“Sorry to disappoint you,” I told my mother, “but nothing much happened.”
Dad said, “You may as well come out with it, because your mother won’t stop until she knows everything.”
He wasn’t wrong, so I told them what I thought I’d felt and heard at the top of the quarry, and what I'd experienced when I’d touched the body on the stretcher.
“Psychometry!” my mother declared.
“Huh?”
“You’re a psychometrist, dear.”
“No, I’m not.”
“It’s a form of ESP that occurs when you touch an object with residual memory and pick up emanations from its energy field, because the past is always entombed in the present via atom exchange.”
“Setting aside the fact that I have no idea what you just said and fully believe it made no sense, can we just back up a minute? A psychometrist is a psychological professional who administers and scores psychometric instruments like IQ and aptitude tests.”
“Are you sure, dear?” she said, with that politely incredulous look she always gave me whenever I said anything inconveniently logical or scientifically true.
My mother would find it easier to believe that a posse of leprechauns had carried me off to the end of the rainbow than to trust any of Newton’s laws.
“Yes, I'm sure,” I snapped. “I've got— I’ve almost got a master’s degree in psychology; I know what psychometrics are.”
“Don’t bite my head off, Garnet. That might be what psychometrics are. But psychometry is the skill of object-reading. It definitely is.” She gave a firm nod, as if the question were settled.
“You people can’t just co-opt established terms for your woo-woo nonsense,” I said, outraged.
Blithely ignoring this, she continued, “The old term for it was psychoscopy, but nobody calls it that anymore. Goddess, this is so exciting! Objects get infused with energetic signatures, you know, especially of past traumatic events. And now you have the psychic ability to read the residual energies inside them through touch, to possibly even connect to their previous owners! I wonder …”
Her gaze wandered around the room, and I knew exactly what was going through her mind. She was searching for an item on which I could test my “object-reading” abilities.
“Did you feel anything when you touched the bone?” Dad asked.
Mom’s head snapped back around, and her gaze locked onto my face.
“That was different,” I told my father. “It wasn't the same as when I touched the woman’s body. It felt — I don’t know — horrible. Bad.”
My father stared at me, his face creased in concern, although I couldn’t tell if he was worried about my sanity or just alarmed at the prospect of being outnumbered two-to-one by the crackpots in his family.
“What did you see?” Mom said.
“Darkness.”
She sucked in a breath and then, with a thrill of horror in her voice, said, “The presence of evil!”
Despite this being exactly what I’d felt, and even what I’d thought, I was instantly irritated.
“No, it wasn't. It was me knowing that there could be no good reason for a human rib to be lying out in the wild,” I retorted, flinging Ryan’s explanation at her.
“Your second sight is growing in power, Garnet. You can deny it all you like, but you have the Gift.”
I faked a yawn. “I'm really tired, guys. Would you mind if we called it a night?”
“No problem, kiddo,” Dad said, no doubt sensing the argument that was looming.
“Hold the telephone,” Mom said. “We haven't decided what mother-and-daughter activities we’re going to do.”
“I need to work,” I reminded her.
“You get some work done tomorrow, and we can have an outing on Wednesday afternoon when I have an assistant in the store. We could have lunch in town, or I could do a tarot reading for you, if you like?”
“How about that maple syrup tasting you suggested before? You said it was at the Sweet and Smoky factory?”
I felt a strong compulsion to go and see the place where Laini Carter had worked, and to check whether I could pick up anything more.
“I doubt they'll be running tours now, dear. That poor woman isn't even cold in her grave yet. I wonder when the funeral will be?”
So did I. Maybe I could sneak in and see if I got anything more.
“There won’t be a funeral,” Dad said. “No memorial service of any kind. Just a cremation.”
“Fancy that!” my mother said, clearly shocked at this flouting of the conventional formalities.
“According to the grapevine, she was an atheist. Her brother, who hails from the South, is coming up tomorrow and meeting with the Medical Examiner in Burlington to formally identify the body, or some such thing. And then he’ll be in Pitchford on Wednesday to meet with the police.”
