“It wasn’t a psychic bullet.”
She looked away from the reception area to stare at him, startled, then had to smile. “Sorry. I guess that question did sort of come out of nowhere.”
“So did the bullet.” He shrugged. “Classified mission, so no details about it, but I can tell you I was a courier with no reason to expect violence.”
“Is that why you got out of the navy?”
“Not because I was shot. My recovery was remarkably fast and easy, according to the doctors; the bullet literally did no damage even though it passed through an area of my brain.”
“You mean…from one side to the other?”
He indicated with his index finger a point several inches behind and slightly below his left ear. “Went in here.” Then he moved his finger to just above his left temple. “Came out here. My hair covers the scars.” He shrugged. “The docs said the bullet could have just skimmed over the skull and under the scalp; they’ve apparently seen that before. But this bullet cracked through my hard skull and actually traveled through the brain before coming out again.”
He had Emma’s full attention now. “How could it pass through your brain without damage?”
“The docs didn’t have an answer for that. At the very least, given the trajectory of the bullet, it should have damaged one or both of my optic nerves, affecting my eyesight, but it didn’t. Far as they could tell, it didn’t do any damage at all except for the entry and exit wounds. They had me in a medically induced coma because they expected my brain to swell, but it didn’t. When they brought me out, I was fine. No memory issues, no physical issues—nothing.”
“Until you discovered you were psychic?”
“Yeah.”
“How did that happen?”
Navarro shrugged. “It dawned on me, gradually, that I knew things I shouldn’t know. About people around me, about things that had happened. Small things, mostly. At first, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I asked my doctor, who was kind enough not to either laugh at me or lock me away, but he just said the brain was a landscape largely unknown to medical science, and maybe that bullet had…sparked something in me.”
“That doesn’t sound like any doctor I’ve ever heard,” Emma said, thinking of her own doctor’s dismissal of her dreams.
“Yeah, that struck me too. Then, a few days later, I got a visit from Special Agent Noah Bishop of the FBI’s Special Crimes Unit. He wanted to talk to me about being psychic and what it could mean.”
“How did he know? I mean, did he read somebody’s mind or something?”
“Simpler than that. I gather Bishop has spent years building a huge network of friends and allies all over the country, including some in the military and government, who simply notify him of little oddities like my bullet in the brain and subsequent medical report.”
“Your doctor? Violating privacy laws?”
“I’ll probably never know. But it seems most likely. In any case, Bishop’s agenda has always been clear: He’s looking for people with psychic ability. People suited for the work and open to being recruited. For his unit and for Haven.”
“So how did you end up in Haven? It sounds like you would have fit easily into the FBI.”
“Yeah, I’m qualified. But after so many years in the navy, I wanted a bit more freedom. Haven offered that, and the jobs have certainly been…varied. I like the travel and I like the long stretches off when I feel like I need to recharge.”
“So no roots?” She thought about her own, deeply set.
“I’m from a military family, Emma, and went in straight out of college; it’s the life I know. But I will admit that sometimes the idea of having a home rather than just a home base has its appeal.”
Emma felt the need to veer away from the personal. “So you found a job that allows you to use your abilities. What’s the other one called, by the way? Sensing things you aren’t supposed to know?”
“Clairvoyance.”
“Are you picking up anything now?”
Without even thinking about it, Navarro replied, “There’s a honeymooning couple in the inn, doing what honeymooning couples usually do; your chef is having problems getting to know his new stove, so you might plan to send out for tomorrow morning’s pastries; that group of paranormal researchers—” He broke off with a frown.
“What?” Emma was unconsciously fascinated.
“Something off about them. Can’t quite pin it down. Anyway, they’re in their rooms going over paperwork. Or records. Historical stuff about the town.” He frowned again.
“What?” Emma repeated.
“Nothing. I could just swear I was being blocked, sensing only what they want me to.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“Very.”
“Maybe they’re bad psychics,” she suggested, more tongue-in-cheek than anything else.
“No, it’s not negative energy I’m sensing.” He shook his head as if to shake off whatever it was, then looked at Emma and said, “I’m also sensing that you keep your mother’s pearls as a memento only because your only memories of her are that she allowed you to borrow her clothes and jewelry to play dress-up when you were very young.”
FIFTEEN
The storm had brought nightfall earlier than usual, since the skies remained cloudy, and Jessie found herself less than halfway back to the inn when it became difficult to see her way.
She had a flashlight in her pack, and didn’t waste much time getting it out and turning it on. The problem was, as familiar as she was with the shortcut she’d been using to reach the cabin, she had never been out this far after dark.
Everything looked different after dark.
So she picked her way cautiously, aiming for accuracy rather than speed; if she went off her course and got lost, she could easily find herself wandering around out here all night.
At best.
She didn’t think about the worst that could happen.
To say that she felt wary and uneasy would have been an understatement; the fine hairs on the nape of her neck were literally standing out, and she felt cold despite the warm humidity left behind by the storm.
