If Avalon Harris minded, she didn’t show it. “Oh, yes. Edgar is a dear. We remain close friends. He reached out to me after your show because we have something in common, you and I.”
“We do?”
“Indeed. Not so much the psychic-touch angle, though I do have a bit of that. Mine’s not terribly strong, I’ll confess. I’m a much better medium, though that’s somewhat unreliable, too.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss the whole business as a gamble. “That said, I have a great deal of experience and a significant amount of education on the subject.”
“Are you… do you…?” Leda wasn’t sure how to formulate her question. “Do you want to work together? Is that why you’re here?”
“No, not particularly. I stopped consulting for the cops on a formal basis decades ago, but I understand you’ve recently been approved as a consultant for the Seattle Police Department.”
“How… how did you know that? Wow, you really are psychic!”
She laughed. “Darling, I can read. Your publicist has amended the recent flyers to include the distinction. I suppose it lends you an air of authority.”
“Oh God. Ben…” Leda mumbled. “Okay, yes, but right now it’s just a verbal agreement—there’s no paperwork. That’ll take a while, or that’s what they tell me. And they’ll only call me in if they’re totally stuck and they think they can use me. The consultant offer isn’t a promise of anything. It just makes me more official and less…”
“Less sneaky?” Avalon asked with a gleam in her eye. “You and Detective Merritt did so much work behind the scenes, off-the-books, semiofficially… it must be nice to know that they’ll give you a pass, going forward. From what I’ve heard, they’d be fools to let you get away.”
“Aw, shucks.”
“No, I’m serious. You have a great deal of raw talent, and I’m here on the off chance that you’d like to learn to wield it a little… better? More precisely, let’s say. I can’t turn you into an all-knowing, crime-solving machine, but I think that you could probably use some armor.”
“Armor?” Leda asked.
She nodded. “Shields, perhaps. If you like that analogy better. Here’s the thing,” she said, leaning forward and tangling her fingers loosely together. “I’ve seen people like you before. I’ve known and loved them, and I’ve lost a few of them.”
Leda swallowed. “Lost them? Like, you misplaced them??”
“One died by misadventure, and one died… through more personal means,” she said carefully, and Leda wondered if she meant suicide or drugs, but she did not ask. “Another went absolutely mad and never came back. It doesn’t happen to everyone with a gift like ours, but it happens too often, I’d say. So I am here, today, sitting in your office, offering myself up as a friendly ear. Or, if you’re interested, as a teacher.”
“Oh. Um…” Leda looked to Niki, who shrugged. “That sounds lovely, if I’m honest. I’ve never really met anyone else who could do anything like this, much less had any friends or teachers who knew what it was like. But I don’t have any money or anything, if that’s—”
Avalon cut her off there. “No, don’t be ridiculous. I have plenty of my own.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend…”
“It’s all right.” She took a deep breath, as if she felt the need to compose herself. “You’re well within your rights to be suspicious, and now that you’ve got a modicum of fame, you can expect all sorts of weirdos and charlatans to creep out of the woodwork, but I’m not one of them. And I didn’t make my money from telling fortunes or consulting with grieving families, either.”
There it was. Leda got it now. Avalon Harris had been accused of this in the past, and it was a touchy subject. She didn’t need clairvoyant abilities to read the woman’s face. “I apologize, I was just thinking you were offering classes or something.”
It wasn’t the perfect thing to say, but it was close enough. The woman softened. “No, nothing like that. I’m only here to offer you my company. And my card.” She reached into a small, shiny leather purse with a silver chain and retrieved a business card. “Here, I want you to have this.”
Leda took the card. It read quite simply Avalon Harris, Psychic Medium and Adviser. Then an email and phone number.
“If you’d like to get coffee sometime, or if you simply want to bend an ear that understands precisely what you’re up against, when a case is bloody and hard… I’m here.”
“In Columbia City?” Niki asked.
“On Bainbridge Island, actually—but it’s a short ferry ride, and I’m semiretired. My days are flexible, and I’m interested in paying it forward, you could say. I lost my own mentor a few years ago; my God, the woman was nearly a hundred when she passed, but she was such a giant of the field. And also…” She hesitated, but then said, “I lost my son last year. He wasn’t murdered, and there’s no question about what happened. I’m not seeking any answers. I’m just hoping to help someone else who might find their life filled with… unusual difficulties like ours.”
With this, she rose to her feet and gave both Leda and Niki a short bow.
“Thank you for your time,” said Avalon Harris, who then collected her purse and left the way she’d come in.
When the door had closed, and the women were alone again, Niki exhaled like she’d been holding a whole balloon’s worth of air in her chest. “Wow. That was weird.”
“Only weird, though. Kind of exciting, for sure! There are other people out there who… who do what I do and are probably better at it than me! I might actually learn how to do this professionally and earn some money. I mean, and help people. Obviously. And that’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s definitely not bad,” her friend agreed somewhat more cautiously. “Weird isn’t always bad.”
“And weird is par for the course around here, right?”
“Damn right it is,” Niki agreed—offering a silent, long-distance high five that Leda returned from behind the desk. She reclined back into her original position, foot up and arms sprawled out.
Casually, she asked, “So… are you ever gonna call her?”
Leda grinned and sat back down. “Maybe one of these days. Okay, probably one of these days.” She opened her laptop again and saw three new emails since their unusual guest had appeared. “Wow,” she breathed. Then she cracked her knuckles, reached for her mouse, and dived into all the messages from all the hopeful travelers, each and every one of them wanting the reassurance of Puget Sound’s most famous psychic, proprietor of Foley’s Far-Fetched Flights of Fancy, which might actually get off the ground after all.
Would wonders never cease?
Acknowledgments
When I first began drafting this book in 2018, I specifically aimed for something lighter and funnier than my usual fare. After all, the world was dark enough already, wasn’t it? If I wanted to write something a little brighter than horror, then surely the time had come.