Ice Cold Death Read online

  “Do you mind if I ask,” he said, “what you saw when you spaced out?”

  I shifted my gaze away from him for a moment. I didn’t like that he knew—or seemed to know—that I’d seen something.

  “Did you know Brad Keel?” I said, sidestepping his question. “More than casually?”

  Diego nodded. “He interned for a while where I work. His father is an old friend of my boss.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “We weren’t friends,” he said. “I knew him from work and I’d see him around the rink, but it was just a nod and say hi kind of thing.” He shifted his weight. “So, will you tell me what happened to you in there?”

  “Happened?” I said, putting all the innocence I could muster into the word.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Something obviously happened. There was a lot more than my magic pinballing around that rink, and it came from you.”

  I looked away and rubbed my thigh, thinking. Maybe it would be good to tell him. Maybe saying the words would get the pictures out of my head.

  “I saw the murder. It was ugly. I didn’t see who did it.”

  Diego nodded, taking that in. “Psychic?”

  I gave a little shrug of admission.

  “And empathic,” he said, “judging by your physical reaction in there.”

  I tilted my head slightly in admission.

  “Yeah,” he said, and was somber a moment. His face brightened. “Would you like to get some breakfast? I’m famished.”

  I was all for changing the subject, too. “Will you tell me something in return?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “When you’re in net, do you use magic to cheat?”

  “Are you questioning my character?” There was no hint of insult in his voice, only bemusement.

  “Just curious.”

  “No.” He fished out his keys. “I don’t need magic to win.”

  The way he said it, it wasn’t a brag, only a statement of fact.

  I raised my eyebrows, not quite believing him. “Not even in a championship game, score tied in the last minutes, the other team on a breakaway with their best shooter bearing down on you. When he shoots, you know you’ve misjudged and that without magic the puck is going to find the back of the net and your team will lose the game?”

  He beeped his car door open. “Not even then.”

  I sent my senses out looking for unwarranted pride or general full-of-him-selfness, and didn’t feel any of that. Didn’t feel a ton of ego either. Either this Diego guy was telling the truth, or he was one of those people who so believed whatever lie they told that it sounded, smelled, and tasted like truth when they said it.

  So, a saint or a sociopath?

  I didn’t want to have breakfast with either, or with anyone right now. The vision of what I’d seen on the rink flooded back. My knees felt too weak to hold me upright. I leaned against my car.

  “I think this. . .” I said. “Brad’s death. It’s a bit too much.”

  “And you’d like to just go home.”

  “I would. Yes,” I said. “Thanks for the offer though.”

  He nodded. “I’m happy to just go home myself. Things like this morning take a while to process.”

  “A wizard and a gentleman.” I decided he probably wasn’t a sociopath at least. “It was nice meeting you, even if the circumstance was pretty awful.”

  He grimaced. “About that wizard thing. Let’s keep it between ourselves.”

  “Sure” I said, “so long as you don’t go telling people I psychically saw the murder.”

  “Deal.”

  His gaze flickered over me again. “On the rink, do you ever use your psychic powers to know what your opponent plans to do next?”

  I beeped my car door open and pulled it wide.

  “I’m no saint.”

  * * *

  My thoughts were still on Brad as I drove toward home. At 7:30 on a Sunday morning, I had the road mostly to myself. I couldn’t shake thinking about Brad and his companion, his murderer, and how there was something wrong in the way I saw the killer’s physical body and aura.

  I drove safely, though—stopping at red lights, not running into the back of the car ahead of me. If we knew how many drivers on the road were in a ‘mind somewhere else’ state at any given time, we’d never leave our houses.

  I must have blanked out for a moment though, because out of nowhere a man stood in the road directly ahead of me. I pressed the brake pedal, glanced in my rearview mirror and then from side to side. A Toyota Corolla was coming up fast on my left. I couldn’t change lanes to avoid the man. I couldn’t swerve right up onto the sidewalk or I’d hit a woman walking a French bulldog and a German shepherd.

  Why didn’t the man move?

  I hit my horn. The man put his hand up in a ‘stop’ gesture, but I couldn’t stop. Not in time. I was going to hit him.

  Move, dammit, I willed in his direction. But he stood rooted.

  My hand on the wheel was gripped so tightly it hurt. I kept applying the brakes and using the horn. I’d hit the man, but if I could slow the car enough, maybe I wouldn’t kill or badly injure him.

  He still didn’t move. Impact was inevitable. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the collision, steel on flesh.

  My car passed straight through where the man had stood without so much as a gentle bump. A glance in my rearview mirror showed nothing but the back of the woman calmly walking the dogs.

  My heart thundered in my chest. There had been a man in the road, I was sure of that. I hadn’t hallucinated him.

  Or maybe I had. The apparition I’d seen was the same height and body shape as Brad’s murderer. Sometimes our minds play tricks.

