Itsy-Bitsy Spider E-Book

Mayer Dale

• Herausgeber: Valley Publishing Ltd.
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This is the 13th Psychic Visions Novel from USA Today Bestselling author Dale Mayer.

Queenie Landry’s job as a fortune teller at an amusement park pays the bills but it's a far cry from the respectable psychic advisor role she once filled at the police station where the love of her life, Kirk Wallace, was a detective. A case went bad when she steered the team in the wrong direction and a woman died. Queenie experienced a horrific crisis of faith in her own abilities and pushed everyone away.

Nine months later, alone and denying her psychic gift, she gives birth to a son and feels redeemed. But a happily-ever-after isn't to be. Following a severe illness, Queenie wakes up eighteen months later only to be told her son died. Unable to handle her grief, she opens herself once more to her abilities, desperate to connect with her child. Resigned to telling fortunes at the park, she's stunned when a man walks into her tent and she sees a vision of a woman he’s murdered. She realizes she has to contact Kirk again.

Kirk left under duress. Though he regrets his decision, he's never forgotten Queenie or found anyone to replace her. Having to be the one to tell her about her son's death all but destroyed him because he knew it would unhinge her and he isn't sure how she'll ever find stability again.

Unknown to either of them, someone has been watching her for a long time, someone who likes to play games with other people's lives--as he has Queenie's. But even he's confused by the creepy spiders amassing all around her. What message are they trying to convey to her that she's stubbornly refused to hear…and what price will she have to pay if she fails?

The Psychic Vision Series

1.Tuesday’s Child
2.Hide’n Go Seek
3.Maddy’s Floor
4.Garden of Sorrow
5.Knock, Knock…
6.Rare Find
7.Eyes to the Soul
8.Now You See Her…
9.Shattered
10.Into the Abyss…
11.Seeds of Malice
12.Eye of the Falcon
13.Itsy Bitsy Spider
14.Unmasked
15.Deep Beneath
16.From the Ashes

Leseprobe

Itsy-Bitsy Spider

A Psychic Visions NovelBook #13

Dale Mayer

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About This Book

Complimentary Download

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Sneak Peek from Unmasked

Author’s Note

Complimentary Download

About the Author

Copyright Page

About This Book

Queenie Landry’s job as a fortune teller at an amusement park pays the bills but it’s a far cry from the respectable psychic advisor role she once filled at the police station where the love of her life, Kirk Wallace, was a detective. A case went bad when she steered the team in the wrong direction and a woman died. Queenie experienced a horrific crisis of faith in her own abilities and pushed everyone away.

Nine months later, alone and denying her psychic gift, she gives birth to a son and feels redeemed. But a happily-ever-after isn’t to be. Following a severe illness, Queenie wakes up eighteen months later only to be told her son died. Unable to handle her grief, she opens herself once more to her abilities, desperate to connect with her child. Resigned to telling fortunes at the park, she’s stunned when a man walks into her tent and she sees a vision of a woman he’s murdered. She realizes she has to contact Kirk again.

Kirk left under duress. Though he regrets his decision, he’s never forgotten Queenie or found anyone to replace her. Having to be the one to tell her about her son’s death all but destroyed him because he knew it would unhinge her and he isn’t sure how she’ll ever find stability again.

Unknown to either of them, someone has been watching her for a long time, someone who likes to play games with other people’s lives—as he has Queenie’s. But even he’s confused by the creepy spiders amassing all around her. What message are they trying to convey to her that she’s stubbornly refused to hear…and what price will she have to pay if she fails?

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Time is running out … For her … For him … For them …

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Chapter 1

Saturday Night …

“Hey, Queenie, you’ve got a hell of a line outside your tent tonight,” Booker called from the Ferris wheel station. “How come you didn’t see that coming?” And out came his usual full belly laugh at his own joke.

Queenie waved and smiled as inside she groaned. Somehow this teasing never seemed to get old with this group. And the jokes didn’t get any better. At least with the people she worked with here. Then again she was a fortune-teller at an amusement park. She had to expect a certain amount of ribbing.

Still, she did what she could, and, for that, she was grateful to have a job. She finished her ice cream, tossing the last portion of the cone into the garbage. All around her, the noise of the park and the smell of supersticky cotton candy filled the air.

She had to stay focused. This wasn’t for her—this was for someone else. She stepped through the back entrance of her tent. After shrugging off her sweater, she picked up the huge headdress that went with the seer’s role and placed it on her head. Her crystal ball prop was under the table. She put it on the table in front of her. Then she pulled back her chair and sat down. This booth made money. Because of that, the owner paid to keep her around. Not much money, however, but it was easy work, and she got cheap food as a side benefit.

She’d been here, near Seattle in the state of Washington, for several years now. She was footloose, yet a long way from being fancy-free. Life sucked. But it didn’t matter because it was all for the right reason. She leaned across the table and opened the curtains that separated her from her customers. Close to six feet from the tent door, the line had formed, curling to the left. She smiled at the teenage girl standing in front and motioned for her to come forward.

The teen handed over her five-dollar bill. Queenie accepted it with a smile and asked, “What question can I answer for you today?”

“Will I get asked to the prom this year?” She squealed out the question in a breathless voice.

Queenie chuckled inside. “Is there someone in your life already?”

The young woman shook her head. “Not yet. But I’m really hoping you say there will be soon.”

“Let’s find out.” Queenie held out her left hand and said, “Place your hand in mine.”

