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Cass hit the button, heard the soft dulcet voice inform her that she had one new message, listened to the beep, and waited.
“Cassandra, it’s Dr. Farver. I would like to talk to you. I’ve been trying for some time. I’m surprised you didn’t let me know your number had changed. But…that’s not the point. I’m calling because there’s someone I want you to meet…”
She hit the erase button before he could finish. She didn’t have to listen to the rest of the message to know what he was going to say. She’d heard the same song often enough before, which had been her reason for not giving him her new number. Not that it had worked…obviously.
And the fact that he had called after 1:00 a.m. was no surprise. Once Leonard Farver struck upon a new idea or found a new candidate to research, he could be relentless. She knew that from experience.
Someone he wanted her to meet. More like someone he wanted her to read so he could test, monitor and poke at her. Not anymore. Cass had promised herself a long time ago that she was done being his lab rat despite what he’d done for her.
She waited for the guilt that usually surfaced anytime she blew him off, but this time she felt nothing. Exhaustion trumped guilt every time.
She made her way down the short hallway and let herself fall face forward into the double bed that took up most of the room. She could have gone with a twin bed and added a vanity or dresser, but the cats slept with her and they needed their space, too.
Bone-weary, Cass considered crashing in what she was wearing, but knew the discomfort of her bra would only wake her up later. Sitting up, she shucked off the shirt, toed off her sneakers and kicked out of her pants. Then sighed blissfully when she unhooked and discarded her bra. In nothing more than a pair of white panties, she scooted under the covers.
“Spook. Nosey.” She felt one then the other leap onto the bed. One settled by her feet, the other against her side. Their soft purring served as the best kind of lullaby. After what could have been only seconds, she felt her body and her mind drift off to sleep.
Cass dreamed she was at a ball. There were women in gowns and men in tuxedos. A champagne fountain emitted tiny bubbles in the center of the ballroom, and tables laden with all sorts of exotic foods surrounded a large dance floor. And she was on that dance floor, moving, spinning and twirling like a little girl playing Cinderella to the beat of an orchestra that played a waltz.
When Cass glanced down at her feet in amazement, knowing that she had never danced like this before, she saw that she was wearing sneakers instead of glass slippers. Black work sneakers coated with the dust of coffee beans and dry milk. She wore her apron and her green Salvation Army coat.
The ballroom now silent, she stopped, aware that everyone was watching her.
Looking to the side, she saw her grandfather on the edge of the dance floor, shaking his head. She couldn’t decipher his expression; she’d never seen it before.
Talk to me, Cassie. Please.
But she didn’t want to talk to him. Her grandfather was synonymous with betrayal. And worse—guilt. She didn’t want to ever have to talk to him again. She turned to leave, but a gasp from the crowd as Malcolm McDonough walked out onto the dance floor stayed her. It was his party.
She wanted to hide, she wanted to run, but her feet were stuck to the floor.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
Cass opened her mouth to tell him that his sister had invited her, but before she could get the words out, the ballroom was gone and she found herself alone in an empty white room.
This place she knew. Here, she was comfortable. This is where they came to talk to her. Where she welcomed the dead who wanted to speak.
Cass stared at the door and wondered how she could be here, now, in her sleep. Was it possible that she was preparing to make contact? Part of her mind rejected the idea. The definition of a medium was being in the middle. A conduit between two people, one living and one dead. If the dead were trying to come through, then who did they want to talk to?
Her? In the dream, she’d seen her grandfather. But she’d always been able to block his connection. It had been so long since he tried that she thought he might have given up, if such a thing was possible of the dead.
The door to her room slammed open. Cass struggled to brace herself for the energy to hit her, but the image that was forming beyond the door had her gasping for breath. It wasn’t a man or woman.
It was a monster.
With a piglike snout and horns that burst out through its head, it reared back and shouted with a horrible reverberating baritone voice. It was the size of a man, had a powerful chest and stood on two legs. But hooves replaced hands, and fangs replaced teeth. It shouted again and the sound was as crippling as the pain of impact. In the room, Cass dropped to her knees.
