“Not how you tell it. But the dead do speak to the living. Not by leaving phone messages …”
Did he blink?
He did. He flinched. No one else might have noticed it.
But I did.
I dug in. “The dead speak. They tell you how they died by what they leave behind. If anybody ever stops people like you, it’s going to be with evidence.”
“Evidence is what landed you right here, Allie, I’m sad to say.”
“That ski mask was Juliet’s. It was mine once. But we switched ski masks. Hers was plain. She wanted the one my grandma sewed with fake rhinestones. She liked bling. But you know that.”
“I know that. I know all that, Allie. I know just what Juliet liked.”
Had he actually forgotten himself for a moment? My heart leapt. For a split second I rejoiced, wanting to do a little entrechat with a victory fist in the air. Garrett Tabor would keep on talking. And this dumpy place, after all, was more than a research lab or a morgue; it was an official government office. Everything would be on videotape. Garrett Tabor was putting the noose around his own neck. I had a short fantasy in which I presented my professor and advisor, Dr. Barry Yashida, with those tapes—skipping neatly around the roughnecks in what I thought about later being able to bring that proof to Juliet’s father. But not now. Now, I would bide my time.
“I have work to do,” I said.
“Yes, like putting death certificates in envelopes and sweeping the floor? Better get to it! We’re both serving our community tonight, me as a healer and you as a … little drone.”
“Maybe,” I began. I took a deep breath. “Maybe it’s good I’m here. Maybe I can keep an eye on you. Did you ever think of that?”
Garrett Tabor turned away and shrugged in his white lab coat. “I think of everything, Allie.”
Tears stabbed the backs of my eyes. “You … you pig,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be nasty. You’re not supposed to talk trash to your superiors.”
“I don’t see anyone like that here. You’re not superior. You’re just old.”
“And yet I’ll last longer, Allie. I’ll be going strong when you’re just like Juliet.”
“We’ll see. We’ll see who has the last word.”
He turned back and nodded toward the surveillance camera, perched above the door. “Well, all these words would look bad if they were being recorded. But the little video cameras don’t work. I think they’re just for show. They’ve never worked. You know our hometown. Everything’s a little down market in Iron Harbor. So, like I said. It’s just you and me—”
“And me,” said a mild voice.
A blast of cold air announced the arrival of my doctor, Bonnie Sommers Olsen. Not my XP doctor: that was Dr. Stephen’s brother and Garrett’s uncle, Andrew Tabor. Rather, my doctor for what little regular life I had.
“I’m here, too.” Bonnie put her coat on the hook. The heavy steel door swung shut behind her. “The weather snapped. Cold out,” she added. “Did you notice it was starting to snow?”
The night was filled with surprises. And yet, at that moment, I couldn’t have been happier to see her if she’d jumped out of from behind a desk wearing a superhero cape.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“Filling in,” she said. “I’m subbing in as the supervisor while Dr. Stephen’s gone, and I’ll be working here a few nights a week on and off. Chris is at Northwestern. I’ll be paying his tuition with my life insurance.”
I loved Bonnie, even though she was a Daytimer—our term for people who lived on the regular clock instead of getting up when the sun went down. She was one of the few doctors on earth who didn’t try to tell me, a chronically sick kid, to “go easy” or “be careful.” Most important of all, Bonnie knew just what I thought about Garrett Tabor. She agreed with me that he was someone who made your skin crawl. Like my mother, she also knew that he’d slept with half the women at the hospital. None of that, however, proved that he was a killer.
But I would, I silently promised Juliet. I would do that on my own or die trying.
“Bonnie!” said Garrett Tabor with a big phony smile. “I should have known my dad wouldn’t trust his lab to anyone but the best.”
“Thank you, Garrett,” Bonnie said evenly. “I think he trusted it to someone he knew would stay awake, because my blood is half caffeine by now.”
“Bonnie, I happen to know you were an assistant medical examiner in Cook County, before you moved here,” Garrett Tabor said. “Not a job many women would cherish. Women are all about healing.”
