Years ago she had come to realize that if she was seeing ghosts in mirrors, windows, pools of water and other reflective surfaces, it meant that she had stumbled into one of the dark places in the world, a place tainted with the heavy energy that was laid down at the time of violent death. As the old saying went, murder left a stain. But she was not a cop or a trained investigator. She was just a psychic counselor who interpreted dreams for her clients and earned a little money on the side writing scripts for a low-budget cable television series. There was nothing she could do to find justice for the dead.
“When Wesley Lancaster finds out about my death, he’ll probably want you to turn it into a script for his show,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I can see it now. Was this reclusive paranormal investigator murdered by paranormal means? Is there a link to the mysterious deaths that occurred in this same small town two years ago?”
“You’re distracting me,” Gwen said. “I’m trying to call 911.”
“Why bother? We both know where this is going. The authorities will assume that I died of natural causes.”
“Which is entirely possible.”
“But your intuition is telling you that I was murdered like the others.”
“My intuition has sent me in the wrong direction before,” Gwen said.
“You’re thinking about what happened two years ago, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. I’ve been thinking about it all night and during the drive from Seattle.”
Gwen turned her back on the ghost in the mirror and focused on the crisp voice of the 911 operator.
“What is the nature of your emergency?” the woman asked.
“I just found the body of an old friend,” Gwen said. “Dr. Evelyn Ballinger.”
“Ballinger? The crazy old lady who lives out on Miller Road?”
“I’m sure your professionalism would be an inspiration to 911 operators everywhere,” Gwen said.
She rattled off the stark facts and verified the address.
“I’ve got cars on the way,” the operator said. “Your name, ma’am?”
“Gwendolyn Frazier.”
“Please stay at the scene, ma’am.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Gwen ended the call and wondered if Harold Oxley, the Wilby chief of police, would be among the first responders. Probably. It was a small town, after all.
When she turned back to the mirror, the psychic vision made a tut-tutting sound.
“No one except you and the killer will know that I was murdered, let alone that I was killed by paranormal means. The perp will never be brought to justice, not unless you do something about this.”
Just like last time, Gwen thought.
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “I’m not a cop and I’m not a private investigator.”
“No, but you owe me, don’t you? When you were locked up at the Summerlight Academy, I taught you how to handle your talent. And I’m the one who got you the job writing those scripts for Dead of Night. We were friends. And this time it’s different, isn’t it? Two years ago, you didn’t know any psychic investigators. But now you are aware of a certain security consulting firm that specializes in the paranormal, aren’t you?”
The annoying thing about talking to ghosts was that it was a lot like talking to yourself, Gwen thought, which was pretty much exactly what was going on.
She closed the phone and dropped it back into her tote. For the first time, she noticed that there was an empty space on top of the desk. A film of dust traced the outline of the place where a laptop had once sat.
“He took your computer,” she said. She thought about that glaring fact. “Maybe this was a home-invasion robbery.”
“In that case, I probably would have been killed in a more traditional fashion, don’t you think?” the ghost asked. “Perhaps with a gun or knife or a blow to the head.”
“Something violent happened here, I can sense that much, but there’s no sign of a struggle, and you would have fought back.”
“Not if I was caught unawares,” the ghost pointed out.
“There was violence done here, but it’s possible that your death was due to a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the shock of the robbery.”
The ghost smiled. “But the only thing missing is my laptop. You know as well as I do that it was not a particularly valuable, high-end machine. There’s my old backpack sitting on the chair. Why don’t you see if the thief took my money and credit cards?”
Gwen crossed to the chair and picked up the small, well-worn backpack. The crystal wind chimes shivered again, unleashing another string of spectral notes. Max crouched in the doorway, flattened his ears and meowed again.
There was fifty dollars and two credit cards inside Evelyn’s wallet. Gwen set the pack back down. So much for the home-invasion theory.
“As for other motives, you know me,” the ghost continued. “I wasn’t dealing drugs out the kitchen door. I didn’t cultivate a marijuana plantation in the woods behind the house. I was very fond of my crystal jewelry, but none of it was expensive.”
“You also had a cell phone.” Gwen turned on her heel to survey the room. “But I don’t see it.”
“Gone, like my computer.”
“Phones are small. It could be anywhere. Maybe it’s in the kitchen or your bedroom.”
Sirens howled in the distance. It sounded as if the 911 operator had sent the community’s entire fleet of emergency vehicles. Gwen realized she did not have a lot of time to search for the missing cell phone.
She whipped through the study, opening and closing drawers as quickly as possible. There was no sign of the phone.
The sirens were closer now. Gwen slammed the last drawer shut and raced past Max, out into the hall. The cat hurried after her.
She paused at the entrance to the kitchen and did a quick survey. The old-fashioned tiled countertops were bare except for a row of pottery canisters and an ancient coffeemaker.
Turning, she dashed upstairs, Max at her heels, and did a swift foray through the two small bedrooms. She was on her way downstairs when the first patrol car roared into the drive.
