A Touch of Gold (6 page)

“I know.” She shook her head and had to adjust her helmet again. “I’m sorry we can’t do more. We all loved Max.”

“No good jumping to bad conclusions anyway,” Gramps added. “We’ll have to let the investigation run its course.”

“We’ll do our best, Mayor O’Donnell,” Brad assured me. “I know this isn’t easy for anyone.”

I don’t know why exactly, but I lost it then. Maybe it was these hardworking firefighters that had been out there working all night. I knew Cailey was as close to Max, or closer, than I was. I knew all of these people loved Max. No one wanted to think his death and the destruction of the museum could be anything but a terrible accident.

I took my hand from Kevin’s arm. He started to walk with me when I moved, but I shook my head. I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down my face. I left abruptly and went toward where the side of the museum had been. I stripped off the dirty gloves to wipe the tears away.

I needed a few minutes alone. If that looked crazy or weak, so be it. Max was dead. He had always been there for the town and for me. The horrific truth of it settled on me like a cloud of the greasy black soot from the fire.

I kicked something and looked at it. It was the trash can I’d helped Agnes with yesterday. Somehow it was still in one piece. All of its contents were on the ground, but that appeared to be the result of someone accidentally knocking it over. It didn’t look like the fallout from a cannonball ripping into a propane tank and blowing up the museum.

Even through my tears that strange twist hit me as amazing. It was like that time a bad hurricane blew through Duck, demolishing one house while leaving the one right next door completely untouched.

“Are you okay?” Kevin came up behind me anyway. “I could take you home if your grandfather wants to stay.”

“I’m fine, except that Max is dead. The whole museum is gone. But this stupid trash can is still here. Someone could take it home and use it. What a world, huh?”

I could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t really getting what I was saying. That was okay. It actually made me feel a little better saying it.

I reached down without thinking and picked up the coffee card I’d put into the trash yesterday. I don’t know what possessed me to touch it after my recent experiences.

It was dripping wet, probably soaked by the high-power fire hoses. For a second, I didn’t feel anything from it. I thought maybe my new ability had left me, gone as fast as it had come, like a storm at sea.

Then suddenly it all rushed in, filling my mind with information that choked me. I dropped to the wet ground as I heard Kevin call my name.

Chapter 4

I
t was as though I was standing at the end of a long tunnel. I was engulfed by the vision from the card. I could still hear Kevin calling me but I couldn’t answer.

I saw Max arguing with the man who had the coffee card in his pocket. The man slammed the door to the museum when he went outside. He glanced at the coffee card as he took it out. All of the numbers were punched on it. He shrugged and hurled it toward the trash can before he got in his car and drove away.

I couldn’t really tell anything about what was said. It was enough to know that he and Max were both extremely angry. That didn’t surprise me once I realized that Max was speaking to Sam Meacham from the Corolla Historic Museum.

The intense feeling from the argument between the two men dissipated as rapidly as it had come to me. I gasped for breath and found Kevin with both arms around me, holding me up.

“Someone call 911,” I heard him yell. “Get an ambulance over here!”

“No!” I put my hands on his chest, feeling the familiar energy from his jacket. “I’m okay. Really.”

“The hell you are,” he growled.

“It’s not what you think.”

His eyes stared into mine. “Then what is it? What’s going on, Dae?”

I showed him the soggy coffee card. “Something’s happened. I feel—some kind of energy from things since the explosion. Everything I touch: my clothes, your jacket,
everything
. I don’t know what to do about it.”

There!
I’d said it out loud. It was a relief.

Two firemen I recognized as paramedics ran over to us, emergency medical bags in hand. They both looked bone weary, the kind of exhaustion where your eyes are dull and your skin looks gray. “What’s wrong? You need help?”

“No. I guess not.” Kevin shrugged. “It’s fine. Sorry. Thanks.”

Surprised, I moved away from him as the paramedics gave us an annoying glare before returning to their grunt work sifting through the debris that had been the museum. “You believe me?”

“Of course.” His tone was matter-of-fact. “Your abilities probably changed when you underwent the shock from the explosion. I’ve seen it before.”

Of course
, my inner critic mocked him,
it’s rather commonplace
. “Great! Maybe you can tell me what to do about it.” I was being sarcastic. How would he possibly know what to do?

He glanced around. “Not here. I know your abilities aren’t a secret, but maybe now isn’t the right time to talk about them with the media.”

I followed his gaze and noticed the TV crews fanning out around the debris field, trying to find someone to pounce on for information.

I wasn’t ready to be recognized and go through an interrogation about what happened. Maybe it was a nonmayorlike attitude, but I didn’t want to blurt out something that I’d regret later. I needed time to decide what my statement was going to be.

“Missing Pieces.” I put the coffee card into my pocket with the gold coin. “Let’s go there. I don’t want to tell Gramps about this yet. I don’t want to worry him any more than I have already.”

Gramps didn’t protest the fact that Kevin was taking me to the store. He was surprised but recovered quickly with a pleased expression on his face. He loved the idea of me having a relationship with almost any local man. Kevin was icing on the cake since Gramps liked and respected him.

Kevin and I managed to skirt around the reporters as Cailey took off her helmet and walked toward them as if she was going to give them a statement. The reporters moved toward her like sharks to a chum bucket. Maybe she did it on purpose. As soon as we were away from the scene, she left them angrily demanding to know what was going on.

Kevin helped me into his pickup. I cursed my awkward, injured storm knee for making me look like an old lady. Then I dealt with the new sensations of manufacturing and distribution coming from the truck. I rubbed my hand on the worn red seat.

