Authors: Jennifer Ryan
“As for the crystal ball, sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t own one. I don’t need it to do what I do. As for the cauldron, well, it’s how I whipped up this batch of tea. You know, a little wing of bat and eye of newt. Poof and voilà, iced tea.” She’d tried to keep her voice light, but a hint of annoyance tinged her words.
He was teasing her, but she wanted him to like her. She wanted to be accepted by him and everyone else in their family circle. She wanted to belong. She used to feel like she belonged, right up until she lost her connection with Tyler.
She didn’t like people making her out to be something she wasn’t. Like something bad or evil. She was just a person who’d been given an extraordinary gift. It had taken her a long time to get to the point where her gift was more blessing than curse.
She didn’t trust him enough yet not to judge her. She probably already thought he had judged her and found her to be the witch everyone had called her as a little girl. Sam liked the whimsical way she spoke of fairies in the lilies, like a leftover fantasy from a childhood that had been anything but sweet and charming.
“Jack tells me you’ve lived here for about two years. I know you met Tyler in Texas. Where’d you live before that?”
“You have an interesting mind.”
“Can you read my mind?”
“Sometimes. You have very good boundaries set up. It’s what makes you a good investigator and undercover agent. What I mean is that you look at things like a puzzle. While I can’t see the actual information you have, or what you’re looking for, when I look at you as you ask me questions, I see floating puzzle pieces. I have a feeling that with each new bit of information I give you, you’ll assign it a puzzle piece and fit it to its partner until you make the whole picture.”
“Is that how you do what you do? You see images of things. I know the clues you give us are all abstract images or impressions. Is that how it comes to you?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s very specific, like a dream of what’s happened or will happen.
“How to put it in simple terms?” She sat back and tapped her foot on the floor. “I might see a duck. Depending on the situation, or the person, the duck could mean simply a waterfowl, or look out. It could mean the person needs to let whatever it is roll off their back like water off a duck. What I see isn’t always literal. It’s taken me a long time to understand the things I see.
“To give you an example you can relate to, when I met Jack the first time, he rode up on his horse. When I look at that horse, I see a blue horse with a shield on its chest. Now, since you know Jack, you know his favorite color is blue. Blue, the horse, is his favorite and named for Jack’s favorite color. The shield is a little harder to relate, unless you know Jack and Jenna. I can see a past in which Blue stood guard over her. He thinks of her as his to protect, hence the shield.
“If you and Tyler had a case and I told you I see a man on a blue horse who has a shield on its chest, you wouldn’t know what to do with that information. Once you investigate and found out that the man rides a horse by the name of Blue and he protects his mistress it makes sense.”
Jack laughed. “Is that really what you see when you look at my horse?”
“I see a lot more, but that just illustrates to Sam what I see and how I see it. It isn’t simple.”
Not simple at all, and he didn’t need to hear the trace of irritation in her voice to know it frustrated her sometimes. He could just imagine having a picture in his head and not knowing what it meant. At times, some of his cases felt the same way. He had pieces of the puzzle and no idea what picture those pieces should make.
Now she was making him think like her. Creepy.
“Stop thinking I’m creepy. You and Tyler do that far too much, and I have to say, it’s annoying. You’d think by now all of you would be used to me and what I can do.”
Sam nodded at her in agreement and steered the conversation back to her past. “So, back to the question still on the table. Where did you live before Texas?”
“Ever the detective,” Morgan mused. So he wanted the details of her past. He must already know about her parents and her disappearance. Better to take the direct route than playing Twenty Questions. They’d wasted enough time. They needed to get to the heart of the conversation. That meant getting to the murders by way of her nightmare past.
“Y
OU KNOW ABOUT
my parents?”
Definitely a question. Sam had to stop assuming she knew everything he knew. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. He’d seen enough TV shows and movies with psychics that he should know they didn’t see everything. It worked more like a switch, either on or off. Morgan’s switch seemed to be on more than anyone else’s.
“I read the files and the newspaper accounts. Yeah, I know,” Sam said.
