“Trust me on this one,” I said. “The other day in the library, Lexie was trying to do something Sighty with what I was saying. One second she was there, the next she was gone, eyes glassy, no response, totally pale. Whatever’s going on here, it’s dangerous, and Lexie does not need to be a part of it.”
“You took my little sister to the library?” Lissy asked incredulously.
“Lissy, focus.”
“Okay,” she said finally. “No Lexie.”
The two of us were in agreement on something. It was remarkable, really.
“Anything else?” she asked.
Given the fact that Lissy was more than a little conspicuous about her own Sight, I felt the need to clarify one other point. “Once we get in there, keep your voice down. Don’t mention anything supernatural if you don’t have to. And try not to cause a scene.”
“I don’t cause scenes,” Lissy objected.
“Says the girl who did what on the first day at Emory?” I asked.
As a reward for mentioning her show-stopping barf performance, Lissy gave me a death glare, but she couldn’t argue the point. She did have a slight tendency to cause scenes, in an awkward Lizzie McGuire kind of way.
“Can we just get on with it?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“No Lexie,” I said. “No scenes.” I paused. “I think that about covers it.” I took a deep breath, and then, without further ado, I told her everything I knew. Cade and the boys he’d killed. The platinum blonde with the sickly seductive smile. The dreams, the woman.
“Shannon.” Lissy whispered the name and looked over her shoulder, as if she expected the dark-haired woman to appear out of nowhere.
“Shannon,” I repeated. The name was little and cute and totally didn’t fit the woman I’d seen.
“The First Seer,” Lissy explained. “She’s my a million times great-grandmother, or something like that. Grams says she was infinitely blessed. She had all of our gifts, so she saw pretty much everything.”
“And now she’s in my dreams,” I said. “Oh, joy.”
“It’s not a dream,” Lissy said, her voice quiet and matter-of-fact. “It’s a visitation. Sometimes she comes to people with the Sight in times of great need. She leads them….” Lissy trailed off, and I did the math.
“So this Shannon chick helped you out with the whole evil math teacher thing?” I asked.
Lissy nodded. “She showed me her shield. Kissler had a copy of it hiding the door to his evil room of darkness and doom.”
“How sweet.”
Lissy snorted. There was a slight chance that she may have laughed as well. Lissy James? Laughing at something I said? What happened to thinking I ate puppies for breakfast and babies for lunch? Don’t even get me started on the afternoon snack….
“So…yeah…Shannon helps people. Our kind of people, I guess.”
Lissy James and I had a joint kind of people. Weird.
“Whatever this Shannon chick is trying to tell me,” I said, “it has to do with us, and with what happened with Mr. Kissler, and what’s going to happen with Cade. And Brock.” I mentioned my boyfriend almost as an afterthought. “And possibly something about these three girls whose mother died.”
Lissy bit her bottom lip in what I could only assume was deep thought. To me, it looked a little like she was constipated. Lexie was right—Lissy totally needed to practice those facial expressions in a mirror. About the time I realized that I found that fact oddly endearing, I forced myself to concentrate on what was important: finding out about the boys Cade claimed to have killed.
“You ready for this?” I asked Lissy.
She nodded, still nibbling on the corners of her mouth.
I opened my car door and walked quickly into the library. No need to draw more attention to myself than was necessary.
Lissy, however, tripped and stumbled. She managed to catch herself. In the course of doing so, she emitted a high-pitched squeaky sound.
I arched one eyebrow at her.
“That wasn’t a scene,” she argued.
“Uh-huh,” I said. She gave me a look, but took my teasing for what it was and didn’t say another word. I smiled, and somehow, she managed to follow me into the library without so much as another stumble. I was tempted to give her a gold star.
“Where do we start?” Lissy asked the moment we were both safely inside.
“Old newspapers,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “And yearbooks.” I’d seen visions of Cade in his own time, in our school cafeteria, and touching the water fountain had triggered my Sight and shown me glimpses of the other boys. I could only infer that, once upon a time, they’d gone to Emory High.
