Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(104)

4

The three men sat in silence while Abra went upstairs to get something in her room. Dave thought of suggesting coffee—they looked tired, and both men needed a shave—but decided he wasn’t going to offer either of them so much as a dry Saltine until he got an explanation. He and Lucy had discussed what they were going to do when Abra came home some day in the not-too-distant future and announced that a boy had asked her out, but these were men, men, and it seemed that the one he didn’t know had been dating his daughter for quite some time. After a fashion, anyway . . . and wasn’t that really the question: What sort of fashion?

Before any of them could risk starting a conversation that was bound to be awkward—and perhaps acrimonious—there came the muted thunder of Abra’s sneakers on the stairs. She came into the room with a copy of The Anniston Shopper. “Look at the back page.”

Dave turned the newspaper over and grimaced. “What’s this brown dreck?”

“Dried coffee grounds. I threw the newspaper in the trash, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I fished it out again. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.” She pointed to the picture of Bradley Trevor in the bottom row. “And his parents. And his brothers and sisters, if he had them.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He had freckles, Daddy. He hated them, but his mother said they were good luck.”

“You can’t know that,” Dave said with no conviction at all.

“She knows,” John said, “and so do you. Get with us on this, Dave. Please. It’s important.”

“I want to know about you and my daughter,” Dave said to Dan. “Tell me about that.”

Dan went through it again. Doodling Abra’s name in his AA meeting book. The first chalked hello. His clear sense of Abra’s presence on the night Charlie Hayes died. “I asked if she was the little girl who sometimes wrote on my blackboard. She didn’t answer in words, but there was a little run of piano music. Some old Beatles tune, I think.”

Dave looked at John. “You told him about that!”

John shook his head.

Dan said, “Two years ago I got a blackboard message from her that said, ‘They are killing the baseball boy.’ I didn’t know what it meant, and I’m not sure Abra did, either. That might have been the end of it, but then she saw that.” He pointed to the back page of The Anniston Shopper with all those postage-stamp portraits.

Abra told the rest.

When she was done, Dave said: “So you flew to Iowa on a thirteen-year-old girl’s sayso.”

“A very special thirteen-year-old girl,” John said. “With some very special talents.”

“We thought all that was over.” Dave shot Abra an accusing look. “Except for a few little premonitions, we thought she outgrew it.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

“Maybe she shouldn’t have to be sorry,” Dan said, hoping he didn’t sound as angry as he felt. “She hid her ability because she knew you and your wife wanted it to be gone. She hid it because she loves you and wanted to be a good daughter.”

“She told you that, I suppose?”

“We never even discussed it,” Dan said. “But I had a mother I loved dearly, and because I did, I did the same thing.”

Abra shot him a look of naked gratitude. As she lowered her eyes again, she sent him a thought. Something she was embarrassed to say out loud.

“She also didn’t want her friends to know. She thought they wouldn’t like her anymore. That they’d be scared of her. She was probably right about that, too.”

“Let’s not lose sight of the major issue,” John said. “We flew to Iowa, yes. We found the ethanol plant in the town of Freeman, just where Abra said it would be. We found the boy’s body. And his glove. He wrote the name of his favorite baseball player in the pocket, but his name—Brad Trevor—is written on the strap.”

“He was murdered. That’s what you’re saying. By a bunch of wandering lunatics.”

“They ride in campers and Winnebagos,” Abra said. Her voice was low and dreamy. She was looking at the towel-wrapped baseball glove as she spoke. She was afraid of it, and she wanted to put her hands on it. These conflicting emotions came through to Dan so clearly that they made him feel sick to his stomach. “They have funny names, like pirate names.”

Almost plaintively, Dave asked, “Are you sure the kid was murdered?”

“The woman in the hat licked his blood off her hands,” Abra said. She had been sitting on the stairs. Now she went to her father and put her face against his chest. “When she wants it, she has a special tooth. All of them do.”

“This kid was really like you?”

“Yes.” Abra’s voice was muffled but understandable. “He could see through his hand.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like when certain pitches would come, he could hit them because his hand saw them first. And when his mother lost something, he’d put his hand over his eyes and look through it to see where the thing was. I think. I don’t know that part for sure, but sometimes I use my hand that way.”

“And that’s why they killed him?”

“I’m sure of it,” Dan said.