Forever and Always

by Jude Deveraux

  If this was true, then my worst fears were alleviated. My fear had always been that Adam and Bo were being held for that blasted mirror. After all, why had they taken the thing with them when they left? Why had they left in such secrecy? Why hadn’t Adam told me what had happened that so excited him? Why hadn’t I made a point to listen?

  I’d spent months beating myself up over my lack of attention to what Adam had been so excited about that day, but I couldn’t change the past.

  But perhaps I could change the future. I’d told Linc that there was too much evil and wrongdoing in the world for me to be able to help, but I wasn’t about to tell him the truth.

  I know that most people don’t believe in psychics. And no wonder, with so many charlatans out there. Tell people they’re one way in public and another in private and they’ll say,“She really knows me!”

  But you know what I found out after I married Adam? I found out that the FBI believes in psychics. It seems that the FBI will use anything there is to try to bring criminals to justice—or to stop them.

  A psychic can walk into her local police station and be laughed out of the office, but if she goes to the FBI, they’ll say,“Show us.”

  Adam had a friend in the FBI, a man who’d helped us bring down that evil woman in Connecticut, so we both felt we owed him. He showed up at our house one Friday afternoon with a hand truck and three big file boxes packed full. He didn’t leave until the next Thursday. By that time we’d gone over every case file in the boxes and I’d told him all I could.

  I really hated doing it. What was in those files was horrible beyond imagining. In spite of what I told Linc, I can block out some of the horror around me. It’s not easy to figure out if a person is fantasizing about murder or is really about to do it. Also, people do things on the spur of the moment. Someone can be hugging his/her spouse one day, and kill them the next.

  But, as much as I hated doing it, I went over every file and I talked about killers, and innocent people in jail, and missing people who were dead or living elsewhere.

  As my father knew, because he’d studied my ancestresses, I was good at finding people and things. Give me a map and I could close my eyes and quite often find missing or kidnapped people. Too often, I found graves.

  Since that first time, every week, the FBI had sent me papers to go through to see what I could.

  What my husband, Bo or my father never told the FBI or anyone else about were the other things I could do. I could make people do things; I could put thoughts into their minds. I had an idea the FBI knew more than they let on because they were the ones who covered up how the four people in the underground tunnel had died. Their final report said that Adam and his cousin, Mike Taggert, had killed the people. Also, the autopsy report that said there were no marks on the people, just their burst brains,“disappeared” almost immediately.

  I pounded the pillows again and saw that it was nearly four A.M. Last night I’d had a flash of a premonition, that I needed to go to this place in Alabama with this man. There was something there I needed to find and take. Okay, steal. But steal what? Heaven help me, I hoped it wasn’t another stupid mirror. I hated that thing passionately. My father rarely left it and Bo talked with great sadness about how she could no longer see the future in it because she was no longer a virgin.

  For me, I’d never seen anything in it and didn’t want to. I got rid of my virginity approximately one hour after the wedding ceremony. Adam grabbed me and pulled me into—

  No! I could not think about that. It was something I’d learned soon after Adam left. Thinking about, remembering, our joyous times in bed together was guaranteed to make me go insane.

  I turned on the bedside light and picked up the photo Linc had given me. I knew the woman in the picture had given birth to Linc’s child. So who was the woman in the car who’d been killed? The newspaper said it was this woman but it wasn’t. When I touched the newspaper clipping I could see that the woman who’d been killed was taller, thinner and had darker hair than the mother of Linc’s child.

  For a moment I closed my eyes and tried to put together pieces I was seeing. Maybe if I had that dreadful mirror my father could look into it and see what was ahead. But we’d all learned that what he saw was what could be. The future could be changed—changed from what was in the mirror, that is.

  “How do I do this?” I whispered, clutching the photo.

  “And how is this connected to my husband and Bo?”

  When I had another thought I opened my eyes with a jolt. My mother. She had been given a movie audition because of the Montgomery name, but the talent that got her leading roles was hers. I was truly shocked when I heard she was going on TV. Why had she agreed to do that? Because she liked the show a lot? I’d read every interview she’d given—and there were many—but she’d never once explained why she’d agreed to do a TV show.

  Suddenly, I sat upright in bed. Was all this too much of a coincidence? My mother steps down off her big-screen pedestal to do a TV show, and the next thing I know, she’s sending me off to some real-life murder mystery weekend. In my heart I knew there was more to this than finding a missing child. There was a connection to my husband. A link, so to speak, I thought, then I smiled. A Linc, maybe? I lay back on the pillows and smiled some more. It would be just like my mother to use a gorgeous young man to run errands for her. Maybe I couldn’t be in the same room with my mother for more than fifteen minutes without being made to feel inadequate, but she had rescued me. She’d risked her life to save mine.

  So what was she doing now? I wondered. And even more importantly, where had she found out information that I couldn’t?

  I picked up the brochure Linc had given me, held it between my palms and concentrated. Whatever I was looking for I felt was there, so I wanted to make sure the place had empty rooms for us. And I wanted to make sure Linc would be allowed in because this was a females-only resort.

