Doctor Sleep

said, “and so do you. Get with us on this, Dave. Please. It’s important.”
    “I want to know about you and my daughter,” Davesaid to Dan. “Tell me about that.”
    Dan went through it again. Doodling Abra’s name in his AA meeting book. The first chalked hello. His clear sense of Abra’s presence on the night Charlie Hayes died. “I asked if she was the little girl who sometimes wrote on my blackboard. She didn’t answer in words, but there was a little run of piano music. Some old Beatles tune, I think.”
    Dave looked at John.“You told him about that!”
    John shook his head.
    Dan said, “Two years ago I got a blackboard message from her that said, ‘They are killing the baseball boy.’ I didn’t know what it meant, and I’m not sure Abra did, either. That might have been the end of it, but then she saw that .” He pointed to the back page of The Anniston Shopper with all those postage-stamp portraits.
    Abra told the rest.
    When she was done, Dave said: “So you flew to Iowa on a thirteen-year-old girl’s sayso.”
    “A very special thirteen-year-old girl,” John said. “With some very special talents.”
    “We thought all that was over.” Dave shot Abra an accusing look. “Except for a few little premonitions, we thought she outgrew it.”
    “I’m sorry, Daddy.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
    “Maybe she shouldn’t have to be sorry,” Dan said, hoping he didn’t sound as angry as he felt. “She hid her ability because she knew you and your wife wanted it to be gone. She hid it because she loves you and wanted to be a good daughter.”
    “She told you that, I suppose?”
    “We never even discussed it,” Dan said. “But I had a mother I loved dearly, and because I did, I did the same thing.”
    Abra shot him a look of nakedgratitude. As she lowered her eyes again, she sent him a thought. Something she was embarrassed to say out loud.
    “She also didn’t want her friends to know. She thought they wouldn’t like her anymore. That they’d be scared of her. She was probably right about that, too.”
    “Let’s not lose sight of the major issue,” John said. “We flew to Iowa, yes. We found the ethanol plant in the town of Freeman,just where Abra said it would be. We found the boy’s body. And his glove. He wrote the name of his favorite baseball player in the pocket, but his name—Brad Trevor—is written on the strap.”
    “He was murdered. That’s what you’re saying. By a bunch of wandering lunatics.”
    “They ride in campers and Winnebagos,” Abra said. Her voice was low and dreamy. She was looking at the towel-wrapped baseballglove as she spoke. She was afraid of it, and she wanted to put her hands on it. These conflicting emotions came through to Dan so clearly that they made him feel sick to his stomach. “They have funny names, like pirate names.”
    Almost plaintively, Dave asked, “Are you sure the kid was murdered?”
    “The woman in the hat licked his blood off her hands,” Abra said. She had been sitting on the stairs.Now she went to her father and put her face against his chest. “When she wants it, she has a special tooth. All of them do.”
    “This kid was really like you?”
    “Yes.” Abra’s voice was muffled but understandable. “He could see through his hand.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Like when certain pitches would come, he could hit them because his hand saw them first. And when his mother lost something, he’dput his hand over his eyes and look through it to see where the thing was. I think. I don’t know that part for sure, but sometimes I use my hand that way.”
    “And that’s why they killed him?”
    “I’m sure of it,” Dan said.
    “For what? Some kind of ESP vitamin? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”
    No one replied.
    “And they know Abra’s on to them?”
    “They know.” She raised her head. Her cheekswere flushed and wet with tears. “They don’t know my name or where I live, but they know there is a me.”
    “Then we need to go to the police,” Dave said. “Or maybe . . . I guess we’d want the FBI in a case like this. They might have trouble believing it at first, but if the body’s there—”
    Dan said, “I won’t tell you that’s a bad idea until we see what Abra can do with the baseball glove, but youneed to think pretty carefully about the consequences. For me, for John, for you and your wife, and most of all for Abra.”
    “I don’t see what kind of trouble