18

PROPHETS AND MADMEN

I followed my father out of the interrogation room into the detective room—and there was Jeff Winger.

The detective room was a windowless office with lots of flyers and papers pinned to bulletin boards along the wall. There were three gray desks crowding the floor. There was a detective sitting behind one of the desks, talking on the phone. At another desk, there was a detective tapping at a computer. Jeff was sitting next to him.

Jeff was in handcuffs. He looked totally miserable. His head was hanging down and his weaselly eyes weren’t darting around every which way like they usually did. They were just staring at the floor.

Until I came in, that is. When Jeff heard the interrogation room door open, he looked up. He saw me at the same time I saw him. He stared at me—and his eyes looked so dark and so unhappy, I actually felt sorry for him even though he’d beaten me up. He didn’t have a dad to get him out of trouble—and he was in a lot of it.

I paused for a minute and just stood there looking at Jeff as he looked at me. Then my father stopped walking. He turned back and took hold of my arm.

“Come on, son,” he said.

And I left the detective room with my dad as Jeff Winger sat there in handcuffs, watching me go.

I kept my mouth shut until Dad and I were in the Passat, driving out of the police station parking lot.

“Dad!” I said then. “That was so awesome! That was so cool! You turned that detective guy inside out! He never knew what hit him!”

“Well,” said my father quietly. “Then that makes two of us.”

I was about to say something else, but my mouth fell shut with a snap. I hadn’t really had time to think about how all this had seemed to my father. Me running off without telling anyone. Getting in more trouble over Jeff Winger without saying anything to him. And it was real trouble this time too. This wasn’t just some fistfight out by the side of the road. Harry Mac was dead! Murdered. And for a minute there, before my dad unleashed his death-ray intellect on Sims, I was feeling like I was the prime suspect.

“Listen, Dad, I’m really sorry. I’m, like, the worst son ever. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, no, no,” said my father, holding up his hand as he drove. “I can see what happened. I’m not sure you did exactly the right thing, but I can see you didn’t do anything actually wrong—not as far as I can tell anyway.”

I was quiet then, thinking about everything that had gone on. The Passat cruised down a tree-shaded lane of houses. It was Sunday quiet out there, the lawns and sidewalks empty, no one in sight. The afternoon sun shone through the late-winter branches, sending patches of light and shadow over the windshield.

“How could it happen?” I said after a while. “How could Jennifer’s hallucination come true?”

My father shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think . . .?”

I couldn’t find a way to put it into words, so after a minute my dad glanced at me. “Do I think what?”

“Well, do you think Jennifer might be some kind of, like, prophet or something?”

“A prophet?” He repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. “What do you mean?”

“Well, there are prophets in the Bible, right? People who had visions about what was going to happen . . .”

My dad gave an unhappy sort of laugh. “Well . . . I think the prophets in the Bible were just very wise people who knew how to listen to God in their hearts and who understood that actions have consequences.”

“But the prophets did have visions, didn’t they?”

“Yes, some of them.”

“So, I mean, isn’t it possible that Jennifer could be somebody like that? I mean, maybe her mom is taking her to the doctor and giving her medicine and whatever, and really she’s fine—she’s just seeing visions of things that haven’t happened yet.”

I watched my father as he thought this over. The corner of his mouth turned up in a smile as he drove, but it was a very sad smile, I thought.

“Listen, Sam,” he said finally. “Jennifer is a sick girl. She has a mental disorder and she’s having hallucinations. How those hallucinations managed to get you to that barn just as Harry Mac was being murdered—well, that I don’t know, but . . .”

He stopped. I thought there was something he wanted to say, but now he was the one who couldn’t figure out what words to use.

“But what?” I said.

“Aw, Sam . . .,” my father said with a sigh. “I’ve devoted my life to my faith, so you know what I believe. I believe there are powers beyond the ones we see, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Well, the world is not a magical place, that’s all. The things that happen are pretty predictable, and they can usually be explained in ordinary terms. People do bad things and bad things happen that we can’t control. People hurt each other. They get sick. They grow old and . . .” He shrugged.

