a Touch of Ice (31 page)

Also by L. j. Charles

The Gemini Women Trilogy

The CALLING

An excerpt

One

The sultry song of the bayou played with my mind and left equal measures of icy panic and hot pleasure in its wake. I wove through shadows and listened to the plants breathe while I kept an eye on the Pitre brothers’ cabin. The scent of moist earth, lush vegetation, and yesterday’s garbage lingered in the air. Made my nose itch.

Snatches of the brothers’ discussion drifted through the trees and crackles of electricity flickered under my skin. Tonight was it. Finally. The information needed to incarcerate them for the rest of their natural lives was recorded for posterity and the sheriff’s department. Now, if they blathered on just a bit longer—
Crack.
Damn! I swept a glance down to the broken limb beneath my boot, and my stomach lurched. The brothers’ conversation had stopped cold. I held my breath and froze, pressing the heels of my hands against trembling quads.

An eternity and the mother of all muscle cramps later, the Pitres got on with their chat. I eased from my crouch and edged closer to the window, praying not to step on any more buried branches.

Perfect. They were sniping at each other about whether they should move Avril’s body, what they were going to do with the money they stole from beneath her floorboards, and the best place to relocate so as not to get caught. Their voices floated on the air and blended into the quiet of the night, but were distinct enough that I didn’t miss a thing. And neither did my recorder.

I’d been chasing the brothers for eight nights running. Ever since Avril Dupré’s very demanding voice took up residence in my head, I’d spent my evenings slinking through the Bayou, trying to gather proof of her murder. I couldn’t argue with her ghostly contention that they buried her not ten feet from where I stood. The brothers had angled an old wooden picnic table to cover the freshly turned earth. Hardly a fitting gravestone for Avril Dupré—at least not according to her.

The conversation in the cabin stopped, replaced with the sound of silverware scraping against tin plates. I was done here. I backed away, stopping briefly behind a renegade banana plant to tuck the recorder in my pocket, and then faded into the trees.

Avril objected to my retreat, as she wanted me to dig her up and move her remains to consecrated ground. And she intended on chattering in my head until I remedied the situation. The amazing thing? This is absolutely normal. Has been ever since I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday thirty days, seven hours and sixteen minutes ago. I rolled the diamond stud gracing my left earlobe between my index finger and thumb. I wasn’t used to it yet, Grandmamma’s engagement diamond. A birthday gift to celebrate my coming into the calling.

She made a ceremony of adding a second piercing to my lobe, and then placing the sparkling gemstone just so while she explained its meaning—a symbol of courage that intensifies the qualities of the wearer. Positive and negative. My guess is she added that last part to keep me on the right side of the universe. What with murder victims prattling on about exactly how they wanted me to rectify the circumstances surrounding their deaths, I was prone to fudge the law when necessary. A muscle ticked in my jaw. As a former police detective, it didn’t come easy, solving crimes without benefit of proper procedure.

I rubbed the faceted surface of the stone. Courage. That’d be good. I was learning to cope with the dead—hearing their voices, separating their thoughts from mine, and blocking their emotions, but not as well as I’d like.

When I was about fifty feet from the cabin, I stretched into a full-out run and hoped the movement would quiet Avril down some. I shook my head, pressed my fingers into my temples. Grandmamma Boulay didn’t have any sage advice about how to silence the dead once they started telling me the particulars of their homicides. I was still miffed that her only suggestion was, “Do what they say, child. Just do what they say.”

I jumped in my car, eased onto the road, then gunned the engine and zipped toward her house—where I’d been staying for over a month. Avril nagged me every minute of the half hour trip, and I turned up the radio hoping to drown her out. No luck. I’d had enough by the time I pulled into the driveway.

Grandmamma waited on the porch, the clicking of her knitting needles keeping time with her rocking chair. The spicy smell of a traditional Monday supper, red beans and rice, chased away the musky scent of the Bayou and had my stomach rumbling.