When she looked up, she saw it was moving toward the door. The certainty that if that thing reached the entrance it would do what no one else had done and cross into her room filled her with a strange panic.
Struggling against a lethargy that pulled at her, Cass pushed to her feet and forced herself to move across the empty space. She reached for the door and watched as the thing on the other side stepped closer and closer, the whole time shouting indecipherable words at her. Instinctively, she did the only thing that seemed logical. She shut the door in its face.
As she let out a heavy sigh of relief, the white room faded away.
Cass woke up with a start, clutching the covers to her chest.
Someone had brought a monster from the beyond. Who? How?
The questions assaulted her, as did the essence of danger, which meant she needed to stop for a second and regain her mental balance. Using techniques she’d learned through yoga, she took a cleansing breath in and then let it out slowly.
Cautiously, she sat up in bed, wondering what the physical effects of the strange encounter would be. Although the pain was in her head, her body always manifested physical evidence of the contact. A bruise here or there, a bloody nose. This time the energy that had overwhelmed her had been intense. Her mouth hurt. With her tongue, she stroked her bottom lip. It was swollen as if she’d been hit.
Checking for her cats, who routinely slept at her side, Cass noted their absence. It was morning, early morning based on the hazy quality of light outside her single bedroom window, and earlier than she normally would have awoken. Typically, the girls never left the bed until she did. This morning they were gone. She wondered if she’d thrashed about during the strange dream.
“Spook? Nosey?”
No morning meow to signal they had gone in search of the dry stash that she left out in the kitchen. No galloping feet to suggest they had been caught napping on the new futon during what was supposed to be their nightly vigil. The silence was disconcerting. The memory of what she’d dreamed…experienced…made it that much more unsettling.
Cass rolled out of bed. Dismissing her discomfort, she found a robe in her closet and made her way from the bedroom down the short hallway to the living room.
She found her girls in the foyer, sitting silently, motionlessly, in front of the locked door. As she came to stand behind them, their two heads turned, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, in her direction.
There was a message conveyed in their feline eyes. Cass thought maybe she was being dramatic, but, after what had happened, she didn’t think so. The lingering sense of evil still shook her, and she knew without a doubt that death waited for her on the other side of the door.
Chapter 4
Cass stood unmoving as she and her cats stared at the door. She was certain there was something wrong outside. She didn’t need any kind of psychic ability to know that. This was pure gut instinct.
Someone had brought that monster into contact with her. It was the only way her gift worked. The monster was on the other side so there had to be someone on this side. Someone living. Someone close.
Was that person still out there? Was he waiting for her? More important, could someone who had been touched by something as horrific as that monster in life not be a possible threat to her physically? Because whoever had brought that thing to her room last night had known evil. Had lived with or had been connected to evil.
It stood to reason that a person like that had a pretty good chance of being evil, too.
Backing away from the door, she considered hiding in her bedroom for a time, waiting until she was sure the person was gone. However, as soon as she found herself hesitating, Cass pushed herself into action. Because there was another possibility.
What if the person the monster was trying to contact needed her help?
With hands that were less than steady, she undid the series of locks and opened the door. Her bare feet made contact with cold concrete and she winced, reminded that she was still dressed in a robe, panties and nothing else. Bolting back to her bedroom, she threw on a pair of sweats, a tank top and some flip-flops that were the first pair of shoes she saw.
It was early and the narrow city street was still thick with parked cars on both sides. A cyclist sped past, and an old woman bundled in a coat and a blue wool hat walked her dog. Cass could hear the sound of the pooch’s claws tapping the pavement, as well as the occasional yap, but nothing else.
No one cried out for help. No one leaped out from among the cars to attack her.
She stopped halfway down the road and shook her head. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe the monster hadn’t been real. After almost twenty years, she thought she had a grasp on her gift, but she’d never experienced anything remotely close to that beast. Yes, there had been impatient messages, sad messages, even angry ones. Mean spirits.
