Page 25 of The Psychic

“Aunt Kat?” answered Ronnie, only peripherally aware of the eyes staring at her in the crowded cafeteria. Even Brandy faded into the distance.

“Hi, honey. Are you okay? Police are everywhere. They’re going into the woods, and—”

“I know,” Ronnie said breathlessly. “I’m on my way. It’s the … clearing?”

There was a brief moment while Aunt Kat collected herself. Then she said, “Ah, you already got the message. Well, come on then. Tell your dad you have to come to the farm. Don’t listen to him when he argues with you.”

“I’m on my way,” Ronnie repeated. In the back of her mind she recognized that her aunt seemed to be way ahead of the moment, already knowing that the victim was a friend of Ronnie’s, already knowing Ronnie needed to be with her.

For someone who claimed she had none of her sister’s precognition, Aunt Kat seemed to often be a step ahead.

There was something there. A silvery thread of intuition.

Knowledge before there was evidence. It wasn’t just Ronnie’s mother who’d had the gift.

“I’ll tell them I’m leaving and then I’m coming with you,” said Brandy, white-faced but determined. “Let’s go!”

Ronnie blinked back to the present and nodded.

As they walked swiftly to the elevators, Ronnie considered calling her father, but let it go. She was certain of what she’d seen, but having trouble processing. The woman in the clearing, the one with the ravaged hands, wrists, lying in the mud was Mel. She could feel it.

But her hair’s dark. Melissa’s a blond.

But maybe not anymore. Or maybe that was mud, dirt, a trick of light …

You know it’s her.

Ronnie shuddered. No excuses. The dead or dying woman was Melissa.

Brandy stopped by the nurses’ station where she worked to explain that she had to leave and met Ronnie at the front doors of the hospital, where a group of carolers in their teens had gathered and were singing the chorus of “Jingle Bells,” one lanky kid actually shaking bells.

With a passing look at the singers, Brandy said, “My coworkers didn’t like it that I was leaving them, but I’m going with you.

I’ll make up for it tonight on a later shift, which is when we’re the busiest and they’ll appreciate it then.

” She shrugged into her raincoat, flipped up her hood and glanced at Ronnie.

“But they’ll deal. They have to. This is Mel we’re talking about. ”

“I know.” They stepped outside, bending their hooded heads against the scudding rain and wind as they headed to Ronnie’s car.

As she threaded her way through traffic, Ronnie’s mind stayed on the clearing and the trees, a place where she and her friends had played together as kids .

It had to be the same general area as the watercolor.

The picture drawn from Mel’s memory. The shack had been newer, better, back then, not nearly so dilapidated as it was now.

She, Brandy and Melissa would stay at Aunt Kat’s and spend hours outside, wandering through the apple orchards or the thick evergreen woods beyond.

She couldn’t remember when they’d stumbled upon the shed and the small clearing.

Their secret place. They hadn’t even told Aunt Kat about it.

She would’ve probably worried about them being so deep into the woods.

“Tell me what you see,” demanded Brandy as Ronnie negotiated the blustery conditions outside, the wipers rhythmically slapping away the pounding rain. “Mel’s not okay, is she? That’s what you saw.”

“I just know she’s hurt …” Dying or dead.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“But she’s at your Aunt Kat’s …”

“Seems that way,” Ronnie said grimly.

And the rest of the trip was made in silence.

The harsh December wind was rushing through the surrounding trees as Cooper stood bareheaded outside the Heart of Sunshine Church’s massive double doors.

The skies had decided to open up again at the exact moment he stepped from his SUV and sleet slid down the back of his neck, chilling him to the bone.

He shivered beneath the portico of Atticus Symons’s place of worship.

Late November had been cold, wet and sometimes threatening snow.

December seemed to have decided to take the winter weather one step further, coming in with frigid hammer and tongs.

The weather aside, he was inwardly coldly angry after talking to Gracie.

All his worry and concern regarding Mary Jo had crystallized into something harder.

Normally he had a cop’s grip on his emotions, but Gracie’s revelation about Mary Jo climbing into the “sunshine van,” or whatever the hell, had opened his palm and he’d let go.

Indulging his rage wasn’t going to help him, however, so he took a moment to pull himself together before pressing down on one of the two oversized handles. Locked. He tried the other one. The same.

