Mind Tricks (18 page)

Another poster hung on the
community bulletin board outside Teague’s, and Emma felt her mouth stretch into
its first smile in twenty-four hours. With so many people aware that he was
missing, Brutus would be found in no time.

Then she saw Jake at a table, sipping
coffee, a newspaper open before him and a stack of familiar posters at his
elbow, and she froze in the doorway.

He must’ve learned from Mickey that
she would be here and was lying in wait.

Go.
Leave now.

But his head lifted, and his dark
eyes caught hers. Too late for an easy escape. Maybe she could tell him that
she felt ill—no lie, with coffee and anxiety boiling in her stomach—and then
get out.

As she forced herself to walk
toward him, his dark eyebrows pulled down into a frown. He didn’t look smug at
having cornered her; he looked confused. Then confusion solidified into sharp
annoyance.

“Just happened to stop in?” he
asked sarcastically, as if she were the one following him.

She stopped at the corner of his
table. “No, I’m meeting someone for breakfast. Your uncle,” she added. Like he
didn’t know.

“Yeah? Well, me too. Why don’t you
pull up a seat for a few minutes, and we’ll see if he even shows.”

If he even shows? Jake didn’t
expect Mickey to appear? The coffee-and-anxiety mix in her stomach thickened
into concrete. “What do you mean?” she asked weakly, grasping the back of a
chair with both hands. Now what was she supposed to do?

She needed to get out of here.
Really, how many times did she have to tell herself that before she’d act on it?

Instead she studied Jake. He
appeared the same as before: exhausted around the eyes, direct in his gaze, and
too good-looking for her to keep her mind on track. The only difference was his
mouth was tight and flat, unwilling to slide up into his usual insides-warming smile.

He didn’t look like a killer. He
looked like Jake. An aggravated Jake, but still Jake.

Brutus stared up from the posters
at her. She pulled out a chair and sat down.

“Has Mickey done this before?” Jake
repeated. “You mean, set two people up to meet and then vanished like a ghost?
Oh, yes. Never to me, though.” He drummed his fingers on the table before
yanking his cell phone out of his pocket. Like all the locals, Jake was wearing
jeans. Only the tourists paraded around in shorts. “Let’s call him and find out
how much of our time he’s going to waste this morning.”

Ouch. This was a man who was not
happy to be in her company.

But that was good, she reminded
herself. That meant he’d stay away from her.

Phone to his ear, he waited and
then rolled his eyes and said, “Emma and I are at Teague’s, expecting you. Just
checking to make sure you won’t be late.” He clicked the phone shut. “I got his
voice mail—surprise, surprise. How long do you want to give him?”

She checked her watch. It was
barely nine. To wait twenty minutes would be polite. But twenty minutes was a
long time to spend with Jake.

“I can stay until nine-ten, but not
much longer. I have a lot of things to do today.”

“Me, too.”

A few seconds passed. He didn’t
seem inclined to start any conversation, but she was going to twitch to pieces
if she had to sit here in silence for ten minutes with him, murderer or no
murderer. If she kept the topic on Brutus rather than Ginny, perhaps everything
would be fine.

“I saw a lot of posters of Brutus
as I drove into town,” she offered. “Did you do that?”

He nodded, his gaze wary.

“Thanks,” she said. He wasn’t going
to get a chance today to tell her,
No
thanks are necessary.

The stiff line of his body relaxed
a fraction. “Mickey said someone just came and grabbed him out of your house.
That’s freaky.”

“Yeah, that’s one way of putting
it.” The scent of coffee being poured at the counter rolled over her. Four
minutes ago, she would’ve sworn she’d never drink coffee again. Now it felt
like her lifeblood that had been separated from her body. And it was a good
excuse to move away—because she was starting to forget that this was a
dangerous man she was sitting with. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, and
then stood and strode to the counter.

As she waited to give her order,
she watched the customers coming in and out of the bakery. A few nodded to Jake
and said hi as they passed his table, but none paused to talk. Other customers
whom Emma could see from her place in line but Jake could not stared openly at
him and whispered to each other.

