Possessed

what she did. Practiced the religion she chose. She was a grown woman. I might have thought it was ridiculous, but it was her life and not my call to interfere. Why are you looking at me like that?”

Cass immediately shook her head to try to erase whatever expression she was currently wearing. “I’m sorry, it’s just so unexpected.”

“Unexpected of me? How? You don’t even know me.”

The reproof hurt. Mostly because he was right. She didn’t know him at all, but she did know how he had reacted to her and to her gift. For someone who saw things in black and white, was being a medium very much different than being a witch?

“You didn’t give me a whole lot of leeway when I told you what I was,” she countered.

“You pretended to be talking to my dead sister.”

Pretended. Ouch.

“Don’t,” he said, holding up his hand as if to stop her. “Please don’t tell me anything else ‘she said’ or what you know about me. I just don’t think I could handle it right now.”

Since he appeared to be even more exhausted than he’d been an hour ago, she let it drop. She wasn’t the type to showboat her talent, but with him, there was this irrational need to prove something. He was right, though. This wasn’t the time or the place.

“Okay.”

“You were looking for something.”

Cass closed her eyes for a second to better concentrate on the voice inside her head.

There was a ticket. Find the ticket.

“A ticket,” Cass stated. “I’m looking for some kind of ticket.”

“A movie ticket, theater ticket, plane ticket?”

But she could see that the door was closing. Lauren’s face disappeared behind it, and Cass stood alone in her room. The mental image faded, and she shrugged to let him know that was all the information she was going to get.

The two of them moved around the room. Thankfully, there wasn’t a large area to search. The couch took up most of the space. The shelves lined the walls of the rest of it. She had a framed picture of her family. It was a snapshot taken outside of what looked to be a downtown restaurant. Cass’s eyes fell to the strawberry blonde in the shot. Lauren was more beautiful alive. Clearer, more vivid.

Malcolm searched the kitchen, but it was tidy, with only a single orange mug in the sink that still had an herbal tea bag in it. She heard him opening and closing doors, and she moved from the shelves back to the end table. The magazines had been stacked next to the books, no doubt by the cops who had gone through them. Given all the natural clutter, Lauren didn’t strike Cass as overly orderly.

She’d bet a million dollars, though, that everything in Malcolm’s place was in neat piles.

Shaking the useless thought from her head, she forced her attention back to the magazines. The one on top had a shiny cover that was coated with a fine, black powder that suggested it had been fingerprinted. Probably not the best surface to extract a print, but the thought process behind it hadn’t been bad.

Neither the lock on the door downstairs nor the one to her apartment had been tampered with, and Lauren had been killed inside her apartment. She’d let whoever did it inside. One of the reasons why Malcolm had been an easy suspect. If it had been a friend or someone she’d known casually, it was conceivable that that person might have sat on her couch, rifled through a magazine, maybe…

Cass lifted the first magazine and shook it gently by the seam, letting the pages flap about freely. She did the same with the one underneath that. By the fourth magazine, she was growing discouraged when a short stub fluttered to the table.

She picked it up and studied it. It was the second half of a train ticket. Baltimore to Philadelphia.

“You found it.” Malcolm could see through the open kitchen area to where she was standing.

“It was stuck between the pages of one of the magazines,” she told him. “Had she been outside Philadelphia recently?” Cass read the date on the ticket. “Within the last two weeks?”

“No. She just got a job. Some New Age store a couple of blocks from here. She was excited about it. I know for a fact that she was working at least six out of her last seven days.”

“Did she have any friends who lived in Baltimore?”

“Not that I know of.”

Cass had grown up in Baltimore but kept that information to herself so as not to trigger another round of suspicion. Not that it was anything more than a coincidence, anyway.

“Last night, you said you weren’t close.”

Reluctantly, he nodded. “We weren’t close in age. I didn’t spend much time around her friends, as I’m sure you can imagine. They were all…like her.”

“Witches.”

He frowned. “Can you not use that word?”

“It’s politically acceptable within their practice.”

“You know about…witches?”

“I know a lot about people who are on the fringe. The unaccepted. The unusual.”

“Because that’s where you fit,” he logically reasoned.

“It’s where I belong.”

He didn’t respond but instead looked away when he finally answered her first question. “No, we didn’t hang out together a lot. But we spoke on the phone at least once a week. She would have told me if she was having company from out of town.”

“Even if that company were male?”

“Especially that. Lauren was always very excited about the prospect of meeting her true love. She’d had three of them by the time she was seventeen. If a man was coming to visit, one she cared about, she would have told me and…” He sighed. “She’s never going to have that now, is she? There’s never going to be the one. Not for her.”

“You said she had three.”

“That was school stuff. Childish, immature crushes.”

“Love is love. And whoever said there had to be only one real thing and it had to come when you were ready? You can’t spend your life thinking about what she missed. You have to remember what she had.”

“Yeah. Are we done?”

“I found what I came for.”

“So what happens next?”

“We find out who from Baltimore came to visit Lauren.”

“We?”

“The police,” Cass amended. “I know you don’t completely trust me. But you can trust them.”

Malcolm stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked away from her. “It seemed like too much of a coincidence that you happened to be there this morning. It wasn’t the most ridiculous theory.”

“No, I suppose it wasn’t.”

“This time I’m definitely not going to apologize. Not for what I thought.”

“I didn’t expect you to,” Cass told him. “You’re the type who can apologize forever when you know you’re wrong, but you won’t budge if you think you’re right.”

He turned back to her, his gaze sharper. “You keep assigning me these types. Why do you do that?”

It was a fair question. She imagined because it made him easier to deal with if she believed him to be a black- and-white, close-minded, high society, inflexible man. If he was all those things, then he was to be kept at a distance. If he wasn’t…then she wouldn’t know how to deal with him.

That idea slightly unsettling, Cass replied by going on the defensive. “Please. You pegged me as a nut the moment we met.”

“I didn’t peg you. You did that yourself when you told me what you were.” He closed his mouth abruptly. Then he tried to apologize. “I didn’t mean to say you were actually crazy. I just…”

“It doesn’t matter.” But she could hear the bitterness creeping back into her voice. It was her fault for using the term nut. It conjured too many bad memories of her grandfather after he stopped being her family and instead became her jailer. Deep down they had all believed she was crazy. A nut. Her grandfather, the doctors at the asylum, all of them.