Swimmer Read Free Page B

seen faces and people and things that he didn’t want to think of, ever again. Shadows, ghosts. Demons running through the streets, and screaming at him out of closets. Dead people, standing outside supermarkets. Sad and bewildered faces, reflected in windows, when there was nobody there.
    He couldn’t take any more of it. People didn’t seem to understand that he found his psychic ability even more frightening than they did. He had no choice about what he saw. If he went to visit a friend, and his friend’s dead grandfather was sitting in the corner of the room, and only Jim could see him, what could he do about it? What was he supposed to say?
    As he sat there, Tibbles Two dropped off the couch on to the floor. She padded across to the coffee table, where Jim had stacked all his various decks of mystical cards. She stood up on her hind legs and tipped the Grimaud deck on to the floor, so that the cards were scattered out of their box.
    â€˜Thanks, TT,’ said Jim. ‘It’s nice to know that there’s somebody even messier than me.’
    He knelt down to pick up the cards, but while he was shuffling them back into order, TT picked one out of the deck between her teeth and walked off into the kitchen with it.
    â€˜The hell—’ said Jim, and followed her.
    TT was standing over her water bowl. With great care she dropped the Grimaud card into the water, and watched it as it sank.
    â€˜Great move,’ said Jim. He knelt down and picked the card out of the water, and shook it. It was the death card, the card of the empty-eyed skeleton, the nine of clubs, wrapped in a dark gray sheet with a scythe over his shoulder and an hourglass in his hand.
    â€˜What’s this?’ Jim asked her, holding up the dripping card. ‘All of a sudden you’re playing boats?’
    TT stared at him as if she couldn’t believe how stupid he was.
    â€˜What, then?’ he demanded.
    She came up to him and flicked the card out of his hand with her paw. Then she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it back in the water bowl.
    â€˜Death in the water,’ said Jim. ‘That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? Death by drowning. And more than one death.’
    He fished the card out of the water bowl and shook it. ‘Listen … I’m going to see Jennie and try to find out what happened. But I can’t do anything more than that. I’m still leaving for Washington Wednesday, and when I’m gone, I’m gone for good. And nobody else in the world is ever going to discover that I can see their recently deceased nephew playing ball on their lawn.’

Two
    J ennie looked smaller and much more pale than he remembered her – as if the laughing, suntanned, provocative girl that he had taught in Special Class II all those years ago had died, and this was her ghost. She was sitting in the corner of the café with a glass of mineral water, staring out of the window, and it was only when Jim walked right up to her table that she lifted her eyes, and focused them, and gave him the faintest suggestion of a smile.
    â€˜Well, well. Jennie Bauer.’
    â€˜Jennie Oppenheimer these days.’
    Jim sat down, and ordered a Coors. ‘What happened to your son … that was terrible. I had some friends in San Fernando who lost their daughter in their pool. Tragic.’
    â€˜You mean that she was deliberately drowned, like Mikey?’
    Jim sat back in his chair and looked at her in just the same narrow-eyed way that he looked at all of his students when they flew off on some over-imaginative tangent. ‘You saw the bushes move, and you saw some wet footprints beside the pool?’
    â€˜Somebody was there, Mr Rook. Somebody or something. I could feel it. It was cold. It was very evil. And I swear to God I’m not making this up.’
    Jim’s Coors arrived, in a ridiculously tall, frosted glass. Personally, he preferred it straight out of