Chapter Twenty-Five
In the dashboard glow she looked ghoulish; dark half-moons under her eyes, and so pale the blue dash lights made her face look luminous. He reached to turn the stereo off. She beat him to it, turned it up. “Trust me,” she muttered, then tossed him a look. “Although I know that’s difficult.”
“You’re awful lippy for a shut-in. You steal all your best lines from TV?”
He didn’t need to be psychic to feel how much she wanted to clock him, but it was worth it. Riling her up seemed to make her forget to keep shrinking away from her window and its proximity to the cemetery. “Tell me what really brought you to Vestemere,” he said.
“Tell me how you know I’m a shut-in.”
“I’m a cop. It’s my job to find out things.”
She regarded him and—Christ!—there was puke on her shirt. So much blood it looked like she’d been flailing a scalpel in some primitive sort of O.R. Still, she looked regal. Tsarina.
“Stop calling me that,” she snapped, then fixed him with a gold stare. “‘I am a cop,’ he says, yet he sings when he builds houses for Blue Eyes. Off-key and often with the wrong words, yet…he sings.”
He set his arms in an X over his chest.
“You never sing when you police your Downtown East Side. You’re too busy being alert and…” She closed her eyes. “Feeling adrenaline. Like lightning up your spine. You felt it again, out there, tonight.” She pointed, no looking, out at the graves. “You…like that feeling.”
Yeah. He did.
“But you don’t sing,” she said softly.
That pissed him off. Kind of. Her upside-down smile, what she said…it also made him want to talk. Confide.
Maybe that was why he felt pissed off.
“I came here with my cousin,’ she said then, switching gears, and he listened, learning terms like ‘Shadows’. ‘Blocked with ink’ And ‘Fairy tales often end violently’. There he stopped her.
“What do you know about that?”
She offered empty hands. “I’d never read a fairytale in my life before I came here.”
Hence her uptight abhorrence about the stories. It had not been an act.
“And what have you found out?” she asked.
“Galinko,” he said, smacking the proverbial card on the table. “A website on unsolved crimes seems to think your family hung and gutted him.”
She visibly curdled. “I…I did not do that.”
Christ, obviously.
She didn’t notice him roll his eyes. Started knitting her hands. “The Galinko family, they’re…stiff. Disapproving. Churchy. What we are, Jakob and me, what we can do—”
“Second Kings Seventeen and Thirteen,” he said.
“Yes.” She crumpled in her seat like so many other witnesses he’d seen, weighted with the relief of being understood. “I’ve scrubbed that Bible verse off my house a thousand times. Yet, if one of the Galinkos is this threat-maker, then they too are psychic, so…” She trailed off, brow folding. “…I guess it seemed like a better theory when it was just in my head.”
He grunted. “Welcome to policing. Tell me about your cousin. He really a collectables dealer?”
Yes. And does he use his clairvoyance to cheat people? Often. Next question?”
“He really setting up a store here?”
“No. And not in Cascadia, either. That’s where he senses our threat-maker is holed up.”
Same town where Cory Chandler lived. He tabled this, said “He looking to have an affair with Jessalyn Haslom?”
“Wha—no. Absolutely not.”
“You sure? She’s an artist, he’s a collector—”
“And if he wanted to add to the appallingly long list of married women he’s deflowered, he’d be far more gratified by her husband being alive and bested, not dead.”
Huh. Real stand-up guy. “Okay, next topic: You just tried interrogating Vincent Haslom about his Galinko. You’ve surmised that the Galinko family is the link you share with Rob.”
“Yes.” She stiffened, prim. “That…that is the only link.”
Horseshit. Her hands had just started re-knitting. Yet he tabled this too and shifted his car into gear, began creeping away from the graveyard.
“Thank you.” She sagged again, replete with relief.
Pity stabbed him in the chest right where she said Rob would be injured. Killed. He looked at her. “What did Vince Haslom tell you?”
“Nothing I valued,” she retorted, and stared out her passenger window.
Her reflection was twisted. Pissed off. His mouth curved into a sardonic corkscrew of its own. “Well, old Vince never was the type to make anything easy.”
“Horrible man,” she said, mostly under her breath, and he wondered—what the hell had Haslom’s ghost done? Christ knew the old prick had always looked at him like he was dog shit staining his shoe.
