She glances over at me and arches an eyebrow. “So what is it you can do? Light fires? Toss skillets through the air just by looking at them? Pretty sure you can’t read minds, otherwise you’d have . . . known . . .”
She trails off, looking a little embarrassed. I’m tempted to ask exactly what it is I would have known if I was able to read minds. But I don’t want to push, so I answer her question instead.
Her mouth twists skeptically when I tell her about my hitchers. “And you can do this because one of your parents was part of that same program that Jasper was in? Back at Bragg?”
“That’s my best guess. I was abandoned when I was three, so I don’t really know much about my parents. But Taylor and Aaron?” I nod toward the picnic table, where Aaron is keeping a cautious eye on us. Taylor and Deo are sitting on the grass a few feet away from him, watching the puppy toddle around. “Their dad was definitely in the same program as your husband.”
“And they’re also . . .” Miranda stops and snorts softly. “What do you call a kid who can do the kind of things my Peyton can? Gifted?”
“I think a case could be made for either gifted or cursed, but yes, they both have psychic abilities. A bunch of other kids do too. The people who tried to snatch Peyton earlier this year were just studying them, but . . . something seems to have changed. If you’ve been following the news this past week, you may have heard about the kids at Fort Bragg who were kidnapped—”
“Killed, you mean?”
My surprise that she knows that already must show on my face, because Miranda looks mildly amused. “Guess I’m following the news a bit more closely than you are. Authorities issued a press release this morning. All six were found on land the Army uses for training. A couple other bodies, too. No leads yet on who did it. So . . . you’re telling me those kids were all like Peyton?”
“Three of them for certain. I’m pretty sure the others were as well.”
“And you think this group that was collecting the kids before, studying them—you think they’re killing them now?”
I shrug, because I’m not really sure what to think on that front. “I’m convinced that at least one of their people was involved. Other than that, it’s just conjecture.”
She sits there for a moment, thinking. “You’re asking me to take what you’ve said on faith. There aren’t any ghosts around here for you to pick up, at least to the best of my knowledge, and even if there were, I wouldn’t know what to ask so that you could prove it to me. Though you do seem a little young to be connected to the people who tried to snatch Peyton—they were walking stereotypes, I swear. Dark suits and sunglasses—almost like Will Smith and that other guy in Men in Black. That’s one reason we got away. Those men stood out like a sore thumb in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. If they’d been in blue jeans and work boots, I’d probably have been slower to react, and they’d have Peyton. Anyway, like I said, you look too young. But . . . maybe they got smarter about that.”
Miranda nods toward the picnic table. “What exactly can they do? Can they move stuff around like Peyton?”
“No. But if you want details, I’d rather you asked them directly.”
Her eyes narrow slightly. “Fine. What’s the girl’s name again?”
I tell her, and she calls out to Taylor, who scoops up the puppy and begins walking toward us. When Miranda asks, Taylor gives her a basic overview of her ability and then reaches under her collar and pulls out a chain. At the end is one of those friendship pendants with one half of the heart missing.
“My friend Molly was killed a few years back. I found her body because I had this. She was wearing the other half.”
Miranda considers Taylor for a moment and then grabs her gun from the step and goes back into the house. When she returns, the gun is stuck in the waistband of her jeans and she’s carrying a plastic snow globe. The curved stand that holds it was once white, but it’s now yellowed with age and has a missing chunk near the front.
Taylor gives me the puppy so that she can hold the object in both hands. “Is this Peyton’s? If so, I can tell you where she and her dad are hiding.”
“No,” Miranda says. “That would be too easy. You might have followed Jasper. Maybe you flew over in a helicopter and saw them when they left. I want you to tell me where it came from.”
“I can’t guarantee anything,” Taylor says. “But I need something to draw with.”
“TJ?” Miranda calls. “Bring me some paper and a pencil.”