Cass was never sure what name to apply to those who made contact. Ghost, spirit, soul. To her they were people. They just happened to be dead. Wasting time on semantics or philosophizing on the religious implications of what her gift was about didn’t interest her. Getting the messages and giving them to the right people so that the dead would stop hassling her and the living would know some resolution—so she could go on with her life—that interested her.
But this thing last night had been different. Angry, yes, but the anger swirled around it, mixing and blending with other emotions. If she closed her eyes, she could remember the fear she’d felt because she knew that on the other side of her door was everything that was wrong with the human element. Hatred, rage, greed, power and pain. Pain that it liked to inflict on others.
And it had almost come inside. A trickle of unease had sweat pooling under her arms and dampening her palms despite the coolness of the crisp fall morning. Part of the purpose of her mental room with the single door had been to keep the dead at a certain distance. Cass lived with the very real fear that one day contact wouldn’t be enough for them, that only possession would suffice as a way to express their message.
What if the monster was some kind of foreshadowing? What if the images from last night, the sense that it was getting closer, were a way of letting her know that the dead were coming for her?
She wouldn’t allow it. Mentally, she was too strong to let herself be used. Wasn’t she? A lingering memory of a night about a year ago flashed behind her eyes. She and Dougie on a bed. Entwined. Connected. And Claire, his dead wife, in the shadows of her mind just beyond the door…watching. Instantly, Cass quashed the remembrance. She didn’t want to go there. It was too disturbing and opened up too many questions she didn’t want to have to answer.
The small dog that was being walked by the old woman broke loose from its leash and took off down the quiet street, yapping frantically. The shrill sound snapped Cass out of her thoughts, reminding her what she was doing outside in the first place.
There was something wrong out here.
Following the dog’s direction, Cass jogged down the street after the woman, who was desperately calling her pet. The older woman was moving as fast as she could but was losing ground to the animal, which had an impossibly speedy gait considering how short its legs were. The dog rounded the corner and descended steps that led to a brick apartment building similar to Cass’s. The old woman came to an abrupt stop on the sidewalk in front of it.
The woman’s stillness was unnerving—and it wasn’t because she was simply out of breath. Cass came up behind her and circled her so she could meet her head-on. The old lady’s mitten-encased hands covered her mouth and her eyes were wide. She was so pale Cass feared she might faint.
“Are you all right?”
The woman merely pointed to the steps that dipped below the level of the sidewalk. Two slim, bare feet stuck out from around the bend of the cement steps. They didn’t move. The dog, out of sight around the corner along with the rest of the body, continued to bark.
“Call 911.”
The older woman shook her head. “I…don’t…I don’t…have a cellular phone. My daughter wanted to get me one, but I said I didn’t want one. I don’t like cell phones very much and…”
Cass put a hand on the woman’s shoulder in an attempt to calm her before she carried on about the evils of cell phones in general.
“Down the street a little farther, there’s a convenience store,” Cass pointed out. “It’s early, but they sell coffee in the morning so they should be open.”
“I buy my Powerball tickets there,” she muttered.
“They’ll have a phone. Tell them to call the police. Tell them they need to get in touch with Doug Brody. Can you remember that name? Detective Doug Brody.”
“Doug Brody,” she repeated mindlessly.
“Good. Go on now.”
“Is that girl dead? Is that why Muffy won’t stop barking? I’ve never heard him bark that way.”
“I’ll watch Muffy. You go.”
The woman hesitated but seemed ultimately to understand that she didn’t want to have any part of walking down those stairs. Swinging her arms as if to speed up, she took off down the sidewalk for the convenience store.
Cass took the stairs slowly, watching to see where she stepped, knowing from what she’d seen on TV shows more than anything else that even a flip-flop can mess with evidence. By the time she got to the bottom, she could see around the bend of the brick portico that framed the apartment door.
Muffy, a brown cocker spaniel, barking unceasingly, stood steadfastly at the head of the victim, who unfortunately could no longer hear him. The woman wore only a sheer nightgown. It wasn’t ripped or torn to suggest the attack had been sexual, but there was no doubt that it had been deadly.
