by Lois Duncan
LOIS: Is she following what’s going on here?
NANCY: Very definitely. And she says to tell you, “Don’t worry. Even if they’re not convicted, it doesn’t matter.” And I know what she means by that, because when you cross to the other dimension, you have to face yourself. I guess, in a sense, that’s what is meant by Judgment Day. Everything you’ve done is known to God, and you have to give an accounting of how you have and haven’t grown karmically during your past lifetime. So she’s not going to be that upset if these people aren’t convicted, because she’s sure these men will get what is coming to them eventually.
What she is concerned about is more murders. That bothers her a lot.
LOIS: Murders of members of our family?
NANCY: No, murders in general by this particular group of drug dealers. She’s very concerned that they’re going to kill someone else. She has discussed this with the people who are helping her learn how to communicate again.
LOIS: What do you mean by “helping her to learn to communicate”?
NANCY: Telepathy has to be learned. Kait can receive, but she has difficulty sending.
LOIS: Is there anything I can do to help her to communicate?
NANCY: Possibly, as you heal, you’ll be able to help her. The mind has two states, sending and receiving. You know how, when you lose something and you look and look and look for it and can’t find it, when you give up and are walking away, you immediately know where it is? What causes that is you’ve kept your mind in a sending state, but when you unblock, the information comes through. It’s a subtle difference in the way you think. Meditation helps you to be better able to achieve it.
LOIS: We don’t know when the trial will be.
NANCY: They’ll keep postponing it.
LOIS: We’re worried that we’re going to be kept out of the courtroom.
NANCY: Actually, that would be just as well. I always advise my clients—not that they listen to me, but I advise them—to stay out of the courtroom, because what goes on in there is not about the truth, it’s about who puts on the best performance. The theory upon which our justice system was built is a good one, and if people acted in the way it was intended, we’d be fine, but that’s not how it is.
Let me give you another piece of advice. Try to mend your fences with the prosecutors. I feel you have a difficult relationship with the police right now. The prosecutors are very wary of you, because you’ve been labeled something of a nut. They think you’re so mad, you might hurt their case. If you demonstrate to them that that’s not your intent, they will be more cooperative. Right now they have a pretty jaundiced view of you.
We wanted to know who owned the Desert Castle, even if he was not involved in the drug ring and had abandoned his home “out of fear of this group of occupants.” When I couldn’t find the house in the city directory, I asked a friend in real estate to see what she could find on it, and she got me the name of the owner.
According to the tax rolls he was the only occupant.
I gave this information to my friend at the credit bureau, who pulled the man’s credit file. It was very unusual. In the year and a half since Kait’s death he had applied for credit four times, and on each occasion he had given a different address, none of which was the address of the Desert Castle.
I got out our map of the city and went out with my camera to photograph each of these residences, with the idea of sending the pictures to Nancy to see if she could solve the mystery of what this gentleman was up to. The streets appeared on the map and were easy to find but they all dead-ended slightly short of the house numbers. The owner of the Desert Castle did not seem to want to be located. None of the addresses on his credit applications existed.
26
FEBRUARY. THE NASTIEST MONTH of the year. Autumn long gone and spring still too far away to contemplate.
The duck pond in the park behind the town house froze over, and the ducks waddled pathetically about on the blue-black ice, unable to understand why they weren’t paddling in water. Don’s car wouldn’t start unless he jumped it every morning. Donnie injured his knee and had to have surgery. I started work on the text for The Circus Comes Home, wrote another article for Woman’s Day, and submitted the paper Dr. Roll had requested for his parapsychology journal.
We received an offer for our house, and our realtor advised us to take it, although it was for much less than we had hoped. She said the publicity about Kait’s death had had a negative effect upon potential buyers who were morbidly concerned about “which room the murdered girl slept in.” We accepted the offer and closed on the house, consoling ourselves with the knowledge that we now had one less thing to worry about.
Donnie announced that he was planning to move to Florida, because Albuquerque no longer seemed like home to him, and, despite having just received an award of excellence from the Department of Energy, Don decided he would take early retirement so we, too, could leave at the end of the year.
We didn’t know where we would go, just “somewhere away.”
According to the DA’s office the trial still hadn’t been scheduled. All anyone would tell us was that the continual postponements were “by mutual agreement.” Juve Escobedo was still not in custody, although half of Albuquerque seemed to keep bumping into him. A stranger, who recognized me from television, came up to me in the grocery store to tell me she had called APD to report that Juve was at his girlfriend’s house, but nobody had come to pick him up.
On February 14 I went to the cemetery and was surprised to find an arrangement of flowers on Kait’s grave. It was a sweetheart bouquet, with forget-me-nots and a rosebud, and a little pink heart poised pertly on top of a pipe cleaner. At first I thought Dung must have left them there, but then I remembered Kait’s telling me that the Vietnamese men didn’t understand the concept of Valentine’s Day. Was it possible Kait’s “other boyfriend” had been there grieving for her?
I sat down on the brown matted grass and wept for all of us.
