Free Book Excerpts

If Lavinia Stout had known what she was getting into, she never would have taken the job.  Her psychic business was doing quite well, and even though she had a detective’s license, she did not enjoy doing leg work, especially if it involved murder.

Excerpt

The Man Without a Past
Chapter One
“Not everything is about you!” I snapped at him.  I didn’t realize, then, how often that phrase would come back to haunt me as I descended into the paranoiac scenario that lay ahead.  I have always known that there is evil in the world, but I have always tried, and for the most part succeeded, to keep it at arm’s length.
“Livvy, please,” he coaxed, calling me by my old college nickname, an appellation that I no longer used.  It sounded like a dog’s name.  My name is Lavinia.
I should have known that something terrible was about to happen when Mark Bell came back into my life on a windy October morning.  When he made a remark about the fact that I was still unmarried, it ticked me off.  We had broken up on rather unfriendly terms back in our senior year in college, and I never expected to see him again after graduation.  I’ve never been good at breaking up, and Mark had frightened me with his possessiveness, which verged on madness.  Yet he had been the one to end it by openly courting one of our classmates, a stunning blonde named Doris who dressed like a fashion model.  I hate blondes.  Mark graduated near the middle of his class with a degree in business management, while I focused on liberal arts, which meant anything that did not involve math.  I used to love hanging on his arm at the campus social events.  We did make a lovely pair, he with sandy brown hair and a gorgeous tan, I with dark hair and almost transparent pink skin, except for th
e freckles.  I never have been able to achieve a tan, no matter how long I stay out in the sun; all I do is burn and peel.  Now his formerly slim build had developed that thickness which comes with the end of adolescence and the approach of age 30, but he still had that athletic look about him.  I was willing to bet that he was into skiing, since his cheeks and nose betrayed a slight redness from sun and harsh weather underneath his still perfect tan.
“How is Doris?” I asked, just to push one of his buttons.  Mutual friends had told me that he married the blonde two days after graduation, and after a few years they also informed me that she had left him for one of the lifeguards at their private country club.  By that time Mark was making a small fortune with his mining company in Colorado, and Doris got a generous settlement in the divorce.  Served him right.
“Livvy,” he addressed me by my irritating nickname again, “I didn’t come here to talk about old times.”
“Why did you come here, exactly?”  He didn’t strike me as the type to ask for a psychic reading.
I had a little storefront in one of those strip malls that developers have cloned all over the landscape of southern California.  The adobe-brown stucco buildings are topped with red Spanish tile roofs, and the facades sport rounded archways in imitation of the Spanish mission style.  In every one of these malls, a Blockbuster Video outlet or some other big box store or chain restaurant stands out front, in its own separate square building near the street.  The rest of the shops share a long, narrow building set back behind the parking lot.  Dressed as a gypsy, not as an authentic member of that proud tribe of Romany, but merely as the Hollywood image, I sat in a comfortable chair at a small table in a dimly lit room and gave readings to those members of the public who hoped that their future might be brighter than they feared.  Sometimes I peered into the crystal ball, and other times the customer requested a card reading.  I kept a dozen types of Tarot decks, ranging from t
he ordinary deck of playing cards to the Native American version, to please every sort of seeker of the Truth from Beyond.  Very few asked for palm readings any more, although I offered that service, as well.
It was all a sham.  I, Lavinia Stout, provided the image of the psychic seer, but my partner Craig Thorson provided the information from his computers in the back room.  Craig was one of those eternal teenagers whose age you couldn’t tell by looking, with his long black hair tied at the back in a curly pony tail, his face betraying a touch of acne, his slight frame looking too tall for his body weight.  With high-speed Internet access and the information from their credit cards and the appointment book, he was able to gather enough information about the clients to convince them that I had the second sight.  Most of the readings followed a script, more or less, designed to tell the clients what they wanted to hear.  Walk-ins required some skill on my part, so I resorted to cold reading techniques to assure them that I really did know all of their little secrets, but that I was too discrete to reveal their most embarrassing misdeeds.  For example, I would tell a woman that I sa
w a man in her life.  If she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and if I saw a certain squint in her eyes, I’d quickly recover and say, “But you aren’t married, so I guess we’d better not talk about that.”  Counting down numbers was another trick.  I would slowly count down from ten to one, closely watching the client’s face for that glint of recognition.  “Does the number five have a special meaning for you?” I’d ask, and then I’d pay more attention to a slight nod or sideways motion of the head than to anything that they said to me.  They might consciously try to fool me, but their body language rarely lied, being mostly a product of the unconscious part of the mind.
