Crystal Vision

by Patricia Rice

  Sam and Mariah turned to study the figure Tullah was working on.

  “Dark curly hair,” Sam said dubiously. “It’s hard to picture Keegan with hair down to his shoulders, especially hair that’s prettier than any woman’s. Did they have curling irons back then?”

  “Broad square shoulders, cleft chin, brownish amber eyes, high cheekbones, five o’clock shadow before everyone else. . .” Mariah felt sick to her stomach, not just at the resemblance, but at her perfect recall of Keegan’s good looks. She never bothered remembering faces.

  “Signet ring,” Harvey added helpfully.

  They all stared at the gold ring on the curly-haired man’s finger. Keegan wore an identical one—with a unicorn and what might have been a thistle carved into it.

  Underneath the brown acrylic, his look-alike had red eyes.

  Crap damn. Without a word to the others, Mariah slammed her walking stick to the floor, got up, and stormed out.

  Keegan had gone to city hall. She couldn’t steal that ancient computer as she usually did when she couldn’t resist her obsession. But Aaron had cable internet. He had computers. She didn’t think there was an engineer alive who didn’t have a computer, so Keegan would have one as well. And he was living above Aaron’s store.

  Obsession overcoming sense, Mariah limped down the boardwalk.

  Carrying his encyclopedic volume, the antique dealer caught up with her just as she tried his shop door. Pulling out a key, Aaron unlocked a series of locks and let her in. “After something?” he asked casually.

  He wasn’t fooling her with his nonchalance. Everyone in town knew to keep her away from computers, and she never visited his store.

  Aaron had a vaguely foreign accent and a European sophistication that did not fit Hillvale. But his psychometric powers made him right at home, even if he resented being called a Lucy. Despite the sophisticated goatee and tailored suits he affected, he was still just a man. Mariah glared at him.

  “A family tree. Keegan isn’t here just for an old family diary.”

  “Even if he had some evil family member here half a century ago, that doesn’t mean Keegan is polluted,” Aaron argued, flinging the volume to an oak stand by the door. “You’ve met the man. He’s as straight, uncomplicated, and honest as any man in existence.”

  “Saints don’t exist,” she countered, stomping for the stairway at the back of the store, making her knee ache more. “He was right there when Daisy died. He didn’t tell us the truth about his damned family. What else isn’t he telling us?”

  “Probably as much as you aren’t.” Aaron grabbed her stick, stopping her. “Don’t underestimate everyone simply because they don’t reflect your expectations. I can’t swipe ghosts the way you do but don’t dismiss me. I can almost literally read you like a book, just by touching this staff. You’re angry, hurt, and the pain all ties back to a memory you crush even in your own head.” He released the stick. “Keegan conceals nothing compared to you.”

  Mariah glared at her walking stick. She had forgotten Aaron’s ability to read objects. That he could read her didn’t make her any less furious. “Keegan is a black hole in the universe. I doubt anyone can read him.”

  Aaron nodded acknowledgment. “I met him at Oxford. He was only sixteen and already in his third year of engineering studies and captain of the archery team. He was young and not easy to read even then. I was older, but as you said, like attracts like. I knew he was gifted. I gave him the usual parlor trick, picked up his pen, and read his anger at a cheating teammate. He accepted my reading and took my advice regarding the teammate after I advised him that he was correct about the cheating. In the year that I knew him, he was inevitably honest. I helped him to learn more about blocking others like us.”

  “I can still sense your energy—you don’t create a black hole the way Keegan does,” Mariah retorted. “And lacking your acuity, I need computers.”

  Aaron stepped back and shrugged. “Good luck. I doubt even you can open his programs. I’m not letting you near mine.”

  He had a point there, but she refused to acknowledge it. She could get into Monty’s computer because he was a trusting soul and left his password where anyone could find it. She doubted Keegan would do the same.

  She dragged her aching knee up the stairs to the room Keegan had adopted while here. She had expected an engineer’s freaky order, but the place looked as if it had been ransacked. Drawers hung open. The bedcovers looked as if they’d been tossed. Papers on the desk were scattered. . .

