His hands also intrigued her. They were strong and masculine but there was something sensual about the way he gripped the obsidian. Just watching him hold the rock sent a little thrill of awareness through her. One would have thought it was a diamond, not just an attractive stone that she had picked up on a morning walk.
The rest of the man went very well with the hands and the unusual eyes. Jack moved with the fluid grace of a natural-born hunter. His near-black hair was cut very short in a severe, no-nonsense style. His face was all edgy planes and strict angles. Everything about him was infused with an ascetic vibe. In another time and place he could have been a warrior-monk, she thought. Instead, he had a decidedly checkered job history.
He had taught classes on criminal behavior at various small colleges and he occasionally gave seminars on the subject to certain law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. But evidently he had abandoned that career path—or maybe it had abandoned him. All she knew for certain was that somewhere along the line he had left the academic world to write books on the subject of the criminal mind and to pursue what she sensed was his true calling—the investigation of the coldest of cold cases.
It was that line of work, or, rather, the aftermath, that had brought him to the front door of her small cottage a little over a month ago. She had just moved into the town of Eclipse Bay on the Oregon coast and set up in business as a meditation instructor. Jack had been one of her first clients.
She was well aware that requesting that initial consultation with her had not been easy for him. He had been extremely wary, downright skeptical, in fact. Suspicious would not have been too strong a word to describe his attitude toward her and her line of work. She had known at first glance that he had come to her because he had run out of options.
After a couple of sessions, however, he had become much more comfortable with what he called the woo-woo thing. But she was pretty sure that there was another reason why he had made the effort to overcome his skepticism and give her techniques a try: They had something important in common. They had both lost their parents while they were in their early teens and both of them had wound up with foster families. That made for an unusual but very real bond.
“Where are you now?” Winter said.
“Leaving the ice garden,” Jack said. He tightened his grip on the obsidian. “Walking along the main boulevard toward the gates of the city.”
He spoke in an uninflected, unemotional, trancelike voice. But unlike a person who had been hypnotized or someone in a true dream state, he maintained a degree of awareness of his surroundings.
The boulevard was a new addition to the dreamscape that he had been rapidly crafting under her guidance.
“Are you certain that you are ready to leave?” she asked.
“I identified the killer,” he said in the same neutral voice. “The hunt is finished.”
Only until the next hunt began, Winter thought. But she did not say the words aloud. When Jack was in a lucid dream he referred to his investigation as a hunt. But when he surfaced he was careful to call each dark venture that he undertook a case study.
Regardless of the terminology, they both knew that sooner or later he would be compelled to take on another investigation. That meant he would enter a new self-induced dream at the start and again at the conclusion. It was how he worked.
At the beginning of a hunt he used his talent for lucid dreaming to gather the evidence and weave it into a coherent story that would point him toward the killer. When the case was concluded he used another dream to process the emotional and psychological fallout.
And there was always fallout, because, as far as she could tell, Jack’s cases never ended well. The best thing you could say about them was that they ended.
He seemed to be drawn primarily to old, unsolved mysteries that involved fire. She knew that there were those who would have described his investigations as an eccentric hobby. Others would no doubt label his work an unhealthy obsession. She was certain that what he did was something else entirely. Jack’s cold cases were, in her opinion, quests.
She had understood from the start of their association that, like anyone with a gift, Jack could not thrive unless he used his abilities. But, as with any gift, there was a serious downside.
When Jack had first consulted with her, he had been struggling to find a way to deal with the psychological and emotional blowback that he endured in the wake of every case. Over time the accumulated weight of the aftereffects had become increasingly difficult for him to handle.
Initially she had taught him how to meditate. His lucid dreaming ability had made him a natural. Meditation had given him a tool that he could use to take a step back from the emotional and psychological aspects of a case.
After he had become comfortable with meditation, he had cautiously raised the subject of his lucid dreams. She had realized immediately that he was using the wrong imagery.
“Fire is counterproductive for you,” she had explained. “It’s getting in the way.”
He had shot her a disbelieving look. “What, then?”
“Ice.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he’d asked.
“Trust me, I’m pretty good with this kind of thing.”
“You don’t think I’m hallucinating?”
“No, of course not. You are doing lucid dreaming. You just do it in a rather unusual way, that’s all.”
For a moment he had gazed at her as if he was wondering what planet she was from. Then something changed in his demeanor. He seemed to relax. She got the impression that a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders.
“Ice,” he had repeated. He had mulled that over for a few seconds and then nodded once, very crisply. “An ice maze might work.”
“Why limit yourself to a maze? Think big. Create a dreamscape with more options.”
