Magician's Muse

by Linda Joy Singleton

  “Hurry, hurry!” Thorn flung open the passenger door and shoved Penny-Love into the front seat.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “Buckle up!” she ordered without stopping to answer my question. She hurried to the driver’s side and jumped in, keys jangling from her fingers.

  “What’s going on?” I clasped the front seat for balance when the car jerked to a start.

  “We’re getting out of here!” Thorn revved the engine.

  “But why the urgency? And why are you driving?”

  “Someone has to. She can’t.” Thorn thumbed at Penny-Love, her tone angry but a little scared, too.

  Penny-Love said nothing as she fastened her seat belt. Her freckles stood out on her eerily pale face and her eyes stared ahead blankly. A reddish stain splattered her blouse sleeve. Dark red … like blood.

  “What happened?” I demanded again, worried.

  Thorn, driving, shook her head. “Ask her. We have to get far away and fast.”

  “Pen, talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  But Penny-Love just stared ahead, blank, as if someone had hit the delete key on her personality. The only hint of emotion was a single tear sliding down her cheek.

  “She hasn’t said a word since it happened.” Thorn yanked the wheel, jerking the car (and us) sideways.

  “Since what … Thorn!” I cried as she nearly collided with a garbage truck. “Slow down! Are you trying to kill us?”

  “Kill us?” Thorn started to laugh, a bitter sound that scared me.

  “Thorn, what’s going on? And what did you do to Pen?”

  “Me? You think I did something?” Thorn snarled. “She’s the one who got us into this mess.”

  I turned back to Penny-Love, who still stared ahead with a vacant zombie expression. I turned her toward me, and my gaze connected with Penny-Love’s blank stare. I felt myself jerked forward—and this time it had nothing to do with Thorn’s wild driving. A searing wave of energy erupted and smothered me with startling intensity. Everything went dizzy as I lifted and spun, spun, spun …

  When the spinning stopped, I was still in the car, but at a different moment in time. I’d somehow time-traveled back to the moment when Thorn, Penny-Love, and I had arrived at the apartment. Only instead of staying in the car, I was moving across a parking lot and entering the building. And Thorn moved beside me, which confused me until I realized I wasn’t replaying this moment as myself. My soul had hitched a ride on Penny-Love’s memories.

  We hesitated in a hallway until Thorn closed her eyes, trancelike, and pointed to the right. We walked down the narrow corridor on a stained carpet … faded orange paint and smells of cat pee, tacos, and mildew … Thorn was nodding as we approached the end of the hall.

  “This is how it’s going down,” Penny-Love told Thorn as they passed Apartment 12. “I’ll go inside alone. You wait in the hall while I work my charm on Jacques.”

  “Five minutes,” Thorn snapped, clearly annoyed at being given orders. “If you’re not back, I’m leaving.”

  I felt Penny-Love’s face curve into a confident smile, everything about her upbeat and confident. She applied strawberry lip gloss and finger-combed her curly hair. As she lifted her arm to knock on the door of Apartment 18, she gave a soft cry of surprise. “It’s already open!”

  “That’s weird,” Thorn said, frowning.

  “No, it’s wonderful!” Penny-Love rejoiced. “It’s a sign I’m meant to be here!”

  “You’re being stupid.”

  “You know your problem, Thorn? You have no sense of romance.”

  “And you know your problem, Cheerleader? You’re—”

  Before Thorn could tell her, Penny-Love gave a perky wave and sailed like a cool breeze into the apartment. “Jacques, I’m here,” she called out as she raced through the living room, then down a hall where another door stood open like an invitation, as if he was expecting her.

  She burst into the room … then everything went blurry with violent colors of red and black. Something on the floor … no, someone.

  Penny-Love cried out, kneeling by the still body. Jacques

  … Jacques … why didn’t he move? Lifting a limp arm and clasping his hand, begging him to move … something sticky. She pulled back her hand, staring, horrified, at something wet on her fingers.

  Sticky, damp, red … blood.

  And she screamed.

  Energy whiplashed me back to the present, and the world went silent.

