Chapter 11

After the Professor Sloan debacle, Brian fell off Sharon’s list of peeps. She gave him the cold shoulder at the video store and steered clear of him on campus. Even worse, Rebecca went silent, too. Not one single dream about her or with her or whatever they’d been doing.

Dead silence. For days.

He couldn’t sleep. Or when he did, he couldn’t remember his dreams. School became a blur of half-heard lectures, sloppy homework, and tortured daydreams about his amazing Ogham-speaking girlfriend and what he might have done to chase her away. The list was short.

I let Sharon look at her book.

Then, a week after the Ogham incident, Sharon texted him.

Can you meet me at Grainger Hall right away? I’ve been helping Abigail with a research paper on American myths, and you won’t believe what we found! First study room upstairs. Don’t bring anyone.

No chance. He’d already messed up by letting a secret see the light of day. Best to keep his distance now. He texted back.

Can’t make it.

Fifteen seconds later:

Don’t make me kill you, Brian.

Okay, so this was big enough to prompt death threats. But his lips were sealed. No more book showings or other Rebecca info of any kind.

He headed to the appointed meeting place and opened the door.

“Quick! Close it behind you!” Sharon stood before a table so cluttered with documents and news clippings, some had fallen to the floor.

She flashed a sunny smile, chasing away whatever cloud of ill will had been hovering between them before. Wider than she’d been smiling when lights turned a poster girl’s lips from blue to yellow to purple during their ice-cream date a thousand years earlier. “Look who I found!”

Not the cleaning crew. They would have swept the mess away. But seriously, only a surprise of massive proportions would have anyone this ready to jump onto the table and tap-dance.

Surprises hadn’t been his friend lately. He almost didn’t ask the question begging to be asked. “Who did you find?”

“Rebecca!”

Geez. He should have ignored the death threat and stayed away.

Sharon thrust a copy from some old journal page into his hands. “Remember the research I was doing for Abigail? Well, did I ever find a smoking witch! Her legend dates back to the days when the first trappers traveled across the Great American Desert.”

This conversation could only be heading toward the revelation Rebecca’s cabin sat on the gravesite of some mythical witch. He’d seen the marker. And now, he groped for the doorknob behind him.

“Don’t even think about bolting.” One after another, Sharon held up copies of maps, beginning with one so old it didn’t define anything west of the Mississippi, to another segregating the Nebraska and Kansas territories, and finally to a map showing all forty-eight contiguous states. The same general area had been circled in orange on each. “The Witch of the Hills has been haunting the region you visited for centuries!”

He had to humor her. Sharon was too jacked with insane enthusiasm to let him out of the room without a fight. So he took a closer look at the highlighted sections of each map. Yes, his car had stalled somewhere in there, but the circles were big. Maybe fifty miles across. Besides, did she say centuries? “Rebecca’s our age, Sharon.”

“Who says witches show their warts and wrinkles?” She gestured to a pile of newspaper clippings. “Those accounts date back two hundred years, and they all describe a teenage girl. She provides food and shelter to anyone who finds her cabin. Sound familiar?”

Right. If he’d met Rebecca in Oregon, Sharon would have called her Bigfoot. Other than the mild coincidence that Rebecca had been in the same general area as this mythical witch, he probably wouldn’t find a single thing on the table linking her to the legend.

He grabbed the nearest clipping to prove his point. “Okay, Sharon, I’ll read this one and you tell me how—”

A single word jumped out at him. Furlongs.

His voice caught in his throat.

Sharon’s eyes widened. “What’s the matter? You look like you saw a ghost.”

Yeah, something like that. He had two choices. Turn and run or peer down into the chasm. Option one was awfully tempting but, “Can you…read this? I got something in my eye.”

“Sure.” She took the clipping, read in silence, looked up. “Okay, listen. According to the legend, the witch camouflages her cabin, spins compasses in the wrong directions, and shifts landmarks from place to place. We haven’t found a single report mentioning multiple sightings by the same person.”

