A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder (28 page)

“Tiaras,” Cat and Gilley said together.

My eyes widened as I looked around, and then at Gil. He took off the tiara on his head, put it back in its white box, and took out another, the size of a beauty pageant crown. When I stared at him in surprise, he shrugged and said, “What? She gets me.”

I laughed, and it felt so good. “Got any green tea?” I asked him.

He moved over to stroke my cheek fondly and said, “Coming right up.”

Cat and I made small talk for a bit, and as Gilley fussed with the tea and something to snack on in the kitchen, my cell rang. I looked at the display curiously, excused myself, and went to answer the call. “This is M.J.,” I said.

“Oh, thank goodness I got you!” said a voice I didn't recognize. “M.J., my name is Diana Dahlmer. I got your name and number from Lucy Ashworth. She said you could help me. I've just purchased an old house in Swampscott, and there's some awful poltergeist scaring us half to death! We need you to come and get rid of it for us, and I'll pay whatever you're charging. I'm that desperate.”

I didn't say anything for a moment—that instinctive urge to help someone in need was pulling at me. But then I turned and looked back at Gilley and Catherine sitting in his living room, gabbing like old school
friends—like Gil and I had when we were young—and my next thought was to my child, and what friends she might grow up with. What I said next was actually far easier to say than I'd expected. “Diana, I'm so sorry that you haven't heard, but my husband and I are retired. We're no longer available to do any ghostbusting.”

“Oh!” she cried. “Please, M.J.? Won't you please reconsider just this one time? As I said, I'm desperate!”

At that moment there was a knock on Gilley's front door, and a second later Heath's voice echoed out from the kitchen. I heard him say, “Hey, Gil, any chance that gorgeous wife of mine is here?” His voice sounded so happy and relaxed, and my heart filled with love for him.

“M.J.?” Diana said. “Are you there?”

“Yes, Diana, I'm here, but my answer to you is no. I won't reconsider, and I really am sorry. You might try Rick Lavinia, though. I hear he's always looking for work.” With that, I hung up the phone and headed back out to my husband and my best friend . . . and the rest of my life, spook-free.

Read on for a look at the first book in Victoria Laurie's
New York Times
bestselling Psychic Eye mystery series,

ABBY COOPER, PSYCHIC EYE

Available now from Obsidian wherever books and e-books are sold.

My basic philosophy is simple: People are like ice cream. Take me, for instance. You'd think that by my profession alone—professional psychic—I'd be a ringer for Nutty Coconut, but the reality is that I'm far more like vanilla—consistent, a little bland, missing some hot fudge.

The exception, of course, is my rather unique ability to predict the future. Okay, so maybe with that added in I'm at least a candidate for French vanilla.

Still, overall my life is sadly
that
boring. I'm single with no immediate prospects, I rarely go out (hence the no immediate prospects), I pay all my bills on time, I have very few vices and only two close friends.

See what I mean? Vanilla.

Now, I'm not saying my life is
all
bad. At the very least I'm privy to the richly flavorful lives of my clients. Take the Tooty-Fruity sitting in front of me, for example. Sharon is a pretty young woman in her mid-thirties, with short blond hair, too much makeup, a recent boob job and not a clue in sight. On her left hand dangles a rather opulent diamond wedding ring, and over the course of the last twenty minutes all I've been able to do is feel sorry for the poor schmuck who gave it to her.

“Okay, I'm getting the feeling that there's a triangle here . . . like there's someone else moving in on your marriage,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And it's someone
you're
romantically interested in.”

“Yes.”

“And they're telling me that you think this is true love . . .”

“Yes, but, uh, Abigail? Who are ‘they'?” she asked, looking around nervously.

I get this question all the time, and you would think I would have learned by now to prepare my clients before beginning the session, but change was never my strong suit. “Oh, sorry. ‘They' are my crew, or rather, my spirit guides. I believe that they talk to your spirit guides and it all gets communicated back to me.”

“Really? Can they tell you their names?” she whispered, still looking around bug-eyed.

We were getting off track here. I pulled us back on course, afraid I would lose the train of thought
flittering through my brain. “Uh, no, Sharon, I don't typically get names. I only get pictures and thoughts. So, as I was saying, we were talking about this love triangle, right?”

“Yes,” she answered, leaning forward to hang on my every word.