Within a week he had constructed an astonishingly detailed dreamscape in which to do his lucid dreaming. Now he hunted killers in Ice Town.
The fact that she’d had to convince him to abandon the fire imagery made her curious. The mind always clung tightly to strong visuals that triggered powerful memories. She had a hunch that at some point in his past, Jack had endured a terrible experience with fire. Someday perhaps he would tell her the story but for now he was keeping his secrets. She understood. She was certainly keeping a few secrets herself.
She was determined to practice patience with Jack but it wasn’t easy. He was the most intriguing, the most mysterious, the most interesting man she had ever met, but she wasn’t sure it would be smart to rush things.
“What are you doing now?” she said.
“I’m about to use my key to lock the gate,” Jack said.
The “key” was actually a word that he said to himself when he wanted to end a lucid dream. Early on she had realized that, in addition to the radically different imagery, he needed his own private escape word to ease the transition from the dream state to the waking state. She had no idea what word he had chosen. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that it worked for him.
Advising him to choose an escape word, one that had some deep, personal meaning to him, had been another simple fix. Nevertheless, Jack seemed to have been astonished by the results.
She realized that he was profoundly grateful to her for helping him get control of his unusual ability, but she was afraid that gratitude had become a huge problem in their relationship—or, rather, the lack thereof. She did not want him to see her as a convenient meditation instructor and dream therapist. She was determined to make him see her as a woman, preferably one to whom he might be attracted.
He blinked once and then he was fully awake. He looked up from the obsidian in his hands. She had worked with him often enough to know what to expect in the moments immediately after he surfaced from a dream. Nevertheless, she still got a thrill of awareness whenever
he fixed his intense eyes on her.
She smiled. “Welcome back to the waking world.”
“Thanks.” He set the obsidian aside somewhat reluctantly and opened his eyeglass case. When he put on the glasses, the green fire in his eyes did not disappear, but it cooled a little. “You were right about ice. It’s a lot easier to manipulate.”
“For you. But that wouldn’t be true for everyone. What you are doing when you construct a lucid dream is a kind of self-hypnosis. A trance of any kind usually works best when you use imagery that has a calming vibe. Fire is wrong for you because it arouses the part of you that needs to exert control.”
His eyes tightened a little at the corners. She could not tell if he was amused or annoyed.
“You think fire arouses me?” he asked.
She had a bad feeling that she was blushing.
“Not in the sexual sense,” she said quickly. “I meant that it calls forth the warrior side of your nature. When that aspect is ascendant, your logical, contemplative side is partially suppressed.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but never a warrior.”
“Well, I suppose the right term, the modern word, would be investigator.”
“Nope,” Jack said. “I’m not one of those, either. Both of my foster brothers are private investigators and my foster dad is a retired cop but I’m the boring one in the family. I research cold cases and then I write books based on that research.”
“Okay, so you don’t solve those cold cases with a gun,” she said, a little exasperated. “Instead, you use your ability to collect a lot of seemingly unrelated facts and link them together in a logical fashion.”
“Some people would say that what you just described is the working definition of a conspiracy theorist.”
She realized he was serious.
“That’s ridiculous, and you, of all people, should know it,” she said. “A true conspiracy theorist starts with the answer or the outcome he wants. Then he manipulates the facts to fit his theory. If some of those facts don’t support the desired conclusion, he simply discards them.”
Jack studied her for a long time, his expression unreadable. Then he appeared to brace himself, as though he was about to deliver bad news.
“I should tell you that, in the past, people have accused me of being a for-real, card-carrying conspiracy theorist,” he said.
She smiled. “In that case, where’s your tinfoil helmet?”
His eyes got a little more intense, as if he was processing some new information. Then he visibly relaxed.
“Must have left it back at my place,” he said.
“Look, here’s my take on your situation,” she said. “You were exhausting yourself just trying to control your burning maze. You were like a firefighter trying to put out the flames while simultaneously analyzing bits and pieces of evidence of the arson that started the blaze.”
Jack did not move. “How did you know?”
She widened her hands. “It’s what I do, Jack. I understood your problem with lucid dreaming the same way you understand how to string clues together into a pattern that explains an arson scene.”
Jack startled her with one of his rare smiles. “Amazing.”
She leaned back in her chair and shoved her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans. “I do realize that you probably still have some doubts about my work. I’m well aware that you had to overcome a lot of skepticism just to book that first session with me.”
“Well, I’m not going online tonight to order up a gong and a mantra. But I’m okay with your brand of meditation instruction and your dream therapy.”
She raised her brows ever so slightly. “Just okay?”
“Better than okay. I’m fine with it.”
