Free Sarah Armstrong - 02 - Blood Lines by Kathryn Casey

seeing?”
    Again, silence.
    “Faith, I can’t help if you’re not honest with me.”
    She must have considered that and decided I was right. “Mysister and I shared a belief in the supernatural. Perhaps that’s why I’m so certain she’s communicating with me,” Faith said. “The therapist she saw deals primarily in hypnosis and past lives.”
    “You want to say that again?” I asked.
    “Past lives, like reincarnation,” Faith said. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she realized how bizarre I thought this sounded. “I know it’s pretty unusual, but you really need to talk to Dr. Dorin. She’ll explain it. It’s not really that eccentric, I promise.”
    As I wrote down the doctor’s name and phone number, I thought that this just might be the oddest case of my career. If it weren’t for that bruise Dr. Joe showed me, by now I would have agreed with H.P.D.’s conclusion and written the whole thing off. It didn’t help my mood any when Faith said she had something else she wanted to tell me.
    “This is the first evening since Billie’s death that six o’clock came and went and nothing unusual happened,” she said. “I think it’s because she knows you’re going to help us.”
    “I’ll do my best, Faith,” I said. “But please remember, in the end it may turn out that H.P.D. is right, and your sister’s death is a suicide.”
    Thinking about how much I would have liked it if Bill had dropped in to leave messages after his death, then shrugging off even the thought that that was possible, I hung up the telephone, and went into the living room to check on Maggie. She wasn’t there, but I knew where to find her. I walked out to the shed, and there she was, in her soft flannel nightgown, slumped down in one of the old metal chairs, in a light sleep. I peeked in on Emma Lou, who slept peacefully in her temporary home. Confident that, at least for now, all was well, I nudged Maggie a bit, whispered her name, and she woke up. We were past the point where I could carry her. She opened her eyes, and I walked her down the hill. As we approached the house, she caught another glimpse of the Christmaslight dream catcher over the gate, with Mom and Bobby still standing beneath it.
    “It really is beautiful, Mom. Just like the stars,” Maggie said. She smiled, and then cuddled against me for the rest of the walk into the house.

 
     
     
Eight
     
     
     
    C assidy Collins’s heart pounded so hard as she walked onto the stage, she worried it might rivet its way through her chest. She used to look forward to performances, but now they filled her with an acute dread, an overriding foreboding. I’ve got to pull it together, she thought. I can’t let this perv get to me.
    Oblivious to her plight, all around her the San Diego audience cheered, called out to her, a sea of strangers that intensified her fears. Were they, as they appeared, simply a throng of parents, daughters, and sons? Were they all there just to have a good time? Or had something else brought one spectator to the concert?
    He could be out there
, she thought.
He could be watching
.
    The tempo built, hard and solid, the music pulsing around her, and Cassidy concentrated on the beat, trying to ease her disquiet. The stage was her territory, where she felt the most alive. I’m not going to let some dude with an overblown ego ruin this for me, she thought. He won’t try anything, not here, not now, not with all these people watching. That creep wouldn’t dare.
    Behind her the band kicked into a hard-rocking number, andCassidy relied on instinct for the dance moves that maneuvered her across the stage. In the audience, a girl in the front row reached up toward her, holding a red rose. Cassidy bent down to take it. As her hand closed around the stem, a searing pain pierced her palm. Four more dance steps and as she began the song’s second verse, she threw the rose back into the audience, where a heaving patchwork of bodies rushed