Photograph, page 9
“It’s still one murder twenty-six years ago,” Kate said dubiously.
“Agreed. It won’t necessarily be easy to find. Most records from that long ago aren’t digital. So I decided to ask for help.”
“Help?”
“There are lots of cold case forums online. Amateur crime fighters play Sherlock Holmes and try to solve these things. I posted the details on several sites, along with a scan of the photograph. I’m hoping somebody will remember the crime and be able to point us to a location and a victim.”
Kate smiled weakly. “That’s smart.”
“If it works, it’ll be smart. If not, well, then we’ll try something else.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. We were still holding hands, me comforting her, her comforting me. Sometimes that’s what daughters need. The Carnival ship had sailed away and was nothing but an orange glow on the Atlantic horizon. The waves had gotten higher and were now splashing around our knees.
“What happened to your own mother, Shannon?” Kate asked me. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me, but I was just wondering.”
“It was suicide.”
Kate turned and faced me. I saw empathy in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. She suffered from depression most of her life. After she and my father split up, she couldn’t deal with the loneliness. Although really, she’d been lonely throughout most of their marriage. I blame him for that, but I know that’s not really fair. Mental illness doesn’t care whether you’re happy or not. She might have done it even if they’d had the best marriage in the world. But I needed to blame someone, and it’s easier to blame him than myself.”
“You? Why you?”
I shrugged. “Maybe if I’d loved her a little more. Maybe if I’d been there for her a little more. Know what I mean?”
“That sounds like crap, Shannon. She did this. The only person you should really be angry at is your mother.”
“Oh, I am angry at her. It’s hard to forgive her. But that’s not fair, either. She didn’t ask for what she got.”
“What about you?” Kate asked quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“I looked you up, Shannon. I mean, I know what happened to you. You didn’t ask for what you got, either.” She had the embarrassed look of someone who didn’t know if she’d just said the wrong thing. Most people went out of their way to say nothing when they found out about my background.
“I don’t talk about it. I don’t like playing the victim.” I said it in the tough, careless, lying way I usually did.
“That doesn’t make you less of one,” Kate replied.
Suddenly, she reached out and pulled me close and hugged me. It was simple, spontaneous, her arms wrapping around me and holding me tight. I didn’t have time to say no. My instinct was to push her away, to push anyone away who was physically close to me. You may find this strange, but I had not hugged another person since the assault. Not my father, not anyone. I shrank from any kind of warmth or touch; I didn’t allow it to happen. But as Kate embraced me, I realized how much I needed it, how much I missed it, how much a simple gesture of friendship could revive my heart, which felt as if it had stopped beating years ago.
I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. Kate released me, and I had to look away, because I felt overwhelmed. She seemed to realize I needed space, and she took a few steps away from me, deeper into the crashing surf. But I knew that moment was a turning point between the two of us.
My mother used to tell me that the good and bad of our lives lead us where we’re supposed to go, but I had stopped believing that after she died. When the assault happened, I became convinced that life was simply brutish and random and nothing more than what we made of it. I had not felt blessed in a long, long time.
And yet here I was with Kate.
It was hard not to wonder if I was standing on this beach on this moonlit night, with this woman, with this friend, in the middle of this mystery, because this was exactly where I was destined to be.
For reasons I didn’t yet understand.
When we left Jetty Park, Kate went home to Jacksonville, but I had somewhere else to go before I returned to Daytona Beach. If I was willing to believe that things happened for a reason, well, someone else had come into my life recently, too. Maybe there was a reason for that.
Maro had a rental condo only steps from the beach, no more than ten minutes down the A1A from where I was. I’d been there once before, for the bizarre journey that had let me see things that happened before I was born. I still didn’t really believe it, but I’d listened to my own voice on the recording, talking as if I were a woman named Jenny, facing down a killer in her bedroom.
A woman named Jenny, with a husband named Christopher and a daughter named Olivia. A woman who—as far as I could tell—had been killed thirty years ago, months before I was even born.
So I wanted to see Maro again.
I found her apartment door open, as if she already knew I was coming. Well, that made sense for a woman who could see things, right? I called her name as I went inside, but she didn’t answer. The condo had a pungent smell of incense and marijuana, which I suspected would put her cleaning deposit in serious jeopardy. She’d hung suncatchers and wind chimes all over the room, and the windows were open, making plink-plink music as the ocean air blew inside. Maro had a cat, a striped tabby who eyed me from the window ledge, then jumped outside to escape. I called Maro’s name again, waiting. When she still didn’t answer, I went to the condo’s back door, which led to a patio area and a berm with a sandy trail leading to the beach.
The cat was gone, but Maro sat on a picnic bench, her knees pulled to her chest, her long multicolored hair blinking on and off in rainbow colors from LED beads wound around the strands. She wore a billowy white nightgown and—it was painfully clear from how she was sitting—absolutely nothing underneath. I shielded my gaze, then took a seat on the other side of the bench. Her head turned lazily, and her eyes—one green eye, one blue eye—seemed to swim rather than focus.
