Aidan McConnell awoke to the smell of gingerbread and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman’s scream. The scream ended the moment he opened his eyes. The smell did not.
It took him a minute to place the scent, which had invaded his head as he tried to grab some sleep just before dawn on Thursday. At first, in those early moments between asleep and awake, he thought he was dreaming of a holiday visit to his great-grandmother’s house. Her kitchen had always been rich with all the delicious aromas any sugar-deprived kid could desire.
But when he sat up on his couch and realized the cloying, sickeningly sweet odor of ginger and spice was filling every breath, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was connecting.
“Damn it,” he muttered, not wanting this, not now, not again. Not so soon after last night’s mental invasion. Bacon and sausage, for God’s sake. The reek of fatty, greasy pork had seemed to permeate every inch of air in his house a few hours ago, and now it was gingerbread.
Forcing himself to focus on his other senses, he stared at his desk, at the files, books, his laptop. There was a cup filled with colored pencils and a mug that read, “Psychics do it when they’re not even there.” A paperweight. An old-fashioned wind-up brass clock that dinged violently when the alarm went off. Normal stuff. Familiar stuff.
Aidan focused. He thought about the coolness of the brass, the heft of the paperweight, and how freshly brewed coffee tasted from the mug. He thought of the many sketches he’d made with those pencils, trying to capture images he’d seen while mentally connecting with someone before they shortened and finally disappeared from his mind like a shadow at high noon.
It didn’t work. Ginger. Sugar. But bloated, vile, thick and putrid.
He focused harder, rubbing the tips of his fingers across the grain of the leather couch, craning to hear the tick of that clock, ordering his other senses to combine and smother the smell. But still the stench enveloped him. He could taste gingerbread and candy now, rancid and rotten.
Closing his eyes, he gritted his teeth, resorting to his oldest tricks against the familiar invasion into his psyche. He visualized a sea of sturdy cement building blocks. One by one, he began piling them up, erecting the psychic barrier between his mind and the one he was unwillingly connecting with. Building mental walls in order to protect himself wasn’t just an expression when it came to Aidan, it was pure survival.
His great-grandmother had taught him the trick when he was little. The old woman had been like him: strange, seeing things she’d never seen, knowing things she couldn’t know. She’d been the proverbial skeleton in the family’s closet, though she wouldn’t allow herself to be banished. When she felt like it, she inserted herself into her family’s lives.
That was lucky for him. She had been the only one Aidan could talk to about his own unexpected, unwanted abilities. His parents had been appalled by them. His mother’s great-grandmother was the only one who’d understood and helped him.
And she’d made the best gingerbread. That smell.
“No, build, damn it!”
He mentally built, row by row, foot by foot, his head aching. The cement wall was almost to the clouds by the time the stench began to dissipate like steam off a mirror. Finally, he could breathe again, smelling nothing but the faintly old air of the closed-in house in which he lived.
He could also think again. Unfortunately, his thoughts went to one place: Who was it? Who had he met, touched, interacted with in the past, whose thoughts were filled with stink and rotting garbage? And gingerbread. Why was that person’s mind consumed with it—so consumed Aidan was overwhelmed by their thoughts, which translated into physical scents, from far away?
He didn’t doubt he’d met the person with whom he was connecting. He’d touched him or her; perhaps just a faint brush of hand against arm as they passed on the street. The sensory reactions were never this strong without personal contact. Studying a photograph or holding an item used by someone he was seeking might bring a quick sensation, a breathful of odor, a flash of mental imagery. But for it to go on like this morning’s nightmare meant skin-to-skin contact.
Thank God the scream hadn’t rung in his ears as long as the stench had filled his nostrils.
Maybe it wasn’t connected. Perhaps the scream had merely been a last remnant of one of his own forgotten nightmares. He preferred to think that, not wanting to imagine the scream was really happening anywhere else but in his own mind. Aidan didn’t want to picture the screamer in agony, desperate for help. His help.
“Forget it,” he muttered. He didn’t do that anymore. He did everything he could to stay in his own head these days, and out of everyone else’s. Where he’d once used psychic ability, he was now quite content to use his own highly tuned sense of intuition and reasonable deduction.
Right now, he reasonably deduced that the smell had been noticed and thought about by somebody he’d briefly met, somebody who was walking by a garbage dump. And the scream was a product of his own tortured memories running rampant in his dreams. Period.
The ringing of the phone came as a jarring surprise. First because it was so early, and second because he seldom received calls. He liked it that way, having isolated himself in this old house in Granville when he’d decided to get out of Savannah after everything went down so badly last year. He rarely shared the number, and when he saw who was calling he heaved a sigh.
Julia Harrington hadn’t given up trying to get him to come back to work for her. She knew he still had his fingers in a few pies, that he couldn’t completely stay away from the world of crime-solving, even if he did it without the “spooky” stuff, as she called it. As if she had room to talk about anything spooky, considering how she got her information.
“Hello, Julia,” he said as soon as he lifted the phone to his mouth.
“How did you know it was me? Admit it, you’re doing your psychic thing again, right?”
“Ever heard of a little invention called caller ID?”