And then she waved her right hand around the crystal ball. As soon as the young woman’s hand connected with Queenie’s, she smiled. Was there anything fresher than young love? She studied the ball, using it to formulate a story to tell the young woman. The ball was a prop for the people. Queenie could see everything through her eyes right now. She said, “Somebody named Jake, by any chance?”

The young woman cried out again as she gripped Queenie’s hand like a lifeline and did a half jump in joy. “Yes, that’s him.”

“Well then, you needn’t worry,” Queenie said gently, happy she could hand out the good news. “Because he’s going to ask you to the prom.”

The young woman dropped her hand and squealed again, jumped up and down, and then dashed out of the tent.

Queenie smiled and dropped the money into the jar beside her. “Next,” she called out.

A man in a business suit walked in, carrying a briefcase.

She studied him and found nothing unnerving about him, but something was off. He appeared to be calm, maybe too calm. He sat down in front of her and said in a quiet voice, “I’m about to lose everything. Is there anything I can do to help myself?”

Now that was interesting. Rarely did people come with a question of what they could do to turn something around.

He handed over his money and said, “I know this is all fake, but you have a certain reputation. I need some advice. A direction to look in? Something? Preferably good news,” he said heavily. “I could really use a shot of good news right now.”

Interested in spite of herself, Queenie held out her hand and said, “Place your hand in mine.”

As soon as he did, tingles went up and down her back. Now she was very interested. Normally she was good at judging the core character of a person. And nothing about him had set off her inner alarms. She waved her hand over the ball as she tried to sort out the images coming to her. But all she could see were metal bars. And then she realized why he had lost his job. She glanced up at him and said, “Are you trying to find work?”

He shook his head sadly. “No. I thought everything was going great … but then …” His voice trailed away.

“But then?”

“Somebody blamed me for something.” Pain and discouragement were heavy in his voice.

She studied the bars in the ball and realized they were a jail cell. He was in grave danger of going to jail for the rest of his life. She frowned and looked at him. “Do you know somebody named Mike? Mike Marrow or Munro?” She frowned, trying to get the name clearer in her head.

He leaned forward. “Mike Munro, yes, he’s my best friend.”

She looked at him sadly. “He’s not your best friend. He’s the one who framed you. He’s the one who’s guilty.”

The man stared at her in horror. He got to his feet and bolted from the tent.

She dropped his money into the jar. Next thing she knew, three little kids stood before her. They were giggling. One held up a five-dollar bill and placed it on the table. She could see the mom to one—or all—standing in the back. Queenie smiled down at the kids and said, “What would you like to know?”

“What am I going to be when I grow up?”

She held her hand out to the first boy who wore a plaid shirt and cowboy boots.

He placed his hand in hers.

Instantly the answer flooded her mind. She chuckled. “You’ll be a fireman.”

He gasped and raced toward his mother. “Mommy, Mommy. She said I’m going to be a fireman.”

Queenie smiled at the kid’s excitement as a little girl stuck out her hand. “What about me?”

“You will work with animals, little one,” Queenie said softly, seeing images of this girl as an adult, caring for dogs and cats. “I don’t know if it’ll be as a veterinarian or as something else. But your path lies with animals.”

The little girl dropped her hand, stepped away and waited for the third child, a little boy, to step forward. He held out his hand and said, “What about me?”

But his voice was defiant, almost angry, as if he’d wanted to be the fireman, and he didn’t like that his friend had that role. As soon as his hand touched Queenie’s, a shock coursed through her system. And then a cone appeared over his head. She swallowed hard at that sign and said, “Wow, you’re really hard to read. I’m not sure I see anything.”

“You don’t have to. I’m going to be a policeman,” he yelled. “I’m going to hunt down robbers.” He broke contact and raced away, past the adults at the entrance to the tent and roared like a banshee.

She carefully eased her chair backward, and, using some of the antibacterial soap, washed the hand he’d held. It wouldn’t change the fact that the little boy would die—and sometime in the next three days.

She shuddered, hating that part of her talent. The last thing she wanted to know was who would die prematurely. Especially when a child.

So far the cone hadn’t been wrong. She’d seen enough of them to know. She sat back, sipping water from her bottle, trying to calm her nerves.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a spider walk across her table. She looked at it with guarded curiosity. The amusement park was definitely not the cleanest place, and certainly loads of food were here for rodents. But she hadn’t seen much in the way of spiders. She wasn’t afraid of them, but neither did she like them. As far as she was concerned, if they left her alone, then she’d leave them alone.

This one didn’t get the message.

It walked across her table, heading for the fortune-telling ball. She watched, wondering at the odd light around the bug. She saw auras all the time. Rarely around animals though. Never around bugs. But the spider definitely glowed. She smiled at the oddity. “Where are you from?”

Something inside Queenie told her to pick it up. But she hesitated. Just because she wasn’t killing the thing at first sight didn’t mean she wanted it crawling all over her. The spider went up on its back legs, reaching out one of its front legs to touch the crystal ball. A mist swirled deep inside the ball.

And those eyes … How many eyes did spiders have?

The spider speared her with a look she found fascinating. She leaned forward, studying the bulbous critter carefully. Then, unable to help herself, and yet cringing as she did so, she touched the spider. It scrabbled onto the back of her hand.

Instantly images assailed her.

Blood. A woman giving birth. A toddler—a boy. And a name flashing in neon inside her brain—a name she’d never forget: Reese.

