Page 124 of Power of the Mind

“Hi. I’m Memphis,” I announced to break the tension. “I have an appointment. Sorry, I’m a few minutes late. Car trouble.”

“Memphis,” she repeated as though tasting the word to see if it was bitter or sweet. I had the uneasy feeling this woman could pick out truths and lies without blinking.

“Come in.” She held the door wide.

I entered, surreptitiously glancing around at a part of the house that hadn’t been visible from the backyard window the previous week. It was unusually dark with the closed curtains, shapes indistinct. A sole light emanated from a distant hallway. Low music played from somewhere deeper in the house, a melancholy spiritual compilation that was both hypnotic and soothing.

I told myself not to read too much into the atmosphere, or I’d start believing in psycho-babble nonsense and become another sucker, handing over the reins and letting Rowena play god with my mind. She couldn’t read my thoughts. She had no control over my brain.

I still had free will. Choice.

I followed her toward the light and into the room I’d already seen with a round table, walls full of celestial art, and packed shelves with what I assumed was psychic paraphernalia. The music was louder but not assaulting. It had been joined by a trickling fountain and the faint tinkling of bells from dangling wind chimes, although how they were moving without a breeze boggled my mind. Was there an open window? An air current?

Madame Rowena motioned for me to sit. The chair was cushioned in what appeared to me as muddy, green-brown velvet. It molded pleasantly to my ass. A rich scent of strange herbs and spices hit my nose. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, although I couldn’t pick out specific notes with any accuracy. It seemed floral at times, then smoky before changing to something redolent of damp, mossy woods, conjuring recollections of a hiking trip I’d gone on in college. I caught myself excessively inhaling, trying to pick out the hints of olfactory fragments and categorize them.

Then I worried the air was filled with toxins meant to alter my thinking and make me more suggestible, so I held my breath and tried not to breathe at all.

Madame Rowena moved around the room, lighting a few candles and a stick of incense in a jar on the shelf. She adjusted the volume of the music until it became secondary, almost distant. A dream-like afterthought. She pulled up a chair across from me, folded her hands on the cloth-draped table, and, silent as ever, studied me with an inquisitive eye.

A cliché crystal ball sat between us, catching the flickering flames from the candles, warping them strangely along its smooth spherical surface. Was it pulsing? I stared at it for a moment, hypnotized by its strangeness. Was it radiating with light from within? No. It must have been my imagination.

“Um…” I wasn’t sure what we were waiting for or why Rowena hadn’t begun, so I felt compelled to say something to fill the silence. “So, how does this work exactly? It’s my first time.”

“It works by you telling me why you’re here, Tallus Domingo. I’ve been waiting for you to show your face. Took longer than I expected.”

My blood turned to ice.

28

Diem

When the line went dead, I cursed and tossed my phone on the desk. It skidded across the surface and went over the other side, landing with a crash on the floor. Fucking headstrong Tallus was off playing detective hero on his own without a goddamn clue in the world. This was my fault. I’d given him too much power. I’d put him in charge of the case out of a misguided sense that it was not a case at all. We were no longer working as a team. We weren’t even working on the same theories.

I zigged. He zagged.

I wanted to calmly gather information. He wanted to slink, spy, and chase leads before they were leads.

Maybe I’d spent too much time emphasizing we weren’t partners.

Maybe it was because I couldn’t express my thoughts clearly enough. Story of my life. God knows, instead of runningscreaming the other night after hearing what I had to say, Tallus had taken me to bed. What did that say about the man?

He was either stupid or resilient.

Maybe it was because I’d treated this whole goddamn case like a joke and let him run wild as I lumbered along, obeying his every command and not injecting an opinion often enough.

Either way, I had information on hand that qualified as suspicious. I didn’t know how it related to the eleven dead people, but enough years as a PI told me to warily keep digging because I was getting closer to something big, and I knew not to ignore my gut.

The question was, did I rescue Tallus from the psychic before I found the key piece, or did I let him have his fun and do this on my own?

Logically, I should leave him. What information did I have?

One of the kids arrested for dealing drugs used to work for Janek. The naturopath told me her ex-employees name when I’d returned to the store, and Kitty had confirmed he was one of the boys they’d hauled into the precinct on Wednesday night from the cemetery beside Rowena’s house.

Brodie Newall, whose mother had worked at the same fair where Rowena and Hilty had performed their notorious show before getting arrested for the suspicious death of two men.

It didn’t mean they knew each other. But if they had, could they have stayed in contact? Was the mother of a drug dealer who worked in a supplement shop beside Hilty a plausible connection?

It seemed flimsy when I said it out loud. Except no matter how many times I did the math, Tallus’s fucked-up case always came back to drugs. No other explanation fit. I’d been saying it since day one.

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