He wanted to rip the doors down with his bare hands.

He’d been focused on just making sure Mary Jo and the baby were okay up to this point. That was still the main objective. But now he was about to blow up. Frustration and fury had taken over and he could only see red.

No … Nope …

Take a breath … or two or three … don’t get yourself in trouble for wanting to strangle the man in charge just because he lives in a commune, cult, whatever.

Symons might not know the whole story. Likely doesn’t know that your wife is currently bedridden, needing to keep down stress, hoping to birth a healthy baby.

But he had to know Mary Jo was pregnant. No hiding that at this stage.

You don’t know Mary Jo’s here …

“Yeah, I do,” he whispered aloud. He could feel it.

Rapping hard on the panels, he bruised his knuckles. Good. Pain was distraction.

He just needed to know Mary Jo was safe. That she was getting the care she needed these last weeks of her pregnancy. Either way he was also bound and determined to have it out with her about running off.

She grew up in a similar type of community. She’s looking for “community fulfillment,” her vision quest.

Yeah, right.

Cooper was keenly aware of his wife’s reservations about Mary Jo.

That he had been the one who’d pushed for Mary Jo to become their surrogate.

He felt wholly responsible. He needed to be calm and clearheaded when dealing with her.

She was too unstable to trust. God knew what fueled her decisionmaking these days.

Like the one to abandon her family and run back to cult living? Or the deluded belief that since Cooper and Jamie were having their own baby now, maybe she could keep the one inside her?

She hadn’t said that. That was his own fear talking.

He was so tense his organs felt like they were shrinking and tightening. A warning against that last, hopefully inaccurate, possibility.

Bunching his hand into a fist, he slammed it against the door panels over and over again. The thick oak boards absorbed his rage and turned it into muffled pounding.

Finally he heard footsteps approaching the door and he drew in a lungful of air, a deep, calming breath.

He could hear a large bolt being thrown back from the other side.

A man in ivory linen robes stood in the aperture of the opened door.

Atticus Symons, he guessed, looking like a being from another age, another place, which was probably the intent.

Cooper put him somewhere in his fifties.

His graying hair was long and bound back by a rawhide tie.

He greeted Cooper with a beatific smile, as if he’d just been waiting for him to appear.

Something superior in it that stoked Cooper’s simmering anger, reminding him again that the women in his family— Jamie, Harley, Marissa and Emma—had all lived through a nightmare experience at a camp the previous summer, one quasi-connected to another cultlike group.

He’d felt powerless then, and he felt powerless now, and though he considered himself rational and fair by nature, he was way out of his lane on this one.

He wanted to rip the bastard’s head off.

“Atticus Symons?” asked Cooper, carefully polite.

“At your service, good sir,” he said with a deep nod of acknowledgment. “What brings you to our door on this dark afternoon?”

“You’re the preacher.”

“I am merely a vessel for our Lord, as are we all. I am the person who leads prayer. In that regard, I am the leader of our flock, but—”

“I want to see Mary Jo Kirshner,” Cooper cut through. “Tell her Detective Cooper Haynes is here.”

A small frown darkened his brow.

“I’m the father of the baby she’s carrying,” Cooper elucidated.

The frown deepened. “There must be some mistake. There is no Mary Jo here … Are you here on official business?”

Cooper counted slowly to five. It was highly possible Mary Jo knew he was on administrative leave.

It was public knowledge. Atticus Symons could know it, too.

This, then, could be a test of his authority.

“Only in the sense that I’m the father of the baby she’s carrying.

My wife is the mother. Mary Jo is near eight months pregnant.

She disappeared about a week ago and I believe she landed here. ”

Cooper could almost see the wheels turning inside the man’s mind.

“I can bring the police,” Cooper stated flatly.

“No need, sir. I’d like to help you, if I can. Please come in. It’s clear you are in some pain and our mission is to alleviate pain and strife in the world.”

“Is she here?”

“All the women, and some men, who stay at Heart of Sunshine are here of their free accord. It is—we are—a sanctuary.”

“Is there a pregnant woman here?” Cooper asked, hanging on to his sanity with an effort.

“Come with me, seeker.” Symons dipped his chin and spread his hands as he headed inside. Well, hell , Cooper thought, entering behind the man.