He could also think again. Unfortunately, his thoughts went to one place: Who was it? Who had he met, touched, interacted with in the past? Whose thoughts were filled with stink and rotting garbage? And gingerbread. Why was that person’s mind consumed with it—so consumed that Aidan was overwhelmed by their thoughts, which translated into physical scents, from far away?
He didn’t doubt he’d met the person with whom he was connecting. He’d touched him or her; perhaps just a faint brush of hand against arm as they passed on the street, but they had physically connected. The sensory reactions were never this strong without real, personal contact. Studying a photograph or holding an item used by someone he was seeking might bring a quick sensation, a breathful of odor, a flash of mental imagery. But for it to go on like this morning’s nightmare meant skin-to-skin contact.
Thank God the scream hadn’t rung in his ears for as long as the stench had filled his nostrils.
Maybe it wasn’t connected
. Perhaps the scream had merely been a last remnant of one of his own forgotten nightmares. He preferred to think that, not wanting to imagine the scream was really happening anywhere else but in his own mind. Aidan didn’t want to picture the screamer in agony, desperate for help.
His
help.
“Forget it,” he muttered, not letting himself go down that path. He didn’t do that anymore. Once crucified, twice shy. He did everything he could to stay in his own head these days, and stay out of everyone else’s. Where he’d once used psychic ability, he was now quite content to use his own highly tuned sense of intuition and reasonable deduction.
Right now, he reasonably deduced that the smell had been noticed and thought about by somebody he’d briefly met, somebody who was walking by a garbage dump. And the scream was a product of his own tortured memories running rampant in his dreams. Period. He refused to consider any other options.
The sudden ringing of the phone came as a jarring surprise. First because it was so early, and second because he so seldom received phone calls. He liked it that way, having isolated himself in this old house in Granville when he’d decided to get out of Savannah after everything went down so badly last year. He rarely shared the number, and when he saw who was calling he heaved a heavy sigh. So much for staying out of the mind-hopping business. Because one of the few people in the world who could occasionally rope him into working missing persons cases again was on the other end of the phone line.
Julia Harrington hadn’t given up trying to get him to come back to work for her, at least on a part-time basis. She knew him well enough to know he still had his fingers in a few pies out there, that he couldn’t completely stay away from the world of crime solving, even if he did it without the “woo-woo” stuff, as she called it.
With this morning’s incident fresh in his mind, he was tempted to just let the machine pick up. If he did, however, he’d be letting himself in for more calls, every half hour, around the clock, until he finally answered, and it didn’t take any psychic abilities to know that. They’d played this game before. His former colleague was relentless about getting what she wanted.
“Hello, Julia,” he said as soon as he lifted the phone to his mouth.
“How did you know it was me? Admit it—you’re doing your psychic thing again, right?”
“Ever heard of a little invention called caller ID?”
“Oh, that. How mundane.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
Julia was one of the few people he kept in touch with from his old life. When everything had gone to hell with his last case, she’d been right there, standing beside him, ready to fight for his reputation if he asked her to.
He hadn’t asked her to. Though he’d certainly appreciated the offer, Julia had her own issues. Ex-cop or no, she now owned a company called eXtreme Investigations, and led a team of psychic detectives. So she wasn’t exactly the most staunch and upstanding of character references. Whenever her name came up, the media was almost as vicious toward her as they were toward Aidan. Almost. Had she been working with him on that last case, she might now be living in the old house next door, just as wary, just as vilified.
“So, whatcha working on?”
“I don’t do that anymore; remember?”
“Yeah, uh-huh, sure you don’t. I thought about you the other day when I saw a story out of Charlotte about an ‘anonymous tip’ that led police to the killer of a local carpenter.”
He stiffened, wondering how she could possibly have connected that to him.
“Morgan.”
Ah. Morgan. Of course. Julia’s business partner definitely got around.
“Reasonable deduction,” he admitted grudgingly.
“Nothing supernatural about it. I merely hacked into the case file, read the witness statements, and found some inconsistencies. It was all right there.”
