Mind Tricks (3 page)

As was people’s gullibility.

Speaking of those who used others’
gullibility…here came Mickey’s pretty neighbor along the path that ran between
their houses. She had tidied up a little since he’d seen her this morning, but
she still had a disheveled look about her, as if she couldn’t be bothered with
putting much effort into her appearance. Of course, she did work with animals
all day. But their owners might have preferred to see someone who looked more
professional. Her shirt was half untucked from her jeans, and her blond hair
was doing a good job of escaping its ponytail. But her slightly messy
appearance was offset by her straight shoulders and that calm she always had
wrapped around her like a shield. What would happen when that shield dropped a
bit, showing more of the woman inside?

Emma’s stride stuttered as she
looked up and saw him. But she kept coming, and when she got close enough to
speak to him without yelling, she said, “Hi.”

“Hi yourself. Did you get back to
bed after we left?” Brilliant, Jake. Talk to her about going to bed. Even a
non-psychic could tell where his mind was with that comment. At least she was
taking his thoughts off his worries about Ginny’s murder.

She shook her head. “Once the
coffee’s brewed, I’m up for the day. So…have any of your memories come back?”
Her gaze slid away as she spoke.

Ah. Rumor was moving faster than
he’d expected. “Nope. Nothing. And it’s pretty important that they do—you
know?”

Emma bit her lip, apparently
debating whether to admit that she knew of his situation. “My assistant told me
that a coworker of yours was killed last night. I’m sorry.”

Done with the niceties, she gave
him a nod of farewell and tried to circle around him, but Jake sidestepped to
intercept her.

“Me, too. She was a friend as well
as a coworker. Problem is, the police seem to believe that I killed her, but I
can’t remember almost anything of last night.”

Pushed by an evil impulse, he
deliberately took a stride closer to Emma. Her eyes widened and her chin came
up, but she didn’t move back. Gutsy.

“I’m afraid I still can’t help
you,” she told him. “What I do with animals doesn’t work on people.”

“What
do
you do with animals?”

“It’s a little hard to explain.”

Uh-huh. That was convenient.

She hadn’t finished, though. “It
basically involves tapping into the animal’s thoughts and emotions, which can
be very chaotic. The trick is translating their emotions into language the
pet’s owner will understand. And animals are like people. They can get upset by
things that aren’t really threatening. For instance, a dog may work himself
into a frenzy when a much smaller dog walks past his yard. And a person may
jump up on a chair to escape a tiny spider. Not logical reactions, but deep and
powerful reactions nonetheless. Then the owner and I discuss how to address
these issues so that the pet is happier.” She stopped and flushed. “Sorry. You
probably didn’t need to know all that.”

“Well, it’s fascinating.” Like the
Loch Ness monster, if you believed in that. Which he didn’t. “I think when we
met, you told me that you heal animals, too.” Somehow he managed to keep any
doubt out of his voice.

Why was he still talking to her
about this? He needed to get to the office, call his parents, call his lawyer
again to see if he’d heard anything new, maybe call the hypnotherapist, if
Mickey found one for him. At eight o’clock he’d go home and get some sleep. Get
lots
of sleep. He felt like a newly
minted zombie. Probably looked and smelled like one too, without a shave and a
shower this morning, though he’d managed to change into clean clothes.

At his comment about healing, she
somehow lit up from within. “That’s the best part: seeing an animal who was
hurting leave my house with much less pain.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Have you heard of healing touch,
Reiki, or qigong? Each involves the manipulation of energy areas within the
body to release tension and pain. That’s how I usually use it. It can also work
with animals who are too scared to let me into their emotions. It relaxes the
animal enough so it opens its mind to me.”

Wait a second. “You manipulate body
energy to open up thoughts?”

“Yes, essentially.”

“Could you do that to me?”

