Flashback Read online

  To my mother, Faye St. Clair Hunter.

  And to my grandmother, Veatrice Falls St. Clair.

  Acknowledgments

  I appreciate my wife LeAnn’s continual support and encouragement. I would like to express gratitude to Jennifer James Spell for again providing me with excellent editorial advice. I would also like to thank the people at Covenant for giving me another opportunity to publish, especially Kat Gille and Linda Prince for all their help.

  A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

  —J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, 1902

  1

  Laura woke suddenly, her eyes searching the shadows for the stairs—for the body—but they were gone. She listened but heard only her pounding heart and her erratic breathing. Feeling as if the dream had sucked all the air out of her, she struggled, gasping for breath.

  She cowered under the bedcovers, trying to stop the panic attack she felt coming on. After all this time, the dreadful dream was back. Moving the blanket up over her mouth and nose, she stared into the darkness, too afraid to get out of bed. As the dream began to replay itself in her mind, she closed her eyes in an effort to shut it out, then immediately opened them again when the images became more vivid. She forced herself to reach out and turn on the lamp on the nightstand, and with the darkness gone, she was finally able to breathe a little easier.

  A knock sounded at her bedroom door, and Laura froze. Then she heard her roommate, Megan, call out, “Are you all right, Laura?”

  “Come in,” Laura invited when she had found her voice.

  Megan opened the door and walked in. “Are you all right?” she asked again. Megan’s short blond hair was messy and her robe on inside out, but she was a welcome sight. Laura sighed heavily and sat up, moving to the side of the bed. “Just a bad dream.”

  Megan frowned, her brow furrowed with concern. “It sounded pretty bad—you screamed.”

  “Did I?”

  “I’m worried about you. Do you want to tell me about the dream? Maybe it would help.” Without waiting for a response, Megan sat down in the corner chair beside Laura’s dresser.

  Though they had been roommates for almost a year, Laura had never told Megan about the recurring dream that had haunted her, because she’d stopped having it not long after Megan moved in. Laura had seen no need to bring up the dream in conversation, plus she had feared that talking about it would cause a recurrence. “It’s hard to explain,” Laura muttered.

  Megan shrugged. “Dreams usually are. You probably can’t even remember it very well.”

  “I wish I couldn’t,” Laura replied. “But I’ve had the same dream many times, more than I can count.” She paused, waiting for Megan’s reaction.

  Megan yawned and sat up a little straighter. “What do you mean?”

  Laura hesitated again. “I mean . . . I had this dream frequently when I was little, and also after my mom passed away. But it stopped again months ago—until tonight.”

  Megan rubbed her eyes and leaned forward with interest. “Wow. What’s it about?”

  “Falling,” Laura answered flatly. “Falling down stairs.”

  “Oh,” Megan said nonchalantly, waving her hand toward Laura. “Falling dreams are common—I have them too, and they wake me up sometimes.”

  “Do you die at the end of yours?” Laura asked with a tremor in her voice.

  Megan’s expression immediately became concerned again. She crossed her arms and shivered. “What do you mean?”

  “In the dream,” Laura explained, “I run down a long, dark hall, then suddenly I fall down a flight of stairs—and I fall for what seems like forever. At the bottom of the stairs, I can see myself lying there. It’s like an out-of-body experience in which my spirit looks down at my body. The eeriest part is that I see a person crouching over my body, a person wearing a hooded cape. That’s when I usually wake up.”

  Megan’s frown deepened. “That’s bizarre. How often did you say you would have this nightmare?”

  “Several times a month, and, like I said, it started when I was a little girl. It stopped for a while, then began to happen again when my mother died. But I thought I’d finally gotten over it this time—I hadn’t had the dream for several months . . . before tonight.”

  The mention of her mother brought a flood of emotions. Laura’s father, John, had died of a heart attack when she was a child. After John’s death, Laura’s mother, Sarah, had attended secretarial school and then gotten a job working for a lawyer. She had raised Laura as a single mother, helping pay her way through college so she could obtain a teaching degree. Laura had taught kindergarten for about a year when her mother had died of cancer, and the dream had started again.

  Laura’s bishop had introduced her to Megan, who was renting a studio apartment over a garage while working part-time and attending City College. The bishop had suggested that it might be financially beneficial for Megan to move in with Laura, who couldn’t afford to live alone after her mother’s death. A convert of only a few months at the time, Laura was grateful for not only the financial assistance but the spiritual strength Megan contributed.

  “What do you think the dream means?” Megan asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Laura responded. “After my mother died, I went to see a grief counselor for a while, and I told her about the dream.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, at first she said that falling is often symbolic of a person’s fear of failure. I’d lost my mother—I was on my own for the first time in my life—and the fall symbolized my fear of not being able to handle things on my own. I had no idea what would happen if I failed, but the idea was dark and foreboding, just like the hooded figure. The counselor also said the hooded figure might represent death. It had taken my mother from me—it had changed my life. She said I viewed death as something fearful and awful, dark and menacing—something hovering over me like the hooded person.”

  “Makes sense,” Megan affirmed with a shrug.

