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  Dropping the phone to my side, I rushed down the hall and into the first doorway with a light on, the hall bath. Claudia had retreated back against the wall, hands over her mouth, gesturing madly toward the wicker dirty clothes hamper on the opposite side of the room. The base had already started to turn a dark brown where something had begun to pool. In my mind, it could only be one thing. A single corner of a white sheet hung over the edge like the tongue of a hanged man.

  “Paul?” a tiny, but persistent, voice from the phone called.

  I started over to it, but Claudia grabbed my arm defensively and dragged me back. We exchanged a brief look before her curiosity got the better of her, and she pushed me toward the hamper.

  Pulling a wad of toilet paper from the roll next to the toilet, I daintily took the edge of the hamper lid, trying desperately to avoid destroying any fingerprint evidence. Gripping my arm like a life-preserver, Claudia draped herself over my back and peeked over my shoulder with wide frightened eyes.

  Written on the inside of the lid in what appeared to be red ink were the words: “Now you don’t!” Below that, a barely distinguishable human head peered up at us atop the remnants of a white bath towel.

  She turned silently and strode briskly out into the hallway, the blood draining from her face, turning a lighter shade than her natural pale.

  I backed slowly away from the lifeless eyes inside the hamper, until I felt the sink at my back and lifted the barking cell phone to my ear. “Dad, you better get the Sheriff’s Department over here right now.”

  Not yet five o’clock and every member of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department were now at two separate crime scenes in the tiny town of Haven. Even Blake Mueller and Payton French, who were technically on vacation for another few weeks, had been called in, along with a few trusted guys from neighboring Crown County.

  It never took long for bad news to travel through Haven, and once word had gotten out that the Grahams were murder suspects, the wake back at home began to break up, as everyone was eager to get back to their own families. Old Man Barrett was one of the last to leave (as he had outlived his older siblings and never married) and as he’d had more than a few glasses of wine, he began to rail to my mother that he had suspected the Grahams “all along.” “They’re Middle Eastern, y’know,” he muttered over his shoulder as Dad escorted him out, as if the statement explained everything. “Their kind is always up to no good. Look at 9-11.”

  Once they were outside, I heard my father’s even-toned rejoinder: “Y’know, Sam, it was racial and religious intolerance that led to 9-11 and to the Crusades for that matter. And the only one I hear perpetuating it here right now is you.”

  Barrett muttered a curse under his breath and wandered off down the street.

  “Twisted old oak,” Dad grumbled, slamming the screen door.

  Mom eyed Dad with a frown as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and began to tap it against his palm unconsciously until he realized everyone was watching him. He wordlessly put it away again and joined the rest of us around the kitchen table.

  “Here are the facts. We found enough to connect Nathan Graham to all four of the murders, but he clearly made no effort to hide it. Either that or he deliberately planted the evidence there to be found.” At this point, he told us about the evidence located in Graham’s desk.

  Then he delivered the coup de grâce.

  “Well, we called off the search for Cyril Graham when we found him stuffed into the dirty clothes hamper of the Graham’s master bathroom.” He stopped long enough to make sure he had our undivided attention before delivering the punch line. “Only problem was, he wasn’t all there.”

  Both of us looked at him with wide inquisitive eyes. He knew very well what the next question would be and sighed heavily, giving Mom an apologetic look.

  “Jack, I told you I wanted full and complete honesty from here on out and I meant it,” Mom said, stiffening herself against what was coming.

  He nodded. “His head was removed with a kitchen knife they found with the body. Only his head wasn’t with his torso.”

  “Sharia law,” Claudia muttered. She was still shivering uncontrollably despite the fact that the heating vent was blowing warm air directly on her. “He was probably drugged first, tied up, then beheaded while he was still conscious. They should check for drug residue in all the cups in the house.”

  “Easy, tiger. We haven’t put you on the payroll yet,” Dad replied, grabbing her delicately in one of his arms and giving her a kiss on the top of her head. “And by the way, the Grahams weren’t Muslim. In fact, they were pretty ardent atheists.”

  We exchanged interested glances. “What else?” she asked.

  “There was a small ceramic head wrapped in the sheet with the body.”

  Another set of tremors rolled through Claudia. I felt her icy hand enclose around mine beneath the table.

  “Written inside the lid of the hamper was the message. ‘Now you see me,’ ” Dad told us, as Claudia simultaneously mouthed the words silently to herself.

  “We thought it might have been his smartass way of confessing. Like, ‘Hey, you got me.’ But then we found the other message inside your hamper.”

  “Now you don’t,” Claudia completed the thought.

  Dad nodded at Claudia. “There you go. Does that hold any significance to either of you?”

  Both of us shook our heads.

  “Does anyone else think this might be a little too neat?” my mother interjected.

  Dad raised his brows. “You’re saying that it sounds like this was all handed to us, right? Like maybe it’s a set up?”

  Claudia and I traded looks. As my parents watched me squirm in my seat, she said, “I think your son has some information he wants to share with you.”

  That’s when I told them about my conversation with Graham, leaving out the part where he showed me the scratch I gave him while we were sharing the same dream.