She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

He couldn’t believe he was asking
her this, much less repeating his question, but if he was ready to consult a
hypnotherapist, why not let Emma do her energy manipulation thing to him, too?
If she failed, as he pretty much expected she would, at least he’d be confirmed
in his opinion of her bogusness. If she didn’t fail… He forced himself to shove
down a rising bubble of hope. It couldn’t be this easy. And anyway, she was a
fraud. Still, he’d be an idiot to ignore the possibility that she might manage
to get something right by accident.

“Could you do that energy releasing
thing to me?” He tried to smile. “After all, I have some thoughts I need to
open up.”

• •

This time Emma did step back. She’d
had to make a conscious effort not to earlier, when he’d halfheartedly tried to
scare her, but she couldn’t stop herself now from putting some distance between
them. “What?” she repeated.

He grimaced in exasperation. “Do
the energy thing to me.”

The word
witch
, burned black with a soldering iron into her front door,
flashed through her memories. More memories tumbled forth: her garbage lit on
fire one night, pentagrams soaped onto her car windows, people crossing
themselves when they thought she wasn’t looking. She’d moved to
Maine—practical, hardheaded Maine—to escape that. And now Jake wanted to drag
her back into that life—and drag ostracism down on her again.
 

“Please,” he added, his jaw tight
with the desperation she’d seen on so many clients’ faces.

“I don’t—” She broke off her own
words. He hadn’t asked her to read his mind. If she could use energy
manipulation to free his memories, then she’d be doing a good deed while she
kept her secret safe.

Plus, it’d feel good to wipe that
skepticism off Jake’s face once and for all.

Wait. She was assuming one thing.

“What if I do it,” she asked, “and
you get your memories back and you discover that you killed your coworker?”

He straightened and for a moment
seemed to loom over her as his nostrils flared. “I didn’t do it. I
know
I didn’t do it. I just need to find
something that gives me an alibi so that I can get the police off my back and
they can spend their time finding who really killed Ginny.”

She studied him, and he stared back
at her, silently daring her to disbelieve him.

She exhaled softly. All right. He
thought he was telling the truth—that he didn’t do it. His body practically
radiated conviction. If she touched him now and looked in his head, she was
sure she’d see him believing in his innocence.

Of course, that didn’t mean he
hadn’t murdered Ginny last night—it just meant he couldn’t remember doing it.

She’d be a twit to put herself in
such a vulnerable position.

He shoved his hand through his
hair, his sudden anger gone, replaced by exhaustion. “I swear, I didn’t do it,”
he repeated.

On the other hand, Mickey had been
a true friend to her ever since she’d moved in next door. Really, her one true
friend. Even after eighteen months here, most of her relationships were
professional ones. Mickey was the only one who’d regularly asked her to go out
for drinks at the Wild Rover, where they both ogled hunky men and laughed at
the sunburned tourists, and who would drop by without calling first. She owed
Mickey far more than one energy healing of his nephew could repay, but it would
be at least some kind of effort toward balancing out the debt.

Anyway, Ian was at home. She
wouldn’t be alone with Jake.

She sighed, knowing she’d already
made up her mind. The bottom line was simple: Jake needed her help.

And when he looked at her with his
eyes so dark they were almost black, no sneer visible on his drawn face, she
had the silly urge to give him whatever he needed.

She wheeled around and headed for
her house. When she didn’t hear him following her, she turned back and
beckoned. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

When Emma stepped onto her lawn,
she saw that Ian’s car was no longer in her driveway.

Um, not good.

She whipped a glance over her
shoulder. Jake was just emerging from the thin line of woods between her house
and Mickey’s. He tripped over a tree root and stumbled, barely catching his
balance.

He didn’t
look
dangerous. He looked asleep on his feet.

Better safe than sorry, though. As
she headed for the back door, she unsnapped Brutus from the leash line. The big
black dog wagged his tail furiously, apparently forgiving her for quashing his
escape attempt that morning.

“This guy has turned into a regular
Houdini,” she told Jake. “Ian and I decided that since he’s managed to get out
of three different kennels, we’re going to alternate between keeping him on the
leash line and in the house.”