I really hated dressing up for the part.  The dangling earrings drove me nuts, especially since the embedded microphones made them extra heavy and sat just inside my ears, making me itch, so I removed them whenever the opportunity presented itself.  The long, full skirt with the brightly colored pattern on a black background tended to trip me up when I tried to walk around, so I always wore my blue jeans underneath to make it both faster and easier to change when I went out for lunch or home for the day.  I chose wrap-around skirts for the ease with which they can be removed.  The beaded necklaces and puffy gypsy blouse came off easily enough, uncovering my T-shirt and ushering me back into the mundane world of my real life.  Removing the long-haired wig revealed my own close-cropped locks, which were so much easier to wash and comb than the long, wavy tresses that I used to fuss over, back when the dating scene meant something to me.
“I need some detective work,” Mark said.  “Tom Cates told me that you’re one of the best, the most discrete.”
“Apparently, Tom exaggerated.”  I’d kept in touch with Tom since college, and he still had a bit of a crush on me, so I tried to avoid seeing him after graduation.  He was some sort of computer geek, and not an interesting one like Craig Thorson.  I’d gone out with him once, on a mercy date, but all he wanted to do was feed a seemingly endless stream of quarters into the video games at the student center.  I was bored out of my mind, and all dressed up for nothing.  He knew that one of my sidelines was background checks for corporate clients who wanted to screen prospective employees, but I wouldn’t exactly call it detective work.  I did have a private investigator’s license, but I was too busy doing psychic readings to make much use of it.  In fact, my main line in that area was finding out whether husbands and wives were cheating, either for divorce attorneys or so I could tailor my readings for clients who suffered from a tinge of jealousy or suspicion.  I also made a litt
le pocket money by serving subpoenas, a task which could be quite unpleasant when someone didn’t want to be served.
Mark reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper that had been folded in fourths.  Smoothing it out on my table, he said, “This is a list of the employees at my copper mining company.  The three names that are underlined in red ink have died.”
“Died?”
“Mysteriously.”  He brushed aside a lock of graying hair that had fallen over his face.
“Were they killed?”  I didn’t have the stomach for investigating a murder.
“The coroner couldn’t determine the cause of death.  Baker was in his fifties, and he had heart disease, but not enough to kill him.  Hobbs and Sellinger were young and in good health.  All three simply fell down and died within a week of each other.”
Please, I thought, do not show me autopsy photographs.  I hate the sight of dead bodies.  “What do you want me to do?”
“Run backgrounds checks, I suppose.  Find out if there’s anything in these people’s histories to indicate that they might have something in their past that they want to hide.  A reason to commit suicide, or something to gain by eliminating their colleagues.”
I hesitated.  “I don’t do leg work.”
“You don’t have to.  Just find the information from computers or phone calls, or whatever means.”
“Didn’t you run background checks before you hired them?”
“Of course.”  He stared at me with those piercing gray eyes, the gaze that used to turn my knees to jelly, and then he added, “But they must have missed something.”
Against my better judgment, I took the job.  It seemed safe, since I was merely handing it off to Craig and his computers, but still I had an uneasy feeling about it.  And Mark kind of ticked me off, showing up after all these years, and he didn’t even ask me out to lunch after I agreed to do him a favor.  The day was just beginning, and I needed to prepare for my readings, so I hustled Mark out with the promise that I’d look into it.  I couldn’t wait for five o’clock, when I could shed my costume and become myself again.
The sky began to cloud up when I went out for lunch, promising an overcast sky by the end of the day, but those clouds were too high to bring any badly needed rain to drought-stricken southern California.  On the other hand, they might provide that horrible obscuring fog on the mountain roads when I drove home to Twin Peaks.  Commuting down the hill was the price that I paid for life in the relative peace of a rural mountain community.  I passed by the Mongolian stir-fry place and the fried chicken stand in the mall and headed down the block to a sit-down coffee shop.  I thought that the walk might clear my head, fuzzy as it felt after my encounter with an old flame.  Besides, I was in the mood for a cold sandwich piled high with turkey, cheese and all the fixings.  Craig chose to stay in the back room with his sack lunch and computer.  He was anxious to get started on Mark’s assignment, which he figured would be the work of two or three days.