Shuddering, she stared at the spider in horror. It stared at her. As if it knew her. As if it knew something about her.

She brushed it off her hand and onto the table and backed away, knocking her chair over in the process, staring at it in horror. “What do you know about Reese?”

Of course the spider didn’t answer. How could it? But it gazed at her with that same knowing look. She shuddered again.

Just then a large man stepped through the tent opening, dragging a young boy with him. The man took one look at her and laughed. “Well, look at this. The fortune-teller is scared of spiders.” He walked over, flicked the spider to the ground and lifted his leg to step on it.

Before he could, she shooed it off to the side away from him. “I’m not afraid of it,” she said quietly. “And I don’t kill anything unnecessarily.”

He snorted. “You’re a charlatan, just like all the rest of the idiots here.”

“No, I’m not,” she said wearily, having heard it all before. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, seeing as how I’m here, you might as well tell me something. I’m trying to acquire a piece of property. A pretty cabin on a lake. Will I get it or not?”

With a sneer he tossed a five-dollar bill on the table. Too many people like this were in her life with the same attitude. Most of the time she could ignore them. This man, however, … had made himself part of her job.

She hated to reach for his hand, but it was necessary in this case, and his closed around hers, holding her tight. And once again images slammed into her. A mountain lake. A cabin with paths up and down to the lake.

And, in the lake, a woman’s face floated just beneath the surface.

Queenie broke contact and sat back down again, holding her hand against her chest, her nerve endings fried, her body already shaking. She didn’t know what the hell was happening. But something was wrong. She gazed at the man and said, “The property owner is dead.”

His gazed narrowed.

Her gut clenched. She should keep her mouth shut. She didn’t need to start anything, … but she couldn’t stop her visions or stop speaking of them. Someone had to. For some reason she saw a whole lot more here than she’d like.

Girding herself for his reaction, in a cold voice she added, “But then you already know that, … don’t you?”

His visage transformed, a black thundercloud forming. “Bitch,” he roared, storming out of the tent and dragging the little boy with him.

Not that it mattered. His face was destined to remain emblazoned in her mind for a long time to come.

But the face from the lake would be there a lot longer. That poor woman had been murdered. And even now floated undetected in the chilly water.

Queenie spun around, grabbed her Closed sign and hung it on the curtain that separated her from the front of her tent, then yanked the curtain closed.

She couldn’t do any more of this tonight. She wasn’t sure what had changed, but, for some reason, her abilities were heightened to a new level right now. And it scraped along her nerve endings to the point where she couldn’t deal with anything. She returned to the table, dropped her headpiece there and picked up her purse.

The spider raced up her arm and onto her shoulder. She involuntarily shuddered and flicked it off. Only it returned to run up her pant leg instead. She danced around, trying to shake it off.

But it was too late.

She’d seen its visions.

Something it knew. Or rather someone it knew.

Then, like a weird echo inside her brain, a tiny voice called out to her. Mommy? Is that you? Where are you?

She froze …

But that couldn’t be. Her son, Reese, had been dead for years now.

Shaking at the unbelievable horror she didn’t—couldn’t—contemplate, yet one that offered hope on a monumental scale … Unable to stop herself, she pulled out her cell phone and the card she’d kept tucked in the back of the phone case for many years. Unable to trust herself to send a text, she dialed the number on the card.

“Hello.”

Her heart slammed into her chest. She hadn’t heard that voice in so very long. She’d loved it once, just as she’d loved the man. Then hated both as her life had been ripped to pieces, and he’d been unable to fix what had happened to her son—their son. Whether he knew it or not.

Finally she found her voice. “Kirk?”

A moment’s pause followed. Then he said with a heavy sigh, “Hi, Queenie.”

Just the sound of his voice had her throat clogging with emotions, her eyes floating in unshed tears.

As her silence lengthened, he asked sharply, “Did something happen?”

She gave a strangled laugh and said, “Yes, but you won’t believe me if I explain.” And she hung up, sagging into her chair, tears burning the back of her eyes.

*

Kirk Sanders slowly placed his phone on the desk. Queenie? After all this time? He tried to think back to the last time he’d spoken to her. It must have been at least three years—or just over? How did one reconcile the passage of time when the first time you heard a person’s voice again was as if time had never passed?

He sat at his desk, letting the comforting sounds move around him, of everyone else’s voices and keyboards clattering in the large room.

Inside he was frozen.

Why had she called? She’d always been tenacious. Almost a bulldog latching onto something and never letting it go. He’d admired that. In fact, he’d loved it. She’d been so driven, and then all hell had broken loose. Her son would be … what? … Five maybe? He’d died at eighteen months. And that had been close to three and a half years ago. Kirk hadn’t even known she’d had a son.

He’d loved her from the bottom of his heart. He’d thought he’d found forever, was willing to do anything to bottle it so he could keep it that long. But, like a puff of smoke, it had all blown up.

Like her crazy abilities—which he’d admired—and how he had defended her and them to his colleagues. She’d been fanatical about acting on her information, but sometimes she expected Kirk to jump when he couldn’t. There was such a thing as needing evidence before picking up criminals. He was a cop and couldn’t go off the reservation or work outside the law. And, when he had been unable to help her with several visions, things between them became strained.

But the Handkerchief Killer case took strained to a whole new level.