In fact, from the looks of the boys, once upon a time they’d ruled Emory High as much as any male could.
“I take it you want the yearbooks?” Lissy asked.
I inclined my head slightly. “How’d you guess?”
Lissy opened her mouth and then closed it again. A few weeks earlier, I probably would have thought she was simply incapable of forming a coherent sentence, but I was beginning to read her body language well enough to know that she was stopping herself from saying something she wasn’t sure she should say.
I waited.
“Your aura kind of wagged when you said the word ‘yearbook,’” Lissy admitted.
Despite the fact that she was breaking the whole “don’t talk about the supernatural” rule, I had to ask. “Wagged like a dog’s tail wags?”
Lissy nodded, a sheepish look on her face.
“Huh.”
“So I’ll take newspapers,” she said, changing the subject from auras with a surprising amount of stealth. “And look for…” She trailed off, waiting for me to supply the answer.
“Deaths,” I said. “Of teenage guys. Start about fifty or sixty years ago.” I paused for the very slightest second and tried to keep my voice even. “I think someone may have had a knife.”
Lissy nodded, and for one horrible moment, I thought she would reach out to comfort me. Since I wasn’t exactly sure how much comforting I wanted, I opted for pushing her buttons instead. “Chop-chop,” I said lightly. “Newspapers don’t read themselves.”
I won’t describe the face Lissy made at me then, except to say that it wasn’t flattering in the least.
As she headed off to look for newspapers, I walked to the information desk. “I’m looking for yearbooks,” I said.
“Have you checked the high school library?”
I hadn’t, and that was a stupid mistake on my part, but she didn’t need to know that. “Do you have them here?” I answered her question with a question.
“A limited selection,” she sniffed. “But you really would be better served—”
“And the limited selection is located where?”
The librarian paused, just for a moment, and I gave her my best impression of a genuinely sweet smile.
“Purple bookshelf,” she said. “Back wall.”
As I walked, I couldn’t help but think that I should have known. The ugly purple bookshelf had given me a touch-triggered vision, and Lexie had told me on our first library adventure that help would come from something purple. As I approached the bookshelf, I issued a steely glare in its general direction. My body still ached from my last touch vision. I so wasn’t looking for another one.
Cautiously, I knelt next to the shelf and pulled out the first yearbook I saw. 1999.
In a town our size, you pretty much only have one yearbook, and it covers everyone from kindergarten through senior year. Traditionally, other than class pictures, the entire book is dominated by pictures of high schoolers. For a brief moment, I considered the book in my hand. The year I was nine had not been my best, and honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to remember it. Before my Sight could get any funky ideas, I put the yearbook down and reached for another, aiming for one with a more weathered, tattered cover. 1987.
Much better. I opened it to the middle, and the first thing I saw wa
s a picture of a blond boy with enormous shoulders and hair that was, objectively, out of control. Moving on instinct, I placed my fingertips on the picture, and the moment I did, I sank into it, my mind absorbed in another place, another time.
“Davis. Davis, MY MAN.”
The sounds of a guys’ locker room were drowned out by a single voice, and the blond boy nodded toward the guy who’d yelled his name.
“Say it ain’t so, buddy. Say it ain’t so.”
“Say what ain’t so?” the blond, who I could only assume was Davis, asked.
“You and Cindy on the outs? That girl is…” Rather than search his mind for an adjective, the speaker let out a long, low whistle.
Davis slammed his locker shut. “Cindy and I are fine,” he said. “She knows she’s got a good thing here.” At the word “here,” he gestured to himself. “Anyone tell you otherwise?”
Davis’s friend didn’t speak for a moment, and Davis advanced on him. “You tell whoever it is that he’s dreaming, and that if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll stay away from Helen.”
“Helen?” I mouthed the question, even as the other guy spoke it, but Davis stormed off without another word, and the moment he rounded the corner, he disappeared into nothing.
