Touch of Rain

by Teyla Branton

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Touch of Rain (Imprints Book 1)

  Smashwords Edition

  Published by White Star Press

  P.O. Box 353

  American Fork, Utah 84003

  Copyright © 2017 by Teyla Branton

  Cover design copyright © 2017 by White Star Press

  Cover and ebook design by ePubMasters

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-939203-90-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  First electronic release October 2017

  Originally published by the author as Imprints under another pen name.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Book Description

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Sneak Peek! On the Hunt

  Bonus! Preview of The Change

  About the Author

  Books by Teyla Branton

  Under the name Rachel Branton

  Sometimes what you can’t see means everything

  When a young woman vanishes without a trace, her heartbroken parents turn to the last prospect they can find for hope: Autumn Rain. Autumn reads imprints—emotions left behind on certain objects. Only she can shed light on their daughter’s last thoughts.

  But Autumn’s gift makes her life difficult. Everyday activities like opening a door or holding a friend’s keys can send her into turmoil. It doesn’t help that the infuriating Detective Shannon Martin, who Autumn has helped on cases, usually treats her more like a suspect than a consultant. Too often Autumn finds herself retreating to her antiques shop and the company of her best friend, Jake Ryan, to avoid notice. Private detective Ethan McConnell, whose widowed sister has gone missing under similar circumstances, also comes to Autumn for help, but her involvement sets in motion a series of events that risk not only her own life, but the lives of those she cares about most.

  For my family, who puts up with my eccentricities and endlessly cheers me on. Especially my daughter Cátia, for her encouragement and unending support.

  Chapter 1

  My breath came faster as I stared into the shoe box sitting on the counter at my antiques shop. None of the items inside was exceptionally valuable or remarkable in any way—a kaleidoscope of bric-a-brac and childhood keepsakes that had once made up a young woman’s life.

  A missing young woman.

  I met Mrs. Fullmer’s swollen, tear-stained eyes, small and brown inside the fine scattering of wrinkles that were evidence of her suffering. Her hands tightly gripped the edges of the box holding her daughter’s possessions, though the box sat on the counter between us and needed no support.

  I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t have to. If I refused, Jake would escort the couple quickly outside and make sure they didn’t return. I was very near to fainting as it was, though more with fear of what I would discover than of what the box contained. I’d learned the hard way that some emotions left imprinted on random objects were better off undiscovered.

  “You okay, Autumn?” Jake’s voice was both worried and curious. He smiled tentatively, his teeth white against his brown skin.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  A soft snort came from Mr. Fullmer. “Maybe we should be going.”

  An unbeliever. I didn’t blame him. I hadn’t believed in psychometry myself when the imprints had begun, and I hadn’t told anyone about my strange gift for months after. I’d confessed to Tawnia first, and that my practical sister believed me was a testament to the connection between us—despite our having spent the first thirty-two years of our lives apart.

  Jake Ryan was the second person I’d told. Solid, reliable Jake, who was gorgeous despite—or perhaps because of—his chin-length dreadlocks, or locs as he called them. When he was at the counter in my store, women bought more of my antiques just to see him smile or to have an excuse to talk to him. He had increased the sales in the Herb Shoppe considerably since I’d sold Winter’s business to him. Winter Rain, my father.

  Silently, I met Mr. Fullmer’s gaze and saw him notice my mismatched eyes, his mouth opening slightly in surprise. People are always surprised when they look at me long enough to actually see my eyes. I didn’t give him credit for seeing, though, as we’d met already once before and because he’d been staring at me for the past five minutes, searching for obvious flaws. He took a step back, which I regarded as defeat.

  “If there’s any chance Victoria left a clue,” Mrs. Fullmer said in her breathless voice, “we have to try. She’s been gone for months.”

  When no one spoke further, I slowly removed the oversized antique rings from my fingers and handed them to Jake, the comforting, pleasant buzz they gave off ceasing the moment I released them. Wearing them wouldn’t prevent me from reading other imprints, but it would soften them, and I didn’t want that now. I reached for an object. A hairbrush. I held it in one hand, running the fingers of my other hand over the polished length, pushing at the hair-entwined bristles.

  A face in a mirror, a narrow, pretty face with long, blond hair. There was a sound at the door and a flash of an angry man staring down at me, words falling from his lips: “You are not going tonight, and that’s final!” The urge to throw the brush at his face, an urge at least nine months old.

  I shook my head and set the brush back in the box. I’d recognized the girl as Victoria from the picture they’d shown me and the man as Mr. Fullmer, but the scene hadn’t told me anything except that once last year Victoria had been angry enough to want to throw the hairbrush at her father. She hadn’t done it, though, and the memory was already fading. Mentioning it now wouldn’t help them find her. I moved to the next item, passing purposefully over the new-looking socks and worn swimming suit.

