“A clinic?”
“They did laser treatments, that kind of thing.”
“What could that have to do with your son, Ms. Taggart?”
Marcia had become flustered. “They rented from-I have some properties. Investment properties, business space I rent out. I rented office space to the Scar Free Clinic, out past the Post Mall.”
Keisha said, “Well, I must have this wrong. Your son could hardly be hiding out in a clinic.”
“No, but they went out of business. The office space is empty.”
Dwayne’s eyes lit up. He gave Keisha an approving look. “That’s why you just saw the empty filing cabinets.”
“Could Justin have got a key to that place?” Keisha asked.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Marcia said. “Just a minute.”
She got off the couch and hurriedly left the room. Dwayne said, “She’s got an office in the house where she keeps keys to her various rental properties. Do you think he could be there? Is that what you’re getting? Is that the vision you’re seeing?”
“Please,” Keisha cautioned. “Don’t get your hopes up. I get these little flashes, I see things, but this might not be the thing that-”
“They’re gone!” Marcia screamed from another part of the house. “The keys are gone!”
“There’s something else,” Keisha said. “I keep seeing him with his eyes closed.” She paused. “Maybe he’s just sleeping.”
The three of them went over in Dwayne’s Range Rover. Marcia, rattled, sat in the passenger seat, squeezing her hands together. Dwayne hit the wipers to keep the windshield cleared of snow.
“Why’s he sleeping?” Marcia kept asking. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Keisha said quietly from the backseat. “But I think we should hurry.”
“Can’t you go any faster?” Marcia said.
“The roads are slippery!” Dwayne said.
“It’s four-wheel drive, for Christ’s sake!”
The former offices of Scar Free were on the second floor of a four-story office building. The three of them ran into the lobby, and after waiting ten seconds for the elevator to show up, Marcia lost patience. She took off down a nearby hall, pushed open a door marked “Stairs” and scurried up the single flight.
As they exited onto the second floor, they faced a door to an accounting firm. “This way,” Marcia said, turning left, running to the end of the hall and stopping at a frosted-glass door with “Scar Free Clinic” painted on it in black letters. Someone had Magic Markered “CLOSED” on a sheet of paper and taped it to the glass.
“I have no key, I have no key,” Marcia said. “How am I supposed to get in?”
Dwayne tried the door, in the unlikely event it was unlocked. No luck. He puffed up his chest and said to the women, “Stand back.”
Keisha said, “I could be wrong. He may not even be in there.”
But Dwayne wasn’t hearing her. He reared back, brought up his leg, and kicked in the glass with his heel. It crashed to the floor with the sound of a hundred cymbals. Seconds later, the accounting office door whipped open and a short, heavyset man in a white shirt and skinny black tie looked on with alarm.
“What the hell is-Marcia?”
“It’s okay, Frank,” she said.
She reached in through the broken door to turn the deadbolt. The door swept back some broken glass as she swung it into the room. Their shoes crunched on the shards as they entered.
“Justin?” Marcia called out.
There was no answer.
The place was as Keisha had so briefly described it. Empty. Shelves cleared, filing cabinets half open, nothing inside them. No generic landscape pictures or diplomas or anything else on the walls.
But on the floor, several discarded fast-food containers. A pizza box, a Big Mac container still smeared with special sauce. Several empty beer cans.
“Someone’s been here,” Dwayne said. “Someone’s been living here.”
There was a spacious foyer, then a short corridor that serviced four examining rooms. Marcia was moving that way, opening one door, then another, Dwayne and Keisha running to keep up with her.
When she opened the last door, she screamed. “Oh God!”
A second later, Keisha and Dwayne found her on her knees next to Justin, who was lying on the floor, dressed in a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, feet bare. His shoes and socks were scattered alongside him, and a winter coat was rolled up and tucked under his head as a pillow.
The young man’s eyes were closed.
An orangey opaque pill container lay on its side a foot away from his head. Dwayne bent over at the waist, one leg raised behind him, and snatched it off the floor.
“Marcia,” he said. “Aren’t these the sleeping pills you were on a year ago?”
“Justin!” she said. “Wake up!”
“It’s full of pills,” he said. “It doesn’t look like he’s taken any.”
Justin stirred. “What, what’s going on?”
Marcia pulled him into her arms. “Are you okay? Are you all right?”
Groggily, he said, “I’m okay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
Now Dwayne had seen something else on the floor. A sheet of paper, with something scribbled on it. He grabbed it, saw what was written on it, handed it to Keisha without saying a word.
It read: “I know I’ve been a huge pain, Mom. Maybe your life will be better now.”
“My word,” Keisha whispered. Dwayne shook his head, looked at the pill container in his hand.
“God, if we’d been a few minutes later…” he whispered back.
“Justin, listen to me,” Marcia said. “Have you taken anything? Have you taken any pills?”
“No, no, I just… I just had some beers, that’s all. I was going to take them later, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was going to do. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
Marcia clung to him and began to sob as he patted her head. Before Dwayne knelt down next to his wife and wrapped his arms around her and his stepson, he said to Keisha, “I’ll see that you get your money this afternoon.”
Keisha Ceylon smiled modestly.
Justin weakly put his own arms around his mother and stepfather. His face was buried in his mother’s neck, his eyes closed. But then they opened, and fixed on Keisha.
Justin winked at her.
And Keisha winked back.
Two
Ellie Garfield had been dreaming that she was already dead. But then, just before the dream became a reality, she opened her eyes.
With what little energy she had, she tried to move, but she was secured, tied in somehow. She wearily lifted a bloody hand from her lap and touched her fingers to the strap that ran across her chest, felt its familiar texture, its smoothness. A seat belt.
She was in a car. She was sitting in the front seat of a car.
She looked around and realized it was her own car. But she wasn’t behind the steering wheel. She was buckled into the passenger seat.
She blinked a couple of times, thinking there must be something wrong with her vision because she couldn’t make anything out beyond the windshield. There was nothing out there. No road. No buildings. No street lights.
Then it dawned on her that it wasn’t a problem with her eyes.
There really was nothing out there. Only stars.
She could see them twinkling in the sky. It was a beautiful evening, if she overlooked the part about how all the blood was draining from her body.
It was difficult to hold her head up, but with what strength she still had, she looked around. As she took in the starkness, the strangeness of her surroundings, she wondered if she might actually be dead already. Maybe this was heaven. There was a peacefulness about it. Everything was so white. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudless sky that illuminated the landscape, which was dead flat and went forever. It was, it occurred to her, more like a moonscape than a landscape.
Was the car parked on a snowy field? Off in the distance, she thought she could make out something. A dark, uneven border running straight across the top of the whiteness. Trees, maybe? The thick black line, it almost had the look of a… of a shoreline.