Blinded

by Teyla Branton

  “You wait a couple days before you call him,” Cody said. “Your ability might come back on its own. If it doesn’t, then you decide if you want to go see Easton. It ain’t an exaggeration when I say he’s dangerous. Oh, and you’d better tell that detective of yours where you’re going so Easton will have to let you go.”

  A shiver went through me. “I get it already. Text me the number, and I’ll think about it.”

  “Good.” He paused before adding. “I’ll be finished next week. Tell your sister, okay? She wanted to see the boat before my buyer picks it up.”

  “I’ll mention it. But when you see her, don’t tell her about the scientist. That’s between us.”

  “Deal.”

  I said goodbye, hung up, and texted Tawnia about the boat, knowing that with everything going on, I’d probably forget about it later. If I weren’t so embroiled in my own troubles, I’d want to check out Cody’s boat carving myself. Last I’d seen, it was only partially finished and rose nearly two stories high. Tawnia texted right back, and I felt a distinct relief knowing that at least we still had the texting connection. Go, modern technology.

  To my relief, the headache was easing. Tawnia would laugh herself silly if she knew I’d taken a non-herbal remedy.

  I could do nothing more for the moment about my lost ability, and I refused to stay at the store and wallow in fear. JoAnna Hamilton was a good place to continue my investigation, not only because Russo thought her a person of interest, but because I didn’t for a minute trust Russo’s explanation of what he wanted me to do with his contract or what he planned to do with the information. Once, I would have trusted my gut, let myself get caught up in his charisma, but imprints had conditioned me to become a skeptic. People were rarely what they seemed at first glance.

  Easing myself off the stool, I made my way to the door. I thought about letting Jake know I was leaving, but he’d probably want to go with me, and I didn’t want his chivalry getting in the way of his reunion with Kolonda. Besides, with any luck, I’d be back before closing and he’d never know I’d been gone. If I didn’t return in time, Thera would come over after the rush eased at the Herb Shoppe and close up for me. My work as a consultant for the Portland Police Bureau had conditioned the widow to be ready to pitch in at a moment’s notice.

  I would lock my outside door, though, and turn over the sign alerting my customers to enter through Jake’s, a courtesy we offered each other during slow times. It cut down on shoplifting—not that I had much of a problem with that these days.

  As I glanced behind me at my antiques shop, feeling a renewed loss at the absence of the buzzing that signaled imprints, I spied Jake and Kolonda through our connecting doors near his display of dry packaged herbs. They made a striking couple with their matching bronze skin and black hair, his muscles emphasizing her petiteness. He was smiling.

  With a sigh, I strode out the door, ready to face JoAnna Hamilton.

  Chapter 7

  Too late I remembered my watchers outside. If I managed to find Ms. Hamilton’s house, I couldn’t exactly bring the police to her doorstep and expect her to talk to me. But after what happened that morning, neither was I stupid enough to go alone.

  I needed to remember to buy a wig with longer hair like Tawnia. Then maybe I could go around incognito. But that thought got me worrying about my sister. What if the people who jumped me this morning thought she was me and followed her when she left my shop? I shook off the thought as paranoia. We looked different enough, and she had all the baby equipment to further obscure any resemblance.

  I ducked into the jazz music shop next door, fairly certain I hadn’t been spotted by the officers since the doors were so close. Or if they had glimpsed me, they’d think I went back inside my own store. The owner of the jazz shop, a long-haired, baby-faced kid barely out of college, looked up from a group of equally young customers. “Hey, Autumn.”

  “Hey, Stu.” That was usually the extent of our conversations, except for a notable time four months ago when he’d wept on my shoulder after his girlfriend had dumped him.

  “I need to go out the back,” I said. “That okay?”

  “Sure, help yourself.”

  Unlike me, he had a door into an alley that let out on the opposite side of the block. I’d have to walk back around to my side of the block to enact my plan, but at least Peirce and Delaney wouldn’t be watching for me that way.

