Dark Whispers & Other Stories

Nothing to say about this, really. I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and went downstairs to my office and started putzing around and all of a sudden the main character came to mind, and off I went.

1

The two men were about what you’d expect. Crew cuts. Freckles. Dark suits. Very white button-down shirts. Club neckties. Shoes so shiny they revealed that the men had spent at least some time in the armed forces. Intelligent but curiously empty blue eyes.

Five hours ago, the two men had been in Langley, Virginia. It had been raining, festive Indian summer suddenly giving way to the harsh gray tones of winter.

Missouri was a bit more fortunate. As the men walked from the small airport to the green Ford sedan that had been arranged for them, the temperature was 84 and the sunlight was so brilliant they quickly put on their sunglasses.

“Hot,” said the first man as they strode — each gripping an identical brown leather attaché case in his right hand — across concrete and then across gravel and then across grass to where the Ford sat.

You could smell asphalt melt. You could smell smoke in the surrounding hills. You could smell burning sunlight and dog shit on the green lawn and exhaust from passing cars. You could smell the sweat on their faces commingle with the sharp scent of Old Spice.

“Very hot,” said the second man, as he opened up the rear door of the sedan and set his attaché case on the back seat.

In a few minutes, they had the front windows rolled down and they were pulling away from the airport. They drove slowly.

There was no hurry. They could do what they’d come to do and there would still be plenty of time to be on the last flight out tonight at 10:08 p.m.

2

Name: Jessica Anne Reardon

Present Address: 145 Farber Avenue, Baxter, Missouri

Occupation: student, Wilson Junior High

Parents: William and Helen Reardon

Occupation (father): factory worker

Occupation (mother): housewife

The first time Jessica exhibited her special talents was in first grade when she woke up one morning and came down to breakfast and told her mother that she’d had a terrible dream. Her older brother David would be hit by a car today.

Later, of course, her mother would feel guilty about the way she reacted. She told Jessica that many people, herself included, often had terrible dreams about people they loved but that didn’t mean anything, and they never came true.

At 3:04 that same afternoon, David Reardon was struck from behind on his bicycle. Both his arms were broken, and it was feared at first that the paralysis in his legs might be permanent.

Approximately a year later, Jessica had a dream about the house next door catching fire. She did not tell anybody about the dream because by now she was afraid that her dream about David had not only predicted his bicycle accident, but had somehow caused it to come true.

That night, the elderly widow Mrs. Pinehurst was burned to death while sleeping in her bed.

Over the next six years, eight more dreams of Jessica’s proved true. There was the school bus accident with the football team aboard; the explosion in the boiler room of Rafferty’s department store; the tornado that ripped apart an entire mobile home court, leaving ten dead, including an infant. And so on.

During this time, Mr. and Mrs. Reardon had consulted with a city council member (a shirt-tail cousin of the mister’s); a young and wry and somewhat snotty priest; a psychologist who showed a most appreciative eye for Mrs. Reardon’s worn but gentle beauty; and a minister who kept glancing at himself in the mirror behind Mr. Reardon’s head. (Mr. Reardon had worn a necktie for this particular meeting and the minister had looked suitably impressed, until Mr. Reardon told him that he worked in the local Choate factory on the loading dock. It was then that the minister had frowned and started looking at himself in the mirror.)

All these people said the same thing.

The dreams are just coincidence.

There’s nothing wrong — or special — about your daughter.

Just go back home and lead a nice, normal family life and don’t pay any attention to these dreams.

Lots of people have them and they don’t mean a darn thing. All right? Well, thanks for stopping in Mr. and Mrs. Reardon, and good luck on everything.

3

Dr. Fran Lederer had never been exactly sure why she’d come to the blue hills of Missouri, and taken the job as psychologist for the school district.

She supposed it might have been because of a broken heart (rather badly broken, in fact) and because, having grown up in New York City, she had a sentimental notion of rural life. Life here would be clean and simple and she’d meet at last the “right” man and they would live out a clean and simple life together.

Instead, she’d found Baxter to be a small city of rigid class and religious lines.

The first man she dated that first autumn could never get over the fact that she was Jewish. It was all he talked about, her being Jewish, and she soon tired of it, and spent the winter alone in her three-room apartment writing letters to her sarcastic friend Sharon and getting to know her cat, Sara.

