And though he was disturbed by the dramatic intensity of her words, Milton had said, “How do you think this vision of yours makes me feel? You must think it’s the truth, then.”

  Without hesitation, she had dismissed his comment and said, “When we join the others, don’t talk about this to anyone. You must promise me that. I must have time to sort this out and decide what’s the right thing to do. Perhaps if I concentrate hard enough, the rest of this vision will come to me and I can even prevent it from happening.”

  He had promised her, but saying nothing to any of the others as he staggered out of the reading room had only made things worse, more fearful, more anxious for him. He couldn’t carry around the dead weight of this vision all by himself, he decided, so he had unburdened himself to Rex and Merrie Boudreaux back at Party Palooza headquarters that evening. They had tried their best to calm him down, but their efforts had worked for only a short time. There was just no way they could extract the terror from his body.

  By the time he had returned to the little house he rented, he had come up with what could only be termed a desperate, runaway strategy. None of it made much sense, and he knew he wasn’t thinking it all the way through. First, continuing to work for Party Palooza put him in peril, he figured. Wearing a tuxedo with all the trimmings put him at risk. If that knife was going to plunge into a tux shirt, then he would stop wearing one by putting an end to delivering singing telegrams. To do that, he had to quit working for Rex and Merrie, but he didn’t have the gumption to tell them so to their faces. Eventually, he must stir up the courage and face his fears. Aurelia had said that the vision would happen soon. He could think of no other recourse than to get the hell out of Rosalie, to give himself some breathing room and decide what to do next.

  Could he go to the police about a vision a psychic had seen? They might smirk at him to his face and then bellylaugh behind his back once he’d left the station. He spent a sleepless night turning and tossing, and by the time the sun had come up the next morning, he had reaffirmed his course of action.

  He piled some of his clothes and toiletries into a suitcase, leaving his tuxedo and the two ruffled shirts he used for his telegrams behind. To his mind, they were toxic and taboo—articles of impending death. He remembered seeing reruns of that old TV show The Beverly Hillbillies on one of those oldies cable stations and found a light moment and a brief smile as he pictured them piling everything they owned into a Model T and heading for Beverly Hills. But the sense of doom, of something dark hanging over him, soon returned. None of this felt remotely like a sitcom. He grabbed his laptop and cell phone, leaving behind the TV set he had intended to replace with a state-of-the-art flat-screen when he’d saved up a bit more money.

  Sadly, he knew he would miss those singing telegram tips. All the people who received them didn’t appear to be hurting for money. That professor out at the College of Rosalie, for instance, had tipped him handsomely for those anonymous telegrams that he’d delivered to the man’s home. The last thing he did after loading up his car was to cash a hefty check at Bluff City Bank & Trust and put Rosalie in his rearview mirror for the time being. For some reason, he stopped short of closing out the account.

  But now that he’d done all this running around frantically as if he were in the midst of some kind of improvisational fire drill—where was he actually going to go? How far away from Rosalie should he get? He wasn’t thinking at all; he was merely driven by his own fear. On an impulse, the small town of Rolling Fork north of Vicksburg became his first destination. He had no idea why. Maybe it was the unusual name and his fascination with it. How, indeed, was a fork able to roll? How long would he stay there?

  He was going to eventually run out of money, despite the size of the check he had cashed. He felt he was losing his mind, totally out of control. Would he live to tell his grandchildren about this helter-skelter episode of his life? He found a moment to smile at that last thought. Grandchildren. Children. That might not ever happen, but he had chosen not to share his doubts about himself in that regard with anyone, not even his parents. That was another issue entirely, and at the moment, he did not have time to wrestle with it as he had for many years. Not with the prospect of death hanging over him.

  Perhaps he should allow this text from Wendy to bring him to his senses at last; even though it magnified the notion of coming to a tragic end that he had been feeling ever since Aurelia had revealed her vision to him. Why had he pressed her on it? He would have been better off not knowing what she had seen. It also appeared that she would have been better off not seeing it, too.

  Now, according to Wendy, she had chosen to leave the world because of it. What should he do next? Did he dare return to Rosalie? Without the tux and the shirts, was he now safe, and was it that simple a proposition? No telegrams, no shirt, no knife, no death.

  He looked at the stack of money sitting on the nightstand. Mostly twenties and a couple of hundreds. Once again he had to acknowledge the fact that they would not last him all that long. He realized he had to make up his mind once and for all and stop acting like a frightened little child who had just stayed up late and watched a horror movie, wanting to hide under the covers all night.

  Then came the startling knock at his motel room door, which sent jolts of adrenaline through his heart. Was the vision catching up with him now, despite everything he had done? Aurelia had said that something wicked had been set in motion that could not be stopped. Was it now on the other side of the door, waiting to plunge a knife into his chest?

  But the single word, “Housekeeping,” brought the instantaneous relief that he so desperately needed.

  He peered through the peephole and then opened the door a crack to a short Hispanic woman. “Checking out today, sir?” she said, flashing a perfunctory smile.

