Murder on the Astral Plane (A Kate Jasper Mystery)

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  “So, give me the bad news,” I said. At least I was right on that.

  “Well, they screwed up the acupuncture earrings,” she informed me.

  And it went downhill from there. Especially when Jade got to the subject of her brother-in-law, Eddie, the genius of the Internet, the maestro of Websites, and a guy who could probably use some money.

  “See, Kate,” Jade explained for the fourteenth time. “He’s a real geek. He could make your Website work. Peg doesn’t have it linked up to the right places. Now, Eddie’s got contacts…”

  I filled out an invoice while she went on. I hoped Eddie knew how hard she was pitching on his behalf.

  The doorbell rang about fifteen minutes later. I pinched my brows together, concentrating. A picture formed in my mind. Barbara was at my door. Yes, I was sure this time. A course in statistics that I took in college made this psychic stuff a little easier. Chances were about nine-point-nine out of ten that it was Barbara, taking all the recent data into account.

  I hung up on Jade gently as she continued to list Eddie’s virtues, and marched to the door.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Barbara greeted me. “Good job. It is me. In the flesh.”

  I felt pretty smart for a minute. Then I asked myself why I’d answered the door at all if I knew it was Barbara.

  “I brought food,” Barbara explained, holding out a bag filled with steaming takeout cartons. I smelled Thai: lemongrass, galanga, chili paste, and basil.

  “A little late lunch and a few quick visits to suspects before the meeting at Justine’s?” she bargained softly.

  “There enough there for Wayne?” I countered.

  “Chicken coconut milk soup and rice, green curry, spicy duck salad—”

  Wayne walked in, arms outstretched like a zombie. This time, at least, I heard his flat-footed approach. But this time, he was trying to be funny.

  “Fe-fie-foh-fum, I smell the bones of a chicken, yum,” he growled. The man was definitely getting well. And he hadn’t even asked me about the murder Barbara and I had been discussing the day before. Maybe he just didn’t want to know.

  We all ate the feast at the kitchen table. Coconut soup without chicken for me, sweet potato slices in a sweet and sour dip, and basil tofu. Not to mention the pad Thai noodles with chopped peanuts, green onions, and bean sprouts. Food for an army. A gourmet army. Wayne finished most of it. It was probably the best food he’d had in a while, I concluded guiltily.

  Barbara jerked her wrist to face level and peered at her watch as Wayne swallowed the last bite.

  “Oh, wow!” she cried. “We’re late for the seminar.”

  The overacting even lost me for a moment.

  “What seminar?” I asked.

  “The psychic seminar,” she answered.

  “Oh, right,” I said and jumped out of my chair. “You go back to bed,” I told Wayne.

  A flash of suspicion crossed his face, but a quick kiss erased it. Boy, I was gonna pay big time for my sins when he found out. If he found out, I reminded myself. There was always the possibility that Silk’s murderer would be discovered before Wayne found out anything. It was time to believe in miracles.

  Barbara and I stopped at Isabelle Viseu’s first. Once again, we opened the little gate and walked up the cement pathway to her front door. But the only beings stirring were the bees buzz-bombing the pansies along the pathway. Otherwise the place was silent.

  Barbara rang the bell three times, then headed off to the side of the house again.

  “Barbara!” I whispered angrily. “She’s not home.” I figured she’d hear the whisper psychically if not auditorily.

  Barbara reappeared in front of the house again. I let out the breath I’d been holding. And then froze once more as she gave the doorbell another poke. This place made me nervous for some reason. That reason probably being Barbara.

  I turned around and started back down the pathway to the gate.

  “I’m leaving,” I told Barbara.

  “But—” she began.

  “You can always walk home,” I suggested.

  And oddly enough, Barbara followed me out of Isabelle Viseu’s yard.

  She didn’t say anything until we were back in the car.

  “I don’t like it,” was what she finally said. And she was serious. I hated it when Barbara got serious like that. “Her car’s there, but she isn’t.”

  “Barbara—”

  She put up a hand to silence me.

  “Forget it, kiddo,” she advised. “Weird things bother me.”

