Текст книги "The Last Victim"

Автор книги: Karen Robards

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CHAPTER THREE

Charlie’s voice sounded hoarse to her own ears. She would have straightened away from the desk if she hadn’t suddenly needed it for support.

“I wish it were,” Bartoli said, while Crane shook his head. Bartoli continued, “We want you to come with us to Kill Devil Hills, look at the crime scene, see what you can come up with. Give us whatever insights you can.”

“No.” Charlie’s chest felt tight. The floor seemed to heave beneath her feet. Crane had been right, she should have been sitting down for this. But how could she have imagined …?

Bartoli’s expression softened fractionally.

“Look, we know what happened to you,” he said. Moving closer, he rested a hip against the desk beside her and folded his arms over his chest in rough approximation of her posture. Mirroring: that’s what he was doing. It was an easy way to establish rapport with a subject, but unfortunately for him she was well aware of the technique. Deliberately she allowed her arms to drop. But her subconscious took over again as her fingers curled around the edge of the desk and held on. “We know what you went through the last time this creep crawled out of the woodwork. We know this is tough.”

“It’s the same MO,” Crane told her. “We think it might be the same guy. We think the Boardwalk Killer is back.”

A wave of dizziness hit Charlie, and she had to swallow hard before she could speak.

“No,” she said again. She realized she was breathing way too fast. God, was she going to hyperventilate? Please, not here. Not in front of them. The Boardwalk Killer was the name the media had bestowed on the slayer of Holly and her family. Because Holly’s body, like those of the other five girls he had snatched after slaughtering their families, had turned up under the boardwalks that are ubiquitous in Atlantic Coast beach towns. “It can’t be him. It’s been fifteen years. Serial killers almost never start up again after that long a period.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Bartoli shrugged. “Maybe he was out of the country. Maybe he was in jail. Maybe he had some kind of illness that kept him housebound. It might even be a copycat. The thing is, though, we don’t have time to waste trying umpteen different ways to come at this. We think it’s the same guy. You saw him. You lived through one of his attacks. You’re the only one who saw him and lived through one of his attacks. That makes you the best person available to help us. If you need to go home to pack a bag, we’ll take you. If you need to contact people, let them know you’re leaving with us, that’s fine. Whatever arrangements you need to make, whatever makes this work for you, we’ll help. But we need to get going as soon as possible. Preferably within the hour.”

“I can’t do it.” Charlie shook her head, knowing even as she said it that refusing was the only choice she could make. Time and much effort on her part had papered over the gaping wound in her psyche left by that night, but it was still there, still raw and weeping and capable of causing her a horrific amount of damage if she allowed it to be ripped open again. “I’m sorry, but no. I’ll do what I can from here, but I can’t go with you. I can’t get involved in this in a personal way.”

“We need you.” Letting his arms drop so that a palm rested flat on her desktop (mirroring again? Charlie wondered as she became aware of her own posture; if so, it was more subtle this time), Bartoli leaned in, held her gaze. The intensity in his eyes made Charlie want to close her own. Anxiety tightened her stomach, dried her mouth. “Aside from your personal history, you’re the foremost expert on serial killers in this part of the country. Your assistance with this case was requested by the Bureau, and has been cleared through official channels all the way up to the top dog in the Justice Department. Bottom line is, you’ve been assigned to us for as long as we need you. And you’re the best hope Bayley Evans has.”

“I’ve been assigned to you? Without anyone asking me?” Charlie’s voice sharpened with welcome indignation even as the image of Holly as she had last seen her rose in her mind’s eye. Oh, God. Another girl’s life might depend on what I do next. She was suddenly bathed in cold sweat.

I’m not strong enough.

“Temporarily. Until this case is over. Technically, I guess you’re free to decline.”

“I want to help.” Even while she said it, she shook her head in dogged refusal, because she couldn’t, just could not, expose herself to that kind of life-destroying horror again. She was doing her part in the war against evil by learning all there was to know about the enemy, with the intention of sharing that knowledge with the world so it could be forewarned and, thus, forearmed. She should not be expected to go to battle in the trenches, too. Charlie had to force the next words around the lump forming in her throat. “I’ll do a profile. I’ll—”

An eruption of shouts out in the hallway was punctuated by a man’s bloodcurdling scream. Even muffled by walls and a steel door, the disturbance cut through her words, riveting the attention of everyone in the office, making Charlie’s heart jump.