“He hurt you?” he asked, too sharp, for she immediately flinched.
“N-ne,” she said, but distraught, and with more hand fretting. “It’s just…I’m not a medium. Not usually. I didn’t know how sick it would make me to…call the dead.”
She shuddered, and as he felt himself do the same the stereo switched tracks. An ancient Eagles tune, Witchy Woman. Grimacing, he flicked it off. She quickly turned it back on. “Owen, this needs to be private.”
“From who?”
“Jakob. I…I need to sort out how to tell him about…Haslom.”
Didn’t she say she’d told him already? He lifted an eyebrow.
“He can’t hear me through music,” she added.
Really? He cocked his head. “What can’t you hear through?”
She looked surprised. “Many things. Most things. I…I’m not like him. I am not a strong psychic.” She pulled a face at his expression. “I am not usually a strong psychic. I only see the past and even then, I have to have touch as a conduit. Though I can prevent it with massage oil. Massage…it’s a good career for me. Then I can touch people and not…”
She fell quiet and he sailed back to how he’d crowded her against her front door. “I don’t like you.” “I know. No one does.” He wished he could chew the words back in. Swallow them whole.
She turned, faced him. “You do not have to pity me, Owen Brophy.”
His shoulder twitched, unnerved at how aptly she’d raided his thoughts—and irritated too. “Why the hell do you stay where you know you’ve been branded? You have to know it isn’t you. Because even despite circumstances, you’ve already made friends here.”
“With one person! Jessalyn Haslom can’t stand me.”
“Jessalyn is a suspicious cop’s kid who’s not just abrasive with you. You should hear some of the things she’s said to me. Or seen her go toe-to-toe with Sab.”
She looked skeptical. Talk about ‘suspicious’.
“And besides Jessalyn or Sabrina, you have Rob wrapped around your little finger.”
She flinched and looked…aghast, he believed the word was. What a puritan. He could not resist poking. “He’s quite taken with you.”
Her sunrise eyes were large enough to swallow her face. “Rob is….are you implying….ne. No. He is devoted to little Heart Face, wise Policii Brophy. You forget. I see.” She touched her temple.
“Thought you said it was only my head you could burglarize and paw through like a book.”
“A comic book,” she said acidly. “And it is. I’m not talking about my Shadows. A woman doesn’t need preternatural abilities to see how a man looks at someone he loves.” Her face softened then and despite the blood, the puke, and her fear, she truly was beautiful. Ethereally so.
“Plus,” she said, “she’s having his baby.”
“Jessalyn?” He blinked. “Her too? Sab’s pregnant.”
She didn’t ask how he knew, bust him for one more thing he’d eavesdropped on, and instead gasped as her gaze trickled up the block. “Pull over!” she said. “Right now!”
He obeyed, quickly wheeling to the curb.
“Jakob.” She pointed toward the cottage where a silver—holy shit, that’s a Maserati!—vehicle was parked outside. “I’m not sure I want him to know that I’ve talked to you.”
“So you don’t trust him.”
“No, I want him to trust me.” She swiveled to face him. “But before I go I want to check a theory.”
He jacked a brow.
She lifted her palm, fingers splayed. “Give me your hand, Policii Brophy.”
“Owen.”
“You say Tsarina, I say policii. And close your eyes.”
He hesitated.
She sighed. “Owen, please.”
Please, Owen. Her plea from when he’d pinned her to the door. He raised his hand. Shut his eyes.
Their skin met and that rush, electric euphoria, coursed through him. He heard her gasp and “Natasha?” he murmured. What was that sensation? Did she feel it every time? But then…footfalls. Footfalls fell over anything he might say, methodical and crunching through…he listened. Dry grass? An inward scene floated into focus.
“Do you see that?” she whispered.
Yes. They stood in the middle of a prairie. An endless vista. He could see forever yet…could see nothing at all; it was twilight and everything was monochromatic, blacks and greys. “Is it supposed to be black and whi…” he began, but his voice dwindled as fog drifted around his ankles, clouding as he crouched. There was a bouquet of fluffy flowers clenched in his hand, and “Tsarina,” he heard himself say, quietly, then placed the flowers at the foot of a tombstone. BELOVED, it read and, above: NATASHA NOREENA NIK—“Jesus!” He yanked his hand back. The prairie disintegrated and they were back in his car, faces lit by blue dash light, not twilight. “That date. It’s less than a month.”