  Thorn jerked the car to a bone-snapping stop.

  I glanced out the window. We were now in a parking lot with no other cars, at the side of a large boxy building with a steeple spiraling from the roof toward heaven. First Church of Sheridan Valley, I read on a back-lit marquee.

  “We can talk here,” Thorn explained, unsnapping her seat belt and turning around.

  “Is this where your mom works?” I guessed.

  “Yeah … for now anyway.” Thorn’s crimson lips pressed tight, like this was a topic she didn’t want to go into. “There’s no prayer meeting or Bible study tonight, so it’s private. We have to talk about serious stuff.”

  “Jacques’ death,” I said, so softly I almost didn’t hear my own voice.

  “How did you know?” Thorn asked then she shook her head without waiting for me to answer. “Cut that question. You always know things that you shouldn’t.”

  “So what I saw was real?” I rubbed my head. I was used to talking to people after they’d died but dream-viewing the bloody body of someone from my school was horrific. “Jacques really is dead?”

  “Very dead,” Thorn said with an uneasy glance at Penny-Love, who still stared off blankly at nothing. “I followed Pen into the apartment but waited in the living room. I noticed some official-looking folders scattered on a table. A photo attached to one folder startled me and I was reaching for it when I heard Pen scream. I didn’t get too close to the body, but no way could I miss all the blood on his chest. It was either suicide or he pissed someone off pretty bad.”

  “Thorn!” I gave her a nasty look. “Some sensitivity, please.”

  “It’s not like he can hear us.”

  “Pen can.”

  But Penny-Love still wasn’t talking, and when I turned to look at her, she was staring down at her trembling, red-splotched hands.

  I turned back to Thorn, something odd she said coming back to me. “You mentioned a folder and a photo that startled you. Who was in the photo?”

  She frowned, rubbing her pierced eyebrow. “This isn’t a good time to answer that question.”

  “When will be? Things are already critical. Whatever you saw can’t make things any worse.”

  “Don’t count on that.”

  “What are you hinting at?” I demanded. “Just tell me.”

  “Fine. But you won’t like it. I only got a quick look at the folder. It was labeled Hughes, Greyson in black ink and had some kind of an official stamp in the corner. Stapled to the front were two photos: one of a freaky-tall blond dude and the other … well … it was Josh.”

  I opened my mouth to insist that Thorn had to be mistaken, but stopped when I heard Penny-Love sob Jacques’ name. I’d continue this with Thorn later—right now Penny-Love was more important.

  I reached out, touching Penny-Love’s shoulder. “Take it easy, Pen. You can’t do anything for Jacques.”

  “Sabine?” Penny-Love blinked at me like an ice statue slowly thawing. “Do you know what happened?”

  I nodded.

  “I can’t believe it … He was just lying there … not moving.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say.

  A tear trickled down Penny-Love’s freckled cheek. “Jacques can’t be … gone. He is … was … so talented, such an amazing artist, and too young to … ohmygod! It has to be a mistake … he should be alive …”

  “But he’s not,” Thorn cut in impatiently. “And we’re the lucky finders of his dead body. Tha
nks a lot, Cheerleader.”

  “Don’t be cruel, Thorn,” I snapped.

  “I’m being realistic. We have some serious decisions to make.”

  “What decisions?” My brain seemed stuck on pause. “We can’t do anything to help him now, except call 911. Or did you call already?”

  “I was more interested in getting the hell out of there.”

  “You ran from a crime scene?” I’d watched enough TV shows to know this wasn’t a good idea.

  “You bet I did, and dragging the zombie cheerleader with me wasn’t easy either. She wouldn’t let go of the corpse’s hand. I practically had to carry her out of there. Do either of you have any idea of the trouble we could be in? If the police questioned us, we’d have to explain how we found Jacques. Do you really think they’d believe my Finding ability makes me a human GPS?”

  “We could say we knew his address,” I argued.

  “One lie leads to another and another, and they’d guess we were hiding something. It would have been insane to stick around.”