“What the hell?” Bartoli straightened from the desk abruptly. Clanging metal, running footsteps, and more shouts were followed seconds later by a frenzied pounding on Charlie’s closed office door.

“Dr. Stone! Dr. Stone!” a man yelled through the panel. “Come quick!”

Such a summons was unprecedented. Alarm flooding her veins, Charlie rushed to jerk open her door. A guard—Parnell, according to his name tag—jiggled from foot to foot with nervous excitement, pointing down the hall the second he set eyes on her. Looking in the direction in which he pointed, Charlie saw that, just on the other side of the mesh double doors, a cadre of jostling guards had congregated, while more hustled a chain-linked contingent of inmates away. Obviously agitated, the remaining guards seemed to be focused on something on the ground.

“What’s hap—?” she began, only to have her question cut off as Parnell grabbed her arm and physically pulled her from her office.

“Warden says you should come now!” He was already in motion, breaking into a run, towing her down the hall with him.

“Hey, wait a minute!” It was Bartoli, yelling after her from her office, sounding alarmed on her behalf. As if he thought Parnell was kidnapping her or something.

“It’s all right,” Charlie called back to him, even as she ran with the guard.

“Dr. Stone! We’ve got a man severely injured here! You’re a medical doctor, you know something about emergency care, right?” Looking around at her as she reached the closed mesh gates, Pugh crouched beside what Charlie realized, from his orange uniform, was an inmate lying on the floor.

“Yes,” she replied, her eyes on the injured man. As one of the guards hurried to open the double doors to let her through, she was peripherally aware of Bartoli and Crane running up behind her, flashing their badges to get past the guard, negotiating the complicated procedure of passing through the clanging metal cage right along with her. Charlie stayed focused on the scene unfolding in front of her: a little distance beyond the fallen man, guards were dragging another inmate, this one apparently unconscious, toward the intersecting corridor that led to the main part of the building, where the cells, among other things, were located.

“What happened?” Breathless, she asked the question Parnell had interrupted earlier as she rushed through the last door and dropped to her knees beside Pugh. Adrenaline surged like a double shot of speed as she assessed the victim with the triage mentality of a first responder. With a sense of shock she recognized the injured man as Garland. He lay motionless, sprawled on his back on the concrete floor, blood pumping from his chest. The front of his jumpsuit was already wet, shiny, saturated scarlet. His eyes were closed. His skin was ashen.

“Mr. Garland,” Charlie called to him urgently even as she pressed two fingers to the pulse beneath his ear, while Pugh said, “One of the other inmates stabbed him. Do something.”

Charlie could feel only a faint, irregular pulse, but it at least meant Garland was still alive. Moving fast, she unzipped his jumpsuit to the chain around his waist and yanked it open to reveal the wound. A muscular, supremely fit man with an inch-long slit just above his left nipple, which was probably going to kill him, was her lightning-quick assessment. The rhythmic way the blood gushed from his chest was ominous, but it told her that his heart was still beating. Although it had been hard to tell at first glance, she saw that he was breathing on his own as well.

“It was Nash who done it. They’re taking him to the hole,” one of the guards—Johnson, she saw with an upward flick of her eyes—said to Pugh. The way he grimaced told Charlie that he thought he was in big trouble for letting the attack happen. She guessed the warden had been on this side of the gate, on his way to his office in the first of the five buildings that made up the huge prison complex, when the assault had gone down, and that the commotion had drawn him back to the scene.

“Nash was with the group we was taking to the library,” another guard added. The library was on the same side of the mesh doors as Charlie’s office and the interview rooms, so clearly the attack had happened as Garland was coming out and the library group was going in. “He jumped at Garland so fast, wasn’t nothing nobody could do. Just, boom, like that, and it was done.”

“We got the shiv,” a third guard volunteered. “About six inches long, sharp as a razor blade.”

“Goddamn it. Find out where it came from.” Pugh’s face was suffused with anger as he looked at the guards. Spotting the feds looming behind Charlie, his complexion went from dark rose to magenta in about half a second. His eyes bulged and his jaw worked. Charlie saw all this in passing even as she slapped her hand flat against Garland’s wound and laid the other one on top of it, putting her weight into it, applying as much pressure as she could in an attempt to stop the bleeding. His chest was wide, warm, firm with muscle—and slippery with blood. So much blood.

