Page 7 of Confessions of the Dead

Although the smile was still on Gabby’s face, there was no hiding the vein pulsing on the left side of her temple like the thin wisp of steam that signaled a tea kettle whistling.

Matt shrugged out from under Addie’s hand. “It’s fine. I’ve got a spare at the station.”

Abbie grinned at Gabby. “It’s funny, I was gone for so long, but everyone here has just welcomed me back, arms wide open. Feels like I never left, the way we’re all picking right back up.” Her grin shifted to Matt and widened. “Good seeing you again. Real good.”

She retrieved her purse and wandered back through the dining room, her black bra fully visible through a sheer blouse worn over tight jeans. While Matt pretended not to look, Gabby glared at the other woman. “Pregnant women should not dress like that.”

It had been about a month since Addie dropped that particular bombshell. She was about twelve weeks along, and she’d yet to tell anyone who the father was. In a town as small as the Bend, it was a hot topic. Addie and Matt’s past wasn’t exactly a secret.

Matt took out his wallet and set a twenty on the counter. “I best be getting back to the station. Ellie is out on patrol, and Sally’s holding down the fort.”

Gabby didn’t answer. She was still looking out over the dining room, her flushed face gone white as a sheet. The voices behind Matt died away, the clink of silverware on plates vanished. There were several gasps, then silence.

One hand instinctively easing to his gun, Matt turned slowly on the stool and faced the front of the diner.

Standing in the open door, the sun bright at her back, was a girl of maybe sixteen. She wore not a stitch of clothing. Her long dark hair draped over her shoulder, partially covering her right breast. Her bare feet were caked in mud.

3

Matt

SHE DIDN’TMOVE.

Nobody did.

Gabby reached over the counter and clasped Matt’s hand.

Somewhere in the room, a throat cleared.

But nobody went to her.

Matt wasn’t proud of that fact, and it would haunt him until his dying day. He wasn’t the type of person who froze, never had been. Even back in his glory days when he played ball, standing back on his own twenty-yard line with linebackers sailing through the air about to unleash a world of hurt, he didn’t freeze. He got the ball off. He sidestepped. He reacted, he acted, but he never froze.

She looked ethereal.

Celestial.

Christ, she looked like a damned angel. There, he said it.

Not any angel, but a fallen angel, and for the briefest of seconds, he was absolutely certain if she turned around there wouldbe tiny nubs at her shoulder blades where her wings had been clipped.

Matt knew how unbelievable that all sounded, hadn’t set foot in a church since he was a kid, but there it was. Looking around at the faces around the packed diner, he knew those thoughts weren’t solely his own. He even caught Peggy Lockwood crossing herself, and she did go to church. She went at least three times a week.

Matt didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t a local, and if she’d come in for the weekend with the rest of the tourists, he hadn’t seen her before. He would have remembered her.

Matt rose from his stool, and his legs were trembling as badly as Buck’s had been. In a fraction of a second, a buzzing in his ears was followed by a feeling like intense air or water pressure. His skin prickled all the way down to a momentary numbness at the tips of his fingers that then tingled with the pins-and-needles sensation of a sleeping limb. In the time it took for him to complete a single step, the world tilted and it was gone. Matt wasn’t alone in that, either. All around him, people were rubbing their arms, glancing at each other with a mix of fright and bewilderment.

Someone to his left said in a childlike voice, “I smell ozone. Anyone else smell ozone?” Sounded like Hershel Brown, but also didn’t because Hershel Brown was a six-foot-four Black man on the wrong side of fifty who weighed upward of three hundred pounds. His speaking voice was deep enough to rattle the windows, anything but childlike. When Matt glanced at him, the fear in the man’s eyes told him all he needed to know.

The girl still hadn’t moved. Naked as the day she was born, she stood at the mouth of the diner, one arm bracing the door open, the other hanging at her side. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out.

Matt got his shit together.

He crossed the room to the coatrack where he’d hung hisjacket when he first arrived with Buck. Snatching it with enough force to nearly tumble the rack, he draped it over the girl’s shoulders, quickly scanned her body for visible signs of trauma—cuts, bruises, abrasions—and found nothing except that she was in some form of shock.

With fumbling fingers, nothing but thumbs, Matt pulled the jacket closed and managed to get the zipper going, brought it up to the base of her neck. She wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot two; the jacket reached halfway down her thighs, offering her at least some sense of modesty.

“You’re going to be okay,” he told her softly, and the moment the words passed his lips, he knew they were a lie.

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