Platinum (16 page)

On the drive to the library, I realized three things.

First, I realized that Lissy James should never be allowed to touch a radio dial. Her taste in music was horrible, and she seemed unacquainted with the whole “the driver picks the music” concept. It was times like these that I was glad I was an only child.

Next, I realized that Lissy wasn’t exactly an angel on the bitch front. She couldn’t quite suppress her glee at the fact that Fuchsia wouldn’t be in a position to be talking about anyone anytime soon. It occurred to me that there was a distinct chance that if she knew I’d orchestrated the whole thing, she would have approved.

And the third thing I realized was that I was still craving cookies and milk.

As I pulled into the library parking lot, I flipped the radio back to my station of choice, and Lissy shuddered.

“Don’t go there,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes.

I rolled my eyes back at her, and then I turned the radio off, just to be safe. “Before we go in, we should probably get a couple of things straight,” I said.

Lissy looked less than enthused at the idea of me imparting any kind of wisdom. Color me shocked. If ignoring Lilah’s advice had been an Olympic sport, she could have medaled.

“This stuff is important,” I told her. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Lissy waited.

“One, you can’t tell Lexie anything about any of this.”

Lissy opened her mouth to say something, but I didn’t give her the chance. Rule number one was the most important rule, and if I had to do a song-and-dance number (complete with baton twirling) to get the point across, I was fully prepared to do it.

“Trust me on this one,” I said. “The other day in the library, Lexie was trying to do something Sighty with what I was saying. One second she was there, the next she was gone, eyes glassy, no response, totally pale. Whatever’s going on here, it’s dangerous, and Lexie does not need to be a part of it.”

“You took my little sister to the library?” Lissy asked incredulously.

“Lissy, focus.”

“Okay,” she said finally. “No Lexie.”

The two of us were in agreement on something. It was remarkable, really.

“Anything else?” she asked.

Given the fact that Lissy was more than a little conspicuous about her own Sight, I felt the need to clarify one other point. “Once we get in there, keep your voice down. Don’t mention anything supernatural if you don’t have to. And try not to cause a scene.”

“I don’t cause scenes,” Lissy objected.

“Says the girl who did what on the first day at Emory?” I asked.

As a reward for mentioning her show-stopping barf performance, Lissy gave me a death glare, but she couldn’t argue the point. She
did
have a slight tendency to cause scenes, in an awkward Lizzie McGuire kind of way.

“Can we just get on with it?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“No Lexie,” I said. “No scenes.” I paused. “I think that about covers it.” I took a deep breath, and then, without further ado, I told her everything I knew. Cade and the boys he’d killed. The platinum blonde with the sickly seductive smile. The dreams, the woman.

“Shannon.” Lissy whispered the name and looked over her shoulder, as if she expected the dark-haired woman to appear out of nowhere.

“Shannon,” I repeated. The name was little and cute and totally didn’t fit the woman I’d seen.

“The First Seer,” Lissy explained. “She’s my a million times great-grandmother, or something like that. Grams says she was infinitely blessed. She had all of our gifts, so she saw pretty much everything.”

“And now she’s in my dreams,” I said. “Oh, joy.”

“It’s not a dream,” Lissy said, her voice quiet and matter-of-fact. “It’s a visitation. Sometimes she comes to people with the Sight in times of great need. She leads them….” Lissy trailed off, and I did the math.

“So this Shannon chick helped you out with the whole evil math teacher thing?” I asked.

Lissy nodded. “She showed me her shield. Kissler had a copy of it hiding the door to his evil room of darkness and doom.”

“How sweet.”

Lissy snorted. There was a slight chance that she may have laughed as well. Lissy James? Laughing at something I said? What happened to thinking I ate puppies for breakfast and babies for lunch? Don’t even get me started on the afternoon snack….

“So…yeah…Shannon helps people. Our kind of people, I guess.”

Lissy James and I had a joint kind of people. Weird.

“Whatever this Shannon chick is trying to tell me,” I said, “it has to do with us, and with what happened with Mr. Kissler, and what’s going to happen with Cade. And Brock.” I mentioned my boyfriend almost as an afterthought. “And possibly something about these three girls whose mother died.”

