CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Laura sat up on the lumpy, flat mattress the motel had provided, sighing. She’d been trying to sleep for twenty minutes, but all she’d gained was more and more frustration.
This wasn’t right. None of it was. It felt like her whole world had tilted on its axis, leaving her unbalanced and without the footing she was used to.
Nate knew about her ability. Some weird stranger had turned up having claimed to have seen a vision of her, and neither of them knew why. She’d had to hide that, and keep lying about her visions, to Chris, even if it was only the lie of omission that she was used to using on everyone else in her life. It was just that suddenly, now that one person did get the honest truth, she had an itchy feeling that she was being awful to everyone else she should have been able to trust.
And then there was this ongoing problem with her visions, which she still wasn’t any closer to solving.
It was stupid – she normally avoided touching things in public places as much as possible – but she got up and started running her hand along every surface in the room, hoping for some kind of sign that her ability wasn’t broken.
Nothing came, of course. Why would it? Everything here was over-saturated, touched by too many people, and most of them only old echoes. There wasn’t anything special here. Nothing she could focus on.
Laura turned and got back into bed with a sigh, closing her eyes, but instead of darkness she was looking at images from the case in the back of her eyelids. The mannequins posed with both of the victims. The positioning. The bodies. What had they missed? It wasn’t like her and Nate to stall when they were only this far into an investigation. There was another lead out there, another clue they hadn’t been able to explore yet. All they had to do was find it.
She traced over it all in her mind. The connection with the therapist. The office and that weird waiting room. Dr. Usipov’s manner – barely controlled rage. The patient with a thing about law enforcement officers going for Nate. What was really connected, and what was just a red herring? It felt almost impossible to tell.
And those mannequins. God! Why did it have to be now? Why did it have to be right after she had told Nate everything, right when he was waiting to be blown away by how efficient and useful her visions were, that they failed her?
There was still time, obviously. Sometimes the visions did take a while to come in a case. But the utter lack of anything coming up with the mannequins, combined with how shadowy and hard to see her vision of Kenya’s ex-boyfriend had been, was worrying her.
Was it performance anxiety? The fact that she knew Nate was watching and their whole relationship could rest on whether he did or did not accept the way she did things?
It was terrifying, in many ways, to have to reveal herself like this. To bare something she had spent her whole life hiding. But that couldn’t be the only thing. She’d been scared or nervous before. For most of her childhood and teenage years, she’d dreaded the visions, wished they would go away. She’d tried to suppress them. Still, they had remained strong, as if to spite her.
It would be just like those spiteful visions to fail now when she was finally able to embrace them more fully.
Laura tossed the covers aside again, frustration making her movements sharp and snappy. She couldn’t sleep like this. Not when she was still unsure what was going on. It was just going to keep going around and around in her head until she figured it out.
And right now, there was one person who might actually be able to help her – someone she’d never had a chance to ask for help before.
Laura took a long, deep breath and then grabbed up her cell phone, trying not to give herself enough time to think and talk herself out of it.
There was a ringing tone twice, then a faint crackle, and then he spoke. “Hello?”
“Hi,” Laura said, hesitating. Did he even realize who she was. “Zach. This is Laura Frost.”
“I know,” he said, with a hint of a smile in his voice. “I do have caller ID. I know I look like I belong to the last century, but I do have a few modern touches here and there.”
Laura felt a moment of panic that subsided under his soft tone. Joking. He was just joking. He wasn’t really mad at her.
“Sorry for calling so late,” she said. “I’m just out on a case, and I couldn’t sleep, and -”
“Nonsense,” Zach said, cutting off her excuses. “You can call me at any time of day or night. I thought I made that clear. You don’t have to have a reason. What’s an old man like me going to be doing that’s so important I can’t take your call?”
“Sleeping, for one thing,” Laura said, but she sensed they were getting off-topic. “Look, I just needed to ask you something. About your visions, you know, the experiences you’ve had.”
“Shoot,” Zach suggested.
Laura took another breath, trying to figure out how to put it. “Have you ever felt – I don’t know – blocked? I’m having a lot of trouble with getting the visions to come right now. When I do, they’re murky – hard to see. Like I’m in a dark room trying to see with the beam of a single light.”
“Hmm.” Zach paused, and Laura got the sense of him moving – maybe pacing the floor or rubbing a hand over his chin thoughtfully. “Blocked. That’s an interesting way to put it. Well, I never tried to force the visions like you do – I was more often than not hopeful of avoiding them, not encouraging them. But, sure. I’ve had times when they didn’t come for a while, and the ones that did were unclear. I suppose that sounds like what you’re experiencing now.”
Laura breathed for a moment. Normal. It was normal for this to happen. That’s what he was saying, right? Nothing was wrong with her. It was just a block. Something that could come on from time to time. She only hadn’t been trying to force her visions, as he put it, for long enough to come across one of these blocks yet.
“What did you do to make them go away?” she asked, but even as she did, she feared she knew what the answer was going to be.
“I didn’t do anything,” Zach said, crushing all of her hopes. “Like I said, I was happy they were gone. When they came back, sometimes it would feel like a curse coming back over me all over again. But they did always come back, I’ll tell you that. Whether I wanted them or not, time would pass and there they would be. Sometimes after days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. I guess I don’t know the rules or the whys and wherefores, but my experience was they always came back.”