Following Christopher Creed (28 page)

He tossed the paper onto the middle of the table. My fingers and Ali's slapped down on it at the same time, so we were both reading sideways. It was a .pdf file of an advertisement, and Mrs. Adams had been good enough to put the
Press of Atlantic City
dateline at the top from a week ago. I let Ali do the aloud reading.

"'Vera Karzden. Psychic. Criminal Investigations. Psychic Forensics. Cold Case Readings.'" Ali looked at Torey in disbelief. "Oh my God! I think you made the woman famous!"

"If so, I didn't mean to," he said quickly, and we all laughed. Miss Vera's prediction that he would find "death in the woods" had freaked Torey out so badly that he didn't sleep for nights. From his web passage about him and Ali visiting her, you would think he had never forgiven the woman for being so accurate.

He said, "Read on."

"'Miss Vera has moved her offices from Margate, New Jersey to Route 9, just two miles north of Steepleton—' and the address and phone."

They laughed a little more, thinking it was funny to hear something about Miss Vera so many years later. Margate was only about half an hour from Steepleton, so the move wasn't exactly strange.

Torey even added hastily, "A lot of people move from the islands because it's too expensive there now." But his tone implied he was offering explanations to keep from being freaked out by something.

"Her Margate offices ... I wonder if that was her room above the garage!" Ali laughed. "Glad she finally made it!"

I was smiling too, though I felt tempted to say
More bad frequency.

I supposed Bo had read
ChristopherCreed.com
, but probably only once, if that. I wouldn't have pegged him as a reader.

Ali said, "Remember when you stole Chris's diary, and Torey and I found in there that he'd briefly dated some girl named Isabella Karzden? Torey and I went to her house in Margate to see if he'd told her anything about where he was going. Remember this?"

Bo muttered, "Yeah, sure," but looked lost in thought. Obviously this had nothing to do with his sister.

"She hooked us up with her aunt Vera, the chain-smoking, Dorito-munching psychic who lived over the garage." Ali let out a snorty laugh, and Torey managed to smile. "She told Torey he would find 'death in the woods.' Torey ran out of there so fast—"

"Two miles north of Steepleton..." Bo recited, twisting the ad around so he was looking straight at it. He read off the address.
Bad frequency,
I thought, though Bo seemed to have a slightly different opinion. "That's somewhere between Steepleton and Conovertown."

Nobody could deny it. The silence pounded.

"So," Bo said, seeming to come to life after being lost in thought. "Do you guys believe in fate?"

Only Torey answered, saying, "Oh my God. Don't—"

Bo pulled out his cell phone, laughing but not smiling. "You guys want to know why I hardly ever drink more than one beer?" He tapped his glass, which only had an inch of brew left in the bottom. I think it was his second. "It's because I have moments like this."

He dialed. I felt the call would be a dud. It was close to midnight, and the woman probably had business hours, even if she was a psychic.

"Just be careful, man," Torey said quickly. "I hold no opinion on psychics. In other words, I was just showing you a weird and funny ad. If you're let down, I don't want it on my conscience."

Bo put the speakerphone on, and we put our heads together to hear. I was almost smiling, not believing the passage of great writing I'd set myself in the middle of, even if she didn't answer. But the situation got better than my wildest dreams.

A woman actually picked up. She didn't sound like she'd been asleep. It was a normal "Hello?"

"Is this Miss, uh, Vera?" Bo asked.

"Sure is," she said.

"Sorry ... if I woke you up. This is not a crank call, okay? My name is Brody Richardson, though my friends call me Bo. You ever, um, take night visitors?"

I could hear something like the exhale of a cigarette. The woman replied, "Grief doesn't have hours. And I'm so sorry for your loss."

O
UT IN THE PARKING LOT,
I found Justin snoring behind the wheel of his mom's car. He was sitting straight up, mouth open, as if the sleep had come on so suddenly that he didn't even have time to lie down.

Adams looked over my shoulder and whispered, "That your ride?"

Lanz stood in the back seat, wagging his tail. I nodded, then turned to smile at Torey. "Justin Creed."

Adams did a double take. "He was a little kid last time I saw him, and now he looks almost like a man."

