“Really? I’m trying to figure out how you never knew she existed.”
“That’s easy enough. My father was an only child. His father was killed during World War II. I guess my great-grandfather was the first to settle in the Gainesville area, and that was pretty much all we knew about his family. My mother was first generation Irish, and her folks died when I was young. And that was that.”
She reached over to try the salmon roll, but before she popped it into her mouth, she said casually, “I wonder how Amelia knew you all were out there, then. I mean, I could see it if the property had gone to your father. But all three of your names were listed in the will.” She stared at him, and smiled. “You know, the lawyer said she wrote that will right before the end of her life.”
“Your turn. Should she have left the property to you?”
“Probably not. I couldn’t have kept up with the insurance and the taxes.”
He was good at reading people, and she seemed to be speaking honestly and without rancor.
“Amelia might have thought she would just have been leaving a giant burden tied around my neck,” she went on. “She might have thought I would try to carry it and fall down with the effort.” She took a drink of tea. “I guess your business does fairly well.”
He shrugged. “Well enough. Just when we were getting started, Zachary pulled in a gig from a certain rock star I can’t mention. His daughter had disappeared in Brazil. We found her, managed to get her back. Her father wanted to pay us a fortune in gratitude, so we let him. It set the agency up well.”
“Do you only work for rich people?” she asked him.
He felt himself tense. There was a definite edge to that question. What the hell did it matter what she thought? he asked himself. It wasn’t as if she was some selfless dogooder. In his opinion, any psychic reader was just playing off the hopes, dreams and pain of others.
“Actually, at the moment, I’ve taken on a case for a dollar,” he told her. She looked up at him, clearly curious, so to get off that subject, he quickly asked, “So what was the story between you and Amelia?”
“She rescued me,” Kendall told him.
“From what?”
“When I was sixteen, my folks were killed in an automobile accident,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “They left nothing. I mean nothing. They were musicians, more in love with playing than making a living. I didn’t blame them—they did well enough, and we had a nice little house close to Rampart Street. I was put in foster care. I met Amelia when she hosted some of us kids out at the plantation for a field trip. She heard about what had happened. I actually ended up moving in with Vinnie’s folks, but they had a hard enough time making ends meet without me there, so Amelia helped them feed another mouth. I started spending weekends with her, helping her with the house—she still had a caretaker and a maid back then, but she always found something interesting for me to do. I managed to get a scholarship to Loyola, and once I was out of school, I started working. Nothing exciting, just a job to pay the bills. When the shop on Royal came up for lease, Amelia and I took a plunge together, because she liked my idea for what to do with it. So she took out a small mortgage to give me some start-up capital, and thank God, I was able to pay it back quickly. I believed I could make a go of it, and Amelia believed in me. So you can understand why, when she got sick, I was determined to help her.”
A simple enough story, he thought. Too simple, maybe, given that a lot more had certainly happened over the ten or twelve years since her parents had died.
“What about your family?” she asked, staring straight at him.
Her eyes were like emeralds, he thought. Emeralds glittering with amber lights. The flame of the candle on the table was reflected in them, constantly changing the color.
“Similar story, actually,” he said. “My parents died my senior year of high school. My mother caught a flu they couldn’t stop, and I think the pain of losing her made my dad’s heart give out. They left enough for me to hang on to the house until we could all graduate. Zachary was just a sophomore at the time, and Jeremy was a junior. I figured the only chance we really had was for me to join the navy, so I did. I could go to college while my brothers finished high school, then do my basic training after. A legal aide attorney helped get me custody of Jeremy and Zach until they reached eighteen themselves.”
“Very admirable,” she told him.
He shook his head. “The two of them picked up the pieces. They learned to cook and clean, and they both got into local bands that made money playing for weddings, graduations, that kind of thing. When I got out of the service, I studied graphics first. I almost started into architecture. But I’d been on a few covert missions in the service, so when Jeremy went into criminology, and then Zach, I found myself following. The next thing I knew, there was an FBI guy trying to recruit me, and I was intrigued. Jeremy wound up becoming a police diver, and Zachary headed down to the Miami area to work forensics.” He shrugged. “I guess you can only go so long in that line of work before you have to make a change. You just hit a breaking point.”
She looked at him. “And yours was?” she asked softly.
“My breaking point wasn’t professional,” he said.
“Your wife?”
He never talked about Serena. Never. And he didn’t want to start talking about her now.
Maybe not talking was worse.
“Car accident,” he said briefly.
He was startled when he felt her hand on his. Warm. And her eyes startled him even more. There was an empathy in them that touched him as no other attempt to comfort him had done before.
He was tempted to jerk his hand away. The feeling of warmth was too gentle. Lulling. It was the kind of thing that could take him off guard.
“Well, we’re a pair, aren’t we?” he said abruptly.