“Okay.” I spoke the word under my breath and looked again at the picture I was touching.
IN LOVING MEMORY: JOHN MICHAEL DAVIS, CLASS OF 1987.
“He disappeared.” My thoughts were coming out of my mouth so quickly that I couldn’t have stopped them if I’d tried. “He walked around the corner, and he disappeared. And then, somehow, he died.”
Taking out my cell, I quickly texted Lissy. It occurred to me briefly to wonder how I had her number in my phone book, but with the vision still fresh in my mind, I had other things to worry about.
John Davis, I typed into my phone. 1987.
I hit send, slapped the yearbook shut, and reached for another. Flipping through the pages of the book was like walking through a crowded room. The sounds and memories the pictures represented flitted in and out of my head. 1958 was a wash, as was 2000, and my temple was starting to pound with the memories I couldn’t keep from dancing across my mind.
I played with the idea of getting as far away from the yearbooks as possible, but somehow, I didn’t think old newspapers were going to be that much better, and I wasn’t ready to give up. Now that I’d seen Davis, the whole murder and mayhem aspect of this felt more real. Not that he’d been a particularly stand-up guy, but he had been real and alive, and I couldn’t help but remember the way things always ended in my visions of Cade: blood and flesh and death.
1957.
The moment I touched it, I shivered. No visions came—I didn’t see anything, but I could feel it in the way the hairs on my arms stood straight up.
The first thing I looked for was an “In Loving Memory” page, and I found it almost immediately.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF TAD BRADFORD.
I’d seen him before: dark hair, preppy, cocky look in his eyes. Roughly the size and build of a buffalo.
I’d seen him in my visions, his face blurring into the faces of four other boys, among them John Davis, the guy who’d picked on the dweeb in the library, and the guy who’d shoved another boy up against a school locker bank.
I’d seen him this afternoon in the cafeteria, his arm wrapped protectively around the shoulder of a girl with a shining blond ponytail I was starting to despise.
Beside me, my phone buzzed, and when I picked it up, the text message from Lissy stared me in the face.
Bingo.
Now I had a perfectly reasonable excuse to put the book down and back away, find Lissy, and reap the benefits of her newspaper sleuthing, but somehow, I couldn’t. Deliberately, I placed my fingers on Tad’s photo and willed my mind into the past. This time, the information came as a single punch to my brain, and I saw so many things at once that it literally threw me backward.
I saw Tad, King of the World, with his best girl, my favorite platinum blonde.
I saw Tad on the football field, Tad drinking with his buddies.
Tad roughing up the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Tad leering at them, his boys on his heels.
Tad behind the wheel of a brand-new car, his arm around someone who wasn’t the blonde.
Tad watching the blonde talk to another boy.
Tad’s fury rising.
The other boy—Cade?—not realizing the blond girl was using him.
As I recovered from the mass of images I’d been bombarded with, I couldn’t help but think that boys were dumb. And that Tad was an ass.
With those two equally important thoughts in mind, I flipped the page. My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. I was a girl on a mission.
“Where are you?” I muttered under my breath. “I know you’re in here somewhere.”
And then, there he was—in the yearbook in front of me and standing beside me, looking over my shoulder.
“Not my best picture.”
I made a concerted effort at not reacting as Cade’s voice reached my ears. “No,” I said, “it’s not.” Entranced by the yearbook, I didn’t look up at the real Cade and instead stared down at the page. The photo was grainy, and he was in the process of turning his back to the camera, too cool to be caught on film.
In the here and now, Cade knelt by my side, and I resisted the urge to touch the picture.
“You killed Tad.” It was a statement, not a question.
Cade didn’t respond.
“For her?” This time, it was a question. I took a stab in the dark at the girl’s identity, based on the name I’d heard over and over again in my visions. “For Helen?”
Cade froze at the mention of her name.
