Forever and Always Read online

  I don’t know why her lack of spell-casting was so scary, but it was terrifying me.

  “So where’s my son?” I asked.

  “Damned if I know.”

  “You faked your death to get him so where is he?” Maybe I was an idiot but Barney’s gun scared me much less than Darci’s staring did. Maybe it was because I’d faced so many guns—fake, but they looked the same—in my acting, but he didn’t frighten me at all.

  Barney shrugged. “I needed to get out. I have a problem with gambling so there were some people who wanted my kneecaps.” He laughed as though this was a very funny and very original joke. “So I got cute little Ingrid to help me out. I used some old wino for the body and stuck my dentures in him.”

  “And my son?” I was inches away from the poker now and I began to wonder what I was going to do with it. Throw it?

  “It took me a while to figure out what to do with the kid. I couldn’t see myself runnin’ a healin’ parlor.” Again he laughed at his own joke. “It was Delphia that found out the kid could make people sick. She hated kids but she had trouble gettin’ employees to stay on account of the ghosts and all, so she kept the kid’s mother on in spite of him.”

  Again, he paused to laugh. “One day the kid was doin’ somethin’ bad and rotten, like all kids, and she threatened him with dismemberment or somethin’ unless he stopped. He said he hated her and that he was gonna make her sick. That night she spent throwin’ up and in the can, and the next day she was sneezin’ and blowin’. Little Lisa went to Delphia and apologized for her son and that afternoon Delphia was fine. Never felt better.

  “She and her sister were just startin’ to figure out how to make money off the kid when I showed up for my yearly visit to wherever the kid was. I’m Uncle Barney to him.”

  His story made me feel naive and self-centered and oblivious. All this had been going on for years and I’d known nothing about it. I’d received a piece of paper every year from Barney about my son and I’d thrown it into a safe and not even read it carefully.

  “Who sent the note saying my son was missing?” I asked.

  “You got me on that one,” Barney said.

  He started to say more but, suddenly, everything happened at once. Maybe because of what was going on in the room I didn’t hear the sirens of the fire department. The first I knew of them was when the front door opened and men started shouting,“Is anyone in here?”

  The fire, contained until the front door opened, rushed up from the basement windows and licked into the windows of Darci’s bedroom.

  Somebody screamed, Barney shot, and I felt something hit me. I looked down at my chest. There was a hole right where my heart was. The next thing I knew I was looking down at my body and there was light all around me. I saw men grab Barney, and I saw Darci kneeling over me. I felt her trying to pull me back into my body, but the heart was no longer beating in that body so I couldn’t get back into it. I really wanted to go toward the light but Darci wouldn’t let me. I tried to touch her, to tell her to let me go, but I could see that she wasn’t listening. Let me go! I tried to send to her, but she wouldn’t release me. I gave up trying to reason with her. All I could do was hang around and wait until she saw that she had to let me go.

  Darci

  Chapter Nineteen

  LINC WAS DEAD.

  The second that man, that Barney, appeared, Linc’s aura disappeared, so I knew that Linc was going to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I didn’t know the details of how it was going to happen, so I couldn’t work to prevent it. If I paralyzed Barney that might cause him to shoot Linc. If I ran, that might cause him to shoot Linc. There was nothing I could do except stand there and watch—and prepare. I could prepare for what I knew was about to happen.

  I had connections to some people nearby so I put out a psychic SOS. I wanted to be ready when the time came. Maybe…I thought. Maybe there was something that could be done after Linc was dead.

  I hurried the firemen into the room. They took Barney away and I kept them from seeing that Linc had been shot. I made them leave a stretcher leaning against the wall.

  Behind the firemen came the pastor, Christopher Frazier, Onthelia, and her big fourteen-year-old daughter. I’d had to put them all into a trance to get them to walk into a burning building.

  Without a word, without being aware of what they were doing, they picked up the stretcher, rolled Linc’s body onto it and carried him downstairs. The fire was all around us now but I couldn’t take my eyes off Linc. I clutched the bowling-ball bag to my chest and concentrated with all my might. I had to control the three people carrying the stretcher, had to keep Linc’s spirit from leaving the earth; I had to keep all the people outside away from us, and most of all, I had to get Linc’s child to meet us at the double elm.

  Amelia was helping with that. She’d been behind Linc the whole time Barney had been holding a gun to him. I don’t know what Linc had said to her, but she felt she owed him.

  They carried the stretcher to the tree, set it on the ground, then Christopher, Onthelia, and her daughter left. Once they were out of sight, I released them. They’d not remember what they’d done.

  I turned to the people standing under the tree. There was Lisa Henderson, and the moment I saw her, information came flooding into my mind. I hadn’t been able to find her because she had no real connection to Linc. To be able to find someone I must have something that’s close to them. When I looked at her I saw that she’d been incarcerated in a small, isolated house owned by Delphia and Narcissa. The women had left her alone there, drugged senseless, for days. When Barney had arrived just hours ago, he’d awakened her and hit her to make her tell him where her son was.

  Lisa had taken all the blows, but never told him anything about her son, not past or present. I knew that her son was her life.

  Barney, in his rage at having his plans thwarted, hadn’t bothered to secure Lisa very well when he’d left. He’d wanted to kill her but he thought he might need her with the child in the future. All he’d wanted was to get to 13 Elms and set fire to the house. He wanted no one, meaning all the women guests, around to talk about his failed scheme. When he’d found a half-drunk Sylvia snooping upstairs, he’d set fire to the room and locked her in.

  After Barney left, Lisa had escaped her bonds, crawled out a window, and started running. Whoever had directed her son to go to the double-trunked tree had told her where to go.

  Turning, I saw a little boy. He looked like Linc, just with lighter coloring. He was the child of my dreams. The child who would help me find my husband.

  What I knew about him was that he’d been protected. While I had been at the church, he’d been there, taken care of by the pastor and his wife, who’d had no idea the child was being sought. When I was with Pappa Al, I’d felt someone in the church, but the feeling had gone away, had been taken from me.

  For a moment, I marveled at the power it had taken to hide the child from me. Had Devlin done it? Had he told the child to leave his hiding place and come to us?

  No, I thought, and suddenly knew that Devlin was a tool, like the Mirror of Nostradamus was a tool. Devlin was a tool being used by a very, very powerful human.

  Who? I wondered. I was certain I’d never met anyone with such power, but then I’d been fooled in Connecticut so maybe someone else had fooled me.

  I looked at Lisa Henderson. She was holding her son’s hand in both her own, protectively, and when she saw me, she put herself between the child and me. But the boy, tall for his age, stepped forward. I saw that he was an old man in a child’s body. He’d been through so much in his short life and already he knew a lot. Instinctively, he felt the psychic kinship between the two of us.

  The child and I said nothing to each other. We had understanding beyond words. He knelt on his father’s left side, by his heart. When Amelia appeared at Linc’s head I heard Lisa gasp at seeing a ghost, but the boy didn’t so much as look. He can do things besides heal, I thought.