Vortex (10 page)

“Protect yourself? From what?”

“The people I deal with... well, they’re some pretty bad people. Sometimes seeing inside them is... painful. Damaging.”

“So you have to try
not
to see inside them? Because seeing comes naturally?”

“Like breathing.”

Karen opened her mouth to speak, then stopped a moment, thinking,
Do you really want to ask this question?
After hesitating a moment, she said, “Can you see inside me?” Penny nodded. Then she smiled and said, “I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I don’t mind seeing into you so much because you’re such a nice person. I’m not used to that.” Karen felt her eyes sting with tears as a lump developed in her throat. It wasn’t from the sweet compliment, but from the relief in Penny’s voice, from the way she relaxed for a moment, revealing just how tense she’d always been up to that moment. Karen’s heart broke for the girl. She gulped the lump and willed the tears away.

“Thank you, Penny,” she said. “That’s the best thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.”

“I see that Crystal has already talked to you about your feelings for Mr. Keoph.”

Karen blushed.

“She’s very nice,” Penny said. “Crystal, I mean. But she’s not psychic. She thinks she is, but it’s really a talent she has for reading people. She’s not seeing inside them, she’s just seeing things outside them that most people don’t see. That confuses a lot of people.”

“What is it like to see inside people?”

“Scary. Sad. Especially when I see things about them that they don’t even know. Like you. You don’t know it yet, but you’ve already set aside a place in your mind for the regret you’re going to feel later when you come to see what an opportunity you missed by not telling Mr. Keoph how you feel about him.”

Karen stopped breathing. She felt her heartbeat in her throat. Something about what Penny had said made those stinging tears return, and this time she couldn’t will them away. She stood quickly and told Penny to get some sleep, stepped outside the bedroom and pulled the door closed. She stood in the hall for a moment and took a few deep breaths.

When the conversation with Burgess ended, Gavin stood and stretched, reaching up toward the ceiling, then bending down and trying to flatten his hands on the floor. He massaged the back of his neck as he walked around the room. “Are you going to do it?” Crystal said from her chair.

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you going to go to the Mahler’s house tomorrow, like Marty suggested?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to talk to—”

“Yes,” Karen said as she entered the room, “we are. We have to do something. I couldn’t live with myself if we just walked away from this.”

“How’s Penny?” Crystal said, standing.

“Trying to sleep. Do you mind keeping her here for the night?”

“No, of course not.”

“Don’t be so glib about it, Crystal. Keeping her here is extraordinarily dangerous.”

“Don’t think that just because I’m a New Agey girly-girl that I’m, like, helpless. When I lived in Los Angeles, I was burglarized and, um... attacked. I decided not to be traumatized by it and never to let it happen again. So I started buying guns and learned how to use them. I’ve got guns all through this house and I’m a damned good shot. Anybody comes in here, they won’t be leaving without an ambulance or a coroner. Besides, what choice do I have? We can’t send that girl back to those people.”

Karen smiled at her. “Martin is exhibiting unusually good taste in women. He should hang on to you. And you can tell him I said that.” She turned to Gavin. “We should get some sleep, don’t you think?”

Gavin chuckled as he shook his head slowly. “Yeah. Wish us luck with that.”

Forty-five minutes later, Karen was lying beside Gavin in bed, unable to sleep. Penny’s words ran through her mind on a loop, again and again and again.

You don’t know it yet, but you’ve already set aside a place in your mind for the regret you’re going to feel later when you come to see what an opportunity you missed by not telling Mr. Keoph how you feel about him.

She could hear Gavin breathing beside her, his back to her. She could feel him as if her body were touching his, although it was not. She wondered if she was blowing it. Was her personal rule prohibiting relationships with coworkers really that important? Since when were
any
of her personal rules really that important?

Karen turned her head on the pillow and looked at the back of Gavin’s head in the dark.

Gavin?

His body jerked with surprise. “Hm? What?”

“How come we never see each other between jobs?”

He didn’t respond for a long moment, then he slowly rolled over to face her. “Um... because you live in Los Angeles and I live in San Francisco?”

“Well, yeah, I know, but...1 mean socially.”

He propped himself up on an elbow. “What? Are you awake? Or are you talking in your sleep?”

Karen began to feel embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.” She rolled over on her side, turning her back to him.

“No, no, what’s on your mind? Seriously. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Really. Go to sleep. We have to get up in a few hours.”

