He thought that he was prepared for whatever vague analysis she came up with—prepared for anything except the possibility that she might actually be able to see into his dreams. There was only one way she could strike that close to the truth.
“I told Sam something of what went down on that last case,” he said. “He told Abby and Abby told you. So much for keeping some things private within the family.”
“You mustn’t blame Sam or Abby. Neither of them told me anything about your dreams. As for what happened on your last case, it’s no secret that you nearly got killed and that you had to swim out of an underwater cave—which does explain some of the urgency in your dream, of course. But there’s something else going on. You’re revisiting the same dreamscape again and again. My reading tells me that you’re searching for something.”
A dark chill whispered through him. “And you can help me find it?”
She smiled, her eyes filling with a wistful regret, as if she had just acknowledged to herself the loss of something she had longed to possess.
“I fix bad dreams, remember?” she said gently.
“I’m not interested in therapy. I can handle my own damn dreams.”
“Right.” She took a breath and pulled her cloak of cool, polite reserve around herself. “Now you see why I lead a very limited social life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re thinking that it’s as if I had caught a glimpse of one of your dreams, aren’t you? It felt like an invasion of privacy.”
He started to deny it but decided there wasn’t much point. “Thought crossed my mind, yeah.”
“If it’s any comfort, I can’t actually see your dreams.”
He was starting to get pissed—with himself, not with her. He was the one who had challenged her to do a fast reading on his aura. The fact that he didn’t like the results was his own fault.
“Good to know,” he said.
“There’s no need to growl at me.”
“I am not growling.”
“I know growling when I hear it,” she said. “The thing is, heavy dreams affect the aura, especially if they recur frequently and especially if the dreamer has a lot of psychic talent. What I pick up is the dreamlight energy in a person’s aura. My intuition then interprets that energy. I don’t always get it right, and it’s impossible to do an accurate analysis when I don’t have any context. But I can usually see enough to start asking the right questions. That’s where I’m at with your case.”
“I’m not your case, and I’m not here to get psychic dream counseling,” he said. “I’m here to solve a murder. You’re the client, not me.”
Anger flashed, quicksilver bright, in her eyes. In the next instant the shadows were back, veiling her secrets.
“No,” she said much too politely. “You are not my client.”
He felt as if she had just slammed a door in his face. And it was his own damn fault.
Nine
She had nobody but herself to blame for the glacial chill in the atmosphere between them, Gwen thought. She should have known better than to tell Judson the truth. She had been aware that she was rolling the dice when she described what she saw in his dreamlight energy. She had hoped that his own psychic abilities, combined with his understanding of the paranormal, would allow him to accept her talent. But she had placed a losing bet. Then she’d made the stupid mistake of doubling down on a very bad wager by trying to convince him to let her help him.
It wasn’t the first time she had miscalculated with a man, but this time it seemed to matter a lot more than it usually did. She told herself it was better to get the truth out in the open before the relationship progressed any farther.
Then again, the only relationship she had with Judson Coppersmith was that of client and hired investigator. She needed to keep that in mind at all times.
Show no weakness, she thought. It was the motto that Nick Sawyer had taught to Abby and her early on in their time at the Summerlight Academy. Definitely words to live by, then and now.
She and Judson finished dinner in a brittle, tension-laced silence and walked outside. The night air was crisp. Stars and a half moon glittered in an obsidian dark sky, but they did little to illuminate Wilby.
“I really do not like this town,” she said, breaking the edgy silence.
“I’m not surprised, given your history here,” Judson said.
“What’s our next move?”
“There are a lot of next moves,” Judson said. “Tomorrow I want to see the old lodge where you found the bodies and where Zander Taylor attacked you and then went over the falls.”
“All right.”
They started across the mostly empty parking lot. The lights of the Riverview Inn glowed in the distance.
“As a matter of curiosity, what did you see in Zander Taylor’s aura?” Judson asked.
She thought about the visions that still came back to haunt her in the darkest hours of the night. “Nothing that told me that he was a killer, at least not until he attacked me. Afterward I could make sense of at least some of what I had seen, but by then it was too late. That’s the problem with my visions. I keep telling you, without context—”
“Without context you can’t interpret what you see. You’ve made that clear. Tell me what you saw in Taylor’s aura.”
“I saw the kind of energy that I’ve come to associate with drug addiction. But I didn’t see any indications of an actual drug in his aura. I mentioned the bad energy to Evelyn, but she said as long as he wasn’t using at the time, she wasn’t going to kick him out of the study. She reminded me that a lot of people with psychic talents end up experimenting with drugs at some point in an attempt to self-medicate. Sensitives often think they’re going crazy. Sometimes they go to a doctor who thinks they’re disturbed and puts them on medication. Either way, drugs are often a factor when it comes to dream therapy.”
“The bottom line being that the indications of addiction were not a serious red flag.”
“No, especially since he showed no obvious signs that he was on drugs at the time. It was only later that I realized it wasn’t drugs that he was addicted to—it was the killing.”
“The ultimate game for a full-blown psychopath,” Judson said.
“Game is exactly the right way to describe how Taylor viewed his kills. Evelyn and I were convinced that there had been many victims before he got to Wilby.”
A van that had been driving down the street abruptly veered into the parking lot. The headlights pierced the night. The vehicle was moving much too fast and it was coming straight at them.
Judson was already reacting. He seized Gwen’s arm and swept her into a protected zone created by two parked cars.
The van slammed to a halt less than three feet away. There was just time enough to read the words Hudson Floral Design before the driver’s-side door shot open. A woman dressed in jeans, boots and a faded cotton shirt leaped out. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She ignored Judson and fixed her full attention on Gwen.
“I heard you were back,” she said. Rage and long-smoldering pain seethed in the atmosphere around her. “I also heard that Evelyn Ballinger is dead and that Oxley found you in the house with the body. Sounds like you’ve gone back to your old habits.”
“Hello, Nicole,” Gwen said.
She kept her voice low and soothing, intuitively trying to counteract some of the other woman’s anger. But she knew there was little hope of success. She was aware that Judson had gone ominously still. He stood very close and a little in front of her, partially shielding her with his body. She wanted to tell him that there was no immediate physical threat, but she wasn’t altogether certain that was true. It had been two years since she had last faced Nicole. On that occasion Nicole, sobbing hysterically, had vowed vengeance.