That case had blown apart their lives, and they’d separated. Over two years later—a rough two years—he had walked into the station one day to hear she’d been hospitalized. Then he’d heard about her son. She’d never mentioned him, and he’d never asked. And now it was too late for all of them. His heart tugged at the thought of the little boy who’d been so sick. She had done everything she could to help him, but, when they had both collapsed, both were rushed to the hospital, her son dying before she’d ever awoken.

Due to some mix-up with the paperwork, her son’s body had been cremated and buried. And when Queenie had regained consciousness, they’d almost lost her again when they told her the news.

She couldn’t identify the signature on the cremation order—although it was her name. She didn’t remember signing the order, but the hospital staff said she had.

He’d seen the signature. Hell, he even had a copy of the cremation order on his desktop. Something he couldn’t quite let go of. Somewhere along the line something had happened, as if she’d been unable to deal with the grief, so she’d fed on all kinds of conspiracy theories. She even wanted Kirk to open a missing person’s file. He’d tried to explain to her there was no way he could. Her son’s death, although painful, was aboveboard. It had been verified by several attending nurses and the physician. His supervisor, when he’d broached the subject of what to do, had said Queenie needed mental assistance and to recommend she get treatment—at least counseling.

That he had privately agreed at the time wasn’t something he told her. She’d fought him on it for days as he distanced himself further and further. What did one do in the face of such pain? In the face of such disbelief and the high level of fantasy? She wasn’t willing to see his side. How could he possibly see hers? And yet the mystery remained. … Who had signed the cremation order? Queenie refused to believe she’d done it. Even more so, who had buried the remains?

The mystery was just a little too unsettling for him, and he could see how it fed her own psychosis. But, at the same time, he didn’t dare let himself get sucked into it. Unfortunately he’d seen shit like this happen before, way too often.

Maybe somebody had signed it as a good deed, realizing Queenie herself would not likely make it through her own illness. Again, any number of scenarios were possible, but, as far as Queenie was concerned, her son had disappeared from the hospital’s care, and they were ultimately responsible.

And it broke his heart all over again. Because that same devotion, that same focus she’d had on various cases, was now something she was locked on to herself. To stay sane, to have any kind of life, she had to let it go.

“Kirk, what the hell’s the matter with you?”

Startled, he glanced around and looked at Peter, one of his team of detectives. “Hey, sorry. Just got a weird phone call. Tossed me back for a loop.”

“What phone call?” Peter looked at him with a frown. “It takes a lot to shake you. But you sure do look rattled.”

With a quirk of his lips, Kirk said, “Queenie.”

Peter’s eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. “That’s not just strange. That’s heading into psychotic territory. You stay away from her.”

Kirk chuckled. “I haven’t had anything to do with her for years, and, out of the blue, she calls me.”

“What did she want?”

Kirk said, staring at his monitor moodily, “Nothing. At least she never said.”

Peter asked, with a shake of his head, “She’s still out there, isn’t she?”

“I know. I thought, after all this time, she’d have been better.”

“I think, when mothers head down that path, absolutely nobody can do anything to help them. They see dead children because they want to see dead children.” He smirked. “And, for Queenie, that goes double, as she always sees dead kids.”

“You mean, she sees their spirits,” Kirk corrected. “Because she wasn’t there, she didn’t see him die, see his body afterward, so she has no closure on her son’s death.”

“Hell, when Melissa had a miscarriage,” Peter said with a heavy sigh, “I thought she’d gone off permanently. I can’t imagine what would have happened if she woke up in the hospital to find out her child was gone, and she not only didn’t get a chance to say goodbye but she didn’t even see the body or go to a funeral, … nothing.”

“Exactly. And, because of that, Queenie couldn’t let go of the thought that maybe her son was stolen, maybe somebody did something, and maybe the child was still alive somewhere. But she didn’t say anything about Reese this time. It was a weird call actually.”

“Can’t she contact him with her abilities?”

Kirk nodded. “I imagine she tried. But you know what she was like. She would get all these weird hunches and psychic visions, and sometimes there’d be voices. Sometimes there’d be pictures.”

“Nothing was normal about her visions or her abilities,” Peter said. “I’m not even sure I believe any of that shit.”

“But she did help us close dozens of cases,” Kirk said. It had been phenomenal at the time. When she had information, it was usually good information.

“Not at the end,” Peter reminded Kirk. “It was stuff somebody else could have gotten from a newspaper or something. Hell, maybe Queenie was listening in at the closest coffee shop where the cops hung out and getting tidbits from there.”

Kirk didn’t bother answering. They’d had this conversation before, although not for years. He stared at the number on his phone, jotted it down on a sticky note and stuck it to the base of his monitor. He couldn’t quite let go of the feeling that something strange was going on—and not just with her phone call.

Her voice had been strained, as if some major trauma had occurred. She’d already been through more than most people had. Yet, he also knew that to go down that path, to even pick up the phone and call her again, was to open up a hornet’s nest in his own life, and he didn’t want that either.

“You better stay away from her,” Peter warned. “She’s bad news for you.”

Not much Kirk could say to rebut that. She’d been his everything until she broke down and sent him away. But he hated to look at that time too closely. Nor could he forget about her all these years. He’d kept tabs on her after she had lost her son but always from a distance. Then he’d lost track of her. Every six months his calendar reminded him to do another search for Queenie, to find out where she was, if possible. This exercise kept him somewhat connected to Queenie and also reassured him that she was somehow still okay.

“You know what happened when your last girlfriend found out about Queenie.”