“Just can’t stay out of it, can you?”
“If by ‘it’ you mean dabbling in cold-crime solving, I’ll admit that I haven’t lost my interest. But as for the rest? Hell, yes, I can stay out of it. So you might as well not even start.”
“Hold on, before you go getting your excuses lined up about why you can’t come back to the real world, and have to keep wearing your hair shirt and indulging in self-flagellation—”
“That was a mouthful.”
“I’m just saying, don’t panic. I’m not calling to beg you to come back to work, or to lure you into working a
special
case, or even to pick your brain.”
He couldn’t deny a flood of relief. She didn’t want him for a job. He’d never worked for her exclusively, but he’d done a lot of contract jobs for Julia when she and her partner were getting eXtreme Investigations off the ground. Since his “retirement” she’d come to him a few times, strictly for advice—so she said—or trying to lure him into work via the back door of consultancy.
But not this time. Which meant she was probably calling to try to reengage him in a social life, like she had a few weeks ago when she and two of her other agents had shown up at his door. Aidan wasn’t the type who enjoyed surprise visits, nor did he ever go to beer-and-wings joints like the one to which they’d dragged him. Despite the fact that he’d almost had a good time, he had no desire to repeat the experience. Because even here in Granville, where he was a newcomer and a stranger, people knew him by reputation—and oh, how they did like to stare.
“Aidan?”
“Okay, so why are you calling?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know.
“I got a call last night from a reporter.”
“We don’t use that word anymore, remember?”
“Oh, sorry. I mean, I got a call last night from a lying, manipulative media cockroach.”
“Better.”
“It’s about the Remington case.” The words sounded like they’d ridden out of her mouth on a deep sigh, as if she hated to be the bearer of bad news.
“Wonderful.” Aidan lifted a hand to his face and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. Of all the names he didn’t want to hear ever again, Remington topped the list. “Go on.”
“He wanted to get in touch with you to see if you’d heard Caroline Remington tried to commit suicide last week, on the anniversary.”
“Jesus.” Aidan sagged against the back of the couch, a well of emotions surging through him. Anger, pity, frustration. Regret. Such regret. It was like his worst nightmare, only it just kept going and he couldn’t wake up from it.
“I know; it’s awful.”
He’d never even met Mrs. Remington; she’d been well protected by her husband from the minute their son disappeared. But from the pictures he’d seen in the paper, she looked like a pretty, fragile woman whose world had been shattered, leaving her confused and heartbroken.
“Is she all right?”
“Apparently. She took some pills, but her husband found her in time. I thought you’d want to know, in case the cockroach from the morning news manages to track you down.”
Finding out his general location probably wouldn’t be too hard. He hadn’t made it a state secret that he was moving to Granville, fifty miles west of Savannah. Or that he was giving up his role as prominent author, speaker, and expert on psychic phenomenon to become a hermit who growled at the world whenever it dared to intrude on him.
But at least his number was unpublished and his address unlisted. Anyone wanting to reach him would have to do some digging, and hopefully the reporter wouldn’t bother.
Wishful thinking
. In his experience, there was no place too low for most reporters, no dirt they wouldn’t claw through, no muck they didn’t want to rake up.
“I hate that this is coming up again,” Julia said. “I’m really sorry.”
“I figured it would, with the one-year mark. Besides, I’m not the one you should feel sorry for; Caroline Remington is.”
First, for the loss of her six-year-old son, and second, for being married to a controlling, manipulative bastard like Theodore Remington.
Thrusting the anger away, he forced himself to think of the fact that, even though he was a rich, spoiled, overbearing asshole, Remington was also a grieving father. He had good reason to bear a grudge against Aidan. Whatever petty revenge he’d taken, using his contacts and power to make Aidan’s life hell, it had been justified. After all, in Remington’s mind, Aidan had been responsible for his son’s death. And Aidan couldn’t entirely disagree with him.
“Aidan?”