No need to tell Jake that she and
Ian had discussed having Brutus inside only at night. But a big dog in the
house might dissuade Jake from any hasty actions if he discovered that he had
killed Ginny Lamberton.

“Makes sense,” Jake said, but his
tone was a bit dry.

Feeling her cheeks heat, Emma
opened the back door and gestured for Jake to precede her. Brutus tried to
charge inside at the same time, leading to a tangle of dog and legs. Not one to
miss any opportunity, Brutus shoved his muzzle into Jake’s crotch.

“Wow, what a greeting.” Jake pushed
the dog’s head away and squeezed through into the kitchen. “The UPS men must
love delivering packages to you.”

“I’m sure they’ll learn to stop at
the end of the driveway and honk.” Emma shut the back door behind her and waved
Jake toward the dining room. “We’ll work in there.”

Brutus had already torn out of the
kitchen, thrilled to investigate new rooms and new smells. He’d been in the
dining room/exam room before, so he barely paused to give the table a sniff
before dashing into the hallway and up the stairs. His toenails clicked on the
hardwood floors above as he methodically made his way through each of the three
bedrooms.

When she entered the dining room,
Jake was staring at the stainless-steel-sheathed tabletop. He turned to her.
“One: I don’t think I’m going to fit on that. Two: It looks really cold.”

“It’s not cold.” But he was
right—he wasn’t going to fit on the table. His head or his feet—or maybe both,
she thought, sizing him up—were going to hang over the edge. Hardly a
comfortable situation, and she needed him to be physically at ease for her to
have any hope of loosening his blocked memories.

“Maybe the couch will work,” she
said, crossing the hallway to the living room. Nope—the couch was too short, as
well.

She took a deep breath, conscious
of Jake standing close behind her. “I have a single bed in one of the guest
rooms upstairs.”

“Hey, this is your show. Whatever
you want to do is fine with me.”

This
is your show.
A subtle dig at her? Instead of going up the stairs, she
turned on him and braced her hands on her hips. “We have to get one thing
straight. If you go into this believing with all your might that there’s no way
I can help you, then I can’t. You have more mental power over yourself than
I’ll ever have. Hope and faith are fifty percent of healing. Pessimism prolongs
sickness.”

“What about you?” he asked. “You
don’t seem totally confident this is going to work. That isn’t helping my
confidence levels any.”

He had a point. “I’ve never done
energy work on a person before,” she admitted. And it had been a long time
since she’d deliberately gone into a person’s thoughts. Almost two years, ever
since she’d been run out of Maryland. She’d limited herself to pets ever since.

Looking back, she knew she should
have limited herself to pets long ago—right after Trisha killed herself. But
she’d been young and stupid and convinced that people who did bad things shouldn’t
get away with it. All that she had to show for that attitude was a dead best
friend, a town full of people in Maryland who thought she was a witch, and a
very limited social life here in Maine, where she’d come to lick her wounds.

She started up the stairs,
motioning for him to follow her. The sound of his footsteps on the treads
echoed in the tiny stairwell and through her body, shaking loose a realization
she wished she could stuff back into a dark corner: Jake was the only
attractive man who’d ever come up here with her.

Scratch that: the only man,
attractive or no.

But that wasn’t so odd, right?
She’d been busy putting together a business, putting down some roots.

Sure. Keep on telling yourself
that, Emma.

They reached the second floor, and
she turned down the hall, walking past the half-open door to her bedroom.

Her plan for Jake was simple. For
safety’s sake—okay, and because she was curious—she’d look into Jake’s memories
to see what had happened last night, and then she’d massage his energy flow to
let his memories come back to him naturally.

Well, she’d let his memories come
back to him naturally if she saw that he
hadn’t
killed Ginny. If he had, she’d pretend to do the energy healing, tell him it
hadn’t worked, and then get him the hell out of her house.

When she pushed open the door to
the smaller of the two guest rooms, Jake chortled. His eyes crinkled in a way
that made her knees go weak even as indignation straightened her spine.