Lissy bit her bottom lip in what I could only assume was deep thought. To me, it looked a little like she was constipated. Lexie was right—Lissy totally needed to practice those facial expressions in a mirror. About the time I realized that I found that fact oddly endearing, I forced myself to concentrate on what was important: finding out about the boys Cade claimed to have killed.

“You ready for this?” I asked Lissy.

She nodded, still nibbling on the corners of her mouth.

I opened my car door and walked quickly into the library. No need to draw more attention to myself than was necessary.

Lissy, however, tripped and stumbled. She managed to catch herself. In the course of doing so, she emitted a high-pitched squeaky sound.

I arched one eyebrow at her.

“That wasn’t a scene,” she argued.

“Uh-huh,” I said. She gave me a look, but took my teasing for what it was and didn’t say another word. I smiled, and somehow, she managed to follow me into the library without so much as another stumble. I was tempted to give her a gold star.

“Where do we start?” Lissy asked the moment we were both safely inside.

“Old newspapers,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “And yearbooks.” I’d seen visions of Cade in his own time, in our school cafeteria, and touching the water fountain had triggered my Sight and shown me glimpses of the other boys. I could only infer that, once upon a time, they’d gone to Emory High.

In fact, from the looks of the boys, once upon a time they’d ruled Emory High as much as any male could.

“I take it you want the yearbooks?” Lissy asked.

I inclined my head slightly. “How’d you guess?”

Lissy opened her mouth and then closed it again. A few weeks earlier, I probably would have thought she was simply incapable of forming a coherent sentence, but I was beginning to read her body language well enough to know that she was stopping herself from saying something she wasn’t sure she should say.

I waited.

“Your aura kind of wagged when you said the word ‘yearbook,’” Lissy admitted.

Despite the fact that she was breaking the whole “don’t talk about the supernatural” rule, I had to ask. “Wagged like a dog’s tail wags?”

Lissy nodded, a sheepish look on her face.

“Huh.”

“So I’ll take newspapers,” she said, changing the subject from auras with a surprising amount of stealth. “And look for…” She trailed off, waiting for me to supply the answer.

“Deaths,” I said. “Of teenage guys. Start about fifty or sixty years ago.” I paused for the very slightest second and tried to keep my voice even. “I think someone may have had a knife.”

Lissy nodded, and for one horrible moment, I thought she would reach out to comfort me. Since I wasn’t exactly sure how much comforting I wanted, I opted for pushing her buttons instead. “Chop-chop,” I said lightly. “Newspapers don’t read themselves.”

I won’t describe the face Lissy made at me then, except to say that it wasn’t flattering in the least.

As she headed off to look for newspapers, I walked to the information desk. “I’m looking for yearbooks,” I said.

“Have you checked the high school library?”

I hadn’t, and that was a stupid mistake on my part, but she didn’t need to know that. “Do you have them here?” I answered her question with a question.

“A limited selection,” she sniffed. “But you really would be better served—”

“And the limited selection is located where?”

The librarian paused, just for a moment, and I gave her my best impression of a genuinely sweet smile.

“Purple bookshelf,” she said. “Back wall.”

As I walked, I couldn’t help but think that I should have known. The ugly purple bookshelf had given me a touch-triggered vision, and Lexie had told me on our first library adventure that help would come from something purple. As I approached the bookshelf, I issued a steely glare in its general direction. My body still ached from my last touch vision. I so wasn’t looking for another one.

Cautiously, I knelt next to the shelf and pulled out the first yearbook I saw.
1999.

In a town our size, you pretty much only have one yearbook, and it covers everyone from kindergarten through senior year. Traditionally, other than class pictures, the entire book is dominated by pictures of high schoolers. For a brief moment, I considered the book in my hand. The year I was nine had not been my best, and honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to remember it. Before my Sight could get any funky ideas, I put the yearbook down and reached for another, aiming for one with a more weathered, tattered cover.
1987.