“Not that bad,” she told him, pulling her hand back and flushing slightly, telling him that she had never meant to touch him. “Vinnie is like a brother to me. Mason is the world’s greatest employee as well as a friend. I’m from here, so I have a lot of good friends, really. But…”
“But now you’ve lost Amelia. Followed by a good kick in the face—my brothers and me.”
She laughed. “I honestly don’t dislike you for that.”
“So why do you dislike me?”
“Well, you walk around like a thundercloud, and you’re…you’re rude.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s all right. You’re kind of like a neighbor’s cranky dog. After a while you get accustomed to the growling.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” he assured her. They were both smiling. It was almost an awkward moment.
“Another personal question,” he said.
“I’ll answer if I choose.”
“Vinnie has been your best friend forever, but you two were never romantically involved?”
“Vinnie and me? Good God, no!”
He wasn’t sure she’d wanted to be quite so honest with him; his question had obviously taken her by surprise.
“Sorry.” He laughed. “It just seems like the guy has more than his fair share of admirers.”
“Oh, he does. No, it’s just that…we were kids together. Like I said, he’s as close to me as a brother, really. He was a geeky kid, small and thin. He’s tall now, and he’s found a way to make those dark eyes and the long hair pay, plus he’s a respected guitarist. He’s come into his own. I’m really happy for him. But as to ever having any kind of romantic feelings for him…” She trailed off, her smile broad. “He’s a friend. A really good friend.”
“But he had a tough time as a kid?” Aidan asked. Childhood rejection was something profilers always looked for. He was tempted to ask her if she’d ever seen Vinnie torturing small animals.
“Who doesn’t have a tough time as a kid?” she asked, then eyed him knowingly. “Except, of course, the guys on the football team.”
“I wouldn’t know. I never played,” Aidan told h
er.
“You didn’t play sports?” she asked skeptically.
“Tennis and golf,” he told her. “Someone once told my mother that you should buy your kids a tennis racket, golf clubs and a guitar. My mother took it to heart. Oh, I also have a decent bowling average.”
She smiled. “Sorry. I was stereotyping you, I guess. The bruisers usually go out there and…inflict bruises.”
“And it sounds as if you’ve gone through life acting like Vinnie’s older sister, bolstering him up, looking out for him. A cheerleader, right?”
She laughed. “No. School newspaper—I wrote about the cheerleaders.”
“Snide little digs?”
“Not at all. I have nothing against cheerleaders or football players.”
“Vinnie must be grateful to you for looking out for him, though,” he said.
“Friends don’t have to be grateful to friends,” she told him, frowning. “He’s always been around when I’ve needed him, and I’m there when he needs me.”
Her tone indicated that she knew Vinnie was under some kind of attack—and she wasn’t going to have any of it.
“I guess it’s nice that Mason and Vinnie seem to be such good friends.”
“Of course it’s nice.” She looked at him, confused, but instinctively wary. “Vinnie’s not an actual employee, but he still works at the shop when I need him and he’s free. When I’m not around, it’s often the two of them. Of course I’m glad they hit it off.”
Aidan kept his features impassive. Inwardly, he couldn’t help but think of the occasional serial killers who worked in pairs. It wasn’t that he was suddenly convinced Mason and Vinnie were some kind of bloodthirsty symbiotic duo, but he couldn’t ignore the possibility. Frankly, he had no real evidence that anyone was a killer, but had to start somewhere. And Jenny Trent’s last credit card charges had been at Kendall’s shop and the bar where Vinnie played and Mason hung out.
“What are you getting at?” she asked him.
He hesitated, then drew Jenny Trent’s picture from the breast pocket of his jacket and laid it down in front of Kendall.
Her reaction was far worse than he had expected. She turned white. Pure white. Her eyes rose to his, stricken.
“Why are you asking me about her?” she demanded.
“She disappeared in New Orleans. She was supposed to be heading—”
“On a trip to South America, I know. What happened to her?” Kendall asked. She was staring at him with dread.
“No one knows what happened to her,” he said. He leaned closer. “You tell me. I know she was in your shop. Obviously something happened there.”
“Nothing happened in my shop,” she protested.
“Then why are you whiter than Christmas snow?”
“She came in for a reading,” Kendall said.
“And did she say a stranger had been following her? Was she nervous about anything?” he pressed.
“I remember her because she was full of life and very nice. That’s all,” Kendall said.
“You’re lying, Kendall,” he accused evenly, quietly.
“Is this why you asked me out to dinner?” she asked. “To accuse me?”
“No. I didn’t know what I know about this woman until today.”
“That’s right. You wanted to know about the house, about Amelia. Well, I’ve told you what I know. And anyway, what does the past matter? The house is yours now.”
She was nervous and defensive. He couldn’t understand what about the photo of Jenny Trent could have thrown her so badly.
“What happened at your shop?” he asked again.
“She was like any tourist. She came in,” Kendall told him, her voice hard. “She wanted a tarot card reading. I gave her one. She was pleasant. She told me she was a teacher and that she’d saved for years to pay for her vacation. She was excited to be going on such an adventure.”