He sighed heavily. “As if I have anything to add on that subject? Haven’t I said enough to and about that family?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He’d heard those words a thousand times in the past twelve months, since the Remington boy had been found dead, trapped inside an old antique freezer in his own grandmother’s garage. At least, he’d heard them from his friends and colleagues.
From strangers, the media, the boy’s parents? Well, their words weren’t nearly as comforting and their attitude not nearly as understanding.
“You are not responsible; it was a tragic accident.”
“An accident,” he repeated.
Maybe. Probably.
Or maybe not. Sometimes he wondered. Though, of course, he couldn’t voice his curiosity now, couldn’t ask the questions the investigators should have asked back then. Because he had zero credibility and nobody gave a damn what a disgraced former psychic thought.
“What you do isn’t an exact science.”
“No, but if I had stayed out of it, maybe—just maybe—somebody would have thought about how much the kid loved to play hide-and-seek, actually done a proper search and found him in time, rather than going on a wild-goose chase into every orchard in eastern Georgia.”
All because when he’d focused all his thoughts and psychic energy on young Teddy Remington, he’d smelled peaches. He’d also felt the brittle spray of rain on his face, the press of hard wood against his back, and the sting of splinters puncturing his skin.
“You’re repeating your own bad press,” Julia insisted. “You didn’t send them running around like a bunch of idiots. You told them what you were feeling and Ted Remington decided what it meant—that his son had wandered into one of the local orchards and gotten lost. You didn’t put that boy in that freezer.”
“I sure as hell didn’t help him get out of it,” he replied, hearing his own bitterness.
“Look, if the cops had been doing their jobs, it wouldn’t have mattered if you had visions of a convicted pedophile snatching the kid.” Her righteous anger exploded through the phone lines, snapping and hot. “Searching everyplace he could have gone, including his own damn grandmother’s house down the street, was the first order of business. They should have been fired for letting Ted Remington’s money and influence browbeat them in the wrong direction.”
They should have been fired. And
he
should have been run out of town on a rail.
At least one of those
should haves
had come true. Not that he’d actually been run out of Savannah; he’d left of his own free will. But the effect was the same—Aidan McConnell was no longer in the psychic business. Never again would he let himself be responsible for the well-being of someone else’s child. Not ever.
He’d had misfires before. Like Julia said, it wasn’t an exact science. There had always, however, been some bit of truth, some small element that had been correct, just misinterpreted.
But in the Teddy Remington case? Nothing.
The top-opening, chest-type freezer had been ancient, unused for years. It had held no fruit, much less sweet, fragrant peaches, and the garage itself had smelled of nothing but stale air and mothballs. The unit hadn’t been plugged in. It contained no moisture at all, so the child certainly hadn’t felt the hard, punishing spray of cold water on his face. Rusty metal, sagging plastic—no hardwood, certainly no tree limbs, nothing to cause splinters. All wrong.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for the heads-up,” he told Julia. “I’ll be sure to activate my electric fence and charge up the cattle prod.”
“Ha-ha. No torturing members of the press, as tempting a target as they may be.”
Considering how brutally the media had dissected him last year, stopping just short of accusing him of murdering a child, they were indeed a tempting target. Still, he said, “Got it.”
“We’ve got a lot of cases, Aidan. Let me know when you’re ready to get back to work.”
“Let
me
know when you’re ready to stop asking.”
“Not gonna happen.”
A bitter laugh emerged from Aidan’s mouth and he shook his head. “Ditto.”
Not gonna happen.
Thursday, 8:15 a.m.
As she typed her article on the community playhouse’s production of
Annie
, Lexie Nolan somehow managed to refrain from punching her fist through the computer monitor. It took some effort, real willpower. But the urge faded when she reminded herself of a few pertinent truths.
First, it would hurt. She might slice off a finger, which would make typing a real chore.
Second, she wasn’t using her own computer; this one was owned by the newspaper for which she worked. Considering the reporting pool for the
Granville Daily Sun
had a sum total of three creaky old desktops for use by the entire staff, she would not only have to pay to replace it, but would greatly inconvenience the other four reporters who worked here.