A Memory of Murder: An Audrey Lake Investigation (Audrey Lake Investigations Book 1)

by Nichelle Seely

  “And the book?”

  “Pastor’s way out. Turning ugliness into something like love, something useful for others. Not revenge. Healing. Forgiveness.” Claire empties her bottle. Again. “Don’t think I could forgive something like that, myself.”

  I think of the evil that I’ve seen. “Yeah, me neither.”

  “Audrey?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know who killed Victoria?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Do you know who killed Daniel?”

  “No.”

  We stop talking. The neon signs buzz. A truck rumbles by on the street outside. A drop of water falls from the bar sink faucet and hits the stainless steel basin with a plink like a musical note.

  “Claire?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’ll keep trying. I won’t give up.”

  “Okay.” Claire peels the label off her bottle, using her thumbnail. It comes off in a single piece, slightly tattered at the edges. She smooths it carefully on the bar top. “Neither will I.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  WHO SANG THAT song “Monday Morning Coming Down?” Or is it Sunday morning? Whatever, my Monday starts out like I stuck my head in a church bell right before Quasimodo started to ring it. I can hear my brain thumping in time with my pulse. And the spikes of sunlight that penetrate the shades are lasers aimed directly at my eyes. The ceiling spins slowly above. Seems like a good day to stay in bed.

  When Phoebe calls later, I almost don’t answer. Almost let it go to voicemail. But. I’d gone this far, told her unthinkable things. So I pick up, my voice a husky rasp. Phoebe says the other consultant she wanted to talk to is in her office now. He’s a friend, and I can trust him absolutely. She assures me she hasn’t told him anything about what she and I discussed, but he might be able to throw some light on my hallucinations. Could I please come over?

  I whimper like a distressed animal. Do I have to? But. I need answers. Plus, Phoebe is sure to have coffee. So, out of the cot, down the suicide stairs, into the shower. Water beating like warm rain. Clothes. Hair. I carefully don’t look at my face.

  Trepidation knots my belly as I walk up the stairs to the street, up the sidewalk to the Rutherford house and down the stairs to Phoebe’s office. No escaping the hills of Astoria. The cold hardness under my feet makes me realize I need some grounding. Need to know where and how I stand: on the brink of madness, completely over the edge, or somewhere else entirely.

  I knock and the door opens.

  Phoebe greets me with a smile. “Hello, Audrey. I’m glad you could make it on such short notice.”

  Over the threshold. Bluebeard, or the good fairy? Only one way to find out.

  She gestures to a man beside her, saying, “This is the colleague and friend I told you about. Bernard Flowers.”

  He says, “Call me Bernie.” We shake hands. His is warm and dry. Mine is cold and a bit damp. He’s white, older, dressed in a chunky cabled sweater and wide-waled corduroys.

  Phoebe says, “Bernard is a psychotherapist with an expertise in psychic phenomena.”

  Wait, what? I’m confused. “I don’t —”

  Phoebe lifts a warning hand. “I know you’re skeptical. As am I, frankly. But please, just listen to what he has to say. Then you can decide for yourself.”

  Skeptical? Try flummoxed. At sea in a dinghy without oars and no land in sight.

  Flowers glances from one to the other of us, shrugs, and leans back in the arm chair, putting his hands behind his head. Phoebe goes to her desk, and I lean against the edge. I feel the corner poke into the flesh of my left buttock, but don’t change position. It’s a counterpart to the pain in my head. My arms cross my chest, and I feel the hard lump of my weapon.

  Phoebe hands me a glass of water. “Do you want a chair, Audrey?”

  “I’m good.” Standing, I can get a running start if I need to leave the room. “So. What is this?”

  The man’s voice is pleasantly rumbly. “It’s difficult to know where to start. I’ll just blather, and you can jump in with questions, okay? I don’t claim to have any psychic powers myself, but I have worked with various members of the sensitive community who are struggling to integrate their abilities, so I know something about it.” He pauses for thought.

  Shut up. A psychotherapist named Flowers? The ‘sensitive community?’ What the fuck?

