Third Eye Watch (A Serena Shaw Mystery) (4 page)

Double Whoa! Dad too?

“Do you want to come again tomorrow?” Mom asked. Serena looked at her.

“I need to get my hair done tomorrow too, but I can do it earlier in the day” “What is that girl thinking about?” “Why is she staring at me”?

Serena’s head spun and she blinked, feeling close to hysteria.

“Serena, are you listening,” her mom persisted.

“What mom?”

“Are you coming to dinner tomorrow?”

“No, no. Not tomorrow, I’m errr I’m having dinner with uh Nicole”. She lied, saying the first name that came to mind.

“Oh Nicole? I haven’t seen her forever. Tell her I said hi,” her mom said.

Her mom kept talking, but Serena got up and went into the kitchen, turning on the faucet and drinking cold water directly from it.

Then she let the water get bearably hot, and tilted the faucet up, letting the hot water freshen her wilting face. Drying her face with a paper towel, she went back to the couch and cuddled up to her mom who held Serena close and kissed the bump on her forehead gently.
Moms are like that, nosy one minute, loving the other.

“Ok, you should leave now, it’s getting dark and with the snow, the drive will take some time.”
There she goes, OCD’ing.

Goodbyes can take anywhere from thirty to fifty minutes in their home; but the cold weather helped in abbreviating the number of times “bye, love you” was said today.
Serena hugged and kissed her parent's goodnight one more time, and then hurried to her car, turning on the heater full blast before slowly easing off the snowy driveway.

The police cruiser followed close behind.

Tax dollars at work.

An hour and a half later - the roads were worse - she parked her car and walked into the deserted lobby of her apartment building. The elevator deposited her on the ninth floor and Serena glanced at Sofia’s door with sadness for a long moment before opening her door and entering.

She threw the deadbolt, and then pulled up one of the end tables and set it in front of the door, then eyed the front door before heading to her bedroom.

Just in case.

xxxx

Serena binge-watched
House of Cards - Season Four
until four am and then fell into a restless sleep. She dreamed of two muscular men laughing loudly, their gold teeth glinting Danny Devito’s had in
Home Alone
. One held her arms behind her back, while another stood in front of her with a letter opener, ready to stab her with it.

She awoke with a start. A quick check of the time on her phone showed she had barely slept for two hours. She forced herself to remain in bed and closed her eyes, eventually falling asleep again, and not waking up until noon the following day.

Several text messages awaited her response; her brother wanted to know why she hadn’t called last night; her mom making sure Serena was ok, and a girlfriend asked if they were still on for their weekly Saturday afternoon gym routine.

But she wasn’t up for sweating it out today; her bruised butt needed more couch-time. So she texted her girlfriend that she was going to visit her parents, told her mom she was fine, and told her brother she had tried calling him, but he hadn’t answered.
I’m getting really good at lying to everyone in my life.

She spent the afternoon cleaning her mini apartment, thinking the dust mites didn’t stand a chance against the dominant clean-freak genes she had inherited from mamma hound. Later, she ordered pizza and collapsed in front of the television for another marathon session of House of Cards.

Serena spent Sunday the same way, watching TV, Law & Order reruns this time, but also chatting with her brother, her parents, and a few of her girlfriends. Then she ate leftover pizza and went to bed early; her bruised body felt better from the couch-time but the buzzing in her head hadn’t diminished an iota.

xxxx

The next day, she requested an emergency appointment with her primary physician, who upon hearing about her head injury didn’t need to be convinced to order a battery of tests; She underwent X-Rays, CT Scan, and even an MRI. While she was in the physician’s office, she started in surprise when she heard his thoughts too. Fortunately, his thoughts were genuinely focused on ensuring her well-being.

A week after Sofia’s disappearance, the
Detroit Free Press
ran a human-interest story about Sofia’s disappearance. Citing an anonymous source from within the police department, the reporter shared that the police had no clues or leads.

“Sofia,” wrote the reporter dramatically, “had simply vanished into thin air!”

After that,
“Where in the world was Sofia”
, became a daily discussion topic on various crime shows across the nation, with experts pontificating on what could have happened.

Serena had a vested interest in the topic, and religiously watched all the shows that talked about Sofia’s disappearance.

Ten weeks later, on the Sunday morning
Crime in the D
talk show, a former district attorney talked about coyotes or human smugglers who were paid enormous sums of money to smuggle young girls into the United States. These girls, he said, were either kidnapped or promised jobs in America; and were primarily from Eastern Europe and Asia. Upon arriving in the United States, they were forced to work as prostitutes in hotels and strip clubs, their illegal status, lack of funds, and fear of being hurt or killed, preventing them from leaving or seeking help from the police.

“Human trafficking is a big business,” he proclaimed, “and it is happening right here in our backyards.”

By now, it had been three months since Sofia’s disappearance, and the same Detroit Free Press reporter who had done the human-interest story, followed up with another three-page write-up, once again citing his anonymous source within the Detroit Police Department. He stated that an organized crime unit was active in the area and that a half a dozen young women had been found dead in the past two years; they were all Jane Doe’s, with no family or friends having come forward to claim their bodies.