I bent to kiss her papery cheek, inhaling the peppery aroma clinging to her apron and the sweetness of baby powder that surrounded her in a fragrant halo. I dropped to the top step of the stoop. “The Pitre brothers killed Avril.”

“Yes, ‘n tha’s what she’s a’ been sayin’ to you.”

“She has, yes. And continues to nag me on the subject.” I pulled the elastic out of my hair and shook my ponytail loose. “Tomorrow I’ll post a note to the sheriff telling him where to dig, send the recording of the Pitres’ discussion about the murder and the money they stole from under her floorboards.”

“Avril will stop talking then, ché.”

“If she’s like the first three, she will." I ran my hands through my hair and tried to massage Avril’s voice out of my head.

“Grandmamma?”

“What’s a’troublin’ you, Whitney, child?”

“Why is
this
my calling? Why couldn’t it be, oh, shape shifting? Something more interesting.”

“Oooh, now. We haven’t had a shape shifter for as far back as forever. Don’t know as I’ve ever heard of one ‘cept as legends. Why you askin’ ‘bout that, child?”

I rolled my shoulders to ease the cramped muscles that came whenever I thought about the calling. And about what Nia—a woman I’d met and grown sister-close to during one of my Honolulu Police Department cases—had recently experienced. “Nia mentioned something about it when we…last month.”

The rocking chair came to an abrupt stop. “You told her? About the calling and this being your thirty-fifth birthday?”

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s the way of the women in our family and naught to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just a damn nuisance.”

Grandmamma tsked. “Language, child. Be’in schooled in England is’n no excuse.”

“Um. No, rather a lot of other things, but no excuse.”

I stretched across the wooden porch to pat her bare feet, warm and rough with calluses. “Nia had enough to think about what with saving her parents’ lives and falling in love—”

“She’s stayin’ in your home with your friend, the attorney, yes?”

“Trace Coburn. They’ll be at my place to oversee the work on his condo. When it’s finished they’ll be dividing their time between here and Minot, North Dakota of all places.” A jolt of pain pierced the back of my skull as Avril decided to give me a piece of her mind. I gave my head a hard shake hoping to dislodge her.

“Avril’s talking at you?”

“She is.” The bottle of Aleve sitting on the bathroom counter called to me.

“Grandmamma?”

“Um-hmm. What is it, ché?”

“About my calling. Why isn’t it clairvoyance like you, or seeing mathematical patterns like mum?”

She tsked again. “Full of questions tonight, you are. Not always comfortable, clairvoyance. Oh, not like your discomfort with dead people talking at you, but it’s not an easy thing to see the future. Especially the bad things. Your mama had an easier time of it. Took to working for that government think tank like alligators take to marshmallows.”

Not much point chatting about my mum as she’d left me with Grandmamma when I was fifteen—the year she turned thirty-five and became adept at seeing numerical patterns in everyday life occurrences. And codes. Mum did a lot of work in cryptography back then. It’s anyone’s guess what she’s doing now.

Over the years I'd come to accept she didn’t have a choice about leaving me. It’s like that with the calling. We either embrace it completely, or go absolutely mad trying to run from the responsibility that comes with it. Insanity doesn’t appeal to me, which is why I planned to get accustomed to the voices in a big hurry.

I stood, brushed the seat of my jeans off. “I’ll post the letter tonight, then. The sheriff will get it tomorrow, and maybe Avril will leave me alone so I can get some sleep.”

Her eyes met mine. “Anonymous, yes? Tha’s not the quickest way, child.”

A chill snaked along my spine, settled at the small of my back. “Quite. I could ring him up, but I’m not ready.”

Grandmamma pushed herself from the rocker. “Not’a gonna get any easier, accepting who you are.”

I swallowed a sigh. “I know, but it’s a bit much. I hardly have any peace from the newly dead, and if I tell anyone, word will get around and the living will start going on at me just like the dead. Wanting to know about their loved ones who’ve passed. Only it would be worse as I’d have to be polite to the living.”

She looped her arm through mine, and I reached for her basket of lush, purple yarn as we made our way into the house.