Jack didn’t know about this part of the conversation, so he kept his mouth shut and let Sam do his thing. If Morgan wanted to share, she would. She did things her own way, and he’d respect that.
“Does Tyler know?” She didn’t necessarily want him to know one more thing about her that made her odd. Not everyone had a father who murdered their mother. Tyler would be angry she hadn’t told him. Another thing she didn’t share when he’d shared so much with her.
“Yeah, he knows the basics. I didn’t fill him in on everything I’ve uncovered, since he’s been gone and pissed me off.”
She wanted to ask about his being gone, but she held her tongue. None of her business, even if she wanted it to be.
“Then you know my father killed my mother. They said he did it in a rage of passion when he discovered she was leaving him.”
“That’s what the police said. It isn’t what you said.”
“They didn’t believe me.”
“No, they didn’t,” Sam said sadly. “Instead they called you a witch and people protested outside the courthouse and chanted hateful things at you. Some even threw things when they brought you into the courthouse. The press fed the frenzy and the defense attorney made you out to be crazy. He tried to discredit you on the stand and advised the court you should be sent to an institution for
evaluation
. It’s what your father wanted to do with you.”
Jack let out a disgusted grunt, outraged for Morgan. He didn’t like the idea of people treating her badly and Morgan appreciated his support and understanding.
“Oh, he didn’t want to have me committed. He wanted to kill me. He started the cause to get the devil removed from his daughter’s possessed body. After that, every religious zealot and fanatic came out of the woodwork. They didn’t come to get justice for my mother and see my father pay for what he did to her. They wanted to see the witch, who could see things. Devil, demon, witch, crazy, psycho, I’ve been called them all since I can remember.”
“What did you see your father do?”
“There’s no mistaking the fact he killed her. It’s the part where they called it a crime of passion and charged him with manslaughter instead of cold-blooded murder. That I couldn’t let him get away with. He planned killing her. He thought everything through. Everything, except for me. He didn’t count on me calling the police and having them show up minutes after he’d killed her.”
She waited for the million-dollar question. They didn’t disappoint her.
“Why didn’t you call the police and tell them before he killed her?”
“Because I didn’t know he planned to kill my mother before it happened. I only saw the murder and the events leading up to it minutes before he killed her. Without her standing between us, he’d finally have control over me. Standing up to my father wasn’t easy, but when it came to me, she tried. She didn’t want him using my gift and me.
“I was on my way home from school when it happened. I made the call to the police from a grocery store and ran all the way home. I arrived just as the end of the vision came true. I watched him kill her—twice.”
A lot to take in, no one said anything for a minute.
“He used to play games with me. When I was really little, I thought it was fun. As I got older, and better at it, it wasn’t fun anymore.”
“What kind of games did he play with you?” Alarms went off in Sam’s system. The little devils crawled up his back, his chest went tight, and he held his breath for what came next.
“Little things like, guess which hand I’m holding the coin in, or which card comes next in the deck. I was always right,” she smiled.
Those were happy memories of a time when her father had been less angry at the world.
“He’d ask me to guess what number he was thinking. I wasn’t always right on that one, but I got it most times. As I got older, the games got harder. He’d want to know something specific about someone. Like I’ve told you, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t ask me something like, ‘What’s Jenna’s bank account number and her ATM secret code?’”
“So he’d ask you these questions, so he could use it to his advantage?”
“Yes.”
“He was blackmailing people.”
“You’re sharp, Sam. It started off so innocent, the way it happened. The fun games we used to play turned into dark games. Then, they weren’t games anymore, but serious business. To him anyway.
“I was about six. I asked why a friend of his was kissing another woman. I knew the man and woman in the picture in my mind. They didn’t belong together. They were both married to other people. He took that information and got them both to pay him money to keep the affair quiet. An easy way to make money, it continued until I figured out his game.”
She tried to tell herself she was young and hadn’t understood the ramifications of what she saw. Sometimes she could accept that, and other times she blamed herself.