  Bed, dresser, desk. . . computer, a lovely advanced piece of titanium technology.

  Gleefully, she carried the laptop to his messy bed, propped up pillows, and switched it on, luxuriating in the freedom from her self-imposed prison.

  All she had to do was not remind the world that she existed.

  Twelve

  July 9: Monday, afternoon

  Well-fed but armed with little more information than he already possessed, Keegan left City Hall feeling as if he’d been manipulated. When he saw Aaron in his doorway across the street, signaling to him, Keegan stomped across the parking lot.

  He wanted to see what else had been uncovered on the mural, but even he had to admit that the mural was a distraction. What he really wanted to do was see what Mariah was up to, but accommodating his friend and landlord made more sense.

  Aaron used his thumb to indicate the back of the store. “She’s been up there for about ten minutes. She may have bombed Tokyo and evicted Congress by now. I thought you were smart enough to keep your computer password protected.”

  “It is protected,” Keegan protested, pulling out his cell phone. And then he remembered there was no reception. He wouldn’t receive a verification request without cell or wi-fi, and he wasn’t connected to either. How in the name of all that was holy could she circumvent that? “Damn.” Well, he’d wanted to see what she was up to.

  “I don’t think she’s after your personal files, if that’s any help,” Aaron called as Keegan fumed through the store. “Mariah’s not bent that way.”

  But she was bent. How much was the question.

  She had to hear him coming. This old building with its creaky wooden steps protested his weight. When he flung open the door, she startled, as if he’d woken her.

  Shocked at the state of his usually orderly room, he glared. “Did you have to toss the room? The computer wasn’t enough?”

  Sitting in the middle of his bed, pillows propped around her, she followed his gesture in puzzlement. “Toss the room? Why would I do that? I just figured you lived that way.”

  If she hadn’t tossed it, someone else had. He flipped through the correspondence he’d been working on, finding nothing missing or of value to anyone but him. He had nothing anyone could want, but he hated the idea of strangers poking through his belongings. “I keep my travel kit in order so I may leave at a moment’s notice. Someone has been in here.”

  She frowned. “I only touched the computer. I’m not much into men’s underwear.”

  That created an awareness requiring adjustment of said garment. He cooled it by checking the dresser. “Aaron wouldn’t do this. Besides, he was with us in the café.”

  “Someone thinks you’re hiding diamonds?” she asked, rightfully dubious. “Or maybe. . .” She turned his laptop around so he could see the image she’d called up. “We’re getting closer and someone’s worried.”

  Images. She had half a dozen resembling him, if hair color and face structure counted.

  Keegan swept the laptop from her clever hands, sat down in the cushioned chair, and pulled out his reading glasses.

  “I labeled them for you,” she said. “You have a few coyotes on the family tree.”

  “Coyotes?” He scowled and clicked on the image that looked like one he’d noticed in the mural. It brought up a short history of Trevor Gabriel.

  “Tricksters, like Loki and Hermes, if you know your ancient myths. Coyote is Native American lore. Someone with godlike intelle
ct or knowledge that he uses to trick others and who disobeys societal conventions and laws.”

  “My family isn’t godlike,” he growled, clicking his way through the images. “My father is a chemist. My grandfather was a miner. You would call them Nulls. Most Ives are Nulls.”

  “They may have stifled their gifts or not recognized them.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “But your great-uncle Trevor, a few times removed, lived in the Ingersson commune. That picture on the computer is of him after he cut his hair and went into the guru business. His eyes in Dinah’s mural are red.”

  “I’m guessing a ninety-year-old man didn’t toss my drawers.” But from this biography, he gathered Trevor Gabriel knew crystals.

  “If you didn’t have anything worth stealing, you may have just discouraged a thief,” she acknowledged.

  “Aaron is the one with the valuables,” he countered. “They should have tossed him.”

