Cold Read

by Renee Joiner

  “There isn’t much down here. It’s just open space,” she commented.

  “Which is more suspicious than a basement filled with shit. Usually, you only have space this big when you need a storage room, like furniture or equipment. Others turn it into something recreational. There’s nothing but a toolbox in the corner.” He walked over to inspect it. “It’s old. These latches have been rusted shut. Probably because it’s so god damn damp in here.”

  Tasia turned to study the subterranean space more intently but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The basement was utterly barren. The house was old, but that had been apparent when they entered. Crescent Avenue had many of the sort dotting the street. She surmised that the woman who lived here had owned it for some time. In that period, it was highly probable that she had accumulated enough possessions to require storage. She paid attention to the floor, looking for any trace of something heavy being moved or shifted. With her third swoop over the area, her eye finally caught something on the floor. She was about to move closer, but suddenly a loud bang startled her from behind.

  It was from Daniel. Clearly frustrated with the toolbox, he had smashed it against the floor to unhinge the locks. Noticing that he had drawn her attention, he looked almost sheepish. “What? There was no other way to open these clasps.”

  “Aren’t you remotely afraid that someone might hear us?”

  “Nope. I’d have a reason for being here. You, on the other hand, will be difficult to explain. If I wasn’t pressed for time, I would coerce you to leave, you know.” He turned his attention back to the toolbox, rummaging around its contents. After a while, he frowned, pulling out what looked to be an old baseball glove. “This just gets fucking weirder by the second.”

  “You think it belonged to him? The son?” she said, only half paying attention as she remembered the marks she had seen on the floor.

  “Max... I think his name was—is—Max. It’s written here in crayon. I just can’t figure out why it would be in here...”

  “Maybe this could give you an answer,” Tasia said from across the room. She was kneeling beside what looked like scratch marks leading directly to the wall. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Daniel studied the marks intently before bringing himself to stand in front of the wall. His hand was grazing the surface as if trying to find something he was unable to see. The basement light didn’t reveal all that much and most of the room’s edges were still shrouded in shadow. “Do you have your phone on you? I left mine in the car.”

  “Um...” Tasia brought her hand to her back pocket, feeling the rectangular shape against the fabric. “Yeah, I do.” Knowing what he was after, she switched on the flashlight, shining it on the spot where his hand rested. At first, nothing seemed strange until they both noticed a small gap that ran down the length of the wall.

  “Could it be—” Daniel started, before knocking on the surface. A hollow sound met their ears, surprising both of them. “I—I think this is drywall. This must be a door.” His fingers found the gap, finding purchase right before he gave it a tug. With a screech, he managed to drag open the wall, revealing a dark niche inside. On the floor lay a single object, a baseball, ghostly white, and turned to show a single name on Max’s pale surface.

  Spooked by what they had found, they decided to get out of the house. Making peace with what could be found in the house; Daniel was intent on initiating a trace for an address where they could find the owner’s son.

  Tasia was the first to speak. “I sure didn’t expect to find that when coming here.”

  Daniel suddenly turned around, the stern expression returning to his face as he regarded her. “What were you expecting to find? I’m not letting this go, Tasia. What made you come here?”

  She was afraid he’d start this line of questioning again. Still, she felt desperate to avoid it altogether. “I told you, Daniel. I saw your desk, I made a connection, and I made a snap judgment to follow my intuition. I didn’t need the details. I remembered the street.”

  “You’re still trying to feed me bullshit. There’s more to this, and I think it has to do with why you came to the FBI office in the first place. Why was that? There’s no ‘normal’ reason when it comes to your motives. I think your ‘intuition’ started working long before you even decided to follow a lead on this address. Oh, and by the way, I only found that detail out about 20 minutes after seeing you. There’s no way you gleaned that from the evidence and clues on my desk.”

  Tasia sighed, looking into his steely eyes and the stubbornness behind them. “Fine. Look, Daniel... I don’t even really know how to approach this discussion with you. It always got ‘weird’ for you whenever I brought it up. Remember when I told you, a long time ago, that I sometimes get prophetic dreams?”

  “Yeah. I do. You also said that they usually contained predictions of bad things that were likely to happen. You never spoke of them fondly. Is that why you’ve come? Tasia, did you see something bad happen to Sarah?”

  “No. I had a premonition about you.” The fact that she was having this conversation with a mortal was hazardous. It spoke of an emotional familiarity that was dangerous for rusalkas. Intimate attachments often ended in great remorse and despair when it came to her people. Mortals didn’t understand their world, nor did they know how they could be affected. Daniel had come dangerously close to experiencing that in the past, when he did not understand why he was falling for her. At first, she had allowed it as she was falling for him in turn. But she could never know if it was love—not when she was what she was. In acknowledging that, she also reminded herself of the peril that put him under. The only way she could save him was by turning the love he ‘thought’ he felt into hate. So, she withdrew herself. It was the only way he could be free of mystical influences beyond her control. So, she used the complexities of heartache to work in her favor.