“Your enthusiasm is a little underwhelming but I’m glad to know that you’re fine with what you’ve learned from me, because I’ll be sending you my bill at the end of the month.”
“You’ll get your money on time.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s good to know, because I have to tell you that trying to establish my meditation business here in Eclipse Bay is proving to be harder than I expected.”
“I’m not your only client,” Jack said. “I’ve seen some of the other locals stopping by your cottage.”
“Between you and me, most of the people who have booked sessions have done so out of curiosity. But I have hopes that some of them will become regulars. My landlady tells me business will probably pick up when the summer people arrive. She says that bunch is a real yogurt-and-yoga crowd. She thinks they’ll go for the meditation experience.”
“Was that the kind of clientele you had when you worked at that spa in California?” Jack said.
She froze. “You never told me that you knew about my job at the Cassidy Springs Wellness Spa.”
“Did you really think I’d book a session with a meditation instructor without doing some background research?”
Should have seen that coming, she thought. This was Jack Lancaster, after all. He was the naturally suspicious type and he knew how to do research.
Winter took a deep breath and told herself not to let Jack’s comment rattle her. He was right. She should have expected him to look into her background before booking a session.
“You never asked me about my previous experience so I just assumed you weren’t curious about it,” she said, going for casual and unconcerned. “In hindsight, I guess that was rather naïve of me, wasn’t it?”
“A little, given what you know about the kind of work I do.” He paused. “Is there a problem here?”
“Nope,” she said quickly. Probably too quickly. The problem was that, after a month in Eclipse Bay, she had allowed herself to let down her guard. She had begun to assume that she was safe. She tapped a forefinger gently on the table and tried to decide how to proceed. “Was it easy to find out about my previous employment?”
Jack made a small, somewhat apologetic motion with his hand. “I had a lot of data to work with. Your name. Your profession. The fact that you were from California. Your car’s license plates.”
She reminded herself that she had not been trying to hide from him. If Kendall Moseley was looking for her, which seemed unlikely, he would be forced to conduct a search from the Cassidy Springs end. She was quite certain she had left no clues to her destination when she fled that town in the dead of night. She hadn’t even known herself where she was going. She had gotten behind the wheel and started driving.
But they said that you could find anyone these days, thanks to the Internet.
“Did you, by any chance, contact the Cassidy Springs Wellness Spa to ask about me?” she said very carefully.
“No,” Jack said.
She allowed herself to start breathing again.
He continued to watch her with a shadowed expression. He was waiting for an explanation but it was clear that he was not going to demand one. She did not intend to provide one. It would not be right to drag him into the Kendall Moseley situation. There was nothing he could do about it. In any event, if necessary, she could take care of herself.
“The thing is, I left the spa without giving any notice because of a conflict with my boss,” she said. “It’s a long story but the upshot is that I’m pretty sure my former employer would not give me a good reference.”
That was certainly true, as far as it went.
“I understand,” Jack said.
She eyed him uncertainly. “You do?”
“I’ve had a few professional conflicts myself. Not everyone appreciates my work.”
“But you do great work,” she said. “You solve old murders. Who could possibly object?”
“Believe me, there are always people who are not thrilled when I start digging up the past.”
“I see.” She considered that briefly. “I hadn’t
thought about it from that angle. I can see that an investigation into a decades-old crime could disrupt the lives of those connected with the crime.”
“Local law enforcement isn’t always happy, either.”
“Because you make them look bad?”
“Sometimes,” Jack said. “Let’s just say that, before I agree to accept a case, I try to make certain that my client is prepared for whatever answers I come up with. That’s the most difficult aspect of a case for me, the part that I often get wrong.”
“Trying to decide if the client can handle the answers?”
Jack turned his hands palms-up. “I’m very good at finding answers because, as you say, I can see links between facts. But old crimes have a tendency to send long shock waves down into the present. I’ve been surprised by the reactions of my clients often enough to know that I don’t excel at reading them—not until it’s too late.”
“Probably because, when they hire you, they don’t have any way of knowing how they’ll react to the truth themselves.”
Jack pondered that for a moment. “You’re right. It’s one thing to want to find out who murdered someone you loved a couple of decades ago. It’s another thing altogether to discover that the killer was one of your own relatives or the person you later married or the neighbor across the street.”
She shivered. “I think I see why your cases sometimes end badly.”
“About those clients you used to work with at the spa. Can I assume they were all yogurt-and-yoga types?”
“A lot of them fit that description but while I was employed there we started to pick up some corporate business as well. Cassidy Springs is close to Silicon Valley. The intense twenty-four-seven work ethic in the tech world leads to a lot of stress, and that, in turn, creates a ready-made clientele for people who specialize in reducing stress.”
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