I could see the kid in Justin, but knew what he meant. Bo and Ali were already in Bo's old bomb car, and he honked, which made Adams jump straight up, though Justin didn't even stir.

"Do we ... include him in this?" he whispered.

"Uh, no," I said, using the same line of reasoning as I'd used to keep him out of the interview. He'd gab and dominate. "Let him sleep. He really needs it."

We took off down Route 9 in Bo's car.

Ali turned around to the two of us in the back seat. "Torey, are you sure you're okay with this?"

Bo added, "Listen, buddy. If visiting the woman freaks you out too much, I'll turn around now."

Torey straightened only slightly. But out of his mouth came more Torey Adams integrity: "Bo, I got a great music tour coming up, and you've had a death in your family. Would I deprive you of
any
means to get to the truth?"

"You don't have to come in," Bo added.

"I'll decide when we get there." He picked one thumb with the other and said under his breath to me, "I don't know which would be worse: going in and maybe being singled out again for gross and disgusting predictions, or staying in the car alone at midnight so the Jersey Devil can come along and make a snack out of me."

Bo added loudly, "I'm suddenly not so sure
I'm
going in. What in hell am I doing, going to a psychic to find out who buried my sister? If the guys in my unit found out about this, they'd think I'd lost my marbles."

"You're responding to your grief," Ali said, rubbing the back of his head. "Nobody would expect you
not
to have dialed that number under the circumstances." She turned sideways in the front seat, so we could hear her musings. "It was weird, how she knew who you were right away. It was almost like she was
expecting
you to call her."

"Don't let's get carried away," Bo said. "You'll freak Adams out, and I don't want him puking in my car on the way home, lovely as it is." There was a rip in the fabric on the ceiling and it hung down. I had to keep batting it away from my face. "She read today's newspaper is all. Anybody, psychic or not, who heard the name Richardson today would think of that."

The house was right on Route 9 and had lights on in every window, so it wasn't hard to find. It was a cute little rancher with ground lights going up the walk and around the bushes—a step up from a room over the garage. As we parked in the drive and rang the doorbell, Torey stayed silently beside me, apparently having made his decision not to be eaten alive by the Jersey Devil.

I felt a sense of déjà vu, which was probably even stronger in him. In his story, he'd been amazed that he felt nothing entering the psychic's house and nothing as she made her predictions. Waiting for her to open the door reminded me of that. You'd expect to be overwhelmed with some feeling of creepiness, especially given the midnight hour. But we could see boxes in the front room, as if she still had a lot of unpacking to do.

She opened the door in a T-shirt that said
IRISH PUB,
and shorts and bare feet.

"Sorry—I was painting. I'm a nightowl," she said, standing aside so we could come in. The smell of paint was overwhelming, and through the doorway I could see the dining room walls glistening.

"Sit down," she said, and pointed to a long couch in the living room. There were boxes in front of it, but she pulled a folding chair over and sat facing us, using a box to rest her elbow on.

"You sure have changed." Ignoring the rest of us, her eyes rolled up and down Torey, who was next to me. As she'd spoken to him for all of about five minutes five years ago, it jarred me.

"Um..." He tried to smile politely, but his neck looked tense enough to crack. When she didn't break in with further commentary, he added, "And you've quit smoking, I take it?"

"Oh, no, I just don't bring them into my soon-to-be parlor. I just had one. You can't smell it?"

I smelled it but wasn't sure they did.

Adams shook his head once, studying his fingers with a nervous grin. "Guess I'm not very psychic."

"So, you found death in the woods," she persisted. "I read your website. The whole thing."

Torey scooted around in his seat, though the four of us were kind of squashed. "Yeah, well, I really don't want to talk about ... that's not why we're here."

She looked immediately at Bo and kept her gaze fixed there. We hadn't introduced ourselves, so she could have easily thought
I
was him. Bo didn't pick up on that.

He laughed nervously and said, "Lady, I'll be frank with you. I'm a one-beer Charlie, and I was at the bottom of my second when I said we should come here. I guess you could say ... I don't know what I'm doing here."

"A lot of people feel confused on their way through my door," she said easily.

He didn't look too comforted. "I mean, if Adams hadn't whipped out your ad and pointed you out as the person who was pretty accurate with him, I wouldn't be here. At all. I don't exactly believe in psychics."

