“Ah, well, back to our story. Yes, indeed, the witch was fattening them up,” her captor said. “But do you know why?” He hummed a strange tune, repeating himself in discordant song. “Why, why, why? Do you know why?”
Her eyes remained open as she listened to that crooning voice deliberately trying to lull her into much-needed sleep. Her body wanted to give in to it, to let go. If she thought there was a chance she might never wake up, she would have gladly embraced the chance.
But she wasn’t that lucky. And she knew she would regret it when she awoke and found out what he wanted to do to her. So Vonnie forced herself to shake her throbbing head, knowing the sharper the pain the less she’d be inclined to give in. “Why?”
He laughed softly, not answering. Just as well. She probably didn’t want to know the answer to that question, given the way he was turning these nightly stories into tales from his twisted crypt of a mind.
“You’ll just have to wait and see. Patience, sweet . . .”
His sibilant words were interrupted by the sound of banging coming from somewhere above. Before Vonnie could even process it, she heard a clang of metal. The small sliding panel in the door, through which he watched her, talked to her, and tormented her, was slammed shut. The narrow column of illumination that had shone through it, one single beam of blazing light in the darkness, had been chopped away like the head off a snake.
Another bang from above. She tried to focus on it, tried not to let the relief of his leaving make her give in to exhaustion. That noise, the way he’d reacted to it, was important, though it took a second for her to process why.
Then she got it. He had been startled. The creature had been surprised out of his lair by something unexpected. Or someone?
Oh God, please.
Hope bloomed, relentless and hot. What if someone else was out there? For the first time in days, she realized he hadn’t taken her to the bowels of hell but to somewhere real, a place that other people could come upon. A mailman, a neighbor? Anyone who could help her?
An internal voice tried to dampen her hopes. That might not have been someone banging on the door at all, but merely a loose shutter or a tree branch. Besides, it was dark out, maybe even the middle of the night—no mailman worked these hours.
The police. Maybe they’re looking for me.
It was a long shot. But long shots were all she had right now. “Help me. Somebody, help me,” she whispered. “Please, I’m here!”
She didn’t think about what he’d do when he came back. Didn’t stop for one second to worry whether he’d find some new way to punish her.
No. Vonnie Jackson simply began to scream as if her life depended on it.
Chapter 1
Thursday, 6:05 a.m.
Aidan McConnell awoke to the smell of gingerbread and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman’s scream.
The scream ended the moment he opened his eyes. The smell did not.
It took him a minute to place the scent, which had invaded his head and his dreams as he tried to grab some sleep just before dawn on Thursday. At first, in those early moments between asleep and awake, he assumed he’d been dreaming of some long- forgotten holiday visit to his grandmother’s house; her kitchen had always been rich with all the delicious aromas any sugar-deprived kid could desire. But when he sat up on his couch and realized the cloying, sickeningly sweet odor of ginger and spice was truly filling his every breath, he knew he wasn’t dreaming.
He was connecting.
“Damn it,” he muttered, not wanting this, not now, not again. Not so soon after last night’s mental invasion. Bacon, for God’s sake. The reek of fatty, greasy bacon had seemed to permeate every inch of air in his house a few hours ago, and now it was gingerbread.
Forcing himself to focus on his other senses, he stared at his huge, antique walnut desk, which sat in the dead center of the room. Its surface was hidden as completely as the top of a freshly buried casket. Files, notepads, research books, his laptop—they consumed almost every inch of space. A few random items finished the job: A coffee mug that read, “Psychics do it when they’re not even there.” A colorful sand pail filled with pencils in varying lengths. A paperweight. An old-fashioned wind-up clock that dinged violently when the alarm went off.
Aidan stared; he focused; he thought about the coolness of the brass on the clock and the heft of the stone base of the paperweight and the way freshly brewed coffee tasted when sipped out of that mug. He thought of the thousands of doodled sketches he’d made with those pencils, trying to capture images he’d seen while mentally connecting with someone before they shortened and finally disappeared from his mind like a shadow at high noon.
It didn’t work.
Spice. Cinnamon. Sugar. But bloated, vile, thick, and putrid like the remnants of a Thanksgiving pie buried in a garbage heap with rotting turkey and moldy stuffing.
He focused harder, rubbing the tips of his fingers across the grain of the leather couch, craning to hear the faint tick of that clock, staring at the desk, ordering his other senses to combine and smother the smell. But still the stench enveloped him. He could taste it now, the sting of too much ginger, the vile, rancid sugar melting on his tongue. His stomach rebelled.
Closing his eyes, he gritted his teeth, resorting to his oldest tricks against the familiar invasion into his psyche. He visualized a sea of sturdy cement building blocks. One by one, he began piling them up, erecting the psychic barrier between his mind and the one with which he was unwillingly connecting. Building mental walls in order to protect himself wasn’t just an expression when it came to Aidan; it was pure survival. He’d have gone insane long ago if he hadn’t learned how to protect himself.