  “It did until I told her that I’d had the dream—the exact dream, mind you—over and over again when I was a child. I told her that this dream had been with me for as long as I could remember, that I almost felt like I’d been born with this dream inside me. She didn’t know how to explain that, so we moved on to other topics like my anxiety attacks.”

  “I took this class once,” Megan started, “where the professor said that recurring dreams weren’t dreams at all. He believed they were memories passed on to us from someone else.”

  Laura’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. He called it genetic memory theory or something like that. The idea was that experiences are imprinted on our DNA and passed from one generation to another.”

  “What do you think of that?” Laura inquired.

  “I don’t buy it,” Megan replied. “I’m more inclined to believe dreams connect the past—the individual’s past, not their ancestral past—to the present. Whatever is bothering you has to do with your own life, not something that happened to your ancestors. Is there something that’s happened recently that might explain why you’ve started having the dream again? You said it had stopped again a few months ago, right?”

  Laura hesitated.

  “What?” Megan pressed.

  “Well . . .” Laura opened the drawer of the side table and slowly pulled out an envelope. “There is this.” She handed it to Megan.

  Megan looked at the return address. “A law office in Virginia. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Read it,” Laura urged.

  Megan took out the letter and read quickly, then excl
aimed, “Wow, Laura! I can’t believe this. How long have you known about this?”

  Laura looked down at her pajama-clad knees. “A week or so,” she answered softly.

  “What? And you’ve been keeping it a secret?”

  “Well, I needed to think about it,” Laura explained. “I mean, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it.”

  Megan jumped up from the chair. “Do about it? What do you mean? Of course you know what you’re going to do about it! If I had a letter from a lawyer saying that I’d just inherited a plantation and millions of dollars, I know exactly what I’d do!”

  “What would you do?” Laura asked.

  “I’d be on the next plane to Virginia asking, ‘Where’s my money?’” Megan replied with a chuckle.

  Laura stood and walked over to the dresser, then looked at herself in the mirror. Her long, chestnut hair was mussed from the bedsheets, and her face looked even paler than usual. People had always told her she was a pretty girl, but she’d always had a hard time accepting the idea. She’d struggled with fears and anxiety for what seemed her entire life—all twenty-four short years of it.

  For most of her life, Laura’s mother had tried to shield her from any situation that could cause discomfort. When Laura began living alone after her mother’s death, she had realized that such overprotectiveness had probably caused her tendency to have panic attacks. Her mother had referred to her as a “nervous child,” but she hadn’t outgrown her anxiety by the time she reached eighteen. After high school, Laura had somehow managed to ride the bus to St. Louis’s City College every day and had eventually received her teaching degree. After graduation, she found a job at the elementary school just a few blocks away from her mother’s apartment. She never had to travel far from home, and that was just the way she wanted it.

  Laura glanced at Megan. “I guess I’m a little attached to my comfort zone,” she confessed, realizing that it sounded inadequate and perhaps even a bit immature.

  “A little?” Megan quipped.

  Laura smiled. “Okay, I’m a lot attached to my neighborhood. I mean, I know everyone in the neighborhood and at work, so I feel safe here. I have everything I need—I don’t really need a mansion or millions of dollars.”

  Megan laughed. “What are you going to do, tear the letter up and forget that it ever came? Do you want to spend the rest of your life asking ‘what if’? Laura, as your friend, I feel I should tell it to you straight: It’s time to get out of your comfort zone. Destiny is calling. You’re going to Virginia, and I’m going to make it my personal goal to make sure of that.”

  “We’d better get some sleep,” Laura mumbled. “Maybe we can talk about this again tomorrow.”

  2

  Laura sat at her desk in front of an empty classroom. The school day was finally over, and she was exhausted. Unable to go back to sleep after the nightmare, she’d been preoccupied all day. Her students had even commented on it. She couldn’t put the letter from Virginia out of her mind. Her mother’s only sister, Laura Buford, had died and left her namesake niece millions. The bequest included a mansion on a tobacco plantation of several thousand acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Laura could have it all if she agreed to move to Virginia and live in the mansion for three years. And that was the problem: she would have to leave St. Louis.

  Laura massaged her temples. She wanted to go home, but first she needed to prepare the classroom for the next day. The afternoon sun glared through the west windows, making the room uncomfortably warm despite the air conditioning. Such were the hazards of teaching summer school, Laura decided as she walked over to pull down the shade. That’s when she saw the man in the silver Mercedes.

  The sun reflected off the car’s windows, so Laura couldn’t be absolutely sure it was the same balding man she’d noticed before, but she was pretty sure it was the same car. It was parked across the street from the school.

  Laura tried to remember the first time she’d seen the Mercedes. She seemed to recall noticing it near the neighborhood market when she’d picked up a few groceries last week. At the time, she had assumed the man was waiting for someone who was in the store, and she had only noticed him because he was driving her dream car. But two days later Laura saw the car again, with the same man behind the wheel, when she came out of the city library. At that point she had wondered if someone—perhaps an elderly lady who needed a driver—had moved into the neighborhood. But then she had noticed the same car parked on her street as she walked to work that very morning, and she had seen someone inside it. Now it was parked across the street from her school, and she was sure it was the same man inside.

