One Last Scream

rearview mirror. “I’m sorry, Sandra,” she muttered listlessly. “I guess you haven’t met my father.”

“What?” Sandra checked the rearview mirror, and saw a shadowy figure suddenly spring up from the floor. She gasped.

All at once, he grabbed her hair and yanked her head back. It happened so fast, she couldn’t fight him off. He slapped a wet cloth over her mouth. It must have been soaked with some chemical, because it burned her face. Sandra’s eyes watered up. She tried not to breathe in, and desperately clawed at his hand.

But he wouldn’t let go. Almost unwillingly, she gasped for air, and then realized it was too late. Sandra had never experienced this sensation before. She wasn’t passing out, or falling asleep, or even fainting. No, this was something different.

Sandra Hartman felt herself surrendering to something very close to death.

Seattle-three years later

“Nope, sorry, I still haven’t seen hide nor hair of Amelia,” Jessie said into the phone. In front of her on the McMillans’ kitchen table, was a pile of laundry, still warm from the dryer. “No calls either, except from Karen, checking up on me about a half hour ago.”

“Okay, Jessie, thanks,” George said on the other end of the line. “Jody should be home from school in about an hour. Could you take him with you when you go to pick up Steffie at Rainbow Junction Daycare?”

“You asked me that this morning, and I will,” Jessie said. “Now, can I tell you something? That cleaning woman of yours isn’t worth the powder to blow her to hell. There are dust balls behind your sofa and under the cushions, I found three old French fries, a plastic barrette, some popcorn and forty-seven cents in change.”

“Well, you can keep the barrette, but I want the forty-seven cents,” George said. “You sure everything’s okay there?”

“Peachy,” Jessie assured him. “I’m folding laundry, and after this I’m taking out your recycling. Pretty exciting, huh?”

“Well, take a break, for God’s sake,” George replied. “I’ll talk to you later, Jess.”

She hung up the phone, and finished folding the clothes. Then Jessie got the recycling bin out of the pantry, and carried it out the kitchen door. She lumbered up to the edge of the driveway and let out a groan as she set the bin on the front curb.

Jessie paused to take a look down the block. She spotted a black car parked about four houses down on the other side of the street. But it wasn’t Karen’s Jetta, and that was the one she was supposed to be on the lookout for.

This car was just a beat-up old Cadillac.

With a sigh, Jessie turned and headed back for the house.

Chapter Seventeen

Karen took the turnoff at Coles Corner to Lake Wenatchee Highway. The scenery along Stevens Pass had been gorgeous: the mountains and rivers, the trees so vibrant with their fall colors, and even a few small waterfalls. But she’d barely noticed any of it. She couldn’t stop thinking about what George had discovered, that Amelia had a twin sister.

No wonder Amelia had developed so many neuroses, having been torn apart from her twin at such a young age. With the sudden absence of her sister, Amelia might have taken on her twin’s persona. Perhaps she assumed her sister felt abandoned, angry and bitter, even destructive. And maybe Amelia was adopting those traits during her blackouts while the twin sister part of her took over. That lost time Amelia experienced kept her from knowing about this sister-half and her activities.

“Or maybe they’re just alcohol-related blackouts,” Karen muttered to herself. “And you’re making way too much of this twin thing.”

She passed a sign for Lake Wenatchee State Park, and knew she was on the right track, at least as far as her driving was concerned. According to Helene’s directions, she would be at the Faradays’ lake house in another fifteen minutes.

Amelia’s separation from her twin certainly explained other things: the nightmares and those phantom pains and “faked” illnesses that had plagued her all the way through adolescence. Karen had read accounts of twin telepathy when she was in graduate school. Some were rather dull, dry studies. “Though separated, both twins picked the red ball for the first two experiments, and the green ball for the third, and the red ball again for the fourth. The choice patterns of the separated twins matched in 96 percent of the test cases.”

Other accounts were a bit more like a Twilight Zone episode. Karen recalled one story about a 55-year-old businessman who woke up in the middle of the night in his Zurich hotel room with severe abdominal pains and a high fever. The doctors in the emergency room at the hospital couldn’t find anything actually wrong with him, and his fever went away by the next morning. He got back to the hotel to find a message from his sister-in-law in Columbus, Ohio. His twin brother had been rushed to the hospital the night before with a ruptured appendix.

Karen remembered one of her professors dismissing such stories, though apparently dozens of similar cases were on record.

Had young Amelia, with her unexplained maladies, been feeling the pains and illnesses of her twin sister? Karen remembered some of Amelia’s descriptions. It felt like someone was kicking me…. Like my arm was being twisted off…It felt like someone was putting out a lit cigar on me….

She wondered about the awful things being done to Annabelle Schlessinger when her estranged twin sister- miles and miles away-had felt those horrible sensations. What kind of violence had that child endured? Amelia had said she’d stopped experiencing the phantom pains and illnesses about three years ago, when she was sixteen. And Annabelle Schlessinger had died at age sixteen.

Perhaps Amelia’s violent nightmares while growing up had been the result of some kind of telepathy. Maybe she was picking up real incidents as they happened to her twin.

Karen could almost imagine her professor laughing at her for such far-fetched speculation. It might not hold up with an American Psychological Association review panel, but there were all sorts of phenomena that couldn’t be easily explained. And twin telepathy was one of them.

Karen kept a lookout for the street signs. Along the forest road, she could see the placid lake peeking through the trees. She finally spotted a sign, with a red and white checkered border:

DANNY’S DINER

Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner

You’ll Come Up a Winner!

1 MILE AHEAD

That was the restaurant both Amelia and Helene had described to her-the one near the gravel road that led to the Faradays’ lake house.

Karen still didn’t know what she expected to find when she got to the cabin. She might have driven all this way for nothing. If Amelia was hiding out there, Karen would calm her down and talk to her. They certainly couldn’t put off going to the police any longer. Hell, they were both probably persons of interest in Koehler’s disappearance, and about a notch away from fugitive status, if not there already. But Karen was still determined to protect Amelia, and make sure she got the help she needed.

Up the road a piece, she saw Danny’s Diner, a small chalet-style restaurant with flower boxes in the windows and four picnic tables in front. The parking lot was big enough for a dozen cars, and at the moment, half full. As Karen drove by, she noticed the phone booth by the front door.

Eyes on the road, she reached over for her cell phone, and tried to dial her home number. A mechanical voice told her, “We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed. Please hang up and try again.”

Helene was right, cell phones didn’t work around here. That would make things extremely difficult if she ran into trouble at the cabin. She had to prepare herself for the possibility that Amelia was indeed at the cabin, but not at all herself right now. She might even have Blade with her.

Karen noticed the turn off to Holden Trail, a gravel road that sloped down and wound through the forest. The