* * *
Traveling north from Globe, through the Apache Mountains, with the San Carlos Indian Reservation to the east, Jilly gradually became aware that something had changed between her and Dylan O’Conner. He wasn’t relating to her quite as he had previously. He glanced away from the road more frequently than before, studying her in what he believed to be a surreptitious manner, and so she pretended not to notice. A new energy flowed between them, but she couldn’t define it.
Finally she decided she was just tired, too exhausted and too stressed to trust her perceptions. After this eventful night, lesser mortals than Jillian Jackson, Southwest Amazon, might have lost their sanity altogether, so a little paranoia was nothing to worry about.
From Safford to Globe, Dylan had told her about the encounter with Lucas Crocker. He’d also recounted the story of Ben Tanner and his granddaughter, which revealed an application of his sixth sense that was more appealing than being drawn into the depraved psychotic worlds of people like Crocker and like Kenny of the Many Knives.
Now, as the lights of Globe receded, as Shep remained quietly engaged with Great Expectations, Jilly brought Dylan up to speed on the unsettling incident in the women’s restroom at the restaurant.
At one of the sinks, as she’d washed her hands, she had looked up at the mirror and had seen a reflection of the bathroom that was accurate in every detail except one. Where the toilet stalls should have been, three dark wood confessionals stood instead; the carved crosses on the doors were brightened by gold leafing.
‘I turned around to look directly, and there were only toilet stalls, as there should have been. But when I looked at the mirror again… the confessionals were still reflected in it.’
Rinsing her hands, unable to take her eyes off the mirror, she had been watching when the door of one of the confessionals slowly opened. A priest came out of the booth, not with a smile, not with a prayer book, but in a sliding heap, dead and drenched in blood.
‘I got the hell out of the bathroom,’ she said, shivering at the memory. ‘But I can’t turn this off, Dylan. These visions keep coming at me, and they mean something.’
‘Visions,’ he said. ‘Not mirages?’
‘I was in denial,’ she admitted. She slipped one fingertip under the gauze pad of the Band-Aid that covered the point of injection in her arm, and she gently fingered the sore, slightly swollen puncture wound. ‘But I’m not playing that game anymore. These are visions, all right. Premonitions.’
The first town ahead was Seneca, thirty miles away. Twenty-eight miles beyond Seneca lay Carrizo. Both were just wide spots in the road. Dylan was driving deeper into one of those many areas in the Southwest known separately and collectively as the Big Lonely.
‘In my case,’ he said, ‘I seem to be making connections between people and places, regarding events that happened in the past or that are already underway in current time. But you think you’re seeing some event in the future.’
‘Yeah. An incident in a church somewhere. It’s going to happen. And soon, I think. Murder. Mass murder. And somehow… we’re going to be there when it goes down.’
‘You see us there? In your visions?’
‘No. But why else would these same images keep coming to me – the birds, the church, all of it? I’m not having premonitions about train wrecks in Japan, airplane crashes in South America, tidal waves in Tahiti. I’m seeing something in my own future, our future.’
‘Then we don’t go anywhere near a church,’ Dylan said.
‘Somehow… I think the church comes to us. I don’t think there’s any way we can avoid it.’
A rapid moonset left the night with none but starlight, and the Big Lonely seemed to get bigger, lonelier.
* * *
Dylan didn’t pilot the Expedition as if it were a wingless jet, but he pushed it hard. He completed what should have been more than a three-hour drive in two and a half hours.
For a town of five thousand, Holbrook boasted an unusual number of motels. It provided the only convenient lodging for tourists who wanted to visit the Petrified Forest National Park or various Native American attractions at nearby Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations.