Page 60 of The Psychic

“Mine? What? What? ”

Her brain couldn’t process what he’d said. The hysteria that had been lying just below the surface bubbled upward and spilled over. She fell into the chair she’d been using for support, then bent forward, her head down by her knees, suddenly laughing like the mad woman she’d become.

He tried to outwait her, which made her laugh all the more.

It wasn’t ha-ha funny. It wasn’t even strange funny. But she couldn’t stop herself.

“Have you eaten?” he asked as she finally climbed to her feet and shoved her hair from her eyes.

“Oh … yeah … I went to a restaurant and ordered a prime rib dinner with all the trimmings, Yorkshire pudding for sure!” Ha, ha, ha, ha. “Next, I’m going to have crème br?lée … No. Baked Alaska! Set the dessert on fire and bring it to me.”

Sloan regarded her with concern. He moved as if to embrace her, but she shrank away from him.

“Don’t touch the crazy person,” she said tightly.

“You’re not crazy.”

“How do you know? I’ve done some pretty crazy things, right? I’ve seen it in your face.”

“I don’t think you killed Melissa McNulty,” he stated flatly. “Oh, well, thanks for that.”

“I’ll order something,” he said, dragging his eyes from her as he retrieved his phone from a pocket.

“You do that,” she gulped.

She wanted to scream and jump and have a full-on fit. Anything to shake up his composure like she’d been shaken to the core.

As soon as her laughter slowed down, she was stricken by hiccups that threatened to knock her off her feet. She crossed the living room to the balcony and then paced back again. She was acting like a maniac. She knew. Her head felt it was about to explode. TMI to the max.

He was ordering ramen and gyoza and rice. Japanese food. She had no appetite but realized grudgingly that she needed to eat or everything was just going to get a hell of a lot worse.

She wanted to go to bed and pull her pillow over her head for a millennium. She wanted to find her lying father and wring his neck. She wanted to hit Carlton over and over again with Marian’s cane, and she wanted to make love fiercely with Sloan and make it all go away.

Her gaze was centered on Sloan, watching as he clicked off. She was a hair’s breadth from throwing herself on him, ripping off his clothes, slamming him up against the wall.

He misunderstood whatever emotion showed on her face. “There’s this little ramen place I found that I wanted to take you to.”

“Before you decided I was a criminal.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t think you’re a criminal.”

“Okay, no. Not a criminal. But certifiable. Bring on the 5150,” she said, citing the police code for involuntary detention of someone having a mental health crisis.

Her head was still full of Evan’s shocking news. She hadn’t even asked him about debriefing Carlton. She didn’t have room for anything more. Except … “DNA?” she repeated, trying to make it make any sense. “ My DNA?”

“So Townsend said.” He finally took off his coat, throwing it over the back of a chair, not the peg behind the door. A clue that he wasn’t planning to stay.

Well, fine. She didn’t want him to, anyway.

Liar.

“Food’ll be here in about forty minutes,” he alerted her.

“Well, good. A last meal.”

She could almost feel him shrink away from her, even though he hadn’t moved. She wanted him to leave. She needed to be alone with her thoughts, to calm down, to think. Her DNA? What the hell? Was this from that swab she’d sent off to some lab to check her heritage? Had to be.

The fact that she’d wanted to know more about her “gift” had now somehow put her on the short list for Mel’s killing?

“Were you ever at that clearing before Melissa McNulty was killed there?” he asked.

“Since childhood? I don’t think so. Unless … maybe I just don’t remember. Maybe I was in a psychic fugue and went there to strangle my friend … from elementary school … and then I came to you to be the one to find her because … because …”

“How did a coffee-cup lid with your DNA end up in the clearing? Give me a way that could happen,” he cut in.

He’s giving you an out. He really wants to believe in you.

Or, he wants you to face the fact you are a complete lunatic. You are a complete lunatic. Your mother was a complete lunatic … and she’s ALIVE?

He was waiting for an answer.

With an effort she forced herself to take a deep breath, trying desperately to clear out the insanity, trying to reach reality.

Finally, she said, “I don’t know how it got there.

I didn’t leave it there. If I’d set out to kill a friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in a decade or more”—she shot him a baleful look—“I sure wouldn’t be sloppy enough to leave that kind of evidence that I’d been there. I’m not quite that inept.”

“Ronnie—”

“Stop!” She held up a hand. “I liked it better when you called me Quick.”

She saw his jaw work. Was she pissing him off?

She hoped so. She wanted to feel something more than this terrible overwhelming tsunami of pain and grief and complete bafflement.

