Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“Kind of,” he said. “They needed a match for her bone marrow and they decided to take a chance and have another child.” He put his arm around her and said, “Just in case.” It wasn’t supposed to be a sexy move, just a kind of reassuring gesture from someone who cared about her. Grace could feel it.

“Right,” she said. “Just in case. And, you know that it worked. The little girl was a match.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Grace,” he said, after a pause.

“I’m not saying it is exactly the same thing, but I grew up knowing that I was a kind of replacement for Tricia. Don’t get me wrong, I know my parents loved me. But they just missed her so much, loved her so much, that I was there to fill the void. You know, like a family sometimes rushes out and gets a new cat the day after their cat is run over.”

Shane looked off at the water, thinking.

“That’s a little severe, Grace.”

“Maybe, but that’s how I felt. It was always Tricia this, Tricia that. Do you know that Tricia and I wore the same outfit to our first day of school? It was a pink sweater with a poodle applique. I thought it was cool because it matched Mirabelle. I didn’t even know it was the same sweater until years later when I was going through an album tucked away in the basement.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that is a little creepy,” he said.

“That’s not all. I mean, I could tell you stories all night about what it was like being the sister of a dead girl. Even though she was gone and had been gone before I was even born, there was never a time when her name didn’t bring my dad to tears. There never was a time when I didn’t feel that they wanted her so much that if there was a knock on the door from someone with a potion or promise that could bring her back and the only caveat would be that I was to be traded for her, they would have done so without so much as a thought.”

Grace held Shane’s gaze for a while. She could see trust, understanding in his eyes. Yet she was unsure how much she could really say. She had never been abused or anything like that; she understood that a parent’s loss was undoubtedly greater than whatever anyone could imagine unless they’d been there themselves. As she grew older she could see a haunted look in the eyes of those who had suffered great loss. When she was a small girl, her parents hosted a support group for mothers and fathers of murdered children. Her mom had her serve cookies at many of the meetings and she could feel the longing stares coming from the club members as they watched her move from the kitchen to the living room, where a semicircle of chairs had been set up.

“How old is your little girl?”

“Nine,” her father said.

“My Tracy would be about her age now.”

“My Danny would be driving a car.”

“Paula would be married by now.”

It was always that way. The parents talking about their loss in terms of what their children would be doing at that very moment had they survived their killers. Yet, like Tricia, the reality was that they were frozen in time. Forever stuck. Just like the pictures that hung in all the sad little bedrooms of those kids who never came home-always there, as if waiting for the inevitable and relentless tears of those who mourned them.

Emma Rose set out a pair of black pants, a white cotton blouse, a SAVE THE SOUND T-shirt, a black sweater, and a pair of black heels. She was short and no matter what the occasion, heels were always in order. Even for work at the Starbucks adjacent to the Lakewood Towne Center, just outside Tacoma. Starbucks dress code was much more relaxed than her clothes indicated, but Emma was the kind of girl who liked buying her work attire at Target in batches of threes. It just made everything easier not to worry about what she was going to wear when working. There was no disputing that she was a creature of habit. Never late. Always ate at the same place-on a bench in the parking lot in front of the coffee place. Emma always wore her long, dark hair the same way too-parted in the middle and held in the back with a loose clip.

She worked with Oliver Angstrom until just after nine.

“Do you hate this place as much as I do?” she asked as they wiped down the counter space and loaded the dishwasher for the last cycle of the night.

Oliver, a twenty-five-year-old in search of a publisher for a graphic novel about the end of the world, looked up. “I don’t even like coffee,” he said.

“I used to. Now the smell of it makes me sick,” she said. “I don’t know which I hate more-the people who come in here or the coffee.”

“Tell me about it. I think that fat guy that sat over there,” Oliver said, pointing across the room to a leather lounge chair under the plasma screen that touted the supposedly hip music that provided atmosphere all day long, “was actually watching porn with his hand in his pants.”

“You’re kidding me,” Emma said, clearly disgusted.

Oliver nodded. “No lie. No one complained, though. Everyone who comes in here is too self-absorbed to pay attention to what anyone else is doing.”

“Coffee-drinking Facebookers!” Emma said, with mock outrage. “Why don’t they just go home to do their social networking?”

Oliver nodded in agreement. Emma was right. Over the past couple of years Starbucks had changed from a place where people breezed in, got a latte, and left for work. Oliver theorized that the declining economy was an invitation for whole groups of patrons who didn’t have anywhere to go. No rush to get anywhere. Now people planted themselves at a table and Facebooked. Sometimes they didn’t even buy a drink, which totally sucked in a business plan built on making people think they could sit and visit, when really turnover was needed.

“What did you think of the woman who bitched that her quadruple-pumped caramel macchiato didn’t have enough syrup in it?”

“Gag me, is what I thought,” Emma said.

Oliver laughed. “Or the dude who spilled his mocha and told us it was all our fault.”

“Like we were going to argue with him, even though I saw the whole thing, too.” Emma stood across the counter and surveyed the scene. She liked Oliver, but she could feel what was coming next. Some girls have a kind of sixth sense about when a guy is going to hit on them. Emma did.

“You want to hang out some time?” Oliver asked. It was a question that he’d wanted to ask for weeks, but until that moment he just hadn’t had the nerve. He’d even asked his manager what he ought to do and she’d told him to go for it. He stopped what he was doing and looked over at her.

She lifted a shoulder and shrugged. Oliver wasn’t bad looking. He had a lean build, nice features, dark, expressive eyes magnified through horn-rimmed lenses. So the physical side wasn’t bad. Neither was his personality. One thing bugged her, however, and she couldn’t get past it. He was a video game developer and graphic novel geek who lived at home with his mom and splurged once a year for a trip to Comic-Con. She lived in the real world-and she wanted to fix it. The T-shirt she wore under her work blouse said it all.

She wasn’t really interested, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. Emma Rose simply didn’t want to live in the world of geekdom. She didn’t even want to visit it. Oliver was too, too into it. He’d once brought everyone out one at a time to look at his latest purchase in the trunk of his car.

“What is it?” Emma had asked. “Looks like a lamp.”

“Are you shitting me?” Oliver had looked at her like she didn’t know what day it was.

“Er, no,” she’d said. “Not shitting you at all.”

“This is a lamp used on the set of the Green Lantern movie.”