With any luck, he would volunteer an update.
Hitting another stoplight, she made a random turn. And another. And even more, until she realized she was literally going nowhere. Pulling over, she found herself in Caldwell’s financial district, the thicket of skyscrapers blocking out the light, the pedestrians all in gray and black like shadows of real people.
She really needed to just go home, she thought—even as she put the car in park and sat back in her seat.
Man, one thing that sucked as you got older was that you had so many more associations with things. A couple of years ago, she might have gone to that theater, heard that someone she didn’t know had been killed, and probably only had a moment’s pause. Now? After Sissy Barten’s brutal murder, she was stuck in a domino effect that took her right back to that hospital, when her brother had been taken off the ventilator.
He should have been wearing a helmet. Goddamn him, he knew he wasn’t supposed to skateboard without a helmet.
But teenagers were clueless enough to believe their skulls were stronger than concrete.
That had been the transformative part for her, she realized. If he’d only been properly prepared, he would have been okay—he would have survived the impact.
That had been the basis of the fixation on order for her: the idea that if you just made sure you were always neat and prepared, you’d be safe. If you put on a helmet, you would never be injured. If you always wore your seat belt, and got regular checkups, and flossed and brushed, and never, ever took a step without first considering what kind of padding and safety equipment you needed…
She thought of Thom: If you stuck with nice guys who you weren’t really passionate about, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting your heart broken.
“Yeah, right,” she muttered to herself. That had happened anyway. And curiously … it had been okay. It was okay.
And didn’t that make her think about the differences between G.B. and Duke.
She had known that she was going to have to make a choice at some point. She had not expected to have that decision come to her here and now, as she sat in her car at the side of the road, swarms of business types walking by, taxis shooting up and down the street, distant sirens suggesting that crises were all around.
She had tried the safe option once before and the outcome had been what it was—and in fact, crash helmets only helped in certain kinds of accidents … and even neat freaks who relied on order to protect themselves got chased in garages and scared shitless.
Hell, for all she knew, whatever woman had been killed at the theater had had a color-coded closet, too.
There was no protection from injury, disillusionment, disappointment.
God, what a depressing thought. And yet it was liberating, too.
She knew who she wanted.
At least … she thought she did.
The knock on her window made her shout in alarm.
“Ma’am?” It was a meter maid, her voice buffered by the closed windows. “I’m going to have to ticket you if you don’t get moving.”
“Sorry,” Cait said, trying to remember where the gearshift was. “I’ll leave right now. Thanks.”
Getting back into the flow of traffic, she felt a strange dread come over her, as if her destiny was somehow threatened. But … that was just crazy.
Wasn’t it?
At the next stoplight, she dragged her bag over and searched through it … and as she found what she was looking for, she couldn’t believe she was thinking about calling that psychic, the one whose business card she’d taken from the corkboard at the theater.
Focusing on the address, she mentally mapped out a route. She’d never been to anyone like that before, and had no idea what to expect—or what she could possibly get out of it.
The only thing she was sure of was that a kind of … crossroads … seemed to have appeared before her, and she wanted some sort of confirmation that the direction she intended to go in was the correct one.
Couldn’t hurt, right.
Hitting the gas, she got lost in images of the two men, anxiety sharpening the pictures to an almost painful degree…
When Cait’s car stopped again, she was barely aware of having hit the brakes. And … wait a minute, this was not the grungier end of Trade Street. In fact, it was…
Where the hell was she?
Too much grass to be downtown.
She was about to pull a U-ey when she saw the stray dog. Small, low to the ground, and scruffy as a floor mop, it was seated on the broad stretch of lawn and staring right at her.
Cait got out. “You okay there, boy?”
Somehow she knew it was a boy. No collar, though. Poor thing.
As it lifted its forepaw, she was compelled to go around the front of her car—and that was when the place she’d arrived at came into her consciousness.
Not the psychic’s, no. Try church and steeple.
It was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the grande dame of all Christian houses of worship in Caldwell, the one with the Gothic spires, and all the saints, and the stained glass that looked like jewels.
Where Sissy Barten’s funeral was going to occur.
How had she ended up here?
She turned back to see the dog, but he was gone. “Where are you?”
Cait looked all around, pivoting in a circle—he’d disappeared, though.
Following a long moment, and for no good reason she could think of, her feet decided to take the term walkway to heart, pulling a one-after-another that brought her up to a side entrance. As she reached out to open the door, and found the heavy weight obliging, she labeled the impulse that carried her over the threshold under “preparation for Sissy’s event.”
There was no other purpose for her to come here. In fact, she hadn’t been in a church since she’d moved to Caldwell—unless she’d gone home and been dragged to services. And she certainly wasn’t Catholic, all that regal tradition antithetical to the pine-floored, white-washed, garden-flowers-on-the-altar simplicity she was used to, and had revolted against.
Inside, she had to close her eyes and take a deep breath. Oh, wow, did that smell good—incense and old wood and beeswax.
She was in a side vestibule, as it turned out, and as she walked across the polished stone floor, her footsteps echoed forward into the vast expanse of the nave. Stone block walls rose to seemingly incalculable heights, the buttresses flying like the wings of angels at every juncture, depictions of holy men and women marking the corners and the straightaways, different chapels running down the longest length from the incredible entrance to the beautiful altar.