“Knowing why people die is all about healing,” Bonnie answered softly. “Hi, Allie. Have we got any guests tonight?”
Guests.
“Not quite a full house, but yes,” said Garrett Tabor.
They meant bodies in the refrigerated drawers. Rubbing her hands along the arms of her long-sleeved sweatshirt, Bonnie consulted a chalkboard list. “Oh no. Alex Trayhern. Of course. I knew that. That boy was in my son Elliott’s class,” she said. “Twelve years old. Hunting accident. And Vanessa Adams. A nurse. She was a good nurse, too … Who knows why people …”
“She was a suicide, correct?” Garrett Tabor said. “Injected herself with a syringe of air. She was about to be nailed for stealing prescription drugs, wasn’t she? Don’t nurses have the highest rates of suicide, Bonnie?”
“I’m sure you’d know better than I would, Garrett,” she said. “You’re a nurse.”
“Well. You just ask me for whatever you need.” He touched an imaginary hat brim.
“Perfect gentleman,” Bonnie said, as he strolled away.
I told her, “That’s what all the ladies say.”
4
FEARS FOR TEARS
Time drained like a big hourglass with a fracture in the bottom, stoked by my fascination with all things terminal. The fascination, in turn, was stoked by my horrific recent past and my obsession with learning the truth about Juliet. The first time I looked up from filing reports about sudden or unusual deaths, my shift had ended.
It was already 1 A.M. The window thermometer showed that the temperature was just a few degrees above zero. I stifled a groan. For the past couple of weeks, the weather had seesawed this way, going late-summer warm in daytime, then skidding downward at night. I hadn’t bothered with a heavy coat. But on my way out, Bonnie offered me an old parka that her younger son had left in the car that day. When I tried to refuse, she insisted.
“I know you’ll return it. Besides, I know where you live,” she joked.
I thanked her and bundled up.
HURRYING OUT OF the medical examiner’s building, I could think only of joining Rob in his huge and indecently comfortable bed, smack in the middle of his bachelor “apartment” over his family’s garage. It was lucky that Rob’s passion (besides me) involved computers, music mixing, and every kind of daredevil sport aside from raising elephants … or his parents would have turned the garage into a zoo.
Like every other XP parent except my mother, Rob’s parents gave him everything. It made sense: Rob might not live to enjoy all the rewards of adulthood. The apartment his dad had made for him was to provide the illusion of independence. Although Rob would “go” to college online in the fall, he wouldn’t really “go” anywhere. One of the agonies of a chronic illness is too much family togetherness. But my mother, convinced the research would beat XP before it beat me, saw no reason to give me anything more than a spare set of keys to her ancient Toyota minivan.
I was barely to the bottom step of the medical examiner’s building when I heard the voice: low, urgent, infused with laughter.
“Allie,” Garrett Tabor said into the frozen stillness. “Look what I have for you! A present.”
I blinked at him in the frozen air. My pulse quickened. He held up my rhinestone-studded black ski mask. The one Juliet had “borrowed” in exchange for mine. The very key to how he’d framed me. But how had he gotten hold of it? “Don’t you want this?” h
e asked. “All I want in return is a little forgiveness. A little compassion.”
“That would require a little amnesia, don’t you think?” I managed to say. “I’m going home.”
Tabor took a step toward me. Something I couldn’t really see glinted in his other hand, against the pale wool of a glove. A key? Or something more up Garrett Tabor’s street? A scalpel? He wouldn’t dare. I turned to head back in. Then I remembered. It was locked. It had to be locked. I had to buzz and hope Bonnie would set the land speed record for letting me in. Or I had to act.
In Parkour, a tracer always “derives” a course. Although speed is key, no tracer ever goes forth without a plan. My heart punched in my chest. I could charge straight past Garrett Tabor, but once my back was to him, he would take me. People who run away in a straight line give their adversaries an advantage. Ask any soldier how to get caught, knocked down, or shot, and you’ll get the same answer: be predictable. Parkour was created as a wartime discipline. Although I hadn’t done it in months, the skills would not desert me.