“Put the whole damned place on lockdown,” Pugh snapped, and one of the guards started barking the necessary orders into a handheld radio.

It was no wonder Pugh was upset: a violent death inside the prison meant an outside investigation, Charlie knew, and knew, too, that such an investigation was the last thing the warden wanted. Just a month before she had arrived at Wallens Ridge in June, the Bureau of Prisons had concluded an investigation into the death of an inmate who had supposedly committed suicide in his cell. The inquiry had been ugly, and the final report was still pending.

With the FBI agents observing, there would be no hiding this.

“Move back,” somebody said above her. The voice was authoritative: she thought it belonged to Bartoli, and that he was talking to the nervous guards, but she was concentrating too hard on Garland to glance up and make sure. “Give her some room to work.”

“Uhh,” Garland moaned. His head moved slightly. His wrists were shackled and fastened to the chain around his waist. His hands, resting on his abdomen, twitched. His chest heaved as he suddenly began to fight for air. He gasped and coughed and choked. Bloody froth rose to lips.

Not good. Charlie’s heart beat faster.

“It’s bad,” she told Pugh, reluctant to be more specific on the off chance Garland was still capable of understanding what she was saying. She could feel his heart beating against her palm, feel its desperate attempt to function. His skin was still warm, hot even, but she saw with a sinking feeling that his lips were starting to turn blue.

“Mr. Garland, it’s Dr. Stone.” She spoke as calmly as she could. “I know it hurts. Keep trying to breathe.”

“Just keep him alive.” Pugh’s face was a study in furious dismay. “Dr. Creason”—the prison doctor—“is on his way. There’s a stretcher coming, too. My God, we can’t let something like this happen again.”

“Tell them to bring oxygen.” Charlie’s voice was tight as Garland gasped again. “Mr. Garland, take shallow breaths. In and out, as easy as you can.”

She was almost sure he couldn’t hear her. His chest continued to shudder as he fought for air just as violently as before. His blood felt thick and slimy beneath her palm. From the way it was spurting and the location of the wound, Charlie guessed that the aorta had been nicked. Attempting CPR or chest compressions with such an injury would only make the patient worse, as it would force more blood from his body, which was the last thing he needed. Without any kind of medical equipment, she was doing all she could. But she felt woefully inadequate. Helpless in the face of what she recognized, even as she hated to admit it, was encroaching death.

“He needs to be inside an operating room stat,” she looked up from her patient to tell Pugh urgently, although she already knew Garland’s chances of survival were almost nil. His only hope—and that it would work was a million-to-one long shot, in any case—was a top-notch surgeon and an immediate operation to open the chest and suture the aorta, which just wasn’t going to happen at Wallens Ridge. While the prison’s medical facilities included a rudimentary operating room for emergencies, it wasn’t equipped or staffed for something like this. And as for getting Garland to an outside hospital, there simply wouldn’t be enough time.

Pugh stood up abruptly, saying something to one of the guards, who started yelling into his radio again. Charlie wasn’t listening anymore. Every ounce of her concentration was focused on doing what she could to save Garland’s life. He was a convicted serial killer with a death sentence hanging over his head, yes, which should have made the loss of his life by brutal murder more a case of justice being served early than a tragedy, but he was also a human being. To have him die like this, under her hands, when just moments before he had been alive and well and full of insolence as he passed her office, was horrifying.

His legs moved, and a fresh fountain of blood coated her hands.

“Keep still,” she told him, although she doubted that her words were getting through. Swiftly stripping off her coat, she wadded it up and pressed it down on top of the wound, holding it in place with all of her strength, only to watch the white cotton soak up the blood with terrifying speed. As she worked, she could tell from the way the blood was gushing that nothing was going to help. It was already too late. He was bleeding out even as she tried her best to hold off the inevitable. A scarlet pool of blood spread out around them, creeping across the floor, soaking through her pants from the knees down. She knelt in the warm, wet puddle of it, and the knowledge of what she was kneeling in made her ill. The raw meat smell of fresh blood hung in the air. Garland’s wheezing breaths were becoming more widely spaced, more erratic, and with a sinking heart she realized he was going.

“Where the hell is that oxygen?” she bit out, glaring at Pugh, at the guards, even at the two FBI agents who hovered uselessly with the rest, galvanized with the need to try something else, anything.

“Mmm,” Garland groaned, coughed up a bright red dribble of blood, and opened his eyes.

