Jeff shuddered. “It was so real.” He was awake now, his whole body covered with an icy sweat, the terrible feeling that had come over him as he’d called out to his brother one last time still gripping him.
“What’s going on?” Brad Hinshaw asked, coming into the room. Then he saw Jeff. “Jeez, man, you look like you saw a ghost or something.”
“H—He did,” Josh stammered. “He dreamed that Adam was dead, and that it was his fault.”
“Shit,” Brad breathed. But before he could say anything else, someone else came into the room.
“Is Adam in here?”
A deathly silence fell over the room as the three boys stared at one another. Then Jeff got slowly out of bed and made his way toward the door, Josh and Brad instinctively backing away to let him pass. He walked to the room next to his own, hesitated a moment, then went inside.
The bed was empty, though it looked as if it had been slept in.
All Adam’s things were in their usual places.
“M—Maybe he just went to the can,” Brad Hinshaw suggested, but then a new voice spoke. “I
just looked. It’s empty.”
Jeff stared at the empty bed for another moment, and then his eyes shifted to the computer on Adam’s desk. Moving slowly, almost as if he were being drawn to it against his will, Jeff approached the desk and pressed the power button on the bottom of the monitor. A green light flashed on, and then the monitor began to glow. A second or two after that, the last words that Adam had typed appeared next to the prompt. Jeff, along with Josh and Brad, stared silently at the words:
C: NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME, SO IT IS TIME THAT I MOVE ON. I AM GOING TO A BETTER, HIGHER PLACE.
Josh, gazing at the message, felt his stomach tighten as he realized what it meant. In his mind he was suddenly back at the beginning of last week, when he’d sat on the bed in his own room back home in Eden, the hunting knife in his hands.
Unconsciously, the fingers of his left hand touched the scabs on his right wrist, all that was left to remind him of what he’d done.
Suddenly he understood why Adam had been acting weird the last few days. Josh knew he’d thought about dying for only a few minutes when he was angry. Unlike him, Adam must have been thinking about it for days.
Thinking about it, and making up his mind.
But what had he done? Where was he?
“Wh—Whatcha going to do?” he asked, his voice barely audible.
But Jeff merely turned and walked away.
Just as Jeff Aldrich emerged from his brother’s room, Hildie Kramer appeared at the top of the stairs.
She seemed puzzled when she saw him, but spoke to him in a soft, steady voice. “Jeff? Could you come downstairs with me, please? There’s something I have to talk to you about.”
A minute later, sitting in his pajamas on the sofa next to Hildie, Jeff listened in silence as she told him that Adam’s body had just been found.
“It was on the railroad tracks,” she said. “I—I suppose it might have been an accident …” Her voice trailed off, and she slipped an arm around Jeff.
The boy stiffened in her embrace.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident. He left a note on his computer.”
For a long moment Hildie said nothing. Then, after discharging a deep breath from her lungs, she said, “I think I’d better get you to your parents.”
Jeff said nothing, letting her lead him back to his room so he could dress. But even as he began pulling his clothes on, the dream kept coming back to him.
So what Adam had said in the dream was right: he hadn’t chickened out at all.
Oddly, Jeff Aldrich felt proud of his brother.
And even as he felt that wave of pride, he knew it was something he would never tell anyone about.
Not ever.
10
Chet Aldrich awakened slowly, his eyes automatically seeking out the blue digits of the clock radio on his nightstand: 5:47.
The alarm wasn’t due to go off until six-thirty.
Chet scowled in annoyance. He never wakened so long before the alarm went off; indeed, he invariably woke up a minute before the alarm sounded, squelching it before its irritating beep even had a chance to begin.
But something had disturbed his sleep. He glanced out the window to see the sky, already brightening. Thunder? He dismissed that idea from