In the spring, she took a driver’s ed course, bought a car and started driving around the countryside. She found a huge pottery kiln that fascinated her, and among the local artists who worked there she met a man named Steve Robisher, whom she liked a lot.

The following September, a rain-lashed, late afternoon, she was sitting in her tiny office watching the rain slant silver and cold from the dark sky, when a new blue Chevrolet sedan pulled up and three people emerged, running immediately for her office building.

This was her first sight of the Reardon family. Her first impression was that they were working class in a sound, dignified way; that the mother and father looked very young to have a daughter this age; and that their problem, whatever it was, was serious. In this part of the country, folks were skeptical about psychologists. Getting fathers to come to a session was a tug-of-war. Yet this father had shown up willingly. Hence: these people had a serious problem.

At that first meeting, they told Fran of Jessica’s history of predictive dreams and while Fran had listened as politely as possible, she was not convinced that anything remarkable was going on here. Applying scientific method to what the Reardons were describing would soon discredit it.

What Fran was interested in was fourteen-year-old Jessica herself. She had the same shy beauty as her mother except for her eyes. They told of some great and overburdening sorrow. Fran could never recall seeing such grief in the dark eyes of a teenage girl. She wanted to learn about the events that had put such sorrow in Jessica’s eyes, and then she wanted to help Jessica take that grief away forever.

Fran was careful not to hurt any feelings, not to make them feel crazy in any way. She said that the dreams were interesting but that before she could appraise them, she would have to know a great deal more about Jessica. She would, she said, like to see Jessica once a week for an indefinite period. Would that be all right?

Thus began the friendship between Fran and Jessica, between Fran and the entire Reardon family, really.

4

Jessica’s summer job continued into the fall. Mr. Washburn at the Rexall Pharmacy kept her on as a stock clerk. He’d never had much luck with boys, they just couldn’t concentrate on what they were doing, and so Jessica was perfect.

She liked stock work. She’d spent a week at the cash register up front but her shyness had turned the task into an ordeal. She didn’t know what to say when boys flirted with her, she didn’t know what to say when the adults whispered about her. Most of the townspeople knew about her dreams. Some people snickered at her. Others shook their heads at her, as if she were bedeviled or insane. She felt humiliated by all this.

Her job ended at six-thirty. Most days she went straight home, out along Renzler Park Road. She loved Indian summer sunsets, the impossible colors streaking the sky, indigo and gold and vermillion and wine-red. She loved the smell, too, of day’s end, heat fading to a slight chill, and the melancholy cries of dogs and birds as the harvest moon first appeared in the dusk.

On Fridays after work, she went to Fran’s. She called her by name now, and not “Doctor” because during the past year they had become best friends.

Over small bottles of ice-cold Cokes Fran kept in a little refrigerator, the two talked usually until nine or ten about every subject imaginable, from the boys Jessica found cute, to what fun Fran used to have as a high school student going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and places like that. Fran promised to take Jessica to New York the summer of Jessica’s high school graduation.

And of course, they talked about the dreams.

There had been two of them in the past year and both of them had turned out to be accurate in what they had predicted. One snowy afternoon Fran and Jessica had bundled up, gotten into Fran’s five-year-old Dodge, and driven to the state university, where a somber man with a salt-and-pepper beard and thick black horn-rimmed glasses questioned Jessica for more than three hours. At the beginning of this session, Jessica had been terrified. By the end, she was merely exhausted.

On the way home, driving no more than thirty miles per hour because of the drifting snow and all the emergency alerts on the radio, Fran had explained that Dr. Toler was a famous parapsychologist and was interested in talking with Jessica again in a year or so. He’d told Fran to keep an accurate journal of everything that Jessica dreamed about.

Then a month ago, Jessica had started having one dream in particular, and several times over a week.

The first time she heard it, Fran was clearly rattled. She asked Jessica to ride her bike over three times a week instead of one.

This dream had disturbed Jessica greatly, too. Many nights, she couldn’t sleep. She lost twelve pounds in three weeks. Her parents kept asking what was wrong but Jessica did not want to share this particular dream. She was horrified that if she told anybody but Fran and the dream then came true — she was afraid she would be marked a freak forever.

The terrible dream was their secret, Fran and Jessica’s, and Jessica had agreed to let Fran decide the best thing to do about it.

