Dream Eyes

Two

“You’re too late,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I’m already dead.”

There was no accusation in the words, just a calm statement of fact. Dr. Evelyn Ballinger had always been logical and even-tempered in life, reserving her deepest passions for her work. There was no reason why death would give her a personality transplant. But knowing that did nothing to temper the terrible sense of dread and guilt that chilled Gwen Frazier’s blood. If only she had opened the e-mail last night instead of this morning.

If only. The two most despairing words in the English language.

She crossed the cluttered, heavily draped room that Evelyn had converted into an office. All of the rooms in the house were dark. Evelyn had never liked sunlight. She claimed it interfered with her work.

Gwen’s movement through the room stirred the still air. The crystal wind chimes suspended from the ceiling shivered, producing an eerie music that seemed to come from beyond the grave. The sound raised the hair on the back of Gwen’s neck.

In the doorway behind her, Max, Evelyn’s burly gray cat, meowed plaintively as if demanding that Gwen fix the situation. But there was no fixing death.

The body was crumpled on the floor beside the desk. Evelyn had been in her early seventies, a large, generously proportioned woman who had been caught in a fashion time warp like so many others who resided in the small town of Wilby, Oregon. With her long gray hair, voluminous tie-dyed skirts, and crystal jewelry, she had been a model of the proudly eccentric look that Gwen privately labeled Hippie Couture.

Evelyn’s blue eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. Her reading glasses lay on the floor. A photo had fallen beside one hand. The pinhole at the top of the picture indicated it had come from the corkboard over the desk. There was no blood or obvious bruising on the body.

“No sign of an injury, you’ll notice,” the mirror ghost said. “What does that tell us?”

“Always the instructor,” Gwen said. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

“No point changing now, is there, dear? I repeat my question. What does the lack of an obvious injury indicate?”

“Could be natural causes. You were seventy-two years old, a type two diabetic who insisted on eating all the wrong foods, and you were absentminded when it came to taking your meds. You refused to lose weight, and the only exercise you got was an occasional stroll down by the river.”

“Ah, yes, the river,” the ghost said softly. “You won’t forget the river or the falls, will you, dear?”

“No,” Gwen said. “Never.”

She knew there was no hope, but she made herself check for a pulse. There was only the terrible chill and the utter stillness of death. She got slowly to her feet.

“This scene looks dreadfully familiar, doesn’t it?” the ghost said. “Brings to mind what happened two years ago.”

“Yes,” Gwen said. “It does.”

“Another person connected to the study is dead by what appears to be natural causes. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

Gwen looked at the vision in the mirror. The ghosts were always wispy, smoky images—never sharp and clear like photographs. For the most part, the specters she encountered were strangers, but she had known a few of them all too well. Evelyn Ballinger had now joined that short list. Evelyn had been both mentor and friend.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen said to the ghost. “I didn’t see your e-mail until this morning. I called you right away. When you didn’t answer your phone, I knew something was wrong.”

“Of course you did, dear.” The ghost chuckled. “You’re psychic.”

“I got into the car and drove down here to see you. But it’s a four-hour trip from Seattle.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself, dear,” the ghost said. “There is nothing you could have done. It happened last night, as you can see. I was working here in my office. You remember that I was always a night owl.”

“Yes,” Gwen said. “I remember. Your e-mail to me came in around two o’clock this morning.”

“Ah, yes, of course. You would have been asleep.”

But she hadn’t been asleep, Gwen thought. She had been walking the floors of her small condo, trying to work off the disturbing images from the dream. It had been two years since Zander Taylor’s death, but each summer in late August the nightmares struck. Her talent for lucid dreaming allowed her to control the dreams to some extent, but she had not been able to dispel them. Each time she dreamed the terrifying scenes from that summer of death, she came awake with the same unnerving sense that it had not ended with Taylor going over the falls.

“I was up,” Gwen said. “But I wasn’t checking e-mail.”

She stepped back from the body and dug her phone out of her tote. Max meowed again and lashed his tail.

“I’m sorry, Max. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.”

Max did not look satisfied with that response. He watched her intently with his green-gold eyes.

She concentrated on punching in the emergency number and tried not to look at the mirror. Talking to ghosts was not a good thing. It made other people—potential lovers as well as friends—extremely nervous. After all, there were no ghosts. She was really talking to herself, trying to make sense of the messages that her odd form of intuition picked up at the scenes of violent death.

She usually went out of her way to avoid such conversations because she found them incredibly frustrating. There was, after all, very little she could do for the dead. That was the job of the police.

