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 bottom 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.