“One thing I’ve learned in the consulting business. Don’t look back. Not unless there is information in the past that can be used to figure out what is going on in the present.”
“It’s a good rule.” Gwen picked up her fork. “But in my line, I’ve learned that the past always impacts the present.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’ve run up against that problem a few times, myself.”
They ate in silence for a while. He tried not to watch Gwen overtly but it was hard to take his eyes off her. It was good to be here with her, basking in her delicate feminine energy. This was what he had needed ever since he had returned from the island, he thought. Gwendolyn Frazier was the fix he craved.
“It’s usually better if you don’t ask,” she said matter-of-factly. She speared a tomato slice and ate it.
He went very still, vaguely aware that his ring was suddenly infused with a little heat.
“Better if I don’t ask what?” he said, feeling his way as cautiously as he had when he had escaped the underwater cave.
“You’re wondering what I see when I view your aura.” She munched the tomato and swallowed. “I was just warning you that it’s better not to go there.”
He had known he would have to deal with this sooner or later. She was not the type to let go.
“You do realize that you’ve left me no option,” he said. “Now I have to ask.”
“I was afraid of that. Promise you won’t get spooked?”
“I’m a talent. I take the paranormal as normal.” He forked up a mouthful of fish. “Why would I get spooked?”
“My aura readings sometimes have that effect on people, even those who accept the reality of the paranormal,” she said.
“What do you see in my aura?”
She hesitated. He could see the uncertainty in her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “But remember that my visions involve all sorts of misleading symbols and metaphors. When I go into my talent, I essentially slip into a trance, a waking dream. Those kinds of dreams can be just as hard to interpret as regular dreams unless I have context.”
She paused to give him an encouraging smile.
“No context,” he said. “Let’s see what you can do without any hints or clues.”
She stopped smiling.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” she said. “You don’t believe that I can actually see anything useful, do you?”
“I don’t doubt that you can see auras, and I’m convinced you’re sensitive to heavy energy like the kind laid down at crime scenes. But read my dreams? No. I don’t think anyone can do that.”
She sat quietly for a moment, her incredible eyes luminous with a little psi. Energy shivered in the atmosphere. Two men at the nearby table glanced around uneasily and then went back to their meal.
Gwen lowered her talent. Her mouth tightened at the corners. “Your aura looks the same as it did a month ago when I met you in Seattle. You’re stable. But I can tell that the dreams are getting more powerful. They aren’t nightmares—not exactly—but there is a rising sense of urgency linked to them. You’re not sleeping well, either. But there’s something else going on, too, something I can’t figure out without more context.”
He made himself put his fork down with no outward show of emotion. “Is that the best you can do? Because any storefront fortune-teller could pull that kind of analysis out of a crystal ball. Everyone has a few bad dreams from time to time.”
“I know,” she said.
Her voice had gone flat and cold. He felt like he had just stomped on a butterfly.
“I apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t have implied that you were a storefront fortune-teller.”
“I’m aware of what the general public thinks about psychic counselors. Most people assume that we are entertainers at best and scam artists at worst.”
“I know that your talent is genuine, Gwen. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry.”
She relaxed. “Apology accepted. Do you want me to finish telling you what I saw in your aura?”
“Sure.”
“There’s not a whole lot more to tell. It’s all that hot radiation in your dream currents that I find difficult to interpret. I’m sure it’s psi. But the ultra-light is the same color as the energy I see from time to time in your ring. Did something happen to you that involved that amber crystal? Were you caught in an explosion? A fire, maybe?”
He thought that he was prepared for whatever vague analysis she came up with—prepared for anything except the possibility that she might actually be able to see into his dreams. There was only one way she could strike that close to the truth.
“I told Sam something of what went down on that last case,” he said. “He told Abby and Abby told you. So much for keeping some things private within the family.”
“You mustn’t blame Sam or Abby. Neither of them told me anything about your dreams. As for what happened on your last case, it’s no secret that you nearly got killed and that you had to swim out of an underwater cave—which does explain some of the urgency in your dream, of course. But there’s something else going on. You’re revisiting the same dreamscape again and again. My reading tells me that you’re searching for something.”
A dark chill whispered through him. “And you can help me find it?”
She smiled, her eyes filling with a wistful regret, as if she had just acknowledged to herself the loss of something she had longed to possess.
“I fix bad dreams, remember?” she said gently.
“I’m not interested in therapy. I can handle my own damn dreams.”
“Right.” She took a breath and pulled her cloak of cool, polite reserve around herself. “Now you see why I lead a very limited social life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re thinking that it’s as if I had caught a glimpse of one of your dreams, aren’t you? It felt like an invasion of privacy.”
He started to deny it but decided there wasn’t much point. “Thought crossed my mind, yeah.”
“If it’s any comfort, I can’t actually see your dreams.”
He was starting to get pissed—with himself, not with her. He was the one who had challenged her to do a fast reading on his aura. The fact that he didn’t like the results was his own fault.