The landscape of the San Bernardino valley is basically flat, with streets laid out in grids and lined on both sides by either Deodar cedars or date palms planted in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street.  Freeways cross through at odd angles, some north to south and others east to west.  In some cases, you might actually be traveling north on a westbound freeway or east on a southbound freeway.  This is due to the necessity of skirting the ring of mountains, a branch of the Sierras, that encircles the valley.  On the southern edge, the Riverside Mountains barely qualify as high hills.  On the northern edge, we have real mountains towering as high as eight thousand feet or more; this is where you will find the ski resorts.  The valley catches most of the smog from Los Angeles when the wind blows in from the Pacific Ocean.  It tends to sit like a hen on her eggs in a dome over the valley, no doubt causing serious health problems for many of the residents, until
a northeast wind blows in from the high desert and breaks up the smog, snapping off tree branches along the way and tossing the neighbors’ lawn furniture into my yard.
The mall on Baseline Street where I had my little storefront sat in one of the flattest, hottest parts of San Bernardino.  On a cold day in winter, the temperature would top out at about 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  On a hot summer day, it would reach 80 by nine o’clock in the morning.  So even though October is in the autumn season, the days were still uncomfortably warm.  Those who could fled to the mountains or the beaches, while those who could not dressed as lightly as possible.  It wasn’t unusual to see teenagers walking around in shorts and tank tops all the way into mid-November.
The city of San Bernardino is the county seat of San Bernardino County, a suburb of Los Angeles which has grown from a bedroom community to a thriving empire with all the usual problems of gangs, drugs and poverty.  Several historic neighborhoods languish from poverty and neglect, while brand new developments erect huge two-story houses on postage-stamp size lots for those who can qualify for huge mortgages beyond their means.  Farm fields and orange groves have been bulldozed and paved over to make room for freeways and for shopping malls with all the big and little stores that attract anybody with a few bucks to spend or an afternoon to kill.  Street signs are often obscured by graffiti, and billboards display misspelled ad slogans in huge red letters.  It makes me wonder about the literacy rate in this county.  It also makes me wonder why I choose to live here and to do business here.  But then I look up at my beautiful mountains, and I know why I stay here.

