Chapter 1
June 27, Olathe, Kansas
The man who was going to stand by and watch while Helen burned to death liked his coffee black.
Helen looked up from her menu and, across the little diner, she saw him sitting there, not twenty feet away. He was the man of her dreams—or more accurately, of her visions. Technically it was just one vision. Over and over. She was going up in flames while he watched. Smiling at her.
“See something you like?” asked Lexi, the diner’s only waitress on duty. She’d been working at Gertie’s Diner for only a couple of months now, but there was something about her that made Helen trust her enough to share things no other living person knew, including Helen’s vision of her own death. “Cook’s gone for the day, so all we have left is meat loaf, baked chicken, and pot roast. Pick your poison.”
Across from Helen, her dinner companion, Miss Mabel, sat low in the red vinyl booth. Her age-hunched shoulders barely cleared the table. Her gnarled hands gripped the laminated menu, which wavered so much Helen wasn’t sure how she could read it without getting motion sickness.
“How’s the meat loaf?” asked Miss Mabel.
Lexi was a petite twenty-something with a killer body and a brain to match. What she was doing waiting tables in Olathe, Kansas, living in her car, was a total mystery to Helen—one Lexi refused to solve no matter how many times Helen asked. She’d offered to let Lexi stay with her until she found a place, but Lexi said she wouldn’t bring trouble to Helen’s doorstep when she clearly had enough of her own.
Lexi leaned down until her short, white-blond spikes threatened to poke Miss Mabel in the eye. “You’d be safer eating two-day-old roadkill, which is what I’m guessing Paulo used to make the meat loaf. He left early when I started asking questions about it. Smart man.”
Miss Mabel blanched a little. “Definitely no meat loaf. I’ll take the pot roast.”
Lexi winked and wrote it down on her pad of order slips. “How ’bout you, Helen? What can I get you today?”
Helen tried to focus on her menu as she held it up to shield her face so Vision Man couldn’t see her. Her hands trembled, making the words blur. She was already on the verge of panic. If he caught her watching him, she was sure she’d lose it completely.
Helen wanted to scream at Lexi to throw the pot of scalding coffee into his lap and run away. Instead, she fought her rising panic for a chance to learn something about him in the hope of escaping the vision. She sank lower in her seat and tried to pretend that everything was fine, which she did with flying colors. Helen had a lot of practice at pretending everything was fine.
“I’m not sure,” said Helen to stall for more time, hoping her hands would stop shaking so hard she could read the menu. Against her better judgment, she eased the menu aside so she could take a quick peek. Maybe she’d imagined it was him.
Nope. It was Vision Man. In the flesh.
He listened to what one of the men sitting across from him was saying while he sipped his coffee. One thick arm was sprawled out across the back of the booth and she could see some sort of tattoo peeking out from under Vision Man’s T-shirt sleeve. Strands of hair, maybe? Vines? She couldn’t be sure at this distance and she didn’t think staring long enough to figure it out was a smart move. She did not want him to notice her staring. She didn’t want him to notice her, period.
He had thick brown hair that was just getting long enough to show off a bit of curl. And that was the only thing about him that looked soft. He had high, almost sharp cheekbones with deep hollows beneath. His mouth was pressed into a hard, flat line as he listened to his friend, his expression grim, almost angry. The muscles in his jaw bunched as if he was grinding his teeth, and Helen had the distinct impression that he was in pain. Lots of pain.
Good. It served him right for watching her die. Not that he’d committed that particular crime yet, but he would. She knew it like she knew the sun would set in a few minutes. There was nothing fake or distorted about her vision. She’d tried for years to find some flaw, some speck of doubt that what she saw was real. Tried and failed. And now she knew that her time was nearly up. The man in her vision was this man, not an older version of him.
Helen was going to die soon. Maybe tonight.
Grief and fear swelled up in her chest and she fought them down. Focused on her breathing and relaxing each little muscle starting at her fingertips. She’d learned the technique from her therapist, who was convinced she was suffering from some sort of delusion. All she had to do was face it and it would go away. Well, she was facing it now and it wasn’t going anywhere. Fifty thousand dollars and many years later, she was still just as deluded, but at least she could keep the fear at bay. Breathing and relaxing was the only way she knew to control the panic. The only way to keep herself from screaming in terror.
Burning alive. What a fucking gruesome fate.
She’d tried to prepare herself for this, but she’d obviously failed. It was too soon. She wasn’t ready to die yet. There was still so much work left to be done. So many people who needed her help.
“You okay?” asked Lexi, her pale forehead puckering with a frown. She glanced over her shoulder to where Helen kept trying not to look. Vision Man and two others sat drinking coffee and eating pie as though they had all the time in the world. Man, wouldn’t that be nice.
“Those guys bothering you?” asked Lexi, sounding more worried from Helen’s lack of response.