The boy brings back a spiral notebook and a stubby pencil. Taylor wrinkles her nose at the lined paper. “Just so you know, this is going to look like crap.” Her eyes flit over to TJ, standing behind his mom, and she adds, “I saw you looking out the window. You can hold the puppy, if it’s okay with your mom. Just be careful. He’s only a few weeks old.”
TJ’s eyes grow wide. “Can I, Mom?”
Miranda sighs. “Okay, but right here next to the steps. And only for a minute, then you get back inside.”
The boy sits on the grass next to the steps, and a huge grin splits his face when I hand him the wriggling puppy.
Miranda shakes her head, and one side of her mouth twitches up slightly. “Score one for your crew. First time TJ has smiled in the past three days. He wants a dog so damn bad, but there’s no way we’re getting an animal in the middle of this craziness. No telling what Peyton might do if she got scared or if it scratched her.”
“Is she able to control it at all?”
Miranda looks a little surprised. “She controls it constantly. Peyton just turned four last week, and I don’t think you’ll find many kids her age who work so hard to keep their cool. If she didn’t, I doubt any of us, including Peyton, would still be alive. It scared the hell out of her when she hurt TJ. It was just that one second when she let her guard down. This . . .” She touches the stitches on her head. “She’s got an ear infection, okay? Been prone to them since she was a baby, but it took two trips to the doctor for the asshole to finally give her an antibiotic. She’d been feeling miserable for over a week, so her resistance was way down already. And then she was in the cabinet looking for a cookie, and I told her not until after supper. That earned me a foul look, but that would have absolutely been the end of it if Peyton hadn’t bumped the shelf. A can of tomatoes landed right square on her toe, and . . . I guess she was still a little mad at me about the cookie, because next thing I know she’s screaming and crying and a cast-iron skillet is flyin’ toward me.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah,” Miranda says. “I don’t know how long I was out. It was just me and Peyton here when it happened. Jasper had taken the boat across the Sound to pick up TJ from school. They were back when I came to, and there’s blood-soaked Cheerios and potato chips all over the floor, feathers from the sofa pillows floating around in the air. Peyton was just rockin’ back and forth, saying ‘Mama’ over and over, so scared that there was no way she could have stopped that thing inside her from lashing out, but she had the control to turn it toward things like feathers and snacks—light stuff, soft stuff—that couldn’t hurt me any worse than I already was. That couldn’t hurt any of us. So, yeah, my baby can control it, but she’s four. There are plenty of four-year-olds can’t even control their bladders.”
She looks over at the picnic table. “How long is this likely to take?”
Taylor is sitting so close to Deo that their shoulders touch. I wonder if she feels that odd tingle when she’s using him as an amp.
“Don’t know. I’m guessing it will be pretty quick. But . . .” I hesitate and then just decide to say what’s on my mind. “This won’t really prove anything, you know. I’ve already told you that there are quite a few people who were affected by the Delphi program. Some of them work for the group that tried to kidnap Peyton. So, even if Taylor comes back with something in her sketch that shows she’s clairvoyant, that doesn’t prove we’re on your side.”
“True,” she says. “But it will show whether you’re tellin
g the truth about something. And . . . I don’t have any psychic abilities at all. Jasper, on the other hand? You wouldn’t want to play poker with him, not unless you like to lose. I don’t let him gamble often. You win too much, people start to think you’re cheating. Then things get nasty, and I can’t really count on Jasper to hold his temper.”
She looks confused for a second, like maybe she’s trying to find her original train of thought. “Sorry. When I’m tired, I tend to ramble. Anyway, like I was saying, I’m not psychic. But I do have a good sense of people. You listen as much as you talk, and you didn’t break eye contact, even when I had the gun in your face. I don’t think you’d do that if you were trying to hide something.”