Backing up, I took two steps and, placing both hands on the railing, swung my body straight up and over—my booted heels slicing the air near Tabor’s head. He stepped back. I used that moment of disengagement to hit the panic button on my keys. The van erupted in horn blasts and flashing lights. Then I sprinted. I didn’t breathe until I was swinging into the seat and peeling out of the lot, lightly kissing the immaculate tire of Tabor’s red vintage sports car with the droopy bumper of our old Toyota.
I drove straight to Rob and didn’t look back.
TEN MINUTES LATER, with the help of an elliptical machine and a straight-backed chair, I was reenacting my escape for Rob. Annoyingly calm, he lay on his back in the middle of his vast bed, smack in the middle of his “rooms.” (This was Rob’s classy term for his apartment.) Other than a bathroom, it really only was one big room, but designed for everything Rob needed, and its showpiece was a giant panel in the roof that rolled back at the touch of a fingertip to reveal the stars and the storms, and shut tight to seal out the sun.
“So that was how I got away from him,” I said, or words to that effect. Either I was mistaken or Rob looked impatient.
“It was necessary, right? You think it was, Sherlock?” he asked.
“Why? Don’t you? Are you saying I overdid it?”
“Allie, it wasn’t as though Tabor was in your bedroom. It wasn’t as though Bonnie wasn’t there, too.”
If he hadn’t been so innocently beautiful, the muscles that framed his hips like narrow cords—and also indecent under the light blanket pulled up to those hips—I might have stalked out. Rob had a habit of failing me in the area of drama. “Do you think I was over the top? Even given what he said?”
“I think you showed off.” He smiled then, his black hair falling forward over his forehead. “Come on. This bed is cold. Garrett Tabor has no place in this room.” He pulled back the covers and made a place for me.
“I think I should tell someone, though, Rob,” I said, obliging him by climbing in next to him and attempting to unfurl my tense body, one neuron at a time.
“Honey, if you were to tell someone, what would you tell? We’ve been through this.”
“He taunted me with that mask …”
“Taunting isn’t a crime. You don’t even know if that was the same ski mask, Allie-Stair. In fact, I would be pretty sure it isn’t. The police probably have that ski mask.”
Duh. How dumb could one criminal justice major be?
Garrett Tabor had done exactly nothing except take a single step toward me. Unrecorded for posterity.
“Come here,” Rob said, pulling me into the place I fit, just in the crook of his shoulder. Before anything went further, I reminded him that I had to call my mother
“She’ll be worried about me. After the other night … and especially since he was there.” I hadn’t gone into the specifics of my Corona incident, but the way news got around our town, the Dorn family had already heard about it.
Poor Jackie Kim. Her husband dumped her, a sick kid, and now this …
My mother had been in this what-freak-out, that-freak-out-never-happened mode. I knew it must have been an effort. She had switched to the three-to-eleven shift at the hospital after Juliet’s death. While also working some days at the clinic on the XP Sibling Project, she was adjusting to a new circadian rhythm. Unless I was going to be home and with her, she spent most nights sleeping. She was probably asleep right now. Call? Not call?
No sooner had I finished dialing than I repented. Even leaving a message would worry Jackie. I had been the kind of daughter who didn’t even call back, much less call to pass the time of night. Mom would cover the distance between our house and Rob’s house like a falcon without benefit of wings. But …
“This is Jacqueline Mack Kim, co-director of the XP Sibling Project at the Tabor Clinic and After Five Emergency Services Coordinator at Divine Savior Hospital. I’m with a patient now, but will call you back promptly. If you have a life- or limb-threatening emergency, please hang up and call …”
Why, I will, Mom, was my first and self-centered thought. When Tabor gets hold of a limb. And thanks.
But my next thought was: Thank goodness. She is asleep. She’s letting it go over to voicemail.
“I’m fine, Mom. Just wanted you to know.”
Because nothing … really happened.
It really didn’t.