  What Zoe said. My confidence in Phoebe takes a deep dive.

  Bernie clears his throat. “Most people have a mistaken idea of what psychics do and are. The ones I know are very low key. No one is sitting behind a crystal ball with big earrings and a pointy hat.” He rubs his jaw, glances at Phoebe, and adjusts the neck of his sweater. “So. There’s different kinds of ESP — extrasensory perception. It’s literally perception of things beyond our normal five senses, although what psychics ‘feel’ is translated through those sensory templates that we are familiar with. Clairvoyance, for instance, is visual in nature, images seen with the ‘inner eye’. Clairaudience is auditory, sounds perceived with the ‘inner ear.’ Am I making sense so far?”

  Ye gods. “Well — I guess — I don’t really know.” My head is killing me, and I squirm against the edge of the desk. “Truthfully, I don’t believe in this stuff. No offense.” Except, what did I think the vision was, a complimentary movie from the gods? Like that was any more credible. The truth is, I simply hadn’t wanted to think about it.

  The queen of denial.

  I look over to Phoebe, raising my eyebrows in appeal. She shrugs and inclines her head toward Flowers.

  He laughs and says, “You’re not offending me. It’s not an easy thing to assimilate. Like explaining color to someone who was born blind. Really, ESP is just a different way of perceiving the environment. For instance, I know a woman who can pick up information about another person by touching an object they have owned.”

  Struggling to be polite. “I frankly don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “Phoebe says you used to be a detective. Think of how a forensic scientist can utilize DNA from clothing or jewelry, and the information that can be gleaned from those traces. How is that so different from what you might call psychic residue?”

  “Because it’s physical — tiny bits and pieces. It’s really there, even if you can’t see it with the naked eye.”

  “Okay, think about sound then. Purely an energetic phenomena that we pick up with our ears. Vibrational disturbances that our brains translate as music, noise, or speech. Why shouldn’t there be other kinds of energetic information patterns? Echoes of personality, of events?”

  “If that’s true, why can’t we all see or hear these things?”

  “Why can’t we hear radio broadcasts without a radio? Or see colors beyond the rainbow spectrum? It doesn’t mean those things don’t exist, just that we need specialized equipment to ‘tune in,’ so to speak. Many creatures have more acute senses than we — just because a dog can hear a noise that we can’t, we don’t discount the existence of the noise. We accept that a dog can hear better than a human. Well, some humans have more acute perception than others.”

  “But.” I struggle to justify my unbelief. “A dog is hearing a noise that is happening right now. How can a person, no matter how acute their senses, be seeing something that has already happened? Days or weeks or years ago?”

  Bernie glances at Phoebe and steeples his fingers. “I don’t know the actual mechanics, but think of an echo. If I shout in a canyon, the echo bounces back and back, and can be heard even after I have stopped shouting. The sound goes on and on. An animal may hear reverberations of an echo for a much longer time than a human might. In some way, perhaps an event gets imprinted on an object, or the environment. Maybe because of intensity. Maybe the greater the emotional energy, the stronger the imprint — the psychic ‘echo,’ if you will.”

  “Are you saying the environment — the world — remembers the thin
gs that happen on it?” I can’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. And yet, a part of me wants to believe, to latch on to this explanation of what is happening to me, as an alternative to mental illness.

  “Not in the sense that you and I remember, but maybe in the sense a computer remembers. It’s just information, stored in a matrix that can be accessed by a particular type of antenna. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” He crosses his legs. “Haven’t you ever been in a place with an atmosphere? A place that seems eerie, or forbidding, or even evil?”

  I think of the Baxter Building, the miasma of human pain and misery that seemed layered into the walls along with the paint. I think of jail cells; interrogation rooms; the back alleys of Denver where unspeakable crimes were committed.

  Yeah. Atmosphere. Vibe.

  Bernie speaks again. “You have, haven’t you? I have too. I don’t know if Phoebe told you, but I’m also an antiquarian. I own From Time to Time, an antique store downtown. Sometimes I get a piece that has its own story, its own resonance. My friend who can feel the past can identify a doll that has been loved, a rocking horse that has been part of imaginary adventures, or a shackle used to imprison a slave that contains horrors.”