And die, I thought. Like Mr. Boling.

My dad glanced at me and I looked away—because he looked so sad. I guess he was. I guess that’s why he sounded so sad.

“Well, then . . . how do you explain what happened?” I asked him now. “How do you explain that Jennifer had a hallucination about a coffin with someone alive inside it—and then I went off to that place and there was a box with Harry Mac alive inside it, just like she saw? And what about her telling me that something terrible was going to happen on Sunday—and then it did?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “I can’t explain it. Maybe it was just some kind of coincidence or . . . something. I don’t know.” He brought the Passat to a stop at a stop sign. He stayed there a second in order to turn and face me. “What I do know is that Jennifer needs medical help. She’s not a prophet, Sam. She has a disease, that’s all. Those are hallucinations she’s having. Not visions.”

I wanted to argue with him, but I decided against it. He looked like he wanted to stop talking about it now.

I wished I could’ve stopped talking about it too. But there was no way. When we got home, I had to tell the whole story all over again to John, who was kind of annoyed about my running out of church like that without telling him. Then that night, when my mom got home from the Bolings’ house, I had to tell it to her. She practically went through the ceiling like a bottle rocket.

Then the next day in school, Monday, everyone wanted to know about it. Zoe asked me about it on the way to history class. Mark and Nathan and Justin made a big deal about it in the cafeteria, pulling kids over to their table and getting me to tell them the story even if they already knew the details. At night, a radio station even called the house for an interview, but Dad wouldn’t let them talk to me.

More news came out the next day. We heard how Jeff Winger and Ed P. had both been charged with killing Harry Mac and a whole lot of other stuff too, like stealing cars. I guess that meant my dad was right and Harry Mac had been killed because he was talking to the police about what Jeff was doing. A couple of days later we heard that both guys had gotten lawyers. They were going to be tried as adults and faced long sentences in prison, maybe even life.

I only got a little news about Jennifer. Mark didn’t want to talk about it much. He told me his sister had been put in the secure ward at St. Agnes Hospital because she was so upset. He said they were waiting for the antischizophrenia medicine to kick in. Then they hoped she would calm down and they could put her with the rest of the patients.

It wasn’t until the end of the week that things started to quiet down a little bit. And by Friday people were finally talking about something else—namely, the big track meet against Empire and Cole. In fact, people were so excited about it, I went the whole day without anyone asking me a single question about Jeff or Harry or Ed. I was glad about that. Really glad. I thought maybe the whole thing was over. In fact, that night after dinner, I went on my computer and sent a message to Joe:

ME: Well, I guess that’s the end of it.

JOE: Guess so.

ME: I even got my bandage off. I almost look normal.

JOE: That’d be a first.

ME: I’m really glad it’s over. It’s been awful.

JOE: Well, like you said, it’s over now.

Just then, my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number on the readout. I picked it up.

“Sam Hopkins, Sam Hopkins,” a voice whispered to me breathlessly.

“Jennifer?” I said. My heart began speeding up. What now?

“I have to tell you what’s going to happen next,” Jennifer said.

“Next?” I said—or tried to say through my dry throat. “What do you mean? Jennifer, where are you? Did you run away again?”

“I can’t run away. I can’t, Sam Hopkins. They locked me up. They locked me up in the demon castle.”

The demon castle? I thought. “The hospital?” I said. “St. Agnes?”

“They gave me medicine so I wouldn’t hear, so I couldn’t see. But I can hear, Sam. I can see. I see with my eyes. Through the lies. I see who dies.”

“Jennifer,” I said. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I see what’s going to happen, Sam.”

I licked my dry lips. I tried to remember what my dad said. She was just sick. She was just having hallucinations.

But I remembered Harry Mac in the box too, like a man in a coffin, just as Jennifer had said.

“What do you see, Jennifer?” I asked her. “What do you see is going to happen?”

There was a long pause. And then suddenly—and this was just really terrifying—suddenly Jennifer whispered very quietly:

“So many dead, Sam! So many dead!”