She grinned, with as much victory as sympathy, I sensed. "But here you are."

"Well. Yeah."

I waited for her to say something like "So what can I help you with?," but she just seemed interested in talking about his mom, his sisters and brothers, the Burden family, and how everyone was feeling. In telling all that, little facts started spilling, starting with Danny's suicide letter.

"Aw, the poor family," was her comment to that.

About Bo's mother thinking the whole time that Darla was in Vegas..."Mothers are sometimes the last to figure out the truth," she verified.

About what a nice guy Danny was and how he'd been sucked in: "Women are vipers," she said, shaking her head, and added, "I know my gender. What can I say?"

None of it was very psychic. But Bo jumped naturally one step closer.

"I believe Danny. I believe my sister, well, did herself in. I'd just love to know how she got in that grave. Because it looks like a murder now. It could become bad business for some innocent people out our way."

"Could be," she agreed noncommittally.

I glanced down until I found my watch. I had never dismissed Adams and Ali's psychic as a complete hoax, but she was going nowhere fast. I was worried that Justin might wake up, find me gone, and take off with my dog.

"There's these two guys out in Conovertown, called the Brownie's Mafia. I'm thinking maybe they did it. Buried her, I mean." Bo had held up two fingers when he said "two guys."

She suddenly held up three fingers. "Three people buried her."

"Three ... what?" Bo babbled.

"Three. I see three. Two male, one female."

Bo scratched his head. "Um ... the
body
was a female."

Miss Vera went on in a normal voice, "The female's voice is saying, 'Haul ass, you goddamn lazy morons.'"

"Even
sounds
like my sister." Bo laughed unhappily, and I got an image in my head of two guys digging a grave and Darla's ghost standing at the top, mouthing off, while her body rested in a blanket beside them. It was surreal, but probably similar to what Bo was thinking, because he shuddered.

Miss Vera's next statement didn't gel with that image, though. "The female said, 'Dig deeper. I don't want to see her toes poking through come April showers.'" She swallowed in revulsion, making me stare. Like Adams, I'd been taken aback by her ability to just talk normally while telling things that are so abnormal. You
want
to think it's a hoax.

Bo put a hand over his mouth and laughed uncomfortably again. "That's disgusting."

"Yeah, sure is," Miss Vera agreed, looking more pensive than apologetic. "Who talks that way?"

"Darla," Bo confirmed. "Maybe some boon chicks who've been taking lessons from her. Well, let's say you're right. So, one of Darla's girl groupies got involved. Which one could keep her mouth shut this long? That's what I'd like to know. It would all come pouring out in the first snort of coke. Those girls never shut up. And it makes me doubt, suddenly, that Mack and Ozone are involved. There is
nobody
out there who would talk to
them
like that."

I thought Miss Vera might add some more intriguing details, but she merely reached across me and Adams and patted Bo once, decidedly, on the knee. "Look. You know it was a double suicide—that is correct. You know there's no bringing either of those kids back. Why not just ... try to let it alone and move on?"

"Because we're back to old tricks," Bo finally said, "of thinking somebody is going to swing for a crime when they're innocent."

"Who's going to swing?" Miss Vera asked.

Bo shook his head, looking confused and suddenly weary.

"Because there is another key player involved," she said.

Bo watched her, his mouth hidden behind his fingers, which he drummed a little. "You mean the girl."

"No, besides the female. There's someone you haven't mentioned yet. Someone who wasn't at the grave. Someone who helped make some really important decisions just after Darla died."

Bo shook his head slowly back and forth. "You sure about that?"

She nodded, though it was maddening in its lack of detail. "Focus on the female and the male who wasn't at the grave. Find out who they are if you want all the answers. They're very close to one another."

"You mean ... they're in love? Married?" Bo asked.

It made me want to ask Bo, "What is Mrs. Burden like?" Because she had a saintlike son, I'd been picturing a saintlike mother and father, but having studied so much of family dynamics, I realized how untrue that might be. I suddenly pictured the father cleaning up the mess in the shed, the mother burying the body with God knows who, and I wondered how tough the courts would be on a couple who merely buried somebody already dead. And, being that the girl was engaged to their son and no adult in town had liked her, it could look like a murder.