All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(69)

“Great. I’ll let you know how far away he is when he tears my throat out.”

“Don’t be snide. I’m trying to help.”

“I know,” I said, scuffing my running shoes along the cement. “Honestly, I know, Becca. But it’s making me feel worse. What am I supposed to do? In a dream, facing Mr. Big Empty, I might be able to hold my own. If I had enough time to figure things out, maybe I could even find a way to . . . stop him, destroy him, whatever you do to a ghost. But it’s not Mr. Big Empty I have to face. It’s DeHaven. And that’s not a dream. That’s real, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Becca had a curious look on her face. “You went into my dream.”

“Yeah?”

“But why did I have that dream? Why was Mr. Big Empty showing me River’s mutilated body?”

“Maybe it wasn’t about the body. Or maybe the body was just to scare you. Remember, DeHaven was in the dream, and he would have killed you because you’re my friend. Considering how things have gone with Emmett, you might be my only friend besides Austin. So it makes sense that Mr. Big Empty would try to kill you.”

Climbing the foothills, we turned into her subdivision and began winding up towards her house. From a big, two-story house with ancient wood siding, opera music blasted across the street. The crisp, fallen-leaves smell of autumn grew stronger as we climbed and left behind the state highway and the traffic. My stomach grumbled again, and this time, the queasiness was stronger. The hamburger was the only thing I’d eaten yesterday, and now almost half of today had gone by without anything to eat. I didn’t know what Becca meant by real food, but I was hoping she’d live up to her promise.

“I still don’t buy it. So Mr. Big Empty wants me dead. Why doesn’t he just kill me? Why go to the trouble of a custom-tailor dream? God, does that sound as crazy to you as it does to me?”

“Just about.” I struggled to make sense of what had happened. “River skips out on meeting you, maybe because Emmett and Hailey take him to Jigger Boss, maybe because he hooks up with someone else,” I glanced over at her, “Sorry, but it could have happened.”

She dismissed the comment with a wave.

“And,” I continued, “then you get a phone call with River screaming. Something happens to River, but we don’t know what. The next morning, after you come to tell me about River, you have that dream. You’re right. If Mr. Big Empty wanted to kill you, he could have done it that night. DeHaven killed River because he’s insane, because he’s got that obsession with drifters. Maybe Mr. Big Empty was counting on that. Maybe he thought DeHaven would find you and River together.”

“But he couldn’t count on that,” Becca said. “Because he had no way of making sure that River and I met on a date. I mean, that was just chance.”

“Ok. So Mr. Big Empty brings DeHaven into town. He’s planning on using him as a weapon. But, DeHaven is also bat-shit, which means he’s not completely under Mr. Big Empty’s control. So that night, DeHaven kills River because of his own obsession. It has nothing to do with Mr. Big Empty. But, Mr. Big Empty wants to get you, so he pulls you into that dream.”

“No.” Becca was shaking her head as we crossed her driveway and went inside. She led me straight back to the kitchen, where she started pulling things out of cabinets: canned beans, sweet potatoes, jars of spices, tortillas, lettuce, tomato, sour cream. As she set to work, opening cans and chopping vegetables and setting a frying pan on the range, she said, “If all he wants is me dead, then he just sends DeHaven another time. The dream still doesn’t make any sense.”

“Unless he wanted you to see River’s body.” I thought back to the dream. All of the dreams that Mr. Big Empty had shown me had the same feel to them, a kind of rickety, two-dimensional feel, as though everything were just painted scenery on a stage. A stage. Yes, that felt right. It felt correct. And what did you put on a stage? Whatever you wanted people to see. “He set it up for you to see it. I don’t know if he cared if I was there. Maybe that was an added bonus. But he wanted you to know that River was dead. He wanted you to know that you were in danger.”

Becca paused in the middle of slicing the sweet potato. “Why?”

“Because this hasn’t been an investigation,” I said. “We haven’t been hunting for River’s killer.”

“What have we been doing?”

“We’ve been letting Mr. Big Empty lead us around by the nose.”





As we stood in Becca’s kitchen, with onions sizzling in the frying pan and their smell making my stomach tense with anticipation, I fought a wave of anger. Anger for myself, and for my foolishness.

“He’s wanted us to do this. The whole time.”

Becca scooped sweet potato into the frying pan, her face painted with a frown as she stirred. Onions and sweet potato slopped over the edges of the pan, but she didn’t react. She was somewhere else, off in Becca-land, thinking.

“He wanted us to know River was dead,” she finally said. “Jesus Christ,” she flicked a smoking piece of sweet potato off the glowing heating element. “Were you going to let me burn the house down?”

I shrugged.

“He wanted us to know River was dead,” she repeated, “so that we would search for River.” She tapped the wooden spoon on the pan, and it rang out. “Why?”