  “All right,” I agreed, pulling the Toyota into traffic, though I really wanted to ask her if she meant that things bothered her that shouldn’t, so those things were weird, or if she meant that Isabelle’s situation was weird and therefore bothersome. I was surprised when she didn’t answer my unvoiced question.

  “Merlot,” she said.

  “You want wine now?” I demanded.

  “No, Merlot is the subdivision where Rich McGowan lives,” she explained. “Remember, he was the weaselly looking guy that Silk called a narc. I think he works for the Medical Board of Examiners, or the FDA, or the FHA, or some other set of initials.”

  I didn’t even ask where she got that idea. I didn’t want to hear the explanation.

  “Is he going to be home yet if he works?” I asked, checking my own watch.

  “No, but his wife and kid will be,” she told me. She smiled evilly. “We can ask them why he was at Justine’s.”

  For once, Barbara was wrong. Rich McGowan’s wife and kid were home all right, but so was he.

  I didn’t get a chance to savor Barbara’s lapse though, because it was Rich who opened the door. And he looked sick. Almost as sick as Wayne.

  “Are you all right?” were the first words out of my mouth. I couldn’t help it. The man’s narrow face was grayish. His close-set eyes were twitching. And he smelled of that kind of sticky sweat that goes with illnesses, or nightmares.

  “Flu,” Rich mumbled succinctly, but he wouldn’t look either of us in the eye.

  “It’s hard to see someone die like that, isn’t it?” Barbara cooed soothingly as she stepped past him through the doorway and into the white-walled, beige-shagged living room that I’d seen in what seemed like a hundred other apartments and houses. Including my own, but at least I’d covered mine up with bookshelves and plants and pinballs. Rich McGowan’s living room appeared to house two utilitarian plaid couches, a TV set, and one sports poster. That was it for decor. I stepped in after Barbara, before he could think to close the door on me. He’d have to work on his reflexes if he was going to deal with Barbara.

  “Honey?” a voice called, and a plump and pretty, pink-cheeked woman entered the living room from a side door at the same time as Barbara and I entered from the front. The pink-cheeked woman was followed in turn by a little girl who must have been all of seven years old and stared at us silently, her hazel eyes round. Were we that scary? I wondered and bared my teeth in a smile. The little girl hid behind her mother, clutching her Care Bear shirt. So much for the smile.

  “Hi,” Barbara greeted the woman cheerily. “You must be Rich’s wife. We’re from his psychic soiree.”

  The pink faded from the woman’s cheeks.

  “Oh God!” she yelped and thudded down on one of the couches. The girl sat next to her, still watching us. “No one else has died, have they?”

  “Debby,” Rich murmured. “Don’t be silly. Of course—”

  “Rich is still all upset,” Debby offered, undeterred. “He’s like afraid he actually tuned into that dead lady or something. He said he felt a flash of pain when she died.” Debby drew her finger across her throat as a visual aid, then shuddered. The little girl sitting beside her repeated the finger-slashing movement. “It’s just been making him sick—”

  “Debby,” Rich said again, this time with a warning in his voice.

  “Oh, sorry, honey,” his wife said. But then she opened her mouth again. “And to think he was on
ly there for his job.”

  It was lucky Rich didn’t work as a spy for the CIA. He and his wife would be in a federal penitentiary by now.

  Rich pulled at his hair.

  “Rich works really hard—” Debby began again.

  “The whole situation at the soiree was very disturbing,” Rich interrupted. He thrust his jaw out. “Not only the death, but actually feeling something ahead of its actual occurrence. That’s all I can tell you at this time.”

  “Did you know Silk—?” I began.

  “Daddy wears glasses sometimes,” the little girl piped up suddenly. “Look,” she ordered and produced a pretzel which she held up to her eyes, looking through its loops as if they were spectacles.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. If the kid was trying to draw our fire away from her father, she couldn’t have done a better job.

  The girl looked at her mother, who smiled back, and then pulled out a shred of napkin from her pocket and laid it across her upper lip. She had glasses and a mustache now. She was Daddy in the flesh.

  Barbara clapped. Mother and daughter beamed. But Rich didn’t.