  The day was warm, but not overly so, and the walk did more to assert my sense of self than anything else that day. As I rounded the corner and crossed the street, now only a half block down from my shop but on the opposite side of the road, I threw a colorful silk scarf over my head. A gift from a local shaman, it was purple, mauve, and green. Beautiful and bright enough to hide me in plain sight in case Peirce glanced up the street instead of over at my shop.

  I reached the BMW with the dings, opened the passenger door, and slipped inside.

  Ace didn’t show surprise that I’d climbed in his car, and his customary man-with-a-secret smile on his tanned, narrow face didn’t falter. “Hello, Autumn. What’s up?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one parked on my street. Who are you working for?”

  “Just making sure nothing happens to you before you complete your business with my client.”

  “Russo.”

  Ace shrugged his scrawny shoulders. The former police officer turned private detective was still good at keeping his mouth shut. Maybe that was why Russo kept hiring him.

  “Well, you’re doing no good here, not with my buddies in blue hanging around.” I gestured to the police car ahead of us, separated by several other parked cars.

  Ace laughed. “Peirce and Delaney? That’s not protection.”

  “I’ve seen Peirce shoot,” I retorted, not bothering to hide my annoyance. “And I’ve never had to send someone into a burning building to rescue him. How are you feeling these days anyway? We were worried there for a while that you wouldn’t make it.” After we’d saved Ace from the warehouse, Shannon had said he was too ornery to die, and he’d been correct.

  “That was different.” But Ace had the decency to look away. “Anyway, I do what I’m told. It pays the bills. Especially the hospital bills.”

  I let the matter drop. “Russo thinks JoAnna Hamilton might have plans to double cross him. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know a thing about the woman, and until this week I hadn’t talked to Russo in ten months.” Bitterness laced his voice, though I could see no sign of it in his face.

  I contemplated him for several long seconds. Was he telling the truth? I didn’t know him well enough to say.

  “Well, maybe we should pay Ms. Hamilton a visit.” It was sad involving him in my plan, but any backup was better than none, and he at least could pose as a civilian in his T-shirt and jeans. I didn’t know if he carried a weapon, since he’d never answered the question the last time I’d asked, but he had to know what he was doing, freelancing for a mob boss.

  Ace shrugged. “If what you say is true, Russo will already be looking into her.”

  “So? You know I can find things no one else can.” Or I could have before today.

  His eyes narrowed, and the smile cranked down a notch. “Maybe if that weren’t true, you wouldn’t get into so much trouble.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t work for a mobster, you wouldn’t have almost died.” I held up a hand as he opened his mouth. “I know, I know. You’ve got to pay the bills.” I put on my safety belt. “Well, let’s go.”

  “I can’t go anywhere, I’m working.”

  “You have to follow me, right? There’s no reason we can’t go together.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Where to?”

  “JoAnna Hamilton’s.”

  He started the engine and pulled into traffic, doing a U-turn so we didn’t have to pass the police car. He seemed slow about it though, and I followed the path of his eyes to a white van parked three stores up from my shop. The side windows we
re partially darkened, but two men were inside, and one glimpse at them told me they weren’t casual shoppers.

  Were those more of Russo’s men? Or maybe JoAnna Hamilton’s people? Or maybe they worked for In Loving Memory, the estate sales people, who could still be responsible for my abduction. Had they spotted me? I tucked my head as they looked our way and watched the side mirror as we passed. They didn’t pull out behind us, though I could see Ace still checking them out in his mirror. We turned the corner and the tenseness in his body relaxed.

  “Who were they?” I asked.

  He smiled at me. “Who?”

  “Those men in the white van.”

  He laughed. “You need a new job. I didn’t see any men in a white van, and if you did, it was probably an annoyed husband talking with his son while his wife went into some store.”

  Suddenly I wondered if I had seen what I’d expected instead of what was actually there. I wanted to grab his steering wheel to see if he’d imprinted on it, to see if he was telling the truth. As if that would do any good now. I fought down the gaping loss inside me and stared straight ahead.