  He falls silent, and I struggle to process what he’s said. Why Phoebe had called him. She must think my visions are some kind of ESP.

  I can barely bring myself to think it. It sounds so much like late night television. B movies.

  If they are ESP — I don’t think so, but if they are — does that mean I’m witnessing an actual event?

  A memory of murder.

  The thought makes my head throb even more. I have been banking on that idea all through the investigation, but haven’t made the effort to rationalize my own behavior, or follow the logic to its end. I’ve been treating the visions as I would a hunch. But if Flowers is right, it would mean I’m not crazy. That I’ve been basing my investigation on something authentic. But it also means that the terrible vision I’d had at the Baxter Building, the cops — my colleagues — being directly linked to what happened there. It means that one might also true.

  Fireworks explode in my brain. Was that the real reason behind my meltdown? The recognition of evil combined with the confusion of identity engendered by my undercover operation?

  I realize that the other two are watching me; Phoebe with clinical calm, Bernie with head cocked and an inquisitive expression.

  I lick dry lips. “Do you know anyone who sees things that have happened? How reliable is this — ability?”

  He spreads his hands. “I would say, just as reliable — or unreliable — as any other kind of witnessing. As with any sensory perception, it’s all down to the observer.”

  Phoebe chimes in. “We all filter the information of the world through our particular viewpoints and emotional states. What touches me may not touch you, or not in the same way. We won’t invest the same meaning into any one experience.”

  “And,” Bernie smiles disarmingly, “some people just like to make stuff up.”

  No worse than any other eyewitness, then. And no better. I’ve been dealing with that my whole professional life.

  Grain of salt. Trust, but verify.

  Okay. I think I can handle that.

  I have to leave them. Go walking to wrap my head around it all. Thoughts and beliefs ricochet around in my skull. I used to despise people like Bernie Flowers, irrational nonconformists, who want to skirt concrete facts and solid substance. In the course of my job as a homicide detective, I’ve known too many self-seeking, self-aggrandizing psychics who prey on the tragedies of crime and murder, seeking emotional fulfillment at the expense of people whom death had made vulnerable. There is no way I would join the ranks of those praying mantises.

  And yet…

  And yet, Bernie isn’t profiting. He’s an interested, if bombastic, professional. And my visions. The images. Things I thought were imagined. The horrid visual of my brother’s car plunging off the bridge, each time I passed the stage of his suicide. The lurid montage I had seen in the Baxter Building, the one that had pushed me into catatonia and enabled Zoe to cut permanent footholds in the ice cliff of my psyche. And now the killing of Victoria Harkness. I used to think the choice was between crazy and not crazy. But now the choice is between crazy and psychic. Even the word makes me cringe. The magnetic field has realigned and left me with two negative poles.

  I walk through neighborhoods that are a jumble of Victorian, Queen Anne, and Craftsman houses. I frighten deer from the street-side buffet of ivy, rhododendron, and buttercup. My calves ache from uphill asphalt, my knees from downhill sidewalks. I pass free furniture left on the curb, vacant lots buried in blackberry brambles with the remnant of concrete foundations and steps that go nowhere. The eyes and caws of crows follow me like a smoldering telegraph of black wings.

  I find my way up to the towering Astoria column decorated with a spiraling history of the region, a DNA of events leading to the present day. On one side of the park it’s possible to see the broad Columbia with its anchored ships and hustling pilot boats; on the other I look out over Youngs Bay with its feeder rivers, serene and green as a landscape painting. The Megler Bridge arches like a salmon’s leap over the deep channel of the river; the New Youngs Bay Bridge curves across the junction of bay and river, low and practical, without embellishment. Choices and solutions. Each bridge is what it is; a solution to a set of particular circumstances.