So she was half-braced for something to happen; she just didn’t expect her flashlight’s beam to fall on the almost transparent form of the spirit she had encountered before.
Jolting to a stop, she muttered, “Shit.”
“You’ve gone off the path,” the spirit told her gravely.
“There isn’t a path. That’s the problem.”
The spirit looked around, as though noticing for the first time where they were, then returned her attention to Jessie. “I don’t mean here. I mean you’ve gone off the path you have to follow to get all the answers you need. To stop him.”
“I found where he keeps his trophies,” Jessie said, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice and reminding herself she was talking to a spirit.
“I know. But you’re running out of time. And you haven’t asked the right question yet.”
“What’s the right question?”
“What really happened that night fifteen years ago?”
“I know what happened. At least…I’m remembering.”
“You can’t trust your memories,” the spirit said. “Your guilt and shame are too strong. They’re blocking you.”
“I know that. I’m working on it.”
“Are you? Then why are you out here?”
“Because—”
“Why are you out here when you should be talking to Emma? And listening to her?”
UNTIL THEN, EMMA had been telling herself that everything he’d mentioned could have originated from something overheard or surmised logically. But the pearls…
“Good guess,” she said finally.
Navarro’s smile was faint. “You have no problem at all believing that Jessie sees spirits, and you have firsthand evidence that she sometimes reads your thoughts, and yet my clairvoyance has to be a ‘guess’?”
He had
a point. Dammit.
Emma sighed. “Okay, okay. Yes, that is why I keep the pearls. I loved them as a kid, but I didn’t really grow up into a heels-and-pearls sort of woman, so they stay in the house safe.”
“You don’t have to defend your choices, Emma. Especially not to me.”
She half nodded, but changed the subject with determination. “I know you trust this Maggie you guys work for, that you believe her when she says Jessie isn’t in danger—”
“At the moment,” he qualified.
“Yeah. Yeah, at the moment. Even so, it’s getting late, and she still hasn’t come back here. Assuming she shows up and you guys are able to talk tonight, how is she going to react to you being here?”
“I have no idea,” he replied frankly. “It probably depends on whether she’s still probing her past or has changed course and is on the trail of a killer.”
“If she had done that—found evidence of a killer—don’t you think she would have reported it to Haven?”
“She should have. But according to Maggie, she’s shown a tendency in the past to strike out on her own during investigations.” He paused, adding, “Which, in my experience, is an indication of a lack of confidence in her own judgment. My bet is, she wants to make very sure she has a strong reason to call in the troops before she does it.”
“So calling in the troops is a big deal.”
“Depends. Some cases just call for one other operative. But if Jessie has found or is looking for evidence pointing to a serial killer, then it gets really tricky. Haven isn’t a law enforcement agency; we can work with locals, but only if they ask. We can and do work independently of them as private investigators, but unless we’re deputized, we can’t act as cops. And, when it comes to the really big monsters, we want the biggest guns we can get, and that’s the FBI and the Special Crimes Unit. Which has to be invited in unless there’s evidence of a federal crime.”
“So…Jessie could be looking for evidence of a federal crime, but not necessarily a murderer.”
“Maybe. Or maybe just enough evidence to go to the state cops; they tend to get jumpy whenever anyone says ‘serial killer,’ and tend to be quicker to act on that sort of information than locals. Locals tend toward denial, in my experience.”
“Not in my backyard?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
After a moment, Emma grimaced. “What’s in Jessie’s own past…that was bad enough to drive her away from here, and keep her away nearly half her life. It was what she was fixated on remembering, uncovering, when she got here. She was really, really determined. If she thinks something else is going on, and it’s got her focused on it instead of her past, then it almost has to be a killer.”
Navarro said, “I really wish you’d tell me what it is in Jessie’s past that she came here to settle.”
“I told you, it’s not my secret.”
“And not just hers? It involves others?”
“I’m not going to play twenty questions with you.”
He sighed. “Well, it was worth a shot.”
But Emma didn’t like the way he was frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“Something else I’m picking up. Emma, has it occurred to you that the fall from the horse, the head injury, might have awakened latent psychic abilities in you?”
“How could it have occurred to me? I didn’t even know that’s the way it works sometimes until you told me.” She hesitated. “My nightmares, that’s what you’re thinking about? What you’re…picking up?” She didn’t much like the idea of having information about herself seemingly plucked out of thin air, especially by him.
He didn’t answer the implied question, just the obvious one. “Maybe they’re more than nightmares. Maybe they’re visions.”
“You mean of the future?”
“The future. Or the present. There are some psychics in both Haven and the SCU who can do that. Not really seers because they don’t always see the future; sometimes what they see is in real time, happening somewhere else even as they’re experiencing a vision about it.”
“Just seeing oddball things for no reason?”
“There’s almost always a reason. A connection of some kind.”
It was Emma’s turn to frown. “How could I have a connection to murders happening? Assuming they are, that is.”
“It could be as simple as you knowing the killer.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. At all. The alternative sounded much better. “I have dreams.”