She rushed back into the office. The chimes clattered restlessly, as though impatient with her lack of progress.
“My death is going to be the biggest news in town by noon,” the ghost observed. “There hasn’t been this much excitement around here since Mary, Ben and Zander died two years ago.”
“There can’t possibly be any connection between your death and what happened two years ago,” Gwen said.
“Are you certain of that?”
“It’s been two years.”
“But you’re still dreaming about what happened, especially at this time of year, aren’t you? You’ve known all along that some piece of the puzzle was missing.”
Gwen pulled one of the curtains aside. Her heart sank when she saw Harold Oxley extricate his big, heavily padded frame out from behind the wheel of one of the patrol cars. Dark glasses shielded his eyes, but she could see that two years had taken a toll on the man. The mild exertion of heaving himself out of the vehicle was enough to turn his broad, jowly face an unhealthy shade of red. His uniform shirt was stretched tight across his rounded belly. He moved stiffly, like a man who was plagued with multiple joint issues. But the gun on his hip was as large as ever, and there was nothing to indicate that he would be any more open to the possibility that there were paranormal aspects involved in a death than he had been two years ago.
Gwen let the curtain drop back into place and turned around. She stopped at the sight of the photograph on the floor. It had not simply fallen off the corkboard, she thought. It looked as if Evelyn had ripped it off in her dying moments and clutched it as she went down.
“It’s important, dear,” the ghost said. “Why else would it be there right next to my hand?”
Gwen picked up the photo and looked at the seven people in the group shot. She was the third person from the end in the bott
om row. The picture had been taken two years ago, shortly before the murders had begun. Mary Henderson and Ben Schwartz were in the picture. So was Zander Taylor. They were all smiling for the camera.
“You kept this photo tacked to your bulletin board,” she said. “Why is it on the floor?”
“An intriguing question,” the ghost said.
A heavy fist rapped authoritatively on the front door. Gwen dropped the photo into her tote and went down the hall. Max padded after her.
She opened the door.
“Chief Oxley,” she said politely.
Harold Oxley yanked off his sunglasses and looked at her with an expression that made it clear he was no more thrilled by their reunion than she was.
“Cindy said the 911 call came in from a Gwendolyn Frazier,” Oxley said. There was grim resignation in his growly voice. “I hoped it was just a coincidence.”
“Evelyn was a friend of mine,” Gwen said. She was careful to keep her own voice cool, calm and as innocent-sounding as possible. “We stayed in touch.”
“Two years ago, you and I met over three dead bodies. You leave town and there are no unexplained deaths for the whole time you’re gone. You come back to town and we have ourselves another dead body. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Two years ago, you concluded that all three of those people died of natural causes,” she said. She struggled to keep her temper under control, but she knew she probably sounded as if she was speaking through set teeth. So much for the innocent act.
“Not Taylor.” Oxley narrowed suspicious brown eyes. “He went over the falls and drowned.”
“You called his death a suicide.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll want a statement from you today.”
“Of course.”
A young officer and two medics arrived at the door behind Oxley. The medics carried emergency equipment and a stretcher.
Oxley peered into the hallway. “Where is she?”
“In her office.” Gwen moved out of the way and opened the door wider. “It’s to the right.”
Oxley, the young officer and the medics tromped past her and Max and disappeared around the corner.
Gwen stood in the doorway and watched the light summer rain fall steadily in the trees that surrounded the house. She listened to the commotion and the muffled voices that emanated from the far end of the hall.
Max pressed his heavy frame against her leg. She reached down to scratch him behind the ears.
“I know you’re going to miss her,” she said gently. “I will, too.”
After a while, she remembered the photograph she had found on the floor. She opened her tote and took out the picture. Once again she examined each face in the image. It was impossible not to do the math. Three of the people she was looking at had died two years ago, and now the photographer, Evelyn, was also dead.
Gwen turned the photo over and saw two words scrawled on the reverse side. Mirror, mirror.
Three
What makes Gwen think that Ballinger was murdered by paranormal means?” Judson Coppersmith asked.
He was on the porch of the small cottage, tilted back in a wooden chair that was propped on its two rear legs. The heels of his running shoes were stacked on the railing. He held the phone tightly to his ear so that he could hear his brother over the dull roar of the breakers crashing on the long strip of beach.
There was a storm coming in on the Oregon coast, and the little town of Eclipse Bay was going to take a direct hit. He was looking forward to it. With luck the energy of the gale would prove distracting, at least for a while. He needed a distraction. Lately the days seemed endless and the nights were even longer.
The layers of gray that surrounded him—from the leaden sky to the weathered boards of the cottage—went well with the gray mood that had descended on him after he’d made it out of the flooded caves. He wasn’t sleeping well, which was a good thing because when he did sleep, the dream was intense. And it was getting worse.
“Gwen is a talent,” Sam said patiently. “Like us, remember?”
Oh, yeah, I remember you, Dream Eyes, Judson thought. He’d encountered her on only one occasion—a month ago when he’d driven to Seattle to meet Sam’s fiancée, Abby Radwell—but he wasn’t likely to forget Gwen Frazier.
