darkness. One minute he’d been standing on the bank, the great rushing river a roar in his head. Then he saw her, a floating reed of a girl, motionless but for the current sweeping her along. There was no thought. He was only action. He was only the blast of the frigid water all around him. Then there was a blissful silence, a peaceful, all- consuming quiet. He almost let it take him. But then he saw her floating ahead of him. Her hair was a halo. Her arms were outstretched like wings.
Her thin body was in his hands. He could feel her ribs against his palms as he lifted her, kicking them both toward the milky distant light of the surface. How were they so deep? How did they get so far down?
Then something powerful lifted her from his grasp, and she rose, pulled like a puppet on strings. He watched her go, and as she got farther from him, he felt his will waning. The pull of the cold water was so strong. And now that he had no one to save, his desire to reach the surface was fading. His legs felt heavy, his arms too tired to stroke. So he simply stopped moving, pushing, struggling. It was just that easy.
“Jones.”
Then he was in his own home, lying on the couch. The television filled the dark room with its flickering light. Maggie sat beside him, looking small and pale in her white nightgown.
“You were howling.” Her voice wobbled in the sentence; her eyes were wide.
“Was I?” He sat up, wiped some drool from the side of his face. Being embarrassed in front of his wife was a new feeling. He didn’t like it, how awkward they were with each other. When had it happened? How long had it taken him to notice?
“I thought it was an animal-in pain,” she said. “In terrible pain.”
“What were you dreaming about?” she asked.
He shook his head. Already the dream was slipping away from his consciousness. “I don’t remember,” he lied.
He hadn’t told Maggie about Eloise Montgomery’s visit or her premonition. But obviously she’d unsettled him more than he would have been willing to admit.
Maggie curled her legs under her. He’d decided to sleep on the couch tonight and give her the bed rather than continue to wake up to notice her absence, to lie awake and wonder why she didn’t want to sleep beside him.
She was looking at him in a way that he realized had become familiar, as though her husband were a confounding puzzle she was unsure she wanted to solve.
“What did Chuck want?” she asked. “I saw him pull into the driveway.”
Jones sat up and turned on the lamp beside the couch, grabbed the remote control, and turned off the television. The stack of files Chuck had left sat on the end table. It seemed like a week ago that he’d been there; it had been only a few hours.
“Do you remember Marla Holt?” Jones asked.
Maggie cocked her head, stared up at the ceiling. “The name is vaguely familiar.”
“You were still in graduate school at the time.”
Maggie had left for New York City right after high school, earning her undergraduate degree at New York University and then going on to Columbia for her master’s in family and adolescent psychology. When her father was dying from lung cancer, she’d returned to The Hollows to help her mother. During that time Jones and Maggie connected for the first time since Hollows High and fell in love. She came home, they got married, and she opened a private practice. They’d been in The Hollows ever since.
“Maybe my mother mentioned it,” she said. There was very little that Maggie’s mother, Elizabeth, failed to mention. The former principal of Hollows High, Elizabeth was, in her retirement, an information hub. She would have known everything there was to know about the Marla Holt case and everything else that went on in The Hollows. “But I don’t remember the details.”
“Marla was a woman in her late thirties with a fourteen-year-old son and a small daughter when she went missing in 1987,” he said. “Her husband, Mack Holt, said she ran off with another guy. We suspected foul play, but we could never prove anything. Eventually the Holt disappearance went into the unsolved file.”
“It was your case?” She was leaning toward him now. He remembered this-how she’d always loved talking about his work and how he’d loved talking to her about his cases. Her ideas, her psychological insights, her knowledge of human nature made her an invaluable resource. He relied on her so much, for everything. He wouldn’t have been half as good at his job without her.
“One of my first after making detective,” he said. He got up and bent back to stretch out his spine. He heard a sharp succession of pops, but there was little relief from the ache that had settled there.
“What happened to the children?”
“Funny you should ask. I’m not sure about the girl, but the boy is in his thirties now. And he’s still looking for answers.”
“He wants to reopen the case?” she asked.
“He’s hired the dynamic duo,” he said. “Ray Muldune, retired detective, and Eloise Montgomery, psychic sidekick.”
Maggie released a long, slow breath, rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Those names were bound to bring up a lot of bad memories.
“She came here today, too. Coincidentally,” Jones said. He just dropped it in, so that it would sound casual. “Or maybe not so coincidentally. Maybe it’s part of whatever scam they’re running. Who knows?”
She looked up at him, surprise creasing her brow. “Eloise Montgomery came here? What did she want?”
He released a disdainful snort. “She had a
He rolled his eyes to further emphasize his skepticism, but he could tell she didn’t buy it. She pinned him down with an inquisitive look. He sank into the couch beneath the weight of it. The clock on the DVD player read 12:03.
“How did you feel about that?” she asked.
She didn’t fool him, either. She didn’t want to deal with how it made her feel, so she was asking him about
“Annoyed more than anything,” he said. “Who does she think she is?”
Maggie wrapped her arms around herself. A lifetime ago Maggie’s mother had visited Eloise Montgomery. And the things she’d learned from Eloise had far-reaching impact, the true nature of which was discovered only last year. Jones slid in closer to his wife, dropped an arm around her shoulder, and she molded herself against him.
“So… what?” she said. “Chuck had questions about the Marla Holt case?”
Jones shrugged. “He asked if he could bring the files by, wondered if I’d take a look and see what I remembered. Who knows, maybe from a distance something might pop.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“If that’s okay.”
She gazed up at him with something like relief. He felt her body relax under his arm. “Are they paying you?”
“Just barely,” he said. “Holt is making noise-calling the chief, writing letters to the mayor. Muldune has been asking for the files. Chuck held them off by telling them he’d put someone on it unofficially. But with budget cuts they had to let two guys go this year; they don’t have the manpower.”
“So they want you as a consultant.”
He liked the sound of that, couldn’t help but smile. “On the cheap and down low,” he said.
“I think it’s a good gig. Maybe you need something like this.”
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with my other thriving business-guy around the neighborhood with nothing to do but get your mail.”
She lifted a hand to touch his face. He caught it and pressed it to his chest. She gave him a tentative smile, then looked away.
“That reminds me,” she said. “You got a call today from a woman by the name of Paula Carr from The Oaks.