  “What kind of premonition?”

  “I... saw you dying.”

  He was silent for a moment. She knew the questions were forming wildly in his mind, and she steeled herself for them when they came. “How can you see that?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “No.”

  “Just tell me why. Tell me what it is!”

  “Daniel, I said no, okay? I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She didn’t know how to read his face as he stared at her in an almost desperate plea that she had seen once before. “One day, I hope that you can find it in yourself to let me in. I hope it happens before it’s my last.”

  He couldn’t know how ominously Tasia took those words.

  Four

  Family Fairy Tales

  The silence in the car was deafening. Tasia had decided to remain by Daniel’s side. Daniel had decided that he would allow it. Yet, the mutual agreement didn’t break the tension between them. Still, for the time being, they decided that they’d put their differences aside and invest their efforts into finding Sarah.

  “You mentioned a moment ago that you got your premonition when you held onto something that belonged to me?” he asked.

  She was almost startled by the sudden attempt at a conversation that it took her a while to process. “Uh... yes.”

  “If you were looking for something about Sarah, then why did you touch my dog tags?”

  “There weren’t any of her personal effects that had her... psychic signature on it.” Psychic signature. Was that the best you could do? She asked herself. It was so tricky to explain her mystical qualities to mortals. She couldn’t allude too much to the realm of magic. Instead, she chose the esoteric path and the basic understanding that humans had of otherworldly things.

  “So, all you need is something that belonged to her to get a lock on her position?”

  “Um... not quite. I’m not able to track people, Daniel.”

  “Then how’d you end up at that address?”


  “Sarah wasn’t there. I wasn’t tracking her. When I touched your tags, I simply got mental impressions that I took to be clues. They were... nudges in the right direction. I ended up at your office because of the dream I had, the death precognition. Obviously, I was worried, so my instinct was to find you. I didn’t exactly expect you to be in the middle of a hostage investigation involving your sister. That rattled me a bit. When you sent me to your desk, and I saw what I did, I couldn’t stop myself from looking around. I was looking for something that belonged to her, but only found that photo you had. Nothing came of it, so I thought I’d try something different by getting a read from something that belonged to you instead. And well... here we are.”

  He was quiet for a while before answering. “You wanted to see whether you gained any foresight into her death, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she answered quietly. God, I shouldn’t even be talking about this. But what exactly are you supposed to do when the damsel in distress is an ex-militant?

  He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel before saying, “Open the glove compartment.”

  Tasia frowned but followed his instructions. On opening, an array of items met her eyes: booklets, a car charger, a flashlight, and some protein bars. Nothing particularly unique was kept inside, but he reached over to lift up some of the car manuals, revealing a single CD in a clear casing with ‘Sarah’s Songs’ written on the front in permanent marker.

  “Maybe that could help. She burned that CD for me.”

  Staring at the shining surface, she felt apprehensive. She brought her hand to hover over the item.

  “Well? Are you going to give it a shot?”

  “Daniel, what if I find out something that you wouldn’t like?”

  She could see him weighing the matter before eventually answering. “Then, at least I know whether to look for someone I care for, or whether someone I care for needs to be avenged.” He said the last with a steely resolve that clenched her heart. If anything, news affirming his sister’s death would surely bring her death premonition to fulfillment if he decided to be reckless. Is it worth taking the chance?

  She looked back at the CD, taking it out. Immediately, it had the familiar energy of his sister surrounding it. Her emotional investment in the item made the trace she left thereon all the more powerful. Regardless, after holding it in her hand, Tasia waited for the vision to dawn on her. She held her breath, anticipating a tragic outcome.

  Yet, nothing happened.

  “Talk to me. What do you see?” he asked nervously.

  “Nothing. Which is... good. For now. It means that her life is not in immediate danger.”

  He visibly relaxed, looking more at ease than he had a few minutes ago. The tension fell from his shoulders, and he sat back and took a deep breath. “So we have time.”

  He picked her up the next day, hammering down the highway until they reached a suburban area. In her time off, Tasia had unwittingly become a companion to his investigation. On the one hand, it left her relieved, knowing that she could exercise some influence over Daniel’s choices, perhaps even try to avert his death. On the other, it placed her in a precarious situation of exposing him to another danger by becoming entangled in a world he knew very little about and would most likely not survive.

  “So, where are we going?” Tasia asked.

  “Yesterday, after I took you home, I did some digging. I investigated the history behind that address, tracking people who were likely to have known the woman who lived there, together with her son. Shrouded in mystery as that household was, I did come across something unexpected. So, we are going to talk to someone very special: Max’s sister, Estrella.”

  It caught Tasia off guard. Based on what they had found the day before, it was the last thing she expected. “He had a sister? But... there was no real trace of her in that house. Her picture wasn’t anywhere on the wall.”

  “To be honest, there were no real traces of any of them,” he started to explain. We found a couple of creepy clues and constructed a narrative of an unhealthy relationship between mother and son. But it was nowhere near enough to glean the full story. Maybe the sister got out before it went too far. Or perhaps she was an accomplice.”