  I’d learned by touching everything of Winter’s after his death that distinct feelings or imprints remained intact only on belongings connected with great emotion. Objects a person treasured most or held while experiencing extreme levels of joy, fear, worry, or sadness. Items that weren’t often washed or forgotten.

  For Winter that meant the colorful afghan my adoptive mother, Summer, had crocheted, the first vase I’d made on my wheel when I’d gone through my pottery stage, his favorite tea mug with the sad-looking puppy on it, his plain wedding band. And of course, his cherished picture of Summer, the one I’d dropped in shock and surprise on the day of his funeral eleven months ago, causing the glass to shatter. It was the first object that had “spoken” to me.

  Other objects gave off a muted sensation, a pleasant low hum, but no clear images or scenes I could relive when the burden of missing Winter became too gre
at. I never found anything among his possessions that contained angry or hateful imprints. He must have long ago come to terms with those feelings. My adoptive father had been an exceptional man.

  My hand settled on the journal from the Fullmers’ box, but I could tell right away this hadn’t been a real journal for the missing girl. No emotional imprints, except perhaps the barest hint of old resentment. If she’d written in the book at all, it hadn’t been willingly.

  I picked up the prom pictures instead. Victoria was a slim, pretty, vivacious girl, and her date equally attractive, but though he was nice enough, the girl hadn’t been attracted to him. The feeling had been strong enough to leave a faint residue of distaste on the picture when she’d held it in her hands as recently as six months earlier, which would have been mid-December, several weeks before her disappearance. I set it down.

  The sea shell hinted at the ebb and swell of the ocean, the girl’s possession of it not long enough or felt deeply enough to make an imprint. An old compact mirror with jeweled insets radiated a soothing tingle. Most of my antiques were like that, the emotions clinging to them soft and old and comfortable. I believe that feeling is why I went into the antiques business. Perhaps the objects had quietly hummed to me all along, though I hadn’t yet understood their language.

  Even in the old days there had been attractive items I’d never wanted to bring to my store, and now that I was conscious of my gift, or curse as I sometimes thought of it, I suspected those were the antiques that had fresher, negative imprints, perhaps even violent ones. A cast iron statue at an estate sale last month had flashed a terrifying image of crushing a human skull. No way had I wanted that statue in my shop. I didn’t care that my markup would have been phenomenal.

  I let my hand glide over several more objects in the Fullmers’ shoe box, scanning for emotions that might be clues for Victoria’s mother. The letter (contentment long faded), the porcelain figurine of a ballet dancer (sleepy dream of the future), a book of poetry (whisper of an old crush). To tell the truth, I wasn’t positive any of these weak impressions were real or if my mind showed me only what I expected to find. These items had obviously been important to the missing girl at one time, though, or she wouldn’t have kept them all these years.

  Not until I reached the black velvet jewelry box did I feel a jolt. My hand closed over it, my palm covering the small object completely. Even through the box, the emotion was strong—too strong to come from even my active imagination.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Fullmer asked. “That’s my daughter’s—”

  She was hushed by her husband, who probably thought I would make something out of whatever information she might let slip. But I didn’t need anything from the mother to tell me the girl had loved whatever was inside.

  I opened the box and took out a gold chain with two intertwining heart-shaped pendants, one studded with diamonds. A beautiful piece, one that would never be outdated, and expensive enough to be out of reach for most young girls in their first year of college. I knew Victoria had loved the necklace because it had been her grandparents’ high school graduation gift to her mother and then her mother’s to her. Yet the overall feeling emanating from the piece was not love but guilt, one emotion overlying the other.

  I gently rubbed the hearts between my fingers, my eyes closed. Jewelry often retained the best imprints, which was why I’d saved the velvet box for last. “She wants to take it with her,” I said aloud, “but everything she has will become theirs, and she knows it’s not right to give them her mother’s necklace. It should stay in the family. She thinks you will give it to Stacey when she’s gone.”

  I very clearly felt Victoria replacing the necklace with a sigh. She hadn’t wanted to pass it to her younger sister, and that’s where the guilt came in. She’d wished there was a way to follow her dream and keep both her family and her necklace. With the guilt came several earlier flashes of memory, rushing like water through my hands to my brain.

  A college campus, a park, a man dressed in a flowing, button-down shirt with a wide, pointed collar and elaborate cuffs turned upward, the tails of the shirt untucked. He had kind eyes and longish black hair, and he was surrounded by younger people wearing white T-shirts.

  “Yes, I’m going with you,” I said to him, my hand going to the pendant at my throat. “But first I have to go home. There’s something I have to do.”

  When I opened my eyes, everyone was staring at me. “She left on her own,” I said. “Or at least she was planning to leave with a man in an old-fashioned white shirt. He had blue eyes, black hair down to his collar, a short beard. She wasn’t the only one to go with him. Did you ever see her wear a white T-shirt with blue lettering that says ‘Only Love Can Overcome Hate’?”

