I had seconds to decide, and, really, it wasn’t much of a decision.
I did what came to me naturally.
What had come to me naturally throughout time and space, throughout lifetimes and incarnations. I gathered the surrounding energy that had been building around me, waiting to be used, ready to be used.
I gathered it and stood my ground, and as the car approached, and as the driver’s eyes widened with both alarm and pleasure, I threw my hands forward and released the energy.
* * *
I wasn’t prepared for what was to come.
Yes, I was a witch. Yes, I had developed those skills in past lives, over the centuries. But that didn’t mean I knew what was going to happen in this life.
And boy, did it happen.
Raw power blasted from me like a cannon shot. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. I saw it as a shield in my mind, and that’s exactly what it was.
An invisible shield.
The Mustang slammed into it, or rather, it slammed into the Mustang—I was never sure which—but either way, the front end of the vehicle crumpled completely. The back end lifted up...and Mr. Fletcher, who wasn’t wearing his seat belt, went flying through the front windshield.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I was in the back of Detective Smithy’s squad car.
William Fletcher’s body still lay on the concrete, in exactly the position I’d left him in after I’d rolled him over, after I tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the blood that pumped from the gash in his neck. He had gone through the window face-first. The windshield had won. The blood pooled instantly, and he was dead within minutes, bleeding out, despite my best efforts.
I wept throughout, as did the other teachers nearby, some of whom were shrieking and doing all they could to keep the remaining students away.
The squad car door opened and Detective Smithy slid in next to me. He pulled the door shut gently and looked at me. I was staring down at my hands, at the blood under my now-broken index fingernail. I absently picked under it, flicking the congealed hemoglobin away as Smithy silently watched me.
“You okay?” He’d already asked me that a dozen times, and so had the paramedics. No one, apparently, could believe I wasn’t hurt.
“I’m fine.”
Again, he didn’t believe me. No one believed me. “What happened out there?”
“He tried to run me down.”
“Fletcher?”
“He’s the one who’s dead, isn’t he?”
Smithy nodded. Homicide detectives, I figured, rarely got their feelings hurt. “Why?”
“Because I implicated him in the murder of Penny Laurie.”
Smithy continued staring at me. I continued picking at my nails. Outside, a child cried incessantly. More cop cars appeared. A fire truck. Dozens, if not hundreds, of bystanders. Smithy and I were mostly hidden within a circle of Beverly Hills finest.
“What evidence do you have?” he asked.
I’d been having a hard time thinking straight. I’d gone into a sort of shock, while sitting there on the ground shaking and fighting for breath while a man bled out near my feet.
Not just a man. A child killer.
“Nothing that would stand up in court.”
“So, tell me about it.”
I did, as best as I could. I told him about the dream and the clover field. That Penny might not have been on her way home at all, that she might have, in fact, gone to a nearby park to sulk and think and to silently hate her mother in the way that only a ten-year-old girl could.
“You don’t think she was picked up on the way home from school?” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
“But she always went straight home, every day. This has been corroborated.”
“Not that day.”
“How can you be so sure?”
For the first time, I looked at him. “I’m not sure.”
“And you decided to come here alone?”
“Yes.”
“That was reckless.” He refrained from saying stupid. Why kick a girl when she was down?
I nodded, feeling sick all over again. “I had to know for sure.”
“And do you know for sure?”
I held his gaze. His eyes were bigger than I remembered. “Without a doubt.”
“Without a single doubt, you believe that William Fletcher killed Penny Laurie?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say as much?”
“He threatened me,” I said. “Then followed up on his threat.”
Smithy took in a lot of air, and his little man-child chest filled up. No, he wasn’t a big man, but he had a big presence. “We’ll check him out thoroughly.”
I nodded. “Good.”
I pressed my thumb and fingers into my closed eyes, doing my best to soothe a thumping headache, and saw an image of a blue box buried in Mr. Fletcher’s back yard, under a flat marking stone. I also saw inside the box and my heart sank.
Find the dog, and you will find your answers.
With a heavy heart, I told the detective about the box, finishing with, “I think you’ll find all the evidence you need inside.”
“Inside the box?”
“Yes.”
“Under a stone?”
“Yes.”
“In Fletcher’s back yard?”
I nodded, exhausted. “Yes, detective.”
“Should I ask how you know this?”
“It just came to me.”
“Of course it did. And why wouldn’t the killer’s identity just come to you, too?”
“Because that’s not how this stuff works.”
“It’s not?”
“No, apparently not,” I said.
“Explain it to me, then.”
“Can I explain it another time?” I asked, rubbing my temples now. “I need a shower and to sleep and a place to cry for the rest of the night.”
“First, give me the Cliffs Notes version,” he said, “then you can cry all you want.”
I sighed, rubbed my eyes again, and said, “Some things have to play out, Detective. They have to play out naturally, in their correct place and time. The spirit world does not exist to give us answers all the time, whenever we need them. We are forced to live a little, to experience a little, and to discover on our own, with occasional prodding from the other side; that is, if we go too far down the wrong path.”
Smithy blinked exactly three times over a course of about a minute, before he said, “That might have been the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, but...”