Leaving Time(126)

I can’t answer that for her. I don’t know if Virgil will try to prove that Thomas was the one who killed his wife that night. Or if it would even stick, given the poor man’s mental state.

Jenna sits on the picnic table and draws her knees up to her chest. “I had this friend once, Chatham, who always talked about Paris like it was practically Heaven. She wanted to go to the Sorbonne for college. She was going to stroll down the Champs-Élysées; she was going to sit at a café and watch skinny French women walking down the street, all that stuff. Her aunt surprised her by taking her there on a business trip when she was twelve. When Chatham came home, I asked her if it was all it was cracked up to be, and you know what she said? ‘It was kind of like any other city.’ ” Jenna shrugs. “I didn’t think it would feel like this, when I got here.”

“To Tennessee?”

“No. To … the end, I guess.” She looks up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “Just because I know now that she didn’t want to leave me behind doesn’t make it easier, you know? Nothing’s changed. She’s not here. I am. And I still feel empty.”

I slide an arm around her. “It’s no small feat, finishing a journey,” I tell her. “But no one ever mentions that once you get there, you still have to turn around and head all the way home.”

Jenna dashes her hand across her eyes. “If it turns out Virgil is right, I want to see my dad before he goes to jail.”

“We don’t know that he’ll—”

“It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

She says this with such conviction that I realize it isn’t necessarily what she believes. Just what she needs to.

I pull her closer and let her cry for a little while against my shoulder. “Serenity,” Jenna asks, her voice muffled against my shirt. “Will you let me talk to her whenever I need to?”

There’s a reason people are dead. Back when I could be a medium, I’d only do two spirit communications at most for a client. I wanted to help people through their grief, not be 1-800-Dial-the-Dead.

When I was good at this, when I had Lucinda and Desmond to protect me from the spirits that needed me to do their bidding, I knew how to put up walls. That’s what kept me from being awakened in the middle of the night by a conga line of spirits who needed to get a message to the living. It let me use my Gift on my terms instead of theirs.

Now, though, I would trade my privacy if it meant that I could connect with spirits again. I would never do a fake reading for Jenna—she deserves better than that—so there’s no way I could possibly give her what she wants.

But all the same, I look her in the eye and say, “Of course.”

• • •

Suffice it to say that the trip home is long, hellish, and silent. We wouldn’t be able to get on a plane without permission from Jenna’s guardian, because she’s a minor, and so we wind up driving through the night. I listen to the radio to keep myself awake, and then Virgil starts talking, somewhere around the Maryland border. He glances back first, to make sure Jenna is still fast asleep.

“Say she’s dead,” Virgil says. “What do I do?”

It’s a surprise conversation starter. “You mean Alice?”

“Yeah.”

I hesitate. “I guess you figure out for sure who did it, and you go after them.”

“I’m not a cop, Serenity. And now it turns out that I probably never should have been.” He shakes his head. “All this time I thought it was Donny who fucked up. But it turns out it was me.”

I glance at him.

“I mean, it was a clusterfuck at the sanctuary that day. No one knew how to secure a crime scene when there were wild animals roaming around. Thomas Metcalf was off his gourd, although we didn’t know it at first. There were missing people who hadn’t been reported as missing. One of them was an adult female. That’s all I was looking for. So I made an assumption, when I found an unconscious body that was dirty and covered with blood. I told the paramedics that it was Alice, and they took her off to the hospital and admitted her under that name.” He turns, looking out the window, so that his profile is traced by the passing headlights of other cars. “She didn’t have ID. I should have followed up. Why can’t I remember what she looked like when I saw her? Was the hair blond or red? Why didn’t I pay attention?”

“Because you were focused on getting her medical attention,” I say. “Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t try to mislead anyone,” I point out, thinking of my own recent career as a swamp witch.