“I knew you’d come,” she said. “It was a matter of time, that’s all. You weren’t ready before, were you? You had to get ready. In another place, maybe.”
“Something like that. I didn’t see the point, early on. The police were interviewing you plenty, and I read all of their transcripts.”
“The police asked the wrong questions.”
“Oh? What should they have asked?”
She didn’t answer right away. She drank some of the beer and then said, “Sit.”
“I’m good.”
“No. You’re putting a shadow on the road. Sit down.”
Why the shadow mattered, he had no idea, but he sat. He took the actual bench, so that Dixie was sitting above him, perched up by his right shoulder. He didn’t like that; he liked to be able to see her, to have the best vantage point and the freest movement possible. That was a consistent desire for Mark. Some would call it obsessive-compulsive, but he called it practical. Wild Bill Hickok didn’t get shot until he broke his own rule and sat with his back to the door.
Dixie Witte said, “Your wife had death all around her that afternoon.”
Mark didn’t speak, didn’t move.
“You, um…you were able to see this,” he finally said, thinking of a hypnotist he’d known in Indiana and trying to be accepting of things he knew better than to believe. To be tolerant of them, at least. That wasn’t so much to ask, but still, his own wife hadn’t thought he was capable of it on the day she’d made her drive to this place.
“Yes,” Dixie said. “Death arrived with her. It was very close. Unnerving, because I’d felt that before, but always in situations when it was anticipated. Home visits, usually, dealing with the terminally ill. Those things. But your wife, she was so vibrant. Her body was strong, her spirit was clean. Illness was not present.”
Mark had nothing to offer to that.
“I was relieved that she didn’t ask for a reading,” Dixie said. “Because I knew what I’d have to tell her. Then she told me the purpose of her visit, and I made a mistake. I’ve regretted it every day since. I mean that. Not one day has passed that I have not thought of her with regret.”
“You and me both,” Mark said. “I understand my regrets, Dixie. What are yours?”
“I let her leave without a warning.”
“What would you have said? What would the warning have been?”
“That death was close. Perhaps she would have laughed and gone on her way. I don’t know. But if I’d said it? Perhaps even if she didn’t take me seriously, it would have lingered in her mind just enough. The words linger, and sometimes, the words affect choices. And so I think of her, and I wonder, would she have had her guard up? Would it have mattered?”
“Yes,” he said. His voice was scarcely audible.
Dixie looked pained. “She had that quality. Skeptical but not aggressively so. That was something you shared, of course. You both wanted to believe in challenging things, but you kept that desire secret.”
“I just need facts, Dixie. Not mysticism.”
“You’re not going to succeed with that attitude, and you already know that. If what you’ve experienced recently hasn’t taught you that, what will?”
There was a tight tingle at the back of Mark’s skull, and he had a sudden vision of an accused murderer, Ridley Barnes, vanishing into dark cave waters, and he heard an echo of a hypnotist’s voice, revenants of the last case he’d worked, an experience that had taught him more than he’d wished to learn. He gave a small shake of his head, and Dixie watched him knowingly.
“You don’t care for coincidence, do you?” she said.
“No.”
“But you don’t believe in fate either.”
“No.”
“Do you realize there are no other options?”
“Sure there are.”
She shook her head. “It’s either coincidence or fate, Markus. You’re going to have to decide.”
“I don’t think my wife was fated to die here. I think someone made a choice to kill her.”
“Of course. But there’s one element in the mix that you do believe in already. At your core.”
“And what might that be?”
“Purpose,” she said. “You believe in purpose. You believe that it all fits, that opposing forces will find balance, and that your role in all of it matters.”
She put her left hand over the top of his right. Her eyes had the tender but firm expression of a good mother assuring her child that there were no monsters, and it was time to trust the dark and get some rest.
She said, “You are correct, Markus. Your role in all of it matters. It will matter-and it already did.”
Her touch put an electric heat through him that he wanted to deny, but he didn’t move his hand away. She was leaning forward, a posture that pressed her breasts high against her tank top.
“The answers you need won’t come from me,” she said. “You’ve got to believe that. But I can still provide them.”
“How does that work?” Mark said. His voice sounded the way steel wool felt.
“They’ll come from your wife,” she said. Then she squeezed his hand tighter. “I’ll need to let her enter me, do you see? Once she makes contact…I become the conduit. And you’ll have all that you want then.”
She leaned closer, her chest nearly touching his face. “You don’t want to believe in that, I know. It’s not your way. But you’ll have to. I can’t tell you anything about Garland Webb. I can’t tell you anything about what happened. But Lauren can. Of course she can.”
Mark was silent. She rubbed her thumb lightly over the back of his hand, and when she spoke again, her voice had the same caressing feel.
“I’m a channel, Markus. A conduit for energy. When we return to the house, the rest will be your choice, not mine. If you want the truth, you’ll need to let me open myself for Lauren. And once I have…you’ll need to believe that she’s within me. Will you be able to do that?”
“I’ll try.”
She nodded and squeezed his hand again. “That’s all that you can do. So let’s try together, shall we? We’ll go back to the house, and we’ll find your wife.”
She released his hand and climbed down from the bench, and he rose and followed her back through the moonlit streets.
11
The big house was dark and there was light in the windows of the guesthouse behind it, where Mark expected to go, but Dixie led him up the porch of the old home.
“I thought this was Myron’s,” he said. “Your tenant. The man in the big truck.”
She frowned. “My tenant lives there.” She pointed to the guesthouse. She used a key to turn the ancient lock, then pushed the door open and smiled reassuringly at Mark.
“You’ll need to accept the darkness.”
“What?”
“It helps. Trust me on this. We can have candlelight, but nothing more. Not if you want to hear from your wife. From Lauren.”
The way she said the name was musical, and it hurt him. I take thee, Lauren…
She hooked one index finger through his belt loop and tugged him forward. “Don’t be scared, now.”
In truth, he was a little scared. Everything, from the sound of the lock ratcheting back to the smell of the place, age-old dust and mildew, was unappealing, but there was more to it too. Sparks of concern, flickers at the edge of his consciousness like orbs.
Bad energy.
Mark told himself that the sources of that energy were pretty damn clear-when you blended Myron Pate and Garland Webb and this strange town, how could the house feel anything but bad?
That was to intellectualize it, though, and as Mark stepped inside that house with Dixie Witte, there was nothing intellectual or rational about the negative charge he felt; it was pure emotion, something primal, something that would have told his ancient ancestors, You need to run now.