That had Kirk wincing. His ex-girlfriend Lorraine and he had been going out together for over eight months, with her angling for a ring and permanency, when she found out about Queenie after she’d called him. Lorraine had been horrified about her occupation and him by association. They’d broken up soon afterward.

His email dinged with a new message coming in. He clicked on it.

It was from Queenie. He read the garbled note and realized it was about a vision of some kind. But, once again, no names, no dates, no locations. But she also added the description of a woman who owned property on a mountain who was lying cold under the surface of her nearby lake. The property bordered that lake, and some man was trying to take the property and had murdered the woman to get the property.

Kirk sat back and picked up his cup of coffee, his heart sinking.

The trouble was, he had become a cop because he wanted to help. He then became a detective because he wanted to do more. Queenie had abilities that had allowed him to do even more. He had turned down a promotion because he wanted to remain in the field. He didn’t want to manage people. He didn’t want to manage coworkers. He just wanted to do his job.

The others had thought he was crazy. He would get a bigger paycheck, but the job would have been a much bigger headache too. He didn’t deal well with the brass above, and he would have become the middleman between them and the detectives, so not a position he wanted. But he’d been given raise after raise. Not to mention respect and multiple commendations for a job well done.

Yet, no doubt his record of solving cases had eased back because he no longer had Queenie’s assistance.

How sad was that? Most of the guys had no faith in psychics. Except the department knew and worked with a couple who were too good to not believe. Stefan Kronos was one of them. Queenie was another.

He’d asked Queenie about Stefan a time or two, and she’d just given him a blank stare, as if she didn’t know anything about him. Kirk would have thought they had an inside line to each other.

Not knowing how to reply to her current email, he shut it down. His reply would expose a door he didn’t dare open.

Chapter 2

Sunday, Early Morning …

The next morning, Queenie walked back into her tent at the amusement park. Her gaze searched the floor, the curtains, the tabletop. Where was the spider? Feeling like a fool, she called out quietly, “Are you here?”

No response came. Just the wind, which blew through the thin fabric sides of the tent, making the interior gloomy and lonely. She groaned, pulling out her chair, searching underneath the cot and covered table.

Yesterday had been beyond unnerving between the people who had come for messages and the big man who she suspected had murdered that poor woman in the lake. And then, of course, there was what she thought was the child’s voice and the very real phone call to Kirk.

She had barely slept all night.

Any contact with Kirk was guaranteed to jar her nerves for days. He’d been her lifeline, her grounding rod, in a chaotic world of murders and lost children and desperate family members searching for the truth to terrible crimes. Kirk had been instrumental in closing more than a dozen cases for people who had come to her for help. But she’d cared too much … She hadn’t any defenses against the wounds of what humanity would inflict upon itself. When the last case blew up, it had broken her. Sure they’d gone on to find the serial killer but not before he’d taken his final victim—a woman she’d been desperate to save … and failed.

She went into hiding, like any animal, refusing to talk to anyone—including Kirk. She’d chased him away—and had further splintered her fragile emotional state into pieces.

She had turned her back on him and the other cops, desperately needing to find some peace inside. She’d ended up at a seaside community, renting a small place. Every day she had just walked the beach, trying so very hard to let go of all the pain and the trauma that had taken up residence in her mind, her brain. The memories were like a disease, festering away at her—she wasn’t eating, barely drinking. Her body was a bone rack. But somehow, walking the beach, watching the waves roll over her feet, listening to the seagulls cry above, she could feel some of her own sense of calm returning. But it hadn’t been long afterward that another truth had finally sunk in.

At the time, the trauma circling through her brain was so all encompassing that she hadn’t seen the signs, hadn’t even listened. But a miracle had happened among all that chaos. She was pregnant.

It was obviously Kirk’s child, and, yet separated from the man, she clung to that little bit of Kirk, that part of her just so desperate to find some good in all that had gone so wrong. Overjoyed, she’d started to eat better, to sleep more. She knew she looked instantly better just because she was always smiling now. She walked for miles, hours on end, working through the emotional baggage she’d picked up from all her work, read fanatically on how to let go, how to release all the bits of energy clinging to her so she’d be as healthy as possible for this next part of her life. Her pregnancy was important to her, and she planned to do everything right.

She also worked at a retail store part-time, and tried to rest and relax and look after herself the remainder of the time. She had vowed to walk away from the work she’d been doing to keep her stress levels down and to hopefully create a better future for her and her child.

To that end she had sought out free group therapy—from PTSD counseling to handling grief and stress—all to rid herself of the nightmares, and the daytime ones too. She had attended various such meetings around town, run by local doctors who donated their time. She had to laugh how Kirk had earlier urged her to do this, and she had adamantly refused at the time. If only he knew …

Even odder was that more than a couple of those doctors had asked her out. Dr. Jamison was particularly good-hearted, and then there was Dr. Steel. He was all ego. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t ready to replace Kirk. She wasn’t sure she would ever be ready for that.

Regardless, the group meetings were a necessary diversion and had Queenie among living, breathing people. After all, there was no group therapy for broken psychics. Yet, her biggest improvements came from her discussions with two people not here with her.

It had taken her months of healing—months of talking to the child growing in her womb, months of talking to Kirk in her mind, always apologizing for not letting him know about his child, not letting him know this special person was coming into being. Her connection to her child grew in multiple ways daily.

