The ghost smiled. “But the only thing missing is my laptop. You know as well as I do that it was not a particularly valuable, high-end machine. There’s my old backpack sitting on the chair. Why don’t you see if the thief took my money and credit cards?”
Gwen crossed to the chair and picked up the small, well-worn backpack. The crystal wind chimes shivered again, unleashing another string of spectral notes. Max crouched in the doorway, flattened his ears and meowed again.
There was fifty dollars and two credit cards inside Evelyn’s wallet. Gwen set the pack back down. So much for the home-invasion theory.
“As for other motives, you know me,” the ghost continued. “I wasn’t dealing drugs out the kitchen door. I didn’t cultivate a marijuana plantation in the woods behind the house. I was very fond of my crystal jewelry, but none of it was expensive.”
“You also had a cell phone.” Gwen turned on her heel to survey the room. “But I don’t see it.”
“Gone, like my computer.”
“Phones are small. It could be anywhere. Maybe it’s in the kitchen or your bedroom.”
Sirens howled in the distance. It sounded as if the 911 operator had sent the community’s entire fleet of emergency vehicles. Gwen realized she did not have a lot of time to search for the missing cell phone.
She whipped through the study, opening and closing drawers as quickly as possible. There was no sign of the phone.
The sirens were closer now. Gwen slammed the last drawer shut and raced past Max, out into the hall. The cat hurried after her.
She paused at the entrance to the kitchen and did a quick survey. The old-fashioned tiled countertops were bare except for a row of pottery canisters and an ancient coffeemaker.
Turning, she dashed upstairs, Max at her heels, and did a swift foray through the two small bedrooms. She was on her way downstairs when the first patrol car roared into the drive.
She rushed back into the office. The chimes clattered restlessly, as though impatient with her lack of progress.
“My death is going to be the biggest news in town by noon,” the ghost observed. “There hasn’t been this much excitement around here since Mary, Ben and Zander died two years ago.”
“There can’t possibly be any connection between your death and what happened two years ago,” Gwen said.
“Are you certain of that?”
“It’s been two years.”
“But you’re still dreaming about what happened, especially at this time of year, aren’t you? You’ve known all along that some piece of the puzzle was missing.”
Gwen pulled one of the curtains aside. Her heart sank when she saw Harold Oxley extricate his big, heavily padded frame out from behind the wheel of one of the patrol cars. Dark glasses shielded his eyes, but she could see that two years had taken a toll on the man. The mild exertion of heaving himself out of the vehicle was enough to turn his broad, jowly face an unhealthy shade of red. His uniform shirt was stretched tight across his rounded belly. He moved stiffly, like a man who was plagued with multiple joint issues. But the gun on his hip was as large as ever, and there was nothing to indicate that he would be any more open to the possibility that there were paranormal aspects involved in a death than he had been two years ago.
Gwen let the curtain drop back into place and turned around. She stopped at the sight of the photograph on the floor. It had not simply fallen off the corkboard, she thought. It looked as if Evelyn had ripped it off in her dying moments and clutched it as she went down.
“It’s important, dear,” the ghost said. “Why else would it be there right next to my hand?”
Gwen picked up the photo and looked at the seven people in the group shot. She was the third person from the end in the bottom row. The picture had been taken two years ago, shortly before the murders had begun. Mary Henderson and Ben Schwartz were in the picture. So was Zander Taylor. They were all smiling for the camera.
“You kept this photo tacked to your bulletin board,” she said. “Why is it on the floor?”
“An intriguing question,” the ghost said.
A heavy fist rapped authoritatively on the front door. Gwen dropped the photo into her tote and went down the hall. Max padded after her.
She opened the door.
“Chief Oxley,” she said politely.
Harold Oxley yanked off his sunglasses and looked at her with an expression that made it clear he was no more thrilled by their reunion than she was.
“Cindy said the 911 call came in from a Gwendolyn Frazier,” Oxley said. There was grim resignation in his growly voice. “I hoped it was just a coincidence.”
“Evelyn was a friend of mine,” Gwen said. She was careful to keep her own voice cool, calm and as innocent-sounding as possible. “We stayed in touch.”
“Two years ago, you and I met over three dead bodies. You leave town and there are no unexplained deaths for the whole time you’re gone. You come back to town and we have ourselves another dead body. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Two years ago, you concluded that all three of those people died of natural causes,” she said. She struggled to keep her temper under control, but she knew she probably sounded as if she was speaking through set teeth. So much for the innocent act.
“Not Taylor.” Oxley narrowed suspicious brown eyes. “He went over the falls and drowned.”
“You called his death a suicide.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll want a statement from you today.”
“Of course.”
A young officer and two medics arrived at the door behind Oxley. The medics carried emergency equipment and a stretcher.
Oxley peered into the hallway. “Where is she?”
“In her office.” Gwen moved out of the way and opened the door wider. “It’s to the right.”
Oxley, the young officer and the medics tromped past her and Max and disappeared around the corner.
Gwen stood in the doorway and watched the light summer rain fall steadily in the trees that surrounded the house. She listened to the commotion and the muffled voices that emanated from the far end of the hall.