Charlie found herself looking into them. Their normal sky blue had turned almost colorless. The pupils were dilating even as she met his gaze. Death, she knew from experience, was just a few heartbeats away. The baddest of bad men, black heart, merciless and evil: all those descriptions of him and more were written down in his file, and she had no doubt that they were true. Still, she worked feverishly to keep the life-giving blood in his veins.

“Stay with me. Do you hear?” Her voice was fierce, her pressure on the wound relentless.

“Doc,” he said. Or at least his lips moved to form the word: her pulse was beating so hard against her eardrums by then that she couldn’t be sure she actually heard it.

“I’m here,” she said. “Don’t try to talk.”

Reaching up, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist. They were still surprisingly strong. For a moment their gazes locked.

Then he died.

CHAPTER FOUR

Charlie knew the instant death occurred. Garland’s chest quit rising and falling, and the sound of his breathing ceased between one breath and the next. His grip on her wrist slackened, and then his hand dropped away. The blood stopped spurting from his wound. Instead what was left from the last pump of his heart oozed out in a warm gush that she could feel soaking through the cotton of her lab coat. His lips quivered once, and then remained motionless. His eyes, which had been focused on her face, fixed and began to glaze.

“Mr. Garland.” Refusing to accept the truth, she leaned in, pressing harder on his chest, her voice urgent.

Then it happened. The thing she dreaded, that she went to extraordinary lengths to avoid, that she had never come to terms with and never would.

Garland’s soul left his body. Frozen in place, leaning over him, her hands, which were drenched in his blood, still pressed to his wound, Charlie saw it begin. Her heart started thumping as she watched what looked like tendrils of white mist gather above the whole long length of him. The mist engulfed her wrists in a surge of electric energy. The tingle of it was tangible. She snatched her hands away, out of the force field, sinking back on her heels as the shimmering miasma gathered and seemed to hang like fog in the air just inches above Garland’s body. In the next instant she felt a cold rush of wind that went past her with a whoosh. The fog blew away, swirling upward, seeming to rise and solidify until Garland himself stood there. Or, rather, until what Garland had now become stood there.

Charlie sucked in air.

Garland’s body lay limp and unmoving on the concrete floor beside her, framed in a growing pool of his own blood. His soul, his essence, his being, his ghost—Charlie was never sure how best to describe the apparitions she saw—stood near the body’s head, not quite solid, not quite as substantial as a living, breathing human being, but undeniably there. His feet appeared to be planted on the concrete floor. His ankles and wrists were shackled just as they had been at the moment of his death. His jumpsuit was unzipped to the waist. His bloody chest was exposed. But no blood pumped from the wound, which was visible as a small black slit, and he appeared as hale and hearty as it was possible for anyone to be, except for the fact that he was dead.

Charlie’s gut clenched.

Dear God, don’t let this be happening again, was the half thought, half prayer that sprang instantly to her mind.

But it was happening, and she was the unwilling witness. Garland looked down at his dead body, the apparition taking in the corpse lying on the floor at its feet. Charlie saw a long shiver run through the shade. Then it—or he, rather, for the corpse was no more Garland now than discarded wrappings were the gift they had once adorned—raised his head and met her gaze.

Charlie’s heart lurched. Her breath caught. His eyes were once again their normal sky blue, alight with awareness and consternation and a touch of disbelief. He looked as conscious in death as he ever had in life.

“Fuck,” the apparition said. “Are you shitting me?”

She could hear him as clearly as if he were still alive, she realized, rattled. Profanity and all, it sounded so exactly like something he would say, it didn’t seem possible that the words were coming from a phantom.

“No,” she replied, forgetting the crowd around them, that they could see her talking to what to them looked like empty space, that they could hear her side of the conversation.

His eyes widened. “I’m dead?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

His lips parted, and she thought he would say something more. But then he glanced around sharply, as if he heard a sound behind him. Charlie didn’t know what was there—she could never see more than the apparition itself—but an emotion that looked very much like fear contorted his face.

As if he saw something coming that would drag him to hell.

The rattle of metal wheels on concrete broke the spell that kept her eyes fastened on him. Looking beyond Garland, she saw the stretcher careening around the corner at last, propelled by a pair of guards, its clatter echoing off the walls. Behind the stretcher ran Dr. Creason and a male nurse pulling a wheeled resuscitation cart. Only a split second or so passed before Charlie realized that she could see the newcomers clearly: her view was no longer obstructed by Garland.

