by Theresa Weir
Bad Karma
Theresa Weir
Cleo Tyler is a fraud. A fake. A phony. At least that's what police officer Daniel Sinclair thinks. And Cleo agrees. But she's out of money and needs a job, so when the call for a psychic comes from the chief of police in Egypt, Missouri, Cleo, and her dog Premonition board a train in Seattle for the cross-country journey to the Midwestern town that is so small a vegetarian would-be psychic can't find a decent meal. There, beneath the picture of pulchritudinous perfection, Cleo finds a whole cast of eccentrics, including former San Diego hostage negotiator Daniel Sinclair who has returned home to care for his developmentally challenged brother Beau, a police chief who consults tarot cards, and a dentist mayor with the phoniest smile money can buy. Haunted by nightmares of the accident that killed her fiancé and their unborn child, Cleo believes her "gift" for seeing things relates solely to the horrible night she'll never forget. Imagine her surprise when she finds her dreams filled with torrid visions of her dubious escort, Daniel-and details of Egypt's only murder, which is as yet unsolved. Award-winning author Theresa Weir blesses audiences here with her talent for vivid prose ("He looked at her with spoon-bending concentration…"), quirky characters, and unexpected humor.
Theresa Weir
Bad Karma
© 1999
For the readers who didn’t forget.
Chapter One
Folks there called it Missoura. Daniel Sinclair used to call it Missoura. Now he called it Missouree. That pretty much summed up his status in the small town of Egypt, Missouri. Outsider.
His was a bigger fall from grace than most, because he hadn’t always been an outsider. No, Daniel Sinclair had been born into the welcoming, nurturing arms of Egypt, Missouri, which was the only way you could ever really belong. You could live there twenty years, but if you hadn’t been shot from someone’s loins on that sacred soil, you were an outsider. And if you were born there and left, well, then you could add traitor to your resumé. And if you came back, nobody forgave you and everybody talked about your hoity-toity accent, which was really no accent at all, but rather the absence of one, a fact there was no use in arguing. You would never convince anyone in Egypt that he or she was the one with the accent.
In California, they’d teased Daniel about his lazy drawl. In Missouri, they teased him about his city talk. A guy couldn’t win.
Daniel stood looking out the door of the one-story clapboard house, past the flies that clung to the screen waiting for their chance to get in, and past the gray-painted porch at his battered blue truck, which was waiting to take him someplace he didn’t want to go. As a kid, he’d harbored the horrendous misconception that once he became an adult, he wouldn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do. Then he’d grown up and realized what a bunch of shit that was.
“Beau!” Daniel shouted over his shoulder, preparing to announce his departure.
Knowing his brother, Beau would still be in the bathroom, going through the ritual of combing his hair until not a strand was out of place, and shaving so carefully and thoroughly that his face took on a baby-smooth sheen.
“See you in a few hours!” Daniel put a hand to the door. The flies stirred, then resettled, their very sluggishness seeming to mock the heaviness that seemed so much a part of Daniel these days.
It was going to rain, Daniel told himself. Flies always wanted in when it was going to rain.
“Wait!” Beau’s shout came from the dark recesses of the house. “Wait for me.”
Daniel’s shoulders sagged. He’d been afraid of this.
Beau hurried as much as Beau could hurry, which meant it was a full three minutes before he stepped from the bathroom, every hair in place, his striped polo shirt tucked snugly into neatly creased jeans.
“You can’t come,” Daniel told him.
“Why?” Beau’s blue eyes held surprise. “Aren’t you picking that lady up at the train station? I love trains. You know I love trains.”
Daniel didn’t want to keep Beau from seeing the train, he wanted to keep him from seeing the lady, the psychic. To Daniel’s supreme irritation, the town of Egypt had hired a damn psychic. Daniel had agreed to pick her up so he could give her his personal welcome, which he hoped might just end with their guest purchasing a ticket back to the voodoo land she’d come from. The encounter wouldn’t be pleasant, but somebody had to do it.