5

Seven months ago, Fran had changed offices. A garden shed in back of the main red-brick administration building had been remodeled into a small office. Fran took it, the shed being about the size of a one-stall garage and offering her clients more privacy.

Jessica leaned her Schwinn against the oak tree to the right of the shed, inhaled deeply of the fresh dusk air, and went inside. The temperature had already dipped into the low forties and Fran had the oil heater turned up. Jessica could smell the oil fumes as she opened the screen door to knock.

“C’mon in, my friend,” Fran called.

Inside, Fran sat at a large black manual typewriter. She worked quickly but with only two fingers. The keys striking the platen sounded loud and hollow in the silence. “Be right with you. Help yourself to a Coke.” Her back was to Jessica. She hadn’t turned around.

The shed was one large room. In the center was the Montgomery Ward oil stove. To the left of it were two big easy chairs that had been recovered recently. One wall was filled with books of all kinds, the other wall with a row of four three-drawer filing cabinets.

Jessica got a Coke from the refrigerator, then went over and sat down in one of the easy chairs. She watched Fran type. She hoped some day that she had Fran’s poise and elegance.

Suddenly, Fran stopped typing and said, “Hey, maybe I should show you the letter.”

“Letter?”

“The one I sent two days ago.”

“About—”

Fran’s dark eyes held Jessica’s. “About your dream, my friend. I had to do something.”

Jessica loved it when Fran called her “my friend.” It made her feel very special.

Fran opened the center drawer of her desk and took out a copy of the letter she’d sent. She fluttered the paper like a bird’s wing, and Jessica took it.

Jessica looked at who the letter was addressed to and said, “You really sent it to him?”

“I really sent it to him. Seems like he’s the right person, don’t you think?”

“Gosh,” Jessica said, excited. “Gosh.”

6

After Jessica was inside and sitting down with Fran, the two men stepped from the shadows of the administration building and went to work quickly.

Both men crouched, running through the shadows to the front door of the shed.

Both men set their identical brown attaché cases on the ground and began pulling out various pieces of equipment.

The stove inside burned oil. It would not be difficult to make it look as if a terrible accident had taken place.

Ready now, the men nodded to each other.

The first man went to the door of the shed and knocked. In a moment, Fran opened up. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry, miss. We’ve had some car trouble. I wonder if we could use your phone.”

Crew cut. Dark suits. White shirts. Intelligent faces.

“Of course. Come in,” Fran said, stepping aside for the men.

7

The explosion scattered everything inside the small shed for hundreds of yards.

Glass, wood, tiling, metal — all looked like the remnants of a giant airplane crash. Fran and Jessica, the fire inspector who wrote up the final report surmised, had had no warning of the explosion. They had died instantly and without pain. Both the Lederer and Reardon families had wanted to be reassured of this.

8

On the night of the explosion, the two men in crew cuts and dark suits made their last flight out of Baxter as planned.

When they reached Washington, D.C., and the black Oldsmobile sedan waiting for them, the first man excused himself and went over to a pay phone.

He deposited the proper number of coins and waited for an answer.

A gruff male voice said, “Yes.”

“It’s me, Ruffin.”

“How did it go?”

“Very, very well.”

The man on the other end of the phone sighed. “You’ll be properly rewarded, Mr. Ruffin. And the same for your partner.”

“Thank you, sir.”

9

And with that, J. Edgar Hoover set the receiver back down in its cradle.

He had been expecting Ruffin’s call for the past hour.

So it was done and the mission ahead of him was once again back on track.

He stared down at the piece of plain typing paper that the woman had typed her letter on.

Hoover put his face into his hands and tried to rub away sleep.

With the assassination plans so near to hand, this letter could have been a disaster.

How could anybody have guessed the time and place for Kennedy to be killed?

Well, now there wasn’t anything more to worry about. The girl with the dream and her hysterical counselor were threats no longer.

He lifted the receiver up again and dialed a familiar number from memory.

“I sure as hell hope you’re going to tell me that all this bullshit about dreams is over, Edgar.”

Hoover winced. He didn’t approve of swearing.

But then how else could you expect a swine like Lyndon Baines Johnson to act, anyway?

“Yessir, Mr. Vice President, it’s over and now we can get back to concentrating on Dallas.”

“Good,” Johnson said. “Good.”