Chapter 17 Annabelle
Annabelle
Annabelle left work early with a raging migraine.
It must be stress, she thought. She hadn’t had a headache this bad in years.
It was three o’clock, and the house was quiet.
Scarlett had a soccer game, so Dylan and the girls wouldn’t be home until close to five.
If it didn’t feel like a nail was boring through her skull, she would have loved to have surprised Scarlett by going, but all she wanted to do was lie down in a dark room with an ice pack on her forehead.
After downing three ibuprofens, she went upstairs.
She tried to quiet her thoughts, but she kept replaying the discussion between her and James about her dreams. When she’d tried to talk to him about it again, he’d cut her off midsentence.
She wasn’t crazy, and she wasn’t imagining things.
The plane crash, the restaurant, Scarlett’s vaping.
It was all too much to be a coincidence.
She remembered her mother telling her about the time her grandmother had dreamed about her husband clutching his chest and falling over.
She’d begged him to go to the doctor and get checked out.
He didn’t listen. A week later, he had a heart attack and died.
Annabelle’s mother said it was a curse that her mother had to bear, seeing these horrible things and no one believing her. And now it was happening to Annabelle.
She finally drifted off into a fitful sleep.
It’s pizza night and Parker sits at my side, his head on my leg, waiting and hoping I’ll share some crust with him.
I know I should scold him, but he’s so adorable with that sweet face and limpid brown eyes that I don’t.
When James isn’t looking, I break a piece of crust and hand it to him under the table.
“Nice try,” James says, “I saw it. That dog has turned into a pest because you all spoil him.”
“It’s not fair. We get to eat whenever we want. Parker has to wait for us to feed him,” Olivia says.
James shakes his head.
Scarlett’s phone pings, and she stands up to retrieve it from the counter.
“Not during dinner!” James admonishes.
She rolls her eyes. “It’s about a homework assignment. I’ll just be a sec.” She gets up and reads the text. “Oh, shoot!”
“What?”
“I forgot! I need a poster board for my presentation. I thought it was due Friday, but it’s tomorrow.”
I groan. “Scarlett! How many times have we asked you to plan ahead?”
“It’s okay, I’ll run you over to the store. We can swing by the grocery store too. I’m running low on my protein shake,” James says.
I clear the table after they leave, then open my laptop to jump on a Zoom call with the West Coast office.
After a while, I look up and see it’s almost eight-thirty.
They’ve been gone for over an hour and a half, and the shopping center is only a few miles away.
A feeling of unease comes over me. I pick up my phone, go to the “find me” app, and look up James’s phone.
It shows him on the road but not moving.
I try to navigate to his contact info to call him but the phone freezes.
My fingers poke the screen and nothing happens.
Why can’t I call him? I turn to go in search of the house phone but it’s like I’m stuck in quicksand.
I can barely move. The doorbell rings. A sense of dread overcomes me.
I don’t want to answer it. Something inside is telling me that once I do, my life will never be the same.
My legs feel leaden. The doorbell rings again.
I make my way to the hallway, again, in slow motion as my legs don’t seem to get the message that I need them to move.
When I finally reach the door and open it, a police officer is standing there.
“No,” I whisper before he says anything.
“Mrs. Reynolds?”
I nod.
“May I come in?”
I open the door without a word.
“Can we take a seat?”
“My husband was in an accident. Wasn’t he?”
He sighs deeply. “A pickup truck going the wrong way collided head-on with his car at 7:05.”
“And?”
“Your husband and your daughter are dead.”
Annabelle woke up with a cry, her eyes open, her pulse racing. “Thank God it was only a dream.” And then she heard the words and doubled over in terror. A dream or another premonition?