  “Then again,” he drawled, “if you ever get bored working with the police, you can work for me.”

  “No thanks.” Even if I could stand Ace, I would never do that to Shannon. A woman officer Shannon once dated had accepted a similar offer from Ace and had been shot and killed doing a job. Working privately might bring me more income than my consultant’s wage, but working with Ace on a regular basis was never going to happen.

  Lake Oswego was about twenty minutes south of Portland. If I’d been driving and I didn’t get lost—which I typically did—I could have done it in fifteen. By contrast, Ace was so methodical in his driving that I wondered how he’d ever put the dings in his BMW. At least the ride was comfortable and dependable, which reminded me that my rusty red Toyota Hatchback was still at my mechanic’s for a long-overdue new muffler.

  Many exclusive houses dotted Lake Oswego, and none of them were alike, except in their uniqueness. No tract housing here, especially right on the lake. But what surprised me was that despite his claim not to know much about what was going on, Ace knew exactly where JoAnna Hamilton lived. Without asking for directions, he steered the car up the drive to the house and into a circular rotunda, which featured a large water fountain. The steeply gabled house, covered with rock in different shades of gray, seemed to go on and on. The homeowner association fees alone were probably more than the mortgage I paid on Autumn’s Antiques, though admittedly I’d owned my store before housing boomed and then crashed.

  I’d been to nice houses before—Kolonda’s, for example, and the attorney who fostered Jazzy—but this was in another league entirely. Newness and luxury oozed from every bend and corner: copper accents, slate roof, elaborate flowerbeds, decorative windows. And I hadn’t yet set eyes on the pool, tennis court, or dockside barbeque the Internet had talked about. The only thought my dazed brain could come up with was to wonder why the old woman had wanted a secondhand antique rocking chair.

  “You sure about this?” Ace pointed his ever-present smile in my direction.

  “Of course. You have a gun?”

  “Won’t need one.”

  I seemed to recall him saying something similar the last time—and that hadn’t worked out so well for either of us. I took out my department-issued phone and turned on the GPS feature I normally kept off so I didn’t feel the department was keeping tabs on me, and updated my location. If I went missing, Shannon and the others would know where I’d been. Comforting thought.

  I pushed open the car door, fighting brief vertigo. The spell was shorter than it had been earlier but still a reminder of my danger that morning. Someone was playing a deadly game. I couldn’t forget that.

  I strode up the cobbled walk, not turning to see if Ace followed, but secretly relieved that I could hear him behind me. The doorbell sounded like someone playing chimes, which at this place wasn’t in the least pretentious. Above our heads in the entryway, two security cameras angled downward, and I wondered how many more cameras might be scattered over the estate and who watched the feed.

  A line of black ants marched across the porch, and I studied them, experiencing a strange satisfaction at their presence in the face of such luxury. One ant deviated from the rest, angling over to my foot, where it turned again, circumventing the obstacle.

  I gave the house’s occupants several minutes before lifting my hand to ring again. No sooner had the chimes stopped than one of the double doors swung open to reveal a woman I recognized from the estate sale that morning, the frailer one, still in her peach dress.

  She tilted her head, the white hair staying firmly in its bun. “May I help you?”

  “I’m here to see JoAnna Hamilton,” I said.

  Her eyes wandered down my jeans, as though contemplating the dirty streaks left after the explosion and fire. Her gaze hesitated several long seconds on my bare feet. Coming to my face again, she gave a little gasp. “Don’t I know you?”

  “We met this morning at the estate sale.”

  “Oh, yes, the rocker. JoAnna is really excited about it. I’m afraid she won’t be interested in selling.” Her blue eyes wandered from me to the ants, and an eager smile came to her lips.

  “That’s okay. Can I talk to her?”

  “What?” The woman looked back at me, her eyes blank.

  “Ms. Hamilton,” I reminded her.