“Oh, that. How mundane.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“Come on, admit it, you miss me.”
Maybe. But no, he wouldn’t admit it.
Julia was one of the few people he kept in touch with from his old life. When everything had gone to hell with his last case, she’d been right there, standing beside him, ready to fight for his reputation if he asked her to.
He hadn’t asked her to. Though he’d appreciated the offer, Julia had her own issues. Ex-cop or no, she now owned a company called Extrasensory Agents, and led a team of psychic detectives. So she wasn’t exactly the most staunch and upstanding of character references.
“So, whatcha working on?”
“I don’t do that anymore, remember?”
“Yeah, uh-huh, sure you don’t. I thought about you the other day when I saw a story out of Charlotte about an ‘anonymous tip’ that led police to the killer of a local carpenter.”
He stiffened, wondering how she could possibly have connected that to him. “Reasonable deduction,” he admitted grudgingly. “Nothing supernatural about it. I hacked into the case file, read the witness statements, and found some inconsistencies.”
“Just can’t stay out of it, can you?”
“If by ‘it’ you mean dabbling in cold-crime-solving, I’ll admit I haven’t lost my interest. But as for the rest? Hell, yes, I can stay out of it. So you might as well not even start.”
“Hold on, before you go getting your excuses lined up about why you can’t come back to the real world, and have to keep wearing your hair shirt and indulging in self-flagellation . . .”
“That was a mouthful.”
“I’m just saying, don’t panic. I’m not calling to beg you to come back to work.”
He couldn’t deny a flood of relief. She didn’t want him for a job. Since his “retirement” she’d come to him a few times, strictly for advice, or so she said, trying to lure him into work via the back door of consultancy. But not this time. Which meant she was p
robably calling to try to reengage him in a social life, like she had a few weeks ago when she and two of her other agents had shown up at his door.
Aidan wasn’t the type who enjoyed surprise visits, nor did he ever go to beer-and-wings joints like the one to which they’d dragged him. Despite the fact that he’d almost had a good time, he had no desire to repeat the experience. Because even here in Granville, where he was a newcomer and a stranger, people knew him by reputation, and oh, how they did like to stare.
“Aidan?”
“Okay, so why are you calling?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know.
“I got a call last night from a reporter.”
“We don’t use that word anymore, remember?”
“Oh, sorry. I mean, I got a call last night from a lying, manipulative media cockroach.”
“Better.”
“It’s about the Remington case.” The words rode out of her mouth on a sigh.
“Wonderful.” Aidan lifted a hand to his face and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. Of all the names he didn’t want to hear ever again, Remington topped the list. “Go on.”
“He wanted to get in touch with you to see if you’d heard Caroline Remington tried to commit suicide last week, on the anniversary.”
“Jesus.” Aidan sagged against the back of the couch, a well of emotions surging through him. Anger, pity, frustration. Regret. Such regret. It was like his worst nightmare, only it just kept going and he couldn’t wake up from it.
“I know, it’s awful.”
He’d never even met Mrs. Remington; she’d been well protected by her husband from the minute their son disappeared. But from the pictures he’d seen in the paper, she looked like a pretty, fragile woman whose world had been shattered, leaving her confused and heartbroken.
“Is she all right?”
“Apparently. She took some pills, but her husband found her in time. I thought you’d want to know, in case the cockroach from the Morning News manages to track you down.”
Finding out his general location probably wouldn’t be too hard. He hadn’t made it a state secret that he was moving to Granville, fifty miles west of Savannah. Or that he was giving up his role as prominent author, speaker, and expert on psychic phenomenon to become a hermit.
But at least his number was unpublished and his address unlisted. Anyone wanting to reach him would have to do some digging, and hopefully the reporter wouldn’t bother.
Wishful thinking. In his experience, there was nothing too low for most reporters.
“I hate that this is coming up again,” Julia said. “I’m really sorry.”
“I figured it would, with the one-year mark. Besides, I’m not the one you should feel sorry for. Caroline Remington is.”
First, for the loss of her six-year-old son, and second, for being married to a controlling, manipulative bastard like Theodore Remington.
Thrusting the anger away, he forced himself to think of the fact that, even though he was a rich, spoiled, overbearing asshole, Remington was also a grieving father. He had good reason to bear a grudge against Aidan. Whatever petty revenge he’d taken, using his contacts and power to make Aidan’s life hell, it had been justified. After all, in Remington’s mind, Aidan had been responsible for his son’s death. And Aidan couldn’t entirely disagree with him.
“Aidan?”
He sighed heavily. “As if I have anything to add on that subject? Haven’t I said enough to and about that family?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He’d heard those words a thousand times in the past twelve months, since the Remington boy had been found dead, trapped inside an old antique freezer in his own grandmother’s garage. At least, he’d heard them from his friends and colleagues.
From strangers, the media, the boy’s parents? Not so much.
“You are not responsible; it was a tragic accident.”
Maybe. Probably.
Or maybe not. Sometimes he wondered, though, he couldn’t ask the questions the investigators should have asked back then. He had zero credibility and nobody gave a damn what a disgraced former psychic thought.
“What you do isn’t an exact science.”