Her words make me very, very glad that I ignored Daniel’s earlier offer to “persuade” Miranda. Daniel seems really out of it, anyway. At first, I thought he and Jaden might just be overwhelmed dealing with Hunter, but there are no songs on a constant loop in the back of my mind today, so I think the boy’s shock is wearing off. I’m starting to actually sense Hunter’s presence beyond the ball of pain and fear that was pretty much his entire existence last night. He’s aware of what’s going on now, and I can feel him paying closer attention each time I look over at TJ, who is laughing while the puppy gnaws on his finger.
We watch them play for only a few minutes before Taylor heads our way with the snow globe in one hand and the paper and pencil in the other.
“Okay,” she says, plopping down on the bottom step. “That was kind of a blast. If I’d had Deo around when I was searching for Molly, things would have been so much easier. I’ve got several sketches for you, actually. There was some interference. I don’t think this first sketch is the original owner of your snow globe. In fact, I’m guessing this is where Peyton is, because I can tell it’s really close by and it’s an island.”
The island in the sketch is pointed at one end, almost like an arrowhead. Most of the land is shaded in, aside from a tiny strip on the eastern coast that she’s left blank. On that patch of white, Taylor has drawn two circular shapes and one square.
“I don’t know what those are,” she says, pointing to one of the circles and the square. “But I’m pretty sure the other circle is a tent. A yellow tent, to be precise, but”—she waves the pencil—“my color options are limited to graphite.”
Miranda shakes her head. “Like I said before—”
“We could have followed and seen them,” Taylor says. “Yeah, I know. But if something is in the printer queue, I have to get it out before I can move on to the next drawing.”
She flips the page. There are four small numbered sketches, and she taps the one at the top. “Number one here, as you can see, is also an island, but it’s not empty. I think it’s New York, but I’m not sure. I’ve only been there twice. Super crowded, lots of buildings.”
The second drawing is like she’s zoomed in on a specific part of the island. Narrow strips of land jut out into the water like the teeth of a comb. Streets are laid out in a grid, and she’s drawn a star two blocks in and about one third of the way up.
Taylor starts to describe this sketch, but I stop her. “I know this area. You’re right. It’s definitely New York. Manhattan. Hold on a sec.”
I’m used to fading backward into my head to access the memory banks. It’s something I’ve done on a regular basis for much of my life. I ignore the fact that all three hitchers are watching me and head for the file cabinet marked Didier.
You need an upgrade, girl. Who uses file cabinets anymore? Wouldn’t it be faster to imagine your memory banks as something like Siri, and you could just think, Navigate to Didier.
Jaden isn’t the first to note this. Deo laughed when I described my mental storage facility a few years ago, saying that it was like something out of the 1980s.
This is a visual Kelsey helped me build when I was a kid. And since it’s not broke, I’m not inclined to fix it.
When I return with the data I need, Miranda is giving me an odd look.
“That’s Hell’s Kitchen. In Manhattan.” I tap the section that looks like a comb. “Those are the West Side piers, and the long strip below is the Lincoln Tunnel. Didier, one of my hitchers, lived in Manhattan when he first arrived from Rwanda in the 1980s, and he worked a delivery job for a pizza place in Hell’s Kitchen for a few months. I can’t say for certain, but that looks like around Forty-Sixth or Forty-Seventh Street and Tenth Avenue.”
Miranda’s expression remains guarded, but she’s leaning closer to the notebook, so I can tell this has caught her interest. The third drawing is the outside of a four-story townhouse. The door is set into an arched entranceway. Several letter Zs are stacked on top of each other above the door and windows on the front of the building. I’m about to ask what they are, and then I realize they’re the fire escape.
“The building is brown with a green door.” Taylor points to the fourth drawing. “That’s the living room. I have no earthly clue what that bean-shaped blob in front of the couch is, but it’s painted sort of turquoise. And at some point, this snow globe”—she waves it back and forth and then hands it back to Miranda—“was sitting on it.”
