Burning Alive
Page 1

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.
“Uh, no.” Just breathe. That’s all she had to do. Breathe in. Breathe out. “I’ll have the pot roast, too.”
Lexi turned back around. “Now I know something’s wrong. You never eat red meat.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t live forever,” said Helen.
Lexi’s petite body stilled and Helen could almost hear the wheels in her head turn. “Holy shit! That’s him, isn’t it?” asked Lexi in a near whisper.
Helen wished for the millionth time that she’d just kept her mouth shut, or that Lexi wasn’t quite so intuitive. Lexi should have been a bartender or an interrogator instead of a waitress, the way she was able to get a woman to spill her guts.
Miss Mabel’s scarlet lips turned down in a disapproving frown. “I thought I’d quit hearing talk like that when I retired from teaching high school.”
“Sorry, Miss Mabel,” said Lexi, patting the older woman’s hand. “Pie’s on me tonight as payment for my potty mouth.”
“Forget the pie, tell me about the man.” Miss Mabel twisted her bent body around in her seat so she could see where Lexi had been looking. Not that the men were hard to spot, seeing as how they were the only other customers in the diner tonight—well after the dinner rush.
Helen felt a frantic bubble of fear rise up inside her. “Don’t look!”
“You never told me you had a boyfriend,” said Miss Mabel as if it was the crime of the century—a huge betrayal of their friendship that she’d kept a secret.
“He’s not my boyfriend. Stop looking!” She was begging, on the verge of panic. What if he noticed them looking? What if he walked over here right now and looked at her with that half smile on his face—the one he wore when he watched her die? This could be her last few minutes on earth and the only solace she could find was that her will was updated and all the money she’d inherited from her mother would go to help pediatric burn victims.
Lexi—bless her—shifted her slim hips so that they were between the men and Miss Mabel’s wide, obvious gaze. Helen knew that if the men did bother to look over here, one glance at Lexi’s ass would be enough distraction for any red-blooded man to forget what he’d just been thinking.
Miss Mabel struggled to get her frail spine to cooperate, but couldn’t manage to outmaneuver Lexi—not with her waitress reflexes. The old woman gave a frustrated sigh. “You either tell me what’s going on or I get my walker and go over there and find out for myself.”
Lexi gave Helen an apologetic grimace. “I should have kept my mouth shut. If you want, I’ll kick them out.”
“That wouldn’t really help the whole trying-not-to-get-noticed thing I’m working on here,” said Helen.
“Why don’t you want those men to notice you? Are they stalkers? Should I call the police?” asked Miss Mabel. “I knew I should have bought one of those cell phones.”
“No,” said Helen, trying to think fast enough to outwit a woman who had taught public school for thirty years. “He’s just a guy I have a crush on. I don’t want him to know.”
“Why not? You’re a lovely girl and you should just go right over there and ask him out. That is how it’s done these days, and if I’m not too old to know that, then neither are you.”
“I can’t do that.” Helen slid down deeper in the booth seat and lifted the menu up to shield her face again.
“Well, then, I will. You need a man, Helen. I’m not going to let you end up old and childless like me.” And with that declaration, Miss Mabel reached for her walker at the end of the booth, positioning it so she could stand.
Helen had to get Miss Mabel to stop before Vision Man saw her. Maybe if Helen got out of here unnoticed, there would still be time before she died. Even if it was only a few more days, or even hours, Helen wanted every one of them.
“You can’t. He’s married.” The lie slipped out so smoothly it surprised Helen. It was the first time in her life she’d ever lied to a teacher, and already her stomach was turning sour.
Miss Mabel’s head whipped around faster than Helen would have thought possible, considering her frail neck and the weight of the giant bun she wore held up by a single yellow number-two pencil. “You’re lusting after a married man?” She whispered it as if just saying the words was a sin. “Oh, honey, don’t you know that can only end badly?”
Thank you, God. Miss Mabel swallowed the lie. “I know,” said Helen, hanging her head, still strategically placed behind the menu. “That’s why I’m staying away from him. I can’t help the way I feel about him, but I can keep my distance.”
“See that you do,” said Miss Mabel, slipping into her lecturing voice. “Maybe we should just go now and have dinner elsewhere.”
Hallelujah! “Good idea. We can go anywhere you like,” Helen told Miss Mabel. They always went out to eat on Tuesday night, and Helen couldn’t stand to disappoint her, not even if her world was spiraling toward its end. She’d spent the past ten years trying to do something meaningful with her life. She wasn’t smart enough to find a cure for cancer and she wasn’t strong enough to join the military or brave enough to join the police or firefighters, but she made a difference to a few dozen shut-ins, bringing them food and company or just getting them out of the house for a few hours. It wasn’t much to her, but it was to them. She saw it in their eyes every time she showed up at their front doors and every time she left. For some of those people, she was all they had and that was enough for her. It had to be.