“She was using you, you know.” I couldn’t help but impart some of my alpha-girl intuition on him.
He looked at me, his eyes funny and intense and dead serious all at once. “What do you mean ‘was’?”
He’d no sooner gotten the words out of his mouth than the air around him cracked, and he disappeared back to the past. Back to the time of the picture I couldn’t bring myself to touch.
“Lilah, I texted you like four times.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, still distracted by the picture on the page in front of me. I wondered who Cade had been in 1957, who I would have been if I’d lived then.
“Do you enjoy driving me crazy?” Lissy asked, her tone bordering somewhere between exasperation, annoyance, and a whine.
“You found something,” I surmised. “So did I.” Without bothering to explain it to her, I carefully (and stealthily, I might add) ripped Cade’s page out of the 1957 yearbook, folded it twice, and stuck it in my back pocket.
Lissy looked duly shocked that I had violated library property. I rolled my eyes. “So are you going to give me that look or tell me what you found?” I asked.
For a moment, it appeared as though my question was going to prove somewhat rhetorical.
“Fine,” Lissy said.
I waited.
“First, I looked up John Davis. He disappeared from Emory High in the middle of the school day sometime in the fall of 1987, and his bloodied body was found several hours later, at the exact spot where he’d last been seen.”
I pictured the locker room in my mind.
“No one was ever arrested for the murder. His girlfriend was inconsolable.”
At the word “girlfriend,” I looked down at the book, where Cade’s picture had been before I had commandeered it as my own. There, peeking through the ragged edges of the torn page, was a familiar set of blue eyes, a familiar blond ponytail.
I turned the page, and as I read, Lissy did the same over my shoulder.
HELEN LANDON: FALL PRINCESS.
I started flipping the pages, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Winter Queen, homecoming court, head cheerleader…
Helen Landon was everywhere in this book. And, I was convinced, she was evil.
“1957,” I
told Lissy. “Tad Bradford. Helen Landon. Cade…” I trailed off, realizing I didn’t know Cade’s last name. “I need to know what happened.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Lissy said.
She was getting brave. Good for her.
“Thanks,” I said.
Lissy balked for a moment, then blew a wayward strand of brown hair out of her face. “You’re welcome.”
I closed the book on Helen Landon and followed Lissy to the newspaper archives, and in perfect respect of the “no scenes” rule, neither one of us said a single word.
17
Payback, Part 2
Apparently, I’m not the only bitch.
I wasn’t surprised when we managed to pull up the article on Tad Bradford. The newspaper writer referred to him as an “upstanding young man.” The irony wasn’t lost on me as I remembered all I’d seen of said young man beating up on anyone and everyone who was smaller, weaker, and poorer than he was and cheating on his girlfriend.
Needless to say, Tad Bradford was not my favorite person. And I couldn’t help but notice that he had a stupid name.
Tad’s body had been found just outside the school. He’d been stabbed. Both the suspect (one Cade Kent) and the victim’s girlfriend (another upstanding young citizen, Miss Helen Landon) were missing. The reporter never came out and said it, but it was strongly insinuated that Cade had somehow abducted Helen and run for the border.
“This is how it started,” I said, more for Lissy’s benefit than my own. “With Tad and Helen and Cade.”
“Your Cade?”
I paused for a few seconds too long. “He’s not my Cade.”
Lissy gave me a look, which I ignored. “Helen and Tad were the golden children. She was the homecoming queen; he was the quarterback. They both came from wealthy families….”
“They were upstanding young citizens,” Lissy finished for me, dryly. She knew as well as I did that the pretty, shiny people of the world weren’t exactly known for their kindness in the face of adversity. In fact, most of the time, they were the adversity.
“And then there’s Cade.”
“Your Cade.”
“I could have sworn my lips were moving,” I said, and I tapped my chin thoughtfully with my finger. “Yes, yes they were, which seems to indicate—tell me if I’m wrong here—that I was talking. And when I talk…”