The four of them had gone out to dinner together at a restaurant in the trendy South Lake Union neighborhood of the city. He’d taken one look into Gwen’s witchy green-and-gold eyes and immediately started contemplating a long hot night spent amid sheets made damp with sweat. He had convinced himself that the attraction was mutual. There was no way he could have been wrong about the energy that had sparked in the atmosphere between them that night. No way. There had certainly been no doubt in his mind that Gwen was exactly the distraction he had needed to get his mind off the damn dream.
But the vision of a night of sexual relief had gone down in flames when Gwen had looked at him and said those four little words. I fix bad dreams.
It was at that point that he realized he had completely misinterpreted the look in her mysterious eyes. She hadn’t seen him as a potential lover. She had viewed him as a potential client—vulnerable and in need of her professional expertise.
He now had a new four-word rule. Never date psychic counselors.
“Gwen sees auras, doesn’t she?” he said into the phone. “Dead bodies don’t have auras, so I don’t understand how she could pick up much at a crime scene.”
“Abby says that Gwen’s talent is a lot more complex than she lets on,” Sam said. “Don’t forget those two have known each other since they were locked up in high school together.”
“Locked up?”
“After their psychic talents started to manifest, Abby and Gwen both wound up in a boarding school for troubled youth, the Summerlight Academy,” Sam explained. “In Abby’s case, her family figured she was psychologically disturbed. Gwen ended up there after the aunt who had raised her died. It’s a long story and not a happy one. Abby says there were bars on the windows.”
Judson exhaled slowly. “That had to be rough.”
“Knowing Abby and Gwen has brought home to me the fact that you and I and Emma don’t always appreciate just how damn lucky we were to grow up with parents who managed to deal with the paranormal side of our natures.”
Meeting Abby Radwell had changed a lot of things for his brother, Judson thought. Sam had fallen for Abby like the proverbial ton of bricks after Abby had hired him to investigate a case that had involved murder, revenge and a rare psi-encoded book.
The couple had announced their intention to marry immediately. Willow Coppersmith had flown into a mild panic. Claiming some rights as the mother of the groom, she had beseeched Sam and Abby to wait until she could plan a more formal wedding.
A compromise had been reached. The wedding was scheduled for the end of August, less than three weeks from now. Judson was pretty sure that the negotiation had been Abby’s doing, not Sam’s. Abby had struggled all of her life to find a real family. Now that she was about to join the Coppersmith clan, she wanted to start off on the right foot with her new mother-in-law.
The gala celebration was going to take place at the family compound, Copper Beach, on Legacy Island. The normally secluded enclave in the San Juans was now abuzz with activity as Willow and the wedding planner she had hired exercised their remarkable talents for organization to pull together a large-scale event in a short span of time.
Judson suspected that there were probably no more than five men on the face of the planet who would have enjoyed the commotion associated with the planning of a big wedding. Sam was not among those five, but he was the groom, so he was stuck coping with the hubbub created by the constant comings and goings of caterers, photographers and florists.
Judson felt a little sorry for him, but he figured Sam could handle the situation. In any event, he knew that in his present mood he would not be good company. Also, in his present state, it was best to avoid Willow. She had a mother??
?s intuition. If she found out about the recurring dream and the sleepless nights, she would freak. That was the last thing anyone—especially Sam and Abby—needed.
“Look, I understand that you want to take a break before we decide what we’re going to do with Coppersmith Consulting,” Sam said. “But this is a family situation. Abby says that Gwen is really upset about Ballinger’s death. Gwen wants an investigation, and she’s not going to get that from the local cops. All we’re asking you to do is make a quick trip to Wilby and figure out what happened to Ballinger.”
“What if it turns out that Ballinger was murdered by paranormal means? What the hell will Gwen expect me to do about it? It’s not like this is one of our old agency jobs where I can go in, analyze the scene and turn the problem over to Spalding so that he can make the problem go away. Regular cops and prosecutors don’t think much of the woo-woo stuff. They need hard proof to build a case, and that’s not always available.”
“I’m aware of that,” Sam said.
“It’s why we don’t do much private work, remember?”
“I know, but this falls into the friends-and-family category,” Sam said.
“I get that, but that still begs the question. What will Gwen Frazier expect me to do if I determine that her friend was murdered but can’t find any usable evidence?”
“You’ll think of something,” Sam said. “You always do. This is very important to Abby. She says Gwen needs closure.”
“Closure for what?”
Sam cleared his throat. “Evidently Gwen has a history there in Wilby.”
“This thing is starting to sound more complicated by the minute.”
“Two years ago, Gwen was one of seven subjects in a research study conducted by the dead woman. The study was designed to try to find a way to prove the existence of paranormal talents.”
“Safe to say that the study was a failure,” Judson said. “No way to prove what can’t be scientifically measured. The Coppersmith R-and-D lab has been working on that problem for years.”