The stranger’s eyes were open in a death gaze that, for all her experience with the dead, Cass had never seen. The worst, however, was the blood. It was smeared all around her mouth and face and underneath her body. Cass could see that the welcome mat was saturated with it. She thought about what McDonough had told her earlier about his sister and shuddered. So much blood.
And why?
Not wanting to disturb the scene any further, Cass moved around the body to the dog and plucked him up and into her arms. She stroked him until he calmed down, limiting his barks to about one every other second.
Backing out and up the stairwell, Cass and Muffy waited for the old woman, the police and, most important, Doug. He would understand what this meant. She could only hope he would know what to do about it.
A light from a street-level window above the stairwell caught her eye.
Palm Reader—Fortune Teller.
It was a red neon sign with the outline of a crystal ball in its center. Cass could see that it belonged to the same apartment whose doorway the woman lay in. Guessing from the nightgown, Cass had little doubt that it was the dead woman’s apartment, which meant that she was likely the palm reader. Not that Cass could ask her.
Cass turned back and stared down at the still motionless feet.
“I’ll bet you didn’t see this coming,” she mumbled, more to break the morbid silence than anything else.
There was no reply to the bad quip. Not that Cass expected one. She never communicated directly with the dead. Except in one case, which was completely different altogether.
Of course, there was the monster to contend with, but the resolution of what that thing was, was still too far off to consider. Was it connected to the woman at the bottom of the steps? Was it too much of a stretch to believe that it wasn’t?
Cass wasn’t ready to think about it. Better to wait for Dougie and let him decide what had happened before she started leaping to conclusions she couldn’t back up with facts. She trembled involuntarily and Muffy squirmed in her arms. She set him down, careful to keep a firm grip on his collar so he couldn’t return to the body. Turning to her right, she spotted the older woman scurrying down the sidewalk as fast as her aging body would carry her.
“The police are coming. They’re coming,” she huffed as she came within hearing distance of Cass.
Cass nodded in thanks, then handed her back her dog. The woman reattached Muffy’s leash and together they all stood in front of the stairwell like sentinels standing guard over the body.
Minutes later, sirens broke through the early-morning quiet. Two cars screeched to a stop as uniformed officers popped out and started barking orders to one another.
“Do we need an ambulance?”
Cass shook her head at the stocky officer who approached her first. “No. Maybe to take her to the morgue…”
The cop’s face didn’t change with her answer. “Right. We’re going to ask you to wait over there. We’ll need to ask you some questions in a little bit.” He was pointing to a stoop a couple of feet away and numbly Cass nodded. Sitting suddenly seemed very necessary. She tugged on the arm of the woman, who was trying desperately not to look down the steps as the uniformed officers secured the area.
“Come on. We should get out of their way.”
From the third step of the stoop, Cass watched as two standard-issue city cars pulled up. She wondered how it was that detectives were always so shocked when they were made so easily by the criminal element. The car reeked of cop.
Dougie’s long form emerged from the vehicle and instantly he spotted her. Ignoring her for the moment, he checked on the scene. The uniforms had taped off the stairwell, and soon the techies would be by to snap photographs and collect evidence from the apartment and from the victim. Evidently satisfied with the progress they were making, Dougie made his way to where she sat with the old lady at her side.
“How…”
“I don’t know. I think she was stabbed.”
“No, I meant how are you here?”
Cass knew what he meant, but there wasn’t an easy answer. She certainly didn’t want to elaborate with the woman, Ethel, she’d come to learn was her name, and her dog sitting next to her.
“My Muffy found her. My Muffy was very brave,” the woman interjected.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dougie replied politely. “Very brave. The PPD thanks you very much for calling this in and for waiting so that we can question you. If you would head over to the officer with the blond hair, he’s got some questions for you.” Dougie pointed to one of the uniformed cops, who looked to be just out of school. Surely someone so young wasn’t able to handle the responsibility of standing between evil and the rest of society? Someone with a job like that should at least be shaving, Cass decided. Then again, given her youthful appearance and the fact that Ethel called her honey as if she were soothing a child, she guessed she couldn’t throw stones.
“Just tell him everything you saw and heard. And don’t leave anything out,” Dougie said.
