“Thank you,” she mumbled.
She blotted up the last of the moisture from her eyes. An unfamiliar sensation came over her. It took her a moment to identify the feeling. She finally came up with the right words.
“This is going to sound weird,” she said, “but I feel much better now.”
“Good to know.” Drake started the car and reversed out of the parking space. “Speaking personally, I may never recover.”
She laughed again, but this time the laughter sounded right, at least to her ears. Drake flashed her a quick, wicked grin and drove out of the garage onto the street.
Houdini hopped up onto the back of Alice’s seat and bounced up and down a little, unable to contain his excitement.
“You’re such a little speed junkie,” Alice said.
Chapter 8
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THEY DROVE THROUGH THE gates of a private airfield. A sleek, unmarked jet stood ready and waiting. Drake’s overnight bag and Alice’s two suitcases were removed from the trunk of the rental and stowed aboard.
“Are we going to fly all the way to Rainshadow?” Alice asked as they walked toward the plane.
“No,” Drake said. “There’s no landing strip on the island. No strip long enough for the jet on any of the neighboring islands, either. We’ll use the jet to get as far as Cadence and take a floatplane from there to Thursday Harbor. I’ve arranged to have a company boat waiting for us there.”
“Why not take the floatplane all the way to Rainshadow? I remember seeing floats landing in the bay.”
“The last I heard from my brother is that it’s not safe to fly anywhere near the island now,” Drake said. “The energy in the atmosphere is screwing up the instruments and creates mirages that are so bad a pilot can’t rely on visual cues.”
“Why isn’t any of this information about Rainshadow in the news?”
“Because the last thing we need are a lot of curiosity seekers trying to crash through the psi-fence into the Preserve. If that happens, we’ll end up wasting valuable time rescuing trespassers instead of locating the crystals.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Alice said.
Drake escorted her up the steps into the cabin of the jet. He paused to speak briefly to the pilot and the copilot. Then he took the seat across from Alice. They fastened their seat belts.
Drake took the file he had confiscated from McCarson out of a briefcase and immediately became immersed in the contents.
Houdini tried to ride out the takeoff perched on the back of one of the seats so that he could see out the window. Alice grabbed him and held him in her lap until they were safely airborne. Then she released him. He bounded onto a seatback and gazed, enraptured, out the window.
“He likes to ride in anything that goes faster than he can,” Alice explained to Drake.
Drake did not look up from the file. “Who doesn’t?”
She smiled. There was something oddly endearing about Drake Sebastian when he was focused the way he was now. After a time he took out a pen, made a few notes, and closed the file.
“Find anything of interest?” she asked.
“Not much.” He handed her the folder. “But it’s your life. Maybe you’ll see something that looks wrong or weird.”
She opened the file and saw several photos of herself. A few had been shot while she was on stage. Those did not bother her. But most of the pictures had been taken when she was completely unaware of the camera. They sent cold chills down her spine. There were pictures of her coming and going from the various places she had lived in the past year as well as shots of her walking out of a grocery store, boarding a city bus, and sitting on a park bench, watching Houdini climb a tree.
“Geez,” she whispered, shaken. “I knew she was stalking me, but actually seeing the pictures her investigators snapped makes me feel sick to my stomach.”
“Don’t look at the photos,” Drake said quietly. “Read the file.”
She flipped through the handful of printouts with a wistful feeling. “Not much to my life, is there? No family. No permanent address after the orphanage. A bunch of different jobs. Several failed attempts at finding a husband through a professional matchmaking agency. One failed Marriage of Convenience. One MC husband dead under suspicious circumstances.” She looked up. “It’s kind of awful to see your whole life boiled down to a few pages like this.”
Drake watched her steadily through his glasses. “Did the matchmakers give you any reason for their failure to come up with a good match?”
“They were all very polite about it, but the reasons were obvious. Non-standard, high-rez talent combined with a lack of family background information was a nonstarter for most of the agencies. Boy, I sure wasted a lot of money on marriage brokers in the past few years. The few matches they did come up with didn’t work. I’ve had a lot of first dates that never got as far as a second date.”
“Count yourself lucky.”
She raised her brows. “Why is that?”
“I met someone about three years ago. We hit it off right from the start. Had a lot in common. She was also a light-talent. We registered with an agency. Lo and behold, we found out we were a near-perfect match.”
“What happened?”
“Her name was Zara Tucker, Dr. Zara Tucker. She was beautiful, brilliant, and charming, and she worked in one of the Sebastian, Inc. labs. She was the cause of the accident that made me day-blind.”
“How awful,” Alice whispered. “She must have been devastated by what happened. Is that why the two of you didn’t marry? She just couldn’t deal with the guilt of what she had done to you.”
A cold amusement edged Drake’s mouth. “Not exactly. More like she couldn’t deal with the fact that, in spite of what the matchmaking agency claimed, I decided that we were not a good match. She was furious. She grabbed an Alien artifact from the lab vault—a kind of psi-laser—and managed to fire a blast at my eyes.”
Alice caught her breath, horrified. “She was a psycho.”
“Oh, yeah. But to her credit, she hid it well.”
Alice shuddered. “Well enough to pass the matchmaking agency’s test? That’s surprising and more than a little unnerving. I’ve heard those tests are extremely accurate.”
“Harry and I conducted an investigation later. We found out that she bribed the agency consultant to rig the results of the tests. Zara was obsessed with marrying me.”
“Sounds like your perfect match and my ex had a few things in common.”
Drake surprised her by going suddenly thoughtful, as if she had made a significant observation.
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” he said. “And three of the four of us are light-talents.” He paused. “I’m assuming Fulton Whitcomb was not a light?”
“No.” Alice frowned. “You think the fact that three of the four people we’re talking about are lights means something?”
“Probably not, but coincidences always interest me.”
“What happened to Dr. Tucker?”
“When she realized that we were never going to get married, she took her own life.”
“Suicide.” Alice closed her eyes briefly and then opened them to look at Drake. “Her death was supposed to be your punishment. She wanted you to feel guilty.”
“I believe that was part of it, yes. But who knows how a mentally ill person thinks?”
“How did she kill herself?”
“One day she simply went down into the catacombs without tuned amber and started walking.”
“They say that suicide-by-catacomb happens more often than most people realize. Did she leave a note?”
“Yes.”
“Blaming you?”
“Sure.”
“Did they ever find the body?” Alice asked.