  “That’s me.” She blinked. “Oh, you must mean JoAnna. I’m Marribel, her cousin. Please come in.” She looked past me to Ace, including him in her invitation. I wondered why she would so easily trust two strangers, but maybe crime wasn’t common out here. Of course, she had the security cameras and whoever might be watching. I hadn’t really planned on going inside, or exposing myself any more than necessary, but now that I was here, the idea of this old lady or her cousin trying to hurt me—or ordering me taken—seemed ludicrous. Besides, I had Ace with me. Not quite as good as Shannon, but good enough.

  I’d never been inside such a place. The entryway was impossibly wide and the curving staircase long and gracious, like something from the old south. The paint, the wallpaper, the marble floor, the railings, the molding, and the carpet on the stairs—everything gleamed with newness. I bet there were hundreds of places no one had yet left imprints. The paintings, statues, and carvings were perfect, and among the newer pieces, I spied more than a few antiques that were unusual enough to have been handpicked. They were mostly higher-end pieces than what I carried in my shop, but that didn’t stop me from appreciating them. Studying the collection, I knew I had at least one painting and a statue that would interest JoAnna Hamilton. Maybe even a certain rolltop desk.

  Smiling, I followed Marribel Hamilton under an archway into a sitting room decorated with expensive new furniture. Off-whites and beiges, with the occasional splash of color. Tasteful, but no antiques here. Even the abstract paintings looked new, and I didn’t recognize any of the artists, but I wasn’t really into the modern wave of abstract paintings. I only recognized them because of Tawnia’s familiarity with the art world.

  When invited, I sat on a beige leather sofa that was so comfortable I found myself wanting to lie down and have a nap. Instead, I settled back, the sofa cuddling around my body, and gave a little internal sigh. Maybe it was time to rethink the Victorian couch at my apartment. The woodwork on the piece was wonderful and I’d reupholstered it myself using extra padding, but it couldn’t begin to match this for comfort.

  “I’ll be right back,” Marribel said. By the way she moved, I judged she would likely be a lot longer than she hoped.

  “So what are you going to give as your excuse for being here?” Ace asked.

  His words brought me back to the edge of the sofa. It said a lot about my state of mind that I hadn’t actually thought this all the way through.

  “I mean, you can’t just accuse her of trying to kill you this morning.”

  “No, but I can as
k her if she saw anything. And why she happened to be there exactly when I was.”

  “And I would reply that I was trying to see what kind of person you are.” The new voice was imperious, and I jerked my head to the other side of the room, opposite the way we’d entered. JoAnna Hamilton stood there, measuring me with hard gray eyes—and obviously finding me lacking. She’d changed from her aqua suit of that morning to a long, youthful, summery dress that some might have thought would look ridiculous on a woman of her age, but instead brought out her femininity. Her bare arms were tan and supple, the muscles defined, and I guessed somewhere in this house she had a gym and a personal trainer to go with it. No wonder I’d first thought she was younger than her seventy-six years. Her hair was still twisted up in an elaborate knot on the back of her head, but tendrils had escaped to soften her aging face with such perfect preciseness that it had to be orchestrated rather than happenstance. The thick yellow gold necklace and matching bracelet screamed money in the way silver or white gold simply couldn’t.

  I had the feeling she was one of those people who could destroy another human being without a moment’s regret. Maybe coming here had been a mistake.

  I stood up quickly, which was another mistake because my dizziness kicked in again. “JoAnna Hamilton?” I asked unnecessarily.

  “Yes, as you very well know.” She strode further into the room. “And you are Autumn Rain, adopted daughter of Winter and Summer Rain, both deceased. You are a consultant for the Portland Police Bureau, and you use your gift of psychometry to help them solve cases, especially to find missing people.”

  So much for thinking our encounter that morning at the estate sale was anything but purposeful. At least she hadn’t mentioned Tawnia or Destiny.

  Her eyes flicked over Ace, who hadn’t bothered to stand, but she didn’t go into his background, which told me she either didn’t know him or considered him extraneous. His eyes narrowed slightly, but his secretive smile didn’t change.