She lowered her head, took several deep breaths, and looked up at him again. Her eyes were overbright, but her mouth had stopped trembling. “I’m okay,” she said. “Really. I’m just glad not to be alone with this inside my head.”
8
He listened carefully as she described what she remembered of her initial encounter with Bradley Trevor two years ago. It wasn’t much. The clearest image she retained was of many crisscrossing flashlight beams illuminating him as he lay on the ground. And his screams. She remembered those.
“They had to light him up because they were doing some kind of operation,” Abra said. “That’s what they called it, anyway, but all they were really doing was torturing him.”
She told him about finding Bradley again on the back page of The Anniston Shopper, with all the other missing children. How she had touched his picture to see if she could find out about him.
“Can you do that?” she asked. “Touch things and get pictures in your head? Find things out?”
“Sometimes. Not always. I used to be able to do it more—and more reliably—when I was a kid.”
“Do you think I’ll grow out of it? I wouldn’t mind that.” She paused, thinking. “Except I sort of would. It’s hard to explain.”
“I know what you mean. It’s our thing, isn’t it? What we can do.”
Abra smiled.
“You’re pretty sure you know where they killed this boy?”
“Yes, and they buried him there. They even buried his baseball glove.” Abra handed him a piece of notebook paper. It was a copy, not the original. She would have been embarrassed for anyone to see how she had written the names of the boys in ’Round Here, not just once but over and over again. Even the way they had been written now seemed all wrong, those big fat letters that were supposed to express not love but luv.
“Don’t get bent out of shape about it,” Dan said absently, studying what she’d printed on the sheet. “I had a thing for Stevie Nicks when I was your age. Also for Ann Wilson, of Heart. You’ve probably never even heard of her, she’s old-school, but I used to daydream about inviting her to one of the Friday night dances at Glenwood Junior High. How’s that for stupid?”
She was staring at him, openmouthed.
“Stupid but normal. Most normal thing in the world, so cut yourself some slack. And I wasn’t peeking, Abra. It was just there. Kind of jumped out in my face.”
“Oh God.” Abra’s cheeks had gone bright red. “This is going to take some getting used to, isn’t it?”
“For both of us, kiddo.” He looked back down at the sheet.
NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF THE CANTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT
ORGANIC INDUSTRIES
ETHANOL PLANT #4
FREEMAN, IOWA
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
“You got this by . . . what? Watching it over and over? Rerunning it like a movie?”
“The NO TRESPASSING sign was easy, but the stuff about Organic Industries and the ethanol plant, yeah. Can’t you do that?”
“I never tried. Maybe once, but probably not anymore.”
“I found Freeman, Iowa, on the computer,” she said. “And when I ran Google Earth, I could see the factory. Those places are really there.”
Dan’s thoughts returned to John Dalton. Others in the Program had talked about Dan’s peculiar ability to find things; John never had. Not surprising, really. Doctors took a vow of confidentiality similar to the one in AA, didn’t they? Which in John’s case made it a kind of double coverage.
Abra was saying, “You could call Bradley Trevor’s parents, couldn’t you? Or the sheriff’s office in Canton County? They wouldn’t believe me, but they’d believe a grown-up.”
“I suppose I could.” But of course a man who knew where the body was buried would automatically go to the head of the suspect list, so if he did it, he would have to be very, very careful about the way he did it.
Abra, the trouble you’re getting me into.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
He put his hand over hers and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t be. That’s one you weren’t supposed to hear.”
She straightened. “Oh God, here comes Yvonne Stroud. She’s in my class.”
Dan pulled his hand back in a hurry. He saw a plump, brown-haired girl about Abra’s age coming up the sidewalk. She was wearing a backpack and carrying a looseleaf notebook curled against her chest. Her eyes were bright and inquisitive.
“She’ll want to know everything about you,” Abra said. “I mean everything. And she talks.”