Runaway Fate: Moonstone Cove Book One

by Hunter, Elizabeth

  “Yes. Are you okay?”

  Well, that was a loaded question. “I just… I’m not sure how to ask this. I don’t even know if you remember me.”

  “Does this have something to do with Russell House? If there’s a guest emergency, I’m not on-site, so you’ll have to call—”

  “What’s Russell House? I’m sorry.” Katherine stopped. Took a breath. She was calling a woman she’d only spoken to once months before. She needed to explain.

  What was she supposed to say about any of this?

  “I do apologize; I’m not making any sense. My name is Professor Katherine Bassi, and I believe I spoke to you around seven months ago about—”

  “Precognition.” The voice on the phone switched from confused to surprised. “Yes. Yes, I do remember you. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m…” What was she? “…unsettled. But I’m fine.”

  “Okay.”

  Katherine refilled her wineglass. Just be honest, Katherine. This woman was honest with you and put herself out there even when you dismissed her. Just be honest.

  “I’m calling because something happened very recently, and I don’t understand it, but I remembered our conversation from months ago.” Katherine took a drink and cleared her throat when she drank too fast. “And I am so sorry if I seemed dismissive at the time. I admit, hearing about your… friend’s experiences seemed so out of the realm of scientific possibility that I was probably patronizing. I apologize for that.”

  Hopefully that came across better than it sounded in her head.

  Monica’s voice was cautious. “Professor Bassi, what happened?”

  “Are you the friend, Mrs. Velasquez?” Katherine suspected, but she needed to know. She needed to know if Monica Velasquez could give her answers. “I need to know if you were using a common distancing tactic to—”

  “Yes, I’m the friend I was talking about. I experience precognition through dreams.”

  Relief. Immediate, unequivocal relief. “Then I need your help. Someone tried to commit a violent crime yesterday. A shooting. It could have been very bad, but it wasn’t. Because… I saw it happen before it happened. And I helped stop it.”

  Even as she said the words, the images filled her mind again. Gunshots. Broken glass. Blood sprayed on walls…

  “Okay. Katherine, I’m going to get your number and call you back in about five minutes with some friends of mine. Everything is going to be okay, but I have a feeling you’re going to want to talk to all of us.”

  What? Why?

  Relax. You’ve interrupted the woman’s night. Give her a few minutes. “Thank you. I don’t know what’s happening, but… thanks.”

  “Trust me. You are not alone.”

  Something tight in Katherine’s chest—something she hadn’t even been aware of—loosened and relaxed.

  She wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  She walked into the kitchen to grab something to eat. She’d had a big lunch, but she’d forgotten to eat dinner. She briefly thought about ordering something in; then she spotted Baxter through the office doorway, gesturing dramatically and speaking quickly in Cantonese with his brother on a screen.

  She quickly put together a fruit tray and some cheese and brought them into the office.

  “Katherine!” Her brother-in-law, Oliver, waved from the other side of the world. “I told Baxter I thought it was Valentine’s Day in the States and he couldn’t remember. I think it is.”

  “Is it?” She looked at Baxter with a frown. “What’s the date?”

  “The fourteenth, I think.” His eyes lit up. “Oh! I suppose it is.”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day.” She set down the plate of pears and manchego. “I got some pears at the farmers’ market. Is this enough for dinner? I have a call in a few minutes.”

  “This is lovely, darling.” He squeezed her hand. “We always forget, don’t we?”

  “I know, but then we don’t have to go to crowded restaurants.” She waved at Oliver. “We should set up a family chat this week. I miss the boys.”

  “I’ll tell Lily to message you.” Oliver waved back. “Marco and Louis are in ten different directions these days. I have no idea what their social calendar is like.”

  “I think that’s normal with teenagers. My sister says the same thing about hers.” Katherine leaned down and kissed Baxter’s cheek just as she felt her phone begin to buzz in her pocket. “Call’s coming through. Enjoy your game.”

  She walked back to the kitchen as they continued their conversation. Once there, she grabbed the phone from her pocket and answered it. “Hello?”

  “Katherine?”

  It was Monica Velasquez again. “Hello. I’m getting something to eat. Do you mind the sound of chewing?” She’d had enough wine that she was feeling a little loopy. “If you do, it’s called misophonia and it’s completely valid, and I don’t want to dismiss it, but also I’ve had too much wine and not enough food today.”

  “You’re fine. I put you on speakerphone with my two best friends, Robin and Valerie.”

  “Just Val,” said one voice. “I’m psychometric.”

  Katherine nearly tripped over her own feet. “You mean there’s more than one of you?”

  “Three to be exact. We all have different abilities,” Monica said. “Precognition for me, obviously, which we’ve talked about.”

  “And I’m Robin,” a third voice said. “I hope you’re doing okay. Get your food, okay? Make sure you eat something.”

  “I’m getting some.” Katherine hurriedly put together a plate of cheese, crackers, and pears. “I tend to forget to eat.”

  “My mother is the same way. My father constantly has to remind her.”

  “I have to remind my husband. He’s even more absentminded than me.”

  “I cannot imagine a house where people forget to eat,” Val said. “I think my boys eat six times a day. Maybe more.”

