I needed someone to talk to, but Lucas was no good. He was becoming zealous, always talking about our purpose. He was the last person who could help me sort it out.
Briefly I thought of Drea. No. Impossible.
There was no one who knew and no one I could tell, not after the way these past weeks had gone. If only Nan were still here, I thought, and then suddenly realized exactly where I should go. They say dead men tell no tales. I decided to give it a try. Maybe they were the perfect ones to listen.
I found them at the second cemetery I went to. A single headstone with a single word: RENFIELD.
“Hi guys,” I whispered. I sat on the grass beside the marker, curling my legs tight to my chest. The cemetery around me was deserted.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to come,” I said to the smooth gray marble. “I’ve been meaning to. I’ve thought about you a lot since I’ve been here. It’s a great town, Bering. I bet it would have been a great place to grow up.”
It was easy to picture: a farmhouse in the sunflower fields I had passed on my ride from the airport back in May or one of the trim brownstones near school.
“I came today because I need help,” I said softly. “If you’ve been watching me—and I’ve always thought that you do—you know about the mark. It’s an awful thing. Or maybe … maybe it’s a good thing and I just don’t know how to use it.” I sighed. “But I don’t know what to do. The thing is that it looks like I really can warn people, maybe prevent their death, but I can’t tell if I should. I mean, Lucas is still here and that’s a good thing, but he and I are a mess. So I guess I saved him but ruined our relationship.” I took a breath, realizing how much it hurt to admit that he and I were over. Even though I kept going to his apartment, executing the motions, I knew it was only a matter of time.
“Not that a relationship is worth even close to as much as a life. He’s young and smart. It had to be a good thing to save him.
“But last week,” I said, “I warned the wrong kind of guy. I saved him and he killed his wife. I don’t know how I could have known. He was young too. It seemed like the right thing …”
I shivered, a chill running down my spine. “Lucas makes it sound so logical—if I can save lives, why wouldn’t I—but I just don’t know if these lives are meant to be saved. What if it’s truly their time?”
It always came back to that—my gut instinct that fate wasn’t meant to be tampered with. All around me, marked by these headstones, were people whose time had come. Life had gone on for those around them—for me, when my own parents had gone—and my time with Nan had been good, maybe the way it was meant to be.
“Anyway,” I said finally, “I know you can’t tell me what to do. Even if you were here you wouldn’t be able to, but thanks for listening. Mom. Dad.”
Their names, spoken aloud, sounded weird and wistful. I’d never said them before.
I stood, stretched, felt better. I didn’t have any answers, but it’s funny how talking to someone, even if that someone is mostly yourself, is cathartic.
I’m not sure what made me do it, maybe the feeling that it was odd there were no names or dates on the stone, but I circled the marker and sure enough, there they were. First my grandparents—Samuel and Paula—and the start and end dates of their lives, such a brief summary. Then, below them, my parents: Daniel and Georgia. I squatted, tracing the letters with my finger, trying to remember anything about them, not things I’d been told, but things I’d experienced. Of course, it was all too far back.
Then my eyes shifted to the dates. I had to look twice to be sure I was reading them right, that the elements or vandals hadn’t changed them, but they were crisp and clear as if they’d been carved yesterday.
And they were wrong. According to the headstone, my mother died four years after my father.
Chapter 25
I sat in the apartment, still and quiet. I’d wanted to see Drea. When she didn’t answer my voice mail, I texted her. Twice. “When r u coming home?” I wrote. “Need to talk.” She wasn’t, she finally responded, had been called away on business, could it wait? I didn’t answer, not sure if it could, not sure if she’d have the answers to my questions anyway.
I didn’t return Lucas’s calls either, his voice on my messages increasingly frantic. “I’m worried about you, Cassandra. Did something happen? Did you see one? Call me.”
After Cuppa closed, I left a message on the machine. “Hi, Doug, it’s Cassie. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to make it in again tomorrow. In fact, I’m probably going to need some time. A few days at least. I know I’ve been out a lot, but I’ve got some stuff going on. Nothing major, just things I have to take care of. I understand if you have to fire me. Just … let me know, I guess.”
I waited for the day to end and for the sleeping pill I’d taken, one last one, left over from after Nan’s death, to take effect.
I couldn’t understand why Nan had lied to me. In all the time I’d known her, there wasn’t another thing I could remember her lying about. Nothing. Not stupid things like how I looked in a certain dress or important ones like whether she’d loved her husband. There were things she just didn’t talk about, but this was different. Why would she make me believe my mother had died in a car crash along with my father, if that’s even how he died? What else had she lied about?
I was waiting at the door when the Bering Library opened the next morning. Despite the new building, they were as slow to transition to the digital age as Ashville had been.
“The dates you’re looking for would be on microfilm,” the librarian, a nattily dressed man, told me.
“In the basement?”
He laughed. “No, we won’t send you to the dungeon. It’s right over here.” He led me to a small, glass-enclosed room housing two of the large viewing machines. “Now, what did you want to start with?”
I gave him the date under my father’s name on the headstone. I figured I’d start with the car accident or whatever it was and work forward from there.
The librarian brought me two yellowed boxes. “The week’s papers start with Sunday the third, so what you’re looking for should be right at the beginning, but I brought it all anyway. Do you know how to work this machine?”
It looked just like the ones in Ashville. I nodded, but he proceeded to tell me anyway. I didn’t interrupt, willing to postpone what I was about to read for another few minutes.