“What makes you say that?”
“She’s always in character, not just on the stage tonight, but whenever she’s out in public. She’s been a customer at the tearoom almost every day since she arrived in town, and I’ve never seen her put a foot wrong. She is always Madam Zolanda, psychic to the stars.”
Jake gave that some thought. Adelaide was right. The ability to stay in character for an extended length of time required considerable acting talent. It also required a lot of stamina. No one knew that better than him.
“I see what you mean,” he said.
“It’s very hard to assume a certain persona and maintain it twenty-four hours a day. It takes a toll on the nerves.”
The cool certainty in Adelaide’s voice sent a flash of knowing through him. He could have sworn that she was speaking from experience.
“That is very . . . insightful,” he said.
“For a waitress, do you mean?”
The edge was back in her voice. He had inadvertently offended her again.
“For anyone,” he said.
Onstage, Zolanda was giving a demonstration of mind reading, speaking as though in the throes of a deep trance.
“Miss Leggett, I sense that someone in the third row is concerned with financial matters. Something to do with an inheritance . . . Yes, it’s coming through quite clearly now. Someone died but he . . . or was it a woman? . . . left something important to a person who did not deserve it . . .”
A woman in the third row shot to her feet. “That’s me, Madam Zolanda. My uncle promised to leave his house to me but my sister got it.”
Thelma Leggett went to stand at the end of the third row. “Madam Zolanda, do you have any advice for this lady?”
“I see money coming to her very soon from an unexpected source. But wait. I’m getting another message. It’s quite murky. Now I understand. She must be cautious because there are those who will seek to take advantage of her improved financial situation.”
“That’s for sure,” the woman said. “My brother and sister will have their hands out. Thanks for the warning, Madam Zolanda.”
The audience member sat down quickly.
“Fourth row, near the center, Miss Leggett. And—wait—also the seventh row. I perceive some ladies and gentlemen who suffer from insomnia.”
There was an astonished gasp from several members of the audience. Several hands went up in the fourth and seventh rows.
“I can now perceive their auras,” Madam Zolanda continued. “There is a great deal of negative energy in each one. That is the cause of their insomnia.”
There was another round of applause.
Jake leaned toward Adelaide. He caught her light scent—some delicate perfume spiked with spice and flowers mingled with her indescribably feminine essence. For a beat or two he felt a little light-headed. He wished that he really was in Burning Cove to relax.
“It doesn’t take any psychic power to assume that in an audience of this size there will be several people who have trouble sleeping,” he said.
“True.” Adelaide’s mouth tilted up a bit at the corner. “At Refresh I get a lot of requests for blends to treat sleep problems.”
Onstage, Thelma fitted Zolanda with a blindfold and then turned to speak to the audience.
“Silence, please,” she instructed. “Madam Zolanda will now endeavor to provide a demonstration of astral projection. I must warn you that this is not always possible. It depends on the energy in the atmosphere. Noise from the audience can distort the astral wavelengths.”
A hush fell over the crowd. Anticipation gripped the theater. For the first time Jake was mildly impressed. Madam Zolanda was doing literally nothing onstage and yet she had managed to rivet everyone’s attention.
Slowly, deliberately, Madam Zolanda began to speak.
“I am floating above the town of Burning Cove. It is bathed in the light of the moon. I can see the Burning Cove Hotel and the Paradise Club. There is a small dog barking at me. The dog can sense my presence. I am being tugged toward a certain location. It is imperative that I go there. I must warn someone. Wait. I am being drawn to this very theater. I don’t understand.”
There was a collective gasp from the audience. Madam Zolanda continued, her voice rising with alarm.
“Now I am inside the theater looking down from the ceiling. Spirit Guide, tell me why you have summoned me to this place.”
By now almost everyone in the audience was looking up at the darkened ceiling. There was a breathless pause . . .
. . . Shattered by a nerve-jangling scream.
Zolanda.
As one the audience turned back to watch, shocked, as Zolanda rose to her feet and tore off the blindfold. There was an expression of raw horror on her face. Her eyes were wild with panic as though she found herself in a hellish nightmare.
“I see blood. Blood and death. Mark my words, someone in this theater will be dead by morning.”
The audience was absolutely motionless now. All eyes were on the stage.
Zolanda gave a high, shrill cry and collapsed. Her silk scarves cascaded around her in crimson waves.
Chapter 10
“You’ll have to admit it made for a dramatic finish to the act,” Adelaide said. She slipped into the buttery-soft leather seats of Jake’s dark green speedster. “But why on earth would Zolanda make such a ghastly prediction when it is unlikely to come true?”
“Good question,” Jake said.
There was a solid, satisfying ker-chunk as he closed the passenger side door.
Adelaide watched him walk around the front of the long hood. He looked very good in an elegantly tailored evening jacket and trousers and a perfectly knotted tie. If human auras really did exist, she was sure that his would radiate strength of will and a deeply passionate nature held in check by ironclad self-control.
