Rhanna shook her head. “I was already enough of a handful. I didn’t want to add crazy to my repertoire. Besides, it’s not really the kind of thing you want to share, is it—that you’re some kind of freak who sees dead people? They put you away for saying things like that, and I didn’t want to go away. Not then. And in the beginning I didn’t even know what it was. It only happened to people I physically touched, and even then it could take weeks.”

Fourteen. She’d been about the same age when her own gift had appeared. But that was nothing compared to what Rhanna had just described. “I can’t imagine . . . You must have been terrified.”

“I never knew when it was going to happen again—or with who.” A sob escaped her, like an unexpected hiccup. “So many faces. Every time I closed my eyes. And then Lonnie Welden introduced me to vodka, and I found a way to deaden the images. It helped for a while, until it didn’t anymore. Then I had to find other things.”

“Drugs?”

Rhanna shrugged. “Drugs. Booze. Guys. Anything to numb me. And then I found out . . .” She looked away. “And then you came along. A baby. How could I have a baby when I had this thing inside me? What if . . .”

“No, don’t,” Lizzy said, cutting her off. “We can do that later. Why are you telling me this now? And why did we have to come here for you to do it?”

Rhanna stared at her hands, palm up in her lap. “I saw them, Lizzy. I saw the Gilman girls.”

It took a few seconds for the words to actually register. “What? How?”

“I don’t know how. I’ve never known. It just . . . happens. It was a Friday night and I was with Jimmy Swann at the Dairy Bar. We were waiting for them to make our frappes when the girls showed up. They got in line behind us. All of a sudden the oldest one—Heather, I think—brushed up against me. And I saw them. Both of them.”

Lizzy closed her eyes, trying to imagine the unimaginable.

“They were in the water,” Rhanna said softly. “In the pond. I knew it was our pond because there was something shiny on the bottom. It was the charm bracelet I’d lost a few months before.”

Lizzy stared at her, unable to blink. “You knew. All that time they were missing, you knew where they were.”

“I wanted to be wrong, Lizzy. I wanted to be wrong so badly. And for a while, I thought I was. Two weeks later, nothing had happened. Then another week passed, and another. It took five weeks for them to even go missing.”

The memory of Susan Gilman’s tearstained face suddenly loomed. “How could you keep something like that to yourself? Their poor mother was out of her mind.”

Rhanna pulled her knees up, curling in on herself. “You don’t think I know that? Every day I had to watch that poor woman crying for her little girls, begging someone—anyone—to bring them back safely. And all the time I knew where they were—and that they were never coming back. But what was I supposed to say? That I’d had a premonition? And then what?”

Lizzy nodded, reluctantly conceding the point. No one would have bought that. Not coming from Rhanna.

“You can’t imagine what it was like, Lizzy, knowing they were out there and having to keep it to myself. I was like the guy in that Poe story, hearing that heart beating under his floorboards, terrified I’d be found out, knowing what people would think when I was.”

Bit by bit, it was falling together. “It’s why you stopped going to the pond to swim,” Lizzy postulated. “And why you got weird all of a sudden about being touched.”

“Yes.”

Rhanna’s tortured whisper spoke volumes. Last night, when she asked about the episode at the coffee shop, Rhanna had bristled about people pointing fingers and acting like they knew what happened to the Gilman girls, when the truth was no one actually knew anything. No one except Rhanna. But she’d left that part out of last night’s discussion.

Seeing the dead.

It was inconceivable. And yet she’d heard of such things. People who worked with police to find missing children, using the gift of sight to solve crimes and ease suffering. Was that what this was? A gift? Rhanna certainly didn’t seem to think so.

“You could have told Althea,” Lizzy said quietly. “She would have understood.”

“Seriously?” Rhanna seemed genuinely stunned by the suggestion. “She would have gone straight to the police. You know she would have. Because that’s who she was, always doing the right thing no matter what it cost, trusting things to work out like they should. But they didn’t.”

“No,” Lizzy said, almost under her breath. “They certainly didn’t.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me, Lizzy. I don’t deserve that. Not after everything else that’s happened. I just . . . needed you to know.”

Lizzy remained silent as she studied Rhanna. She’d never seen her like this, stripped of her rebel’s guise and shaken to the core—achingly raw. It wasn’t easy to look at, but it was the first time she’d actually felt a connection to the woman who brought her into the world. Perhaps they weren’t so different after all. They had both been born with gifts they never wanted, had both done everything in their power to run away from those gifts, and had both failed miserably.

“I can’t believe you kept this to yourself all these years. I think I would have gone mad.”

“I thought I might,” Rhanna said, pulling in another shaky breath. “But I found a way to deal with it.” She dragged her purse off the floor and, after a bit of fumbling, produced a black leather-bound book. “I drew them.”

She laid the book in Lizzy’s lap and slowly withdrew her hand, as if afraid it might explode. Lizzy recognized it immediately. She’d received one just like it the day she turned sixteen. And here, apparently, was her mother’s.

“The Book of Rhanna,” Lizzy said solemnly.

“We’re supposed to use them for recording our journey, to write about our gifts and how we use them. I drew mine instead. So I could get the faces out of my head.”

Lizzy wrapped her hands around the book but didn’t open it. “Did it work?”

“Not as well as vodka.”

Lizzy held her breath as she looked down at the book. It felt hot against her palms, the leather slick with perspiration. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see what was inside, to know the kinds of images that had lived in Rhanna’s head since that first premonition nearly forty years ago. But she had to see them, didn’t she? To know they were real—to know it was real.

The first sketch was in pencil, crude but accurate enough to recognize what she was looking at: a little girl awkwardly slumped in a car seat, eyes closed. And the lamb.

The sketches improved as Lizzy continued to turn the pages, the details becoming sharper and cleaner as Rhanna’s artistic skills improved over time. Bodies in every imaginable position, their faces eerily still in death. A heavyset man in a plaid shirt, crumpled on a kitchen floor. A runner sprawled facedown on what looked to be a jogging path. An old woman lying in a heap at the bottom of a staircase. It was terrible, like something from a nightmare. And for Rhanna it had been a nightmare. One she’d never shared with a soul.

Lizzy turned to look at her. “All of these?”

Rhanna nodded mutely.

“I’m so sorry,” she said softly, because she was. And because she didn’t know what else to say. So much made sense now. Her sudden withdrawal, the haphephobia. She couldn’t fathom living with those kinds of images in her head.

She closed the book, unable to look further. “Are they in here? The Gilman girls?”

Rhanna shook her head. “I was afraid to draw them. What if someone found it? What would they think?”

Another valid point. A drawing like that would have raised a lot of questions—none of them good. “Does it still happen?”

“Sometimes, but not like it used to. I move around a lot, and steer clear of close connections. It’s easier that way. I know it’s not me causing it, that I’m only seeing what’s going to happen whether I’m there or not. But it’s hard not to feel at least a little responsible.” She bunched her shoulders, then let them drop heavily. “Some gift, huh?”

“I’m sorry you had to deal with it on your own.”

“It was my choice. And it’s not an excuse for all the crap I put you and Althea through. Anyway, now you know.”

“Now I know.”

Lizzy started the car and flicked on the defroster to clear the windows. She was right. It wasn’t an excuse. But she couldn’t help thinking of Althea’s words concerning Rhanna, and how eerily true they suddenly rang. You made up your mind about her years ago, leaving no room for the possibility that there might be more to her story. More than either of us will ever know.

Once again, Althea had been spot on.

THIRTY

August 16