“And don’t ask me why I can’t save myself by just ‘psychically’ calling up who killed Mel.

I know that’s what’s coming next. Well, it doesn’t work that way!

Sometimes it just feels like I’m … blocked! ”

“How did the coffee lid get there?” he asked again.

Cop mode. He was in cop mode. Well, fine, she’d asked for this, hadn’t she? She concentrated hard on her dream of Mel and the dog, but her mind slipped to Carlton … and then Angel …

She slumped into her favorite chair, spent. Too many deaths. Too short a time. Mel … Angel … Shana …

Her brain fizzed. Oh. Shit.

“Shana,” she said, exhaling a whoosh of breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

“Shana?” His attention sharpened.

“She asked to stop for a coffee when I was taking her home from the hospital, so I drove through Starbucks and we each got one. She said she’d get rid of my paper cup for me. She actually seemed eager to do it.” Ronnie blinked in recollection.

“A Starbucks cup with a lid?”

“I left it at her apartment …”

He was staring at her, but her mind was clicking away, reviewing the past. He said slowly, “You’re saying she took your coffee cup on purpose? To plant false evidence?”

“No … I …”

Ronnie trailed off, grappling with the idea that Shana could have purposefully left the coffee cup lid at the clearing.

But what other explanation was there? “Shana didn’t know Mel.

She didn’t know anything about her. That doesn’t make sense.

” But you saw Mel’s image over Shana’s. “She didn’t have a car. I drove her home.”

“There are other means of transportation,” Sloan pointed out as he started pacing. Thinking aloud. “Uber, Lyft, a friend …”

“Shana said she didn’t have any friends. Even Evan couldn’t pick her up.”

Sloan suddenly sucked in a sharp breath of air and stopped dead center in the middle of the living room. “Amy Deggars. I saw her today.” He scoffed. “She accused me of killing Shana.”

“What?” She looked up to see that she heard correctly. “Accused you? ”

“She said Shana was spooked and scared of me.”

“That doesn’t make sense, either,” declared Ronnie.

“I hadn’t seen Shana in years.” He shrugged in bafflement. “Maybe she transferred her fear to me. Or, maybe she was afraid of someone else and didn’t want Deggars to know who that someone was … so she led her to believe it was me.”

“Who, then? Who was she afraid of?”

“If Shana left that evidence at the scene to implicate you, then she knew something about Mel’s death.”

“She knew who he was. And she was a danger to them … oh!” Ronnie pressed a hand to the side of her head.

“What’s wrong?” Sloan was by her side in an instant.

“No, no … nothing. More like too much information. I was just thinking: Could we be wrong? In just assuming Mel’s killer is a man? Maybe there’s a jealous woman out there? Someone who thought Mel was stealing her man … we know Mel had a number of lovers …”

A knock on the door heralded the DoorDash food and Ronnie got out of her chair, ignoring Sloan’s protests to help as she carried the bag into the kitchen, pulled the food from the bag and set up plates and bowls for them at the table, a simple task that left her time to think.

She sat down, her spoon poised over her bowl. “Could Shana have done it?”

“Eat,” ordered Sloan, pointing at her bowl.

Ronnie’s mind was whirling, but she dipped her spoon into the ramen. The broth was salty and hot, and she could feel it warm her chest and take the edge off the chill that had descended upon her.

“It doesn’t feel like a woman,” said Sloan, thinking aloud as he dug into his meal.

Ronnie didn’t respond. She sensed he couldn’t bring himself to blame Shana, even though she had to be the one who’d left the coffee-cup lid with her DNA at the scene.

“I need to talk to Amy Deggars again,” he said determinedly.

So, he hadn’t given up on the idea completely.

“I’m sorry about my meltdown earlier,” she said. “I’m really not crazy.”

His smile was tender. “I know.”

That desire to throw herself into his arms came roaring back.

“What was it Caldwell wanted to give you?” he asked, blunting her impulse.

She didn’t want to go into her family craziness with Sloan just when he’d said he believed in her sanity.

And … she wasn’t sure she believed Evan.

The man loved to play games, and maybe he really believed her mother was still alive …

still alive! … but she needed to work it out for herself.

“Evan seems fascinated by my family’s psychic abilities and did some research on us. ”

“DNA?”

“No, this was something else.”

Sloan’s cell buzzed in his pocket and he withdrew it to read the new text. “Verbena. She’s back tomorrow.” He pocketed the phone again, then took a final bite and wadded his napkin. “I’m going to see Amy Deggars.”

She saw he wanted to keep pushing on the case because it might be taken away from him entirely once Detective Verbena was back on the job. “What about Detective Haynes?”