by Deborah Camp
He looked at Trudy and grinned. “But I like having Trudy on top of me . . . or under me . . . or against me.” He chuckled when Trudy bit his shoulder. “Even when she takes a bite out of me. Especially then.”
“Eight o’clock, Levi. Ta-ta, darling boy.”
Sighing wearily, he dropped the phone onto the bedside table. “She wants us to have dinner at Rhema’s and attend a séance at Sunshine’s place.”
“I heard.” Trudy rubbed her cheek against his nipple, bit it, then licked it. His cock hardened. “I think a séance will be fun with all that talent around one table.”
“Seems pointless, but maybe it will be entertaining. Unless you can make contact with whoever had a hand in this, I don’t see what the rest of us can do. It’ll be up to the police and they have nothing to go on right now.” He kissed the top of her head. Her dark red hair smelled faintly of strawberries. “Maybe you’ll connect with someone tonight.”
“Maybe.” She released a sigh that tickled the hair on his chest. “It’s awful to think that someone rammed Glenn from behind, but I’m sure that’s what happened. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so frightened. Right?”
He wound his arms around her, pulling her closer to him. “Right. But, let’s not dwell on that now. It’s a beautiful day. I have a beautiful wife. We’re in a treehouse. We have time for one more round of ‘making Trudy scream my name.’”
She smiled and arched her body up to rub against his hot erection. “Your favorite game.”
“That’s right. Because both of us always win.”
Seated around Rhema and Alan Martin’s oval dining room table, Trudy savored the plateful of baked ham, green beans, scalloped potatoes, and yeast rolls. Beside her, Quintara commandeered the conversation, moving the topics from memories of Glenn O’Connell to ghost sightings in the Crescent Hotel. She directed questions and comments to everyone at the table, drawing them all into the conversation, including Sabra, who was also present for the buffet dinner, but had said she wasn’t going to the séance.
“Are you sure you don’t want to join us?” Trudy asked, looking across the table at Sabra when there was a lull in the conversation. “It should be pretty lively.”
Sabra shook her head and swallowed a bite of food. “I’ll pass. I have some final papers to grade and I’m in the middle of reading a good mainstream mystery that I’d like to finish before I have to go back to work.”
“I imagine you’ve had your fill of séances,” Levi said with a smile. He sat on Trudy’s other side, his arm resting on the back of her chair. “Your mother conducted a few hundred. She was renowned for her ability to summon spirits and deliver premonitions.”
Trudy’s gaze zipped to Sabra, just then realizing that Sabra’s mother, Alan’s first wife, had been Eudora Martin, a well-known psychic who’d had a highly rated radio program for five years. She’d died a few years ago. Quintara had often spoken of her. A tall, striking brunette with a smooth alto voice, she’d possessed a charisma that reached out across the radio waves. She would take to the streets and give impromptu readings to strangers she encountered, gaining her the tag, “the ambush psychic.”
“Oh, yes,” Sabra said with a good-natured roll of her eyes. “Mother loved a séance. She would be chomping at the bit right now, ready to launch into one.”
“Were she and Glenn good friends?” Trudy asked.
“Yes, from what I gather.” Sabra looked at her father. “Dad, didn’t Mother loan him money?”
“Well, yes.” Alan cleared his throat and seemed a little embarrassed. “More like, gave him money. We didn’t expect him to pay it back. Glenn was soft-hearted and never charged enough for his aura readings.”
“Or didn’t charge anything for them,” Quintara tacked on.
Alan chuckled and shrugged in a helpless gesture. “You’re right, and because of that, he was usually on the brink of losing his house or car or having his electricity turned off. Eudora and I liked him a lot. Glenn was a gentle soul. We didn’t want him to suffer for his inability to gain profit from his gift.”
“I say, people don’t appreciate things they get for free,” Quintara opined with a jerk of her chin. “The more you charge, the more valuable you are to them.”
Levi threw her a grin. “And that’s why we’ve always been crazy about each other, Quintara. Great minds appreciate great minds.”
Trudy pretended to choke, gaining a laugh from the others. “Healthy egos also recognize humongous ones.”