That night I dreamed about Kait. She was about ten years old and was standing next to my bed.
“I need two sheets of your good paper to write to my friend Greta,” she said.
The dream was so clear in my mind when I woke up in the morning that I wondered if it held a meaning. I got out Kait’s weekly planner with the phone numbers in it, but no “Greta” was listed.
Then it occurred to me that she might mean Greta Alexander, the one psychic who hadn’t responded to my letter. I mailed her a second letter saying Kait was asking for her.
Greta phoned me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call before this,” she said. “Your first letter got buried in my mail pile. I’d like to talk with you some evening, if that would be possible.”
“That would be fine,” I said. “I think my daughter wants to channel a message through you.”
“She tells me, ‘When it’s dark, when the light is in the sky,’ ” Greta said. “That’s when she is to speak.”
“You’ve already communicated with her?” I asked incredulously.
“You bet.”
“When would you like to schedule it?”
“I’ll have to ask my angels,” Greta told me. “I did five police cases yesterday, and I’m emotionally down right now. I’ll just have to play it by ear and see what comes to me.”
I had thought I was conditioned to psychics, but obviously I still had plenty to learn.
Dr. Roll received my article and called to thank me.
“May we be on first names?” he asked. “I would like very much for you to call me Bill. I found Noreen’s sketches fascinating. Also very educational. I’m assuming that the man in the picture is not, in fact, the true killer?”
“We have no reason to believe so,” I said. “It’s Noreen’s feeling that this was Kait’s way of telling us it was a drug-related hit. Nancy Czetli also thinks the murder was drug related.”
“How much information did you give these psychics when you wrote to them?”
“They specifically asked that I not tell them anything,” I said. “The only things they wanted were some of Kait’s possessions and pictures of the crime scene.”
“And the police aren’t involved in this endeavor?”
“They would never accept it.”
“You’re probably right,” Bill said. “My experiences working with police have been very disappointing, as most can’t take in the fact that ESP is not an exact science. In everyday life we’re used to focusing on the subject in which we’re most interested, and everything else goes into the background. ESP doesn’t seem to work that way. It’s often quite hard for a psychic to focus on the target, and what comes to mind may be anything related to the situation.
“When you give a task to a psychic, the way to focus her is to supply her with objects. That does help as a rule. But even then there is an inherent uncertainty that we haven’t yet overcome, because we’re not sure exactly how ESP works yet. In lab experiments that uncertainty is called ‘displacement.’ Instead of hitting the target you hit somewhere around the target. So then the question is, why would Noreen have displaced to that picture? The reason you give could be very appropriate—that there is a message—that the drug connection is the significant thing and that is what Noreen got onto.”
“There was something else she didn’t get right,” I said. “At one point she became Kait and described her last moments, and she said Kait was cut off by another car. Then she said the killers came to either side of her car and shot her ‘execution style.’ From everything we’ve been told, that isn’t what happened.”
“I know Noreen,” Bill said. “She works by psychometry. I imagine she was holding an item Kait was wearing when she was killed?”
“Yes, she was holding Kait’s cross.”
“And might there have been another car on the road?”
“It’s possible that there was a VW bug.”
“Then, perhaps Noreen displaced to what Kait was thinking in that moment of crisis. The VW bug cut her off, and she thought, I can’t get away! and visualized the execution scene, and that vision was part of the mental images the cross absorbed. As I said before, ESP is far from an exact science. Using several psychics to get a majority opinion is a fine idea. Just don’t expect all the details they give you to coincide.”
By now I had read most of the books in the New Age section of our chain bookstores. Some seemed contrived and fabricated, but others were mind provoking. I was intrigued by Dr. Raymond Moody’s interviews with children who had survived near-death experiences; by Dr. Roger Woolger’s accounts of past-life regression; by Robert A. Monroe’s experiences with astral projection; and by Jane Roberts’s dialogue with a spirit guide.
Having covered everything available in the mainstream stores, I visited a metaphysical bookstore and found the works of Alice A. Bailey. Betty Muench had told me she found Bailey’s books meaningful, so I bought the one on telepathy. Although the publication date was forty years ago, it contained material that supported one of Nancy’s theories.
In citing the difference between emotional and mental telepathy, Bailey noted that the former could get in the way of the latter. It was her belief that with mental telepathy, as compared with gut animal instinct, “the more emotion and feeling and strong desire can be eliminated, the more accurate will be the work accomplished. … An attitude of nonattachment and a spirit of ‘don’t care’ are of real assistance. … Emotion and desire for anything on the part of the receiving agent create streams of emanating energy which rebuff or repulse that which seeks to make contact. … When these streams are adequately strong, they act like a boomerang. …In this thought lies the failure on the part of the receiving agent whose own intense desire to be successful sends out such a stream of outgoing energy that the stream of incoming energy is … driven back whence it came.”
That could explain why both Kait’s brothers had experienced visitation dreams, while her sisters, who were more emotionally involved, had not. It would also explain why Noreen had evicted me from the conference call.