“I know.” Her eyes were enormous.
“You didn’t tell me you were on this bastard’s hit list too!”
“I…” She shrank from his tone. He didn’t care.
“Dammit, Tsarina, there’s nothing more frustrating than when a vic withholds information!”
“Y-you saw that Facebook page before I did! She has a knife in her chest!”
“And you said that a lot of this stuff is symbolic! Now I see that you’re about to be murdered?”
She fretted. “I just wanted to see if I could show you the date. If you could see what I see the way I see you. I…I didn’t think you’d care—”
“Jesus Christ, Natasha, I’m a cop. Of course I care if someone’s about to get whacked.”
“You…yes. Of course. You care because you are a cop. Policii.”
This time it didn’t sound like an insult. She was trying for a smile.
Screw that.
She shrank even smaller. “Owen, I…I told you before, I really don’t have that many people in my life who would care if I was dead.”
Their eyes met and, internally, within him, he felt it start to rain. He shook it off, said “How the hell do I shut you out of here?” He pointed to his head.
“You…just did.”
He squinted.
“I smelled rain and your Shadow…it held up an arm, blocked me so I couldn’t see.”
He glanced down at his forearm.
“Not…this arm.” She placed a gentle hand on his wrist—then jerked back as if she had burned him. “Your Shadow,” she said. “Here.” She touched her temple. “How did you…not even Jakob can do that.” She beamed a little, impressed.
He didn’t know what to say.
Her grin fizzled and she cleared her throat. “There is something else I need to tell you.”
“Oh? Just one thing?”
She scowled. “I am not withholding information on purpose.”
He believed her. She was just…inexperienced. And painfully awkward. “Okay.” He beckoned with his hands.
“That portrait Jessalyn painted of the psychic, Calling in Light?”
Which was MIA right now. “Yeah?”
“Well, I tried it. Calling light instead of Shadows. And it broke through the ink block. Just pinpricks, but still. That…that’s what I was doing when you came to the cottage tonight.”
“You were surrounded by bloody Kleenex when I came to the cottage tonight.”
“Ja.” She waved this off with a hand. “Because it is difficult, but I still saw something. Heard something, more accurately. I think it’s a date or a time of some sort. Ten-thirty M. Could that be May? Next month? Does it mean anything to you?”
“Ten-thirty,” he repeated. It rang vague bells. Why?
“M,” she added.
Ten-thirty M. Ten-thirty…“Wait,” he said, it was dawning.
“Um…your phone is ringing.”
He heard her, but only absently. Ten-thirty. 10-30. It was a ten code. A police code.
“Owen. Your phone is ringing.”
Dammit! He pulled his cell from his pocket. It was set to silent, yet the screen was lit up with a call. “Look,” he said, shaken. “You need to stop doing stuff like this and listen—”
“No, you listen. Pick up. It…it’s your girlfriend.”
He glanced at the screen. An unfamiliar number. Sondra. Where the hell was she?
“I…I’ll give you privacy.” Natasha reached for the door.
“Wait! Ten—”
“Owen, answer your phone. A woman…a woman doesn’t need preternatural abilities to see how a man looks when he loves someone…remember?” Her mouth fell into its upside-down smile.
And, inside, rain started to fall. “Tsarina—”
“Your phone, my subject,” she said, exasperated, then slipped outside.
“Wait!” he barked, and swiped his screen, snapped “Wait!” into the phone too.
Outside, and illuminated by a weak pool of streetlight, her clothes were even filthier, and her gold eyes…Christ, she looked sad. Unbearably. He pinned his gaze into that sorrow. “Meet me tomorrow.”
Her head waggled, uncertain.
He rattled off his address. “Just down the street. Private. Natasha, I can help, you.”
She shrank back, withdrawing.
“You can help me.”
She hesitated, clearly torn.
“Rob’s my best friend,” he tacked on, angling for guilt. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He reached over, slammed the passenger door shut before she could say no, then drove away.
©bonnie randall 2005