Everything she was saying was true, he knew; she just wasn’t saying everything.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” she told him firmly.
“Then why did you look as if you’d seen a ghost?” he demanded.
She shook her head, just staring at him. Then she said, “I know why the cops hate you.”
“‘Hate’ might be too strong a word.” Or was it?
“You’re never going to make it here. You aren’t an insider. You don’t know the area. You come in here like you think you can save the day when we’ve all been picking up the pieces for a long time. Seriously, just who do you think you are?”
It was strange, he thought. She was genuinely indignant.
And just as genuinely afraid.
“I’m not that much of an outsider—I’ve been coming around here forever,” he said curtly. “My brother is involved in a major benefit for the area kids. So you think I’m an intrusive ballbuster? Well, I’m pretty sure this girl is dead,” he said. “And I think I found a piece of her remains.”
Kendall stared at him. He was surprised she hadn’t gotten up and walked out on him yet. But she was just staring at him, her eyes very wide and her skin ashen.
“What makes you so positive that you’ve found this girl?”
“I’m not positive about anything.”
Almost unconsciously, she ran fingers over the picture as she stared down at it. For a moment he thought she was going to cry. She was definitely distressed. He reached across the table, setting a hand on hers. “Kendall, what the hell is it?”
“She was very sweet,” she said.
She started to move her hand away; he held firm.
She shook her head. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“So that you can look down on me even more?” she asked bitterly.
“I don’t look down on you.” All right, so he was lying then, at least a little bit. But hell, it had looked as if she’d been living off a frail old woman. And he did have a problem with people who indulged in all that psychic claptrap, believers or not.
“All right, so I’m a skeptical man,” he admitted.
“I think I should go,” she said.
“Please, stay. Help me. I know I’m floundering in the dark.”
She was searching his eyes, wondering if he was sincere. His hand was still on hers, and he sincerely hoped she wasn’t going to bolt.
“Please,” he said again.
“If you laugh at me, I swear, I will never speak to you again,” she said. She meant it. He could tell.
“I don’t find anything about Jenny Trent to be amusing,” he said.
Her lashes fell; she looked toward the table. “There was something strange when I tried to give her a reading….” She looked up at him again. She seemed to sit taller; she was stiff and regal. “I don’t actually believe in psychic powers myself. Yes, I give readings. Good ones, I think. But I graduated with degrees in psychology and fine arts. I had a teacher who taught me once that entertainment has to do with knowing your audience, and psychology taught me how to do that. So then the shop came up, and I was positive I could make a go of it, but I never thought I could read anyone’s palm or look into a crystal ball and tell someone their future. But I knew something—that presentation could make or break a show, and giving readings, giving people what they want, is a way of putting on a show.”
As she spoke, he found himself wanting to reach out and stroke her cheek, wanting to tell her that it was all right, that she had done everything right. Except he still didn’t know what she was getting at.
“I see,” he said, but the truth was, he didn’t see at all.
She took a deep breath. “There have been a few times when something really strange has happened. One of those times was with Jenny Trent.”
“Kendall, what happened?”
“Tarot cards have more meanings than you can begin to imagine. A good reader should have instincts to help sort through those meanings as they relate to each client.” She took a deep breath. ?
??What I’m trying to explain is that they really are a perfect tool for…well, for a psychologist, for a way of listening and then trying to point out certain aspects of life that someone might want to be blind to. Every card can mean many things. The Death card doesn’t mean death. Not usually. It means change.”
He stared at her, pinning her with his eyes. “And you drew the Death card for Jenny Trent? You…you saw death for her?”
“Yes and no.” She took a deep breath and went on. “I just explained that the cards have all kinds of meanings. That the Death card doesn’t mean literal death. It indicates an ending for something. Depending on what other cards turn up, it can mean a major upheaval, the end of a relationship. But it’s also associated with the concept that when one door closes, another opens.”
“So why did it bother you when the card appeared for Jenny Trent?”
She looked at him across the table, and he could see her steeling herself to answer.
“It laughed at me,” she told him.
“What?” He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but it certainly hadn’t been that.
She jerked her hand back at last. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew you would just laugh at me and think that I must have been drunk or that I’m crazy, or I am just taking myself too seriously. Look, I’ve told you my history, Jenny’s history, and I’ve even answered your ridiculous questions about Vinnie. What more do you want from me?”
“I wasn’t laughing at you,” he said.
“May we please leave?” she asked.
“I swear, I wasn’t laughing at you. I just don’t understand.”
“No, and I don’t think you’re going to, so I want to go.”
All right, maybe he did think she had just been seeing things. But even so, her reaction to Jenny Trent’s picture had been real. Whatever was really going on, she clearly believed something strange had happened that day.
And didn’t everything he himself was doing now come from something unexplained? A hunch?
“Kendall, I promise I wasn’t laughing at you, and I’m sorry if you thought I was,” he told her soberly. He glanced at his watch. He did want to get to the club, but he didn’t want to end the evening with her feeling like this.