  Laura’s heart began to pound, and she pulled down the shade. Calm down, Laura, she thought. Don’t let your imagination run wild on you. He could have a perfectly normal reason for parking outside the school, and he might just coincidentally end up in the same places you do.

  Rubbing her throbbing temples again, Laura realized she was just tired and being silly. She quickly prepared the classroom for the next day, cleaned off her desk, grabbed her purse, and headed out.

  As she walked out of the school into St. Louis’s sweltering summer heat, she dug through her purse for her sunglasses. She couldn’t find the glasses and dug deeper, looking into the bag’s dark crevices as she made her way down the street. Customarily she walked to and from work unless she had too much to carry, in which case she had Megan drop her off if it worked with Megan’s schedule. The school was so close that Laura felt silly driving unless it was absolutely necessary.

  After checking her purse again without any luck, Laura realized she must have left her sunglasses at the school. Turning abruptly, she saw him and froze. Her heart pounded, and sweat sprang to her palms and forehead.

  He stood at the crosswalk she’d just crossed, obviously following her, and he seemed startled to find her suddenly facing him. He was tall and thin, almost gaunt, a balding man of about fifty with lines etched so deeply in each cheek that they almost looked like scars. Dark circles underlined his deep-set eyes, the resulting shadows making his expression almost eerie. She didn’t know him—other than having caught sight of him here and there in his silver Mercedes—yet she was sure by the look on his face that he knew her. But how? And what was she to do now that she was face-to-face with him?

  Laura gasped involuntarily as she realized that the man must know her habits—what time she went to work each day, her lunch hour, her trips to the grocery store and the library. And yet she didn’t understand why he should care to know all this. She wondered what motivated stalkers in the first place. Possibly she’d passed him on the street or in the grocery store—perhaps she had innocently spoken to him. Maybe she’d smiled faintly at him as she normally did when she inadvertently made eye contact with a stranger as they passed. She meant to be polite and friendly, not encourage anyone’s attention.

  Could her shy smile have caught a stranger’s eye? Maybe he was lonely, looking for companionship. She was young enough to be his daughter—perhaps he’d lost a daughter, and Laura’s large green eyes reminded him of her. For that matter, she could look like a deceased wife or old girlfriend. No matter how innocent she tried to make it, she knew he could be a mentally or emotionally disturbed individual, or worse, a psychopathic rapist or murderer.

  As all these thoughts passed quickly through Laura’s mind, the man turned and walked away. She didn’t dare return to the school for her sunglasses—she had to get home as quickly as possible. Turning on her heel, Laura headed toward her apartment.

  Breathing rapidly and walking quickly, Laura turned back every few seconds to make sure the man wasn’t following. Her quiet neighborhood had taken on a gloomy hue in the late afternoon sun, the great oak trees and weathered Victorian mansions that lined the street casting long shadows across the crumbling sidewalk. Except for the occasional vehicle passing, the old neighborhood was quiet until Laura heard a voice—her voice. She was muttering prayers out loud. “Please let me get home safely.
Don’t let anyone hurt me.”

  The words came in raspy breaths—she was nearly hyperventilating. Glancing back over her shoulder again, Laura thought she detected a flicker of movement, but the sidewalk was empty, and she decided it must have been a breeze disturbing the leaves on the trees that lined the block. She should stop, pull out her paper bag, and start breathing into it, Laura realized. She should start her mantras. You’re okay. Inhale slowly. Calm your mind and soul. What were the rest of them? That was the problem with panic mantras: she could never remember them when she most needed them. By the time she realized she needed them, her mind was racing so fast, she couldn’t remember anything other than pure, unadulterated fear—panic so intense it seemed to run through her veins like poison. It didn’t matter, though, because prayer came more naturally now than mantras, and prayer actually worked every time. Glancing over her shoulder, Laura again thought she saw a flash of movement, and this time she told herself it was probably a cat or a squirrel. She knew that anyone who could see her would think she was acting strange, and that they might call the police and have her checked out. The police would approach carefully, not knowing exactly what they were facing—for all they knew she could be a strung-out junkie with a knife or a gun.

  Off—Off—Officer. It’s okay. I—I—I’m not on drugs. This evil-looking guy is following me, maybe trying to kill me. He—He’s been following me around town. No, don’t shoot. I’m reaching for my brown paper bag—really.

  She laughed at her own thoughts, then lapsed into silence as she realized how hysterical she sounded. Her heels beat on the sidewalk, echoing like gunshots against the worn housefronts.

  She tried to refocus her thoughts and began naming the residents she knew in each building. Cooper up, Hillstead down. Breathe, Laura, breathe! Miriam and Dylan. A bunch of guys. The largest houses in the neighborhood had been turned into apartments, and young professionals had purchased and restored the smaller homes. The rectangular apartment building where Laura lived had been squeezed in between two huge Victorian homes years before, its brick façade standing out among the many wood-framed houses. Six apartments made up the two-story structure—three on the first floor and three on the second. Laura lived on the far right end of the first floor.