His maternal grandmother—the one who’d slipped him usually denied sweets—had taught him the trick when he was eleven or twelve. Teaching him how to survive in a world that didn’t like kids who were “different,” she’d given him just about every coping skill he had. She had been strong-willed, had fought for him when nobody else would and Aidan was too young to do it for himself. They’d made quite a team. The old woman had been different, strange, had seen things she’d never truly seen, known things she couldn’t possibly know.
Like him.
In another era, she would have been burned as a witch. In modern-day Georgia, however, she’d been deemed a quack and hidden away like the proverbial skeleton in the family’s closet. She was seldom spoken of, but would never allow herself to be completely banished. When she felt like it, she inserted herself into her family’s lives, whether they wanted her there or not.
That was lucky for him. Because she had been the only one Aidan could talk to about his unexpected, unwanted abilities. The only one who’d understood and helped him. She was also the one who had never called him a demon from hell when he was eight years old.
That’d been his oh-so-devout parents. Who said radical Southern Baptists didn’t know how to raise a kid right? They’d reacted by locking him away with his grandmother . . . who made the best gingerbread. That smell.
“No, build, damn it!”
He mentally built—row by row, layer by layer, foot by foot. His head ached, but he forced every brain cell into submission. The cement wall was almost touching the clouds by the time the spicy stench began to gradually dissipate like steam off a mirror. Until finally he could breathe again without smelling anything but the normal leather of the couch and the faintly old air of the closed-in house in which he lived.
He could also think again. Unfortunately, his thoughts went to one place: Who was it? Who had he met, touched, interacted with in the past? Whose thoughts were filled with stink and rotting garbage? And gingerbread. Why was that person’s mind consumed with it—so consumed that Aidan was overwhelmed by their thoughts, which translated into physical scents, from far away?
He didn’t doubt he’d met the person with whom he was connecting. He’d touched him or her; perhaps just a faint brush of hand against arm as they passed on the street,
but they had physically connected. The sensory reactions were never this strong without real, personal contact. Studying a photograph or holding an item used by someone he was seeking might bring a quick sensation, a breathful of odor, a flash of mental imagery. But for it to go on like this morning’s nightmare meant skin-to-skin contact.
Thank God the scream hadn’t rung in his ears for as long as the stench had filled his nostrils. Maybe it wasn’t connected. Perhaps the scream had merely been a last remnant of one of his own forgotten nightmares. He preferred to think that, not wanting to imagine the scream was really happening anywhere else but in his own mind. Aidan didn’t want to picture the screamer in agony, desperate for help. His help.
“Forget it,” he muttered, not letting himself go down that path. He didn’t do that anymore. Once crucified, twice shy. He did everything he could to stay in his own head these days, and stay out of everyone else’s. Where he’d once used psychic ability, he was now quite content to use his own highly tuned sense of intuition and reasonable deduction.
Right now, he reasonably deduced that the smell had been noticed and thought about by somebody he’d briefly met, somebody who was walking by a garbage dump. And the scream was a product of his own tortured memories running rampant in his dreams. Period. He refused to consider any other options.
The sudden ringing of the phone came as a jarring surprise. First because it was so early, and second because he so seldom received phone calls. He liked it that way, having isolated himself in this old house in Granville when he’d decided to get out of Savannah after everything went down so badly last year. He rarely shared the number, and when he saw who was calling he heaved a heavy sigh. So much for staying out of the mind-hopping business. Because one of the few people in the world who could occasionally rope him into working missing persons cases again was on the other end of the phone line.
Julia Harrington hadn’t given up trying to get him to come back to work for her, at least on a part-time basis. She knew him well enough to know he still had his fingers in a few pies out there, that he couldn’t completely stay away from the world of crime solving, even if he did it without the “woo-woo” stuff, as she called it.
With this morning’s incident fresh in his mind, he was tempted to just let the machine pick up. If he did, however, he’d be letting himself in for more calls, every half hour, around the clock, until he finally answered, and it didn’t take any psychic abilities to know that. They’d played this game before. His former colleague was relentless about getting what she wanted.
“Hello, Julia,” he said as soon as he lifted the phone to his mouth.
“How did you know it was me? Admit it—you’re doing your psychic thing again, right?”
“Ever heard of a little invention called caller ID?”
“Oh, that. How mundane.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
Julia was one of the few people he kept in touch with from his old life. When everything had gone to hell with his last case, she’d been right there, standing beside him, ready to fight for his reputation if he asked her to.
He hadn’t asked her to. Though he’d certainly appreciated the offer, Julia had her own issues. Ex-cop or no, she now owned a company called eXtreme Investigations, and led a team of psychic detectives. So she wasn’t exactly the most staunch and upstanding of character references. Whenever her name came up, the media was almost as vicious toward her as they were toward Aidan. Almost. Had she been working with him on that last case, she might now be living in the old house next door, just as wary, just as vilified.
“So, whatcha working on?”
“I don’t do that anymore; remember?”
“Yeah, uh-huh, sure you don’t. I thought about you the other day when I saw a story out of Charlotte about an ‘anonymous tip’ that led police to the killer of a local carpenter.”
