Superstition Read online

  He looked haunted.

  Hell, he thought with a grimace, he was haunted. Or something.

  “So us being on TV’s not popular with the mayor?” Dave asked, providing a welcome distraction.

  “He seems to think it’s bad for business. Come on, we better get over there.” Joe turned away from the mirror and started moving toward the door. “Did anybody know about this?”

  “Not me.” Dave was moving right along with him.

  “Supper’ll be on the table in five minutes,” Amy said, appearing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She took in the situation at a glance and planted both fists on her hips. A slim, suspiciously buxom bottle blonde with some obvious mileage on her, she was wearing Daisy Dukes with a blue-checked shirt tied at her waist and high-heeled white mules. Deeply tanned and reasonably attractive, she narrowed her carefully made-up blue eyes at them. Given the fact that they were at that moment making tracks for the front door, which opened directly out of the living room, with the obvious intent of bypassing the kitchen, where she had until that moment been, Joe couldn’t exactly blame her.

  “You guys aren’t taking off, are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  Still some three feet shy of the door, Dave cast her a hunted look.

  “Work,” he said in a strangled tone.

  “An emergency’s just come up,” Joe explained. With Amy’s gaze drilling into him, Dave froze in that spot like a rabbit when a dog catches sight of it. Joe pushed him toward the door, then reached around him to open it.

  “But what about supper?”Amy demanded.

  “We’ll be back,” Dave called desperately over his shoulder as Joe shoved him out the screen door onto the small concrete stoop. “Thirty minutes, max. Keep it hot.”

  The screen door banged shut. Somewhere in the depths of the house, the kid started to wail.

  “Like hell I will,” Amy yelled after them. “You . . .”

  Dave hunched his shoulders as her insults followed them to the street. It wasn’t full dark yet, and there were still quite a few people out and about in this neighborhood of neat, close together ranch-style houses that had been constructed just after the conclusion of World War II. The kids running around the yard next door shooting each other with squirt guns appeared oblivious to Amy’s X-rated suggestions as to what Dave could do to himself. But the older couple sitting in lawn chairs in the yard on the other side looked startled, and the woman bicycling with her little girl down the street threw Dave’s house an outraged glance.

  “Oh, man,” Dave said, as the furious slam of his own front door cut off the tirade just as they reached Joe’s cruiser, which was parked along the street out front. Having waved feebly at his lawn-sitting neighbors and grimaced an apology at the bicycling woman, Dave looked like a turtle doing its level best to withdraw into its shell as he walked around to the passenger-side door. Meeting Joe’s gaze over the top of the car, he made a face. “Women. What’re you gonna do?” Then, on a more glum note, he added, “You can bet your fanny she’s going to make me pay through the nose for this.”

  Joe thought about telling his Number Two just how, in his opinion, his love life could be better managed, but he remembered in the nick of time that he was not in the doling-out-advice business. He didn’t have the energy, for one thing, and anyway, it was easier just not to get involved. Dave was a big boy. He could figure it out for himself—or not.

  Either way, as long as it didn’t affect Dave’s performance on the job, it was no concern of Joe’s.

  Then he noticed what his second-in-command was still wearing.

  “Take off that damned apron, would you?” Joe growled as he opened his door. “And get in. We’ve got work to do.”

  Casting a quick look down at himself, Dave flushed and fumbled with the lopsided bow behind his back for a minute before finally managing to get the apron off. Crumpling it in one hand, he slid into the car. Joe was already inside. He had the car started and was staring out through the windshield grimly. As soon as Dave’s butt hit the seat, Joe put the car in gear and took off, pulling out into the street and heading west.

  With a quick glance over his shoulder, Dave tossed the apron into the backseat and reached for his seat belt. Clearly, he had no inkling that the despised garment landed right beside Brian, who was grinning broadly as he made himself at home in the backseat.

  2

  “BAD NEWS, NICK. Mama says she can’t do it,” Livvy said casually, as though she could conceive of no earthly reason why this should be a problem.