She could tell that he had been affected by Zolanda’s final act but his interest was of a detached, clinical nature. He was curious, she realized, but, unlike her, he was not disturbed.
Her nerves, on the other hand, had been badly rattled. She would not sleep well tonight, if she slept at all. The mere prediction of bloody death, even if only for dramatic effect, shocked her senses. It hurled her thoughts straight back to the night of her escape. Memories of the laboratory window exploding beneath the weight of Ormsby’s body and visions of the killer emerging from the hallway that led to her room would haunt her until dawn.
She suppressed a small sigh. It wouldn’t be the first time she had tossed and turned and finally given up on sleep. She had not had a single night of truly sound sleep in months, not since the terrible day when the police had come to her door to inform her that her parents had been killed in an explosion in their lab.
True, the authorities were not searching for a homicidal escapee from an insane asylum, but she was very sure that someone was looking for her.
There were excellent reasons for keeping the news of her escape a secret, of course. As long as she was assumed to be under lock and key at Rushbrook, Conrad Massey could continue to drain her inheritance and Dr. Gill could continue to hope that the FBI would not become aware of his experiments with Daydream. But it also meant that a killer was on the loose and quite likely searching for her.
She was well aware of her own reasons for having been unnerved by Zolanda’s prediction, but Jake’s odd silence made her wary. Instead of dismissing the final act as the melodramatic finale of a fraudulent psychic, he had gone very quiet after the curtain came down.
She thought about what Raina had said that afternoon when she had telephoned with the news that Jake Truett was evidently exactly who he claimed to be—a successful businessman and a widower who had sold his import-export business in the wake of his wife’s tragic death. Under the circumstances it was probably not surprising that he would find such a dire predic
tion unsettling, even if it had been delivered by a charlatan. Nevertheless, his abrupt lapse into near silence struck her as strange.
He opened the driver’s side door, got behind the wheel, and turned the key in the ignition. The powerful engine purred to life. He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
She was very aware of the shadowed intimacy of the front seat of the speedster, but as far as she could tell, Jake was oblivious. He was lost in his own thoughts. Whatever those thoughts were, she had a feeling they were dark. She waited, tense and uncertain, for him to make another comment about Zolanda’s prediction. When she could not abide the silence any longer, she tried to restart the conversation.
“This is Burning Cove, after all,” she said. “I’m told there is very little serious crime here.”
That comment had the effect of hauling Jake up out of some deep place—temporarily, at least.
“A friend informed me that a while back an aspiring actress died in the spa pool at the Burning Cove Hotel under suspicious circumstances,” he said.
“I did hear something about that. Still, Florence assured me that was a very unusual situation. Murder is hardly a common crime in this town. This isn’t New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco, where a fake psychic could play the odds and assume that somewhere in the city someone might die by violence in any given twenty-four-hour period. As it stands now, everyone will be opening up their copies of the Burning Cove Herald first thing in the morning looking for a report of a murder.”
“She predicted a bloody death,” Jake said. “She did not predict murder.”
Adelaide glanced at him in surprise. “You’re right. I hadn’t considered the exact wording of the prediction. But when you think of a bloody death, murder is the first thing that comes to mind, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Why would Zolanda risk her reputation by making a prediction that probably won’t come true?”
“I don’t think Madam Zolanda’s reputation will suffer if the prediction fails,” Jake said. “That’s the interesting thing about the psychic business—it’s virtually impossible to kill off a good act. Nobody remembers the predictions that didn’t happen. People believe what they want to believe and forget the rest.”
“So Zolanda made that horrible prediction just to inspire dark thrills in the audience?”
Jake shot her a quick, searching look and then returned his attention to Cliff Road, a narrow, two-lane strip of pavement that followed the bluffs above the ocean.
“Zolanda’s grand finale really upset you, didn’t it?” he said, his voice very neutral.
It upset you, too, she thought, but she did not say the words aloud.
She took a deep breath and composed herself. “I admit I was rather startled.” She paused, searching for a brighter conversational topic. “You were right about the psychic act. It’s just a form of stage magic. A combination of clever tricks and a good story.”
“The difference is that when you watch a magician perform, you know it’s all clever tricks and a good story,” Jake said. He eased the car smoothly into another gear. “The magician invites you to be amazed, and if he’s good, you are astonished by his skill. But a psychic wants you to actually believe in the paranormal. Those who fall for the act can be persuaded to do things that they might not otherwise do—things that prove to be harmful or dangerous.”
She studied his hard, unyielding profile. Understanding whispered through her.
“Can I assume you know someone who was taken in by a psychic or a fortune-teller?” she asked quietly.
He hesitated and then nodded once. “Yes.”
“I see. If your opinion of psychics is so low, may I ask why you wanted to accompany me to the performance tonight?”
For the first time since leaving the theater, a shadow of a smile briefly transformed Jake’s stern features.
“Isn’t it obvious why I talked you into giving me that second ticket?” he said.
