The Law of Moses(40)

“She’s dead. Isn’t she? You can see her so that means she’s dead.”

I nodded.

“I need you to tell me where she is, Moses. I need you to find out.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I don’t see the whole picture. Just pieces. I don’t always even know who the person belongs to. If I’m in a group, it could be anyone. They don’t speak. At all. And if they do, I can’t hear them. They show me things. And I don’t always know why. In fact, I never know why. I just paint.”

“You knew with Dr. Andelin!”

“His dead wife followed him around during the group session! And she showed them having sex, okay? It didn’t take much to decipher that one!” I was getting agitated and Tag was moving in on me like he was getting ready to do battle.

“They show me pieces. Memories. And I don’t always interpret them correctly. I don’t interpret them at all, you know? I’m not Sherlock Holmes.”

He shoved me and I resisted the urge to shove back. “So you’re telling me that you’ve seen my sister before and you had no idea she was mine?”

“I saw Molly long before I ever met you!”

The truth of the statement suddenly slammed home.

I had seen Molly long before I’d ever met David Taggert.

And that didn’t make any sense. It never happened like that. The dead that came through were always a result of my contact with the people close to them.

“She went away. I painted her face on an overpass and she went away.” I’d seen her the night Gigi died. But that didn’t count. That night, I’d seen every dead face that had haunted my life since the beginning. I just hadn’t seen Gi.

“And she came back?”

“Yes. But I think she came back because of you.”

“And what does she do?” Tag was yelling now, frustrated, his hands fisted in his dark hair, his green eyes blazing. I knew he wanted to start swinging. Not because he was actually angry at me, but because he had no idea what to do with his emotion. And I understood that.

“She shows me things. Just like they all do.” I lowered my voice and kept my eyes level. It felt a little strange talking someone else down.

“Please. Please, Moses.” Tag was suddenly battling back the tears, and I resisted the urge to start a fight, to push him down and pummel him just to get him back to the Tag that wanted to hit me and called me a crazy son-of-a bitch.

I turned away from him and sank down on my haunches, bracing myself against the wall, but my eyes found the picture of Molly staring up from my sketch book that I’d tossed to the floor. She smiled back at me, a heart-breaking illusion of happy-ever-after. There was no happy-ever-after. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my head, blocking out Tag and the smiling face of his dead sister. And I raised the water.

I focused on Molly Taggert, blonde hair flying just like Georgia’s. I immediately lost concentration and felt the same old slice in my gut that I felt whenever I allowed her memory in. But with the thought of Georgia, the overpass I’d painted came into focus, the place where I’d taken Georgia’s virginity and permanently lost a part of myself.

Immediately, I needed to paint, and I swore viciously, yelling at Tag to throw me the sketchbook and a pencil. It wasn’t the same, but I had to have something. My hands got icy and my neck burned and in my mind I watched as the strip of land became pale and flat as the water split in half and was sucked into two towering walls, leaving not a single drop behind to moisten the ground.

They’d made me cover Molly’s image on the overpass with paint. The Sheriff’s Department had supplied me with a gallon of flat grey paint that covered the upsetting truth that children disappeared and the world was a scary place. But as I watched, the paint started to peel as if pulled by imaginary hands, revealing Molly once again in swirling lines and twinkling eyes and a smile that I could now see was identical to Tag’s. We never saw what was obvious until we were hit over the head with it.

And then images started to flood my mind, the same images Molly always fed me.

“She always shows me that damn math test!” My arms were flying, and I drew the test with Molly’s name in flowing script at the top.

The math test fluttered away as if Molly had whipped it out of my hands. I hadn’t shown the proper appreciation for that red A circled at the top. Tag wasn’t the only one in the family with a temper, apparently. The A in the circle became a star, just a simple golden star that morphed into a night sky with stars shooting and exploding, like she was staring up at a light show, so glorious and color-filled that I cursed the pencil in my hand and begged Tag to bring me something else.

Then Molly showed me fields, fields that looked just like the fields around the overpass and I tried not to curse in frustration. Instead, I drew the long golden strands of wheat in those fields, blending them with Molly’s hair as she raced through my mind, until the wheat became weeds that brushed against the concrete overpass.

“Stop! Moses!” Tag was shaking my shoulders and slapping at my face. “What the hell, man! You’re drawing on the walls!” Tag’s voice faded off. “Actually, I don’t give a shit if you draw on the walls.”

But the connection was gone, and I was dazed. I was pissed too, and stepped back from the wild, star-filled sky, smudged and shaded and half-finished before me. If I would have had paint