  “They sound like teenagers.” Katherine took her plate to the deck and sat down.

  “They are, and they’re hungry. Constantly. How about you? Any kids?”

  “Just my students,” she said. “There are more than a few of those. And I have two gorgeous nephews in London and a niece and a nephew in San Francisco.”

  “It sounds like you have a wonderful family,” Monica said. “Have you told your husband about any of this yet?”

  “Oh no.” Baxter would immediately take her to a neurologist. “Absolutely not.”

  “Does anyone know?”

  “Um… you three know.” And it was possible that Megan and Toni suspected something, but that was a whole other problem she didn’t know how to deal with. “I think that’s all I can handle right now.”

  “Why don’t you tell us about it?” Monica said. “Start from the beginning and describe what happened to you exactly.”

  Katherine spent the next few minutes giving Monica, Val, and Robin an accounting of the incident the day before. She tried to include everything she could think of, including what Megan had said at the police station and her suspicions about Toni’s empathy.

  “That’s a lot,” Robin said after she’d finished the story. “No wonder you’re feeling frazzled.”

  “Frazzled?” She wouldn’t have used that word, but it was a pretty good description. “Yes. I’m frazzled. I don’t know what to do with any of this.”

  “Now, other than human understanding, I don’t know how much we’ll be able to help you. I’m a medium—”

  “A medium?” Katherine blinked. “As in… ghosts? Spirits?”

  “Ghosts, I guess you’d say. I haven’t met any spirits that haven’t belonged to a dead person. Not that I’m aware of anyway.”

  Katherine was extremely glad she didn’t see ghosts. “And Val said she’s psychometric.” She glanced at her neighbors’ deck, glad that they were rarely home. “So she reads memories and emotions from objects?”

  “You got it,” Val said. “Have you studied this or something?
”

  “Not formally. It’s a bit of a side interest. I haven’t really looked into it in years. I’ve been really busy with other things.”

  “So between you, the gun-moving gal, and the lady who calmed the guy down, I think you and I have the most similar talent,” Monica said. “And my visions sound very different than yours.”

  “Yours was interesting.” Val was speaking. “It was so immediate. It seems like it would be really easy to doubt yourself.”

  “I had the same thought,” Katherine said. “It would have been so easy to imagine that I was suffering from anxiety or had an overactive imagination.”

  “Why didn’t you think that?” Robin asked.

  She tried to recall the moments in the gym before everything had broken loose. “I just… knew. I could hear the screams. I smelled the gunpowder, and it was almost as if I could feel glass shards cutting me. In the moment, I knew absolutely that it would happen if I did nothing.”

  “So you tackled him,” Val said. “Fucking badass, Katherine.”

  “Cover your ears, Monica.” Robin continued, “I have to agree. Fucking badass.”

  Katherine stuffed some cheese in her mouth and swallowed. “Okay, but what do I do? This is not normal. Is it going to happen again? Is it a onetime thing?”

  “There’s no way of knowing,” Val said. “You just have to wait and see. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll only happen once.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much you can do,” Monica said. “All our abilities were triggered by the same incident. It’s been three years and they haven’t gone away yet.”

  “What incident?”

  “Robin’s car went into the lake,” Val said. “We almost drowned.”

  “RIP faithful Subaru,” Robin said. “I still miss you.”

  “So you had a near-death experience,” she said. “And three years later… still psychic?”

  “Yep,” Monica said. “I thought I’d just get hot flashes in my forties, not visions.”

  Did an averted mass shooting count as a near-death experience?

  Probably. Probably it did.

  This wasn’t good.

  “I wish I could tell you that the visions probably won’t happen again,” Monica said, “but I found them to come more regularly the longer I had the ability.”

  “Like… every day?”

  “Oh, nothing close to that. I’m not like Val.”

  “I wear gloves,” Val said. “All the time. And I take antianxiety medications. They dull my senses just enough that I don’t usually have an immediate reaction to everything.”

  “I have social anxiety and I’m medicated,” Katherine said. “Do you think that might stop more visions?”

  “Were you taking your medication when you had the vision?”

  Damn it. Of course she was. She never missed a dose. “Yes.”

  All three women seemed to hem and haw. Several comforting mutters were audible.

  “I think you’ll just have to wait and see,” Monica said.

  “What should I do about Megan and Toni?” Katherine asked. “Should I try to get in touch with them? Ask them if they’ve ever experienced this kind of thing before?”

  “If it was the first time they genuinely ever feared for their life, it may be new for them too,” Robin said. “I’d at least try to contact them and see if they’d be willing to talk to you. Then you wouldn’t be alone.”

  “Do your families know?” Katherine tried to imagine telling Baxter. He would immediately suspect a brain tumor.

  “My husband knows, but I didn’t tell him right away,” Robin said.

  “My boyfriend knows,” Val said. “He actually suspected before I told him. He’s a sheriff, and he worked with a psychic when he was down in Southern California. The real kind.”

  “Right.” She was having a hard time taking everything in, but it did feel good to talk about it. It made her feel a little less on edge. “Monica, how about you?”