The pregnancy had been rough. She’d been sick for months, had cramped constantly but had no medical insurance, so her checkups had been nonexistent. Reese’s birth, more than three weeks early, had been the most painful and the most magnificent event of her life. Because of the birth’s accelerated timing, she had decided to go to the hospital, in case of any complications, then gave birth and awaited the initial medical checkup of Reese, saying all was good with him. She and her son were gone within hours.

She and Reese had slipped out without notice, leaving what little money she had to cover a paltry part of her bill. Upon admittance, she’d given a fake address and phone number, being so broke that she’d been living in a slum hotel. That didn’t stop her from dreading any mail that arrived, fearing it would be the rest of her hospital bill. But, when it never materialized over the next year, she finally relaxed.

Her son’s arrival was so personal, and their connection was incredible and so damn deep. When Reese had stared out of those huge magnificent dark eyes, her heart had completely melted, and she’d vowed to do everything she could to keep him safe and to show him a whole lot better world than the one she lived in.

But it wasn’t to be.

She’d worked steadily, trying several menial jobs, attempting to find a balance between enough money to live on and to raise her son on and yet, not so much work that she was away from him too long. She preferred to take jobs where she could keep him with her. She had cleaning jobs and phone-answering jobs, gardening jobs, always with the condition that her son could come with her. But then she’d gotten sick, and so had he.

Without enough money for early medical treatment, she kept working, doing everything she could to get him the best that he could have, until one night when her landlord had come looking for the overdue rent. Queenie had managed to open the door, and then she’d collapsed.

When she awoke, it was too late. Her son was gone.

She would have done anything to have left this Earth with him because the pain of being left behind was so torturous. She went into a spiraling decline that nobody could talk her out of. Added to that was the hope that her son was alive. She swore she could hear him crying out for her, as if their intimate connection was unbroken—only there was no response on his side. She was knocking, but no one answered. Kind of like her relationship with Kirk.

When her fever broke and she’d finally come to in the hospital days later, her body exhausted but over the worst of it, Kirk stood there to break the news to her. She could see his own pain as he was the one delegated to tell her the harsh truth. While his sympathy was vividly real, and he was helpless but to watch her endure this horrible loss, she also glimpsed his questioning glances, looks. He was doing the mental calculations, wondering …

Not only had her son died but his body had already been cremated. She couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the shock, the loss. In her mind all she heard was his cries of pain when she had collapsed at the front door of her apartment. Added to that was the fear her son was alive, taken from her by unknown someones.

Reese’s death and funeral already completed, Kirk paid for it as a favor to her. His own son … and he didn’t know.

Her recuperation had been slow and lonely. As soon as she returned to her home, she’d set about reawakening her abilities for the sole purpose of contacting Reese. “Didn’t I?” she murmured softly.

Yep, and it worked, didn’t it? Her son’s light laughter around her made her smile, as always, but now she wanted to cry at the same time.

It had taken her a long time to contact Reese, her own abilities rusty and the tunnel between the two that she’d forged was subsequently broken through illness and death. But she’d survived and that connection—different now than it had been—was more precious than anything anyone else could imagine. To know he was there, not always and not for long, but those few moments gave her a sweetness she’d thought she’d lost forever. This kept a smile on her face when nothing else could.

Terrified that if she didn’t continue to use her abilities, she’d lose her connection to her son, she worked at the amusement park as the Queen Seer to provide answers for five dollars a question. A misfit of all misfits, she’d felt right at home. And she’d been here ever since.

Only she was stronger now. Her abilities clearer.

Even three and a half years later, whenever she heard about missing children cases, they broke her heart. Or, if little children came into her tent, her heart stuttered in pain—her loss of Reese still so damn hard to fathom. One didn’t get over such a tremendous loss easily.

Initially after Reese’s death, she had seen grief therapists, three to be exact. Spending her grocery budget on this new expense seemed to be the wiser choice. Yet everyone grieves in their own way. None of the counselors were quite right for her. Two were men, so Queenie had sought out a third, a woman. But still, she wasn’t a mother. Funny but the very institution that had never really accepted Queenie had provided her with free counseling after her son’s death. And the police department shrink had been by far the best fit. Still, it didn’t last for long. Meeting at the police department and reminded of all her losses—Reese, Kirk, her work with the police, her confidence in her gift—wasn’t conducive for a proper psychological and emotional healing.

So Queenie sought out some spiritual help. She spoke with two rabbis, a female Methodist preacher, a Catholic priest, a Baptist minister and some nondenominational church leaders. Each were of some solace when she was in their presence, but nothing stuck. Nothing helped afterward.

There was no training for this. No way to rid herself of the guilt that ate incessantly at her soul. She’d promised to look after Reese, but she’d failed. She’d have done anything for her son to get that second chance to keep him safe. To give him a future … In the back of her mind, she wondered, Had she spoken to Kirk back then, would he have been interested in being a father? Would he have helped? Only she’d been a mess when they had split. An unstable mess.

That was the last memory he had of her. And she’d been too terrified that he’d take away her son. Afraid she was unfit to be the mother of his child. … Maybe he’d have been right. But she’d tried. Dear Lord, she’d tried. And Kirk didn’t know how much she’d changed. He didn’t know how much joy having her child in her arms had brought her. How it had turned her life around so much so that she’d finally started looking after herself.

She shook off her memories, focusing on the present. Her gloomy tent. The absence of the curious messenger spider. She looked around for him quickly one more time. No luck. Then she stepped out of the doorway to her tent and took several deep breaths.