“Okay, I'm just going to give it to you the way they're giving it to me. . . . They're giving me the feeling that this other guy is saying all the right things, that he may say he's interested in you and that he wants to be with you but he's not telling you the whole story.” Sharon's bug eyes squinted now as she looked at me critically. “Okay, does this other guy have blond hair?”

“Yes.”

“And he works some sort of night job, like, he works at night. . . . Is he a bartender?”

“Oh my God . . . yes, he is!”

“And your husband, he's the guy with dark brown hair and a beard or facial hair, right?”

Sharon sucked in a breath of surprise and replied, “Yes, he's got a goatee.”

“And your husband does something with computers, like he has something to do with making computers or something.”

“He's a computer engineer . . .”

“Okay, Sharon, they're telling me that the blond is a liar, and that you may not think your husband is Mr. Don Juan but he loves you. They're saying if you leave your husband for this other guy with the blond hair that there won't be any going back. You won't be able to fix it once it's out in the open.
And I get the feeling that if you continue to fool around on the side you're going to get caught. If you think you won't, then you're kidding yourself. They're saying there is already a woman—I think she's older than you—with red hair who's
very
nosy and she already suspects, and she wouldn't think twice about telling your husband. I think this is like a neighbor or something . . .”

“Oh my God! My neighbor, Mrs. O'Connor, has red hair, and she
would
tell my husband!”

“See? She's already very suspicious, and I get the feeling that if you don't rethink this whole thing you could end up divorced and alone. This bartender guy isn't going to marry a divorced woman with two kids. You have two, right? A boy and a girl?”

“Yes, but . . .” she squeaked.

“No,” I said firmly. “No buts. You need to do some hard thinking here, 'cuz there will be no going back, and if you continue down this path I'm seeing nothing but heartache in your life. You won't really know what you've lost until it's gone.”

At that moment I heard the blissful sound of my chime clock dinging and the tape in the cassette player clicked off. I instantly felt relieved. This woman wasn't picking up what I was laying down and it was pretty frustrating to me. I stood and said gently but firmly, “And that's all the time we have.” I flipped open the cassette player and removed the tape, enclosed it in its plastic case and handed it to her along with a tissue. Sharon got up
with me and walked with a bent head and a forced smile toward the door.

She thanked me for my time and was asking when she could come back when I said, “Actually, Sharon, I'd prefer it if you made an appointment with a friend of mine.” I walked back toward my credenza and retrieved a card from a stack piled there. “This is Lori Sellers. She's a psychotherapist with an office over on Eleven Mile. She's very good and I think it would be a good thing for you to talk to her about the choices in front of you.” I put the card in her outstretched hand. “If you want to come back and see me, I allow only two visits per year, and that's a good rule of thumb. You shouldn't get hooked on readers; remember that all of the answers are inside you. All you have to do is trust yourself and listen.”

Sharon didn't look convinced, so I placed my hand on her arm and walked her gently to the door. “Now I want you to go home and replay the tape and consider everything I've said. You have the gift of free will, and it's a powerful force. You can change your own destiny if you put your mind to it. Just be careful, okay? I mean, you've been married for . . . what? Ten years?”

Another sucked-in breath of surprise. “Yes. How did you know that?”

I smiled and spread my hands in an “aha” gesture. “I'm psychic.”

As I watched Sharon leave I couldn't help but consider for the billionth time how much that word “psychic” still caught in my throat. It's just too
close to the word “psycho” for my taste. Typically, when asked what I do for a living I tack on a softer word, like “psychic
intuitive
” to lend a smidgen of legitimacy. I'd even had business cards made up reading,
ABIGAIL COOPER, P.I.
with teeny-weeny little letters underneath in parentheses spelling out
PSY
CHIC INTUITIVE.
Most people think I'm trying to be clever. The truth is, I'm a chickenshit.

I never wanted to be a psychic, professional or otherwise. It's something that was more or less thrust upon me, and I've never really felt comfortable with it. It isn't that I'm not proud of what I do; it's just that I've always been conscious of the fact that I'm
different
.

For instance, there are plenty of people out there who will engage me in casual conversation and might even find me amusing until they discover what I do for a living . . . and then they recede like a tide from the beach and I'm left in the sand feeling like I've got a big red
X
on my forehead. I've been a professional psychic for four years now, and I'm still waiting for the proverbial tide to come back in.