With a snap, Jake opened the paper
again and began reading, the corners of his mouth white.

Weren’t these people his friends,
his neighbors? They should be supporting him instead of practically shunning
him.

Of course, she was avoiding him,
too. But she at least
knew
he was
involved in Ginny’s murder. These other people couldn’t be so sure. Unless they
knew him better than she did. Unless they knew him to be very capable of
murder. She was the idiot who’d allowed him to convince her that he didn’t
believe he’d killed Ginny.

But wait…it hadn’t worked like
that. He hadn’t tried to convince her. She’d convinced herself, so sure that he
believed himself innocent.

She stared at his dark head bent
over the paper. Wait—that was another possibility. Maybe he
didn’t
know that he’d killed Ginny. If
he had been drugged—or drugged himself—those memories could truly be hidden
from him. And that would explain so much: his asking her to do energy work on
him, his bringing her with him to interview Mark at the Waterview, his warning
her away from him after Cooperman’s visit.

Her coffee cup warm in her hand,
she walked slowly back to their table. This didn’t change anything. Not really.
So maybe he thought himself innocent. What would he do if he knew she’d seen
scenes of blood in his head?

For one, he probably wouldn’t
believe her.

She swerved toward the sugar and
cream station even though the coffee guy had already dumped a healthy slug of
each into her coffee. She needed another few minutes to think.

Jake didn’t believe in psychics in
general, and he didn’t believe in her animal empath powers specifically—she
knew that, despite his polite attempts to act like he might. He had no reason
to imagine that she could pull his memories of Ginny’s murder out of his head.

A release of tension made her hands
tremble as she lifted off the lid of the coffee cup, and a little hot liquid
sloshed over the sides, singeing her skin.

Because of his disbelief in her and
his belief in his own innocence, she was safe from Jake.

Or was she?

There was only one way to find out.
She had to read his mind again.

Jake laid down the paper as Emma
sat again at the table. Somehow with her there—no matter how reluctantly—he
didn’t need the newspaper to shield himself from the sideways stares and
double-takes when customers recognized him.

Yep, murderer in your midst. Watch
out.

He wanted his old life back. Or
even to be where he was two days ago, sure that Emma’s feelings for him were as
straightforward as his own.

He glanced at his watch: 9:08. Two
more minutes, and then he could escape this hellish situation. Emma was
probably thinking the same thing.

“Have the police been helpful with
Brutus?” he asked.

She shrugged. “A little. They came,
wrote up a report, and dusted for fingerprints. But I have so many people who
come in and out of my house that the police weren’t hopeful of that leading
anywhere.”

“Did they say anything about my
backup DVDs being gone?” What he really wanted to know was whether they’d given
her a hard time about it—about her connection to him.

“I hadn’t realized the disks were
missing then, so I never reported them, and I forgot to call the police about
it last night. I’ll call them when I get home.”

Hmm, this was turning into a fairly
normal conversation. Perhaps she’d lost her hostility toward him since they’d
spoken on the phone last night, though he couldn’t figure out why. Given how
he’d hollered at her then, she should be even more hostile this morning.

Maybe she was a kook who’d made it
her mission to corkscrew his emotions every time he saw her. Or maybe she was
just naturally talented. “Don’t bother calling the police about it. They’ll
probably just harass you. I’m not their favorite person.”

“No kidding. I bet they asked me
more questions about you than they did about Brutus.”

He winced. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’d warned me.” And
she reached out and touched his hand.

He flinched in surprise, and she
pulled her fingers back. Okay…apparently good Emma was back. Had she and her
evil twin swapped places when she’d gone up to get coffee?

He wrapped one hand around his own
coffee cup and tucked the other in his lap. No matter which Emma she was now,
he didn’t exactly want her touching him. The last time had ended disastrously.
Painfully. And he’d learned his lesson.