Bottom line, she was as high as a Falcon 9 rocket.
“Shannon Wells,” Maro announced in a dreamy voice. “You came back. And what have you learned since we last met?”
I could have danced around the truth, but I’m not much of a dancer. “She’s real.”
“Jenny.”
“Yes, Jenny. Her name was Jenny Curtis. She lived in Angola, Indiana. She had a daughter named Olivia who went to Notre Dame. Her husband was Christopher. She was killed.”
“Why does that surprise you? That’s what you remembered. I regressed you. I took you back to your own memories. Everything you saw came out of your own brain, your own soul. You showed me the source of your pain. You were killed in a past life. You had your future stolen from you back then. You may be leading a new life now, but the old one still haunts you.”
“Bullshit.” The profanity escaped from my mouth before I could stop it.
Maro didn’t look offended. She simply smiled. “You don’t have to believe it, Shannon. Fate will unroll as it must whether you believe these things or not. But you’re here with me now, and that means deep down, you do believe it. You know it to be true. The only question is what you choose to do with that knowledge.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“That’s up to you. Ultimately, a hand will guide you and show you the way. You’ll make the decisions you are intended to make. You’ll meet the people who are meant to be put in your path.”
The good and bad of life will lead us where we are destined to go.
I shook my head, because I’ve always hated riddles. “This was a mistake. I’m going home.”
I got off the picnic bench and headed for the condo’s back door, but Maro came after me, her white gown loose and diaphanous, her hair twisting in the breeze, her skin emanating a cloud of weed. She walked with an odd up-and-down gait, probably a limp caused by the lightning strike when she was a kid. “Shannon, wait.”
“What is it?”
“Do you want to go back again? Do another regression?”
“Why? To meet Jenny? I already did.”
“No. We can go farther back. Where there’s one prior life, there’s usually more. You may learn something else.”
“Pass,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Then all I can say is, be careful.”
“What are you talking about?”
Maro invaded my space. She was not Kate—I wanted to push her away—but I found myself drawn to her eyes. Those two amazing feline eyes, one blue eye, one green eye. Heterochromia. There was something about it that made it impossible for me to look away.
“Have you ever heard of twin flames?” Maro asked.
“No.”
“They are two people who share a mirror soul. In each life, they’re drawn to each other. They find each other again and again, and typically this is good for both of them. That relationship shapes their lives for the better. But I believe there is another, darker phenomenon. Twin shadows.”
“Just how much have you smoked tonight?”
Her face didn’t acknowledge the joke. “Twin shadows are also drawn to each other, but in a corrosive, destructive way. Their interactions are typically violent. One always seeks to vanquish the other. I believe that Jenny Curtis came face-to-face with her twin shadow that morning. He killed her. My concern for you, Shannon, is that this has been happening again and again over many lives. If we go back, farther back, we can know for sure.”
“Well, like I said, once was enough.”
“Then you need to develop eyes in the back of your head,” Maro warned me. “Twin shadows stay close. If he’s out there, he will find you again. The fact that you’ve been having these visions at night makes me believe he’s not far away. He’s looking for you, and he will come into your life sooner or later. It’s inevitable. When you are together, it can only go one of two ways.”
I couldn’t help myself. As crazy as this was, I had to know the rest. “What are the two ways? What’s going to happen?”
Maro gave me a slow blink, like a cat. “Either you will kill him, or he will kill you.”
TEN
That night, when I finally slept, my vision changed.
I still saw the man coming toward me with a gun, the barrel pointed at my head. But when I heard the explosion ringing in my ears and saw the flash of fire, I didn’t wake up as I usually did. I was still asleep. And still alive. I felt a strange heaviness at the end of my arm and realized that I held my Glock in my own hand. It felt strong and comfortable there, fitted to my fingers, like an extension of who I was. I raised it and pointed the gun at the man hiding in shadows.
That was when I woke up, but I wasn’t screaming this time. My heart wasn’t racing. My body wasn’t bathed in sweat. I lay in the darkness, my breathing calm and steady, and the idea of closing my eyes again didn’t scare me. I had strength. I had a weapon and the ability to fight back against my assailant. As exhaustion washed over me, I fell back to sleep almost immediately, and I slept straight through for six more hours in what felt like a dreamless cloud. My alarm clock went off at seven o’clock, and I felt truly rested for the first time in two years.
I didn’t rush to get out of bed. I lay there with a degree of peace in my life that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I thought about Kate and Faith, and about my mother, and about the jagged connect-the-dots line of my life. In my head, I also heard what Maro had told me.
You have a twin shadow.
Did I believe a killer was chasing me down across past lives? Did I believe I was destined for another violent confrontation? No. Of course not. I’m still my father’s daughter, and I’m too hard-headed to believe in things I can’t touch, measure, and see. And yet I’m my mother’s daughter, too, and she had a spiritual side that I sometimes struggled to appreciate. She would have heard a story like Maro’s and quoted Shakespeare to me. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
It made me wonder about the man’s face on the other side of my vision.
