Bitterroot Lake, Alicia Beckman [good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT] 📗

Sarah,” her sister said, bare feet thumping on the floor between their twin beds. “It’s okay, Sarah. I’m here.”

Oh, God. She grabbed her throat, rubbing it between the vee of her thumb and fingers. That was her screaming. The mattress groaned and sagged with Holly’s weight and Sarah bent forward, her sister’s hand on her back.

Was someone else here? No. No, that had been in the dream. A young woman in a long white nightgown, her back to Sarah. Hurrying down the grand staircase, the thin white fabric fluttering behind her. Sarah squeezed her eyelids shut. The woman reached the main floor, her hand on the newel post, and glanced back, up the stairs. Sarah stared into the memory, the waves of terror flooding over her. Then the woman angled toward the French doors that opened onto the deck. That’s when she’d heard the scream. Her own scream.

“Abby,” she said, gasping. “Where’s Abby? Where’s Noah?”

“The kids are fine,” Holly said. “It was just a dream.”

Sarah ran her hands over her face, pressing the heels into her eyes, then rubbing them with her fingers. The images were gone; the screaming had stopped.

But the terror still lapped at her skin like the waves lapped the cobbled lakeshore.

She’d said there was nothing left to fear, with Lucas dead. Was she wrong? Was the fear just in her mind?

“You’re freezing,” Holly said, draping the thick cotton quilt around Sarah’s shoulders.

“No,” she said. “No. I have to see where she went.” She pulled away, swinging her feet off the high mattress and onto the braided rug.

“Who?” Holly called after her. “Sarah, stop. There is no one.”

In the hallway, Sarah gripped the rail with both hands, then rocked back and collapsed onto her heels.

“She was right here. I saw her. I saw her go down the stairs and out the door. I heard her scream.”

Holly crouched beside her. “There’s no one here but us.”

“I—heard—her. I saw her.”

“Who? Who did you see?”

Sarah raised her eyes to her sister’s, so like her own. So like her daughter’s.

“No one,” she said. “It was no one. You were right. Nothing but a bad dream.”

She couldn’t tell her sister the truth. She had only caught a glimpse of the woman in the nightgown, the woman running toward the doors and out to the lake.

But while she didn’t know the face, she recognized the terror.

 THURSDAY

Twenty Days

 17

This time when Sarah woke, it was to the sound of rain.

But why was she in Holly’s bed? An arm’s length away, in Sarah’s bed, Holly was fast asleep, cocooned in the Flying Geese quilt, the cat tucked behind her bent knees. Sarah pushed herself up, leaned against the pillows, and began to tease the middle-of-the-night events out of the cobwebs in her mind.

The face. The screaming girl.

Her fingers plucked at her chest. The thick cotton of her sweatshirt, not the wispy white nightgown she half-expected to be wearing.

The three-legged clock on the nightstand said six fifteen.

The dream—the nightmare—had been so vivid. As though she herself had been that terrified, panic-stricken girl.

Her therapist said that people in dreams are often mirrors of ourselves, chosen by the subconscious mind to force us to focus on some aspect, some trait that the dream figure represents.

No question what that girl represented.

Déjà vu all over again, her mind alerting her to danger. Was it to her this time?

But why? And from whom?

Or was the danger from within, from her own emotions, as tangled as the bedcovers?

After the nightmare, after she’d rushed down the hall in search of the mysterious figure, Holly had led her back to bed and crawled in beside her, wrapping her arms around her. Like when they were kids and one of them needed comforting. But at some point, she’d woken and switched beds. Now alone in Sarah’s bed, Holly uncurled and rolled onto her stomach, one arm under the pillow, legs bent as though she were running, or leaping.

The way Abby slept.

And the terror struck her again.

Abby’s fine. She’s fine, a voice inside her said.

How do you know that? You don’t know that, another voice said. She can’t reach you. She doesn’t have a father to call.

Sarah rushed out of the bedroom to the landing and grabbed the rail, one hand to her chest. Slow, slow, slow. In and out, the way her therapist had told her to do when the panic attacks hit. Breathe slowly, try not to think, just focus on the breath.

In, out. In, out. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the cat sitting in the bedroom doorway, watching her.

“Go on,” she told the cat. “Janine’s up. I smell coffee. She’ll feed you.”

The cat did not move.

In the bathroom, Sarah rested her hands on the cool white porcelain of the pedestal sink. “Sarah Elizabeth McCaskill Carter,” she told the face in the mirror. “Get a grip. You are fine. Your daughter is fine.”

The sharp, floral scent of the lavender soap calmed her as she washed her face. “You’ve got this. You’ve got this.”

So easy to say in daylight. So hard to believe in the darkness.

But before she did anything else, she had to know whether the voices were right. Which voices to believe. Abby was an early riser, like Jeremy, who loved a morning run, also like him. And she needed to hear her daughter’s voice.

She hiked up the lane, her bare feet slipping inside the tennis shoes, checking for reception every few hundred yards. The car would have been quicker, but she needed to move. When she got past the big bend, her phone pinged and her heart leapt. But it was just the morning check-in from the house sitter, followed by a text from a friend.

She touched the screen and watched the phone icon vibrate. Heard the almost imperceptible catch as the call was answered.

“Hi, Mom.” Bright and shiny, her Abby. Nothing was wrong.

“Abby, honey. So good to hear your voice.”

“Yours too, Mom. I’m out for a run with my roommate and the girls from down the hall.”