  “I didn’t know Silk Sokoloff,” he told us. It sounded like he was having a hard time getting the words out through his clenched teeth. “I don’t know who killed her. I just wished it hadn’t happened. I—”

  But he never finished whatever he’d planned to say. His face turned a shade grayer, and he rushed from the room.

  “Rich has a sensitive stomach,” Debby said, a touch of pride in her voice.

  “He’s been throwing up lots and lots,” the little girl translated.

  “Well, it’s been nice visiting,” I said. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wasn’t about to interrogate Rich’s wife and children while he was sick in the bathroom.

  “We’ll come back at a better time,” Barbara promised. Lucky them. Though Debby didn’t seemed to mind the prospect.

  She smiled and stood up.

  “Well, don’t be strangers,” she chirped. I resisted the urge to tell her that we were strangers.

  But Debby was a nice woman, if talkative. And she had a clever child. Still, I wasn’t sure about her husband.

  “Don’t you think this guy, Rich, is overreacting to Silk’s death?” I asked Barbara on the way home.

  “Jeez-Louise, Kate,” Barbara answered. “He felt Silk die.”

  “But—”

  “Listen, kiddo,” Barbara informed me, “I felt the same pain. And it was no fun.”

  “You really felt it?” I asked, feeling a little sick myself then. The movement of the cars traveling by on the highway didn’t help either.

  “Yeah,” Barbara continued. “I felt pressure on my throat, at the fifth chakra. It was almost unbearable, but I thought it was a psychic cord, or my own stuff about my parents or something. So I breathed through it.”

  “I’m sorry, Barbara,” I muttered.

  “Thanks, kiddo,” she whispered back, patting my shoulder. I didn’t turn to her as much as I wanted to. I reminded myself I was driving. “Remember, Justine said she felt it too. But I think Rich must have gotten a really strong dose if he’s still sick.”

  “Maybe ‘cause he killed her?” I suggested eagerly.

  “Not necessarily,” Barbara answered slowly. “Rich may be naturally psychic, strangely enough. So what if he goes into business debunking psychics, specifically targeting medical intuitives. Poor guy, what a way to confirm his abilities. If he was, it must have blown his credibility fuses to see Silk dead after what he felt.”

  “But you and Justine didn’t throw up,” I pressed. I wasn’t at all sure Rich was a psychic. He might have just told us he felt Silk’s death. Or he might have felt it from the other end of the cat toy he was using to garrote her, for that matter. I shivered.

  “Barbara,” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me this soiree was doomed from the start?”

  “You felt bad enough,” Barbara explained. “And anyway, now we can investigate—”

  “Well, I feel worse now,” I shot back.

  Barbara didn’t answer me. Damn. Had I actually hurt her feelings?

  I’d apologized to Barbara by the time I pulled into my own driveway. She hadn’t set out to make my life miserable, no matter how good a job she’d done.

  Barbara and I climbed my front stairs together. And raised our heads at the same time.

  And together, we saw the paint splashed all over my front door. Red paint.

  - Eleven -

  I stared, slack-mouthed, absorbing the visual reality of the red paint. Nearly two-thirds of the door was covered Jackson Pollock style, in blobs and splatters. No, I decided, not Jackson Pollock style. Jackson Pollock had been neater. And there was anger in this pattern. Then I smelled it, that unmistakable tang of solvents. The red paint was still wet.

  At least it matched the state of my armpits. In fact my whole body felt slippery with sweat. A breeze floated by, bringing more of the paint smell with it, and chilling my wet body to boot.

  “Jeez-Louise,” Barbara murmured from my side.

  I was suddenly very glad she was there. I looked to either side. None of my neighbors’ windows were open on the left or the right. Would it be worthwhile to ask them if they’d seen anyone? Or across the street? I looked over my shoulder. The street might as well have been a movie set…before the action started. Nothing moved. No doors slammed, no curtains fluttered, no cars went by. Even the dogs seemed strangely silent. Only insects hummed along with the sound of faraway traffic. And you can’t interrogate an insect. At least, I can’t.