The room swam—just as the sky had that day in Nebraska. After he’d had an impossible time trying to find the cabin from the farm. He reached for the back of a chair to hold steady. “No, Sharon, lower down.”

“Oh. Twenty furlongs but never more, the circle at the edge and the cabin at the core.”

Furlongs. Rebecca used the same term. His hands tingled.

She looked up at him. “Rebecca can’t step outside the circle.”

“Don’t say Rebecca, Sharon. This is some myth about—”

“About a random girl who just happens to write a dead language in her book and sketch Wiccan symbols in the margins?”

Somebody knocked on the door.

Brian swung around…and caught his breath.

The scraggily-haired girl in the prairie dress stood in the doorway.

No, not that girl. Had he totally lost it? This girl did look vaguely similar, but she wore a skirt and blouse. And her hair was curly, not scraggily. Same brunette color, but was today the day for taking wildly circumstantial evidence as gospel? This girl stood here, a thousand miles and a whole different world away from the other girl, the crazy hitchhiker he’d met on the side of the highway in Wyoming.

Right?

“Come on in, Abigail,” Sharon said. “This is Brian.”

He tried to speak. Swallowed. Tried again. “Um, have we met? Sharon said you know me.”

Abigail looked him up and down, blank-faced. She glanced at Sharon, shrugged. “Maybe you’re a friend of a friend on Facebook?”

Not likely. Sharon had implied far more than a vague connection the day she helped him with his tire. “Didn’t you tell Sharon you knew I was staying with my aunt?”

She shrugged again. “I must have read your profile.”

Dreaming. He had to be. Too much weirdness had been packed into the last ten minutes. “Listen, I’ve gotta run. Good luck with your paper, Abigail.” He headed out the door. “See you at work, Sharon.”

He should have headed for his next class, but the urge to get in his car overpowered him. The time had come to drive into the sunset and not slow down until he reached the Sand Hills. Maybe the shared dreams had stalled out, but he could still head west and find the real deal. Rebecca. In the flesh.

He turned toward the hallway doors leading outside.

“Stay away from her, Brian.”

Abigail’s voice cut right through him. A nasally tone he’d definitely heard before, on the side of the Interstate in Wyoming. He stumbled, caught himself, and turned to face…who?

A friend of a friend on Facebook who’d taken stalker to a whole new level, tracking him halfway across the country?

No. He’d driven away that day. The hitchhiker had faded into the background in his rearview mirror. She wouldn’t have known how to find him.

But she did find him.

License plate?

Abigail closed in, staring with the same dead-eyed expression she’d used when she warned him about the billboard. “Witches are dangerous, Brian. Let her be.”

He bunched his fists. “What’s your game?”

She smiled. First time he’d seen her do that, and the difference was night and day. No longer the cult type he’d met on the highway, she came across as the friendly, innocent girl next door. “My game is dots.”

“What?”

“You have to connect them.” Abigail turned on her heel, walked to the end of the hall, opened the door, and stepped out of his life.

He hoped.

Brian’s legs were jelly. He wobbled one foot in front of the other, heading in the opposite direction. He reached the door, grabbed the bar handle with both hands, and…a few dots came together. He remembered exactly what Rebecca had said about distances that day in the hills. “Let’s put the tree twenty furlongs behind us.”

But the road had been farther. Rebecca walked a good half mile beyond the circle to meet him by his car. She wasn’t some mythical witch. She was a fantastic girlfriend he’d soon find.

He pushed the bar…and remembered something so creepy a chill ran down his back. When they found the noose, Rebecca muttered the name of her bully.

Abigail.

The dots didn’t come close to connecting. His encounter with the hitchhiker had been random. Same with his detour north into the Sand Hills. What were the odds the same Abigail had been in both places?

What were the odds she’d track him to Wisconsin?

And why would she?

He shuddered. Hurried to his car.

All four tires were flat.