  Without thinking, he was surprised to find himself saying forthrightly, “Yes, yes, I am.”

  Then he closed the door and sat back down on the bed. What he had done so far suddenly seemed absurd. This was no way to live his life. He had to go back to Rosalie and face whatever needed to be faced.

  * * *

  It was as if a different person had put on Vance Quimby’s clothes and walked into the interview room at the Citizen that Wendy had chosen for their meeting. Yes, his physical features were the same, but the body language and facial expressions had taken on a nervous aura that could not be denied. The man was also sweating profusely across his forehead and upper lip, although that was not so unusual for people coming in from outside during Rosalie’s hellish summers.

  “Would you like me to get you a bottled water from the break room?” Wendy said just before sitting across from him.

  He hesitated and started to move his lips, but then shook his head emphatically. “I’m okay. Just . . . let’s get this over with.”

  Wendy opened her notepad to a blank page and prepared to write. “I’m ready to hear what you have to say.”

  “First, you need to know something very important,” he began, nervously drumming the fingers of his right hand on the table. “On the way here I stopped by the morgue, where I requested an autopsy be performed on Relly’s body and then for it to be transported to a funeral home in Omaha. She’ll be buried out there where we grew up. Over the years, she told me those were her wishes. But the most important thing is that . . . I am not a novelist. I did not come here to Rosalie to research and then write a book. Relly was my sister. She was my only sibling, and I’m her only living next of kin. From the start, we were together in this.”

  Wendy looked up from her notepad, already stunned by his words, but managed a somewhat weak, “I didn’t see that coming, but I’m so sorry for your loss, of course.” She quickly wrote down in all caps:

  AURELIA & VANCE ARE BROTHER & SISTER

  Vance’s eyes began to water, and his voice, unsteady to begin with, quavered even more. “Thank you. This is very hard on me, but to cut to the chase you’re looking for—both Relly and I came to Rosalie to set up her psychic business. It’s true that I’ve been doing research all over town and at the courthouse, but not for a novel. It’s been to get background information on a lot of different people and to practice for Relly’s actual marks.”

  “Marks?”

  But even before Vance answered, Wendy remembered that Ross had used the term in describing the techniques used by phony psychics and con artists of all sorts.

  “Yes, people she would target for a session and then hand them over to me for background checks and so forth. That’s just what she did for all of the other bridge newbies, including you. How do you think she knew so much about each one of you that evening? Yes, you can go online and find out a few things about most people. But you’d be surprised how much else you can find out about them just by asking questions indirectly and then continuing to prod. They don’t even realize what they’re giving away. You tell people you’re writing a novel, and they go into an absolute tailspin. They want to know everything about your process, and sometimes you think they might be stalking you. They’re delighted to contribute in any way they can. They think for a minute or two that they might even be in it. You know how it works these days—everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame.”

  He paused for a breath, and Wendy got in a word. “I have to confess that I, too, was intrigued to be around a writer who was in the midst of a novel. It was exciting.”

  “We were counting on that reaction from everyone,” Vance continued. “Anyway, that was my role in all of this, and it’s why I went first at the bridge session the other evening. The plan was to convince you and the others that Relly had actually envisioned the plot of the novel I was writing. There was no novel, and there was no plot. Relly and I just agreed on the business about the service dog leading someone to a dead body in a Dumpster. Sounds intriguing enough, don’t you think? We figured that would create instant interest and credibility, and I think you’ll agree that it did just that. All of you were duly impressed, which is exactly what we wanted.”

  “The Barnum effect, after all,” Wendy said as a reflex action. “So, you’re telling me that your sister was a phony?”

  Vance took a deep breath to try and steady himself further, but the emotion still remained in his voice. “No, not exactly. This is the hard part to explain. When she was a little girl of about eleven or so—and she didn’t grow up in Brooklyn like she said, she grew up in Nebraska with me—she really did get these flashes of insight about people and places. At first, she was frightened by them. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve often wondered how I would handle something like that.”

  “I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be bothered at all, though,” Wendy said, answering his rhetorical question. “I get these flashes of insight that help me solve crimes—not exactly the same way, I would imagine. But it still seems like some sort of gift to me that I can’t explain away completely. Is that how it worked for your sister?”

  Vance took on a faraway look as he continued. “I can only tell you that I remember clearly the day she came to me and said, ‘I think something is wrong with my brain.’ I asked her what she meant by that, of course, and if she was just talking about some kind of bad headache or something. She described these flashes, these images that came into her head like scenes from a movie about certain people and places around Omaha, our hometown. She was genuinely frightened by it all until she found out she could definitely use these flashes to her advantage.”

  “How so?”

  “They were just little things, mostly. Nothing out of the ordinary. Believe it or not, she would sometimes see the questions and answers to tests in school in advance. Imagine that. She knew that it was a form of cheating, but it kept her an A student without much effort. Imagine that. And anyway, how would anyone know she was cheating? She was always in the clear in that respect. None of her teachers ever suspected a thing, and she was not about to try and explain it to them. Think they would’ve believed her anyway?”