“What are you seeing?”

“You got this truck at an auction. Before you had it, a man in Virginia used it to haul tobacco and, occasionally, moonshine.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I knew he was a farmer. I didn’t know about the other part.”

Sensations like those I felt from the truck were already becoming almost second nature. How something was manufactured—even how it was used—was easy to absorb and ignore.

But the coffee card and the gold coin, the pink wheelchair at the hospital were so excruciatingly different. It had to be the emotional quality to the items. I could feel the strong emotions like they were my own. A second aspect to this new and scary ability.

The coffee card emotions felt new, as though the argument between Max and Sam had happened yesterday. “I’ve been completely crazed by all of this,” I said as he started the truck. “I tell you and it’s no big deal. Why aren’t you upset about it? Why don’t you think it’s crazy?”

“I told you I knew people like you when I was with the FBI.” He pulled the truck out into traffic. “One of them was a psychic who was able to track down kidnapped children. She found them in half the time we could with conventional means.”

“And she was blown up?”

“No. She was shot by a kidnapper and almost died. It changed her. She started hearing the children’s voices as well as being able to tell where they were. She could hear their cries for help when they were being tortured. It made her even more effective at her job. It also drove her crazy.”

We’d reached the parking lot for the Duck Shoppes on the boardwalk, where Missing Pieces was located conveniently close to town hall. Everything looked so normal, as if, a quarter mile down the road, the museum was still there and Max was still busy sorting artifacts.

“I don’t know why, but I sense a lesson here.” I turned to him as he parked the truck. “What happened to your friend?”

He shrugged as though it didn’t matter, but I didn’t have to be a psychic to see it did. “She lost herself. When I finally quit last year, she was being transferred to a psychiatric facility. She couldn’t cope with all of it. It was too much.”

“She was your partner, wasn’t she?”

“Is that from your new ability?”

“Nope. A lucky guess. I’m sorry. Is that what made you quit the FBI?”

“It was the end of twelve years of events that made me realize it was time to leave,” he admitted. “Sometimes, it’s just time to go.”

I unbuckled my seat belt and urged my sore knee out of the truck. I hoped this was a cautionary tale because it didn’t make me feel any better. On the other hand, I knew a little more about Kevin. It seemed to come in small bursts. He obviously didn’t like talking about his time in the FBI. “So this is where you get your insight into what’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Dae. At least nothing that a little rest won’t help. Besides being too close to the explosion, your abilities are natural to you. My friend refused to give herself time to adjust to her new abilities. She couldn’t control it, so it controlled her.”

I looked across the parking lot at the Coffee House and Bookstore. I had a powerful urge to go in and question Phil, the owner, about Sam Meacham’s recent visit there. The energy left in the coffee card was like the demanding energy left in the gold coin—pushing me to act. I had no way of knowing whether the feeling was something important or not.

But like so many businesses in Duck, the coffee house was closed until mid-March. I couldn’t find out any information about the card until Phil came back.

People hailed me then rushed over as Kevin and I walked by the shops on the boardwalk overlooking Currituck Sound. Everyone wanted to make sure I was okay—and find out the latest gossip about the museum. Everyone in Duck would’ve heard about it by now. It had probably made the news last night and this morning. Not a lot happened here that made it to TV.

My friend Trudy Devereaux, the owner of Curves and Curls Beauty Spa, which was right next door to Missing Pieces, stopped talking and cutting Ellis Walters’s hair when she saw us.

She hugged me tight and cried. “Oh, Dae! I was so worried about you. Don’t you ever do that to me again! Sometimes trouble seems to find you like a lure attracts fish.”

We commiserated for a few minutes, her green smock feeling familiar even to my heightened senses. Trudy and I had grown up together—there wasn’t much we didn’t know about each other. We were wiping away tears by the time Ms. Walters came out to ask questions about the museum.

“You call me or come by when you can,” Trudy said, urging Ms. Walters back into her shop. “And be careful. You could’ve died yesterday.”

I promised that we’d talk and Kevin and I went next door to Missing Pieces. I played with the key in the lock like I always did to get the door open. Visions of a few former tenants rushed through my mind at the touch of the key to the lock. But they were like ghosts—no substance or emotion. Maybe I’d been there long enough that their energy was starting to fade.

I didn’t open the blinds or turn on the lights, as I usually did. Normally I would’ve been hoping for a few winter visitors who wanted to buy my treasures. Today I felt like skulking around, hoping that no one would wander in.

Kevin locked the door behind us, and I sank down with a grateful sigh onto my burgundy brocade sofa. I closed my eyes and let the familiar energies from my shop lap around my disturbed senses like a warm bubble bath.

“Tea?” Kevin held out a box of orange spice chai. “Or coffee?”

I grimaced. “I’ve had your coffee, thanks. Tea, please.”

“What’s wrong with my coffee?” He busied himself putting water in the little pot on the hot plate. “It kept me awake plenty of nights when I was on a stakeout.”

“
That’s
what’s wrong with it!” I smiled, very happy that he was here with me. Since we’d met a few months ago, we’d developed a nice friendship. I felt like I’d known him forever. There was nothing more to it than that. Not for my lack of imagining more, however.

Kevin had proven to be an easygoing, steadfast kind of person. He was good-looking, hardworking, and every woman in Duck was interested in gossiping about him. And those were just the married ones.

“When did you first notice the change?” he asked as the water in the pot began to get hot.