The apparition was gone. Only Garland’s corpse remained, sprawled just inches away from her bent knees. Her soaked-through coat was no impediment as the last of his blood oozed out beneath it. Charlie felt a surge of profound pity for the dead man, along with a strong sense of thankfulness that his spirit had moved on.

“Dr. Stone, are you okay?”

Large male hands dropped onto her shoulders from behind. Startled, Charlie glanced up. While the rest of the crowd focused on the oncoming stretcher, one of the FBI agents—Bartoli—leaned over her. He frowned down at her, looking concerned. It was he who clasped her shoulders, she realized with relief. And the reason she felt relief was that he was alive, and solid. A man, not a ghost.

Thank God.

All of a sudden the reality of what was happening around her, the noise, the confusion, the presence of so many people crowding into way too small a space, snapped back into sharp focus. Charlie looked over at Pugh, who was beckoning wildly at the medical team rushing toward them while yelling at them to hurry. Two of the guards were halfway up the hall as they ran to meet the would-be rescuers. As she watched, they grabbed the stretcher by the front bar and pulled. The smell of death, of blood, of sweat, of fear, assaulted her nostrils. Colors popped: the scarlet blood, Garland’s orange jumpsuit, the deep blue of the guards’ uniforms. Sounds were amplified. The white glow of the fluorescents overhead bathed the scene in ugly, flickering, merciless light that hid nothing. Bartoli was still staring down at her. Charlie felt suddenly self-conscious, wondering what he and any other onlookers had noticed, and, if they had noticed, what they’d made of her conversation with the dead man.

“I’m fine,” she told Bartoli, who let go of her shoulders and straightened, although her answer was something less than the truth. Shaken and drained, she felt woozy, disoriented, nauseated. Garland’s death in and of itself filled her with sorrow. On its own, such a sudden, violent end was terrible enough. Add to it the fact that she was seeing ghosts again and she felt almost like she had endured a physical assault. It had been a long time, a year at least, since a spirit had manifested itself to her, but still the unpleasant feeling was disturbingly familiar. Even though she had been careful to arrange her life so the opportunity for such a thing happening was limited, when she didn’t see anything supernatural she had begun to hope that her unwanted ability to communicate with those who had recently, violently passed over had waned. Apparently not, but now was not the time to dwell on it, not with so many eyes to see and ears to hear in her immediate vicinity, not with her professional reputation to consider. To a lot of people, maybe even most people, the idea that anyone could see the spirits of the dead was nonsense, and any person claiming to see them was nuts. Nuts are not respected doctors, nor do they qualify for research grants from the government. Therefore, the fact that she’d just had a brief but vivid encounter with Garland’s ghost was something she wasn’t planning to share anytime soon. Pulling herself together required effort, but she managed it. The first order of business was not to look at Garland’s body, because looking at it made her feel ill all over again. As the stretcher arrived with a noisy rattle of wheels she glanced at it instead.

“You want we should get him on the stretcher?” cried one of the perspiring guards, letting go of it as he and two more of the new arrivals made a concerted move toward the corpse without waiting for an answer.

“No! Shock him! Shock him!” Pugh shouted, waving them back, addressing the medical team as he pointed at the corpse.

“Give me the paddles,” Dr. Creason yelled to the nurse, who had pushed the crash cart up beside him. He grabbed the paddles out of the nurse’s hand while barking at Charlie, “Airway clear?”

“It’s too late,” she said in a reasonably strong voice, then repeated the words more loudly as Dr. Creason, paddles in hand, dropped to his knees beside her. To him, to them all, she announced, “He’s dead.”

“Ah, hell.” Pugh groaned.

A shimmer in the air on the other side of Garland’s body caught her eye. It was no more substantial than a heat mirage on a blistering summer’s day, just as quickly there and gone. What worried her more was the sensation that assailed her seconds later, which felt exactly like a cold breeze whispering along the nape of her neck.

Whatever it was, she didn’t like it.

As the warden let loose with a stream of curses and the medical team got busy verifying her words, Charlie stood up, helped at the last minute by Bartoli, who was there with a steadying grip on her elbow when she staggered a little. Ordinarily she would have shaken free of his hand, but her knees, as it turned out, were about as stable as Jell-O. Her legs shook, she felt cold all over, and her breathing was still not entirely normal. She was also, she realized as she glanced down at herself, covered with Garland’s blood.

