Megan smiled. “I thought you didn’t think it was magic.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t read fantasy. I’ve been a card-carrying nerd for forty years, Megan. Of course I read fantasy.”
She laughed. “Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research online and witches—male and female—are practitioners of Wicca, which is a form of modern paganism. Wizards are just kind of general magic users.”
“So do you think we’re wizards?” Katherine was definitely not putting that on her business card.
The corner of Megan’s mouth turned up. “I know you think it’s all part of science we just can’t explain yet, but I think something else might be at work, Doc. All three of us experienced something extraordinary at the same time. Three is a tricky number, you know. It means something.”
“Mathematically elegant,” Katherine murmured, watching the cottages and bungalows of her neighbors creep by.
“What’s that?”
“Three.” She turned to Megan. “Three is a very mathematically elegant number.”
“I’ll go ahead and take your word on that.”
“Here.” Katherine pointed to the redwood-shingled bungalow tucked between two Monterey cypress trees.
“Oh!” Katherine’s mouth formed a nearly perfect O. “It’s perfect.”
“Well, my husband and our handyman would argue that point, but we love it.” It felt nice that Megan—who obviously had a great sense of style—liked her house. “It’s not big.”
“It doesn’t need to be.” Megan opened her car door. “Look at that view!” She swiveled to the pebbled stretch of North Beach extending in front of them. “See, when I imagined living in California, this was what I pictured. Not some weird modern Mediterranean mansion in the hills with rooms we’ll never use. What is a bonus room anyway? Right now it’s just where we keep the boxes we haven’t unpacked.”
Katherine got out and shut her door. “I’m guessing your husband picked out your house.”
“I didn’t even see it before we moved.” She frowned a little, still staring at the ocean. “It’s fine. It’s very large and luxurious. But it doesn’t have any personality. Our house in Atlanta had character.” She turned to Katherine’s house. “This has loads of charm. Ours is just kind of… blah.”
Katherine nodded to the stairs that led up to the broad front deck. “Come on in and let’s get some wine. You can tell me all about it.”
“Wine and ocean views? That’s what I call magic.”
Chapter 9
Katherine made her way to the Fred lab the following Monday. Physically, she felt much better than the week before, but mentally, she might have gotten worse. She’d experienced three more “microvisions” over the weekend. Two of them were mundane, but the third was a car accident she saw happen on the highway just seconds before a small sedan flipped on its side after being sideswiped by a pickup truck.
It was a stark reminder that while she might have been feeling better, life was still very much out of her control.
She walked across the campus, conscious of every student who sped past on a skateboard or bike. She saw a young man jogging in a university sweatshirt and felt an immediate increase in her heart rate.
By the time she reached the lab, she was a bundle of nerves.
“Professor B!” Kaylee looked up from behind her laptop with a giant smile. The young woman was in her midtwenties, but she still looked barely out of high school.
Appreciate it while you can.
Katherine had dealt with the frustration of a young face until her thirties. Then she seemed to go from “Are you a student here?” to “You look tired, Professor B” almost immediately. She knew she shouldn’t complain about aging, but she wished she’d had a slightly longer time to enjoy looking old enough to drink legally before she had to deal with wrinkles.
“How are things, Kaylee?”
The young woman jumped up and walked around the desk. “Can I help you with anything? You look like you’re limping a little.”
Katherine rubbed her knee. “I have one leg that’s still a little sore, but I’m so much better than I was last week. The walk felt good.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I am.” A thought tickled the back of her mind. “Kaylee, remember the girl you were talking about? The one who had the strange incident with the horse before Justin McCabe?”
“Yes.” Caution filled Kaylee’s eyes.
“I was wondering if you might have her phone number or know where I could get it.”
“I absolutely do not.” Kaylee shook her head. “I’m not even sure if I had her name right.”
Katherine narrowed her eyes. Kaylee was acting strange, and she was pretty obviously lying. She’d freely offered the name of the student the previous week—it was Sarah Jordan—and she’d spoken openly about the rodeo incident, which had been written up in the student paper six months before. Katherine had been able to find the article with a quick internet search.
What was going on now?
“Okay. I was just wondering if I’d had her as a student. The name sounds familiar.” The name didn’t sound familiar, but Katherine couldn’t figure out why Kaylee was suddenly so cagey. “I’ll ask around. I was wondering if she and Justin McCabe might have had a connection.”
“Did you have Justin McCabe as a student?”
“I did.” Katherine hardly thought Kaylee was a gossip. She was mainly interested in human neurons. “I had Mr. McCabe in an Elements of Cosmology class.” It was the most common general-education class she taught. “But he wasn’t in my department.”
“He was an ag business major.”
“Correct.”
Kaylee bit her lip and frowned. “You should ask Professor Shaver about Justin. I think he might have known him.”
“You think I should ask Ansel about Justin McCabe?” Ansel Shaver was a psychologist with a specialty in cognitive science who was assisting in the Fred lab, primarily on the sensor readings for their cephalopod test subjects.
He didn’t particularly like working with the animals, and the animals knew it. They regularly squirted him with water.
“Yeah.” Kaylee’s face told Katherine that something else was going on. Something significant. “But you don’t need to tell him I told