Three clients came in that afternoon for their card readings.  I could almost do those in my sleep.  After they shuffled the Tarot deck, I simply made the switch to a deck that had been prearranged to the desired order, laid out the cards one by one on the table and recited the script that I had prepared earlier for that particular client.  If I stumbled on a line, which happened several times that day, Craig read it to me through the microphones in my dangling earrings.  The most important part of the reading was to please the clients, who seemed to believe that the cards could influence their future, as well as foretell it.  Fortunately, we didn’t get any walk-ins that afternoon.  My head was too fuzzy to improvise, even with Craig’s voice prompting me.  Mrs. Thompson was fussy as usual, pulling off her thick eyeglasses to wipe her eyes with a tissue that looked well used already and pushing at her mop of curly gray hair, which kept falling into her face.  “Is it good?” sh
e kept asking.  “It isn’t bad, is it?”  And I had dealt out only three cards when she started asking.
As far I was concerned, the end of the work day couldn’t come too soon, especially since it was Friday, leading to a whole weekend off.  I stripped off my costume and stored it in the little cupboard under my table, then climbed gratefully into my Honda Accord and hit the freeway, struggled through rush-hour traffic and finally got onto the Rim of the World Highway going up the mountain.  I didn’t encounter any fog; thank God for small favors!

My cat Tuffy greeted me as soon as I opened the door to the little mountain cabin that I called home.  Rubbing against me with his gray pelt and voicing squeaky meows, he welcomed home the provider of food and behind-the-ear scratching.  Sometimes I think that he regards me as his personal can opener.  I was glad to be back up on the mountain, far from the troubles of city life and the hassles of a job that required me to reassure strangers that their lives held some meaning.  Tuffy wrapped himself around my feet with his tail straight up, nearly tripping me with his customary greeting.  Once inside I made my way to the kitchen, Tuffy following, to open a can for him and start some coffee for me.  The ominous feeling which had clouded over my little storefront shop dissolved as I settled down on my futon and turned on the television.  One of the few luxuries that I enjoy is cable TV service.  These mountains get absolutely no reception over the air waves, so if you don’t hav
e cable or satellite, you get nothing.  The trees on my property make it impossible to get a satellite signal, so I got cable.  You can’t go cutting down a few trees around here, just to get satellite TV.  Once the trunk has a diameter of more than six inches, you can’t cut down that tree unless it’s dead or a safety hazard.  This is a forest, and people who don’t like being surrounded by 150-feet pines and cedars need to live somewhere else.  Most of the oaks were of the scrub variety, with trunks that rarely exceeded four inches in diameter, but I wouldn’t dream of cutting them down.  I was in the habit of lopping off a few branches in the spring for firewood in the winter.
I would have spent the weekend more fully enjoying myself, walking around the lake, visiting the bowling alley and taking in a movie at our little local theatre, if I had known that it was going to be my last opportunity for recreation for a very long time.  Lake Gregory, a man-made reservoir about a mile long and half a mile wide, surrounded by jogging paths laid down by the county and daffodils planted by the local Community Development Alliance, harbors a population of mallard ducks, little brown hens and colorful drakes with their green necks.  Once, after a major forest fire, half a dozen pelicans visited our lake; there must have been a storm at sea that drove them inland along with the seagulls.  The bowling alley, whose lanes were built in the 60s and lack modern technology, is more a place to visit friends and get a hot meal in their coffee shop or a drink at the bar than to roll a ball weighing ten to sixteen pounds at the pins.  Teenagers haunt the lobby, shoving q
uarters into a variety of video games.  The movie theatre seats about two hundred and usually shows five- or ten-year-old movies for the discount price of only three dollars.  They sometimes play the current films, after they’ve run their course in the bigger venues, for a six-dollar admission ticket, which is still a bargain.  The highlight of the 90s was when The Parent Trap premiered here to a full house, and played twice a day for a week, because most of it had been filmed around here.  The prices at their snack bar aren’t too bad, compared to the bigger theatres, and they donate a portion of the proceeds to local charities.  I would have enjoyed getting out of the house and visiting my usual haunts.  As it was, I wasted two days sitting around playing solitaire on my home computer and watching a Dracula marathon on television.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The evening news was boring, all political speeches and stock market numbers, so I was about to switch channels to the Animal Planet, Tuffy’s favorite, when a piece of breaking news caught my interest.  The news clown – I always thought of them as clowns – read off the teleprompter:
President and CEO of Bell Copper Mining, LLC, Mark Bell surrendered to authorities today in Denver, Colorado, on charges of racketeering.  The indictment lists embezzlement, corrupt business practices and loan fraud.  Details at eleven.
I harbored no great love for that man, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that he was dishonest, at least not dishonest enough to commit the crimes that he was charged with.  What bothered me the most was that he had come to me just a few hours before turning himself in, yet he hadn’t said a word about it.  What was he concealing from me, and why?  No doubt he would be out on bail by Monday afternoon, so he had better hop into that corporate jet of his and pay me a visit, or at least give me a call.
The events of Monday morning wiped those thoughts completely out of my mind.

My little storefront looked like the aftermath of a college fraternity party.  Still feeling dull and sleepy after the pre-dawn phone call from my alarm company, I surveyed the damage.  I had slipped on my blue jeans and T-shirt and my favorite black Reebok athletic shoes with the soles showing a year of wear, opened a can of shredded salmon flavor Friskies for Tuffy, grabbed my windbreaker jacket and rushed out the door without even combing my hair.  I’m sure that I looked a mess, but not as bad as my shop.  When I pulled into the parking lot, two uniformed police officers were just wrapping up their investigation, dusting for fingerprints and calling the building manager to get a copy of the video from the outside security cameras.  We didn’t have our own camera inside the shop, as we hadn’t thought it necessary.
My heart sank when the officers let me go inside to take a look.  My little table was overturned, a dozen or more decks of Tarot cards strewn about the floor in a jumbled mess, the heavy red velvet curtains pulled down from the shattered front windows, my crystal ball tossed into a corner but mercifully not broken.  Those crystal balls cost a small fortune.  The worst of it was in the back room.  Craig’s computer equipment was gone.  Every last printer, scanner and computer had been taken, their wires and cables left like dead snakes all over the floor.  Craig kept two desktops – a PC and a Mac – plus a portable notebook computer, so he would always have a backup if one of them crashed.  Apparently, the thieves didn’t want or need the two big, clunky monitors, which sat on the library-style table staring at the opposite wall with their blank eyes.  The little two-drawer file cabinet where he kept his backup CDs and a few paper documents stood open and empty.  All of his data,
all of his equipment, had been taken away before the police responded to the alarm.  This could not have been done by one person, not in the few minutes that it took for the squad car to arrive.  There must have been at least three of them, perhaps half a dozen, and they must have known exactly what they were looking for.
Craig put an arm around me, more to comfort himself than to support me.  He had shown up a few minutes after I arrived, even though he lived half an hour closer than I did.  He looked hung over, and he probably was.  His black hair was a mess, not pulled into the usual pony tail, and the skin around his eyes looked puffy.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“Buy you a new computer, I suppose.”
“Will the insurance cover it?”
“I certainly hope so.”
The theft and vandalism didn’t frighten me half as much as the telephone call.  After the police officers left, looking uncomfortably warm in their black uniform shirts, which were buttoned up to the top, the telephone rang in the  back room.  They, whoever they were, must have been watching us.

Copyright 2008 Tessa B. Dick. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.