“No, but if I had stayed out of it, maybe—just maybe—somebody would have thought about how much the kid loved to play hide-and-seek, actually done a proper search and found him in time, rather than going on a wild-goose chase into every orchard in eastern Georgia.”
All because when he’d focused all his thoughts and psychic energy on young Teddy Remington, he’d smelled peaches. He’d also felt the brittle spray of rain on his face, the press of hard wood against his back, and the sting of splinters puncturing his skin.
“You’re repeating your own bad press,” Julia insisted. “You didn’t send them running around like a bunch of idiots. You told them what you were feeling and Ted Remington decided what it meant—that his son had wandered into one of the local orchards and gotten lost. You didn’t put that boy in that freezer.”
“I sure as hell didn’t help him get out of it,” he replied, hearing his own bitterness.
“Look, if the cops had been doing their jobs, it wouldn’t have mattered if you had visions of a convicted pedophile snatching the kid,” she snapped. “Searching everyplace he could have gone, including his own damn grandmother’s house down the street, was the first order of business. They should have been fired for letting Ted Remington’s money and influence browbeat them in the wrong direction.”
They should have been fired. And he should have been run out of town on a rail.
At least one of those should haves had come true. Not that he’d actually been run out of Savannah; he’d left of his own free will. But the effect was the same—Aidan McConnell was no longer in the psychic business. Never again would he let himself be responsible for the well-being of someone else’s child. Not ever.
He’d had misfires before. Like Julia said, it wasn’t an exact science. There had always, however, been some bit of truth, some small element that had been correct, just misinterpreted.
But in the Teddy Remington case? Nothing.
“Aidan, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll charge my cattle prod.”
“Ha-ha. No torturing members of the press, as tempting a target as they may be.”
Considering how brutally the media had dissected him last year, stopping just short of accusing him of murdering a child, they were indeed a tempting target. Still, he said, “Got it.”
“We’ve got a lot of cases, Aidan. Let me know when you’re ready to get back to work.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to stop asking.”
“Not gonna happen.”
A bitter laugh emerged from Aidan’s mouth and he shook his head. “Ditto.”
Not gonna happen.
Chapter Two
Thursday, 8:15 a.m.
As she typed her article on the community playhouse’s production of Annie, Lexie Nolan considered punching her fist through the desktop monitor. Since this wasn’t her computer, and was used by the entire reporting pool for the Granville Daily Sun, however, she didn’t do it.
Besides, punching anything—a wall, the mayor—wouldn’t change the fact that she’d gotten herself into this situation. It wasn’t the computer’s fault. Nor was it the fault of those chirpy, perky little orphans singing their guts out in the local musical. It was all her own doing.
She was the one who’d insisted on writing a story she knew would anger a lot of people. The one who’d convinced her editor to let her. The one who’d poured her heart and her soul and every intuition she owned into what she’d been sure would be a shocking, sordid tale that would soon draw the eyes of the entire world to this small Georgia town.
She’d been so utterly positive . . . right up until the moment she’d been proven wrong.
So she was also the one who got to watch as her career blew up in her face. Lexie Nolan, the former big-fish-in-this-little-r
eporting-pond, had been busted down to guppy.
“Aren’t you finished yet?”
Another punch-worthy target popped into her field of vision. But just as she couldn’t fling her fist at inanimate objects, she couldn’t pummel the smirk off Stan Brightman’s face, either. The fact that the other reporter had enjoyed her downfall was just part of the biz. He hadn’t stolen her job—she’d handed it to him on a platter of pure journalistic frenzy.
“I think every little girl in town is in this show. Lots of names to get right.”
“Oh, yeah, you definitely wouldn’t want to get anything wrong in this one.”
She grimaced. Stan was one of those middle-aged guys who thought a droopy mustache and a comb-over would prevent anyone from noticing his blossoming bald spot. He’d played the big-newsman-takes-newbie-under-his-wing game six years ago when she’d landed this job, right out of college. When that hadn’t worked, he’d hit on her. Since that had been a no-go, too, he’d resorted to hating her guts. That was when she’d started mentally thinking of him as S(a)tan.
“I’ll be finished with the computer soon,” she said, pretending she didn’t know he’d come in here only to be a dick.
“No worries; take your time.” His voice could serve as the audible definition of smarmy.
He had probably wallpapered his bedroom with copies of the retraction and public apology Lexie had been forced to write for the paper last month.
That retraction had earned her stares of resentment everywhere she went. She’d terrified an entire town full of people. She’d not only sabotaged her career, she had made herself a pariah in the process. Probably only one other person in Granville was more regularly vilified from under the dryers at the Blow-N-Go Salon. Considering that guy was a disgraced psychic who’d moved here from Savannah after being accused of costing a child his life, that was no comfort.
She wasn’t the heartless fearmongerer she’d been made out to be. A big part of her had been relieved, hoping deep down that she had been wrong, that the missing local teenagers she’d written about were out there somewhere, safe and sound. Something inside her, however, had never fully accepted it. A few questions had been answered, to the satisfaction of most people around here. But Lexie had a lot more. She just wasn’t allowed to ask them.
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