Much better. I opened it to the middle, and the first thing I saw was a picture of a blond boy with enormous shoulders and hair that was, objectively, out of control. Moving on instinct, I placed my fingertips on the picture, and the moment I did, I sank into it, my mind absorbed in another place, another time.

“Davis. Davis, MY MAN.”

The sounds of a guys’ locker room were drowned out by a single voice, and the blond boy nodded toward the guy who’d yelled his name.

“Say it ain’t so, buddy. Say it ain’t so.”

“Say what ain’t so?” the blond, who I could only assume was Davis, asked.

“You and Cindy on the outs? That girl is…” Rather than search his mind for an adjective, the speaker let out a long, low whistle.

Davis slammed his locker shut. “Cindy and I are fine,” he said. “She knows she’s got a good thing here.” At the word “here,” he gestured to himself. “Anyone tell you otherwise?”

Davis’s friend didn’t speak for a moment, and Davis advanced on him. “You tell whoever it is that he’s dreaming, and that if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll stay away from Helen.”

“Helen?” I mouthed the question, even as the other guy spoke it, but Davis stormed off without another word, and the moment he rounded the corner, he disappeared into nothing.

“Okay.” I spoke the word under my breath and looked again at the picture I was touching.

IN LOVING MEMORY
:
JOHN MICHAEL DAVIS
,
CLASS OF
1987.

“He disappeared.” My thoughts were coming out of my mouth so quickly that I couldn’t have stopped them if I’d tried. “He walked around the corner, and he disappeared. And then, somehow, he died.”

Taking out my cell, I quickly texted Lissy. It occurred to me briefly to wonder how I had her number in my phone book, but with the vision still fresh in my mind, I had other things to worry about.

John Davis, I typed into my phone. 1987.

I hit send, slapped the yearbook shut, and reached for another. Flipping through the pages of the book was like walking through a crowded room. The sounds and memories the pictures represented flitted in and out of my head. 1958 was a wash, as was 2000, and my temple was starting to pound with the memories I couldn’t keep from dancing across my mind.

I played with the idea of getting as far away from the yearbooks as possible, but somehow, I didn’t think old newspapers were going to be that much better, and I wasn’t ready to give up. Now that I’d seen Davis, the whole murder and mayhem aspect of this felt more real. Not that he’d been a particularly stand-up guy, but he had been real and alive, and I couldn’t help but remember the way things always ended in my visions of Cade: blood and flesh and death.

1957.

The moment I touched it, I shivered. No visions came—I didn’t
see
anything, but I could feel it in the way the hairs on my arms stood straight up.

The first thing I looked for was an “In Loving Memory” page, and I found it almost immediately.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF TAD BRADFORD
.

I’d seen him before: dark hair, preppy, cocky look in his eyes. Roughly the size and build of a buffalo.

I’d seen him in my visions, his face blurring into the faces of four other boys, among them John Davis, the guy who’d picked on the dweeb in the library, and the guy who’d shoved another boy up against a school locker bank.

I’d seen him this afternoon in the cafeteria, his arm wrapped protectively around the shoulder of a girl with a shining blond ponytail I was starting to despise.

Beside me, my phone buzzed, and when I picked it up, the text message from Lissy stared me in the face.

Bingo.

Now I had a perfectly reasonable excuse to put the book down and back away, find Lissy, and reap the benefits of her newspaper sleuthing, but somehow, I couldn’t. Deliberately, I placed my fingers on Tad’s photo and willed my mind into the past. This time, the information came as a single punch to my brain, and I saw so many things at once that it literally threw me backward.

I saw Tad, King of the World, with his best girl, my favorite platinum blonde.

I saw Tad on the football field, Tad drinking with his buddies.

Tad roughing up the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Tad leering at them, his boys on his heels.

Tad behind the wheel of a brand-new car, his arm around someone who wasn’t the blonde.

Tad watching the blonde talk to another boy.

Tad’s fury rising.

The other boy—Cade?—not realizing the blond girl was using him.

As I recovered from the mass of images I’d been bombarded with, I couldn’t help but think that boys were dumb. And that Tad was an ass.

With those two equally important thoughts in mind, I flipped the page. My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. I was a girl on a mission.