Levi cracked everyone up with his exaggerated menacing glare at Trudy, complete with a curled upper lip.
“Speaking of which, why isn’t Chason here? Didn’t you invite him?” Sabra asked when the chuckles died down.
“I did,” Rhema said. “But he had already made plans to take Sunshine and Perchance out to dinner. Or maybe I have that wrong. They might be taking him out to dinner.”
“That sounds more like it,” Sabra said. “Poor man. I’m sure he feels like a wishbone.”
“And loving every minute of it,” Quintara noted. She turned to Trudy. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, dear. You do know that Perchance and Sunshine are co-authors of a popular young adult series, don’t you?”
“Greasy Ghosts and Gargantuan Galaxies,” Trudy said, quoting the catchy series’ name. “I’ve read a couple of them. They’re bestsellers. Kids call them the Galaxy Sisters. The stories are about a band of ghosts that travel from planet to planet. I’ve read a couple of them. They’re inventive and spooky.”
“They do so well with them, I don’t know why they bother with the other psychic stuff,” Sabra commented. “Percy told me yesterday that she is employed by that psychic hotline headquartered in Los Angeles. I was surprised because I figured they made a good living from their books.”
“I’m sure they do,” Rhema said, “but they can’t ignore the messages they receive. Sunshine predicted Hurricane Maria that struck Puerto Rico.”
Sabra pursed her lips. “Predicting hurricanes doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.”
“She was specific about when it would hit the island and the massive toll it would take on those poor people,” Rhema countered. “Personally, I think Sunshine is quite talented. As for Perchance, I can’t say for certain. What do you think, Levi?”
Levi swallowed his food and glanced furtively at Trudy before he answered, “I think I’m not the one to ask. I can be a bit of a Doubting Thomas when it comes to psychic abilities.”
“Oh?” Sabra sat forward, angling closer to him. “That’s surprising. Why would you doubt abilities that you profess to have?”
Trudy flinched at the “profess” tag. “Because he’s one of the best and can usually ferret out fakers,” Trudy answered for him. “He’s seen a lot of them, so he doesn’t automatically believe that someone has ESP just because they say they do.”
Levi arched a brow and gave Trudy a wink before leaning sideways toward Sabra. “Actually, I haven’t been around Perchance enough to assess her ability. I’m told by Quintara that she’s quite good at knowing things about people when she first meets them, but with Google and other search engines, that kind of ‘gift’ is more difficult to take at face value.”
“Perchance is very talented,” Quintara said, sternly, giving Levi a chastising glare. “She has discerned things about people that she could not have read on the Internet. I agree that her sister is more gifted, but that doesn’t diminish Perchance’s perceptions.”
“Are those made up names?” Trudy asked, flicking a glance at Levi, who had chosen his own last name to separate him from his heartless father.
“No. Marmalade and Dragonmoon are their middle names. Their last name is Johnson,” Rhema said, her brown eyes twinkling. “Their mother’s name was Ocean Waves.” She chortled at the stricken looks around the table. “I kid you not!”
“And her father’s name was what, Starry Night? Peaceful Valley?” Levi asked.
Rhema batted a hand at him. “Albert. His name was Albe
rt. Berty is what Ocean called him. They were hippies who came to Eureka Springs in the first big wave of those long-haired, tie-dyed, peace- and-love seekers. They started a commune in the woods near the Christ of the Ozarks. Later, they branched off and headed up a nudist colony off the beaten track between here and Berryville. Perchance and Sunshine were born there.”
Trudy sat back, finished with the meal, and fascinated by the colorful life of the sisters. “Born in a nudist colony. Imagine that. They must be comfortable in their skin.”
“It wasn’t Paradise,” Rhema said. “Berty liked his weed and mushrooms a little too much and was high as a kite most of the time. Ocean did her best, I suppose, but the girls took care of themselves. They were like wild, wood nymphs. Social services stepped in when they were pre-teens and they were taken away from their parents and placed in foster care in Fayetteville. When they graduated from high school, they came back here to live. Their parents had split up. Bertie was still here – as much as he was anywhere – but Ocean had moved to San Francisco. She’d taken up with another man – a chiropractor – and had a new life that she wasn’t willing to share with Perchance and Sunshine.”