  Having just burst in through the back screen door of her mother’s rambling “cottage” on Pawleys Island, Nicole Sullivan stopped dead and stared at her older sister. Spoon in hand, Livvy was sitting at the rectangular oak table in the typically messy kitchen, digging into a quart of her favorite rocky road ice cream. The old paddle fan turned lazily overhead, adding a rhythmic fwump-fwump to the sounds of the TV show that Livvy was watching. The color scheme, the product of a 1960sera redo, was harvest gold and avocado, with Formica countertops and linoleum flooring. Fluorescent tubes glowing through two frosted panels in the ceiling were designed to illuminate the cooking area, not to flatter. In other words, nobody ever looked like a beauty queen in this particular kitchen, but her sister’s appearance was still enough to make Nicky do a double-take. Livvy’s normally tan and slender face was as pale and round as a full moon. Usually a meticulously kept blond pageboy, her hair was twisted into a haphazard knot on top of her head and—unheard of in Nicky’s experience with her sister—was showing at least two inches of dark roots. Beneath her hot-pink maternity top, Livvy’s previously perky B-cups had engorged until they resembled twin Matterhorns. The table hid the rest of her, but Nicky had seen enough to realize that their mother hadn’t exaggerated when she’d reported that Livvy, now seven months along and in the process of divorcing the scumbag who’d left her for another woman, looked like hell.

  “What do you mean, she says she can’t do it?” Nicky resumed her race toward the master bedroom, which was the only one on the ground floor. Livvy was a problem that could be dealt with later. Her quest for her mother, on the other hand, was urgent. “She has to do it. She’s on live TV in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Nicky, thank God you’re here.” Karen Wise, one of Twenty-four Hours Investigates’s hapless production assistants, emerged from the adjacent den, where Nicky assumed she’d been holed up making more desperate phone calls of the “what do I do now?” variety, like the one with which she had summoned Nicky, who as a result had made a ninety-mile-per-hour detour on her way to the Old Taylor Place. Karen was twenty-two, with shiny black hair razored into one of those chic nape-length ’dos that required minimal styling, near black eyes, clear olive skin, and a slender, petite build that made her look like a teenager. Along with Mario García (hair and makeup), Karen had been sent to Twybee Cottage—all the old houses on Pawleys Island had names, and Nicky’s mother’s was called Twybee Cottage—to prep tonight’s guest star for her upcoming appearance and then accompany her to the site. “She says she’s changed her mind. She flat-out won’t go.”

  “Oh, yes, she will,” Nicky promised, sweeping past. Difficult and her mother were practically synonyms. Fortunately, over the years—her entire twenty-nine years of life, to be precise—she’d learned to cope.

  “Nicole! Sweetie! Oh, you look so good.” Having obviously heard her coming, a man rushed out of her mother’s bedroom, arms extended in welcome, a huge smile on his face as he blocked the hall under the pretext of greeting her. About five-ten, he was stoop-shouldered and thin except for a slight tendency toward a potbelly. Thanks to a lifetime’s worth of careful sunscreen use—a must, as he’d reminded Nicky countless times, for fair-skinned people like themselves—his face was, at fifty-seven, as pale and unwrinkled as a baby’s. He had thinning reddish hair; bright hazel eyes; an aquiline nose; big, puffy fish lips that he hated; and a soft, slightly receding jawline that he hated even more. He was metic
ulously dressed—for Pawley’s Island—in madras Bermudas and a grass-green polo shirt, tucked in and belted. Which told Nicky that whatever position her mother was taking now, she had, at some time in the recent past, at least planned to show up for the gig that her daughter had put her less-than-stellar career as a TV journalist on Twenty-four Hours Investigates on the line to get for her.

  “Get out of my way, Uncle Ham,” Nicky said grimly, shouldering past her mother’s brother—otherwise known as Hamilton Harrison James III—as he attempted to wrap her in a delaying bear hug. His face fell. “I know she’s in there.”

  “But Nicky, she says she can’t . . .”