“The lady’s name is Clara,” Beau stated with authority.
“Who told you that?”
“I heard you talkin’ to Jo about her. Said her name was Clara. Clara Voiyant.”
Daniel laughed. “Her name’s Cleo Tyler, although I think I like your name better.”
“Cleo. That’s a weird name.”
“Maybe it’s short for Cleopatra,” Daniel joked.
“That’s even weirder.”
“No shit.”
Beau shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What key is she going to find?”
Oh, man. Daniel had hoped to keep the key business quiet. “You haven’t told anybody about it, have you?”
Beau looked down at his feet. “Maybe Matilda.”
“Matilda?”
“You know. The girl at Tastee Delight.”
The whole damn town probably knows by now.
It was so stupid, and unfortunately so damn typical of Josephine Bennett. When her husband, the former chief of police, died two years ago, Jo took over. That would have been fine, except she went on a spiritualism kick, and she now thought rocks and cards and candles could answer everything. What was next, séances at the police station?
Jo had read about Tyler ’s involvement in a kidnapping case in California. But Daniel had heard Cleo Tyler hadn’t had anything to do with it, that she’d been brought in just as the police were ready to rescue the victim. An opportunist, Tyler hadn’t wasted a second in taking credit for solving the crime and saving a kidnapped child’s life. Daniel had tried to tell Jo that Cleo Tyler was nothing but a fraud and a con artist, but Jo wouldn’t listen.
“I’ve consulted my cards,” she’d told him. “And they say she’s the one.”
“The one what?” he’d asked. “The crackpot?”
“When did you get so serious?” Jo had replied. “You need to lighten up. What’s happened to you, Danny boy? When you were little, you were always laughing. I never see you laugh anymore.”
“Nothing’s funny, Jo.”
And that was the truth. Nothing was funny.
“The patrol car’s being worked on,” Daniel told Beau. He’d deliberately taken it to the garage the previous day so he’d have an excuse to leave Beau at home. “There won’t be enough room for all of us in the truck. I’m sorry.”
“We can fit. Three people? We can fit. Three people have fit before. Is she fat?” Beau thought about that for a while. “Even if she is fat, we can fit. I’m skinny, and you’re… I don’t know, you’re regular.”
“She has a dog.”
“What kind of dog?”
“I don’t know.” Daniel felt his impatience growing. He fought it and failed. “A dog,” he said sharply. “Maybe a big dog. Maybe a take-a-bite-out-of-your-ass dog.”
Daniel instantly regretted raising his voice. It wasn’t Beau’s fault that the town of Egypt had hired some whacko to come and read tealeaves.
Beau was easy-going, but he knew when he wasn’t being treated fairly.
Daniel had been told that, even as a baby, Beau had been good-natured. That he hardly ever cried and hardly ever stopped smiling. Daniel wouldn’t know, because Beau was two years older.
Beau was a little slow. He’d come into the world in the front seat of their parents’ car, and had been deprived of oxygen for several minutes. Funny thing was, Beau didn’t consider himself cheated in an
y way. No, he was one of the happiest, most content people Daniel had ever known. And wasn’t that what life was all about, if not happiness, then at least contentment?
Daniel thought it would be easy, moving back from LA, but living in Missouri was just a different kind of hard. As a kid, Daniel had pored over travel books. He’d soaked in everything he could about places he feared he might never see. Sometimes he thought that if he hadn’t read those books, he’d be like everybody else in Egypt -complacent, almost smug in that complacency. The people in Egypt didn’t think about what was going on in the rest of the world, what they might be missing.
People were always reaching for more. Maybe the secret was to reach for less.
Daniel watched as, wordlessly, Beau plopped down on the couch, picked up the remote control, and clicked on the television. He was pissed.
“I’ll see you later, okay?” Daniel said, needing to reassure himself as well as Beau.
No answer. Beau didn’t take his eyes from the TV screen.