I was just about to close the door after Sharon when one of my regulars, Candice Fusco, came walking down the corridor, carrying a large manila envelope. “Hey, Candice,” I called as she caught sight of me.

“Hi, Abby. I'm on time, right?” She glanced at her watch and hurried her step.

“Yup. I was just seeing my last client out.” I stepped sideways, holding the door open and
allowing her to enter. Candice was probably only an inch or two taller than me, but the three-inch heels I had never seen her go without made her tower over me. She was an elegant woman, with a fondness for expensive suits. Today she wore cream silk that flowed and rippled with the breeze of her movements and set off the tan of her skin and her light blond hair. Her femininity usually makes me a little self-conscious, but within a minute or two I'm over it, eased, I think, by her genuine nature. You would never guess by her dress and mannerisms that Candice is a private investigator, and a damn good one at that—although her most recent successes were helped a bit by yours truly.

“Would you like to sit here or in my reading room?” I asked, closing the door behind Candice.

“Here would be fine, Abby. This shouldn't take us too long,” she replied, pulling the straps from her purse and shoulder bag off her shoulder.

“So how's Kalamazoo these days?” I asked, gesturing toward the two chairs in the office waiting room for us to sit in.

“Still there,” she said, taking a seat. “I swear this drive takes longer every time.”

“The way you drive? I doubt it. How long did it take you today?”

“An hour and forty-five minutes.”

“New record?”

“Nah. I've done it in an hour and thirty-five before. Of course, I was doing ninety-five the
whole time, but I've slowed it down a notch since you told me to.”

“Yeah, not a good idea to ignore a warning like that when it comes up.” I'd told Candice the last time we saw each other to watch her lead foot or she could end up with a hefty speeding ticket. “So, is that the stuff?” I asked, pointing to the manila envelope she still held.

“Yes, these are the three employees we've narrowed it down to,” Candice said, extending the envelope toward me. I took it and opened the flap, extracting three pictures—two women and one man, all posing for mug shots of the employee-badge variety. I flipped quickly from photo to photo, then back through more slowly, taking my time to open my intuition to each person. Candice had called me the previous evening about a new case she was working on. A large company that handled mutual funds had discovered several thousand dollars missing from its clients' portfolios. The company had not made the discovery public yet and wanted Candice's help in identifying the embezzler.

“Okay—these two?” I said, holding up a photo of a man in his mid-forties, with droopy jowls and yellowed teeth, and another of a woman in her mid – to late twenties, with bangs poufed high above her head and gobby eyes coated with too much mascara. “There's something going on between them. I get the feeling that they have some sort of romantic connection. This guy”—I pointed to the photo of the man—“he's up to no good. I get
the feeling that he's sneaky, and it's not just about fooling around with another employee. There's something more sinister here. Did he just buy a new boat?”

“He's made quite a few purchases lately, which is one of the reasons the company suspects him. And yes, one of his purchases was a boat.”

“Okay, this is your guy. There's something about this boat, though. I get the feeling that he's covered his tracks pretty good, but there's evidence hidden on the boat. I'd start by snooping around on it and seeing what you turn up.”

“What about the third photo?” Candice asked.

I looked at the third photo, an older woman roughly in her late fifties to early sixties, with washed-out gray hair, a prominent nose, and muddy eyes. I held the photo and felt around using my radar. “I get the feeling this woman has no clue about what's going on, that she's being used as a pawn or something. This guy may be using her in some way to cover his tracks, setting her up to take the blame for the crime.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Candice said. “Most of the evidence is pointing to her right now, but she's been an exemplary employee at the company for almost thirty years. She's about to retire, and we couldn't figure out why, after all this time, she would start stealing from the company.”

“Yeah, I agree with your instincts. It really feels to me like she's being set up. Look on the boat, Candice. There's something there.”

Candice gave me a big smile as I put the photos
back in the envelope. “Thanks, Abby. You've probably saved me a ton of legwork on this.”

“No sweat, Candice. By the way, what's the deal with Ireland?”

Candice gave a startled laugh. “God! Does anything get by you? I'm going there next month for a six-week vacation.”

“Wow,” I said enviously. “Well, you're going to have a great time, but you'll need to pack warmer than you think.”

“Thanks. I'll make sure I do. I'll be back in September, and I'm sure I'll be calling you for help on the next big case I get.”

“Anytime,” I said, standing up as she handed me a check and we walked to the door.