  Barbara put a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I brought my eyes back to her, the red paint glowing in the periphery of my vision.

  “I’m really sorry, kiddo,” she whispered, so sincerely that tears stung my eyes for a moment. Barbara was my friend, no matter what. I always knew that in spite of her driving, in spite of her interfering, in spite of—Anyway, she was my friend, period.

  I straightened my spine and pulled back my shoulders.

  “Paint thinner,” I declared.

  “Where?” she asked without hesitation.

  Pretty soon, Barbara and I were rummaging under the deck where I kept the painting supplies in a plastic chest. There was about four feet of vertical crawl space under the deck, so Barbara and I did Quasimodo routines as we gathered the paint thinner and rags.

  When I heard the door open above us, my head hit the deck.

  “Kate?” Wayne called out, his voice confused.

  I ran back out from under the deck, still hunched, but not hunched enough, my head thunking the struts every few feet. Had Wayne seen the door yet? Somehow, this seemed like the kind of stress his doctor had recommended he avoid.

  I ran back around the front of the house and up the stairs, panting, “Wayne.”

  And just as I reached the top step, Wayne closed the door behind him, and glanced back at its red-painted surface.

  He turned into a pillar of Jell-O before my eyes. He swayed as I sprinted across the deck. I put out my arms and caught him, using all of what tai chi had taught me to receive his full weight without collapsing myself.

  “Barbara!” I called out, and then she was there, and we were walking Wayne into the living room.

  “Fine,” he kept insisting. I assumed he meant himself. I certainly wasn’t fine.

  “You almost fainted,” I told him as we plunked him down on the couch.

  “Did not,” he replied.

  The conversation wasn’t going very well to begin with, so I resisted uttering the “did too” that wanted to jump out of my mouth.

  And the conversation only got worse when Wayne’s head cleared.

  “Who did that to our door?” he demanded, looking at me with his brows at half mast over eyes that would take no prisoners.

  “Craig,” Barbara answered for me. She’d already settled herself in one of the swinging chairs.

  “Craig threw paint on our door?” Wayne yelped, his brows hoisted to
top of the mast position.

  “No, Craig didn’t throw the paint,” I corrected Barbara, sending her a look that was meant to be chilling. But Barbara continued to look warm and cozy, swinging back and forth rhythmically in her chair.

  “Not Craig himself,” she replied mildly. “But someone associated with him.” She closed her eyes for a couple of swings. “I still think it’s his—”

  “Is this what you’ve been keeping from me?” Wayne interrupted suddenly.

  “Yeah!” I cried out, trying not to sound too surprised. Or too cheerful. I didn’t have to tell him it wasn’t the only thing I’d been keeping from him.

  “There’ve been anonymous letters too,” Barbara added, getting into the spirit.

  “Show them to me?” Wayne suggested.

  So I did. I ran into my office and retrieved the letters, thrusting them into his hands eagerly after I’d run back. Wayne was smart. Maybe he’d be able to figure out what the messages meant. He studied the bold print thoughtfully as I sat down next to him.

  “Did you check out his girlfriend, Bonnie?” he asked a while later.

  “Uh-huh,” I told him. “But it wasn’t her.”

  “Didn’t I hear Craig’s voice a few nights ago?” he followed up.

  “You heard him?” I said, surprised. Usually Craig’s voice brought Wayne running and scowling.

  “Thought I’d let you two work it out yourselves,” he murmured, looking down at his feet suddenly.

  “Oh, Wayne.” I kept my voice steady. “Craig came over to whine. You know, the usual. He was splitting up with Bonnie, and he had some new girlfriend or something, but he really wanted me—”

  “And you?” Wayne asked quietly.

  “Wayne!” All right, I raised my voice a little. “Craig is still a complete…a complete, you know—”

  “Doofus,” Barbara put in helpfully.

  “Worse,” I insisted. “Much worse.” I crossed my arms. “If he weren’t so pathetic, I’d kick him down the stairs. But then he always has some sad little story—”

  “I know, Kate,” Wayne put in. “Really.” His voice sounded better. And he was looking at me again. “Maybe it’s this new girlfriend,” he went on.