The thin cop’s friendly expression faltered into a frown. What had he asked?
Brewster tried to focus. “I knew Carla, but I didn’t know about…” He couldn’t finish.
“We have forensic evidence,” Jonesy said, “strands of hair on her coat.”
Brewster reached into his back pocket. “If I give you my comb, will you guys hit the road?”
CHAPTER 24
Alone with his thoughts
Brewster stared out his living room window as a spectator in what had to be somebody else’s unraveling life. The cops lingered on the sidewalk in full view of his nosy neighbors before getting into an unmarked car. All in all, a pretty good show for Emily Saunders, who still dragged a rake across the same patch of grass, bent on seeing the final act through to the end.
Finally, the three faces of death sped away with scythes in tow.
Brewster collapsed into a chair and turned a misty gaze to the spot in the street where Carla had appeared at the midnight hour of a magical night. Three cops had just rewritten history into a horror story, claiming she’d already been dead for a year.
He fought the overwhelming sadness fogging his vision by using a coping mechanism honed from many stressful episodes at work. He closed his eyes, relaxed his arms on the chair rests, took deep breaths, and drifted away. Only with a calm spirit could he sift through the chaos of bewilderment, disorientation, grief, and anger setting his entire body into a jittery tingle. Every problem had a solution, every story two sides, every thesis an antithesis. He needed a new angle to rally his hope around.
Carla had been run over by a subway train in a real-life enactment of a recurring and obviously precognitive dream. That cold piece of information had to bite the dust, and he went to work building the case for denial.
Exhibit A—He’d touched Carla’s face, gotten lost in her eyes, savored the spicy fragrance of her perfume, kissed her lips. She couldn’t have been dead. Wraiths didn’t melt in a man’s arms. Yes, he and Carla visited each other through wormholes that might have clamped shut when she wandered too close to the subway tracks, but…
Exhibit B—A paranormal connection transcending the barriers of time and space brought him and Carla together, and the super being behind such a miracle had to have a plan in mind. Derailing the cosmic merry-go-round before the end of the ride didn’t fit the equation, and in any event…
Exhibit C—Didn’t Gabriella’s comment about the butterfly effect at the Tug Hill gas station imply the past could be changed?
He sprang out of his chair and paced the room.
The twelve-year-old girl with thousand-year eyes tipped her hand with that sign in the window about butterflies. Clearly, she wanted the past left alone, and witnesses posed a problem for her. If a tree falls in an empty forest, it creates no sound, and fate continues its predestined course. But if others observed and reacted to an event such as Brewster’s time-traveling Tug Hill visit, the course of human history might have been altered.
Suppose someone had seen and interacted with him? The encounter would have created ripples. A brief pause for conversation at the gas pump could have prevented some stranger from reaching a predestined point farther down the road at the proper time to discover his soul mate, thus triggering a chain reaction of sweeping consequences. A marriage might have been erased, a child unborn. As Gabriella said, a single butterfly can flutter its wings and change the course of weather forever. Or history, for that matter.
But no, he had it all wrong. Gabriella couldn’t have cared less about the ripples in other people’s lives. Her only concern was the possibility a random bystander might slow him enough to prevent his appearance at the right place and time—parked on the side of the road when the love of his life came along to celebrate the snowstorm.
Carla had been the victim of his butterfly wings, the woman needing to be stalled. She’d been on her way to Manhattan without him, but first the snow squall slowed her and then he did, delaying her arrival on the subway platform to just the right moment—the instant a train operator suffered a heart attack, blacked out, and barreled into the station too fast. By flinging Brewster into Carla’s path, Gabriella committed murder as surely as if the little bitch had pushed the woman onto the tracks herself.
And that wasn’t all. The puppet master framed him. The train operator and another witness said recent dreams refreshed their memories regarding a certain man standing beside the victim.
Brewster balled his fists. But with anger came confusion, a host of questions without clear answers. Why frame a man with an alibi? Surely a little vixen able to plant dreams into minds could have poked around in his head and learned he’d been somewhere else the day Carla fell to the tracks.
And why frame him at all?
Above all, why did she want Carla to be killed?
Brewster stopped pacing. He refocused his gaze out the window at the very spot where Carla first entered his life. They were meant to explore the world hand in hand, as soul mates, kindred spirits, two peas in a pod, Romeo and Juliet—no, that ended badly—Prince Charming and Tinker Bell, two butterflies fluttering their wings as one.
He couldn’t let destiny slip away without a fight. Battle lines were forming, storm clouds brewing, and puppet masters could go to hell. He’d suit up in the armor of love and determination, find his way back to the past again, and make a few changes.
Big ones.
Because he could never, ever let Carla go.
His cell phone rang. He ripped it out of his shirt pocket and flipped it open, ready to roll. “Yeah?”
“Where the hell are you?” Heather’s voice came at him in a near screech, from the office, in the
