I couldn’t imagine being that sensitive.
Even though I was on board with punishing the guilty, my temper had cooled during the flight back, and I’d started wondering exactly what Amanda Lee had in mind for me to do with this man. Actually, I had no idea what I was even capable of doing with him.
“I’m happy to do all the homework I can,” I said. “It kind of seems to me that we’re moving a little fast here, though.”
“All right. Tell me how we can slow it down.”
“Well, first off, I’d like to see for myself that this guy is guilty before we start the justice part.”
She slid a concerned glance to me. “I get the feeling you don’t want to do this.”
Chased through the trees, caught, yanked toward someone who was pulling me to my death…
“Actually, I want to do this very much.” Even if I got the vibe that Amanda Lee had pulled me out of my time loop more to be her pet spirit than to right all my wrongs. “I just think it’d make sense to go about this in a more… measured way.”
“Such as… ?”
“Such as haunting a confession out of this suspect instead of barging into him with all guns blazing and exacting vengeance.”
Amanda Lee stared at an oil painting of a serene summer pond, which hung on the wall. For a second, I thought she might be getting some kind of reading. The air even trembled a little, tickling me.
Then she nodded. “Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
That made me feel better. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Amanda Lee’s psychic vibes, but I’d always been a “show me” person, especially after hearing all the platitudes that well-meaning people handed out to me at my parents’ wake. The “things will be fine”s and the “they’re in a better place”s never felt true to me. Nobody could prove that life was going to get better.
In fact, it hadn’t.
Amanda Lee went to the computer, and within a minute, she had conjured a picture of a mansion with red tile roofing and an Italian Renaissance vibe.
“Here’s your first piece of information,” she said. “This is where he’s staying for the time being.”
Yeah, this Gavin guy was rich, but something altogether different struck me about how easy it’d been for Amanda Lee to show me his house.
She raised a slim eyebrow, as if intuiting my discomfort. “There’s no such thing as privacy nowadays.”
Gross. What had the real world come to? Big Brother was definitely in residence.
Amanda Lee was looking at the computer again. “He’s what you might call a ‘free spirit,’ no pun intended. He travels the world with his laptop as his office.”
I had to wrap my head around that. He had freedom—a gift that had been taken away from Elizabeth Dalton. No justice there.
Amanda Lee gestured toward the picture of the mansion. “This is his family’s estate, and he returned to it recently.”
“Is he wrapped up in Mama’s apron strings or something?”
“Hardly.”
She clicked off the mansion picture and to another screen, where an image appeared of a tall man ambling down a beachside street carrying a paper cup of coffee, his other hand fisted at his side, like he was wound up tight.
Something took an unsettling whirl in the center of me. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because of the cut of his brown hair—very short, no-nonsense, as if the last thing he wanted to be doing was gelling and styling it in front of a mirror. Maybe it was because of the look the camera had caught in his eyes—almost a bruised, pugilistic way of gazing at the world around him. Or maybe it was because I could just about see him in motion, with a self-assured walk that told everyone around him that he knew just who he was and where he was going.
Even in a frozen-in-time photograph, he still vibrated with life for me, and I couldn’t look away, even if I’d wanted to.
Amanda Lee thinks he cut a woman apart, I thought, putting my head back where it belonged.
“He’s thirty years old,” Amanda Lee said, and for a psychic, she seemed pretty clueless about the palpitating spirit right behind her.
“Born around the time I ate the dust,” I said. “So why’s he at home if he’s old enough to have his own life?”
“He’s the oldest child—the most responsible one. His mom passed on nearly a decade ago, and his father has been on a succession of business trips all over the world for the past four years or so.”
She always called Gavin “he,” as if that somehow put him at a distance from her. “He normally lives in hotel suites and doesn’t call any place but an official base residence across the country home, but I intuited that the younger son, Noah, needs a parental hand lately, and the father’s not at home to provide it.”
Okay. She’d gotten some kind of psychic woo-woo about it. “Why not just hire a nanny?”
“The kids are too old for that—Noah’s seventeen and Wendy’s fifteen. However, his slightly younger sister, Farah, has lived on the property with them since the dad started traveling.” She fiddled with the computer again.
Amanda Lee finally made the screen switch to another picture, and it showed a stunning twentysomething socialite in a gossip column photo, svelte in a white dress, her sable hair long and gleaming over one shoulder, her legs endless.
“I’m sure,” Amanda Lee said, “Farah called him home to provide some male guidance for Noah.”
She must not have had photos of the kids ready, because she didn’t access the computer.
I cozied against a battery pack resting on a cherrywood end table. Amanda Lee had laid it out earlier, and it was available for whenever I needed to pull energy. Every once in a while, the mild distance between me and my death spot got to me, but juicing myself up like this helped.
I went back to asking about the family situation. “Why’re the kids so much younger than Farah and Gavin?”
“Noah and Wendy are adopted. It wasn’t like this in your time, but nowadays, collecting children in need is a status symbol.”
“That’s pretty cynical. Besides, aren’t you a Richie Rich, too?”
“I only live off a relatively modest inheritance and investments, dear. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon gagging me.”
She gave me a wry “Got it, Valley Girl?” look, and I didn’t bother to tell her that my friends and I had made a sport of mocking hard-core mall rats in my time.
“You sure know a lot about the family,” I said. “Have you communicated with Elizabeth Dalton in any way whatsoever? Or did any other spirits leave you partial messages from beyond?”
She slowly shook her head, just as she’d done after we’d first met and I’d quizzed her all about whom she’d contacted from the other side, especially my parents. This past week, she’d tried to get ahold of them, but nothing had happened.
I forged on. “If you haven’t talked to Elizabeth, how do you know all this information about the Edgetts? From visions?”
Amanda Lee’s skin went a little pink, and she started to mess around with the computer again, avoiding my question.
So I gave her a chilly tap on the shoulder.
“Jensen—”
“I know. I’m cold. And I’m sure I can be a lot colder.”
She sighed. “All right. Jon hired a private investigator—another friend of ours—to watch him.”
Obsessed a little? “Elizabeth’s Jon?”
“I told you,” Amanda Lee said. “The killer has ruined lives. Wrongful death tends to do that to people like Jon.”