  I have discovered my own beliefs are not based on immovable concrete abutments, but rooted in false bedrock that is now eroding. I’ve always associated so-called psychics with lies and con games, with people profiting from someone else’s pain. The worst kind of selfishness. It shakes me to the core to think I might have been wrong, that I’m now one of them.

  Does this new ability make me evil, like those others? But if that’s true, then it means that choice and free will are meaningless. And if that’s true, then what the hell are we all doing here?

  No. It’s up to me how to assimilate the new material, whether to struggle against the turbulence or harness its energy. Build a bridge to another shore. Victoria Harkness took something terrible and tried to transform it into something good. If her legacy means anything, it means I must try to do the same.

  By the time I’m almost home I’m exhausted, my legs and feet pulsing with a deep-seated ache. But now I know I have to move forward with the investigation of both myself and Victoria. The two are so intertwined as to be one and the same.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I’M EXHAUSTED FROM my long walk and from coming to terms with the latest revelations from Bernard Flowers. I just want to get home and put my feet up, knit all the thoughts and implications together. But as I turn up Rhododendron Street, my phone throbs in my pocket. The caller ID announces Claire Chandler.

  I sigh, but pick up. “Audrey here.”

  “Oh my God, I need your help! I’ve discovered something and I don’t know what to do.”

  I press the phone against my right ear and cover my left, turning away from the street. “Where are you?”

  “The church. I was looking at some of the computer files.”

  “Wait, Claire, that’s a crime scene. You shouldn’t be there. You could get in trouble.”

  Irony. That’s what this is.

  “I know, but I couldn’t wait, I had to know. And Audrey, the books aren’t right! At least, I don’t understand them. Please, I don’t know what to do.” Her voice cranks up a notch and I pull the phone away a titch. Take a breath for calm.

  “Okay, first, you should get out of there before someone discovers you.” My own capture gleams sharp in my memory, and Olafson probably wouldn’t be so generous with another intruder. Then reality clicks. “Wait, the computer is still there?”

  “The detectives told me they had to get a forensic team from the State police, and they haven’t come yet. So I thought it would be okay.”

  “Claire, you’re contaminating the scene. Get out, a
nd go home, and then call me back.” I end the call.

  Well, aren’t we concerned about law and order now that you’re not the one breaking the rules.

  I know, I know. But I knew what I was getting into. Claire doesn’t.

  Like you knew what would happen when you agreed to go undercover? What are you, psychic?

  I’m a cop! I knew there might be consequences! I knew things might go to shit. But if that’s the price to prevent what went on at that place, then it was worth it. Worth it to see Sonny and his gang apprehended. Worth it to get those kids out of his clutches.

  Please. Those ‘kids’ were all more streetwise than you’ll ever be. Do you think any of them were surprised that the cops were involved up to their eyebrows? ‘Justice’ isn’t a word in their vocabulary.

  Not all cops are crooked. I wasn’t.

  Does it matter? Tar, brush. Even if you weren’t feeding at Sonny’s trough, you chose to shut your eyes to what was going on.

  No. I was there to get information. Not to arrest people.

  Too bad you didn’t get the relevant stuff. You know, like the other dirty cops. Maybe that’s why you had a ‘psychic vision,’ since you weren’t very adept at putting two and two together. How convenient, that you couldn’t participate in the trial.

  No. The breakdown. I wasn’t fit —

  That’s exactly right. You’re not fit to be a cop, or a detective, or anything else. Go hide in your hole, little mousie. Let other people deal with the dead.

  “Shut up! Leave me alone!”

  Sweat, streaming down my face. The sound of my own voice jolts me with a fearsome realization. I’m standing alone on the sidewalk. Talking to myself. Waving my arms like a lunatic. Knees buckling. With an effort, I look around. Don’t see anyone, but it doesn’t mean I’m not observed. Go back up the street, toward my house. Three-sixty-degree glance at the top of the steps before I dash to the door. This time my perimeter walk is outside first. Look for footprints, try the windows, any sign of intrusion. Don’t go inside until I’m happy with the outside, and once through the door I do the whole thing again. House is empty, entry points secure. Gun is nestled at my shoulder.