He stiffened, wondering how she could possibly have connected that to him.
“Morgan.”
Ah. Morgan. Of course. Julia’s business partner definitely got around.
“Reasonable deduction,” he admitted grudgingly.
“Nothing supernatural about it. I merely hacked into the case file, read the witness statements, and found some inconsistencies. It was all right there.”
“Just can’t stay out of it, can you?”
“If by ‘it’ you mean dabbling in cold-crime solving, I’ll admit that I haven’t lost my interest. But as for the rest? Hell, yes, I can stay out of it. So you might as well not even start.”
“Hold on, before you go getting your excuses lined up about why you can’t come back to the real world, and have to keep wearing your hair shirt and indulging in self-flagellation—”
“That was a mouthful.”
“I’m just saying, don’t panic. I’m not calling to beg you to come back to work, or to lure you into working a special case, or even to pick your brain.”
He couldn’t deny a flood of relief. She didn’t want him for a job. He’d never worked for her exclusively, but he’d done a lot of contract jobs for Julia when she and her partner were getting eXtreme Investigations off the ground. Since his “retirement” she’d come to him a few times, strictly for advice—so she said—or trying to lure him into work via the back door of consultancy.
But not this time. Which meant she was probably calling to try to reengage him in a social life, like she had a few weeks ago when she and two of her other agents had shown up at his door. Aidan wasn’t the type who enjoyed surprise visits, nor did he ever go to beer-and-wings joints like the one to which they’d dragged him. Despite the fact that he’d almost had a good time, he had no desire to repeat the experience. Because even here in Granville, where he was a newcomer and a stranger, people knew him by reputation—and oh, how they did like to stare.
“Aidan?”
“Okay, so why are you calling?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know.
“I got a call last night from a reporter.”
“We don’t use that word anymore, remember?”
“Oh, sorry. I mean, I got a call last night from a lying, manipulative media cockroach.”
“Better.”
“It’s about the Remington case.” The words sounded like they’d ridden out of her mouth on a deep sigh, as if she hated to be the bearer of bad news.
“Wonderful.” Aidan lifted a hand to his face and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. Of all the names he didn’t want to hear ever again, Remington topped the list. “Go on.”
“He wanted to get in touch with you to see if you’d heard Caroline Remington tried to commit suicide last week, on the anniversary.”
“Jesus.” Aidan sagged against the back of the couch, a well of emotions surging through him. Anger, pity, frustration. Regret. Such regret. It was like his worst nightmare, only it just kept going and he couldn’t wake up from it.
“I know; it’s awful.”
He’d never even met Mrs. Remington; she’d been well protected by her husband from the minute their son disappeared. But from the pictures he’d seen in the paper, she looked like a pretty, fragile woman whose world had been shattered, leaving her confused and heartbroken.
“Is she all right?”
“Apparently. She took some pills, but her husband found her in time. I thought you’d want to know, in case the cockroach from the morning news manages to track you down.”
Finding out his general location probably wouldn’t be too hard. He hadn’t made it a state secret that he was moving to Granville, fifty miles west of Savannah. Or that he was giving up his role as prominent author, speaker, and expert on psychic phenomenon to become a hermit who growled at the world whenever it dared to intrude on him.
But at least his number was unpublished and his address unlisted. Anyone wanting to reach him would have to do some digging, and hopefully the reporter wouldn’t bother.
Wishful thinking. In his experience, there was no place too low for most reporters, no dirt they w
ouldn’t claw through, no muck they didn’t want to rake up.
“I hate that this is coming up again,” Julia said. “I’m really sorry.”
“I figured it would, with the one-year mark. Besides, I’m not the one you should feel sorry for; Caroline Remington is.”
First, for the loss of her six-year-old son, and second, for being married to a controlling, manipulative bastard like Theodore Remington.
Thrusting the anger away, he forced himself to think of the fact that, even though he was a rich, spoiled, overbearing asshole, Remington was also a grieving father. He had good reason to bear a grudge against Aidan. Whatever petty revenge he’d taken, using his contacts and power to make Aidan’s life hell, it had been justified. After all, in Remington’s mind, Aidan had been responsible for his son’s death. And Aidan couldn’t entirely disagree with him.
“Aidan?”
He sighed heavily. “As if I have anything to add on that subject? Haven’t I said enough to and about that family?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He’d heard those words a thousand times in the past twelve months, since the Remington boy had been found dead, trapped inside an old antique freezer in his own grandmother’s garage. At least, he’d heard them from his friends and colleagues.
From strangers, the media, the boy’s parents? Well, their words weren’t nearly as comforting and their attitude not nearly as understanding.
“You are not responsible; it was a tragic accident.”
“An accident,” he repeated.
Maybe. Probably.
Or maybe not. Sometimes he wondered. Though, of course, he couldn’t voice his curiosity now, couldn’t ask the questions the investigators should have asked back then. Because he had zero credibility and nobody gave a damn what a disgraced former psychic thought.
Cold Sight Page 2