A flash of understanding sparked through her. She clenched her hand around her evening bag. I should have known he had an ulterior motive, she thought.
“I see,” she said, striving to keep her tone cool.
“What do you see?”
“Madam Zolanda was the psychic who tricked your friend, wasn’t she?”
Jake took his eyes off the road just long enough to give her a quick, narrow-eyed glance.
“How the hell did you figure that out?” he asked.
He was annoyed, she decided, but not with her. He had never intended to give himself away. But he probably wasn’t accustomed to dealing with paranoid mental patients who were always ready to suspect a plot or a conspiracy.
She gripped her bag with both hands and stared straight ahead at the winding road. So much for the possibility of engaging in a fleeting seaside romance with an interesting businessman from out of town.
“It explains a lot,” she said. “You found me and my extra ticket very convenient, didn’t you?”
“You are a very smart lady.” Jake tightened his hands on the wheel. “But for your information, I already had a ticket to Zolanda’s performance tonight. That’s not why I wanted to accompany you this evening.”
“There’s no need for explanations,” she said. “You’ve made yourself clear. You’re in Burning Cove because you followed Madam Zolanda here. That’s why you’ve made a habit of showing up at Refresh every day. You know that there’s a good chance she’ll show up, too. You’re watching her.”
“Stop jumping to conclusions. I admit that Zolanda is why I’m here, but I asked you for that extra ticket because I wanted to spend the evening with you. Zolanda’s performance seemed like the perfect opportunity.” Jake paused. “It was either that or the art museum.”
The museum crack was an attempt to change the subject, she decided. She was not about to fall for it. He had used her, and she’d had enough of being used by men.
“Let’s get back to your real reason for being in town,” she said. “What do you hope to do? Prove Zolanda is a fraud? What good will that do? As you’ve already pointed out, people will believe what they want to believe.”
Jake was silent for a few seconds. She knew he was debating how much to tell her.
“I have reason to think that Zolanda is in possession of a diary that does not belong to her,” he said. “If the contents of the diary were to become public, there are people whose lives could be destroyed.”
Adelaide thought she had been prepared for an alarming turn of events. Nevertheless, she was stunned.
“Are you telling me that Zolanda isn’t just a phony psychic?” she said. “She’s a blackmailer?”
“Yes.”
“I see. So you are in town under false pretenses but for a very good reason.”
“Damn it, Adelaide—”
“It’s all right. No need to apologize.” She waved a hand in what she hoped was an airy gesture of dismissal. “I’ll admit I’m irritated that I was under a misunderstanding for most of the evening, but I do appreciate your reasons for the deception. In your shoes I probably would have done the same thing. Maybe.”
“Will you listen for a moment? Yes, I am here in Burning Cove because I promised someone that I would do my best to recover the diary. But that is not why I asked you to let me use that second ticket tonight. My reasons for that were personal.”
“Sure. And while we’re on the subject of your deceptive behavior, there’s something that I should mention.”
“What?” Jake asked.
She was pleased by the very cautious undertone in the single word. Call me petty, she thought. She had a hunch that making Jake a little uneasy was likely the only revenge she would get.
“One of my friends was concerned about my date for tonight,” she said, grimly cheerful. “She made some phone calls to Los Angeles and asked about you
. She wanted to be sure you were who you claimed to be.”
“You had someone investigate me?” Jake sounded nonplussed.
She had actually managed to shock him. She smiled to herself.
“My friend’s name is Raina Kirk,” she said. “Raina just opened a private investigation agency here in Burning Cove. Congratulations. Looking into your background was her very first case. All right, not exactly her first case.”
“What the hell does ‘not exactly’ mean?”
“I didn’t actually pay her. She did it as a favor.”
“Damn.” Jake was silent for a beat. “I came up clean, I take it?”
“Raina assured me that you are who you say you are.”
“That’s good to know. I’m very glad to find out for certain that I’m who I’ve always assumed I was. You can’t be too careful these days.”
“I just thought you should know that I checked up on you.”
“It was an excellent idea.” Jake turned serious again. “More women should exercise the same caution.”
She thought about Conrad Massey. “You are so right.”
Jake took the Crescent Beach turnoff. A short time later he brought the speedster to a halt in front of her cottage. He shut down the engine and climbed out from behind the wheel.
When he reached down to assist her out of the seat, she got another little electric thrill. It took willpower but she managed to suppress the urge to ask him in for a nightcap.
He went up the front steps with her and waited while she got out her key, opened the front door, and turned on a light. She moved into the small hall and turned to face him.
“Good night,” she said, determined to hang on to her breezy, devil-may-care attitude at all costs. “It’s been an interesting evening.”
He gripped the doorjamb and leaned in a little, his eyes very intent. “I just want to make it clear one more time that I did not ask for that second ticket because I found it convenient to accompany you to the performance this evening. I asked for it because I wanted to be with you tonight.”
“Is that the truth?”