“ ‘Psychic counseling,’ ” he read aloud. “What’s that exactly, Ms. Belgrave?”
“Sometimes I sense things,” she said.
“And you think you can help us with the Sporran kid?”
“That poor little girl,” she said.
Melissa Sporran, six years old, only child of divorced parents, had disappeared eight days previously on her way home from school.
“The mother broke down on camera,” Detective Jeffcote said, “and I guess it got to people, so much so that it made some of the national newscasts. That kind of coverage pulls people out of the woodwork. I got a woman on the phone from Chicago, telling me she just knows little Melissa’s in a cave at the foot of a waterfall. She’s alive, but in great danger. You’re a local woman, Ms. Belgrave. You know any waterfalls within a hundred miles of here?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. This woman in Chicago, she may have been a little fuzzy on the geography, but she was good at making sure I got her name spelled right. But I won’t have a problem in your case, will I? Because your name’s all written out on your card.”
“You’re not impressed with psychic phenomena,” she said.
“I think you people got a pretty good racket going,” he said, “and more power to you if you can find people who want to shell out for whatever it is you’re selling. But I’ve got a murder investigation to run, and I don’t appreciate a lot of people with four-leaf clovers and crystal balls.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“Well, that’s not for me to say, Ms. Belgrave, but now that you bring it up—”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice. Detective, have you heard of Sir Isaac Newton?”
“Sure, but I probably don’t know him as well as you do. Not if you’re getting messages from him.”
“He was the foremost scientific thinker of his time,” she said, “and in his later years he became quite devoted to astrology, which you may take as evidence either of his openmindedness or of encroaching senility, as you prefer.”
“I don’t see what this has to—”
“A colleague chided him,” she said, brooking no interruption, “and made light of his enthusiasm, and do you know what Newton said? ‘Sir, I have investigated the subject. You have not. I do not propose to waste my time discussing it with you.’ ”
He looked at her and she returned his gaze. After a long moment he said, “All right, maybe you and Sir Isaac have a point. You got a hunch about the Sporran kid?”
“Not a hunch,” she said, and explained the dreams, the headaches. “I believe I’m linked to her,” she said, “however it works, and I don’t begin to understand how it works. I think...”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid I think she’s dead.”
“Yes,” Jeffcote said heavily. “Well, I hate to say it, but you gain in credibility with that one, Ms. Belgrave. We think so, too.”
“If I could put my hands on some object she owned, or a garment she wore...”
“You and the dogs.” She looked at him. “There was a fellow with a pack of bloodhounds, needed something of hers to get the scent. Her mother gave us this little sunsuit, hadn’t been laundered since she wore it last. The dogs got the scent good, but they couldn’t pick it up anywhere. I think we still have it. You wait here.”
He came back with the garment in a plastic bag, drew it out, and wrinkled his nose at it. “Smells of dog now,” he said. “Does that ruin it for you?”
“The scent’s immaterial,” she said. “It shouldn’t even matter if it’s been laundered. May I?”
“You need anything special, Ms. Belgrave? The lights out, or candles lit, or—”
She shook her head, told him he could stay, motioned for him to sit down. She took the child’s sunsuit in her hands and closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply, and almost at once her mind began to fill with images. She saw the girl, saw her face, and recognized it from dreams she thought she had forgotten.
She felt things, too. Fear, mostly, and pain, and more fear, and then, at the end, more pain.
“She’s dead,” she said softly, her eyes still closed. “He strangled her.”
“He?”
“I can’t see what he looks like. Just impressions.” She waved a hand in the air, as if to dispel clouds, then extended her arm and pointed. “That direction,” she said.
“You’re pointing southeast.”
“Out of town,” she said. “There’s a white church off by itself. Beyond that there’s a farm.” She could see it from on high, as if she were hovering overhead, like a bird making lazy circles in the sky. “I think it’s abandoned. The barn’s unpainted and deserted. The house has broken windows.”
“There’s the Baptist church on Reistertown Road. A plain white building with a little steeple. And out beyond it there’s the Petty farm. She moved into town when the old man died.”
“It’s abandoned,” she said, “but the fields don’t seem to be overgrown. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Definitely the Petty farm,” he said, his voice quickening. “She let the grazing when she moved.”
“Is there a silo?”
“Seems to me they kept a dairy herd. There’d have be a silo.”
“Look in the silo,” she said.
She was studying Detective Jeffcote’s palm when the call came. She had already told him he was worried about losing his hair, and that there was nothing he could do about it, that it was inevitable. The inevitability was written in his hand, although she’d sensed it the moment she saw him, just as she had at once sensed his concern. You didn’t need to be psychic for that, though. It was immediately evident in the way he’d grown his remaining hair long and combed it to hide the bald spot.
“You should have it cut short,” she said. “Very short. A crew cut, in fact.”
“I do that,” he said, “and everybody’ll be able to see how thin it’s getting.”
“They won’t notice,” she told him. “The shorter it is, the less attention it draws. Short hair will empower you.”
“Wasn’t it the other way around with Samson?”
“It will strengthen you,” she said. “Inside and out.”
“And you can tell all that just looking at my hand?”
She could tell all that just looking at his head, but she only smiled and nodded. Then she noticed an interesting configuration in his palm and told him about it, making some dietary suggestions based on what she saw. She stopped talking when the phone rang, and he reached to answer it.
He listened for a long moment, then covered the mouthpiece with the very palm she’d been reading. “You were right,” he said. “In the silo, covered up with old silage. They wouldn’t have found her if they hadn’t known to look for her. And the smell of the fermented silage masked the smell of the, uh, decomposition.”
He put the phone to his ear, listened some more, spoke briefly, covered the mouthpiece again. “Marks on her neck,” he said. “Hard to tell if she was strangled, not until there’s a full autopsy, but it looks like a strong possibility.”
“Teeth,” she said suddenly.
“Teeth?”
She frowned, upset with herself. “That’s all I can get when I try to see him.”
“The man who—”
“Took her there, strangled her, killed her. I can’t say if he was tall or short, fat or thin, old or young.”