  The rest of Uncle Ham’s protest was lost as Nicky reached her mother’s bedroom and threw open the door. It was a large room, done in soft, feminine turquoises and creams, with a queen-sized four-poster bed nestled against the wall to the left of the door, and a big window that looked out over the ocean at the far end—the end Nicky was looking at as she came through the door. The turquoise silk curtains were closed against the encroaching night, making a nice backdrop for her plump, flame-haired mother, who was sitting in one of the two cream velvet tub chairs in front of the window, puffing into a brown paper lunch bag that Nicky’s Uncle John—John Carter Nash, Uncle Ham’s longtime partner—was holding over her mouth and nose.

  “Mother!” Nicky glared at the pair of them. Not that Uncle John deserved the look particularly. It was obvious even without knowing any details where the problem lay.

  “Nicky!” Her mother and Uncle John gasped in almost perfect unison as they jumped, dislodging the bag, and looked at her nervously.

  “Your mother—she can’t go on. Look at her—the very thought of it is giving her so much stress, she’s hyperventilating,” Uncle John said. Except for being just about the same age, he was Uncle Ham’s polar opposite—bristly blond crew cut, deep tan complete with canyon-deep character lines, and the toned, muscular body of the fitness fanatic he was. He, too, was dressed as if he’d planned to go somewhere, in a snug black T-shirt and khaki slacks.

  “She has to go on,” Nicky said ruthlessly, pinning her mother with her eyes as she bore down on her.

  Her mother—otherwise known as Leonora James, famed psychic medium, once star of her own short-lived television show, author of countless books on communicating with the Other Side, prized consultant to police departments and private clients, recipient of dozens of fan letters a month—gave a despairing wave of her perfectly manicured hands.

  “Oh, Nicky, I think I have . . . I have psychic’s block!” she wailed, her heavily mascaraed lashes batting like hummingbird wings as Nicky reached her side.

  “What?” Nicky stared down at her mother, momentarily dumbfounded. This was new. Creative, even. Not that she had time to appreciate her mother’s ingenuity. The clock was ticking, and this time it was her career that was on the line. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. There is no such thing as psychic’s block, and you know it! Anyway, even if there is such a thing and you do have it, I don’t care. You have to be on the air in”—she glanced at her watch—“twenty-two minutes. So deal with it. We’ve got to go.”

  Nicky curled a hand around her mother’s elbow, urging her—not all that gently—to her feet.

  “You don’t understand,” Leonora wailed, resisting. Still clutching the paper bag, Uncle John made a distressed sound and fell back. With her peripheral vision, Nicky saw Uncle Ham watching from the bedroom doorway. Behind him, Karen and small, wiry Mario hovered, looking equal parts fascinated and worried.

  Great, Nicky thought. She got to deal with her mother in front of an audience.

  “I do understand,” Nicky said, doing her best to keep her voice, expression, and body language within the realm of acceptable loving-daughter behavior as she once again asserted steady upward pressure on her mother’s elbow in a futile effort to lift her from her chair. “You have stage fright. You’ll get over it as soon as you’re in front of the cameras.”

  Just as Nicky had expected, Leonora swelled with indignation even as she settled her backside deeper into the seat cushion.

  “I do not have stage fright. I’ve never had stage fright in my life. I’m telling you, I have psychic’s block.”

  Nicky repressed an urge to give vent to a few choice words. This was vintage Leonora; she should have expected it. It was clear that her mother had at one point intended to go on: She was dressed in her official psychic’s garb of sparkly purple caftan, tons of gold jewelry, and enough black eyeliner and red lipstick to do Kelly Osbourne proud. But for some reason, the tide had turned: Despite Nicky’s best efforts at heavy lifting, her mother was sticking to her chair as stubbornly as if she’d been glued to it. If there had been time, Nicky would have kicked herself. She should have known better than to mix family and job; the two were like oil and water. In fact, she had known better. But . . .