Mom and I stared at Dad, amazed by this flow of information.
He smiled back. “I got the whole lowdown from Hugo.”
Hugo was the owner of the town’s old hardware store, and he knew almost everything about everyone. In fact, he knew things about people which even they didn’t — because they weren’t true.
“I'll call tomorrow and find out if the factory tours are running,” Mom said, collecting the empty plates.
I helped her with the dishes and on my way out went to say goodnight to my father, who was sitting in the living room with a thick forensic textbook open on his lap.
“I’ve been reading up about skeletonized remains,” he said, cheerfully. “Did you know old bones can be black, white, brown or red, depending on the chemical and mineral make-up of the soil in which they’ve lain?”
“I do now,” I said.
“They’ve even found jaw bones from medieval Greece which are stained green from the copper coins placed in the mouths when they were buried — fare for the mythical ferryman who would take them across the river Styx and into the world of the dead.”
I pressed a kiss on his forehead. “Well, whatever their color, my bones are weary. Goodnight, Dad.”
Catching me at the front door, my mother said, “It worries me that you had that bone in your house. You might be contaminated.”
I’d thought the same thing, but I’d been worried about germs.
She pressed a bundle of rolled, dried leaves into my hands. It looked like a massive joint.
“Mom?”
“It’s white sage for smudging, dear.” At my blank look she explained, “You light this end and then walk around every room of the house, waving it in the air.”
“Why?”
“It’s an ancient ritual for purifying your space from harmful spirits. And these” — she handed me a small paper bag — “are bath salts. Epsom salts to reduce stress, relax the muscles and detoxify the body.”
“You can’t extract toxins from the skin, Mom.”
“Plus, sea salt for a spiritual cleanse, and baking soda to pull out blockages from your aura. And I put some vanilla essence in, too.”
“What’s the vanilla supposed to do?”
“It just smells nice, dear.” She slid me a look that implied it was wacky to think vanilla essence might have metaphysical properties and gave me a white gauze bag with five small gemstones inside. “This is a seer kit.”
From the living room came the sound of Dad snorting.
I said, “A what, now?”
“To increase your psychic abilities,” she explained. “Azurite for the third eye, and bloodstone to keep you open but grounded. Bloodstone will help your sex life, too, and goodness knows you could use some energizing in that area!”
I scowled at her.
“Turquoise, of course, and labradorite for clairvoyance, and moonstone because you’re so reluctant to embrace your abilities. And moldavite” — she indicated a green stone — “to give your spirit guide something to latch onto.”
“What spirit guide?” I snapped.
“Colby.”
Stunned, I took a step back. My mother thought Colby might still be hanging around, guiding me? Back in December, Cassie had told me about a psychic medium who’d insisted that Colby hadn’t fully “moved on” to the other side, that he was trapped in “a limbo of unknowing.” If that was true, then surely solving his murder would have freed him? I didn’t want him still hanging around.
Or did I?
My mother studied me through narrowed eyes. “Hmmm. Or would your spirit guide be Johnny?”
“Johnny? Johnny who?”
“Your childhood spirit companion.”
“My childhood imaginary friend,” I corrected.
“Well, whoever’s guiding you, the moldavite will help. Now, quartz is essential for seeing, of course,” my mother continued, “but I’m assuming you still have the piece you picked up at the pond?”
I would rather have swallowed it than admit to my mother that I’d kept the unusual stone — purple at one end and clear at the other. With a jolt, I realized it had been in a pocket of the parka I’d worn on my hike to the quarry. That I’d been fiddling with it shortly before I’d gotten that vision of Laini Carter.
“Always keep these on you,” she said, closing my fingers around the crystals.
“So, just to be clear, I must use the stones to attract psychic phenomena, and the bath salts and sage to repel them?” I said, but my sarcasm was wasted on her.
She beamed at me, clearly delighted that I was such a fast learner.
“That’s exactly right, dear!”