  Mr. Fullmer paled noticeably, but Mrs. Fullmer was nodding. “She had one.”

  “A cult then,” Mr. Fullmer sputtered. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe a commune.”

  “Same difference,” Mr. Fullmer said.

  “I can’t say for sure. I do know that she believed anything she took with her wouldn’t be hers anymore. She wished she didn’t have to choose between them and you.” Almost as an afterthought, I added, “They were selling Christmas cakes at a park. Near a university, I think. That was when she met them.”

  “She came home early on break,” Mrs. Fullmer whispered. “She’d been having a hard time, but we didn’t know until later that she missed all her final exams. She never registered for the next semester.”

  That explained the despair Victoria had left imprinted on the necklace. “She was more hopeful when she met them,” I said, meaning it as a comfort.

  “It’s not only the colleges these people have targeted,” Jake said into the awkward silence that followed my statement. “I’ve seen a similar group here down by the river, selling things to the crowds who come to watch the bridge reconstruction. In fact, they’ve been there almost every time I’ve driven by the past few weeks.”

  “Stupid child.” Mr. Fullmer’s gruff voice was tinged with pain. “She should know better than to talk to crazies.”

  “She could be in danger,” Mrs. Fullmer protested. “She’s too young to know better.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to. There was nothing more I could give them. I stood back from the counter and waited for them to leave.

  Jake handed me my rings. As I slid them on, his warm hand touched the middle of my back, and I was grateful for the support. Last September I’d begun entertaining the thought that we could be more than friends, but our relationship remained mostly linked to business. I didn’t mind too much. After my sister, he was my best friend, and since Tawnia had married and was now expecting her first child, her attention was divided. At this point I needed Jake’s friendship more than I needed romance.

  The Fullmers left, walking together slowly. Mr. Fullmer, his back rigid in his dark suit, carried the box of his daughter’s belongings. His sandy hair was thinning in the back. Jake had a natural remedy that would halt the hair loss, but that wasn’t why he’d come, so I remained silent. Next to him, Mrs. Fullmer looked shrunken, her shoulders hunched forward, her blond head bowed. She clung to her husband’s arm, staggering more than walking. Below her dress I could see a run in the back of her nylons.

  Before she reached the door, she paused, stepped away from her husband, and retraced her slow steps to the desk. “Thank you,” she whispered. She looked around somewhat frantically before her hand shot out to grab the Chinese thirteenth-century Jun Yao vase that sat in glory next to the cash register. It was wider than it was tall, a dark, glossy red piece with bright blue highlights. The sale price was seven hundred dollars and a steal at that because it was in extremely good condition. I’d found it in a basement in Kansas when I’d sheltered with some people during a tornado.

  “I want to buy this,” Mrs. Fullmer said.

  I arched a brow. I didn’t think she really wanted the vase, but business had been slow,
and I wasn’t going to turn her down. I took it from her, enjoying the pleasant tingle of the thoughts that surrounded the piece. Not an image I could see but nice and comforting. At least one person who’d owned this vase had cared for it lovingly and had lived a life of quiet contentment. I wrapped the vase as Jake rang up the sale. Mr. Fullmer waited by the door, impassiveness and impatience alternately crossing his stern features.

  As I passed the bag with the vase to Mrs. Fullmer, she caught my hand and pressed something into it: the velvet box with the necklace. “Keep it for a little while. Maybe there’s something more.”

  I shook my head. “There’s never anything more. I’m sorry.” The last words felt ripped from me, not because I didn’t mean them, but because I knew they wouldn’t help her suffering.

  She made no move to take back the box. “Please.”

  I nodded, sighing internally. Keeping it gave her false hope, and I didn’t want that, but I wasn’t strong enough to refuse.

  She smiled. “Thank you for the vase.” She turned and joined her husband.

  I didn’t feel guilty about the vase because they could obviously afford it, but I did feel bad that she might think buying it could help me see something more.

  “That was nice of her,” Jake said.

  “Nice?”

  “Buying the vase. I told her when she called that you didn’t accept money, but I did suggest that she might want an antique for her house. This way you earn something for your trouble. That’s important, especially if it makes it so you can’t work the rest of the day.”

  As he spoke, he was pushing me onto the tall stool I kept at the counter. Then he disappeared into the back room and returned with a small book of poetry that my parents had written for each other for their wedding. I took it willingly, grateful for the positive emotions that flowed into me. Touching it, I could see them as they held the book in turn and exchanged their flower-child vows in the forest, Summer with a ring of flowers on her head and Winter with his prematurely white hair in a long braid down his back. Though this session hadn’t been all that draining, I felt full of life as I witnessed their silent, love-filled exchange. I hoped these feelings would never fade from the pages. Almost, it was like having them with me again.