  “Mother.” Taking a deep breath, Nicky fought to stay calm. Her fingers did not tighten on her mother’s arm. Her teeth did not clench. But there didn’t seem to be anything she could do to keep the edge out of her voice. “If you don’t show up, the show won’t pay you. If the show doesn’t pay you, you won’t have the money to go in with Uncle Ham and open a restaurant. That’s what you wanted, remember? When you called me and asked if I could get you just one quick little TV gig? Also, if you don’t show up, I’ll probably get fired, because using you was my suggestion. Then I’ll move back to Pawleys Island and we can all live here, together, unemployed, drawing on our savings, until we all run out of money and the bank repossesses the house and we’re out on the streets and we starve.”

  A beat passed in which two pairs of nearly identical brown eyes stared measuringly into each other.

  “Don’t exaggerate, Nicky. You’ve always had a tendency to exaggerate,” her mother said at last.

  This from the drama queen of the Western world. Nicky barely managed to keep herself from rolling her eyes, which, as she knew from bitter experience, would prove fatal to her chances of getting her mother to do anything at all except pitch a royal hissy fit.

  “We have to go, Mama,” Nicky said, tugging.

  “I tell you, I can’t do it.” Leonora nevertheless allowed herself to be pulled to her feet at last. Underneath the drama queen was a pragmatist, after all. It had been eight years since Leonora’s TV show had aired—and been cancelled. Her fame had been at its peak; since then, it had dwindled. With the stock market in the shape it was in and her book royalties having steadily decreased until they amounted to maybe a couple thousand dollars a year at best, Leonora’s income was at its lowest tide ever. Luckily for the success of Nicky’s efforts at mother-moving, even famous psychic mediums had to eat—and pay the bills. “Ever since I saw Harry”—Harry Stuyvescent was her third husband, a sensible man who was in all likelihood at that moment watching ESPN in the detached garage, well removed from all the hullabaloo—“walking toward me all covered in blood, I haven’t been able to see a thing.”

  By “seeing” Harry, her mother meant that she’d had a vision of him, something that psychics were—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the circumstances—prone to. Nicky remembered full well the semi-hysterical phone call she’d gotten just before Easter, during which her mother had insisted that her beloved Harry must be going to die in some horrible, tragic fashion in the near future, because she’d “seen” him all bloody.

  Okay, so Leonora had “seen” her first husband—Neal Sullivan, Nicky and Livvy’s dad—lying in their bed, soaking wet, in the weeks before he’d drowned in a boating accident. And she’d “seen” her second husband, Charlie Hill, on a beach in the Bahamas when he was supposed to be in New York on business—a little vacation he’d taken with his secretary that had ended up costing him his marriage to Leonora. Those visions did, perhaps, argue in favor of Leonora’s ability to predict husband-related calamity. But . . .

  “Harry got hit in the head with a g
olf ball two days later, Mother.” Now she was talking through her teeth. Nicky deliberately tried to relax her jaw muscles, without success. “It wasn’t even a bad injury. It was just a little bitty scalp wound that bled a lot. He didn’t even need stitches. He walked home from the golf course and put a wet washrag on his head, and that was that. Remember, you called me that night and told me all about it. You were so relieved. You said it yourself: That was why you saw him covered in blood.”

  “But the trauma,” Leonora wailed. “You don’t understand how visions like that affect me. You’ve always been so insensitive, Nicky. If I hadn’t watched you being born and you didn’t look just like me, I’d say you couldn’t possibly be my child.”

  This all-too-frequently-heard refrain of her childhood started pushing buttons Nicky had almost forgotten were there.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Nicky muttered, exasperated, and began physically hauling her mother toward the door. Leonora outweighed her by a good fifty pounds and was perfectly capable of planting her feet and refusing to go if she truly didn’t want to. That her mother allowed herself to be pulled along, with whatever degree of apparent reluctance, reaffirmed what Nicky had suspected all along. Her mother had never actually intended not to show up. Ever the diva, she’d just needed to feel as though all eyes were on her first. In other words, this was just another big scene in the ongoing star vehicle that was Leonora James’s life.