  * * *

  I hung out at home until Wednesday—reading, binge-watching Netflix, attempting new recipes—trying to pretend I wasn’t completely freaked out over Brad’s murder. That the images didn’t come flooding back at the most unexpected times. That the whole thing made me a little afraid to be outside. Better to stay in my house where I knew I was safe.

  Lucky for me, I’d had canny ancestors. My great-great-grandfather, Charles Goodlight, had invested heavily in real estate in downtown Los Angeles and here in Hermosa Beach, where I lived in the house he’d built in 1914. My upstairs bedroom had a lovely sand and ocean view.

  Over the years, some of the land and buildings had been sold off, but more had been bought—the Goodlights down through the generations had sharp eyes for good investments. I’d never needed to work to support myself and didn’t have a job now—no unsympathetic employer demanding I show up or be fired while I sorted through my feelings about what had happened.

  I’d held jobs in the past, out of sheer boredom and an abhorrence of indolence. I had a degree in English Lit and worked in preproduction for one of the studios for a while. Spending your days in a place full of egos, insecurities, and desperate wants is no job for an empathic psychic. When I found myself wondering if lining a hat with tinfoil might really work as a defense against the daily pokes and prods of my coworkers desires, jealousies, and disappointments, I knew it was time to move on.

  I’d volunteered as a dog walker at a local shelter after that. The dogs were happy to see me and didn’t want anything more than to get out of their cages, but even feeling their desperation got to be too much.

  These days I lived off the income from the rentals and mostly stayed home.

  But really, three days brooding over Brad’s murder and the awful knowledge that his killer was out there was enough. When staying indoors forever starts to seem like a good idea, it’s time to get dressed and go into the world.

  I’d pulled on black jeans and a white T-shirt, and was tying my red high-top sneakers, when someone knocked at the door. I looked up, surprised. I wasn’t a social person. None of the people from the studio or the dog shelter had ever been to my house. I didn’t keep in touch with more than a handful of people from high school and college. The place ne
xt door was a rental with a rotating cast of frat boys and surfers who I never bothered to meet. We didn’t get door-to-door sales people or Jehovah’s Witnesses here on the Strand—the concrete promenade between the row of expensive oceanfront houses and the sand. I had no idea who it could be.

  I debated ignoring the knock, but since I was determined to be back in the world today anyway, I figured why not go see who it was?

  I opened the front door to find the wizard/goalie from Sunday standing on my wide wooden porch. I tried to remember his name, but it’d gone.

  He wore shorts, a blue T-shirt, and black flip-flops. Sunday morning he’d worn a long-sleeved shirt and jeans that had hidden the tattoos that decorated both arms shoulder to wrist and the ones circling his left leg just above the ankle. I knew enough to recognize the ink as runes and signs, but not enough to know what they meant.

  But what struck me most was how magic danced around his being like his own personal aurora borealis. How could I have missed that before?

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said back. “Do you remember me? Diego Adair. From Sunday.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Now that I wasn’t half in shock from seeing someone I knew dead in the middle of an ice rink, I was a little taken aback at how good-looking the man was. Six feet tall or there about. Dark hair just long and wild enough to give him a rakish, pirate vibe. A close cut beard. Blue-gray eyes. Thin but built, the kind of body that might be used to display an expensive men’s suit. Maybe his face was a little too craggy for everyone’s taste, but I found it pleasant.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “I hope so.” His gaze flicked past me into the house.

  My home is my sanctuary. I really don’t like having strangers invade it, but my mother didn’t raise me to be rude.

  “Would you like to come in?” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said and smiled.

  I turned, and he followed me down the foyer and into the parlor. Most people would call it the living room, but it was called a parlor when great-great-grandfather had built the house and that was how I thought of it. This room had originally been much smaller, but my grandmother had knocked down the wall between the old parlor and formal dining room, making the new parlor a large, airy space.

  I followed my guest’s gaze, taking in the furnishings—taupe couch and loveseat. Two blue club chairs. Teak coffee table and a teak end table at each end of the couch.

  The walls were painted French blue. A large bay window with a family-antique chaise in the bay that looked out onto the Strand. I read and people-watched a lot there. Framed on one wall were the original plans for the house and a dozen family photos stretching from 1900 to the present. Other walls held paintings that had come down through the family and one or two or my own. It was a peaceful room. I liked it.

  I motioned to the sofa for him to sit. I took a chair facing it.

  “How can I help?” I said.

  He seemed uncomfortable and didn’t immediately say anything. The silence stretched out.

  “Just because I’m psychic,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, “doesn’t mean I can read your mind and know why you’ve come.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. Do you remember I told you that Brad had interned at my office and his father was a friend of my boss?”

  I nodded.

  “Brad’s father has asked my boss, Tyron Danyon, to help find who killed his son. To augment the police search.”

  “Why would he ask that?”

  He hiked up one shoulder in a half shrug. “The company, Danyon and Peet, is a private investigation firm. It’s the sort of thing we do.”

  I filed that away: goalie, wizard, and private investigator. An unusual trio of skills.