“Tonight we’ll cook those steaks I picked up yesterday.” How had things gotten like this, Daniel wondered in frustration. He wanted to be Beau’s friend, his brother, not his parent. The enormous responsibility was turning him into some grumpy-assed old man, somebody he didn’t like, somebody he wouldn’t want to hang around with.
He let the flimsy door slam shut behind him. Through the haze of green mesh, he saw Beau staring at the television, arms across his chest, body rigid.
Daniel sighed and stood there, hands on his hips, and contemplated his sandaled feet. Here he was, denying his brother the pleasure of a ride to the damn train station. That was small of him. Really small. Maybe Jo was right. Maybe he was taking life too seriously.
He lifted his head. “On second thought,” he said through the screen, “I could use some company.”
A man transformed, his anger forgotten, Beau jumped to his feet.
“We don’t want to be late,” Daniel said, even though he knew it was useless to try to hurry his brother. As with his morning ablutions, Beau had a certain procedure he had to adhere to before leaving the house.
He checked to make sure everything was in place-his shirt tucked in, his belt through every loop of his jeans. Then he grabbed his Velcro running shoes.
Beau loved Velcro. He often lamented the fact that not every pair of shoes in the world fastened with Velcro.
One time, when Beau and Daniel were out walking through the woods and had gotten cockleburs stuck to their clothes, Daniel had shown Beau how the burs had tiny hooks all over them, just like Velcro. “That gave the guy who invented Velcro the idea,” Daniel had told him.
Beau had examined the cocklebur closely, as amazed as only someone as unjaded as Beau could be. While most people over the age of ten had lost the capacity to wonder at uniqueness, Beau had retained that perception into adulthood. Daniel often thought Beau represented the ability to embrace life-an ability most people lost as they got older.
“TV,” Daniel reminded him now.
“Oh, yeah.” Happy as a puppy, Beau jogged back, clicked off the television, then followed his younger brother to the truck.
Chapter Two
With a firm grip on Premonition’s harness, Cleo Tyler adjusted her dark glasses and grabbed the train’s metal handrail.
“Careful,” the conductor said, his strong fingers grasping her by the elbow. “There are three steps down.”
Her feet made contact with cement.
“There you go.”
Three days. It had taken three unholy days to get from Portland, Oregon, to Clear Lake, Missouri. Heat blasted her from all sides-from the murky sun above, from the cement below her feet, from the train behind.
“Station’s straight ahead.” The conductor still gripped her arm, obviously reluctant to turn her loose.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, flashing him a movie-star smile.
He released her. She heard his voice, muffled now because he turned to help the next passenger. “Watch your step. Watch your step.”
My God. It’s so hot. Was it always like this? she wondered. Couldn’t be. This had to be something abnormal.
Maybe she should have listened to Adrian. No, the reason she’d come to Missouri was because she’d decided Portland was too close to Seattle, too close to her brother. He’d rescued her from herself, probably saved her life, but that didn’t mean he owned her. He couldn’t seem to understand that she was okay now.
“Where are you going?” he’d asked when she’d called to tell him she was leaving. “Do you know anybody there?”
“No. That’s why I want to go. And it’s money. It’s a job.”
“Prostitution’s a job, but you’re not doing that.” There was a long silence. “Are you?”
She should have been mad. Instead she laughed. “Not yet.”
“Shit, Cleo.”
“I’m kidding. I’m not that desperate.”
“Cleo, look. Why don’t you come to Seattle? We’ll talk about this. Maybe I can get a loan so you can go back to school.”
“ Adrian, no.” He had a wife, two little kids, a second mortgage on his house, and a recording studio that was barely staying afloat. “Really, I’m okay.”
“I worry about you falling in with the wrong people.”
“Brother dear, I am the wrong people. You should know that by now. I’m the person our mother always warned us about.”
He laughed.
“I’ll call you when I get there.”
“You’d better.”
“Love you.”
“Me too.”
