Forever and Always Read online

  If this was true, then my worst fears were alleviated. My fear had always been that Adam and Bo were being held for that blasted mirror. After all, why had they taken the thing with them when they left? Why had they left in such secrecy? Why hadn’t Adam told me what had happened that so excited him? Why hadn’t I made a point to listen?

  I’d spent months beating myself up over my lack of attention to what Adam had been so excited about that day, but I couldn’t change the past.

  But perhaps I could change the future. I’d told Linc that there was too much evil and wrongdoing in the world for me to be able to help, but I wasn’t about to tell him the truth.

  I know that most people don’t believe in psychics. And no wonder, with so many charlatans out there. Tell people they’re one way in public and another in private and they’ll say,“She really knows me!”

  But you know what I found out after I married Adam? I found out that the FBI believes in psychics. It seems that the FBI will use anything there is to try to bring criminals to justice—or to stop them.

  A psychic can walk into her local police station and be laughed out of the office, but if she goes to the FBI, they’ll say,“Show us.”

  Adam had a friend in the FBI, a man who’d helped us bring down that evil woman in Connecticut, so we both felt we owed him. He showed up at our house one Friday afternoon with a hand truck and three big file boxes packed full. He didn’t leave until the next Thursday. By that time we’d gone over every case file in the boxes and I’d told him all I could.

  I really hated doing it. What was in those files was horrible beyond imagining. In spite of what I told Linc, I can block out some of the horror around me. It’s not easy to figure out if a person is fantasizing about murder or is really about to do it. Also, people do things on the spur of the moment. Someone can be hugging his/her spouse one day, and kill them the next.

  But, as much as I hated doing it, I went over every file and I talked about killers, and innocent people in jail, and missing people who were dead or living elsewhere.

  As my father knew, because he’d studied my ancestresses, I was good at finding people and things. Give me a map and I could close my eyes and quite often find missing or kidnapped people. Too often, I found graves.

  Since that first time, every week, the FBI had sent me papers to go through to see what I could.

  What my husband, Bo or my father never told the FBI or anyone else about were the other things I could do. I could make people do things; I could put thoughts into their minds. I had an idea the FBI knew more than they let on because they were the ones who covered up how the four people in the underground tunnel had died. Their final report said that Adam and his cousin, Mike Taggert, had killed the people. Also, the autopsy report that said there were no marks on the people, just their burst brains,“disappeared” almost immediately.

  I pounded the pillows again and saw that it was nearly four A.M. Last night I’d had a flash of a premonition, that I needed to go to this place in Alabama with this man. There was something there I needed to find and take. Okay, steal. But steal what? Heaven help me, I hoped it wasn’t another stupid mirror. I hated that thing passionately. My father rarely left it and Bo talked with great sadness about how she could no longer see the future in it because she was no longer a virgin.

  For me, I’d never seen anything in it and didn’t want to. I got rid of my virginity approximately one hour after the wedding ceremony. Adam grabbed me and pulled me into—

  No! I could not think about that. It was something I’d learned soon after Adam left. Thinking about, remembering, our joyous times in bed together was guaranteed to make me go insane.

  I turned on the bedside light and picked up the photo Linc had given me. I knew the woman in the picture had given birth to Linc’s child. So who was the woman in the car who’d been killed? The newspaper said it was this woman but it wasn’t. When I touched the newspaper clipping I could see that the woman who’d been killed was taller, thinner and had darker hair than the mother of Linc’s child.

  For a moment I closed my eyes and tried to put together pieces I was seeing. Maybe if I had that dreadful mirror my father could look into it and see what was ahead. But we’d all learned that what he saw was what could be. The future could be changed—changed from what was in the mirror, that is.

  “How do I do this?” I whispered, clutching the photo.

  “And how is this connected to my husband and Bo?”

  When I had another thought I opened my eyes with a jolt. My mother. She had been given a movie audition because of the Montgomery name, but the talent that got her leading roles was hers. I was truly shocked when I heard she was going on TV. Why had she agreed to do that? Because she liked the show a lot? I’d read every interview she’d given—and there were many—but she’d never once explained why she’d agreed to do a TV show.

  Suddenly, I sat upright in bed. Was all this too much of a coincidence? My mother steps down off her big-screen pedestal to do a TV show, and the next thing I know, she’s sending me off to some real-life murder mystery weekend. In my heart I knew there was more to this than finding a missing child. There was a connection to my husband. A link, so to speak, I thought, then I smiled. A Linc, maybe? I lay back on the pillows and smiled some more. It would be just like my mother to use a gorgeous young man to run errands for her. Maybe I couldn’t be in the same room with my mother for more than fifteen minutes without being made to feel inadequate, but she had rescued me. She’d risked her life to save mine.

  So what was she doing now? I wondered. And even more importantly, where had she found out information that I couldn’t?

  I picked up the brochure Linc had given me, held it between my palms and concentrated. Whatever I was looking for I felt was there, so I wanted to make sure the place had empty rooms for us. And I wanted to make sure Linc would be allowed in because this was a females-only resort.

  I smiled at what I saw. The pain I’d given his head was nothing to what he was going to soon feel. All those women—both dead and alive—and he wouldn’t be able to touch one of them.

  Linc

  Chapter Six

  ALL I COULD THINK WAS, THIS KID BETTER BE WORTH it! He better be some adoring, worshipful little brat who idolized me or I was going to send him back where he came from.

  I don’t know what happened to Darci during the night but she woke up a different person. My first thought was that she was delighted to be going somewhere with me. I’d said I wasn’t interested in white women, but that was a lie. Actually, if given a choice, I prefer…

  Oh well, it didn’t matter anyway. She told me I had to audition for her. She wanted to see if I could act gay. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t resist so I showed off a bit with a pretty good performance: tasteful, on the elegant side. I imagined myself as an art dealer, someone with a lot of knowledge, well-traveled.

  Darci didn’t like it. “Have you ever seen The Birdcage?”

  I groaned. Gays hated that movie, saying it was too exaggerated. It made a caricature of gays everywhere.

  She started looking at me hard. I got this tiny pain in the base of my neck. Loudly, I began reciting the Gettysburg Address. When Darci laughed, the pain stopped. I refused to think about what she was doing and what she could do. If I believed what I was thinking I’d be expecting little alien beings to pop out of my belly.

  “Do you want to do this or not?” she asked. “I called the place, this 13 Elms, this morning and they’re going to let you in only because I told them you’re beautiful and you’re gay. I don’t know why the beauty makes any difference, but they said the women who came there have to sign a document saying they’ll have no sex while they’re there.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Probably not, but I guess they can do what they want. They say that sex interferes with the spirits.”

  “What kind of place is this, anyway?” I asked.

  “A rip-off. They tell these rich women they can’