Downfall by S.D. Wasley

  Chapter 17: Mission

  I unblocked Cain’s number and made a tentative call during the night, terrified he would answer. It went straight through to his message service, just like they’d said. Maybe his phone battery was flat and he had no way to charge it, or he had no signal. Or perhaps he’d lost it. I called Jude.

  “Frankie. Have you thought about it?”

  “Yes.” I took a breath. “I’ll come back. For tonight.”

  “Thank you!” Jude’s voice was full of relief.

  I cut him short. “Jude, I’m not doing this to help you get Cain back. I am only coming back to see if I can help with putting together the visions Nadine and Liz are seeing. And if I can’t, I’m outta there.”

  Jude agreed hastily. “Okay. See you tonight then?”

  “Yes, see you tonight,” I sighed.

  Before I left home I told Albion the truth about where I was going.

  “He won’t be there,” I said as disbelief hit his face. “It’s like ... closure. I’m going just once, and then it will all be over.”

  “No way!” he exclaimed. “No fucking way! I’m calling Vanessa.”

  He continued to protest while I put my shoes on, texting Vanessa frantically. He even tried hiding the car keys. When I found them and went to get in the car he threw his hands in the air and stormed back into the house, shouting as he went. “All those weeks we protected you, what a total fucking waste of time!”

  Everyone was already there when I arrived at Gaunt House. Nadine’s scowl showed me how much she hated me, and her hatred made perfect sense. All she saw in me was an unwelcome intruder and an astronomical blunder on Jude’s part. Liz had the ledger ready. Jude handed me a beer and we got straight down to business.

  “Nadine, tell us what you saw today,” said Owen.

  “I saw an old pickup full of teenagers driving on a beach. There must’ve been at least six people in the tray. It was yellow, an older model. Rusty.”

  “Did you recognize the beach?” Owen asked.

  “No. Never seen it before. But it looked like there was an island out in the water, quite close to shore. Rocky with scrubby plants on it. The beach was clear and protected, like a swimming beach.”

  Liz wrote it all down as usual. I watched her bleakly.

  “Frankie, does any of it sound familiar to you?” Jude asked.

  I sighed. “You don’t expect much, do you? No. No, I can’t solve this little mystery.”

  “I saw the farmer again,” Liz volunteered. “He had a sheepdog with him, and he was working on a fence. There was a water trough nearby―it was blue. He was wearing a button down shirt and a hat. Like a ... leather hat.”

  “Skin,” I said. “An Akubra hat.”

  Liz gave a grateful nod. “He looked across the field,” she went on. “He was frowning, as if something had caught his attention that bothered him.”

  Owen wrote as Liz spoke and there was some discussion of the position of the sun in the sky, trees, landmarks, and lumps of rough, mossy limestone in the field. I felt hopeless. I could see them glancing at me from time to time, hoping I would interject with one of my random epiphanies.

  “I saw more things,” Nadine said. “An eagle circling. It landed in some grass and hopped along for a bit, and then cocked its head to look at the ground. There was a sandshoe with a red stripe lying there.” She kept her gaze on Liz. “I think the eagle was one of those huge brown ones you see soaring sometimes. A wedge-tailed eagle, I think it’s called?”

  Owen nodded and Nadine flicked her hair back. “The other thing I saw was a guy in an old telephone box. He had his back to me. He was wearing a pale t-shirt, maybe white, and had dark hair.” She paused. “I thought it might be Cain,” she said defiantly, which made everyone draw in a collective breath. “He had Cain’s ... stature. He had something red in his hand, something small and red. He was turning it over in his hand, and had the phone to his ear.”

  I took a swig of my beer, trying not to show how her words upset me.

  “Was the phone box on a street? In a park?” Owen asked.

  Nadine twisted her face, trying to recall. “A street, I think. Yes, it was on a street, maybe a highway. A couple of big rigs went by.”

  Cain, on a highway, in a phone box. Was he just ... just driving around, looking for me? That seemed impossibly stupid. I racked my brain to think what the red thing in his hand could be.

  “Could you see his bike?” Owen asked.

  “No.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t him,” Jude said. “If you only saw his back, and it was just a passing resemblance, that’s not much to go by. Could be wishful thinking.”

  “Yeah,” Nadine admitted. “Could be. Just for a moment I thought it was him. It was just a feeling. Then I didn’t think it was him anymore. For one thing, who uses a phone box anymore? It was probably from the past.”

  Liz added more notes as Jude and Owen asked Nadine questions. When they’d finished Jude turned to me. “We’ve been writing down the fragments every night since you left, Frankie. Would you take a look at the book?”

  I held out my hand. I skimmed the last ten or so pages of the ledger, filled with Liz’s handwriting. Dates, clothing, genders, and ages; landscapes, vegetation, and cloud formations. An object in a primary color was circled for each vision.

  “Coastal town,” someone said.

  Four faces swiveled in my direction. Dammit, it was me who’d spoken.

  My words came in a stuttering rush. “Everything you’ve said tonight sounds like it could be in a remote coastal town. The rusty pickup on the beach. The farmer fixing a fence. The eagle. The highway with trucks. And everything for the last couple of weeks in the book, too.” I referred to the book open on the floor in front of me. “A gas station, a sheep skull on a fence post, roadkill, barbed wire fencing, limestone rock, cliffs, tourists, ice cream truck, beach umbrella, an old pub ...”

  Realization dawned on their faces, even the sullen Nadine’s. Jude and Owen exchanged a glance that was so ethereally beautiful it seared my heart. Liz scratched urgently in the ledger.

  I dropped my eyes to the floor, counting the minutes until I could leave.