  “Anything more?”

  This time, Vance shut his eyes, and a tear fell down his right cheek. “Yes, she foresaw our dear mother’s death. She said the image came to her of Mom in a hospital bed, and then she both heard and saw that horrendous flat line on the monitor. Now I know for a fact that something like that would’ve creeped me out, and then one year later, Mom died of a burst appendix. They couldn’t rush her to the hospital in time to save her. After that, Relly was deathly afraid of more visions. She didn’t want them to come to her. She even went to church, got down on her knees, and prayed that she would be delivered of them; and for a while, they disappeared and let her alone. She thought her prayers had been answered. She thought they were gone permanently, and she could live a normal life. She told me back then that that was what she wanted more than anything else in the world. We all want to fit in if we can.”

  Wendy was writing as fast as she could and finally looked up during another of Vance’s pauses. “I gather from the tone you’re using that things didn’t return to normal, though?”

  “No, they didn’t. The flashes began to return not long after she graduated from college. She was working in a bank as a teller and foresaw in one of her flashes the bank being held up and someone being shot in the process. She went back and forth about going to the police, but she didn’t think they would believe her. I mean, what police officer would believe a woman showing up insisting that a robbery would happen sometime in the future? Odds are that just about any bank would run that risk during its lifetime of operation. You know they would think she was crazy, wouldn’t you?”

  Wendy broke in long enough to answer his question. “I know Ross probably wouldn’t believe that kind of story. He would listen politely enough, but I don’t think he’d take it seriously. How would any police department have the time and manpower to devote to something like that? Post a patrol car across the street from the bank twenty-four/seven? It would never happen. I think only insurance companies take into account what might happen in order to go about their business.”

  “Exactly the point,” Vance said. “Anyway, it was the next day that something told Relly to call in sick when there was nothing wrong with her. That was the day the robbery actually occurred, and the woman who took her place at her teller station ended up being shot. Fortunately, she survived, so at least Relly didn’t have that on her conscience.”

  Wendy stopped writing and caught Vance’s gaze intently. “I’m still confused. You seem to be telling me that your sister was both a phony and the real thing. Do I understand you correctly?”

  “Yes, she continued to get flashes from time to time, but they were usually incomplete. As the years went by, she realized that she couldn’t count on them. But by then she had already decided to try to make a living as a psychic anyway. She was comfortable with it as a concept. That’s where I came in. We decided to team up and see how well we could do together, and it worked for us most of the time. Between her flashes and my research, we did okay. But we found it useful not to stay in the same town too long. Fresh faces with their different back stories served us well, and Rosalie was our latest move. We thought it was the best setup ever, what with Overview and all. Yeah, I know, it wasn’t really legit and all that, but Relly never did any harm to anyone that I know of.”

  “That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? The ‘that you know of’ part. You can’t be sure what people will do or have done as a result of readings that aren’t legit. Suppose they do end up harming themselves? You would never know about it, but it might happen just the same.”

  “That’s a slippery slope.”

  Wendy had an uncomfortable expression on her face. “I hope you don’t think this is somewhat insensitive of me at this point, but I have to ask you if your sister snorted cocaine. You need to tell me the truth—at least as you know it.”

  “That’s another reason this couldn’t have been a suicide,” Vance said, raising his voice a decibel or two. “She toyed with it way back in her college days, but not since then. At least, not that I know of. There’s that phrase again. I’m not sure where she’d even get it here in Rosalie. Believe me—that’s a huge red flag. All of a sudden, cocaine shows up in her life. Followed by death, it seems. She would have told me if she’d started up again. I just know she would. This whole thing is just way out of left field and should raise a hundred red flags.”

  Then Vance cleared his throat even as he was pointing to it. “I believe I’ll take you up on that bottled water. My mouth has gotten so dry, I’ve been talking so much. This is taking a lot out of me.”

  “Of course, I totally understand,” Wendy said, rising from her chair. “I’ll just be right back.”

  On the way to the break room, a whirlwind of thoughts crowded into her head. A brother and sister con game had been in their midst, ready to strike and take no prisoners. Ross had already suggested such a thing—minus the brother revelation—with his skeptical comments, so it wasn’t as much of a surprise as it might have been otherwise. Then there was the notion of murder to consider. Vance had trotted it out right away and had been insistent, while she, herself, had her own strong suspicions.

  So, the next thing that Vance must do would be to go to Ross with all these revelations so that the CID could go to work. Overview had to be processed, even though Wendy knew that her DNA and those of her newbies would be all over the place after their evening there. That would only prove that they had all been there, but probably not much more. Unless something startling and conclusive showed up to incriminate someone, and that was always a possibility.

  Then, as Wendy pulled a cold bottled water out of the break room fridge, she realized that Ross would have to run background checks on everyone. Were Vance Quimby and Aurelia Spangler really brother and sister? Could Vance really be trusted at this juncture, since he had already admitted to being one half of a con game? Those answers would be determined soon enough, however.