Who was it? Would I recognize him if I saw that face come into the light?
But at that moment, I didn’t care, because I felt ready for whatever came my way. Or so I thought.
It didn’t take long to realize I was wrong.
Because what came my way next was my father.
I showered, got dressed, and headed downstairs to my usual table at Beachside. There, I found Martin Wells sitting in my office chair, waiting for me, checking his phone. Not only had my father never shown up here to meet me for breakfast, I didn’t think he had ever been to his investment hotel at all.
“Dad. What are you doing here?”
He put down his phone without answering me. He saw my eyes drift to the chair where he was sitting—that was my chair—and he got up and switched to the chair on the other side of the table. I sat down and took off my sunglasses. It was already a blistering hot morning, but my father’s presence made me sweat even more than usual. Rina hovered in the background, her dark eyebrows arching with curiosity. I’d shown her photographs of my father, the handsome fifty-five-year-old surgeon. So she knew who he was, and she seemed to recognize that this was An Important Event.
“I didn’t like the way we left things the other night, Shannon,” he finally told me, with firmness in his voice, as if I were a kid again and he was chiding me for not doing my homework.
“How do you think we left things?”
“We were in the middle of a conversation we’ve been avoiding for a long time, and you ran away from it.”
This was not a good start. My blood pressure began to rise. I mean, he was basically right, but still, it wasn’t a good start. “You’re the one who never wants to talk about Mom.”
“I don’t want to talk about your mother. I want to talk about you.”
The pounding in my head sounded like a drumbeat. “This isn’t a good idea, Dad. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I finally had a good night’s sleep, and I don’t want to fight with you.”
“I don’t want to fight, either.”
“Then how about we wait until next month’s dinner?”
“All we ever do is put things off. You can’t avoid me forever, Shannon. You can’t shut me out, no matter what you think I’ve done. I want you to let me back into your life.”
“I’m thirty years old, and now you’re finally taking an interest in me?”
“That’s not true. You’ve always been the center of my life.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s not kid ourselves, Dad. Work is the center of your life. It always has been, and it always will be.”
His face tightened with dismay.
We both should have stopped right there and called it a draw, but foolishly, we plunged ahead.
“I understand why you feel that way, and I’m sorry,” he went on. “I have a job that requires a lot of my time. But if you think I abandoned you, I didn’t. I would never do that. Not even when you abandoned me.”
I leaned across the table. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Shannon. You chose sides. Your mother was unhappy, and you picked her over me. The two of you set up a girls-only club, and I wasn’t invited to join. Have I made mistakes? Have I done things that I regret? Absolutely. But never, not once, did I turn my back on you. You always came first.”
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit, I could not believe he’d just said that to me.
He couldn’t be that naive. He couldn’t have forgotten. Or maybe he knew the missile I was about to fire his way, and he needed to goad me into admitting how much he’d hurt me.
“That’s weird, Dad,” I told him. My voice started out deadly quiet, but I heard myself getting louder as I talked. “Because I remember sitting in a hospital gown with half my face bandaged and bruises all over my body and blood between my legs and the police asking me questions about my sex life like I was some kind of whore. I was in your hospital, Dad. I was asking for you, begging for you. But you were nowhere to be found. Four hours. Four hours! I was on my own in that room for four fucking hours before you bothered to show up!”
Yeah, when I’m the one wielding the knife, I don’t hold back.
I may as well have plunged the blade into his abdomen and twisted. By the time I was done, I was shouting at him. My face was flushed. These were things I’d wanted to say for two years, and I’d stayed silent, because that was what the Wells family does. Maybe I shouldn’t have said them now, but this was a cry straight from my little girl soul. Believe me, I’m strong and getting stronger, and I have no regrets about who I am or where I’ve been. But that night? That one night? I may as well have been three years old, alone and scared and wondering why my father couldn’t make all the bad things go away.
“Shannon, I was in emergency surgery,” he pleaded with me, his proud voice breaking as he tried to excuse the inexcusable. “I couldn’t stop. I literally had a man’s heart in my hands.”
“And your daughter had literally just been raped.”
“The instant I was done, I ran to you. I ran.”
I shook my head. I was done with emotion. I was back to ice. “Dad, stop. I get it. You couldn’t leave. You were a hero. You saved a man’s life. Applause, applause. But the truth is, I don’t care about that. It’s not fair, and it’s not rational, but I don’t care. I needed you, and you weren’t there for me. It’s that simple. I can’t count on you. Not then. Not ever. You have never sacrificed a goddamn thing for me. So please spare me the bullshit about putting me first.”
If my father were a ghost, his skin couldn’t have turned paler.
I wondered if he’d had any clue about how this conversation was going to go. Did he think he would bully me into backing down the way I always did? That I’d throw my arms around him and everything would be fine between us?
