She whispered, “For Douglas Makinna.”

  Her words made speech momentarily impossible for me. Douglas, the man with Heath’s face, was dead. I felt my world tilt on its axis and then crumble into nothingness. The world that I walked in had suddenly been altered beyond repair. He was gone; it was over. My emotions were even more confused because I knew in my head that Heath was alive and the Douglas who was dead had never been known to me. He had never claimed my heart, but still I could not shake this cold, dead feeling inside of my soul.

  “Miranda….that’s not all I found.”

  I shook myself trying to focus my mind in the here and now. “There’s more? I’m not sure I can take any more right now.”

  Kelly was emphatic. “You’re going to want to know this.”

  I nodded my head and summoned my courage, “Ok, lay it on me.”

  “Douglas MaKinna died on February 9, 1815. Do you remember the letter that Cara wrote to him the following year? It was dated 9 February 1816. She said it had been one year since she had seen his face; it was not because she had sailed for America. It was because that was the day he died.”

  “She knew he was dead? But why write the letters then?” My mind raced with the possibilities.

  Kelly sighed, “I’m not sure. But she definitely knew that he was dead. Jacob and Cara buried him on the same day they buried their parents. All three died in an influenza epidemic that crippled Ireland that year. The epidemic and the loss of Douglas and their parents are what drove Jacob to bring her to America. According to what I could find, Claire stayed in Ireland at the time. She was only five.”

  For a moment I completely lost my ability to speak. I remained silent and clung to the phone as if it were a life line that had been tossed to me on stormy seas.

  Kelly understood that silence and spoke to me gently from one broken heart to another. “Read the letters again, Miranda. You will see in them
all that she said and all that she did not say now that you know all of her secrets. Knowing that Douglas was dead, you can see so much more in them than before. I could, and I know that you will too. Read them.” The line went dead, and I was alone with my grief for a man and a woman long turned to dust but so real to me.

  I don’t know exactly how long I sat there with the world going on around me. My extension rang several times, but I was incapable of picking it up much less carrying on a conversation. My computer beeped and pinged signaling me that emails were being delivered to my mailbox, but I could not summon the strength to care. Finally, there was a tapping at my door and my boss, Gina, came in. She took one look at me and ordered me home. For once, I gave no argument. I simply gathered my belongings and silently made my way to my car. I drove home and managed to get myself inside. Then I just collapsed in a pile on my entryway floor where I sobbed out my grief until I was spent body and soul.

  As I lay there on the floor, my cell phone rang with my mother’s ring tone. I managed to pick it up. “Hey, Mom.”

  I heard the concern in her voice. “Miranda, what’s wrong, dear?”

  “I can’t explain it, Mom. It is too …well it’s just too much.”

  I knew my mother well enough to know that she would not be defeated that easily. “Miranda, you know you can tell me anything. Your father and I have always stood by you and never questioned your decisions. There is no need to try to hide from us now.”

  I sighed, “Yes, Mother, I know. This is just something different. I’ll tell you, I promise. I just need to figure it all out for myself first. Can you understand that?”

  “I don’t like it, but I can accept that for now….but only for now. Do you need me to bring Sam home to you this afternoon?”

  I thought about that for a moment before I answered her. “Could you? That would be great. What I really need now is a hot shower and a nap…That will go a long way to fixing what’s broken.”

  There was still concern in her voice, but she answered immediately, “Then you go do that, jellybean, and I will bring Sam home after we have supper tonight. Your father can make sure that his homework is all done.”

  Tears once again blurred my vision. “Thank you, Mom. You are the best mother in the world.”

  “I know, dear, but so are you.” Then we both hung up before too much emotion set me over the edge for what seemed like the billionth time in the last few weeks.

  I got myself up from the floor and staggered with exhaustion up the stairs. I shed my clothes and slipped under the hot spray of the shower. The needles of warmth slowly pushed the cold out of my body and let reality return to my mind. Reality brought with it Heath and the erotic fantasy of us that usually filled my mind and my dreams or had until they were hijacked by my ancestors.

  “Oh, Heath, am I wrong to want you so? Are you as bad as I think you are, or am I misjudging you the same way that I condemned Douglas? I felt sure that he used and abandoned Cara, but he didn’t. He died loving her. Decades later still, she died loving him. What do I do?”

  No answers came and the water cooled, so I slipped out, dried off, and climbed into my most comfortable cotton PJs and snuggled into my sheets. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow, and I was in Ireland shortly thereafter.

  I looked around me as I knelt in the grass. It was bitterly cold, but the cold that I was feeling was inside my body, not on the skin. I was frozen inside or maybe not…I felt dead inside. Even though I felt my heart beat, I was dead. Confusion swam in my mind; what was going on? But then inside my own mind, I heard her. “You are with me, child of my children.”

  I panicked. I really was losing my mind. I pushed out with my fear like a fist. “Stop that now” popped into my thoughts, and I was helpless to resist. Instead I thought, “Cara?”

  “Yes.”

  I quaked with fear but asked anyway, “What is this I feel? I know I feel something, but it feels like nothingness.”

  “You feel me. You feel me as I am now…alone without my love.”

  I shook my head, “No, that can’t be. I have known pain and loss, but this is more. This is the death of me, of self!”

  I felt arms wrap around my body and understood that Cara was trying to comfort me. “What you felt was pain; what you feel now is the loss of a love so great that time trembles before it.”

  I stammered, “I don’t understand.”

  “I know that you don’t, Miranda, but you will. Remember this feeling when the time comes. You must remember this feeling and fight to save that which you love.”

  Fear snaked through me uncontrolled now. “Who must I save? Who is in danger? Cara, tell me who!”

  But even as I demanded aid, I felt myself leave the dream, leave her. I turned back in my dream, and I saw her staring at me. Her eyes were bleak, and she was bent by her grief as she clung to a stone that bore the name, Douglas MaKinna.