The reporter was invited on the
Crime in the D
show, where he proceeded to share photographs of three women who had in the past two years gone missing and found dead in abandoned buildings and alleyways around town; the girls were all between the ages of nineteen to twenty-one, and to Serena, they all looked like Sofia.

The day after the latest
Crime in the D
episode aired, the mayor and the police commissioner of Detroit held a joint press conference to allay public fear and to assure the fine citizens of Metro Detroit that the police were working to ensure their safety. They blasted the media for “fear-mongering”; making up sensational headlines and stories which lacked proof, and told them to stop preying on the anxieties of citizens just to gain “air-time.”

The mayor has a point. The media is scaring the living daylights out of me.
When she drove, she kept a careful eye on her rear view mirror, and took evasive measures (which she had learned from a decade of reading crime novels); taking unplanned exits or taking different routes to and from work, so as to shake off any crime lords following her. She kept expecting men to jump out of a car and kidnap her off the streets, in broad daylight, never mind that the streets around her were now packed with Christmas shoppers.
Soon thereafter, Serena stopped watching the news, and stopped buying the Detroit Free Press. The apartment next door had been rented again, this time to a same-sex couple in their twenties;  “What is this country coming to?” exclaimed the super.
Judgmental much, are we?

The doctor’s office had called; all tests had come back normal, and medically speaking, all was well with Serena’s head.

CHANGED FOREVER

But the night Sofia had disappeared; Serena’s life had also changed forever. The buzzing in her head had started after it had met the edge of the dresser. The very next night, she had begun receiving thoughts, starting with the cops who were guarding her, and those of her parents over dinner the same evening.

Over the next few days, she had received thoughts from her coworkers, random people she passed in the supermarket, the super, and the male masseuse to whom Serena had been a loyal customer for over two years. That had been her last massage with him; going forward she would only go to female masseuses’, she had decided after she had heard his perverted thoughts.

And after weeks of research, she learned that what she was experiencing was called
visual telepathic perception,
a condition in which thoughts came to people. She didn’t find any instances of people suddenly acquiring VTP; most had been born with it.
But hey, who am I to complain if God suddenly decided that I should now have VTP.

Over the next few weeks, Serena identified a pattern to her abilities. She heard thoughts when people made eye contact with her. No thoughts transmitted to her if they were turned away, or if they weren’t within a few feet away to have a face-to-face conversation with her.

She tested her hypothesis; maintaining and breaking eye contact with different people, at different venues, and at various times of the day. She validated to herself, that when she made eye contact, she heard thoughts; when she didn’t, nothing came through.

xxxx

As the days went by, Serena became an expert at talking to a point beyond people’s shoulders. She learned how to avoid eye contact altogether; that is unless she wanted or needed to hear someone’s thoughts specifically.

During a lunch outing on an unusually sunny winter day, she had discovered that her sunglasses offered a slight protection against the constant barrage of thoughts that transmitted to her.  That had given her the idea that perhaps wearing zero prescription tinted glasses indoors could produce the same results indoors, and she had gone and tried on a pair at the local mall where she made eye contact with the people around her and found that as long as the eye contact was brief, she couldn’t hear their thoughts. It was as if the glasses offered a delayed transmission, giving her a few seconds to avert her eyes when she inadvertently made eye contact with someone. 

Serena never forgot to wear her glasses around her parents. She knew they were still sexually active and the thought of accidently running into their thoughts about having sex totally freaked her out. Her mom thought the glasses were real, and told her she looked cute in them.

She had also gotten used to the buzzing in her head.  She loved having psychic powers and worried about waking up one day without them. So although the buzzing was an annoyance, she thought that as long as she could hear the buzzing, she knew that her powers were well and alive.

Serena decided to keep her psychic powers a secret. She told no one, not even her brother who was her best friend in the world.

GIRL FOUND

PRESENT DAY

Serena sat down at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, feeling as if her head would explode. She had just finished cleaning up the broken coffee cup pieces and along with it; the slideshow in her head had ended too.
She picked up the remote to turn on the television set, then thought better and left it off.

Should I call Special Agent Glennon?
She debated but then decided against it, thinking that if the body found was Sofia’s, then she would no doubt hear from Special Agent Glennon.

xxxx

“She told me she had just celebrated her eightieth birthday, but I could have sworn she was no older than sixty. She said she needed to buy a birthday gift for a friend.”

Serena was closing up, putting things away, and simultaneously talking on the phone with her brother, telling him about the elegant customer who had visited her store.

She had opened
Serena’s
only 45 days earlier. It was an eclectic, high-end gallery where she sold beautiful artisan crafts from all over the world.
She felt lightheaded with pride when people raved over her collection; the stunning Peruvian wool blankets, Turkish oils, assorted jewelry made of pure silver, silver and brass home décor items, and the vast assortment of one of a kind knickknacks and small furniture items.