  Keegan was having a hard time reading the website while trying not to look at the regal princess occupying his bed. She sat cross-legged, spine straight, as if practicing yoga. It was warm up here under the roof, and she’d discarded her vest. Her sleeveless cotton pullover emphasized the strength of her muscled brown arms and revealed more tempting curves. He forgot thieves. He wanted to untangle the long braid dangling over her breasts and see if it shimmered as it had the other night.

  “How does pretending to be a guru make Gabriel evil?” he asked, not finding a list of crimes included in the biography.

  Mariah smiled in a way that made him itch and held out her hand for the computer. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Reluctantly, he handed it back. “I don’t know that branch of the family any better than I know the Wainwrights. As far as I’m aware, they found their fortunes here a century or more ago and don’t visit the ancestral home, probably for good reason. Scottish castles aren’t very welcoming.”

  “The good reason is more likely that Great-Uncle Trevor of red-eyed mural fame conveniently had a heart attack at the age of eighty-two, after the children of his followers sued him for suckering their parents out of their inheritances. His half-dozen kids by his half-dozen wives and mistresses changed their names and melted into the night. Two of them have their own rap sheets. It will take me a little longer to locate all their offspring.”

  “How the devil did you. . . ?” Keegan backtracked to a more direct question. How didn’t matter as much as what she’d discovered. “You think Uncle Trevor swindled the Ingerssons or their followers?” He took the laptop back, pushed his glasses up his nose, and started reading through the documents she’d pulled up.

  “Teddy says crystals have power. If Trevor believed that, he would have helped himself to any he could lay his hands on. Crystals were part of his guru business. One of his sons was convicted of art fraud, like Lonnie Thompson, late of Hillvale notoriety. The less talented offspring imitating the fathers, maybe, although I don’t see much evidence that Trevor was more than a half-assed artist.”

  “Another son went to jail for counterfeiting,” Keegan read with a snort. “That still doesn’t bring us back to Daisy, although his sons might be a better age for pulling a bow than Trevor’s age group.”

  “Nothing I’ve found indicates his offspring spent much time in outdoor recreation. They had to have inherited millions. Trevor worked hard at his fraud and apparently had a talent for investing it. Junior and his brother just seemed to paddle around in hot water a lot.”

  “But they had another brother and three sisters who were never caught.” Fascinated despite himself, Keegan kept reading about his distant American cousins. “How did you dig up so much, so fast?” he finally asked.

  “Talent,” she muttered. “I need food.” She dropped back against the pillows propped on the headboard and closed her eyes. “Add fingerprint and eye identification to that flimsy piece of equipment if you want to keep me out. And you WANT to keep me out, I promise.”

  He shot her a curious look. She was warning him? After she’d already broken in? And didn’t try to hide it.

  “You are a strange woman,” he muttered, continuing to read.

  “You have no idea. That’s a great big door of invitation you’re holding. I want to track everyone on the commune and their families and see where they were the day Daisy died, and even I know that’s insane.”

  “You might as well track every criminal in existence that day,” he said, grasping the dilemma.

  “Just the math makes my head hurt. Let’s say a hundred people passed through Ingersson’s commune. Then calculate each had 2.3 children who each had 2.3 children. . .”

  “Over 500 offspring in two generations,” he calculated without looking up.

  She groaned.

  “We have no reason to believe the sins of the father are passed on to the children,” he reminded her.

  “Unless they inherited evil crystals,” she muttered.

  He worked through the rest of the files she’d left open. Tired of handing the laptop back and forth, Keegan sat beside her on the bed. Mariah scooted aside to give him room. He plopped the computer in her lap and opened the next image that looked less like him. “Also in my family tree? Ian Dougal? Why are we looking into these people?”

  “Facial recognition. I wasn’t certain which one was in the mural. Yours comes up too. Nice to know you are who you say you are. But Trevor looks most like the painting and is the right age. Why does he have a ring like yours?”