Max pressed his heavy frame against her leg. She reached down to scratch him behind the ears.
“I know you’re going to miss her,” she said gently. “I will, too.”
After a while, she remembered the photograph she had found on the floor. She opened her tote and took out the picture. Once again she examined each face in the image. It was impossible not to do the math. Three of the people she was looking at had died two years ago, and now the photographer, Evelyn, was also dead.
Gwen turned the photo over and saw two words scrawled on the reverse side. Mirror, mirror.
Three
“What makes Gwen think that Ballinger was murdered by paranormal means?” Judson Coppersmith asked.
He was on the porch of the small cottage, tilted back in a wooden chair that was propped on its two rear legs. The heels of his running shoes were stacked on the railing. He held the phone tightly to his ear so that he could hear his brother over the dull roar of the breakers crashing on the long strip of beach.
There was a storm coming in on the Oregon coast, and the little town of Eclipse Bay was going to take a direct hit. He was looking forward to it. With luck the energy of the gale would prove distracting, at least for a while. He needed a distraction. Lately the days seemed endless and the nights were even longer.
The layers of gray that surrounded him—from the leaden sky to the weathered boards of the cottage—went well with the gray mood that had descended on him after he’d made it out of the flooded caves. He wasn’t sleeping well, which was a good thing because when he did sleep, the dream was intense. And it was getting worse.
“Gwen is a talent,” Sam said patiently. “Like us, remember?”
Oh, yeah, I remember you, Dream Eyes, Judson thought. He’d encountered her on only one occasion—a month ago when he’d driven to Seattle to meet Sam’s fiancée, Abby Radwell—but he wasn’t likely to
forget Gwen Frazier.
The four of them had gone out to dinner together at a restaurant in the trendy South Lake Union neighborhood of the city. He’d taken one look into Gwen’s witchy green-and-gold eyes and immediately started contemplating a long hot night spent amid sheets made damp with sweat. He had convinced himself that the attraction was mutual. There was no way he could have been wrong about the energy that had sparked in the atmosphere between them that night. No way. There had certainly been no doubt in his mind that Gwen was exactly the distraction he had needed to get his mind off the damn dream.
But the vision of a night of sexual relief had gone down in flames when Gwen had looked at him and said those four little words. I fix bad dreams.
It was at that point that he realized he had completely misinterpreted the look in her mysterious eyes. She hadn’t seen him as a potential lover. She had viewed him as a potential client—vulnerable and in need of her professional expertise.
He now had a new four-word rule. Never date psychic counselors.
“Gwen sees auras, doesn’t she?” he said into the phone. “Dead bodies don’t have auras, so I don’t understand how she could pick up much at a crime scene.”
“Abby says that Gwen’s talent is a lot more complex than she lets on,” Sam said. “Don’t forget those two have known each other since they were locked up in high school together.”
“Locked up?”
“After their psychic talents started to manifest, Abby and Gwen both wound up in a boarding school for troubled youth, the Summerlight Academy,” Sam explained. “In Abby’s case, her family figured she was psychologically disturbed. Gwen ended up there after the aunt who had raised her died. It’s a long story and not a happy one. Abby says there were bars on the windows.”
Judson exhaled slowly. “That had to be rough.”
“Knowing Abby and Gwen has brought home to me the fact that you and I and Emma don’t always appreciate just how damn lucky we were to grow up with parents who managed to deal with the paranormal side of our natures.”
Meeting Abby Radwell had changed a lot of things for his brother, Judson thought. Sam had fallen for Abby like the proverbial ton of bricks after Abby had hired him to investigate a case that had involved murder, revenge and a rare psi-encoded book.
The couple had announced their intention to marry immediately. Willow Coppersmith had flown into a mild panic. Claiming some rights as the mother of the groom, she had beseeched Sam and Abby to wait until she could plan a more formal wedding.
A compromise had been reached. The wedding was scheduled for the end of August, less than three weeks from now. Judson was pretty sure that the negotiation had been Abby’s doing, not Sam’s. Abby had struggled all of her life to find a real family. Now that she was about to join the Coppersmith clan, she wanted to start off on the right foot with her new mother-in-law.
The gala celebration was going to take place at the family compound, Copper Beach, on Legacy Island. The normally secluded enclave in the San Juans was now abuzz with activity as Willow and the wedding planner she had hired exercised their remarkable talents for organization to pull together a large-scale event in a short span of time.
Judson suspected that there were probably no more than five men on the face of the planet who would have enjoyed the commotion associated with the planning of a big wedding. Sam was not among those five, but he was the groom, so he was stuck coping with the hubbub created by the constant comings and goings of caterers, photographers and florists.
Judson felt a little sorry for him, but he figured Sam could handle the situation. In any event, he knew that in his present mood he would not be good company. Also, in his present state, it was best to avoid Willow. She had a mother’s intuition. If she found out about the recurring dream and the sleepless nights, she would freak. That was the last thing anyone—especially Sam and Abby—needed.