  I smiled at what I saw. The pain I’d given his head was nothing to what he was going to soon feel. All those women—both dead and alive—and he wouldn’t be able to touch one of them.

  Linc

  Chapter Six

  ALL I COULD THINK WAS, THIS KID BETTER BE WORTH it! He better be some adoring, worshipful little brat who idolized me or I was going to send him back where he came from.

  I don’t know what happened to Darci during the night but she woke up a different person. My first thought was that she was delighted to be going somewhere with me. I’d said I wasn’t interested in white women, but that was a lie. Actually, if given a choice, I prefer…

  Oh well, it didn’t matter anyway. She told me I had to audition for her. She wanted to see if I could act gay. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t resist so I showed off a bit with a pretty good performance: tasteful, on the elegant side. I imagined myself as an art dealer, someone with a lot of knowledge, well-traveled.

  Darci didn’t like it. “Have you ever seen The Birdcage?”

  I groaned. Gays hated that movie, saying it was too exaggerated. It made a caricature of gays everywhere.

  She started looking at me hard. I got this tiny pain in the base of my neck. Loudly, I began reciting the Gettysburg Address. When Darci laughed, the pain stopped. I refused to think about what she was doing and what she could do. If I believed what I was thinking I’d be expecting little alien beings to pop out of my belly.

  “Do you want to do this or not?” she asked. “I called the place, this 13 Elms, this morning and they’re going to let you in only because I told them you’re beautiful and you’re gay. I don’t know why the beauty makes any difference, but they said the women who came there have to sign a document saying they’ll have no sex while they’re there.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Probably not, but I guess they can do what they want. They say that sex interferes with the spirits.”

  “What kind of place is this, anyway?” I asked.

  “A rip-off. They tell these rich women they can’
t have sex because it’s like telling them they can’t have chocolate—it makes them crave it. The women get into some kind of frenzy of denial so they will believe what they’re told to believe. I think one of the owners says her spirit guide is some dead Indian. I think he wears only a loincloth. Or did,” she added.

  “Maybe I could get his job,” I said, and couldn’t resist flexing a bicep.

  “No sex,” Darci said firmly.

  “So how will they know?”

  “The bedrooms are bugged. There are cameras hidden in the rooms. They use what they hear in the séances.”

  “If you can tell all that from a brochure, how come—?” I broke off. No need to get her angry at me. Just thinking about what she could do made me rub my nose.

  “Why didn’t I know who the witch was in Connecticut?” she finished for me, seeming not in the least upset.

  “She had power, lots of it. And back then I didn’t know much. I’d just left my small town and the most I’d ever done was—” She waved her hand. “Forget that. Can you do Birdcage or not?”

  I grimaced. Of course I could do Birdcage and I’m sure she knew it—but I hated it. I put a hand on my hip, shifted my weight and flexed my wrist.

  “Perfect,” she said, smiling.

  “I’m going to be a rich divorcée from Texas and you’re going to be my personal assistant. Can you type?”

  “No,” I said and gave her a hard look. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind.

  “Use a computer? Take dictation? Make coffee?”

  “No, no, and no.”

  “What can you do?” She was smirking.

  “Play any role ever written.”

  “Even a gladiator?”

  “Honey,” I said in a stereotype of a gay man,“I can out gladiate even a bipolar. If I had been in shock treatment…” I rolled my eyes to let her know that I would have done a better job than Russell Crowe ever thought of doing.

  To my delight, Darci began to laugh and I don’t know when I’d ever felt so pleased about performing. Maybe it was the thought of how much she must have seen and felt in her lifetime, yet she was laughing at my jokes.

  “Okay,” I said, “when do we go? And, by the way, why do you, a rich young woman, want to go there?”

  “My husband, thirty-one years my senior, died without telling me where he’d hidden his first wife’s jewelry. I want to contact his spirit and see if I can get him to tell me where the jewels are.”

  “Good one,” I said. “So when do we leave?”

  “In about three hours. My husband’s cousin is sending a plane to take us. What?!” she asked me as she must have felt my sense of panic.

  “I brought one bag of clothes. I need—” I cut off because I could see she was fighting with herself. Something had made her change her mind about wanting to go and now she seemed to be fighting something else. Overnight, she’d gone from refusing to go to wanting to go instantly.

  “Delay the flight and give me two hours in a high-end mall and—”

  “There isn’t time,” she said. “We need to go now. I have to get something there or meet someone or…or…” When she looked up at me, I could see pain on her face.

  “My husband. He’s taller than you and less beefy, but I think his clothes will fit you.” Turning, she left the kitchen and headed into the bowels of that big house.

  “Beefy?” I whispered. “I’m beefy?”

  “Are you coming or not?” she called to me, and I high-tailed it after her.

  She led me to her inner sanctum, her bedroom, and from the way she ran past the neatly made-up bed, I wanted to tease her. I don’t know where she was getting the idea that I was coming on to her because I wasn’t. I guess sex was one area where her psychic abilities failed.

