Leaving Time(109)

I reach over and grasp the edge of his shirt, wring it out on the ground. “Yeah,” I say sarcastically. “I guess this doesn’t count as hard evidence.”

“So Gideon fakes Nevvie’s death, and she winds up in Tennessee in a house that belonged to her daughter at some point.” He shakes his head. “Why?”

I can’t answer that. But I don’t have to, because my phone starts to ring.

I rummage in my purse and finally locate it. I know that number.

“Please,” Jenna says. “I need help.”


“Slow down,” Virgil says, for the fifth time.

She swallows, but her eyes are red from crying and her nose is still running. I rummage in my bag for a tissue and can find only a lens cloth for cleaning sunglasses. I offer her that instead.

The directions she gave us were a teenager’s directions: You pass a Walmart, and somewhere there’s a left. And a Waffle House, I’m pretty sure the turn is after the Waffle House. Honestly, it’s a miracle that we managed to find her at all. When we did, she was behind a service station’s chain-link fence and Dumpster, halfway up a tree.

Jenna, goddammit, where are you? Virgil yelled, and only after she heard his voice did her face poke through the branches and the leaves, a small moon in a green field of stars. She climbed gingerly down the trunk, until she lost her footing and fell into Virgil’s arms. I’ve got you, he told her; he hasn’t let go of her yet.

“I found Gideon,” Jenna says, her voice hitched and uneven.

“Where?”

“At the sanctuary.”

She starts crying again. “At first I started to think that maybe he hurt my mom,” she says, and I see Virgil’s finger’s flex on her shoulders.

“Did he touch you?” Virgil asks. I am thoroughly convinced that, if Jenna gives a positive response, Virgil would kill Gideon with his bare hands.

She shakes her head. “It was just … a feeling.”

“Good thing you listened to your gut, sugar,” I say.

“But he said he never saw my mother, after the night she was taken to the hospital.”

Virgil presses his lips together. “He could be lying through his teeth.”

Jenna’s eyes fill again. It makes me think of Nevvie, and the room that would not stop weeping. “He said my mom was having a baby. His baby.”

“I know my psychic powers are a little off,” I murmur, “but I did not see that coming.”

Virgil lets go of Jenna and starts pacing. “That’s motive.” He starts muttering, working through a time line in his head. I watch him tick off points on his fingers, shake his head, start over, and finally, grimly, turn to her. “There’s something you need to know. While you were with Gideon in the sanctuary, Serenity and I were with Nevvie Ruehl.”

Her head snaps up. “Nevvie Ruehl’s dead.”

“No,” Virgil corrects. “Someone wanted us to think Nevvie Ruehl was dead.”

“My father?”

“Your dad wasn’t the one who found the trampled body. That was Gideon. He was sitting with her when the medical examiner and the cops arrived.”

She wipes her eyes. “But there was still a body.”

I look down at the ground, waiting for Jenna to connect the dots.

When she does, the arrow points in a different direction than I expect. “Gideon didn’t do it,” she insists. “I thought that, too, at first. But she was pregnant.”

Virgil takes a step forward. “Exactly,” he says. “That’s why Gideon wasn’t the one to kill her.”


Before we leave, Virgil goes to use the restroom at the service station, and Jenna and I are left alone. Her eyes are still bloodshot. “If my mom is … dead …” She lets her voice trail off. “Could she wait for me?”

People like to think that they can reunite with a loved one who’s passed. But there are so many layers to the afterlife; it’s like saying that you’re bound to run into someone because you both live on planet Earth.

However, I think Jenna’s had enough bad news for one day. “Sugar, she might be here with you right now.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The spirit world is modeled on the real world, and the real things we’ve seen. You might go into your grandmother’s kitchen and she’ll be down there making coffee. You may be making your bed and she walks by the open door. But every now and then, the edges will blur, because you’re inhabiting the same space. You’re like oil and vinegar in the same container.”

“So,” she says, her voice cracking. “I don’t ever really get her back.”

I could lie to her. I could tell her what everyone wants to hear, but I won’t. “No,” I tell Jenna. “You don’t.”

“And what happens to my dad?”

I can’t answer that for her. I don’t know if Virgil will try to prove that Thomas was the one who killed his wife that night. Or if it would even stick, given the poor man’s mental state.

Jenna sits on the picnic table and draws her knees up to her chest. “I had this friend once, Chatham, who always talked about Paris like it was practically Heaven. She wanted to go to the Sorbonne for college. She was going to stroll down the Champs-élysées; she was going to sit at a café and watch skinny French women walking down the street, all that stuff. Her aunt surprised her by taking her there on a business trip when she was twelve. When Chatham came home, I asked her if it was all it was cracked up to be, and you know what she said? ‘It was kind of like any other city.’ ” Jenna shrugs. “I didn’t think it would feel like this, when I got here.”