Adrian. He was the only person she could be herself around, but even with Adrian she knew she could only reveal so much. It would scare him and worry him if he knew everything about her.
Premonition tugged at his harness, reminding Cleo of more immediate concerns. The yellow Lab put his nose to the ground and made a beeline for the train station, hiking his leg on the corner of the building.
It wasn’t easy traveling with a dog, especially a big dog. You could put a caged cat in the baggage compartment; it would most likely be miserable and hysterical, but better off than traveling in the open. Dogs were different. Dogs were social. Whereas cats might love cramped, confined, dark places, dogs hated them. A place like that could really screw up a dog’s psyche.
That was why, in these situations, she put Premonition in his guide-dog harness and pretended she was blind.
She didn’t like the idea of exploiting a handicap and she hated the deception, but for the sake of Premonition, she was able to justify the ruse. It was simply part of the scramble called life. At the animal shelter where she’d gotten Premonition, she was told that he’d been so mistreated by his previous owner, he’d never be able to adapt to a new life, but that had made Cleo all the more determined to have him. And except for a fear of confined places, he was now a well-adjusted dog.
Done with his business, Premonition pulled her to a grassy area where he could get off the baking cement sidewalk and rest his paws in the cool grass. Behind her, the train chugged away from the station, taking with it the noise and steam, but not much of the heat.
Looking through dark glasses, Cleo saw but pretended not to see two men moving toward her, both about six feet tall, one with dark hair, the other light.
“Daniel Sinclair’s an Aries,” the police chief had warned Cleo over the phone. “With more of the sign’s undesirable traits than desirable ones.”
Aries. A fire sign. The most energetic of the fire signs. Aries used that energy to bring about change. So what undesirable traits did Daniel Sinclair harbor? Was he intolerant, a poor judge of character, impulsive, or all of the above? But then there were the positive traits. Aries individuals were the risk takers, daring and aggressive.
Neither man looked like a cop, she decided. And they both looked rather…well, unusual. The dark-haired man was extremely tidy, the light-haired man sloppy in an almost equally obsessive way. The tidy one was dre
ssed in a striped polo shirt tucked neatly into creased jeans. On his feet were Velcro sneakers. She didn’t know anyone over four years old who wore Velcro.
As they closed the distance, she could see that the Velcro man’s face was shiny, as if someone had held him down and given him a good scrubbing. In the back of her mind she thought, There’s something a little slanted here.
While the Velcro man was soft around the edges, his friend was rough. He wore khaki-colored cargo pants, leather sandals, no socks, and a camp shirt that had probably been black at one time, but was now a soft gray. Rounding off the slacker look was a need to shave. A shock of hair that was genetically brown, but had been bleached and streaked by the sun, fell over direct eyes. Bold, Aries eyes. Eyes that held irritation. At her? Or the heat? Both?
She’d expected someone older. She didn’t know why. Maybe because to her a police officer was an authority figure, and authority figures were supposed to be older.
“You Cleo Tyler?” the sloppy one asked in an authoritative way that immediately set Cleo on edge, that immediately had her wanting to respond with something childish, like What’s it to you? Instead, she said, “Yes.”
“I’m Daniel Sinclair.”
She read him so easily. A skeptic. She didn’t mind skeptics. In fact, she was one. She’d spent the last several years trying to prove to herself that psychic phenomena didn’t exist.
She could see that Daniel Sinclair had come prepared to dislike her, but the sight of a blind person had sent him into a tailspin. Now he felt guilty for disliking someone who was handicapped, but he still thought she was out to take the town of Egypt, Missouri, for a ride.
Which could be the case. But it wasn’t her fault that they’d come begging for help. It wasn’t as though she was in the business. She’d been working in a coffee shop, for God’s sake. Lately she’d toyed with the idea of going back to school, but when the Egypt police chief called for the third time, Cleo found herself considering their request. Her life had fallen into a rut. And when she was told she’d get paid whether she found the master key or not, well, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse.