The Witch and the Gentleman (3 page)

“
That must have been hard.”

Peter looked at me. “You have no idea. Yes, she put on a brave face. Even organized a charity in Penny’s name and to help other parents of murdered children. But at home, away from the support of the people who organized walkathons and spread the message across social media, Isabelle was lost.”

I felt that sense of “lost” and loss, so much so now that I suspected his wife was nearby. Never before had I sensed the departed. Not like this. Hell, my skin was tingling with static electricity. Then again, my powers had continued to grow, and hadn’t my vampire friend fed from me just the night before?
She had.
We had had drinks at The Ivy. We had seen Tom Cruise and his daughter having dinner. So had everyone else. God, I would hate to be a celebrity.

Afterward, back at my apartment, after chatting and drinking more wine, I had rolled up my sleeve, sat back on my own couch and closed my eyes as my new friend had drawn her sharpened nail over a vein in my wrist. Yes, the pain had been intense. At first. I always gasped, and last night was no different.

My friend didn’t sink her teeth into me. In fact, my friend and I had joked about the TV vampires with their elongated teeth. Vampires, as far as I knew—and my friend would be an expert—didn’t have elongated teeth. Why would they? It wasn’t very hard for such a powerful creature to puncture the skin and drink, especially with those freakish nails they had.

Anyway, I had sat back and relished the sensation of my friend drinking from my wrist. She never liked me looking at her while she fed, and I didn’t blame her. She was a mom, after all. A respected private eye and one-time federal agent. She didn’t want to be seen as a monster. Again, I didn’t blame her. But, of course, she
was
a monster. A beautiful monster.

Our bloodletting sessions were not sexual. Not like my sessions with Victor. No, Sam and I were friends only, and, well, we didn’t swing that way. With that established, our bond was pretty tight. So tight that she and I had almost instantly become telepathically bonded. The bond was growing stronger, too. Sometimes, I caught whiffs of her thoughts from great distances. Up close was different. Up close, we might as well be in each other’s minds.

Yes, last night had been another bloodletting. Samantha Moon had drunk deeply from me, so much so that I’d actually felt weak. The wound on my wrist had healed instantly, as soon as she’d pulled away. Sam had looked away shyly, as she always did, her face delicately flushed, my blood on her lips. She never licked her lips in front of me. She always turned away to do that. My friend was an adorable monster. And a fastidious feeder. She never left my apartment looking like a crime scene. I appreciated that.

So, it was of no great surprise that I was certain I could feel his wife’s pain. Certain, because I knew she was in the room with us now.

*  *  *

“
Your wife’s name was Isabelle,” I said.

Peter nodded and calmly wiped his eyes. It was late evening and the big house was quiet. Correction, not quite. I heard the old place settling, creaking here and there. Nothing supernatural. At least, I didn’t think so.

“I feel her sadness,” I said.

He kept nodding and kept wiping his eyes. Except he wasn’t able to stay on top of the wiping, and tears spilled down his cheeks.

My skin prickled. I felt cold. I wasn’t good enough at this yet to slip inside her thoughts, to hear her, or even to pick up any symbolism she might be using to reach me. I just heard her name, and felt her sadness.

“
I’m not a medium,” I said. “I’m not very good at this, but your wife is here with us now and she is very, very sad.”

I could have made up all of this. Her name would have been easy enough to find. Telling him his wife was here would have been easy enough to say. Except...

“You know she’s here, don’t you?” I asked.

He nodded and finally gave up wiping his tears. His startling blue eyes were now red-rimmed. “I’ve seen her, standing behind you over by the fireplace. I’ve seen her twice. I...I thought I was going crazy.”

“You’re not going crazy,” I said. “We are not alone.”

He nodded, took in some air, excused himself politely, and left the room. I heard him creak through the big home and shut himself into another room. What came next I would remember for the rest of my life. Deep, wracking, shuddering sobs radiated through the entire house and seemed to come up through the floorboards themselves. Up through my feet and legs, they completely took hold of me.

But the sobs lasted for only twenty or thirty seconds. Just as quickly as they had started, they stopped. I heard water running, and a few minutes after that, Peter appeared at the arched doorway. That the man had just produced some the loudest, most gut-wrenching sounds I’d ever heard, one would never guess. He looked calm...although mostly, he looked empty.

He said, “I can show you Penny’s room now, if you’d like.”

Chapter Six

He led me up a spiral staircase.

It was my first spiral staircase. I somehow managed to hide my excitement; after all, saying “Whee!” at a time like this didn’t seem appropriate.

The stairs led to an upstairs covered with dark mahogany walls and deeply cushioned floors. Once again, I just wanted to take off my shoes and run up and down the hallway on the plush carpeting, which, I suspected, little Penny had done often.

Although I felt an elder and younger presence in the house, neither Peter’s mother nor daughter had come through. Not the way Isabelle, his wife, had.

Peter led me down the hallway and past a few generations of family portraits. I had a sense of old money. A sense of his family doing some great things...and not so great things, too. Someone in his family tree had been a shyster who’d ripped people off. Or maybe I was misinterpreting my feelings. It was easy to do sometimes.

Either way, I got good vibes from Peter himself. I hadn’t asked what he did for a living, and I didn’t look into it, but I saw money around him. I saw stacks of money, and I suspected he was in banking. Very high up in banking, too. My guess would be a vice president of a big bank. The family business, I suspected, was banking.

As I walked past a particularly old portrait, of a man who stared down with snake-like eyes at the camera, and wearing a bowler hat, I knew that not all of the Lauries were good people. I shivered as I walked past the picture.

Down the long hallway—and past an enormous study with a leather-tooled surfaced desk and a chair fit for a king—or at least a vice president of a bank—we soon came upon a row of bedrooms. Six to be exact. Damn big house, although not as big as that island resort I’d had the displeasure of nearly dying in. Or, rather, of being possessed in.

But that was another story.

At one such door, Peter stopped, looked at the handle for a heartbeat or two, then reached for it, turned it and pushed open the door. It swung open silently enough, only squeaking when it reached the end of its arc.

“This was Penny’s room,” he said, stepping aside and allowing me to enter ahead of him.

As I did so, I got a psychic hit, or a
knowing,
as I called it. “You don’t come in here very often.”

“
Only a few times, and not for a long time,” he said behind me. Peter no longer seemed surprised by my
knowings
; at least, he didn’t question them anymore.

The room was enormous, and dusty. I suspected that Peter had instructed even the maids to stay away. As I stepped into the dark room, he flipped on the lights. Dust motes swirled. I left actual footprints along what had would have been a beautifully polished hickory floor.

The room was a typical girl’s room...a little rich girl’s room, actually. There were posters on the wall: cartoon characters, Justin Bieber looking quite young and intense, and horses. Lots of horses. The poster closest to me was slightly faded along its edges. Rust from the thumbtacks had stained the corners a little. In the center of the room was a small bed for a small girl, with lots and lots of floor space around it. A big rug covered some of it and I had an image of a little girl playing with her dolls and reading and even talking on a cell phone, right here on the floor, on the rug. I even had an image of her sleeping on the rug...with her mom. A sort of campout in upscale sleeping bags that had never been used for outdoor camping, only slumber parties. I kept these impressions to myself.

After all, Peter didn’t seem to be holding up very well and, as I stood in the center of the room, soaking it in, absorbing the energies, reading the energies, and, in essence, tuning into another world, another place, hell, even another time, Peter stayed back by the door, looking away, looking down the hallway. Mostly, he looked miserable and like he wished he had never opened her bedroom door and looked inside.

The daughter could have been here, or not. I did sense a younger energy nearby, but it was vague. It could be what some psychics called
residual energy
. In effect, I could be sensing her
past
energy, not her present energy. Not all spirits came back. Not all spirits hung around. Many moved on, and if some of my psychic friends were correct, many were re-born as well, into other bodies, other places, perhaps even other times.

It was, of course, all a big mystery to me. And yet, the mysteries were trickling down to me in dribs and drabs. The more Samantha Moon drank from me, the keener I got as a psychic.

I was becoming quite adept at remote viewing. In fact, I was scarily adept at it, so good that I might as well have been in the room with the other person. But that was only if I was “tuned into” them, like I had been when I had Peter on the phone.

I’d never tuned in to the dead. Hell, I’d never even tried. I didn’t know where to begin, truth be known, but I had some ideas.

As Peter continued standing near the doorway, dealing with his hurt and loss as best as he could, I moved through the big room. A busy room, too. Stuffed animals crowded under the window, a dollhouse that was as big as my bathroom stood in one corner, and dressers overflowing with trinkets collected from a short life. But in the corner closest to the bed was something different. A painter’s easel.

“
Your daughter painted?” I asked.

Peter didn’t look into the room, instead he continued looking down the hall. He said, “She...she wanted to be an artist.”

I nodded, although he didn’t see me nod, and headed over to the corner of the room with the easel. Next to the easel was a stack of her paintings. The girl had been good, and seemed to prefer watercolor. She was talented like her grandmother. I knelt down and flipped through the paintings. They were of dogs, all of them. There was Goofy, Pluto, Doug the talking dog from
Up
, Snoopy, Marmaduke, Astro from
The Jetsons
, and one of Dino from
The Flintstones
, although Dino didn’t technically count as a dog. Who was I to argue with the logic of a ten year old?

“
I take it you have a dog,” I said.

Peter shook his head, still looking away. “Sparky went missing on the same day as Penny.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I doubted words would help, anyway. Peter was long gone, and simple platitudes would have fallen on deaf ears. He needed answers, real answers. Not sympathy.

I continued flipping through the paintings until I found a picture of a small, brown-haired little pooch, with the word “Sparky” on his collar. As I looked at it, I got a flash of the little dog barking hysterically, angrily.

A flash of a little girl getting into a car, and of a man’s voice telling her it would be okay. A pleasant voice. A soothing voice.

A flash of the dog jumping in as well.

I got another flash, one that was so horrible that I gasped.
Sweet Jesus,
I thought.

When I had gotten some control of myself, I said, “Would you mind if I took the painting of Sparky home with me?”

“Will it help you find my daughter’s killer?”

I looked at the painting again as I heard the pleasant voice telling the girl over and over again that it would be okay, to come on in,
it’ll be okay
.

“
Yes,” I said. “I think it will.”

“
Then take it,” said Peter. “It’s yours.”

I nodded and carefully pulled it out from behind the others. The paper canvas was thick, and had probably been her grandmother’s art supplies. With the painting now tucked under one arm, Peter showed me out of the room. As he led me back down the carpeted hallway, we came across something unexpected.

It was a book sitting in the middle of the hallway.

Right there on the cushioned carpet, in a spot that both Peter and I had recently walked over. There had, of course, been no book lying there, just minutes earlier.

“How odd,” said Peter, reaching down. He picked it up and examined it, holding it for me to see. It was an old book but not ancient. My guess, from the 60s or 70s. Maybe earlier. The tattered dust jacket read:
Wiccan: A Way of Life.
“Did you see this book here before?” he asked.