Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  I slide an arm around her. “It’s no small feat, finishing a journey,” I tell her. “But no one ever mentions that once you get there, you still have to turn around and head all the way home.”

  Jenna dashes her hand across her eyes. “If it turns out Virgil is right, I want to see my dad before he goes to jail.”

  “We don’t know that he’ll—”

  “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  She says this with such conviction that I realize it isn’t necessarily what she believes. Just what she needs to.

  I pull her closer and let her cry for a little while against my shoulder. “Serenity,” Jenna asks, her voice muffled against my shirt. “Will you let me talk to her whenever I need to?”

  There’s a reason people are dead. Back when I could be a medium, I’d only do two spirit communications at most for a client. I wanted to help people through their grief, not be 1-800-Dial-the-Dead.

  When I was good at this, when I had Lucinda and Desmond to protect me from the spirits that needed me to do their bidding, I knew how to put up walls. That’s what kept me from being awakened in the middle of the night by a conga line of spirits who needed to get a message to the living. It let me use my Gift on my terms instead of theirs.

  Now, though, I would trade my privacy if it meant that I could connect with spirits again. I would never do a fake reading for Jenna—she deserves better than that—so there’s no way I could possibly give her what she wants.

  But all the same, I look her in the eye and say, “Of course.”

  • • •

  Suffice it to say that the trip home is long, hellish, and silent. We wouldn’t be able to get on a plane without permission from Jenna’s guardian, because she’s a minor, and so we wind up driving through the night. I listen to the radio to keep myself awake, and then Virgil starts talking, somewhere around the Maryland border. He glances back first, to make sure Jenna is still fast asleep.

  “Say she’s dead,” Virgil says. “What do I do?”

  It’s a surprise conversation starter. “You mean Alice?”

  “Yeah.”

  I hesitate. “I guess you figure out for sure who did it, and you go after them.”

  “I’m not a cop, Serenity. And now it turns out that I probably never should have been.” He shakes his head. “All this time I thought it was Donny who fucked up. But it turns out it was me.”

  I glance at him.

  “I mean, it was a clusterfuck at the sanctuary that day. No one knew how to secure a crime scene when there were wild animals roaming around. Thomas Metcalf was off his gourd, although we didn’t know it at first. There were missing people who hadn’t been reported as missing. One of them was an adult female. That’s all I was looking for. So I made an assumption, when I found an unconscious body that was dirty and covered with blood. I told the paramedics that it was Alice, and they took her off to the hospital and admitted her under that name.” He turns, looking out the window, so that his profile is traced by the passing headlights of other cars. “She didn’t have ID. I should have followed up. Why can’t I remember what she looked like when I saw her? Was the hair blond or red? Why didn’t I pay attention?”

  “Because you were focused on getting her medical attention,” I say. “Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t try to mislead anyone,” I point out, thinking of my own recent career as a swamp witch.

  “That,” he says, “is where you’re wrong.” He turns to me. “I buried evidence. That red hair that was found on Nevvie’s body? When I saw it in the ME’s report, I didn’t know it belonged to Alice—but I did know it meant the case was more than an accidental death. Still, I let my partner convince me that the public just wanted to feel safe, that a trampling was bad enough, but a murder would be even worse. So I made that page of the ME’s report disappear, and just like Donny had said—I became a hero. I was the youngest guy to get promoted to detective, did you know that?” He shakes his head.

  “What did you do with the page?”

  “I put it in my pocket the morning of my detective ceremony. And then I got into my car and drove over a cliff.”

  I jam on the brakes. “You did what?”

  “First responders thought I was a goner. I guess I flatlined, but apparently I managed to fuck that up, too. Because I woke up in rehab, with a shitload of OxyContin in my veins, and enough pain to kill ten men who were way stronger than me. Needless to say, I didn’t go back to the job. IA doesn’t look too kindly on guys who have a death wish.” He looks at me. “So now you know who I really am. I couldn’t stand the thought of pretending to be the good guy for the next twenty years, when I knew I wasn’t one. At least now when I tell people I’m an alcoholic loser, I’m not lying to them.”

  I think of Jenna, hiring a fraud of a psychic and an investigator with secrets of his own. I think of all the mounting evidence that Alice Metcalf is the body that was recovered from the sanctuary ten years ago, and how not once was I able to sense that.

  “I have to tell you something, too,” I confess. “Remember how you kept asking me if I could communicate with Alice Metcalf’s spirit? And I said no, which probably meant she wasn’t dead?”

  “Yeah. Guess your Gift might need recalibrating.”

  “It needs more than that. I haven’t had a syllable of psychic communication since I gave Senator McCoy the wrong information about his son. I am used up. Done. Dry. This stick shift has more paranormal talent than I do.”

  Virgil starts to laugh. “You’re telling me you are a hack?”

  “It’s worse. Because I wasn’t always.” I look at him. There is a green mask around his eyes, a reflection from the mirror, as if he is some kind of superman. But he isn’t. He’s flawed, and scarred, and battle-weary, just like me. Just like all of us.

  Jenna lost her mother. I lost my credibility. Virgil lost his faith. We’ve all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole.

  We cross into Delaware. “I don’t think she could have picked two worse people to help her if she tried.” I sigh.

  “That’s all the more reason,” Virgil says, “to make it right.”

  ALICE

  I did not go to Georgia for Grace’s funeral.

  She was buried in a family plot beside her father. Gideon went, and Nevvie, of course—but the reality of running an animal sanctuary meant someone had to stay behind to take care of the animals, no matter how pressing the reason to leave. In the horrible week that it had taken for Grace’s body to wash ashore—a week when Gideon and Nevvie still held out hope that she was alive somewhere—we had all been pitching in to cover for her. Thomas would interview for a new caregiver, but that wasn’t a hire that could be made quickly. And now, with our staff below half capacity, it meant that Thomas and I were working round the clock.

  When Thomas told me that Gideon had come back to the sanctuary after the funeral, I was not presumptuous enough to believe that he had returned because of me. I did not know, really, what to expect. We’d had a year of secrets, a year of bliss. What had happened to Grace was the punishment, the payment due.

  Except nothing had happened to Grace. Grace had been the one to make it happen.

  I did not want to think about that, so instead I buried myself in cleaning the barns until the floors were sparkling, in creating new enrichment toys for the Asian elephants. I cut back the brush that had begun to overgrow the fence at the north end of the African enclosure. That would have been Gideon’s job, I thought, even as I wielded the hedge trimmers. I kept myself moving, so that I could not think about anything except the task in front of me.

  I did not see Gideon until the next morning, when he was driving an ATV with a load of hay into the same barn where I was making medicine balls out of apples for that day’s feeding. I dropped the knife and ran to the doorway, my hand raised to call him closer, but at the last minute I stepped back into the shadows.

  Really, what could I pos