Behind her a voice called out. “Hey, are you opening up early today?”

She glanced over at Brutus the Strong Man and tossed him a bright smile. “Nope, certainly not. I came in early to see if I needed to clean up.”

The lie came smoothly to her lips. One of the things she didn’t like about her current lifestyle was the secret she kept and her need for subterfuge. If she were to tell any of them that she hoped her deceased son was alive, they would look at her as if she were ready to be locked up. How could she explain? But the mother genes inside her wouldn’t be silenced. Reese was a reality she wouldn’t give up.

Brutus walked in her tent, looked around and said, “What possible cleaning could there be?” He glanced at her sideways. “You look like shit.”

She glared at him. “Your manners haven’t improved.”

“Why the hell should they?” He gave his big shoulders a shrug. “Nobody gives a damn what we do here. You know that.”

At those words, she had to nod. “Isn’t that the truth?”

“Did you eat?”

The question came out abruptly. Brutus, for all his size and the rough look to him, was really a caregiver. His methodology might leave a little to be desired, but he cared. “I had a banana.”

He fisted his hands on his hips. His muscles bulged, and the cords in his neck stood out. “Get your ass over to Betty and make sure you get some food.”

“I doubt I could keep anything down,” she admitted. “I had a really rough night again.”

“Are you pregnant?”

She gave a bitter laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Any number of guys here would love to be with you,” he said. “You don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to be.”

She wondered at the truth of that. She gave a quick nod. “Maybe I’m just not ready.” She brushed past him, trying to avoid contact.

But he reached out and grabbed her hand. “You can’t always be so isolated,” he growled.

Visions of his world came, images of Betty and him together. At least they were happy images, joyful images. He released her hand, and she gave him a gentle smile.

“You don’t know the truth,” she said quietly. “Some things can never be shared.” And she walked farther into the sunshine. But she wondered at her own statement. She’d have sworn she could have shared anything with Kirk. But she’d chased him away—something she’d regretted ever since.

Inside, she admitted she’d hoped he would return, but it wasn’t to be. And, as she thought about the condition she’d been in, it made sense that he hadn’t. She’d been a wreck and likely to take down everyone close to her.

Comparing the inside of her dark tent to the outside was almost symbolic of her world. So much of her life was caught up with everybody else’s pain, everybody else’s problems. She had to escape that darkness when she was left alone with everybody else’s worries and fears.

She walked briskly toward Brutus’s trailer that he shared with Betty. They’d been together as a couple for a good dozen years. It wasn’t the first time Queenie had had to knock on Betty’s door for food. Queenie should have some money coming in, but she would use it now to hire another detective to do another search. She didn’t know how the heck to get the type of research she needed. Who the hell knew anything about psychic message-delivering spiders? And where had that little bugger gone anyway?

“There you are, child.” Betty was massive. But her smile was just as big, and her heart outsized both of them.

Queenie sighed. “Brutus sent me over. He says I’m not eating enough.”

Betty was wise beyond her years. Although only in her mid-thirties, she had the air of an eighty-year-old about her. “You probably told him you had eaten something to hide the fact that you had nothing, right?”

“How is it you always know?” Queenie grumbled. “I thought I was supposed to be the psychic.”

“Oh, you’re psychic all right. You just don’t want anybody to know you’re the real deal,” Betty said with a big laugh. And, when she laughed, all her chins waggled and her arms moved as if they were alive.

It was fascinating. And so very different than Queenie’s skinny frame.

Betty laughed again and said, “I wish I could give you twenty pounds.”

Queenie admitted in a soft voice, “I wish you could too.”

Betty pushed the trailer door open wider. “Come on in. We’ve got leftover pancakes from breakfast.”

“Pancakes. I haven’t had those since I was here last week,” Queenie said, attempting a joke.

“Maybe I made a few extra in case you wanted to stop by. I heard you had a bit of a rough day yesterday.”

Her mouth full of flapjacks, Queenie shot her a sideways look but stayed quiet.

“You know you can’t hide anything around here.” Betty settled her bulk comfortably on the big bench across from Queenie. Betty picked up a coffee carafe and filled a cup. She pushed it toward Queenie.

Queenie stared at it, wanting it almost as much as she did the flapjacks. She took a breather from inhaling the food and lifted the hot brew, inhaling the aroma. “You make the best coffee.”

“And you might even get a second cup if you tell me what the hell went wrong yesterday.”

“Who said anything went wrong?”

“Well, Carlos went looking for you when the line at your tent was at least ten deep, and he couldn’t find you. At one point he was ranting and raving because you weren’t doing your job.”

Queenie winced, a motion she tried to hide but knew Betty would have caught it anyway. “Yeah, well, I had a couple rough moments there.”

“Care to share?”

Deliberately Queenie cut a big stack of pancakes and shoved it in her mouth. If nothing else it gave her a chance to think. Nobody pulled the wool over Betty’s eyes. She was good. But she came from the heart, and that made it even harder to bluff. “Which part? The spider that created visions in my fake crystal ball or the young boy who will die in three days or that last guy I spoke to who had murdered a woman,” she finally said, her voice low.

Betty gasped and leaned forward. “Really? Did you get any murder details?”

Queenie shook her head. “Not really. Just a woman floating at one end of a lake caught in the weeds under the surface. But her property is there. It borders the lake itself. This guy was trying to buy it. He asked me if he would get it, and that’s when I saw her, and I told him that he already knew the answer to that question. He got really, really angry and pulled the poor little boy he was with out of the tent. But he left an air of evil, and I just couldn’t stay afterward.”