“Good to know,” he said.
“There’s no need to growl at me.”
“I am not growling.”
“I know growling when I hear it,” she said. “The thing is, heavy dreams affect the aura, especially if they recur frequently and especially if the dreamer has a lot of psychic talent. What I pick up is the dreamlight energy in a person’s aura. My intuition then interprets that energy. I don’t always get it right, and it’s impossible to do an accurate analysis when I don’t have any context. But I can usually see enough to start asking the right questions. That’s where I’m at with your case.”
“I’m not your case, and I’m not here to get psychic dream counseling,” he said. “I’m here to solve a murder. You’re the client, not me.”
Anger flashed, quicksilver bright, in her eyes. In the next instant the shadows were back, veiling her secrets.
“No,” she said much too politely. “You are not my client.”
He felt as if she had just slammed a door in his face. And it was his own damn fault.
Nine
She had nobody but herself to blame for the glacial chill in the atmosphere between them, Gwen thought. She should have known better than to tell Judson the truth. She had been aware that she was rolling the dice when she described what she saw in his dreamlight energy. She had hoped that his own psychic abilities, combined with his understanding of the paranormal, would allow him to accept her talent. But she had placed a losing bet. Then she’d made the stupid mistake of doubling down on a very bad wager by trying to convince him to let her help him.
It wasn’t the first time she had miscalculated with a man, but this time it seemed t
o matter a lot more than it usually did. She told herself it was better to get the truth out in the open before the relationship progressed any farther.
Then again, the only relationship she had with Judson Coppersmith was that of client and hired investigator. She needed to keep that in mind at all times.
Show no weakness, she thought. It was the motto that Nick Sawyer had taught to Abby and her early on in their time at the Summerlight Academy. Definitely words to live by, then and now.
She and Judson finished dinner in a brittle, tension-laced silence and walked outside. The night air was crisp. Stars and a half moon glittered in an obsidian dark sky, but they did little to illuminate Wilby.
“I really do not like this town,” she said, breaking the edgy silence.
“I’m not surprised, given your history here,” Judson said.
“What’s our next move?”
“There are a lot of next moves,” Judson said. “Tomorrow I want to see the old lodge where you found the bodies and where Zander Taylor attacked you and then went over the falls.”
“All right.”
They started across the mostly empty parking lot. The lights of the Riverview Inn glowed in the distance.
“As a matter of curiosity, what did you see in Zander Taylor’s aura?” Judson asked.
She thought about the visions that still came back to haunt her in the darkest hours of the night. “Nothing that told me that he was a killer, at least not until he attacked me. Afterward I could make sense of at least some of what I had seen, but by then it was too late. That’s the problem with my visions. I keep telling you, without context—”
“Without context you can’t interpret what you see. You’ve made that clear. Tell me what you saw in Taylor’s aura.”
“I saw the kind of energy that I’ve come to associate with drug addiction. But I didn’t see any indications of an actual drug in his aura. I mentioned the bad energy to Evelyn, but she said as long as he wasn’t using at the time, she wasn’t going to kick him out of the study. She reminded me that a lot of people with psychic talents end up experimenting with drugs at some point in an attempt to self-medicate. Sensitives often think they’re going crazy. Sometimes they go to a doctor who thinks they’re disturbed and puts them on medication. Either way, drugs are often a factor when it comes to dream therapy.”
“The bottom line being that the indications of addiction were not a serious red flag.”
“No, especially since he showed no obvious signs that he was on drugs at the time. It was only later that I realized it wasn’t drugs that he was addicted to—it was the killing.”
“The ultimate game for a full-blown psychopath,” Judson said.
“Game is exactly the right way to describe how Taylor viewed his kills. Evelyn and I were convinced that there had been many victims before he got to Wilby.”
A van that had been driving down the street abruptly veered into the parking lot. The headlights pierced the night. The vehicle was moving much too fast and it was coming straight at them.
Judson was already reacting. He seized Gwen’s arm and swept her into a protected zone created by two parked cars.
The van slammed to a halt less than three feet away. There was just time enough to read the words Hudson Floral Design before the driver’s-side door shot open. A woman dressed in jeans, boots and a faded cotton shirt leaped out. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She ignored Judson and fixed her full attention on Gwen.
“I heard you were back,” she said. Rage and long-smoldering pain seethed in the atmosphere around her. “I also heard that Evelyn Ballinger is dead and that Oxley found you in the house with the body. Sounds like you’ve gone back to your old habits.”
“Hello, Nicole,” Gwen said.
She kept her voice low and soothing, intuitively trying to counteract some of the other woman’s anger. But she knew there was little hope of success. She was aware that Judson had gone ominously still. He stood very close and a little in front of her, partially shielding her with his body. She wanted to tell him that there was no immediate physical threat, but she wasn’t altogether certain that was true. It had been two years since she had last faced Nicole. On that occasion Nicole, sobbing hysterically, had vowed vengeance.