Gavin frowned into the dark. He decided this was a very weird job for all kinds of reasons as he rolled onto his side and tried to go back to sleep.

G
ertie tried to be herself as she ate breakfast. She’d gotten little sleep and felt groggy, but she tried to hide it. Mama had cooked steel-cut oats and hard-boiled eggs and Gertie ate even though she didn’t feel hungry.

“I wonder what all that fuss was last night,” Mama said as she sat down at the table with her bowl of oatmeal. Papa was outside tending the goats, chickens, sheep and pigs with the three young men from town who worked for him part time. The radio on the counter was quietly playing the news on NPR. “Why would they think someone had come to our door at such an hour?”

“I think they were just looking for one of their people,” Gertie said. “Someone who was supposed to show up last night. They wondered if he’d come to the door, is all. He was probably lost.” That barely made any sense at all, but Gertie felt the need to speak, afraid no response would somehow appear suspicious to Mama.

Karen had called Gertie’s cell phone a little while ago and told her they would be coming later in the morning. She explained what they would be telling Mama and Papa—they were mystery writers working on a novel set in Mt. Shasta and had heard that Papa knew a lot about local history—and told Gertie not to let on that they’d met, or that she knew they were
really
there to look into the lab behind the house and possibly meet Mr. Ryker.

“I don’t think Papa will take you out there,” Gertie had said. “And I don’t think he’ll let you go on your own.”

“Even if we ask for a tour of the property?” Karen had asked.

“Well, normally he might. But Mr. Ryker has told us to tell no one about that lab. Papa is pretty suspicious of most people. It took him a while to warm up to Mr. Ryker and his people, and if they hadn’t given Mama and Papa so many gifts, it would have taken a lot longer. He’s never met you, so there’s no way he’s going to get comfortable with you in a single visit. And even if he did, he’d still feel it was his duty to do as Mr. Ryker asked.”

Karen had sighed. “Okay. Don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it.”

Gertie was worried. She was a terrible liar under any circumstances, but she found it very difficult to lie to Mama and Papa. She wasn’t sure she would be able to pull it off. But for Crystal’s friends, she would try.

She glanced nervously at the clock. Just a few minutes after seven.

Karen found it difficult not to dwell on what Penny had told her the previous night, but she gave it her best effort. When they left the house, they found that snow had altered the color scheme of the world. Gavin drove them into town and parked at the curb. They walked into a small diner for breakfast at a few minutes after eight.

As the chipper, plump, middle-aged waitress put their breakfasts on the table, Gavin said, “We’re new in town, and we’d like to—”

“Welcome to Mt. Shasta!” The waitress nearly sang the greeting. Her nametag read “Roz.”

“Where ya from?”

“The bay area,” Karen said.

“Oh, I love San Francisco,” Roz said. “It’s a bee-yoo-tiful city to visit. But I wouldn’t want to live there. I’ve always been a small-town girl.”

Still smiling, Gavin tried again. “We’d like to learn as much as we can about the town and the mountain. Is there someone around here who’d be able to answer some questions?”

Roz winked. “You writin’ a book?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we are,” Gavin said.

“Get off my porch. You’re a
writer
?”

“We both write. Mystery novels. We’re setting one here in Mt. Shasta and we just rented a place that—”

Roz squealed like a little girl. “Oh, damn, I’ve gotta go get a coupla the others to come
meet
you! We got a lotta readers here. Of course, most of us read romances, but still,
mystery
writers! Be right back!”

Karen leaned across the table and said quietly, “Wed better come up with a few titles, because you
know
they’re going to ask what we’ve written.”

Roz returned with another waitress and the manager, a petite, fidgety woman in her thirties named Debra, who kept giggling as they talked. Karen and Gavin introduced themselves as Susan McGee and Peter King, and the next question came from Debra: “Are you related to Stephen King?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Gavin said.

Karen chuckled and said, “Unfortunately, I didn’t find that out until
after
I married him.”

Karen and Gavin got around to asking their question and they got three answers, none of which included August Mahler.

An hour later, they walked through town, visited the shops and struck up conversations whenever possible, just as Burgess had suggested. They asked the same question of merchants and fellow customers: Do you know of someone who can talk with us about the history of Mt. Shasta? And none of them responded by saying, “August Mahler.” After spending a couple of hours walking from one end of town to another, visiting shops and two art galleries, they walked back to the SUV as it began to snow again.