Page 58 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

“Different, but always awful.” She shuddered. “I mean, graphic and emotionally wrenching.”

“How often do you have them? Every night?” He began writing.

“Just about. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the dream and I’m covered in sweat and gasping for breath, confused even though I’m in my own bed. Other times, the dream plays out and I wake up with only a hint that it was there. Then later in the day, it’ll hit me.” She managed what she knew was a feeble smile. “They always involve some member of my family and a life-and-death struggle and . . . and while I’m in the dream I know something bad is happening. I try to help, but I can never stop what’s happening. Sometimes I’m the age I am now, other times I’m a little girl. The last one I remember was the dream with Charles.”

“Your older brother?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s deceased, right?” His eyebrows had drawn together, and all sense of humor had evaporated from his face.

“Yes. I dream about the day he died. I was the one who found him.” She took a sip from the coffee and tried to keep her voice calm, without emotion. “You see, there was this horrible bow-hunting accident,” she said, shivering as she remembered the day that she’d been playing in the woods and had stumbled upon her dying older brother. She told Adam everything she could remember about the accident, about the snow, about being lost while playing with Griffin and Kelly, about finding Charles near death and about pulling the ghastly arrow from his chest.

“I guess I shouldn’t have done that. I was just a kid and I didn’t know any better, but Griffin, my friend who was with me, he told me not to. I ignored him. Thought I was saving Charles’s life.” Her voice caught and she took in a deep breath. It was over. Long over. She had to deal with it. “Anyway,” she said, staring at the floor, “the upshot was that Charles died. The doctor assured me and my mother later that Charles would have died anyway, but I think . . . I mean, I wonder . . .” She sighed and shook her head. “I think Doc Fellers might have been protecting me.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because I was only nine at the time and I—I’ve always felt somewhat responsible, but maybe it’s all just part of the Montgomery curse.”

Adam was writing notes. He looked over the top of his glasses. “The curse?”

She blushed. Hadn’t meant to bring it up. “It’s probably just . . . talk. Superstition. But I’ve heard about it for as long as I can remember. Lucille—she’s my mother’s maid and was as much a nanny to us kids as anything—she swears it’s true. But then . . .” She took a sip of her coffee. “Lucille believes in ghosts, too.”

“And you don’t?”

Caitlyn shrugged. “I don’t think I do and I swear to anyone who asks that I don’t, but . . . sometimes . . . well, I just don’t know. It’s kind of the same position I have about God.” Leaning back into the soft leather, she closed her eyes. “That’s not really right. I mean, I want to believe in God, but I’m not sure I actually do. I don’t necessarily want to believe that there are spirits walking around, invisible beings who haven’t yet decided to pass on, but sometimes I think . . . I mean I sense that I’m not alone.”

“When you really are?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, nodding. “At least it seems that way.” She let out a little laugh. “You know, this even sounds nuts to me. A lot of my family thinks I’m losing it, like my grandmother . . .” Her voice faded as the last image she remembered of Nana—her waxen face and sightless eyes—sliced through Caitlyn’s brain. Her skin curdled and she sucked in her breath.

Adam’s eyes narrowed on her. “You okay?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I mean, I don’t think I’d be here if I was really ‘okay.’ ” She looked him steadily in the eye and pointed out, “You are my shrink.”

“So let’s get back to the Montgomery curse.”

“Oh. That.” Setting her coffee on the table, she stood and walked to the window. Outside, clouds covered the sky, threatening rain. As ominous and dark as the damned curse. On the verandah of the house across the alley, a woman in a big hat was refilling her bird feeders with seeds.

“Yes, the curse.” Caitlyn hesitated, felt the same sense that the family’s privacy was about to be breached, the same sensation she’d experienced when she’d confessed everything to Dr. Wade. Absently she rubbed the inside of her wrists, felt the slits that were beginning to heal—cuts she didn’t remember making. There were people who self-mutilated, who inflicted pain on themselves. Surely—Oh, God, please—she wasn’t one of those. “My family is plagued with mental instability . . . well, okay, so I’m here, telling this to a shrink, I guess you know that much.”

He smiled a little. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I don’t know how many generations this goes back, but my grandmother Evelyn, she suffered from some kind of . . . dementia for lack of a more precise medical term. Her condition was never diagnosed, not officially, or if it was, it was one of the family’s skeletons that was locked away in the closet with the rest of them.” She glanced over her shoulder and arched an eyebrow. “That poor closet is getting pretty full, I think. The Montgomerys might have to rent out another one, or one of those storage units, or a whole damned attic. Anyway, my grandmother and grandfather, Benedict, had two children, my father, Cameron, and his sister, Alice Ann. She was, well, as the family so kindly puts it, ‘never quite right,’ meaning that she suffered from severe depression and was what I think they might call bipolar today. I don’t remember her, as she was institutionalized. Meanwhile, Evelyn—”

“Your grandmother, correct?”

“Yes. Nana,” Caitlyn said, feeling that same skin-crawling sensation she always did when talking about her grandmother. “She turned out to be kind of crazy herself. Even before the dementia set in, but then it could have been because she was dealing with my grandfather, who was . . . oh, there’s no nice way to put it. He was a womanizer. Big time.” She stared out the window as the first drops of rain began to hit the panes. How many times had she, as a child, listened to whispered conversations between her older siblings, or Lucille and Berneda. “His name was Benedict Montgomery, the man responsible for the creation and success of Montgomery Bank and Trust. He had a long-term affair with his secretary, Mary Lou Chaney, and she got pregnant and did the then-shocking thing of having the baby out of wedlock. I wasn’t alive then, of course, but I’m sure my grandmother Evelyn was mortified. Mary Lou wasn’t one to go quietly away to some home for unwed mothers, oh, no. She had the baby and named her Copper Montgomery Chaney. The way the family tells it, that scandal was the start of all Nana’s mental problems.”

“Do you believe that?”

“You know, I don’t know. I never knew my grandmother as anything but . . . weird. Bitter, I guess.” She stared outside to a ledge where pigeons were sheltering from the storm. The rain had gathered speed, spitting against the window and chasing the lady on the terrace across the way inside.

“The scandal didn’t stop with Copper’s birth. According to all my family, she grew up wild and tough and married a guy named Earl Dean Biscayne. They had three children, who should be my half-cousins or something, but no one’s real sure about that because C

opper died a few years back in a fire in her home.”

“Why isn’t anyone sure that her kids are your half-cousins?”

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