“Her death?” he clarified.
“I thought so. But it’s never hard and fast. There are always alternate interpretations of anything I see.”
He swore under his breath. “You were thinking, ‘you’re going to die.’”
“But I couldn’t say it. Not like that.”
“Did you warn her?”
“No.”
His voice turned sharp. “Why not?”
Rachel couldn’t help being defensive. “Would you tell anyone something that devastating? I could have been wrong. I never tell people anything so . . . upsetting. I let her know she was in for a rough patch. At the end of the session, she asked me to meet her at her hotel room tonight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You think I’m lying?”
“No.”
They had been so close a moment ago. Too close, and they must have been thinking the same thing. It was time to put up some barriers.
She moved away from him and automatically felt to seeif her hair was messed up. Some had come loose, and she worked stray strands back into place.
Her head was throbbing, making it hard to think.
“Coming here was a mistake,” she said as she stood up and smoothed out her dress.
He kept his gaze on her. “Something happened between us. Don’t you want to find out what it was?”
“Lust.”
“You know damn well it was more than that.”
Maybe she did, but she wasn’t going to admit it to him. Not now. Not when she was still shaking inside from the intensity of what she’d felt–on so many levels.
Turning on her heel, she left the office and walked through the restaurant, feeling the eyes of the maitre d’ and some of the diners on her.
She kept walking, out onto the street, then headed back toward her building. The shop door was on Toulouse Street. The entrance to her apartment was in a little courtyard with an iron gate. She unlocked it, glad when the light came on as she stepped into her familiar surroundings.
She’d fixed up the area with potted plants and patio furniture. Sometimes she sat down here; sometimes up on the upper patio outside her living room. Tonight she just wanted to get inside her apartment and lock the door.
When she was finally feeling safe, she sat down at the table by the window and stared out into the darkened street, trying to figure out what had really happened tonight.
A woman had been murdered. A woman she’d done a reading for a little over a day earlier.
Was Jake Harper’s harsh judgment right? Should she have warned Evelyn Morgan about what she’d seen? Had she played a role in her death by keeping silent? Maybe Evelyn would have left New Orleans. Maybe that wouldn’t have doneany good, like in that bookAppointment in Samarra, where the guy is heading for death no matter what he does.
She squeezed her hands into fists, grappling with the what if’s.
She came back to the woman herself. There had been a strong streak of determination in Evelyn Morgan. She wouldn’t have run. She would have stayed around to accomplish her mission–whatever it was--but maybe she would have moved up her timetable. What if the meeting had been last night and Evelyn had left town before her murderer arrived?
Rachel had never felt so conflicted about a reading. True, she’d seen death in the cards before. But not murder.
Well, she hadn’t known it was murder. It hadn’t been that specific. And like she’d told Jake, there was always the chance she’d gotten it wrong.
She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to banish the woman’s image from her mind. As she tried to focus on something else, her thoughts jumped back to Jake Harper. Another upsetting subject. For too many reasons.