Sunlight danced on the worn kitchen table in crazy, happy patterns that aggravated the throbbing in my temples. Grandmamma slid a steaming mug of café au lait in front of me.

I rested my forehead on the edge of the table. “Blast and damn.” I cut a quick glance at Grandmamma through the space between the tabletop and the underside of my arm. "I'm claiming temporary insanity and lack of sleep," I muttered. Then I lifted my head, stuck my nose right over the mug and inhaled all the way to my toes. The rich scent, heavy with chicory, wove through my throbbing temples and calmed the pounding. I took a sip, paused for the bite of herb and the mellow flavor of the cream to blend on my tongue before I swallowed, and waited for the caffeine to tug at my nerve endings. Bayou coffee—a blessing when I'm over the edge of sanity and well into a bottle of Aleve.

Grandmamma’s hand curled around my shoulder. “More voices?”

I nodded. “A new death. Someone I knew about. Through work actually.”

She met my gaze, her warm, caramel eyes brimming with too much knowledge. There was no mistaking what
that
look meant.

“You had a vision about her, then?” I asked.

“Yes’n, you’ll be a leavin’ me today, ché.”

I dipped my chin in acknowledgement, and then blew across the mug to cool the fragrant brew. “In a few hours. What did you see?”

She settled into a chair and cradled a mug between her hands. “Jus’ that you’d be a’leavin’ and the man you’re going to see—”

“Evans. Blake Evans. He’s an FBI agent on temporary assignment at the Minneapolis airport.” I dropped my forehead back to the table as his image popped into my mind, clear enough to send a rush of heat twisting into a knot around my heart. There couldn’t be a man in my life. Not with the demands of the calling. And especially not Blake Evans. It was only one kiss. Shouldn’t have affected me at all.

“Whitney, child?”

Damn, I’d been quiet too long. I sat up, took a quick swallow of the café.

Her lips curled into a mischievous grin. “He’s, what do they say nowadays? A hunk?”

I sputtered. “Not so.”

The grin became a belly laugh. “Ah, yes’n he is. What is it you young ones say nowadays? A Bad Boy? The girls in my time would’a been a’buzzin’ all around him.”

Goosebumps skittered along my skin, prickled against my light cotton shirt. Bad. “Where did that come from? Bad Boy? Why did you call him that?”

“Why, child. I can see him plain as day. My eyesight may be goin’, but my
sight
is just fine.” She closed her eyes as she drawled out the “fine,” and a blissful smile settled on her lips.

I rapped her hand. Harder than I should have. “He’s too—”

One eyelid snapped open and I knew I’d been had. “Perfect is the word you’re a’lookin’ for, child.”

I shivered. “Nia used those same words to describe Evans. Beautiful, alone and dangerous. Throws me to hear you describe him as such. I don’t fancy him. Told her the same.”

“Un-huh, an’ you can keep a’telling yourself that.”

I took another sip of café. It’s a waste of time to argue with the woman because she
always
wins. Likely a manifestation of her clairvoyance. Irritating.

Her voice interrupted my irritation. “Time has a way of changin’ things. This is not as it seems, with the woman a’tellin’ you ‘bout her death.”

I ran my tongue over my lips, tasted the lingering nip of chicory. “This new victim, she disappeared a while ago. It was in all the papers. Both here and in the UK. She’s from Hampshire. Was from Hampshire.”

Grandmamma reached for the pot and topped our mugs off, then added a stream of warm cream. “They still seem alive, telling you their stories like they do, yes?”

“Quite.” I scooted my chair back, stood. “I’d best get packed as the flight leaves just after noon.”

“Will you be a’goin’ to visit your father, then?”

The café au lait spun in my stomach and threatened the back of my throat. “No. It’s time for me to go home. I’ve been away from Honolulu, from my house for too long.”

Genteel. Eloquent. Demanding. There are no words to accurately describe Grandmamma’s eyebrows when they ask a question—and insist on an answer.