  Tasia’s mind was swimming with possible explanations, but it was a mystery that she had not yet fully bought into. “Daniel, how do you think all this is tied to your sister? It feels like the search is taking us farther away from her and into an entirely different story.”

  “You seem to understand, hunches. Well, mine is that some of the role players of this drama might be responsible. Our strongest leads pointed to that house, so an avenue to the answer must be there. I felt more convinced after you told me what you did yesterday, about your abilities. You picked up that ball we found in the secret room of the basement, didn’t you?”

  She didn’t know what he was onto, but she answered. “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you ‘feel’ anything?”

  Thinking back, she remembered that she did. As with Sarah’s CD, Max’s baseball had distinct energy about it. It was grimmer, more tragic, but undoubtedly masculine. “Yes. I think if the reading I got from that thing could be linked to anyone, it would be him. But Daniel, just because I didn’t get a death precognition doesn’t mean that he’s worth looking for. He could be dead. My abilities don’t work retroactively.”

  “Sure, sure. But the fact that you felt something of him around that ball could mean that he’s still alive...”

  She had never considered it. It was wishful thinking, but the more she thought about it, it was plausible. “You could be onto something. But, Daniel, we cannot let the fate of an entire case ride on one clue.”

  “Right now, Tasia, it’s the only one we’ve got. And time is running out.”

  The car came to a standstill in front of a modern house. Checking the board, Tasia saw that it had been repurposed for a few health practitioners’ joint practices. Among them was a psychologist called Dr. Estrella Pearce.

  “She’s a psychologist?” Tasia asked in disbelief.

  “The irony, right?” Daniel commented passively. “How almost very unsurprising. She’s good, as well, from what I could gather. Her website ranks at the top of search results for therapists in the area. Want to guess her niche?”

  “If you say family practice, then—”

  “Yip.”

  “My god...”

  They went inside. The receptionist sprang to attention at the back of the counter as Daniel stalked inside. Tasia couldn’t blame her. When he was determined, Daniel had that almost abrasive look to his features that could grind one’s confidence to dust. “Good day, Miss. I am looking for the office of Dr. Pearce. My name is Daniel Walker,” he paused to show her his badge, “FBI. We would like to ask her a few questions.”

  The woman looked bewildered. It was clear to Tasia that they had never encountered Daniel’s type before. “Um... well, she is just in a session right now. I don’t think—”

  “Don’t worry. We can wait.” He turned on his heel and took a seat in the visitor’s lounge.

  “O-Okay.” She looked over at Tasia, sparing her only a momentary glance before rapidly diving down to jot a note.

  Tasia took a seat beside Daniel, and then they waited. The room was beautifully furnished, with richly upholstered armchairs and vintage wooden tables. Unlike the waiting rooms of some of the doctors stationed at the clinic, their reading selection consisted of the classic literature instead of the tired magazines that usually lay scattered over the tables.

  A door opened down the hallway, and they turned their heads just as two people stepped into the waiting room.

  One was a woman in her fifties and the other, a teenage son who trailed after her. Both looked as though they had been through a teary session. Behind them followed a young woman who was, without a doubt, Max’s sister. The memory of the photo in their mother’s hallway had been seared in her memory. She recognized the angular jawline, the high b
row, and the flashing eyes. She wondered whether Estrella Pearce often looked in the mirror, looking at herself with revulsion because she so closely resembled her mother. The patients thanked her and made their way out.

  Daniel was on his feet, ready to announce himself. To their surprise, she acknowledged them first. “I take it you’re the detective. Laura left me a message to give me a heads up. I saw it the moment I opened the computer to book my patient’s next slot. I am free now, so you’re welcome to come through.” She gestured down the hallway.

  Daniel’s mouth was still open, with introductions frozen on the tongue. He composed himself, nodded curtly, and looked Tasia’s way. She stood up, and the three of them walked to Estrella’s office. Closing the door, Estrella gestured for them to sit. “Can I offer either of you something to drink?” she asked, looking straight at Tasia.

  They both kindly refused before the woman took a seat herself to start the conversation. “I must say, I’ve never had an agent here. I take it you are conducting an investigation. Do you need help with psychological profiling?”

  Tasia cocked her head to the side. It was an interesting offer, and assumption, to make out of the blue. If she hadn’t known any better, she would’ve said that the psychologist almost expected it. Do authorities come here often then? She wondered.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Daniel answered. “We are investigating a case in which a trail of evidence led through your childhood home. We’ve come here to talk about two people who have been interested in us of late. Your mother, Mary Pearce, and your brother.”

  Her eyes grew wide. It was clear it caught her by surprise. However, it was best not to be fooled by first impressions in the particular scenario, Tasia knew. “Maxwell? You’re looking for Maxwell?”

  “So he’s alive?” Tasia blurted out, without thinking. Daniel didn’t seem to care.