It was 9:10. He cleared his throat.
“Mickey isn’t here, he hasn’t called, and I doubt he’s going to arrive. When I
see him later, I’ll yell at him. You said you were busy…” He trailed off,
giving her a graceful out.

Emma sipped her coffee and didn’t
make a move. “The problem is, my plans involved Mickey. Do you really think
he’s not going to show up? That throws off everything.”

“What were you doing together?”

“He was going to drive me around
while I used my, uh, skills to try to locate Brutus.”

Figured. What a grand waste of
time. “Too bad he’s bailing.”

“Yes. I’ll just have to do it by
myself.” She sighed. “But it’s difficult to drive and to concentrate on linking
up with Brutus at the same time. Plus it’s going to be even harder today than
it was yesterday, since I got only about three hours’ sleep last night. I had
to patrol the kennels to make sure the guy wasn’t going to come back and grab
another dog. Or all the dogs.”

She gave him an expectant look.

Jake stared back. Surely all this
chatter wasn’t meant to convince him to volunteer to be her chauffeur while she
closed her eyes, swung her crystals, and tried to “link up” with Brutus?

“Say,” she said perkily, “you did a
great job with the posters. I saw them everywhere as I drove into town. And it
looks like you still have a bunch more. Since Mickey’s not going to be driving
me around, I could help you put more posters up.” And then she gave him a big
smile.

Who
was
this girl? Didn’t she remember throwing him out of her house on
Thursday night? Just what was she angling for now?

He kept his mouth shut and waited.

She leaned forward suddenly, her
blue eyes intense. “I’m betting that Brutus’s disappearance is going to push
back if not kill my kennel expansion idea. You promised earlier that you would
help me with my business plans. Would you instead help me up posters today?”

A direct appeal. Hard to dodge
that, but he would.

Instead his mouth said, “Fine. For
how long?”

“An hour or two.”

All right, that wasn’t so bad. And
if she went nutso on him again, he’d simply cut the excursion short. “Let’s go,
then.”

He reached for the stack of
posters, but she rested her hand on his forearm, stilling his movement.

What was with this sudden need of
hers to touch him? And why the hell couldn’t his stupid hormones follow his
brain’s commands and stay dormant instead of bursting through his body like
Fourth of July fireworks?

He waited for her to say something,
but she shut her eyes instead.

What the—?

Wait a damn second. He’d seen stuff
like this on
Star Trek
,
The X-Files
, and all those other shows
with a telepath. Emma was trying to read his mind.

Pet psychic, his ass. She thought
she was the real thing.

He clamped his other hand down on
hers, locking her palm to his skin, and leaned forward until their mouths were
inches apart.
“What do you see?”

“N-nothing.”

Anger scorched up his spine.
“That’s bullshit, Emma. You’re not the touchy-feely sort, and I’ve watched
enough bad TV to figure things out. What the hell do you think you see in my
head?”

Her eyes huge and her face
whitening beneath her tan, she shook her head frantically.

He wanted to grab her shoulders and
shake her. He wasn’t some pampered, pedigreed dog who needed therapy because he
trembled when he saw a cat. He was a human being who was watching more and more
of his fucking future slip down the drain every day because almost everyone
believed he killed Ginny. This was his
life
she was playing games with.

“I’m not playing games with your
life,” she whispered.

Jake felt like someone had kicked
his chair out from beneath him. His skin went clammy and his stomach swooped in
a skydive.

Christ Almighty. She
was
the real thing.

Voice hoarse, she continued, “Do
you
still believe you didn’t kill her?”

Reeling like a man who’d been flung
from a roller-coaster, Jake could only stare at the witch in front of him.
What? What the hell did
that
mean?

A queasy knowledge crawled up from
his gut. It meant that Emma hadn’t seen anything in his head that acquitted him
of Ginny’s murder. No, what she’d seen had made her think he was guilty.

Queasiness spiked into a roiling
nausea. Shoving away from the table, he strode toward the bathroom in the back
of the café. He ran the last few steps, kicked the stall door shut behind him,
and emptied his stomach into the toilet.