Nicole rounded on Judson. “Rumor has it you’re the new boyfriend. Better be careful. People around her have a bad habit of dying.”
“Take it easy,” Judson said.
“She murdered the man I loved two years ago and a couple of other people as well. I’ll bet she killed Evelyn Ballinger, too.” Nicole’s voice rose. “Stick around long enough and you’ll be her next victim. And watch what you eat. She uses poison, you see, so it always looks like a heart attack or an accident.”
“That’s enough,” Judson said. This time he put an edge on his words.
His ring heated a little, and Gwen was aware of an unnerving, deeply ominous sensation.
Nicole gasped and stepped back, startled. She turned quickly, searching the parking lot with an anxious expression, as if looking for something that might be coming up behind her. When she saw nothing, she burst into tears and turned back to face Gwen.
“How dare you come back here as if nothing ever happened?” she got out between sobs. “How dare you, bitch?”
She swung her hand in a vicious slap aimed at Gwen’s face. Judson moved slightly, just enough to get in the way of the blow. He absorbed the impact on one broad shoulder. The scary heat in the atmosphere escalated a couple of degrees.
Nicole whirled and fled back to the van. She got behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. The vehicle careened out of the parking lot and shot off down the street.
The disturbing energy dissipated.
Gwen watched the taillights of the van until they disappeared. Eventually, she allowed herself to take a breath. Judson clamped a powerful hand around her arm and drew her out from between the parked cars.
“Who was that?” he asked. He sounded very matter-of-fact, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
“Nicole Hudson. She owns a florist shop here in town.”
“I saw the sign on the van. She was Taylor’s lover?”
“Yes. She blames me for his death. She never believed that he was a suicide. She thinks I killed him.”
“I got that impression,” Judson said. “You have quite a reputation in this town, don’t you?”
“You have no idea.”
Ten
When Judson and Gwen walked into the lobby, Riley Duncan looked up from whatever he was doing at the front desk. He gave Gwen a stern frown.
“Had a complaint from a guest on your floor, Ms. Frazier,” Riley said. “The lady in three-oh-five says your cat is bothering her.”
Gwen frowned. “How could Max bother anyone?”
“She said he meows loudly whenever someone walks past in the hall. I went up there to check and she’s right. I could hear him on the other side of the door. Three-oh-five says the noise creeps her out. She doesn’t like cats. She’s afraid the cat will get out of the room and trip her up on the stairs.”
“I’ll keep Max away from her,” Gwen promised. “Once he knows I’m back tonight, I’m sure he’ll stop meowing. I think he’s having abandonment issues. Evelyn raised him from a kitten, and he doesn’t understand that she’s gone forever.”
“Probably doesn’t like being cooped up in a hotel room, either,” Riley said. “Cats are territorial, you know. They don’t adapt well to new environments.”
“I’m aware of that,” Gwen said. “But I couldn’t leave him out there all alone at the house. There’s no one around to feed him.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in adopting him?”
“I’m not a cat person,” Riley said. “Take him to the pound.”
He went back to his computer screen.
Gwen and Judson went up the stairs. The meowing started when they reached the third floor. It reverberated down the hall. Gwen winced
, took out her key and hurried forward. When she opened the door Max was waiting. He dashed through the opening.
“Max, no,” Gwen said. “Come back. “
Judson leaned down and scooped up the cat. “You don’t want to go running off like that, Max. She’s the one with the food. Not that you need any. You are a little on the hefty side. Do you lift weights?”
“Evelyn said that he’s part Maine coon cat,” Gwen said. “Maybe a lot Maine coon cat.” She switched on the lights.
Max twitched his ears, but he allowed himself to be carried back into the room. Judson set him down on the floor while Gwen closed and locked the door.
“What are you going to do with him?” Judson asked.
“Take him back to Seattle, I guess, unless I can convince someone local to take him in, which is probably unlikely. Max does not have what you’d call a warm and cuddly personality.”
“He looks tough.”
“He is tough. But Evelyn loved that cat. I’m not going to take him to the pound, and if I turn him loose back at the house, he’ll go feral. Cats that go wild don’t do well.”
“In that case, it looks like you’ve got yourself a cat,” Judson said.
“Probably.” She looked at Max. “Of course, if you take it into that blocky head of yours that you were born to be free, I promise not to stand in your way.”
Max ignored her. He went into the tiled bath and took up a position next to his empty bowl. He glared at her from the doorway.
“Okay, okay,” she said. She opened the minibar and took out the eggs. She cracked two into Max’s bowl. “But don’t blame me if you get too chunky to escape.”
Judson went to the minibar. “How about a nightcap while we talk?”
“Good idea. I could use a drink after that encounter with Nicole.”
Eleven
“Start at the beginning,” Judson said.
Gwen settled into the oversized wingback chair and contemplated the gas fire on the hearth. The dancing flames cast a warm glow over the small space, but she could not seem to shake a deep chill. Max was stretched out on the cushion beside her. The low rumble of his purr was a comforting sensation against her thigh.
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