Fran was careful not to hurt any feelings, not to make them feel crazy in any way. She said that the dreams were interesting but that before she could appraise them, she would have to know a great deal more about Jessica. She would, she said, like to see Jessica once a week for an indefinite period. Would that be all right?
Thus began the friendship between Fran and Jessica, between Fran and the entire Reardon family, really.
4
Jessica’s summer job continued into the fall. Mr. Washburn at the Rexall Pharmacy kept her on as a stock clerk. He’d never had much luck with boys, they just couldn’t concentrate on what they were doing, and so Jessica was perfect.
She liked stock work. She’d spent a week at the cash register up front but her shyness had turned the task into an ordeal. She didn’t know what to say when boys flirted with her, she didn’t know what to say when the adults whispered about her. Most of the townspeople knew about her dreams. Some people snickered at her. Others shook their heads at her, as if she were bedeviled or insane. She felt humiliated by all this.
Her job ended at six-thirty. Most days she went straight home, out along Renzler Park Road. She loved Indian summer sunsets, the impossible colors streaking the sky, indigo and gold and vermillion and wine-red. She loved the smell, too, of day’s end, heat fading to a slight chill, and the melancholy cries of dogs and birds as the harvest moon first appeared in the dusk.
On Fridays after work, she went to Fran’s. She called her by name now, and not “Doctor” because during the past year they had become best friends.
Over small bottles of ice-cold Cokes Fran kept in a little refrigerator, the two talked usually until nine or ten about every subject imaginable, from the boys Jessica found cute, to what fun Fran used to have as a high school student going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and places like that. Fran promised to take Jessica to New York the summer of Jessica’s high school graduation.
And of course, they talked about the dreams.
There had been two of them in the past year and both of them had turned out to be accurate in what they had predicted. One snowy afternoon Fran and Jessica had bundled up, gotten into Fran’s five-year-old Dodge, and driven to the state university, where a somber man with a salt-and-pepper beard and thick black horn-rimmed glasses questioned Jessica for more than three hours. At the beginning of this session, Jessica had been terrified. By the end, she was merely exhausted.
On the way home, driving no more than thirty miles per hour because of the drifting snow and all the emergency alerts on the radio, Fran had explained that Dr. Toler was a famous parapsychologist and was interested in talking with Jessica again in a year or so. He’d told Fran to keep an accurate journal of everything that Jessica dreamed about.
Then a month ago, Jessica had started having one dream in particular, and several times over a week.
The first time she heard it, Fran was clearly rattled. She asked Jessica to ride her bike over three times a week instead of one.
This dream had disturbed Jessica greatly, too. Many nights, she couldn’t sleep. She lost twelve pounds in three weeks. Her parents kept asking what was wrong but Jessica did not want to share this particular dream. She was horrified that if she told anybody but Fran and the dream then came true — she was afraid she would be marked a freak forever.
The terrible dream was their secret, Fran and Jessica’s, and Jessica had agreed to let Fran decide the best thing to do about it.
5
Seven months ago, Fran had changed offices. A garden shed in back of the main red-brick administration building had been remodeled into a small office. Fran took it, the shed being about the size of a one-stall garage and offering her clients more privacy.
Jessica leaned her Schwinn against the oak tree to the right of the shed, inhaled deeply of the fresh dusk air, and went inside. The temperature had already dipped into the low forties and Fran had the oil heater turned up. Jessica could smell the oil fumes as she opened the screen door to knock.
“C’mon in, my friend,” Fran called.
Inside, Fran sat at a large black manual typewriter. She worked quickly but with only two fingers. The keys striking the platen sounded loud and hollow in the silence. “Be right with you. Help yourself to a Coke.” Her back was to Jessica. She hadn’t turned around.
The shed was one large room. In the center was the Montgomery Ward oil stove. To the left of it were two big easy chairs that had been recovered recently. One wall was filled with books of all kinds, the other wall with a row of four three-drawer filing cabinets.
Jessica got a Coke from the refrigerator, then went over and sat down in one of the easy chairs. She watched Fran type. She hoped some day that she had Fran’s poise and elegance.
Suddenly, Fran stopped typing and said, “Hey, maybe I should show you the letter.”
“Letter?”
“The one I sent two days ago.”
“About—”
Fran’s dark eyes held Jessica’s. “About your dream, my friend. I had to do something.”
Jessica loved it when Fran called her “my friend.” It made her feel very special.
Fran opened the center drawer of her desk and took out a copy of the letter she’d sent. She fluttered the paper like a bird’s wing, and Jessica took it.
Jessica looked at who the letter was addressed to and said, “You really sent it to him?”
“I really sent it to him. Seems like he’s the right person, don’t you think?”
“Gosh,” Jessica said, excited. “Gosh.”
6
After Jessica was inside and sitting down with Fran, the two men stepped from the shadows of the administration building and went to work quickly.
Both men crouched, running through the shadows to the front door of the shed.
Both men set their identical brown attaché cases on the ground and began pulling out various pieces of equipment.
The stove inside burned oil. It would not be difficult to make it look as if a terrible accident had taken place.
Ready now, the men nodded to each other.
The first man went to the door of the shed and knocked. In a moment, Fran opened up. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry, miss. We’ve had some car trouble. I wonder if we could use your phone.”
Crew cut. Dark suits. White shirts. Intelligent faces.
“Of course. Come in,” Fran said, stepping aside for the men.
7
The explosion scattered everything inside the small shed for hundreds of yards.
Glass, wood, tiling, metal — all looked like the remnants of a giant airplane crash. Fran and Jessica, the fire inspector who wrote up the final report surmised, had had no warning of the explosion. They had died instantly and without pain. Both the Lederer and Reardon families had wanted to be reassured of this.
8
On the night of the explosion, the two men in crew cuts and dark suits made their last flight out of Baxter as planned.
When they reached Washington, D.C., and the black Oldsmobile sedan waiting for them, the first man excused himself and went over to a pay phone.
He deposited the proper number of coins and waited for an answer.
A gruff male voice said, “Yes.”
“It’s me, Ruffin.”
“How did it go?”
“Very, very well.”
The man on the other end of the phone sighed. “You’ll be properly rewarded, Mr. Ruffin. And the same for your partner.”
“Thank you, sir.”