  All too aware of her sage scent and the curves pressed against him, Keegan had to yank his brain back to his head. He scrolled back to the image of Trevor Gabriel, older than in the mural but still a young man with sideburns. “The rings usually pass through the maternal side of our family, what my mother calls the Malcolm side—the ones with psychic abilities. Most generally, they go to the daughters who inherit Malcolm traits, but my mother had no daughters, and my brother is what you call a Null. I had to have this ring refitted.”

  “So Uncle Trevor here may have inherited a family trait and used it for evil?” she asked in horror.

  “If you call fraud evil, then most likely. It’s not exactly the first time. A family with weird mental abilities is bound to generate freaks every so often. I fail to see how this helps find Daisy’s killer. I’d rather call Walker over here to look for fingerprints.”

  Looking stunned, she slapped the computer closed and handed it to him as if it were filthy garbage. “I don’t want to know more. Lucys are supposed to be peaceful and help the world, not harm. The possibility of someone with my ability. . . No, not thinking about it.”

  She looked so shocked and horrified, that he needed to reassure her that it probably didn’t happen often. But even after removing his glasses, he was too focused on the lushness of her moist lips, and his brain went south again. He leaned over and kissed her.

  To his utter amazement and gratification, Mariah responded with enthusiasm. Apparently kissing was better than thinking of Lucys gone evil.

  With a groan of sheer bliss, Keegan wrapped his arms around soft, giving woman and hauled her closer for more coffee-flavored kisses. She was perfect against him, digging her fingers into his arms, lifting herself into his embrace as if they’d known each other forever. The pressure in his aforementioned underwear increased.

  With a vague reflection on reincarnation and soul mates, he stroked her unfettered, breast, felt her shudder with the same desire wracking him, and deepened his kiss.

  Loud knocks battered the old oak door.

  Floating down from heaven, Mariah took a moment to register the reason why she had to leave her cloud. The banging and Harvey’s shouts only partially registered. The loss of Keegan’s embrace was as abrupt as falling off a ledge. At least this time she hadn’t ruined her knee.

  She gasped and shoved away. What the hell had she thought she was doing? Was craziness the result of sliding down internet holes? She’d thought Keegan had brought her back before she’d lost herself this time.
r />   “Cass is circling the vortex,” Harvey called. “Whatever you’re up to, save it for later.”

  Damn. That brought her out of her sex-addled haze.

  “Circling the vortex?” Keegan asked with a grumble, adjusting his jeans. “Is this some Star Trek speak with which I’m not acquainted?”

  “Plain English.” She pushed up from the bed, almost forgetting her knee until it reminded her. “The vortex draws spirits. Cass is psychic to a degree we can’t measure. She lived inside Sam’s head for days and had to be hospitalized.”

  Rather like the trance she could put herself into, Mariah knew. Human minds could only tolerate so much energy depletion, and not knowing how much was dangerous.

  “And we are concerned why?” Keegan asked grumpily, setting his laptop on the chair.

  “Do you really want to know what happens when a few centuries worth of ghosts begin to congregate? Or would you like to contemplate what Cass might do with them?” Mariah asked, grabbing her walking stick.

  “Why can’t Harvey stop her?” Keegan gave the musician a foul glare as he held the door for her.

  “I write songs and carve sticks,” Harvey said with a shrug. “I have no magic.”

  “None of us has magic,” Mariah corrected, hobbling down the stairs. “And Cass won’t listen to men. Where’s Sam? Why didn’t you call her?”

  “I did. She’s up there with Teddy. But they’re new and don’t know how to approach her.” Harvey took the stairs down two at a time. “They’re the ones who sent me for you.”

  “Tullah?” Mariah asked. “I need back-up.”

  “She has a customer but says she’ll be there shortly. Anyone else?” Harvey held the shop door open. “Keegan, you probably want to stay out of this.”

  Mariah didn’t need to hear his officious Scots’ snort to know he wouldn’t. And this time, she didn’t object. He had connections deeper than any man she’d ever met, and possibly knowledge she didn’t possess. His family tree was downright eerie.

  “While you’re at it,” Keegan added to her commands, “Ask Walker if he’ll test my room for fingerprints. Someone rifled through my belongings.”