night Marco touched my hands and realized something was different. What did he tell himself about that? Did he reason it away?
What will he tell himself about the halo?
And how long will it take him to realize he needs help understanding?
I lean into Jake and watch as Marco disappears. He’s headed toward town. Toward Main Street.
There’s not much there, but I hope he finds what he’s looking for.
24
Brielle
You have time for a drive?” Jake asks.
He’s released my waist and stepped away. It’s weird to have distance between us. I try to shake off the look on Marco’s face and focus on Jake. On this moment. But he’s walking away from me, down the stairs.
“I have something to show you. It’s not far.” He opens the passenger door to his car and holds it for me. I turn toward my house, toward the conversation waiting there for me. The sheriff’s cruiser is still in the drive. Dad will be fine. He has company and I’m still not ready to see him, so I drop down the stairs and slide into the Karmann Ghia.
Jake wasn’t kidding when he said we weren’t going far. He pulls off the highway and parks as near to the Stratus Cemetery gate as he can. Yellow caution tape marks off several areas where dirt and rocks seem to have been displaced.
“Is this all from my mother’s grave?”
“Yeah,” Jake says. “Crazy, huh?”
Being back here is strange. It feels very disconnected to me, and yet if I’m to believe Virtue, all this turmoil was caused because the grave was empty. Because my dad hid emptiness below the ground.
All this because I wanted truth.
I expect to be sad or angry being here again, but I’m just numb. We duck under the caution tape, and I let Jake lead me through the gate and along the path. It’s quiet. Birds zipping through the summer sky, chattering. Dragonflies escort us, unaware that this place has been violated. And still Jake says nothing until we’re standing beneath the mangled branches of the willow tree.
“I found something,” he says.
“Here? When?”
“Last night. This morning, actually. I came back,” he says. “Waited till the police cleared the area, and then I searched.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Anything,” he says. “Just something to point us in the right direction.”
Us.
“I really am sorry about that night. About sending you away like that.”
“Stop,” he says. “I’m not mad.”
His face is tighter than I’m used to, but I’m not about to call him a liar.
“Okay.” I squeeze his hand. “So you found something?”
“Look up,” he says.
The leaves of the willow are singed in places, branches bent and broken. Amongst the wreckage, it takes my eyes a second to find it. But there, hanging from a splintered branch, is a necklace.
It hangs about twelve feet up, a circlet of beads with a single wooden ornament decorating it.
A flower.
I refuse to sink to the mud here again, so I grab Jake’s arms. “I know that necklace. I’ve seen it.”
“Where?”
“I had another . . . it was . . . in a nightmare.”
“You had another nightmare? A different nightmare?”
“It started Saturday night, before the cemetery. You think that was buried with my mom?”
“Elle, we need to talk about the nightmare.”
“I know, and we will, but—”
He growls, frustrated.
“Jake! Do you . . . do you think it was in her casket?”
He releases my hand with a little more gusto than absolutely necessary and moves to the tree. “The thought crossed my mind,” he says. “I don’t know any other way it could have gotten up there.”
Jake grabs hold of a low-hanging limb. Hand over hand, he works his way up to the necklace and with deft fingers works it free.
“Catch.”
The necklace falls straight down, the wooden ornament tugging it toward me. I catch it easily and set to examining it. The beads are multicolored and strung in no particular order. There’s no clasp, just a knot holding it all together. The wooden ornament is circular and smooth, a white plumeria painted on it. Its yellow center is faded, the white petals scratched, but there’s no mistaking it. This is the necklace from my nightmare.
Jake drops from the tree.
“This is it,” I say. “The girl was wearing it in my dream.”
“The girl in the hallway?”
“Yes and no. It was the same girl, but she was younger, happier. Until . . .”
I have a terrifying thought. “Jake, I think the nightmares are coming from the Throne Room. I think they’re telling me something.”