  That just might have sapped some of the credibility out of my story.

  Just before we turned in for the night, Dad called me up to his office. He pulled a metal box down out of the storage closet and unlocked it. He took out his prized 9mm SIG P210 semi-automatic pistol, cleared and visually checked the chamber. Because of its compact size, it was easier for me to handle. He knew it had been my favorite to practice with on the range.

  He visually showed me a fully loaded 15 round clip before he snapped it in. “When this is all over, I want us to start going to the range again. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of time.”

  He handed it to me butt first. It was the substantial weight in the palm of my hand more than anything else that spoke to me of the heavy burden of responsibility which came with this weapon.

  For my thirteenth birthday, I’d asked for a hunting rifle. Instead, what I got was a lesson in firearms. That was the year he first started taking me to a gun range. We had gone once every few months for about a year. Somewhere along the line I had just lost interest. In retrospect, I believe the youthful romanticism of guns wore off and the reality of the responsibility set in. I filed away my interest like a once loved toy is put into storage.

  “In the meantime, I want you to remember everything I taught you.”

  Just for a moment that childish sense of wonder seized me, and I had to fight the urge to hold the gun out and make “bang bang” sounds at an old dusty pair of buck antlers hanging in the corner of the room.

  “Paul?”

  I snapped back to reality and peered up at him, feeling at least a foot shorter and my eyes as wide and innocent as the day I had first managed to keep my bike upright without training wheels.

  “I know I’ve taught you not to keep it loaded, but you should get used to the idea of having to use it at a moment’s notice. You got me?”

  I nodded to my father, realizing with a numb feeling that he was giving me permission to fire on another human being.

  To kill if necessary.
/>   Chapter 29 (Thursday, October 29th)

  I am standing in the grey field of the October Country. It isn’t night this time but just before sunset. The horizon is a lighter shade of grey.

  There is a steady TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK coming from somewhere just over my head, and suddenly I am aware that I am dreaming.

  I recall that Claudia had given me a wind-up clock to orient myself once I was asleep. She had convinced me that I needed to give the lucid dreaming thing one more shot before Nathan Graham killed again.

  Now that I am fully aware that I am in the midst of a dream, I look down and discover that I am once again standing atop a coffin lid. About three by six feet, it is essentially a door that sets flush with the surface of the ground. Taking a quick glance around and seeing nothing but the House in the distance, I go to one knee and place my palm over the surface of the door. It is cold wood and devoid of any handle or knob. Hoping to find an opening or latch, I run my fingers around the edges starting with the side closest to the House and sliding my hands slowly clockwise. When I reach the right hand side, my fingers sink beneath the edge, and I hear the echo of dirt showering down into a shaft of some depth.

  I clear an area wide enough to get both hands beneath and brace my muscles for what I expect to be a great weight, but the door falls open with no effort. I look down and gasp in horror. Half-buried human skulls are exposed in grey dirt, but it is the sight of Claudia’s still-flush face half-buried amid the bones that leave me gasping for breath like the recipient of a kick in the chest.

  Then she opens her eyes.

  I awoke shivering from the dream to the sight of Claudia sitting beside me with concern in her eyes. The first thing I noticed was that she was no longer in her nightgown but in jeans and a t-shirt. She put an arm around the back of my neck and helped me sit up.

  “You’re okay now,” she kept repeating to me. “Relax.”

  I sipped from the glass of water Claudia offered me and glanced around the room. The door to the office was open. I could hear the snores of my father from down the hallway. “Did I call out loud?”

  “No, your folks are sound asleep,” she replied. “What did you see?”

  I told her everything, including the part about seeing her face in what I perceived to be a mass grave. She didn’t react quite the way I would have suspected. She simply nodded and began to nibble her lip.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t my mother’s face you saw? That would explain why her face might be emerging from the grave,” she said excitedly. “That would make sense.”

  I shook my head emphatically. “No, Claudia. It was your face I saw.”

  She stood then, and I could see passion rising in her wide eyes. “Now, I’ve got this suggestion and I want you to keep an open mind and hear me out.” This raised my hackles a bit. “Remember how I told you about the origins of All Hallow’s Eve and the belief of the Celts that on Samhain or the Celtic New Year that the veil between the living and the dead was the thinnest. Well, people often asked the deceased to divine the future or to answer questions.” She paused here and seemed to attempt to read my expression, but I remained a blank slate. “Paul, we don’t have much time here and until we find Nathan Graham, he could take more innocent lives. There was only two days between the car accident and his father’s murder which means he’s speeding up. Now that his identity is known, he’s got nothing to lose.” She stopped again and stood watching me. Finally, she knelt on the bed at my side. “Say something.”

  “Are you asking for my opinion?”

  “No, I’m only asking you if you’ll come with me.”

  It was all I could do to contain my slowly mounting anger. “To do what exactly?”

  “Ask my mother to help us locate Graham… using the Psychic Eye.”

  “Isn’t that..?”

  “Still over at my house? Yes.”

  With the discovery in the bathroom, we had, of course, abandoned all the stuff we had packed.

  I broke eye contact. “Out of the question,” I stated.