“Look, I understand that you want to take a break before we decide what we’re going to do with Coppersmith Consulting,” Sam said. “But this is a family situation. Abby says that Gwen is really upset about Ballinger’s death. Gwen wants an investigation, and she’s not going to get that from the local cops. All we’re asking you to do is make a quick trip to Wilby and figure out what happened to Ballinger.”
“What if it turns out that Ballinger was murdered by paranormal means? What the hell will Gwen expect me to do about it? It’s not like this is one of our old agency jobs where I can go in, analyze the scene and turn the problem over to Spalding so that he can make the problem go away. Regular cops and prosecutors don’t think much of the woo-woo stuff. They need hard proof to build a case, and that’s not always available.”
“I’m aware of that,” Sam said.
“It’s why we don’t do much private work, remember?”
“I know, but this falls into the friends-and-family category,” Sam said.
“I get that, but that still begs the question. What will Gwen Frazier expect me to do if I determine that her friend was murdered but can’t find any usable evidence?”
“You’ll think of something,” Sam said. “You always do. This is very important to Abby. She says Gwen needs closure.”
“Closure for what?”
Sam cleared his throat. “Evidently Gwen has a history there in Wilby.”
“This thing is starting to sound more complicated by the minute.”
“Two years ago, Gwen was one of seven subjects in a research study conducted by the dead woman. The study was designed to try to find a way to prove the existence of paranormal talents.”
“Safe to say that the study was a failure,” Judson said. “No way to prove what can’t be scientifically measured. The Coppersmith R-and-D lab has been working on that problem for years.”
“Sure. But that’s not the big story about what happened in Wilby two years ago.”
“There’s more?”
“Turns out one of the research subjects in the Ballinger study, a guy named Zander Taylor, was a serial killer who specialized in stalking and killing people who claimed to be psychic. Until he arrived in Wilby, most of his targets were probably frauds—a mix of storefront fortune-tellers, tarot card readers, mediums and assorted scam artists.”
A flicker of awareness arced across Judson’s senses. Something that might have been curiosity stirred inside him. It was the first time he had felt anything other than the weight of the gray since he had returned from the island. He took his feet down off the railing and stood.
“Let me take a flying leap here,” he said. “This Zander Taylor wanted a challenge. He volunteered for the research study in order to find himself some real psychics to murder.”
“You do know how the bad guys think,” Sam said. “You nailed it. He succeeded in killing two members of the research study before he tried to murder Gwen. Obviously, he failed but it was a near thing, and Abby says Gwen was badly traumatized by the attack. Now Ballinger’s death has brought back all the bad memories and vibes.”
Another tendril of curiosity flickered through Judson. He looked down at the amber-colored crystal in his ring. The stone was glowing with a little energy in response to his slightly jacked talent.
“How come we’ve never heard of Taylor?” he asked. “That kind of story should have been all over the news. I can see the headlines now. Serial Killer Stalks Psychics.”
“Taylor never made the news because no one ever realized that he was killing people,” Sam said. “In the case of the Wilby murders, the first two deaths were attributed to natural causes. Taylor’s death was ruled a suicide.”
Judson contemplated the restless, gray ocean. “What did the local cops say about the deaths?”
“I’m told that the Wilby chief of police—guy named Oxley—had his suspicions but he couldn’t prove anything. That was fortunate for Gwen.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Gwen was the one who reported all three deaths,” Sam said. “You know how that would have looked to any half
way competent cop. The person who finds and reports the body usually goes to the top of the suspect list.”
“And this morning she finds another body.” Judson whistled softly. “What are the odds, huh?”
“You can see it from Oxley’s point of view.”
Judson wrapped one hand around a wooden post and watched the summer storm sweep in over the ocean. “Okay, got to admit there’s an interesting pattern here.”
“Evidently, when Oxley arrived at the scene this morning, he did not hide the fact that he doesn’t like coincidences.”
“He really believes that Gwen may be responsible for all of the murders?”
“He never could prove that there were any murders, but, yes, he has his suspicions. Gwen is in no immediate danger of arrest, but for her own peace of mind, she needs to find out what is going on. She knows Abby so she knows that you and I are in the psychic investigation business.”
“We were in the business before I pretty much put us out of business,” Judson said.
“We’ll find another client. Got to be more where that one came from.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious,” Sam said. “Losing our number one client is no big deal, given what we now know about said client.”
“Except that, aside from the security work we do for Coppersmith, Inc., it was pretty much our only client. And we didn’t lose the client. I destroyed the whole damn agency.”
“Not a problem,” Sam said. “We’ll find a replacement. At last official count, there were close to a thousand different government agencies, departments and offices involved in the U.S. intelligence community—and a couple thousand more private contractors. I’m sure we can find one that is interested in the services of a consulting firm that specializes in paranormal investigations. But for now, we need to do something about Gwen Frazier’s case.”
The wind sharpened. So did Judson’s senses. This time it would be different, he thought. This time Gwen needed him. She would not be able to treat him like one of her psychic counseling clients.
“All right, I’ll drive to Wilby and take a look,” he said.
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