Royce made quick work of taping her ankles together. “Happy now?” he demanded and tossed the tape. It bounced off the floor and hit the grate, knocking it askew.
“Not yet,” Lurlene said, crossing her arms and tapping her foot.
Royce made a big show of being annoyed when he pulled a knife out of his belt and opened the blade in Riley’s face. She flinched and flattened herself against the wall.
She wasnotgoing to die in a stinky closet during Nick’s birthday party.
2
Five days earlier
8:33 a.m., Friday, October 25
Riley Thorn was finding being psychic while chipping away at her To-Do list to be more complicated than she’d thought.
She swiped the roller through the pan of primer and sneaked a peek at the man in the closet next to her. Gabe was tall and broad and muscled in ways that suggested an inhuman metabolism. He had his back to her, his own roller working methodically. His dark skin and black workout gear were still pristine despite the fact that they were slathering primer onto the walls of the Creepy, Smelly Closet, which was attached to one of the seven questionably livable guest rooms in her new house.
Riley, by contrast, looked as if she’d wrestled with Casper the Friendly Ghost just before he exploded.
“You are pausing to focus,” Gabe observed without turning around.
Busted.
“Sorry. This multitasking-psychic thing is tougher than I thought,” she said, getting back to work.
Technically everything about being a psychic was tough.
The intrusive thoughts that weren’t hers, the confusing ethics of mind reading, the constant decision-making. Did the guy in the cereal aisle need to know that he was going to get fired Friday? Did the mechanic at the tire store really need Riley to tell her that Aunt Marmella had wanted her to inherit the mantel clock but Cousin Bruno had stolen it during the wake?
“Try again. Paint the wall and open your mind,” Gabe told her.
She took a deep breath and immediately regretted it as the scent of something “earthy” and rotten hit her nose. Something had definitely been living in here at one time. If this paint job didn’t take care of the smell, Riley envisioned her psychic garage doors opening wide.
They were practicing reading minds while distracted by physical tasks. Usually, in order to read someone’s mind, she had to mentally drop into what she called Cotton Candy World. A place that existed inside her head filled with puffy clouds and friendly, invisible spirit guides who communicated with her in code.
Sure, the occasional stray thought from a passing stranger presented itself to her. But recent events, including a murderous city mayor and a vigilante serial killer with a bomb, had highlighted the need for mind reading on the fly.
Yeah. It was as weird as it sounded.
She wondered what Nick was doing. Then guessed she already knew. It was the same thing he’d been doing since August.
He hadn’t come to bed again last night. Since they’d moved out of one crumbling mansion on Front Street into another, her private-investigator boyfriend had spent more nights in his new home office than he had in their bed. Now they were only having sex two or three times a week, down from the baker’s dozen of the summer.
She blamed her grandmother.
When the great medium Elanora Basil told a man that the woman who’d disappeared on him six years ago—the woman whose presumed death had still weighed on him—wasn’t actually dead, it was bound to stir things up.
Since that fateful summer day, Nick had redoubled his efforts to find Beth Weber. Retracing his steps through the investigation files. Calling old witnesses. Revisiting old anonymous tips. Scouring cold case forums online for rumors.
While Nick obsessed about the past, Riley quietly kept her eye on the future. In the mornings, she trained with Gabe. The afternoons were reserved for work. But as Santiago Investigations’ office manager, her workload had lightened considerably since Nick hadn’t taken a new case in a while. Instead, she’d been using the time to chip away at the never-ending to-do list of a homeowner with a dilapidated, eight-bedroom Tudor mansion.
“Being present in the moment is a gift,” Gabe said behind her.
Damn it.Her brain was full of chatter this morning, and for once, it was all her own.
She dipped the roller into the pan again. She needed to buy more primer. Oh, and pumpkins for the front porch. Some decorations might make the place look less “haunted house” and more—
Gabe cleared his throat pointedly.
