Elizabeth Basque - Medium Mysteries 01 - Echo Park (2 page)

Oh, God,
I thought, looking up to Him or Her for my own needed approval, which I received. It was then that I took Julie’s hand.

And felt immediate terror.

Chapter Two

Our hands clasped, I saw the dream through Julie’s eyes:

The mother and daughter scurry to the back of the house, but they still look around for anyone watching. The girl sets her backpack on the ground and fumbles inside a zip-pocket.

“
Hurry,” says the mother.

“
I am,” the daughter replies. The mother is almost at the point of hyperventilation, and so the daughter takes a deep breath, like she has so many times before, and does her best to remain calm.
We’ll get through this
, the daughter thinks to herself, looking up at her mother with mixed emotions. Resentment, apathy. And still, a little love for the woman she’s trying to save. Again.

The girl brings out a bobby pin, bites the plastic-coated tip off one side, and bends it midway. She studies the back door, which has no deadbolt. Just a regular lock on the knob.

The mother nervously peeks around the side of the house. “What are you doing? Hurry!”

The girl lifts the bobby pin to the doorknob. She’s shaking though, and covers this hand with her other one, so as to steady it. She inserts the bent side of the pin, listening. She turns the bobby pin this way and that. Can’t get it picked. There, almost, but not quite.

“Dammit!” The girl pulls the bobby pin out and starts all over. The girl now senses something, or someone, and fights panic. She’s desperate now. Her mother is scared in the logical, self-preservation fashion. The girl, however, can see, sense…
he really is coming.

The mother lights a cigarette, a stupid move. “Mom…”

But the mother shoves the girl a little. “What’s taking you so long?”

“
I’m trying! Put your smoke out. It attracts attention.” The girl looks up, serious, to her mother. “I think we should get out of here,” she whispers, and reaches for her backpack.

“
No! Break a window if you have to.”

“
Mom.” The girl’s still trying to be calm, but she can feel him now. She looks at her mother as if her mother is the child. “If we break a window, he’ll know for sure that we’re here.”

Now the girl silently peeks out into the street. Shivers. “We gotta go. We’re out of time. Come on.” She starts pulling her mother toward a nearby alley.

The mother viciously shrugs off her daughter’s grip. “No! Where are we going to go?”

“
I don’t know,” the daughter hisses, “but
please
, Mom, we have to—“

The daughter’s vision shifts from her mother to behind her mother, eyes wide. She turns to run…

I let go of Julie’s hand and the details of the dream receded.

“Okay, that was about as real as it gets without actually being there in the flesh,” I said.

She covered her tear-streaked face with both hands and said, “Welcome to my nightmare.” She couldn’t even look at me.

It had only taken a moment, but it was a powerful vision. For sure, it was not just a bad nightmare. I felt Julie’s pain. I felt the mother’s and child’s fear. I wanted to know what happened next, but that was it. I held onto the vision, staying in it as long as I could, remembering details like the psychic bystander I was.

I reached for the Kleenex box and handed it to Julie. “How long have you been having these dreams?” I asked after a moment, to let her gather her composure. This happened a lot, the breakdown of clients into my arms, so to speak. I patted her shoulder in sympathy, and also to see if I could score any more psychic details from the physical contact.

I moved off while Julie blew her dripping nose. She was upset, but now much more at ease with me. That happened a lot. When I connected like I’d just done, auras seemed to blend, and a sense of trust developed.

“
A couple of months now,” Julie said miserably.

I nodded, still holding onto what images I could. Julie calmed down a little. I didn’t blame her for crying, though. That was some vision. It was hard, I supposed, for a young woman like Julie to carry a weight like that on her normally fun-loving heart.

“Do you have any idea of who they might be?” I asked, although I was sure she would have told me, or I would have sensed it. Because there
was
something more to this…much more.

She shook her head. “No. Do you?”

I was silent for a moment. I didn’t want to scare Julie off, but I felt she had a right to know. I downed a couple of gulps of my special coffee.

“
What is it?” Julie asked. “You saw something I didn’t. I can tell.”

Of course you can, you psychic newbie
, I thought to myself. But I smiled, in spite of everything.

“
You can tell me,” Julie pleaded. “Please. Are they dead?”

“
Probably. But Julie, don’t you feel anything else?”

Her face went blank. “Like what?”

“Like the fact that you’re very closely connected to them. Why else would you be having these dreams?”

Chapter Three

The one place that Mack never followed me was the bathroom. Thank God. He was at least that much of a gentleman ghost. He cursed, though, as I slammed the door in his face and chuckled.

I had assured Julie it wasn’t her fault if she didn’t understand or know the link between herself and the mother and daughter in her dreams. She had seemed somewhat appeased and she relaxed a bit. I told her to go home as I was going to do some research.

After she’d left with the gifted coffee mug with my number printed on it, I’d spent a good portion of the day on my laptop. I’d looked at all the
LA Times
obits and crime reports I could find over the last three months for Echo Park. I finally found them.

It was a shame that news of their deaths was so hard to find. Not like they were anyone important, I thought to myself. Not to the world, anyway. Just an unlucky homeless woman and her unlucky daughter gunned down in the back of a house, right here in Echo Park. Not far from my apartment, actually.

