Page 33 of The Lady Has a Past

He groaned. He should have known better than to go down this path, he thought.

“The act involved members of the audience asking for psychic readings on objects they had brought from home. Usually they wanted to know something about the history of the item. Tinsley would go into the crowd and select someone. He would escort the person onstage and then he would connect me to his damn machine with a metal band around my head and around one wrist. He gave me the object to hold and then he pulled a red curtain around me and the machine. After a few minutes he pulled the curtain aside with a flourish. I announced the results to the audience in a suitably dramatic voice. Satisfied?”

“No. Why the curtain?”

“It was anact, Lyra. A performance. You need to impress the audience with lots of stage props.”

“Okay, I guess that makes sense. The machine was a prop, too, right? You didn’t really need it to do your readings.”

“As far as Tinsley is concerned, the machine is real. I told you, he’s obsessed with it. But it doesn’t actually work. The idea was to make it look like it could channel a person’s latent talent. Tinsley wanted to create a lot of interest in the device so that people would buy tickets to the show and help fund his research. My job was to make the machine look as if it really worked.”

“What kinds of things did people ask you to read?”

“Old jewelry. Family heirlooms. Sometimes they just wanted to know if an object was valuable. Occasionally they tried to do their own detective work. One woman brought a carving knife to the show. As soon as I touched it, I knew it had been used in a murder.”

“You could tell just by handling it?” Lyra said, fascinated.

“Yes.” Simon downshifted for a curve and thought about the sensations he had experienced when he touched the hilt of the blade. “It was the first time I had read an item that had been associated with extreme violence. I was so shocked I blurted out the wordmurder. The audience was stunned. The woman who had requested the reading yelled,I knew it. I knew that bitch killed him.Fortunately it was the last act of the evening. Tinsley and I packed up the show immediately and left town within the hour. The last thing we wanted to do was get caught up in the middle of a murder investigation.”

Lyra said nothing. He glanced at her, trying to get a read on what she was thinking. She was smiling. Amusement sparkled in her eyes.

“What?” he said.

“The image of you and Dr. Tinsley scrambling to hightail it out of town before you had to explain things to the police is rather amusing, that’s all.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t at the time.”

“No, I imagine it wasn’t. But I have to tell you it does sound a lot like a scene from a Laurel and Hardy movie.”

Once again he was caught off balance. He shocked himself with a short, sharp crack of laughter.

“I guess you had to be there,” he said.

“Did you leave the act because Tinsley was using you to make money to finance his research?”

The flash of reluctant amusement vanished in a heartbeat.

“There was no real research involved, Lyra. It was all a con. And I had a major role in it.”

“How can you say that? Obviously you have some sort of paranormal talent.”

“No, damn it.” He paused. “What I have is a good sense of intuition. That’s all.”

“You’ve got a serious paranormal talent and you’re not about to admit it, not even to yourself. Why, exactly, did you leave the Tinsley show?”

“I got tired of being used.”

“I don’t think that’s the whole story.”

“That’s all the story you’re getting.”

“Sooner or later you’ll talk,” Lyra growled in an exaggerated movie-villain voice. “Everybody does.”

“To you?”

“Yep. The hard part is making them stop.”

He had the horrifying feeling she was right.

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