Page 68 of You Can Make Me
“Somewhat. It’s more than that. The carnival itself…has certain properties that aid in healing. They found me after Virgil Evans attacked me and kept me safe for forty years.”
I put a hand over my mouth.“Oh my God. This whole time?”
“Well, for me it was only a few weeks. You can imagine my surprise when Kal and Ryan picked me up and told me it was twenty nineteen.”
“I can. Wait, how do you know about Granddad? Did you meet him?”
“I might’ve? I don’t remember a lot of things about my time there, but I saw him–at least I think it could be him—while using the board.” He looked to Walter, who nodded.
“I thought the board was lost in the explosion,” Denny said.
I must have looked confused, so Dane explained. “My board was lost in the tunnels of Virgil Evans’ hideout.”
“Until it wasn’t,” Walter said, shooting Denny a look. “It’s tricky like that. When you two came back to town, it showed up.”
“No shit?” Denny breathed.
“It’s true,” Walter said. “We used it. It showed us a tall, blond man walking through the carnival.”
Dane smiled. “He looked a lot like Cooper.”
I shook my head. There was so much information coming at me, and I wanted it all, but safety needed to be our first priority. “How does this board factor into what happened to you, and to me?”
Dane took a deep, cleansing breath. “I used it when I got to the house with Ryan and Kal. I helped Walter identify the man I’d seen at the carnival, Hunter Holland. Then I used it to locate Holland, Virgil, and all his sentinels. It worked. We used it the night we found you, but we were too late to help you.”
“But Dane, you couldn’t have known.”
Dane blew out a breath and looked to Walter, who gave him a sad smile. Then he turned back to me with a deep frown. “We thought if we used it again, it would lead us to Evans, but he’s gone silent. Whatever psychic link we had, it’s gone quiet.”
“Search teams working for the task force found a body at one of the sites where he’d worked,” Walter said. “There’s other evidence there, but I don’t think it’s him. I think he knew that he had a psychic link with Dane, and he cut it off to evade capture. I don’t think he’s dead. Neither does Charlene.”
“Shit. It couldn’t be easy, huh?” Denny swore. “I’m inclined to believe Charlene, too.”
“What do you mean by psychic link? And wait, what does Virgil Evans have to do with the man who attacked me?”
Walter exhaled. “Virgil Evans is the man who killed Tess Miller, and we discovered that he is the one who attacked Dane all those years ago. He is able to form psychic links with people. He claims it was something he learned to do in prison, but it must have been some innate gift he had that grew stronger once he was incarcerated and isolated. It’s hard to know how much he was capable of back then, or what he can still do now, if he’s alive.”
“Virgil sent Holland to find Dane, and we believe Holland was trying to break free of his hold when he attacked you,”Denny said. “You weren’t part of Virgil’s plan. That was something Holland wanted to experience. And killing himself was the only way he believed he could break free from Virgil’s hold.”
“Once they showed me a picture of him, I immediately recognized him from Tess’s place,” Dane said. “He was always trying to get access to her. We tried to keep him away. The night he attacked me, he assumed Tess was with me, and he saw my death as a means to get me out of the way so he could get toher. When Kal and I used the board, when you saw us, we’d just made contact with Evans and he told me everything.”
“You had answers, but the price you paid was staggering. Wait.” I held up a hand. I was starting to get a headache from all of this data. “How did he tell you everything? Aren’t those boards for communicating with spirits?”
“This particular board is special. As far as I can tell, it’s spelled or something. The only ones who know would be the old ladies, or maybe someone at the carnival. When I went in, Evans was there, in my mind. He told me all kinds of stuff, showed me horrible things. He couldn’t help himself. He confessed to everything.”
Walter added, “He used Hunter Holland because he couldn’t get into the carnival himself, and then he used several other individuals to try to get to Dane, one of whom attempted to kidnap Ryan from the house in Laurel Canyon. Evans also sent them to stop us from rescuing you. We were run off the road and shot at just before we got to you.”
I turned to glare at Denny. “You didn’t tell me they shot at you!”
Denny gave me a rueful smile. “We had more important things to worry about, baby. Like getting you well.”
“I’m sorry we weren’t faster, Cooper. I really am.” Dane’s voice was full of despair.
I wiped at my face. “It’s not your fault. I should have listened when Gene told me to stay away. I sort of lost all sense of self-preservation when you mentioned the carnival in our interview. I’ve been searching for it for so long, though now that I really think about it, I’m not sure why I was so hellbent.”
Dane cocked his head to the side. “What do you know about it?”
I blew out a breath. “Not much, but my granddad used to tell me stories. He used to joke that if he couldn’t be a newsman, he’d want to be a carnival director, and that when he died, he’d go to that ‘great carnival in the sky.’ Then when I was a teenager, I met some performers who said they were visiting from a traveling carnival.”