On the night of February 28 I had trouble sleeping, and it one-thirty A.M. I pulled a ski jacket on over my pajamas and went for a walk. It was a starless night, yet a full white moon peered out through a space between the clouds and created a pathway of light, which I followed to the far side of the pond where the ducks were sleeping in a row at the edge of the ice. One gave a drowsy quack, as though stirred from a dream of a summertime lake filled with water bugs.
I stared up at the blue-veined moon and the realization struck me—“It’s dark and a light is in the sky!” Why had Kait given Greta Alexander that message? Was there something about the moonlight that intensified her energy?
The cloud bank slid across the moon, and the night went black; tree branches creaked in the wind, and I was suddenly freezing. I groped my way back to the house, tripping over shrubbery now concealed by the darkness, and crawled back into bed next to Don, who was sleeping so soundly, he hadn’t even realized I was gone.
I knew that the phone was going to ring, and it did.
“There’s more to Kaitlyn’s death than meets the eye,” a woman’s voice said when I lifted the receiver.
“Greta?”
“Of course,” Greta said. “This is the night my angels brought Kaitlyn.”
“Please, hold for a minute,” I said. “I have to switch phones.” I hurriedly crossed to my office, snatched up the extension, and turned on the tape recorder.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Kaitlyn tonight,” Greta continued. “I feel that her boyfriend may have had something to do with her death. She was used as a—I don’t know how to say this—used like, ‘You either do as I’ve told you to do or else.’ He was involved in situations that were not ethical. Kaitlyn knew some things, but I don’t think they killed her just to keep her quiet. It happened because of her boyfriend, but not necessarily to keep her quiet. She was going to spill the beans, but there was more to it than that.
“She’s still at unrest. You can feel it. That’s why this has been bothering you so bad. She’s been trying to tell you something. I think she feels very sad she didn’t pick her friends better. And she feels bad to think that you might believe you could have done something and didn’t, because you could have done nothing. She tells me she was a very firm-willed child and that you allowed her to be her own person. I’ll keep in touch with you, honey.”
Click—she hung up.
“Your friends do call at odd hours,” Don remarked at breakfast.
“This one was Marcello’s supersleuth,” I told him.
“Did she charge like a supersleuth?”
“She didn’t ask for payment. Still, I can’t imagine why Kait was so anxious to get her. She didn’t tell me anything important.”
When I talked with Robin, she disagreed with me.
“Greta’s the first to suggest that the motive for Kait’s murder was more than just to silence her,” she said. “That part about Kait being used makes a lot of sense to me. When Kait used your credit card to rent a car for Dung’s wreck, she probably considered that naughty, but not really terrible. It was an offbeat way to help poor Dung earn money, and his friends were doing it. But once she dealt herself in, it started to snowball. Maybe the next thing Dung wanted her to do was rent a car for a drug run.”
“The charge would have shown up on our credit-card statement,” I said.
“Not if Dung paid in cash when he took back the car.”
“Kait would have drawn the line at doing something that serious.”
“We don’t know what kind of pressure those guys were applying, Mother. Nancy talked about violence; Noreen said there was a knife. They might have been threatening the lives of other members of the family. Was there ever a time after Kait and Dung moved in together when she disappeared for a couple of days and you didn’t know where she was?”
“She came over every day—” I began, and then stopped. “There was one occasi
on—I wondered about it at the time—”
“What happened?”
“Kait had just gotten her apartment, so the nest was empty, and Daddy and I took a four-day vacation trip to San Diego. Brett took the dog to his house, and Kait promised to come over every day to feed the cat. We also asked her to record the last segment of L.A. Law for us. We got home on a Sunday night.” The memory was more vivid now. “It was evident Kait hadn’t been over, because the poor cat was starving. And she hadn’t taped LA. Law, she’d had one of her friends do it.”
“What was her explanation?”
“She said she’d just gotten busy. She’d set a big pan of dry food out for the cat, and it hadn’t occurred to her that all the strays in the neighborhood were going to descend on it. And she told us her VCR was broken, so she couldn’t tape the show.”
“That VCR was brand-new! She got it for graduation!”
“And after she died, Brett brought it to our house. There’s never been a problem with it.”
“If Kait deliberately set out enough food to last the cat four days, she didn’t ‘just get busy,’ ” Robin said. “She knew in advance that she wouldn’t be coming over. It sounds as if she was gone all the same days you were.”
“You’re right, it does.” How could I have missed something so obvious!
“How about this for a scenario: Dung took Kait out to Orange County, and they rented a car from R & J Car Leasing to bring back drugs.”
“The leasing service that we think may have served as a cover for the insurance scam?”
“That’s been one of our theories, but it’s never been proven. Maybe R & J was a perfectly legitimate business, but just happened to be where Dung rented the car to do a drug run.”
“The rest of the Vietnamese men may have been doing that too!” I exclaimed. “When Kait and Dung went to California in March, An Le flew out there with them. He was supposed to return on the same flight they did, but when I picked them up at the airport, he wasn’t with them. Kait said he’d turned in his ticket and driven back instead.”