Years ago she had come to realize that if she was seeing ghosts in mirrors, windows, pools of water and other reflective surfaces, it meant that she had stumbled into one of the dark places in the world, a place tainted with the heavy energy that was laid down at the time of violent death. As the old saying went, murder left a stain. But she was not a cop or a trained investigator. She was just a psychic counselor who interpreted dreams for her clients and earned a little money on the side writing scripts for a low-budget cable television series. There was nothing she could do to find justice for the dead.

“When Wesley Lancaster finds out about my death, he’ll probably want you to turn it into a script for his show,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I can see it now. Was this reclusive paranormal investigator murdered by paranormal means? Is there a link to the mysterious deaths that occurred in this same small town two years ago?”

“You’re distracting me,” Gwen said. “I’m trying to call 911.”

“Why bother? We both know where this is going. The authorities will assume that I died of natural causes.”

“Which is entirely possible.”

“But your intuition is telling you that I was murdered like the others.”

“My intuition has sent me in the wrong direction before,” Gwen said.

“You’re thinking about what happened two years ago, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. I’ve been thinking about it all night and during the drive from Seattle.”

Gwen turned her back on the ghost in the mirror and focused on the crisp voice of the 911 operator.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” the woman asked.

“I just found the body of an old friend,” Gwen said. “Dr. Evelyn Ballinger.”

“Ballinger? The crazy old lady who lives out on Miller Road?”

“I’m sure your professionalism would be an inspiration to 911 operators everywhere,” Gwen said.

She rattled off the stark facts and verified the address.

“I’ve got cars on the way,” the operator said. “Your name, ma’am?”

“Gwendolyn Frazier.”

“Please stay at the scene, ma’am.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Gwen ended the call and wondered if Harold Oxley, the Wilby chief of police, would be among the first responders. Probably. It was a small town, after all.

When she turned back to the mirror, the psychic vision made a tut-tutting sound.

“No one except you and the killer will know that I was murdered, let alone that I was killed by paranormal means. The perp will never be brought to justice, not unless you do something about this.”

Just like last time, Gwen thought.

“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “I’m not a cop and I’m not a private investigator.”

“No, but you owe me, don’t you? When you were locked up at the Summerlight Academy, I taught you how to handle your talent. And I’m the one who got you the job writing those scripts for Dead of Night. We were friends. And this time it’s different, isn’t it? Two years ago, you didn’t know any psychic investigators. But now you are aware of a certain security consulting firm that specializes in the paranormal, aren’t you?”

The annoying thing about talking to ghosts was that it was a lot like talking to yourself, Gwen thought, which was pretty much exactly what was going on.

She closed the phone and dropped it back into her tote. For the first time, she noticed that there was an empty space on top of the desk. A film of dust traced the outline of the place where a laptop had once sat.

“He took your computer,” she said. She thought about that glaring fact. “Maybe this was a home-invasion robbery.”

“In that case, I probably would have been killed in a more traditional fashion, don’t you think?” the ghost asked. “Perhaps with a gun or knife or a blow to the head.”

“Something violent happened here, I can sense that much, but there’s no sign of a struggle, and you would have fought back.”

“Not if I was caught unawares,” the ghost pointed out.

“There was violence done here, but it’s possible that your death was due to a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the shock of the robbery.”

The ghost smiled. “But the only thing missing is my laptop. You know as well as I do that it was not a particularly valuable, high-end machine. There’s my old backpack sitting on the chair. Why don’t you see if the thief took my money and credit cards?”

Gwen crossed to the chair and picked up the small, well-worn backpack. The crystal wind chimes shivered again, unleashing another string of spectral notes. Max crouched in the doorway, flattened his ears and meowed again.

There was fifty dollars and two credit cards inside Evelyn’s wallet. Gwen set the pack back down. So much for the home-invasion theory.

“As for other motives, you know me,” the ghost continued. “I wasn’t dealing drugs out the kitchen door. I didn’t cultivate a marijuana plantation in the woods behind the house. I was very fond of my crystal jewelry, but none of it was expensive.”

“You also had a cell phone.” Gwen turned on her heel to survey the room. “But I don’t see it.”

“Gone, like my computer.”

“Phones are small. It could be anywhere. Maybe it’s in the kitchen or your bedroom.”

Sirens howled in the distance. It sounded as if the 911 operator had sent the community’s entire fleet of emergency vehicles. Gwen realized she did not have a lot of time to search for the missing cell phone.