“When I helped him, he got his money and left me alone. When I got it wrong, or didn’t know, I was punished. Usually, a slap and stuffed into the closet for a few hours. Other times, worse. He liked to taunt me and ask, ’Guess what’s coming?’ Even I could see a fist coming at me without being psychic.”
Sam and Jack winced and sat further back in their chairs. Interesting, they did the exact same thing in unison.
“He killed my mother because I refused to help him with something he really wanted. My father wanted in on a scheme that made another man a lot of money, but he didn’t know how the guy did it. I told him I couldn’t see it. He went to my mother to get her to make me tell him.
“She’d denied her gift her whole life,” Morgan said, looking into the past. “She’d learned as a little girl it didn’t do any good to use her gift. She’d been ridiculed and teased. She simply put it on a shelf and ignored it. Whatever she saw or knew, she kept it to herself.”
“Did she encourage you to use your gift?”
“She told me if I used my gift openly, I’d spend most of my life alone. My choice. I could hide my gift, lie, and have a normal life, always trying to pretend I’m something I’m not. I couldn’t shut it off like my mother seemed to do. She was like other psychics I’ve met. I’m different even from them. Using my gift has certain drawbacks.”
“What kind of drawbacks?”
“In order to do what I do, I have to open myself to the energy around me. Imagine every experience and emotion you have is a ball of energy that circles you like planets in orbit. Now imagine someone like me connects with you. Some of those energy balls get thrown to me as a copy. I take in that energy and read it. Most are benign, or have a little punch to them. If it’s a particularly happy memory, then I might feel that light, happy feeling. If the energy is rage, then it’s like being hit by a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball.”
“So you feel the emotion attached to the images.”
“Yes. Most times. I like hanging out with Jack. He’s usually a happy-go-lucky guy. That radiates from him. It makes me feel good. I don’t have to keep any guards up to protect myself from something that might come at me from him. His energy is usually something happy or touching, especially when it’s about his children or Jenna. She’s very loved. I feel that, too.”
Sam chuckled and Jack sat grinning, red faced.
“Now, imagine being around someone like my father. His energy is very negative. It can suck the life out of me. It’s draining to be around someone who is always looking for the easy score, or how he can manipulate someone. All his energy is wrapped up in anger and frustration.
“Most people feel those kinds of things when they’re around negative people. But for someone like me, it’s magnified. Sometimes when I’m having a vision on one of your cases, it’ll take all my energy. I’ll just sit on the couch for hours, until I can focus on the room again, and then move that focus to the reality of the room around me. It’s like I shut down until my energy can recharge, and the bad energy can dissipate.”
“Are you telling me that it physically hurts you when you have a vision about a crime?”
“Not always. It’s when the vision carries strong energy. That energy can be very bad, or very good.”
Sam cocked an eyebrow, not quite understanding.
“A lot of people use the term
empath
, the ability to pick up on other’s emotions.”
She opened herself to him and right away she got a vision of him with Elizabeth.
“I can see your wife having Grace. I can feel the overwhelming emotions you have for that memory. You were happy and scared, in a good way, and nervous. When Grace arrived, you felt overwhelming love and joy. That kind of energy I can handle because it’s good. It makes me feel a little euphoric. It’s like food that nourishes the body. Bad energy is like junk food. Eat too much and you get a stomachache. Eat only junk food and it starts to hurt more than just your stomach.”
“Okay, I think I get it. Let’s get back to your father. You were saying he went to your mother when you wouldn’t help with his newest blackmail scheme.”
“This one wasn’t about blackmail. He planned to kill the man and take over his operation. That’s not important though. My mother wouldn’t help him use me. He threatened, he trashed the house, and in the end he killed her.”
“Wait, why didn’t he ask her if she could help him?”
“Because he didn’t know she could. She’d hid it from him their entire marriage. I know; you’re going to ask why she married him if he’d only end up killing her. All I can say is that I don’t think she knew. Or if she knew he’d be the man he turned into. Even I have a difficult time seeing my own future. I do know she got my sister and me out of the bargain. She told me all the time, I was the greatest gift she’d ever received. She used to say she knew I had important things to do in my life.”