Betty stared at her, wordless.

Queenie took the moment to eat another large bite.

“And what’s this about a spider?”

That was much harder to explain. But typical of Betty to move right along to the next topic. Queenie finished the flapjacks, picked up the coffee, took a big sip and sat back with a happy sigh. “I’m not sure what’s with the spider. But there was a spider, and it reached up and touched my crystal ball. And you and I both know that nothing makes the inside of that ball change. But this time the inside of my crystal ball swirled with a white cloud. That last man, the murderer, was going to kill the spider, but I saved it. Then, after the man left, I was trying to flick the spider off. The whole time it’s as if he was looking at me – communicating with me, and I thought I heard a little boy in my head calling out, Mommy, Mommy.”

A call that had nearly crippled her. But that part wasn’t something she could share.

“Honey, you’ve got to stop following those missing kid cases,” Betty said. “They’re killing you.”

Of course Betty didn’t know about Reese. Queenie took a deep breath. “I know. I know that, but it’s hard. So many people are in need out there.”

An odd silence followed as Betty continued to study Queenie. She had hoped Betty would be satisfied with what she had heard so far. The trouble was, Betty had the natural curiosity of anyone and some of the sight herself. “Did you recognize the child’s voice?”

Queenie gave her a bitter smile. “No. It’s never that easy, you know? No names ever come, no dates, no locations. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go to the cops and say, Hey, there’s a murdered woman in the lake up at so and so. Here’s the longitude and latitude coordinates. You want to run up and grab her? And, by the way, the guy who murdered her is standing beside me with a little kid.”

Her tone was bitter. She’d been through this time and time again with Betty. But she at least understood and had seen the struggle Queenie had gone through.

“Well, you can’t just run away again,” she said comfortably.

That stopped Queenie in her tracks. “Run away?”

“Honey, you work at an amusement park. Off the grid from the real world. You’re either looking for something or running away from something.”

“Maybe it’s both,” Queenie said. She reached across and refilled her coffee cup. She stared down at it. “It still doesn’t change the fact I feel like I have to leave soon.”

Betty sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Queenie’s mind immediately said, I wish I didn’t have to. “I’ll try to stay and make it work,” Queenie promised. “But you know it yourself. When you get that feeling that you’ve got to go, then you’ve got to listen.”

“You’ve got friends here,” Betty said. “You can get cheap food, a place to stay if you need to. This is home.”

“What kind of a home is it though, for me?” Queenie asked, her voice gentle. “You have Brutus. I don’t have anyone. As a future, this isn’t a whole lot to look forward to.”

“That’s just part of what you’re running away from. You came to the amusement park world to get away, not to arrive here. Brutus and me, we’re here because we want to be. You’re here because you don’t want to be somewhere else,” Betty said quietly. “Maybe you need a change of attitude?”

“Or maybe just a whole new life would be nice too.” She smiled, giving herself a good mental head shake to smarten up. “As usual your cooking is divine.”

Betty gave a big belly laugh again. “You can hardly say that. You come here so starving that I don’t think it would matter what I fed you. You just want the food to fill that small stomach of yours.”

“At least it’s awesome food, so I get the pleasure out of that at the same time.” Queenie gave her a big grin. She leaned closer and said, “Did Carlos say anything more?”

Betty shook her head. “No. Haven’t even seen him this morning.”

“Good. I’ll head back to my tent and open up and will be there extra long today. If I’m making lots of money, he might forget about yesterday.”

“Tell him that you were sick. But don’t ever tell him about that murdered woman.”

“Right. I know. He’d start selling my services to the police and take a cut for himself,” Queenie said. “And I did that for free for long enough.”

“Would you do it for money?” Betty asked curiously.

Queenie stopped in the act of getting up from the bench seat. “I don’t know. It’s easy to say no in theory, but, when you’re starving, money can make all the difference.” She straightened, walked over to the kitchen counter and placed her plate and cup in the sink.

“Don’t bother washing them,” Betty said. “I’ve got to wash up the others anyway.”

Queenie turned to look back at her friend and smiled. “You’re a good person.”

A peculiar look came over Betty’s face, no longer with any hint of laughter. “I’m not, you know?” she said. “I was at one time, but I took a wrong path too. I did some things I’m not proud of. And now? Well, now I try to live my life the best way I can, but I know that those mistakes will always be there.”

Queenie stared at Betty for a long moment. Queenie didn’t know if she should ask more questions or not. It was the first time Betty had ever really opened up about the other areas of her life. So many of the people here had secrets. Then people everywhere had secrets. Including Queenie.

She walked over, squeezed Betty’s shoulder and said, “I think the best any of us can do is be the person we want to be, should always have been, from this moment on. I don’t know if there’s forgiveness in this world. I’ve seen so much of the ugliness that I hope a great big pit of black lava awaits for those who have been complete assholes. But, since so many of them got a free pass instead, I’m afraid they’ll get another pass if there’s a life after this. So I can only focus on this moment and hope all the rest takes care of itself.”

“You say the right words, girl,” Betty said. “But I don’t think you’re following your own advice. You’re so caught up in the past that you can’t see the future right in front of you.”

Queenie walked to the trailer door, cast a glance back and said, “No, maybe not. But I am trying.” And she went out and closed the door.