I lived in a great apartment on a hill that overlooked Los Feliz Avenue, in the trendy section of Echo Park, amid expensive renovated homes, some of them built seventy or eighty years ago. It was a nice neighborhood, filled with colorful people from all venues of life and culture. People both living
and
dead. Not many could see the dead, but I could, and they were as interesting as the living, if not more. Ah, such was my destiny to be a resident of such a ghost-filled neighborhood. Did none of them want to go Home?

But back to the mother and daughter. They’d been killed for unknown reasons in the back of a home, just a few blocks away. But down the hill.
Way down.

I got the address and walked over to see for myself. There wasn’t much left, as far as energy and auras went. The home was now up for sale, but that was no surprise. People didn’t like to live in homes where murders had taken place. Most people, anyhow.

Only the slightest trace of police chalk now remained; if it had rained at all in the last couple of months, that would have been gone, too.

I was looking for more, though. Sometimes, the dead chose
not
to leave. I knew many of them, from both my work and my magnetism as a Medium. The dead often needed someone to talk to, and I got to be that person a
lot
.

There, at the home where the murders had taken place, I let myself into the back via a newer gate, and wandered around to the rear of the place, trying to look interested like a prospective buyer would, in case anyone was watching. I found the door the girl had been trying to unlock, and touched it. Nothing now. Not one echo of the past. I peeked around front, as I’d seen both the mother and daughter do in the vision.
Nada.

Finally, I closed my eyes, capturing echoes of their movements to my memory. I stood in the place where the daughter had stood  when she was trying to get her mom away, and when her eyes had shifted from her mother’s to those I presumed were the killer’s. I felt coldness, and a twinge of fear when her viewpoint shifted. I did feel a subtle presence here. Perhaps more than that, I felt…a plea for help.

However, the spirit of the girl wasn’t there. Not then, anyway.

I hoofed it back up the hill to my apartment, huffing and puffing near the top. Damn, I smoked way too much these days to go up and down the famous stairways of Echo Park. So much for my shortcut. I should have taken the street route, and my
car
.

Back at home again, and still thankful for the solitary peace I relished, I did some more research as my lungs released a startling cigarette cough that I had always found so unattractive in others. Now
I
was doing it.
Damn.

I discovered that Julie was only about eight years older than the girl, and about eight years younger than the mother. Julie had sworn that she had no idea who they were, and I believed her. She
didn’t
know. At least consciously. But there was a connection; I could feel it with every psychic bone in my body. The three had never been neighbors, and had never had gone to the same schools. The fact that Julie lived about a mile from their last known address was of no help. Echo Park was a crowded place.

But I was into it now. There was no backpedaling for this mystery. Too late for that. Full speed ahead…

So, that’s where Mack found me, hunched over my laptop in the living room.

“
Ahhh,” he said, seated next to me. “You’ve got some real wahk.”

I jumped. “Quit sneaking up on me. I’m working.”

“Thought it was yuh day off,” he grinned.

“
It was. Still is.”

“
Hahf-ahst suhfin’ on the web?”

“
No. Real work. Told ya.”

“
The mother and daughter?”

I stopped typing. “How did you know that?”

“I knew you’d come upon it, sometime. Can I help?”

“
Maybe you can.” I tried to make my voice pleasant. “What do you know?”

“
Much mah than a bazo like you,” he said. A “bazo” was Boston slang for a boozer. Ah, well. Maybe I
was
a bazo. Maybe just slightly bazo. One could only hope.

“
Be serious,” I snapped. “I’ve been working on this all day and have come up with nothing except for the fact that they’re dead.”

“
Well, I believe I can help yah out,” he continued, taking a seat next to me. Except he didn’t really sit, he just put himself into a sitting position and hovered a couple of inches above the couch. “But thah’s this little bahgin we have…”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I nevah kid about serious things.”

“
The poker party. You want your damned ghost poker party.”

Mack nodded. “You owe me, hon. An’ a cahd pahty is just what this place needs. You could do with a little livening up, too. You’ve been in a rut lately.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” I shot back. “This is a psychic case, Mack. Hearts and souls are at stake.”

“
Make me the pahty and I’ll tell you what I know.” Mack had a devilish grin, one that had probably turned all the girls’ heads back in the day, and he tried to use it on me now. He was charming when he wanted to be, sullen when he didn’t.

“
I can’t believe I’m bargaining with a ghost,” I muttered, turning off my laptop.

“
Trust me. You’ll be happy with this bahgin,” Mack said. “I know where the little gal is.”

That stopped me cold. I glanced at him for more information, but Mack was leaning back, hands clasped behind his neck, peering up to the ceiling.

“Where is she?”

“
Hiding,” he answered calmly.

“
Can you bring her here? Or take me to her?”

“
Yup. Can you give me a pokah pahty?”

Sometimes, Mack was fun to have around when I had nothing to do, and no one to talk to. But just now, he was irritating as hell. He had nothing to lose, after all. He was bound to this earthly plain for reasons I still didn’t understand—which was rare—but I, on the other hand, had work to do. This case was already under my skin, and I failed to see the humor that Mack so enjoyed by dangling this carrot in front of my eyes.

I slammed my laptop closed, and got up. “I know several exorcists, Mack,” I mildly threatened as I made my way into the kitchen and set about making a dry vodka martini.

Like magic, Mack appeared by my side. “I’m sure you do,” he countered, “but I have scared off one or two in my day, ones who mistook me for a poltergeist, when I ain’t nothing of the kind. I sent them packing, mah deah.”