“Sometimes visions come in the form of dreams.” His gaze was still intent. “We’re less guarded when we sleep, and our unconscious minds are…freed from conscious constraints. Sometimes the conscious mind doesn’t want to accept abilities that might frighten us.”
Emma felt uneasy, though she couldn’t have said precisely why. “I don’t like my dreams because they’re filled with violence,” she admitted. “With…unspeakable things.”
He hesitated, then said, “I’m not too thrilled with my own abilities sometimes. The finding the dead part, I mean. It means I have to accept going in that there’s absolutely nothing I can do to save that life. It’s already gone. The only thing I can do is try to bring closure to a family or help bring a murderer to justice.”
“That’s no small thing,” Emma offered. “Some people never know what happened to their loved ones. And plenty of murderers get away with it because their victims are never found.”
“That’s what I tell myself.”
“It doesn’t help?”
Navarro shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. But at least working for Haven means I have people I can talk to about it. People who understand and accept what the rest of the world generally views as freakish abilities. At least, as well as they can be understood. And that means a lot.”
“It doesn’t seem to have helped Jessie,” Emma noted, trying to keep her voice neutral.
“From what I’ve been told, it actually helped her a lot. Word is, she was in pretty bad shape when Bishop found her and got her to Haven.”
Emma frowned. “Because of her abilities?”
Again, he seemed to hesitate, but then said, “I’m sure that was part of it; otherwise Bishop wouldn’t have known about her, much less been able to find her. Look, we try to keep as much of our private lives as private as we need them to be, and that’s not always easy when you work with psychics. We pick up things without intending to, so we try to be on guard with each other if we have part of ourselves or our pasts we want or need to protect.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“That Jessie apparently went through some rough times after leaving Baron Hollow. I don’t know the details; it isn’t any of my business. All I do know is that Jessie is—or was—one of the damaged psychics. Whether it was because of her abilities, her inability to manage them, or whatever was going on in her day-to-day life, from what I heard, she was about one psych evaluation away from being locked up somewhere.”
THE MORE HE thought about it, the more angry he got. Not only because she was nosing around where she didn’t belong, but because he was all too aware that she, of all people, could ruin him.
And, clearly, she intended to do just that.
If he gave her the chance.
She hadn’t been part of his plans, and even after she came home he’d been willing to let her place in his life stay in the past. He even honored her, in a way, because if it hadn’t been for her and that hot summer night all those years ago, he might never have discovered who he really was.
In her own way, she’d been his kingmaker.
Still, as angry as he was, he realized after thinking it through that there was a certain rightness to taking her now that she’d come back home. A certain elegance of timing.
If he’d tried to track her down, there might have been trouble. But this way, she had come to him. And that was just about perfect.
Because nobody believed Jessie Rayburn was going to stay in Baron Hollow. N
obody. Sooner or later, she was going to leave, just as she’d left fifteen years before, and her absence now would cause no more of a ripple than it had then.
Baron Hollow would go on.
He would go on.
And in time, everyone would forget that Jessie Rayburn had ever existed.
WHEN JESSIE DID return to Rayburn House, she passed through the reception area and was halfway up the stairs before Emma could react, and by then she would have had to yell to get her sister’s attention.
To Navarro, she said, “Look, I need to talk to her before you do. I need to tell her about my dreams.”
“I get that. But I need to talk to her too, Emma, and as soon as possible. For her own safety, we need to know what she’s been investigating. She needs to know she has backup here, another Haven operative.”
Emma nodded. “You won’t get an argument from me. I’ll tell her about you. Maybe she’ll be knocking at your door in half an hour or so. But if she doesn’t…Well, it’s late. Tomorrow will be crazy, with the festival, but if not tonight, I’ll tell her to meet you in the dining room for breakfast in the morning so you two can talk.”
Mildly, he said, “If the dining room is crowded, we’ll need more privacy to discuss the situation.”
Sighing, Emma said, “I’d invite you for breakfast upstairs, but Jessie has been up and out before me these last days. Just be in the dining room early, around seven or so, order coffee or something, and I’ll do my best to get her down here. Then you two can find a place to talk. Good enough?”
“I guess it’ll have to be.”
“Okay.” She rose but hesitated, adding, “I hope you can convince her to stop all this running around on her own. I’ll try, but…like I said, we aren’t close and she’s keeping her thoughts and feelings very much to herself with me. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll see you at some point tomorrow. Maybe during the festival.”
He nodded, silent, and watched as she left the room, her patient Sheltie at her heels as usual.
She left Navarro with a lot to think about. He was, for one thing, reasonably sure that Emma was indeed psychic. But whether her dreams were of things to come or things happening as she dreamed them, he couldn’t say. The dream of the woman running naked through the woods argued for visions of something happening at the time she dreamed them, but she had been reluctant to go into detail about other dreams and, without any certain knowledge of when and where those other women she had dreamed of might have died, knowing more wouldn’t have done him much good anyway.