“How sad.” Trudy swallowed the tightness in her throat as pity welled inside of her. “Neither one of them married?”
“No, but they’ve had interesting love lives. They’ve never pined for masculine company from what I’ve seen,” Rhema said. “They don’t have a long attention span when it comes to men. They fall in and out of lust quickly.”
“I’m one of the few men around here they haven’t seduced,” Alan said with a big grin. “Although they did try after Eudora died. They brought me home-cooked meals and invited me over for drinks. I think they had a bet going as to which one would bed me first.”
Sabra slapped at her dad playfully and then covered her ears. “I don’t want to know this!”
“You and me both, Sabra,” Rhema said, then gave Alan a poke in the ribs with her elbow.
“Sorry, honey.” Alan waggled his white eyebrows to accompany his mischievous grin.
Smiling, Trudy eyed Levi, wondering if he’d bedded the Galaxy sisters. As if reading her mind, which he was uncannily good at, he leaned close to whisper in her ear.
“I haven’t fucked either of them.”
Trudy nudged him away with a soft laugh, but couldn’t deny that she was relieved to hear it. In Atlanta, she ran into Levi’s former conquests nearly every time she turned a corner.
Rhema looked down the table at Quintara. “You know who would have loved to be at the séance, don’t you? Kathryn Rubyott,” she said, answering before Quintara could make a guess.
“Yes, she would,” Quintara agreed, her expression going soft and sad. “She would have insisted on leading it.”
“Ah, dear Kathryn. She is missed,” Alan said.
Trudy glanced around at the wistful expressions. Even Levi seemed touched. “I don’t know her.”
“Oh, my dear!” Quintara waved her hands in a moment of agitation. “You know of her! Kathryn Rubyott wrote The Science of ESP back in 1942. It was a bestseller and is still considered a classic. It was the first book on the subject to be taken seriously.”
“The science of ESP,” Sabra repeated with a shake of her head. “As a scientist, I find that incongruous. But, Kathryn was always marching to her own drum beat.”
“Poor thing,” Rhema said. “The way she died . . .”
“How?” Levi asked. “I never heard. I assumed her heart gave out. She was . . . what? Ninety something.”
“Ninety-one,” Rhema said. “Her heart did give out, I suppose. After a while.” Rhema sucked in a deep breath and her eyes filled with tears. “It was horrible.”
Alan picked up the narrative. “She was frail, you understand. Evidently, she took a sack of garbage out to the container and, well, she toppled into it. It was one of those big bins on wheels the city uses. She went in head first and couldn’t get out.”
The horror of that whipped through Trudy and she realized she’d issued a little squeak of alarm and had covered her lips with her fingertips. An image, plucked from the annals of her subconscious, flashed behind her wide eyes and her stomach muscles clenched.
“It was winter,” Alan went on. “A day or two after Christmas. Snow was on the ground. The refuse men found her in the morning. She’d died of exposure.”
“Christ,” Levi murmured, shaking his head and glancing at Quintara and then at Trudy. His gaze stayed on Trudy and narrowed. “You okay, baby?”
Trudy blinked away the gruesome images playing out in her mind and nodded stiffly at him, not trusting herself to speak. Her throat had tightened and her pulse pounded behind her eyes like twin sledgehammers. She couldn’t shake loose of one image – of thin, white legs sticking up from a gray bin, waving about so frantically that one of the bright red, fuzzy slippers fell off her foot, exposing more wafer-thin, veined flesh for the sharp, killing frost to bite. What made her shiver with revulsion were the feelings shimmering around the scene – feelings of satisfaction, of glee.
Happy New Year, bitch. Looks like Karma’s a bigger bitch.
“What did you say, dear?”
Quintara’s voice sliced through Trudy’s inner turmoil, making her aware that she must have whispered something. Her stomach lurched and she swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth. “N-nothing.” The word emerged hoarse and trembling. Trudy cleared her throat. “It’s awful. How she died.”
They all nodded, lost in their own horrific images and grief for their fellow psychic.