My body felt as though something had happened, my brain a brushfire. It wasn’t that I wanted anyone to be scared for me. Not really. Not much. I was Allie Kim, the Great and Terrible, fierce and strong. Except I wasn’t even really … that … either. He scared me. He was a scary person who scared me.
I turned to Rob and smiled.
He closed his arms around me.
A WHILE LATER, staring up at the dark ceiling, I spoke. “It felt good, though.”
“Thanks,” Rob said lazily.
“I mean Parkour.” I giggled and tried to recover. “I don’t mean that being with you didn’t … I meant …”
Rob sat up, rocking back once to pull on his jeans. “No offense taken. I bet it did. I bet it did. We’ve been hiding under a rock since that night.”
Suddenly, and abruptly, I was sick of hiding.
“Why don’t we do a trace?” Rob said.
“I don’t want to do Parkour,” I said. “If I did it for the joy, it would remind me of her, and how she died. Juliet can’t feel that anymore. I couldn’t experience that joy without her. Not yet. I’d be bad at it and that would be awful. Even more dangerous than it was.”
“But you want to do something.”
“Something risky. Some extreme gig only we can do.”
Rob said slowly, “If I say I know just the thing, will you believe me?”
“Is it good? Is it scary?”
“It’s good and scary, I promise,” Rob said.
He had no idea.
5
FREE
They call it free diving, but like Parkour, it is anything but free. The price tag is steep. For starters, it’s the second most dangerous sport. The first is base jumping. When people base jump, they throw themselves from cliffs, bridges, and even skyscrapers, using a parachute to break their fall. (BASE is really an acronym, meaning Buildings, Antenna, Spans, and Earth. Earth is the trick part.) Even if the parachute opens, there are times when the jumper wakes up in a full-body cast. And there are times when the jumper never wakes up at all.
There are half a dozen ways to free dive, but they all involve one thing. Or rather, they all do not involve one thing: an air supply. The breath you go down with is the breath that takes you back up.
Or so you hope.
Some people don’t really dive; instead they descend on a rope to grab a flag that proves their depth conquest. Some simply go submersible in a pool for what is essentially a contest of holding their breath.
Rob and I were going to go the classic competitive way, which is called
constant weight. A diver wears a belt with enough weight so that it’s easier to roll your body into a pike position and go down, arms extended like Superman, kicking as little as possible as you descend (any effort uses up oxygen) until you see how low your body (and your mind, because your mind plays a big role) will allow you to go.
Free divers suffer convulsions. They pass out. They don’t pause to adjust their ears and end up blowing out their eardrums.
But they love the feeling.
Why? I was going to find out why. I’d never even gone scuba diving with Rob, although he pestered me all the time to go with him.
Last summer, he was certified as an open-water diver, his way of coping with Juliet’s disappearance. He’d taken instruction with Wesley, a guy legendary in Iron Harbor for his daring. Wesley had hang glided in the mountains, here and out West. He’d hiked the Appalachian Trail and then turned around and hiked back. He skydived, cave dived, and apparently, free dived, and also taught it all. He had a stack of teaching credentials—with no wall to hang them on—which was why Rob and I were on the way to see him at the Iron County YMCA pool. Rob had signed us both up for private lessons.
Rob was in a great mood.
He idolized Wesley—perhaps (not perhaps, in fact) because Wesley had unrestricted access to everything Rob had severely restricted access to—namely, the outdoors. Wesley also had that irritating nouveau hippie way of living life, so appealing to people with a Y chromosome: no girlfriend, but “special ladies” in his life, planted all over, and only in places like Maui and Taos, where he kept a bag of clothes and a bedroll stashed in their coat closets. I’d met Wesley once, in the dark—but then, almost everyone I met was in the dark—when Rob did his open-water diver’s test. (Let me dis-recommend this experience to you even if you don’t have XP: if you’re not the one doing the test, and you’re watching from the surface, watching someone take an underwater diving test makes collating paper look like a ripper of a party in Hollywood or someplace.)