Page 27 of Chasing Dreams
She became dimly aware of a light, and padding steps on the stairs. “Shaine?”
Her anguished cries had wakened Austin from a light sleep, and he’d hopped into his sweatpants and stumbled into the other room. From the loft above came heartbroken cries.
“Shaine?” he said, softly, kneeling down and reaching for her shoulder. Her slender frame shook with the force of her sobs. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“J-Jack,” she said. “It’s Jack.”
“You had a dream?”
She nodded.
Awkwardly he tried to put his arm around her shoulders. He didn’t have any experience at comforting hysterical women, at comforting anyone really. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he soothed.
“No!” Her head shot up and her arm flung out, the backs of her fingers slapping across his bare shoulder. “It’s not all right.” She scrambled to her feet, her hair a wild disarray, her cheeks streaked with tears that shone silver in the light from below. “It’s not all right,” she clipped out, each word a shot. “Jack is not all right. He’s scared and hurting. There’s an awful woman who’s mean to him. I’ve seen her. I’ve felt what he feels.”
Austin stared up at her, not moving from his kneeling position.
“He’s a little boy,” she said in a tiny voice that broke. “A little boy who misses his mommy and needs someone to take care of him. He called himself ‘Beebee’,” she said. “We always called him BeeBee. The nickname kind of morphed from Baby. Even Maggie called him that.”
“Shaine,” he said, wondering if this was the right time to try to reason with her. “That doesn’t prove that he’s alive.”
Her body stiffened with anger, drawing his attention to the soft curves beneath the short nightshirt she wore. Her legs, long and slender, were the kind of legs that gave a man disturbing thoughts. He tried to draw his thoughts from her curvy body and exotic feminine scent to the subject at hand.
“Well, what does?” she asked, drawing his attention back to her words. “Last night you said yourself, the things in my dreams happen.”
“Maybe this dream is something that already happened. In the past.”
She shook her head vehemently. “No. He was never treated like that. Besides, I’ve told you, he’s older in these dreams.”
“That doesn’t prove anything—”
“You have a big comer-shaped desk in your office.”
He stared at her. “So?”
“It has two computers on it. There’s a certificate of some type on the wall.”
“And?”
“And I’ve never been in there. I’ve never set foot in that room.”
“Come on, you could’ve gone in there any time while I was downstairs—or out running.” Who was she trying to kid?
She took off down the stairs. “I’ve never been in there, I swear. There’s a phone and a flat gray thing by your computer. You have a big oak filing cabinet.”
He followed her through the main room and back into his office.
She stood in the middle of the room in the dark. “Turn the light on.”
He flipped on the track lighting above his desk.
She glanced up at the certificate on the wall. “A degree?”
“Computer science. Pennsylvania State.”
“I never knew what it said. I saw it in my dreams at home, too. I even saw Daisy. Back then I didn’t know how those things were related to Jack. Now I do.”
Austin sympathized with her. Really he did. But she was going to have to face the fact that her nephew was dead. She was trying so hard to persuade him otherwise. How could he convince her that the victims were rarely ever alive?