  “But it was wrong to leave.” I shook my head. “Now what are we supposed to do? Make an anonymous 911 call or just drive off and pretend we don’t know he’s dead?”

  “Driving off works for me,” Thorn said.

  “My poor, poor Jacques,” Penny-Love murmured.

  “It’s not like she can make any decisions.” Thorn gestured at Penny-Love, who was now gazing out the car window and murmuring “Jacques” over and over. “She’d be sweating under police questioning if I hadn’t hauled her ass out of there. Look at her—blood on her clothes and arm. She could be a prime suspect since Jacques dumped her. There’ll be evidence of all that on their cell phones. ”

  “Suspect?” I repeated.

  “Duh.” Thorn rolled her kohl-shadowed eyes. “Whoever finds a body always looks guilty, so they might suspect me and you as accomplices.”

  “But we didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Can we prove it?”

  I’d grown up on Dad’s stories about his cases, including horror stories about innocent people accused of crimes. “Justice is a luxury that few can afford,” Dad had once told me. At the time I wasn’t sure what he meant, but now I understood.

  I looked at Penny-Love. “You okay?”

  Penny-Love shook her head, red curls tangling around her pale face. “Poor Jacques … so much blood. Who would do that to him?”

  Thorn scowled. “Let’s hope the police don’t think it’s his scorned ex-girlfriend.”

  “Huh?” Penny-Love choked. “You mean me?”

  “Just saying the police might jump to conclusions.”

  “Thorn, don’t scare her,” I said, reaching up to give Penny-Love’s shoulder a reassuring pat. “She’s gone through a horrible shock.”

  “She needs to get over it real fast. We have to get our stories straight or go through a nightmare of police drama. Fortunately we got out of there quickly without disturbing the crime scene. We left before I touched that folder. What about you, Cheerleader?” Thorn shifted in her seat to face Penny-Love. “Did you touch anything?”

  Penny-Love didn’t answer right away, her gaze still unfocused and her movements slow. “It’s all hazy and hard to remember … I started to knock on the door only it was already open and I saw the TV on but no one was watching so I went down to the bedroom and that door was open, too …”

  “So you didn’t touch any doors,” Thorn said with relief. “Neither did I. We didn’t leave anything CSI types can trace back to us.”

  “Except maybe one thing,” Penny-Love interrupted quietly.

  “What?” Thorn demanded.

  “I touched Jacques.” Penny-Love rubbed the reddish spots on her hands. “I didn’t know right away … that he wasn’t alive … and I reached out to hold him.”

  “Blood will wash off,” Thorn said. “Get rid of your clothes so there won’t be anything to connect us to the crime scene.”

  Penny-Love nodded.

  “I think our butts are covered.” Thorn exhaled. “I don’t think anyone saw us and we got out of there fast. If your fingerprints are on Jacques, who cares, you’re his girlfriend. So we should be okay.”

  “Well … except I did pick something up,” Penny-Love confessed. “I didn’t know what I was doing … I never meant to touch it. But it fell from his hand when I reached for him, so I moved it.”

  “Moved what?” Thorn asked sharply.

  “This.”

  I leaned so far over that my seat belt cut into my shoulder. I could see Penny-Love reach into her coat pocket and pull out a small, dark-gray gun.

  Thorn swore.

  My mouth gaped open.

  All Penny-Love said was, “Oops.”

  Thorn smacked the steering wheel with such force that the car shook. Then she yelled at Penny-Love, “Put that thing away!”

  Penny-Love did as she asked, then covered her face with her hands. She kept wailing, “I didn’t mean to!” as her shoulders shook with sobs. My gaze fixated on the blood splatters on her arm, which somehow made the whole horrible situation even more horrible.

  Thorn was furious, but to be honest, so was I. Finding a dead body was bad enough. Bringing back what was probably the murder weapon was a zillion times worse. We were now tied to this crime. I hadn’t even wanted to come with them, and now I could be arrested as an accomplice to murder. I should let Thorn and Penny-Love deal with this drama. But if I left them alone together they might add to the death toll by killing each other.