“She was a pioneer,” Quintara said. “She shouldn’t have left us like that. So undignified for such a pillar of ESP.”
“She had a sharp tongue, I do recall that about her,” Levi said. “She didn’t suffer fools gladly. If she thought you were a fake, she came right out and told you so. And if she thought you had a gift, you became a competitor to her. She was determined to best you. To make you bow down to her superiority.”
Quintara made a sound of distress and sent him a scowl. “She wasn’t that rascally, Levi. But she could slice people down to size with that tongue of hers.” She dimpled at a memory. “One time when I was scolding Glenn for not charging for his readings, Kathryn said, ‘If Glenn thinks his readings aren’t worth a dime, who are we to dispute him? He knows his worth better than anyone else.’”
Sabra let out a hoot of laughter and quickly covered her mouth, her eyes going wide. “Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh, but . . .” She shrugged and grinned. “What I mostly recall about Kathryn was that she frowned all the time and – oh! – once she told Mother that I was untrustworthy. I was a kid! Mother’s kid!”
Alan chuckled. “Honey, Kathryn felt that way about all children, so don’t take it personally.”
“Losing her at the end of last year and now Glenn,” Rhema said on a sigh. “It’s all too much.”
“Shall we clear the table and then head out?” Alan suggested, rising from his chair
“Leave it,” Sabra said. “I’ll tidy up. You all go on to the séance.”
“Are you sure?” Rhema asked. “Let me help.”
“No, no. I can load a dishwasher as handily as the next person,” Sabra said. “Please, go on. I’ve got this.”
They said their goodbyes to her and filed outside to their cars. Quintara went with Rhema and Alan. Trudy and Levi followed them in the purring sports car. Levi shifted into second as the car climbed a hill, and then he rested his hand on Trudy’s.
“Something shook you up back there. What?”
She rubbed her temple with her free hand, massaging away the vestiges of the throbbing behind her eyes. “I saw Kathryn. Saw her legs sticking up out of the bin. It was so real to me.”
“I could picture it, too.”
“No. I mean, I saw it.” She closed her eyes and opened her mind to the visions that were pummeling their fists against her temples, determined to crowd in. They came. Fast. Blurring together. The old woman walking slowly, carefu
lly from her house to the garage where she kept the trash bin. She lugged a big, white plastic garbage sack, full and heavy. Running, racing toward the frail figure, she pushed her. Pushed hard. A burst of pleasure, elation, delirium engulfed her as the old woman tipped forward, following her garbage into the bin. Her squeaky noises rose up, barely discernible from the depths, partly smothered by the plastic bag. The red booties waved like little flags from her ankles. So funny!
You bitch. Happy New Year, bitch.
“Trudy?” Levi’s voice brought her back.
“Someone pushed her. On purpose.”
He removed his hand from hers to shift into third. The whites of his eyes flashed in the darkness of the car as he glanced sideways at her. “Is that one of the ‘snippet visions’ you told me about?”
“Yes. I didn’t know what I was seeing. I didn’t understand it. But at dinner when they were talking about how Kathryn died, it all came together for me. I was seeing Kathryn Rubyott being murdered.” She leaned her head against the window, allowing the cold glass to cool her clammy brow. She felt shaky and blurry-headed. “Whoever did it was delighted, Levi. No fear. No remorse. No regret. It feels the same.”
“The same? What do you mean?”
“I believe that Glenn was killed by the same person.”
Chapter 5
Beachy is how Trudy would have described Sunshine Marmalade’s house. Seashells, multi-colored coral, and nautical memorabilia covered every flat surface and most of every wall. Her furniture was white and beige. A floor lamp that looked like a palm tree stood in one corner. A big ship’s wheel dominated the wall above the mantel that was laden with sand candles and fishing nets. They could have been in Malibu instead of in Eureka Springs.
Three cats – a gray tabby, an orange-striped one, and a talkative Siamese – roamed freely, hopping up onto tables, the fireplace mantel, and any available lap.
“Say hello to my babies,” Sunshine said, waving a hand to indicate the felines. “Pirate, Treasure, and Sixpence the Siamese. Come in, come in. I hope cat hair doesn’t offend you.”