She shuddered.

“You sure you’re okay?” Bartoli stayed close beside her as she carefully stepped back from the corpse. His intentions were good, she realized, but she wished he would go away. This was something best recovered from in private. There was nothing more she or anyone else could do for Garland. He would go on to a better—or in his case, quite possibly a worse—place. Anyway, what happened to him now was out of her hands, and she wanted nothing more to do with it. From the way Bartoli continued to frown at her, it was obvious some of her upset showed. Except for him, and Crane, who had moved out of the way with them, everyone else was concentrating on the dead body, which she couldn’t even think of as Garland anymore because she knew that what remained was an empty husk and Garland himself was not there. His blood was already growing cold, and she realized with a frisson of horror that she knew this because it coated her hands to the wrists, and dripped from her fingertips. Watching the droplets fall to form tiny, bright red polka dots on the gray concrete floor, she felt her stomach turn inside out. Bartoli’s frown deepened. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“Having a patient in your care die never feels good,” she admitted. It was absolutely true, and perfectly explained her distress without her having to go into the whole I-see-dead-people thing.

“You did all you could.” His tone was sympathetic, but the look he gave her was borderline weird.

“Probably you want to go somewhere and wash up,” Crane suggested. He was giving her a weird look, too.

Charlie sighed inwardly. Okay, so they had clearly gotten a load of her little conversation with Garland’s ghost and were wondering about it. At the moment, she wasn’t up to creating a plausible lie to explain it away.

“Yes, I do.” Charlie genuinely welcomed the suggestion, not only because getting Garland’s blood off her hands had just become item number one on her agenda but also because it gave her an excuse to go off by herself until she recovered her equilibrium. Never, not once in the last fifteen years, since she had been so unnerved by what she was seeing that she reported her visions to her mother, and the police, and anybody else who would listen, in the wake of the Palmers’ murders and wound up being hustled off to a psychiatrist’s office for a mental evaluation, had she told anyone about her ongoing encounters with the spirits of the dead. Over time, she had figured out she didn’t see all spirits, only those who had died recently, and violently, and were in her general vicinity, and then only for the typically brief period in which they still clung to earth. Shocked to find themselves dead, many of those forced out of their bodies without warning were confused, she had learned, and didn’t know where to go or what to do. Usually, for about a week they hung around some person or object to which they were attached, till they had acclimated enough to their new state to move on. Her ability to see them, which she thought of as a curse rather than a gift, had first manifested itself when she was four and a childhood playmate had been hit by a car in front of the apartment building in which they lived. Her little friend had loitered about the apartments for several days missing his mother. Charlie had talked to him and played with him without fully realizing he was dead. Her mother had been perplexed at Charlie’s new “imaginary friend”; Charlie supposed she had never called the boy, Sergio, by name, and thus her mother had not made the connection but that was all the notice anyone took of it at the time. Maybe she wasn’t always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but Charlie had only become convinced that she could see actual dead people when first Holly’s mother and then Holly herself had started appearing to her right after the horror in the Palmers’ house. Even then, it had taken her a while to catch on to what was happening. Because Holly and her mother had come to her at night, the traumatized teenager that Charlie had been then had convinced herself that the terrible visions she was having were nothing more than hideously real-seeming nightmares. Mrs. Palmer had appeared first, materializing beside Charlie’s bed in the middle of the night some twenty-four hours after the murders, when Charlie had still been in a safe house in the protective custody of the police. Dressed in the bloody nightgown she had been wearing when she was killed, the wound that had killed her visible as a horrifying black smile slashed across her throat, Diane Palmer had wrung her hands while begging Charlie to please help find Holly, who at the time was the subject of a frantic police search. Holly herself had appeared a few nights later, dressed in something that she had never to Charlie’s knowledge worn—a bubblegum pink, bouffant prom dress—with her long blond hair twisted into fat sausage curls that hung down her back. As Charlie lay terrified in her bed, Holly had rushed across the room toward her, crying, “I want to go home. Please let me go home,” before vanishing, only to return again the next night, and the next, always the same thing, for five nights in a row, until Holly’s body was found. Then the visitations, as Charlie had finally figured out they were, although she’d been offered counseling and pharmaceuticals when she had tried to convince anyone else of it, had stopped, swallowed up by the horror of reality.