  So I jumped in as referee again. After more tears and arguments, they calmed down. No one wanted to return the gun but no one wanted to keep it, either. Thorn wanted to bury it. Penny-Love wanted to toss it in a dumpster. My idea to anonymously mail the gun to the police was strongly out-voted.

  Since no one could agree, Thorn said she’d hide the gun in a safe place until we could decide what to do. She wrapped it in napkins she found in the glove box, then left the car and went into a small building next to the church. About five minutes later she came out with empty hands.

  Since I didn’t want my psychic grandmother to get close enough to Thorn and Penny-Love to suspect that anything was wrong, I asked Thorn to drop me off on the street. As I walked the rest of the way home, I tried not to think of Jacques, cursing the vision that bound me to the crime. I wanted to wave a wand and be as innocent as a child.

  And what about the folder Thorn saw? Why would Jacques have photos of Josh and Grey? This made absolutely no sense unless it had something to do with school—except Grey didn’t go to our school.

  It was almost a relief to stop this train of thought as I neared the farmhouse and noticed an unfamiliar dark-brown sedan parked in the driveway. Not that this was unusual, since Nona occasionally met with clients at home. With Nona busy, it would be easy to slip unnoticed up to my room.

  But as I neared the porch, the front door burst open and Nona stepped out with a man wearing a dark suit. He didn’t look like a client. Could this be her potential business partner, Mr. Heart Lights? But he seemed younger than I’d expected, in his thirties instead of closer to my grandmother’s age.

  “I really can’t tell you anything,” Nona was saying in a sharp, unfriendly tone. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “I doubt that,” he said with subtle accusation. Then he saw me and moved quickly, spinning around to stand in front of me, blocking the steps to the house. “And this must be your granddaughter.”

  Nona gestured toward the dark-brown car, inviting him to leave. “Good luck with your search.”

  “Are you going to introduce us?” The man stared at me.

  Nona smoothed a wrinkle from her yellow skirt, her face calm but her hands had balled into fists. “Mr. Caruthers, this is Sabine.”

  “Hi,” I said politely. His aura, jade greens and browns, gave me a troubled feeling.

  “Mr. Caruthers was just leaving,” my grandmother added with unusual rudeness.

  “I’m in no hurry. I’d like
to talk to Sabine.” The man’s hideous tie hung askew, reminding me of a noose.

  “W-Why?” I asked, clasping my hands together.

  “Just routine questions,” he assured me.

  “Mr. Caruthers is a private investigator,” Nona added with a warning look.

  An investigator? And he wanted to talk to me? Guilt flushed my face. Had the police tracked me down already? Did he know about Jacques and the gun? Something about his tie—a sick shade of orange—bothered me. Hadn’t someone recently mentioned an orange tie? As I stared at his tie, my memory clicked.

  Was this the PI who was looking for Dominic?

  “There’s no reason for you to talk to my granddaughter,” Nona said sharply.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Absolutely not! She’s a minor.”

  “She seems old enough to speak for herself.” He tilted his head at me. “Do you mind just a few quick questions?”

  Yes, I minded. But refusing would look guilty, like I had something to hide.

  “It’s okay,” I said, giving Nona a look to reassure her I’d be fine. She shrugged and stepped back, but she continued to frown.

  “Do you know Dominic Sarver?” the PI asked me.

  “No.”

  “But you do know a young man named Dominic Smith?”

  “Yeah.” I tried to sound casual. “I don’t know him that well.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Nona moved beside me, giving me a small jab with her elbow. “I already told Mr. Caruthers that Dominic doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “Right. He doesn’t,” I echoed. “I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “Exactly how long?”

  “A few days. Maybe a week,” I glanced over at Nona who gave me a subtle approving nod.

  “Do you know where he went?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Any idea how can I contact him?”

  “None at all,” I said.

  “He’s quite an enigma, isn’t he? But it’s only a matter of time before I track him down.” The PI narrowed his gaze at me, then looked over to my grandmother. “Are you sure you can’t tell me anything else?”