She whipped through the study, opening and closing drawers as quickly as possible. There was no sign of the phone.

The sirens were closer now. Gwen slammed the last drawer shut and raced past Max, out into the hall. The cat hurried after her.

She paused at the entrance to the kitchen and did a quick survey. The old-fashioned tiled countertops were bare except for a row of pottery canisters and an ancient coffeemaker.

Turning, she dashed upstairs, Max at her heels, and did a swift foray through the two small bedrooms. She was on her way downstairs when the first patrol car roared into the drive.

She rushed back into the office. The chimes clattered restlessly, as though impatient with her lack of progress.

“My death is going to be the biggest news in town by noon,” the ghost observed. “There hasn’t been this much excitement around here since Mary, Ben and Zander died two years ago.”

“There can’t possibly be any connection between your death and what happened two years ago,” Gwen said.

“Are you certain of that?”

“It’s been two years.”

“But you’re still dreaming about what happened, especially at this time of year, aren’t you? You’ve known all along that some piece of the puzzle was missing.”

Gwen pulled one of the curtains aside. Her heart sank when she saw Harold Oxley extricate his big, heavily padded frame out from behind the wheel of one of the patrol cars. Dark glasses shielded his eyes, but she could see that two years had taken a toll on the man. The mild exertion of heaving himself out of the vehicle was enough to turn his broad, jowly face an unhealthy shade of red. His uniform shirt was stretched tight across his rounded belly. He moved stiffly, like a man who was plagued with multiple joint issues. But the gun on his hip was as large as ever, and there was nothing to indicate that he would be any more open to the possibility that there were paranormal aspects involved in a death than he had been two years ago.

Gwen let the curtain drop back into place and turned around. She stopped at the sight of the photograph on the floor. It had not simply fallen off the corkboard, she thought. It looked as if Evelyn had ripped it off in her dying moments and clutched it as she went down.

“It’s important, dear,” the ghost said. “Why else would it be there right next to my hand?”

Gwen picked up the photo and looked at the seven people in the group shot. She was the third person from the end in the bottom row. The picture had been taken two years ago, shortly before the murders had begun. Mary Henderson and Ben Schwartz were in the picture. So was Zander Taylor. They were all smiling for the camera.

“You kept this photo tacked to your bulletin board,” she said. “Why is it on the floor?”

“An intriguing question,” the ghost said.

A heavy fist rapped authoritatively on the front door. Gwen dropped the photo into her tote and went down the hall. Max padded after her.

She opened the door.

“Chief Oxley,” she said politely.

Harold Oxley yanked off his sunglasses and looked at her with an expression that made it clear he was no more thrilled by their reunion than she was.

“Cindy said the 911 call came in from a Gwendolyn Frazier,” Oxley said. There was grim resignation in his growly voice. “I hoped it was just a coincidence.”

“Evelyn was a friend of mine,” Gwen said. She was careful to keep her own voice cool, calm and as innocent-sounding as possible. “We stayed in touch.”

“Two years ago, you and I met over three dead bodies. You leave town and there are no unexplained deaths for the whole time you’re gone. You come back to town and we have ourselves another dead body. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Two years ago, you concluded that all three of those people died of natural causes,” she said. She struggled to keep her temper under control, but she knew she probably sounded as if she was speaking through set teeth. So much for the innocent act.

“Not Taylor.” Oxley narrowed suspicious brown eyes. “He went over the falls and drowned.”

“You called his death a suicide.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll want a statement from you today.”

“Of course.”

A young officer and two medics arrived at the door behind Oxley. The medics carried emergency equipment and a stretcher.

Oxley peered into the hallway. “Where is she?”

“In her office.” Gwen moved out of the way and opened the door wider. “It’s to the right.”

Oxley, the young officer and the medics tromped past her and Max and disappeared around the corner.

Gwen stood in the doorway and watched the light summer rain fall steadily in the trees that surrounded the house. She listened to the commotion and the muffled voices that emanated from the far end of the hall.

Max pressed his heavy frame against her leg. She reached down to scratch him behind the ears.

“I know you’re going to miss her,” she said gently. “I will, too.”

After a while, she remembered the photograph she had found on the floor. She opened her tote and took out the picture. Once again she examined each face in the image. It was impossible not to do the math. Three of the people she was looking at had died two years ago, and now the photographer, Evelyn, was also dead.

Gwen turned the photo over and saw two words scrawled on the reverse side. Mirror, mirror.