“It’s a coffee table,” Miranda says. “It belonged to my grandmother, and it’s now in my cousin’s apartment in New York. We drove up there in September to get the keys for this cabin. Her mom rents this place out in the summer, but she hasn’t been down here since my great-uncle died. Things were getting tense at Jasper’s mom’s house, so I asked Aunt Tracy if we could use this place during the off-season. Peyton took a liking to the snow globe when we were there, and my aunt said she could have it.”
“She still likes it,” Taylor says. “Peyton, I mean. That’s why it was in my printer queue. She held it recently . . . only I don’t think it made her happy.”
Miranda runs her finger over the jagged edge at the bottom. “This was one of the casualties of Peyton’s recent . . . outburst. Jasper said she was holding it when they found us.”
She stands up and tosses me the keys to our truck. “I have to run TJ over to Knotts Island tomorrow for school. I’ll take you to meet Peyton after I drop him. If you and her hit it off, then Jasper and I will discuss this. No promises, and I can warn you he’s going to be pissed off. I wish I could call him to give him a heads-up, but his phone died last night, so . . . we’ll see. Come on, TJ.”
The boy reluctantly gives back the puppy. I thank Miranda for hearing us out, and we’re about to get into the truck when she calls back, “There’s only room in the boat for four, so two of you will need to stay home. Your gun better stay home, too. We leave at seven a.m., with or without you. And it will be cold as hell, so dress warm.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Currituck Sound, North Carolina
November 6, 2019, 6:36 a.m.
“I told you to dress warm,” Miranda says, shaking her head, which is snugly covered by the hood of her quilted jacket. Her gloved hand rests on the throttle of the outboard motor as she maneuvers the boat toward the dock.
“This is me dressing warm.”
That’s true. I’m wearing most of the clothes Deo packed for me when we left Maryland, along with Taylor’s fur-lined Uggs. My hoodie, the warmest item in my wardrobe, lies in a dumpster somewhere near Fort Bragg, covered with blood and gray matter. Deo’s purple denim jacket, which I borrowed as a temporary replacement, was clearly chosen more for aesthetics than warmth.
We opted to stay overnight at a Hampton Inn near Corolla rather than driving all the way back to the RV since we had to be at Miranda’s place before seven. The temperature plummeted in the early hours of the morning, dropping nearly thirty degrees, and it’s hard to believe that it was warm enough last night that we walked on the beach for about an hour after dinner. Taylor and Deo had even joked about diving in for a swim, although all it took was a single chilly wave hitting their feet to convince them that wasn’t such a great idea. Now, a frigid wind mixed with ocean spray whips against my cheeks as the boat skim
s the brackish green water between Carova and Knotts Island.
TJ is bundled up like Kenny on South Park, with just the small patch of caramel skin around his eyes exposed to the elements. Once Miranda has the boat parallel to the dock, Aaron helps TJ heave his bicycle, which bumped against my knee for most of the trip across the Sound, onto the pier. Then the boy climbs on his bike and takes off across the grass toward the dirt road that leads to his school.
Miranda picks up speed as we head back out into open water. We’re now moving about twice as fast as we did before, and the temperature shifts rapidly from cold to bloody freezing, even though I’m sitting with Aaron’s arms wrapped around me. He offered his coat—twice, in fact—but I know he’s only wearing a single layer underneath, and his shoulders would never fit inside Deo’s denim jacket.
I’m glad for the warmth, but there’s an awkwardness that wasn’t there before. I don’t need Dacia’s ability to read his thoughts to know when something reminds Aaron that he’s also—kind of—hugging his brother. His embrace shifts from affectionate to perfunctory and back again several times during the interminably long ride.
By the time I spot the narrow strip of white sand on Long Point Island, my teeth are chattering so hard I’m afraid I’ll chomp off a piece of my tongue. The yellow tent is there, just like in Taylor’s drawing. Another boat, smaller than this one, lies hull-side up on the grassy area beyond the shore.
Miranda cuts the engine, points the boat toward a little copse of trees, and we begin to drift silently toward the beach. My shivers abate somewhat now that the wind is less fierce.