  “The police took my statement that morning at the rink,” I said. “I don’t know what else I could tell you that would help.”

  He nodded. “I would like to get a statement from you as well, but I’m here to ask for something else.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know we said we’d keep the wizard and the psychic thing just between us, but it came out in conversation with Tyron. He’d like you to join the investigation as a psychic consultant.”

  I glared at him. “I don’t think so.”

  “Can I ask why not?” Diego’s voice was low, soothing. He leaned forward, his hands between his knees.

  I regarded him a moment, deciding between being polite and being honest. I went for honesty.

  “You broke your word about keeping my psychic abilities and what I’d seen at the rink secret. You breached a confidence and my privacy. That’s not the sort of person I want to work with.”

  His lips drew together but he nodded. “I did, and I apologize. You don’t know me, so you can’t know that breaking my word wasn’t done easily.”

  I felt genuine remorse from him.

  “Then why did you do it?”

  He sat up straight. “A couple of reasons. I knew Brad and want to find his killer. I think you can help with that. Also, to not say what you’d seen would have been holding back significant information. I couldn’t do that.”

  He’d weighed keeping my confidence against finding a killer and chosen what seemed most important. Was most important. And yet it irked me. It took me a moment to let that go.

  “I understand,” I said. “Apology accepted.”

  A hopeful smile crossed his mouth. “Will you help?”

  I put my hands on my hips and stretched my back, which suddenly felt tight. “I’m not sure I can.”

  I couldn’t run my empathic psychic receiver all day, every day—not even 9 to 5, five days a week. It would exhaust me.

  Anyway, it wasn’t like I walked down the street and clearly picked up the thoughts of every person passing by. I felt people I knew much more than strangers. Thank God for that. Who’d want to know the mundane, profane, or even the profound thoughts, memories, hopes of every single person around? Not me. It was bad enough that I caught random thoughts and emotions whether I wanted to or not. I certainly didn’t want to go looking for them.

  I can read minds, but I needed to focus on the person I was reading and want to know what they’re thinking. Sure, random stuff came through—a person’s stray thoughts hitting me like they were speaking in my ear—but fortunately I usually had to intentionally seek a person’s thoughts. The cacophony would likely drive me insane otherwise.

  Knowledge could come unbidden, of course—full-blown visions, or sudden information about, and awareness of, things, people, or events that there was no normal way I could have known. Like Brad’s murder.

  Throwing in on the investigation would probably mean summoning up that memory more times than I would like, searching it for clues, dissecting every nuance between Brad and his killer. I shivered at the thought.

  There were plenty of reasons not to take this on. I couldn’t think of one reason why I should, other than basic human kindness toward Brad’s family.

  “Oona?” Diego said softly, some worry in his tone.

  I snapped my gaze to him. “I don’t think I can be of any help with this. My own abilities—”

  “Magic,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your own magic, which is what your psychic abilities are—inborn magic that can be trained and honed like any other skill. The more you do it, the better you’ll be at it. No different than playing hockey.”

  I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it. I’d read my great-grandmother Cassie’s diaries. She’d regarded her and her mother’s abilities as magic and had trained to strengthen what she’d come by naturally. My psychic abilities were definitely inborn, and maybe I could make them stronger and more reliable, but I still wasn’t going to be of any use to these people.

  Diego leaned forward and tucked his hands between his knees again. “You’ve already admitted you use your magic to beat opponents on the rink. Why not use it to help put away a killer and bring some ease to
Brad’s family?”

  Sheesh, I thought to myself, sling a little guilt my way why dontcha?

  But he had a point. If I could help, shouldn’t I at least try? If I were a member of Brad’s family and knew someone who maybe could have helped didn’t—I’d be plenty pissed.

  “How would I do that?” I said. “What would your boss expect of me?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “If you come on board, we’ll figure it out as we go.” He paused. “The pay is excellent.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “But you don’t need the money,” he said. “Which is better, frankly. We’ll be working closely together if you join us. I prefer to work with someone motivated by forces other than greed.”

  “How do you know I don’t need the money?”

  “Really?” he said, as though my question was so naive as to be ridiculous. “Danyon and Peet is an investigation firm. Do you think Tyron would have sent me to ask for your help without checking you out thoroughly first?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re one of those people who can be really annoying, aren’t you?”

  He flashed a cat-who-drank-the-cream smile. “Are you in?”

  I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to leave Brad’s family without answers, either.

  I thought about that weird doubling thing I’d sensed from Brad’s killer. What was that about? And what about my hallucination of the man in the middle of the street? Both things had freaked me out to the point where I hadn’t left my house in three days—and I seriously disliked letting fear rule me.

  I stood. “Would you excuse me a minute?”

  Diego nodded, a puzzled expression on his face.

  Everyone has favorite rooms in their house. I loved the parlor and the kitchen, which I’d recently had remodeled. I sat on one of the bentwood kitchen chairs and leaned on my elbows at the oak table and let my thoughts roll unbridled through my mind.