  “My husband passed before it happened, but I have a boyfriend now, and he knows.” Monica laughed a little. “He didn’t exactly react well at first, but he’s come around now.”

  “How did you convince him?”

  “I helped him stop a string of serial arsons.”

  “Oh right. That’s good. Not the arson, but the… stopping the arson.” Was that an empty wineglass in front of her? Not anymore, it wasn’t. Katherine refilled her glass.

  “You sound stressed,” Robin said. “I think the important thing is to make some kind of connection with Megan and Toni. Even if you don’t become friends, having someone who understands what you’re going through is really important. Megan, at least, sounds like she’d be open to talking again.”

  Megan seemed like a social person who would text Katherine on her phone and want to meet for lunch or have brunch or go shopping for purses together. In short, all the social things that Katherine avoided.

  Then again, Megan was also likely as confused as she was, only she didn’t have three nice psychics in Glimmer Lake giving her advice.

  “I’ll call her,” Katherine said. “I think she’ll be willing to talk.”

  Chapter 6

  Katherine got ready for work on Monday with her head full of questions and her body full of aches. She’d once taken a tumble down a steep hill on a ten-kilometer trail race when she was thirty-two.

  Her body was definitely reminding her that was fifteen years ago.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for work?” Baxter frowned at her over his teacup. “You experienced something traumatic four days ago.”

  “What else am I going to do?” Katherine nibbled along the edge of her bagel, wishing she’d spread more cream cheese. “Sit around here and think about how much my knee hurts? Work is better. I can sit for my lecture today if I need to. I only have one class, and if I don’t make my office hours today, I’ll just have to make them up later.”

  Why had she been so skimpy with the cream cheese on her bagel? Life was too short for skimping on cream cheese. Tomorrow she’d lay it on.

  Baxter reached for the french press and refilled her coffee cup. “What about the Fred lab?”

  “I don’t think they need me this week at all actually.”

  The Fred lab was the university’s affectionate term for the research project Katherine was attached to, studying the neural pathways of cephalopods as a starting point for smart prosthetics in humans.

  She hadn’t planned on studying octopus neural networks with two biomedical engineers, a marine biologist, and a neuropsychologist, but a consult had led to a fascination and an inevitable affection for the project’s mascot, Fred, a large Pacific red octopus that lived at the center.

  Fred wasn’t a research subject—they had four smaller octopi that were the test subjects—but he was the unofficial mascot of their odd group, and the five scientists and the dozen or so graduate students working there were constantly devising new games to keep Fred amused.

  “Job and Britt are in the middle of fabricating a prototype, so they won’t need me until they get to the programming stage and they’re not there yet.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “I may go and check on Fred though. I have a puzzle in mind, and I want to ask Maria if she thinks it’s too difficult.” Professor Maria Gatan was the marine biologist in their research group and Fred’s main caretaker.

  “There seem to be few puzzles that cephalopods can’t solve.” Baxter lifted his mug of tea and drained it. “Fascinating creatures.”

  “Poodles.”

  “Hmm?” He lowered the magazine he was skimming. “What?”

  “Poodles are highly intelligent. And they don’t shed. They have hair, not fur. So no dander.”

  Baxter frowned. “I’m not sure—”

  “Not a large one, I don’t think. Or a very small one. They have a medium-sized poodle that would be perfect.”

  He set down the magazine. “Who would pick up the… refuse?”

&n
bsp; “Who cleans the bathrooms now?” Katherine asked. “You have many fine qualities, Professor Pang, but cleaning isn’t one of them.”

  He pursed his lips. “What about London?”

  “Do we have a trip scheduled?”

  “No, but we go regularly. And we go to Hong Kong.” He stood and walked to the kitchen to refill his tea. “We can’t take a dog traveling with us.”

  “Then I’ll ask a friend to watch the dog while we’re gone,” Katherine said. “Well-behaved, cute, fluffy dogs are usually not a hard favor to ask.”

  “Who would you ask to watch a dog for us?”

  Katherine opened her mouth to answer, then shut it. Who would she ask? Her sister was in San Francisco. She could hardly ask one of her graduate students—that was probably unethical. “I’m sure I could think of someone.”

  This was a tad depressing. She flipped through her mental index of friends and associates, but she was having a hard time coming up with ideas. Feeding and walking a dog for a weekend wouldn’t be a stretch for one of the neighbors they were friendly with, but actual dog sitting?

  “I’m sure I know someone.” She stood and poured her coffee into the travel mug Baxter had set out on the counter. “Or we could board it. I’m sure there are kennels in the area.”

  “Hmm.” His mouth was set in a stern line.

  Katherine couldn’t help but kiss it.

  Baxter softened and smiled at her. “You do seem to keep coming back to this idea.”

  “A small dog.” She put her hand on his chest. “Medium-sized. Poodles are smart and not overly needy. I’ve done my research.”

  He poured the rest of his tea into the travel mug next to hers. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  She glanced at his tea. “Are you sure you don’t want some coffee? Your fancy water is looking a little thin.”

  “I enjoy having a functional stomach lining and not whatever scar tissue has enveloped your gastric mucosa, thank you.”

  Katherine smiled. “You driving or am I?” They only owned one car, and Katherine liked it that way.