  “Fine, you don’t have to come with me but I’m not going to sit around here waiting for this bastard to kill again,” she snapped, bolting from the bed and starting for the door.

  I rushed after her and grabbed her by the arm. “Wait!”

  She turned on me with an impatient glare, pulling her arm out of my grip.

  “Claudia, I have to be honest. You’ve got me a little worried,” I hissed at her, trying to keep my emotions under control before I woke the rest of the house up. “You just lost your mother on Sunday and now you want to try to contact her spirit. Do you know how crazy that might sound to anyone but me, and to me, it sounds pretty damn crazy!” I took a deep breath when I realized that Claudia was actually listening to me for a change. I could see it in her face. “Remember what my father told us. Act out of logic, not emotion.”

  Claudia’s lip began to tremble. I could see a corner of the wall she’d worked so hard to erect around her heart began to crumble. Tears began to stream down her cheeks but her expression never changed. It was a little creepy actually.

  “Don’t you think I know she’s…” She swallowed then and I could see that she was fighting a fierce battle to stay in control.

  “It’s okay to cry, Claudia. After all, your mother is dead.”

  Her hand was so fast that I never saw the slap coming.

  Then she was gone, rushing up the hallway and down the stairs.

  Of course, I followed her.

  As I lifted the yellow plastic tape away from the back door, I thought back to the day before when I had almost expected to see the house adorned like a crime scene.

  Now, here it was.

  I held my hand out to Claudia and unlocked the door. She started to reach for the knob but I firmly pushed her back.

  “Like we talked about,” I growled.

  She simply nodded.

  I reached into the waist of my jeans and rested my hand on the grip of my father’s SIG. We entered as a single unit and shut the door quietly behind. I held up a hand and we remained standing in place for a good two minutes. I glanced at Claudia, and she gave a single shake of her head.

  We moved on through the kitchen and into the living room. I stopped her again. We listened in the quiet darkness of the once vibrant home. It was as still as death or at least what my perception of death had always been. (Of course, Claudia was banking on a different interpretation of the hereafter.)

  We continued upstairs. There was tape covering the closed door of the hall bathroom and two long strips laid across the door of Claudia’s room. I stood listening at the door for another few minutes, noticing a thin film of dust over the knob where they had searched for a fingerprint that didn’t belong, then finally opened it and stepped inside.

  Everything looked to be in the exact same position we had left it only the day before. On the bed, there were the suitcases and the Psychic Eye lying next to it. I snatched the box, handed it to her, and stepped back out into the hallway. Shutting the door behind us, we crept like thieves down the stairway and into the kitchen.

  I reached for the door to the garage and realized that Claudia was unpacking the Psychic Eye board onto the table. I shook my head vigorously.

  She was ignoring me. I grabbed her wrist and she gave me such a look that my grip loosened without conscious thought.

  “This was not what we agreed,” I hissed at her.

  “So go then,” she responded in a harsh whisper.

  She took a seat at the table and put two fingers on the planchette, giving me a single accusatory look. I ground my teeth in frustration, locked the door leading to the garage and stepped up to the table. Retrieving the gun from my jeans, I placed it on the table and took the seat across from her.

  Without another word, I put a single finger on the planchette. Claudia closed her eyes and after a moment, so did I.

  “Mom? Are you here?” she whispered.

  It’s true that I didn’t believe
in the board’s power. As Uncle Hank had once told me, it was more a testament to the power of capitalism than man’s faith in supernatural forces that so many people believed in divination and fortune telling, but even he was unwilling to call it complete nonsense.

  Despite my skepticism, I poured all my will into calling Mrs. Wicke just as strongly and passionately as Claudia was doing, trying to cast out the doubt that was the center of my soul. I wanted this to work for Claudia just as much as I feared it never would.

  We continued to concentrate and Claudia would punctuate the silence with the occasional, “Mom?” until the sound of her voice became the eerie call of a mother cat to her kittens.

  Almost a half hour later, I felt the planchette move beneath my fingers. It startled me so much, that I nearly let go out of simple human instinct. After all, there was an inanimate object moving beneath my fingers that I was neither pushing nor pulling.

  The moment I twitched and opened my eyes, the planchette came to a dead stop. Glancing to my right, I searched the darkness of the kitchen for the source of the movement I sensed out of the corner of my eye. I saw nothing.

  “Are you here?” Claudia called again hopefully, opening her eyes as well.

  Five minutes later, it moved again. It traveled up to the top of the board until the little transparent window rested totally and without a doubt over the word “Yes” inscribed into a symbol of a blazing sun on the right side of the board.

  The grey digital window on the top of the planchette displayed the word “Yes” in upper case black letters.

  Fancy schmancy, I thought. Claudia had indeed spared no expense in choosing a communicator with the dead. Former spiritualist and radio inventor Marconi himself would have just pinched himself… had he any flesh left.

  I checked myself from giving a nervous giggle, seriously breaching séance etiquette, and turned my attention back to the board.

  “Mom is that you?”

  Again the planchette moved away from the fiery “yes” and back, causing the word to pop up once again on the display.