She nodded. “I can match any customer with their perfect game. I’ve never had a return.”
Wyatt scoffed.
She took out her phone. “Want to call my manager and ask?”
“No,” he said, looking a little shocked by the suggestion.
Leyta’s teeny apartment was clean and pleasant. The carpet was old and worn in places but free of stains. The pictures on the walls were posters of paintings in cheap plastic frames. The only one I recognized was Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The air was scented with traces of cinnamon.
“Sit, please,” she said, pointing us toward a blue velour recliner in front of a small table. On the other side were two folding chairs. Those four pieces of furniture pretty much filled the living room.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said, sitting on one of the folding chairs.
“That’s fine,” she said. “You need it, I can tell.”
“You can tell?” Wyatt said, his voice painted with skepticism. “Really? How?”
I turned to him. “Do you mind? This is my appointment.”
“It’s okay.” Leyta waved a hand in his direction. “Let him talk. That’s his flow. His journey.”
“Yes, Willa,” Wyatt said, leaning back and folding his arms. “Let me flow on my journey, please.”
I gave him a dirty look and then turned my attention back to the psychic.
“So,” she said. “You said you have questions about the future … but that’s not completely true, is it?”
“You don’t have to be a psychic to deduce that,” Wyatt said. “She’s a terrible liar.”
“Wyatt, buddy,” Leyta said, “shut your flow for a minute. Okay, Willa. You don’t want to talk future. You want to talk past. Things that are done that can’t be undone.”
“Right,” I said. “I need to know about the murders.”
She sat back and frowned at me. Like, big-time frowned. “Honey, what are you into?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just have questions —”
She held up her hand and clucked her tongue. “You don’t have questions. You may not realize it, but what you have is answers. And that’s not all you have.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She shook her head. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. What about the murders? Why come to me?”
“Because you talked to the police,” Wyatt said.
Leyta ignored him and kept her gaze on me. “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”
“The necklace,” I said. “I know there was one. I’ve seen it in my … my visions. And I know about Henry. And water.”
Her expression didn’t change, but there was a shift in her energy. All of a sudden, she was very interested. “Is there a smell? Acrid, like somebody spilled a whole bottle of vinegar?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry. I never noticed that.”
“And what about Henry?” she asked.
“There’s a phrase.” I glanced at Wyatt. I hadn’t told him this part. “It goes, ‘This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“No,” she said, closing her eyes. “Not specifically. I feel that it’s right, but I don’t know what it means.”
“It’s not from any of the movie scenes the killer used,” Wyatt said. His words were know-it-all, but his tone was subdued — for the moment.
Leyta folded her hands in her lap. “So what are you hoping I’ll do for you?”
“Help me make it stop,” I said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
She looked at me with an expression I didn’t care for. Too sympathetic. Like she had bad news. “I can imagine.”
“Why me?” I asked. “What does it have to do with me?”
“Sounds like somebody’s trying to tell you something,” she said. “Trying hard.”
“But I don’t want to hear it.” There was a break in my voice, and I realized I was leaning far forward. I forced myself to sit back and take a long breath. “I don’t care what it means — I just want it to stop.”
“Things come to us in life.” Leyta waved her hands around in what was supposed to be an illustration of the flow, I guess. “Good things, bad things. Sometimes we get what we want, sometimes we don’t. The important thing about being alive is, what do you do when you can’t have what you want? That’s what determines what kind of person you are.”
Wait, so … was she a psychic or a guidance counselor?
“But what do I do? Can you help? I’ll pay you whatever you ask. You could come to my house and —”
“Willa,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “just keep listening.”
“That’s it?” Wyatt sounded like he was trying to keep from losing his temper. “You let her come all the way here to give her a bunch of mysterious, vague non-advice? And then you tell her you can’t even help? Some psychic.”
She replied sharply, without removing her eyes from mine. “As Willa well knows,” she said, “spirits are capable of many things. But there are also many things they’re not capable of. These visions you have — you feel what the girls felt, but you can’t see a face, correct?”
When I nodded, she went on. “What you have to understand is that a spirit presence doesn’t operate like you or me. We’re a mess of thoughts and feelings. A spirit is more like … an instinct. Its whole purpose is to drive at something, to convey an idea or a concept.”
“Like who the killer is?” I asked.
She sat back and raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps. We can only guess.”
“How do I get the … the spirit to tell me what it wants?” I asked.
“Let me put it this way,” Leyta said. “Tell me what it feels like to be in love.”
I swallowed hard. First I thought of Aiden, then I thought of Reed. I glanced at Wyatt and felt myself blushing. He was blushing, too.
Leyta rolled her eyes. “Okay, nix that. I forgot you’re a teenager. Tell me what it feels like to be angry. Really try.”
I glanced at Wyatt again, and noticed how careful he was not to look at me. “You feel something heavy,” I said. “Pushing down on you. Pushing you toward the edge of something. Helpless and … hot and …”
I ran out of words.
“Exactly,” she said. “Now think of trying to convey that idea to someone who doesn’t speak your language, who can’t even see you. What would you do, if you were a ghost?”
“Hold someone down in the pool so they can’t breathe?” I asked. “But the spirit can write. It writes on the walls. So why won’t it just write down its story?”
“Well, you didn’t tell a story just now, did you?” She shrugged. “You didn’t say to me, ‘Wyatt said this and it ticked me off and then I said this … and it made me so angry.’ ”
Her point was beginning to sink in, even though it still felt a little soupy around the edges.
“If I thought I could help, I’d go to your house right now. But nothing’s gonna show itself to me. These messages are for you, Willa. The ghost itself might not even understand what’s going on. It’s driven by a need to convey something. And you’re the one it’s telling it to. Not me. Not your parents. You.”
I buried my face in my hands.
Wyatt’s voice came faintly from my right. “Lucky you.”
“Do you mind if I speak to Willa for a moment?” Leyta asked. “Alone?”
“It’s up to Willa,” Wyatt replied.
Even though Wyatt could be a total pain, there was something reassuring about having him there. Weirdly, I felt I could trust him. “It’s all right,” I said. “He can stay.”
Leyta nodded, then leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “How long ago did you start messing with stuff you shouldn’t have been messing with?”
Her question seemed to vibrate through the air. Wyatt tensed in his chair, and I felt my shoulders slump.
I swallowed hard. “Two years in May.”
“What are you talking about?” Wyatt asked. “Drugs?”
Leyta’s scrawny fingers, wrapped around mine, were surprisingly strong. Her pale brown eyes didn’t waver from my face. “You tried it once, and then you kept doing it, right? You kept pushing and searching.”