Protector - Laurel Dewey [146]
“Didn’t you read this?” her mother screamed.
“I don’t want to read it again!”
“No, you don’t want to see what you’ve done to us! Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist and maybe it’ll go away! Am I right? Well, this is not going to go away! But I am and I’m taking Emily with me!”
Emily heard the reverberation of wood slamming against wood. The sound instantly jerked the child back into herself.
Jane looked down at the kid. “You okay?”
“We had a desk like that. My mom kept all my handmade birthday cards in it.”
“Where did she store them?”
“In the top secret spot that man was talking about. Mommy said she wanted to keep special cards in a special place. She never told me where it was because that’s where she kept private stuff that I wasn’t supposed to see.”
“What weren’t you supposed to see?”
“Santa’s reply to my letters,” Emily said offhandedly, “report cards . . .”
Jane sat back and stared at the TV screen as the scene changed to another antique. Emily rolled off Jane’s lap and curled up against the side of the couch. Jane clicked off the TV and sat in the dark. A familiar feeling tugged at her gut—it was the same psychic pull she felt many times before, akin to the sensation of cresting a long, steep hill and finally locating what you’ve been searching for. But the more Jane tried to structure the impression into something she could touch and understand, the more elusive it became.
Resting her head against the couch, she closed her eyes and tried to succumb to slumber. But, instead, she hovered between the worlds. She opened her eyes and fumbled through the darkness of the living room and toward the radio console. Turning on the radio, she was amazed how much light the front panel emitted. Odd, she surmised, for an old radio. Jane spun the dial from one band of static to another until she heard the crisp voice of Tony Mooney. Amazing, she mused.
“We all think we own our thoughts,” Mooney declared in his deep, trademark tenor. “But do we really? What if two people could share the same thought? The same experience? But, perhaps, from a different point of view?” Jane noted how the light on the radio console seemed to glow even brighter. “Would you allow yourself to suspend disbelief for just one second and believe that?” Mooney leaned closer to the microphone. “Would you . . . Jane?”
Jane rocked out of the bizarre dream and back into the pitch-blackness of the living room. Her heart raced and her head spun as the sound of Mooney’s voice echoed. Instantly, there was a rapid flash of blinding light, followed by the date, 10-24-99 and, finally a wolf’s face. And then darkness. But somewhere in the air, Jane swore she smelled metal burning.
Shafts of the morning sun sliced through the front curtains. Jane and Emily were still on the couch fast asleep. Jane stirred, checking the time. 6:20. Peachville’s morning rush hour would soon begin with the steady drone of trucks heading up Main Street to the highway. Five minutes later, it would be over. In the kitchen, Jane sorted through the basket that Kathy had given them. Discovering a tin of gourmet amaretto instant coffee, she decided to give it a try.
Jane lit a cigarette and sat at the kitchen counter amidst the morning silence. The realization suddenly hit her that Dale Perry was really dead. The greatest known evil in Jane’s life was gone forever. She looked outside the kitchen window into the backyard where the tall grass swayed with the smooth morning breeze. In the last three and a half weeks, her life had taken so many twists and turns that she felt as if she’d been on a roller coaster ride. But suddenly, something seemed very different. As the morning light traced a path through the kitchen, she sensed that a door was opening. She looked around the kitchen and noticed things she had not seen until that moment—a tarnished cupboard knob, an indentation in the linoleum and a curl of peeling wallpaper by the sliding glass door. They had been right in front of her all this