A Deep and Dark December(77)

Although Erin had only described the future, her mother had blamed her for causing it. Erin didn’t understand her mother’s withdrawal, then or now. Her parents’ relationship, fragile on a good day, splintered and cracked. And then came the night her mother had left and her father hadn’t stopped her. Erin began to notice the looks of the townspeople, heard the whispers. So she’d hidden her ability, had seldom used it at all until recently.

Use it. You were given this gift for a reason…to use it.

She gripped the sides of her head, fisting her hair. She didn’t want to use it, didn’t want to admit even to herself that she felt ugly and deformed for having it. It marked her as different. She’d tried so hard to fit in, to hide that part of herself.

The answers are in the future.

She wanted answers. Wanted them more than anything else. She’d been given this ability, this gift for a reason, to use it. The tension in her fingers pulled her hair tighter. The bite of pain punctured her thoughts. Wait. No. This wasn’t her. These weren’t her thoughts. The future never held answers, only pain, pain, and more pain. She pulled harder, the tautness making her scalp lift.

Look at the future. Her voice echoed words she knew weren’t hers. The answers are there, waiting to be discovered.

“No!”

She threw up a wall, visualizing as she’d been taught, a mental fortress that would block her aunt or anyone else from sneaking into her thoughts. The killer. He’d found a new way to get into her head. Was this how he’d been able to manipulate Greg and Keith by disguising his thoughts as theirs? They wouldn’t have known how to block him or even be able to distinguish the difference between his words and theirs.

The fortress shook, but held. He kept trying to get at her. She focused all her energy into the force field and soon she could feel him retreating, slithering back to his cave of anonymity. Taking slow, deep breaths, she relaxed her fingers and slid them out of her hair and into her lap. She wasn’t surprised to find strands trapped between her fingers. She took another breath and shivered, flicking off the last slivers of his control.

This had to stop. But how?

The idea she’d had earlier when Graham had come in and distracted her came back full force. What if she played his game? What if she let it be known that she’d seen the killer in a vision? What if she drew him out of hiding?

Revealing her secret would bring back all the whispers and stares of the townspeople. Could she do it? Was she ready to expose her secret and give up any hope of being normal, of being accepted? No one in this town would ever look at her the same way again. She’d never fit in.

She had to do it, had to save her dad and aunt. She had to stop this killer before he struck again.

*

Graham stood next to Pax on the uneven pavement outside of Betty’s Buds and Blooms on Main Street and watched the tow truck driver hook up Axel Freed’s SUV.

“And he has no idea why he drove his car through the window?” Pax asked.

“Nope,” Graham answered. “The idea just popped into his head.”

“Is there a full moon or something?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So many screwy things happening, like you shaving your beard. Erin make you do it?”

Graham shot Pax an annoyed look. “No.”

“You wouldn’t be the first guy to bend to the will of his woman.” Pax held up his palms. “Just sayin’.”

“You get the ballistics report back on the Hallowell shooting yet?”

“Not yet. Some foul up in the lab.” Pax turned his focus back to the SUV tail up through the display window. “Your dad’ll be glad…about the beard.”

“I’ve got to get back to the station.” Graham gestured toward the hysterical Betty, giving her account of what happened to another officer. “You got this?”

“Yeah. But—” Pax sidled up closer to Graham. “I gotta ask. Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That Erin has some kind of divining power.”

“What? Where did you hear that?”

Pax had the good sense to look ashamed. “My wife.”

“Who did she hear it from?”

“Her sister?”

“And who did her sister get it from?”

Tilting his head back, Pax looked up at the gray sky as if the answer were written there. He bunched up his face. “The lady who cuts her hair maybe?”

Graham spun on his heels and stalked toward the sheriff’s station.

Pax followed. “So it is true.”

“Shut up, Pax.”

“I’ll be damned. I just thought it was a bunch of gossipy women with nothing to do over there.”

“Not another word.”

“I always knew there was something off about her. Her whole family is whacked. I heard—”

Graham halted and spun on Pax. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you get Mabel to write up that flower shop accident back there? Then you could take over for her as the biggest gossipmonger in town.”

“Hey.”

“I don’t know who started this stupid rumor, but it’s going to end right here, got it?”

“Sure, Sheriff. Whatever you say.”

Graham left Pax standing where he was and continued on to the station. What in the hell was wrong with this town? He didn’t know what Erin would do when she found out about this latest development. Stupid, goddamned small town. He couldn’t wait to…shit. Who was he kidding? He was never leaving this town. Not with his parents the way they were and now his relationship with Erin. Plus it was clear this town needed a sheriff and for some reason it had been decided decades ago that the sheriff had to be a Doran.