  Truthfully I had no interest in her at all. She wasn’t my type, no matter what color her skin was. As I followed her into a closet, I contemptuously looked her up and down. She had on a pair of black linen slacks and a rust-colored shirt that just reached to the top of her rear end. Her curvy little rear end. Too curvy for someone as scrawny as she was. And her legs—

  “Cut it out!” she said over her shoulder.

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  She gave me a look that almost set my eyelashes on fire. None of her voodoo magic, just a girl-look telling me to back off. The look kind of interested me. Since I’d been sixteen, I hadn’t had many women say no to me. Actually, when I came to think about it, the only woman who’d ever said no to me was Darci’s mother. Alanna’s no’s didn’t count.

  As she switched on the closet light, I said, “You’re like your mother, you know that?”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  I busied myself looking at her husband’s clothes.

  “You’re the psychic so you figure it out.” I really hoped I’d made her curious, but she didn’t seem to be.

  Yawning, she went back into the bedroom and sat down on a little chair where she could see me but was out of touching distance. Coward, I thought. But as I looked away I knew she was genuinely disinterested in what most women liked about me.

  I looked at the clothes. Everything was of top quality, but was ultraconservative. This wasn’t a man who wore red silk shirts out to dinner.

  “So what can I borrow?” I asked.

  “Anything, whatever.” She looked half asleep.

  “You don’t mind that I wear his clothes?”

  “Clothes are things. He’s not in them.”

  “So where is he?”

  She seemed to want to answer my question but didn’t yet feel that she could confide in me. Yet, I thought. She might have no interest in me sexually, but women liked to talk to me.

  I began to pull clothes out of the closet and put them on the bed behind Darci, then I started unbuttoning my shirt. When she looked at me, startled, I smiled. “I have to try them on, don’t I?”

  She got up, obviously planning to leave the room.

  “Shouldn’t we be talking about what we’re heading into? Are you going to introduce me to these ladies as Lincoln Aimes? And maybe you should tell me what happened last night to make you so happy this morning. Your husband visit you in spirit form?”

  She shot me a look and with it came a little pain to the back of my neck, but I just smiled. I watched as she walked to the other side of the room and sat down on a chair, her back to me. She’d said she was unaffected by me, so why didn’t she want to see me in my underwear?

  As I pulled on a pair of Montgomery’s trousers, I told myself to knock it off. But I really wished I could spend a couple of hours with Alanna before Darci and I left.

  In the end it took Darci and me a couple of hours to pack since I showed her each piece of clothing I tried on. She was right when she’d said he was taller than I was, but as Darci so indelicately put it, “Your behind sticks out much more than his so it shortens the pants.”

  So much for racial differences.

  After we chose clothes for me—and I vowed to go shopping as soon as we got there—I asked Darci what she was going to wear. She looked at me blankly for a second, as though she hadn’t thought about it, then led me to her closet. It was as large as his but only half full.

  “Adam buys my clothes,” she said. “He has such good taste and—” She looked away.

  Since my usual way of cheering up women wasn’t available to me, I decided to put my acting into practice. “Honey,” I said, hand on hip,“with your coloring you can wear just about anything.” I pulled down a cute little blue suit and held it up in front of her—and when I did, I said in my normal voice (which, personally, I thought was quite as deep and sexy as you know whose) that her hair color had to change.

  Our first argument ensued. Or was it our twenty-fifth? I couldn’t be sure. Darci stalked out of the closet. “Oh no,” she said. “My husband likes this color. It’s a strawberry blonde and he likes it.”

  If the guy liked redheads, maybe he wasn’t as deadly dull as his wardrobe made him se
em. “So do the tabloids,” I said. “They love your red hair. Didn’t they say something about your temper matching the color of your hair? And didn’t your hairdresser give one tabloid an interview? Think no one at that place in Alabama will recognize you?”

  When she stopped walking, I knew I had her. “There isn’t enough time to change my hair color, even if there was some dye in this house, which there isn’t.”

  I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew she was lying. She may have all sorts of powers but, underneath, she was just human—and not a great actress. To me, who’d spent a lot of time around actors and liars, she was utterly transparent. “Tell me, Darci,” I said, “do you lie often and if you do, does anyone believe you?”

  I wasn’t sure but I thought I saw a tiny smile at the corner of her lips. It was my guess that she lied often. If I had her abilities, I’d lie to everyone all the time. “So who has the hair dye?” I asked.

  “The housekeeper may have some.”

  “In the room where you put me?” I asked. “The one at the far side of the house? The one so far away from your bedroom it has another zip code?”

  She gave me a full smile. “That’s the one.” She looked at me for a second, then said,“Race you,” and took off.

  She won but only because she didn’t get lost in that maze of a house. She was already in the housekeeper’s closet and, way in the back, under four shoe boxes, was a stash of boxes of black hair dye. As I saw Darci pull them out I thought that I’d hate to work for her. I’d never be able to have a secret.

  Twenty minutes later, I had Darci leaning over a sink and I was squirting the dye on her fine, silky hair. At that thought, she sent a little pain to the back of my neck and I shoved her head down until it clonked against the porcelain.