CHAPTER TWO
Laura Frost tried to center herself, to get some kind of stability into her hands so they wouldn’t shake so much. She flipped down the overhead sun visor and checked her makeup in the mirror, then flipped it back up out of the way. She looked fine. Her blonde hair was neatly tied back, and the red lipstick she’d chosen as a kind of power move to reinforce herself was intact.
She just wasn’t sure it was working.
She looked down at her hands holding the car keys, one of them still bandaged from the burns she’d sustained to the side of it two cases ago, and sighed. This was stupid. She wasn’t going to get anywhere sitting in the car. She had to get out. Go into the café. Meet him.
She’d spent her whole life trying to find another person who had real, bona fide psychic visions like she did, and now that one had found her, she was too nervous to go and see him.
That was true irony, wasn’t it?
She took another deep breath and this time, an image of her daughter’s face floated into her head. Lacey. Her little girl was only five. She looked to Laura as a role model, someone who showed her how to live. Laura wanted to set the example that you had to be brave, take life by the reins, and never allow it to beat you down – the way it had when she’d succumbed to alcoholism and nearly lost Lacey in the first place.
No, Laura needed to be brave. She got out of the car and walked resolutely towards the café, trying to ignore the way her legs felt, like they were going to give way. She headed inside, glancing around for only a moment before seeing him sitting at the other end of the café in a booth that was right in the far corner. He saw her looking and raised a hand, and now she had no choice but to go over to him.
Zachariah Kingston. She’d had time to look into him, since he turned up at her apartment unannounced in the middle of the night. That was why she’d asked him to meet her today, after asking him a few questions that night to make sure he really was a psychic like he claimed to be. She’d seen her fair share of charlatans, after all. She wasn’t about to get caught out by another one.
She had asked him to leave then and meet her later under the pretext of it being a late night, but the reality was she’d wanted to look his name up in all systems the FBI had access to, to make sure there was nothing on his record that would serve as a red flag.
And there was nothing. Not a parking ticket, not a caution for jaywalking, not a single instance in which he’d been taken in for questioning even as a witness.
Which, in itself, somehow, only served to make her more suspicious.
“Laura,” he said, warmly, as she approached. His voice matched his appearance, with a kindly, grandfatherly face framed by white hair. He was still slim and fit, though, and his blue eyes had a twinkle to them that made him seem younger than he looked.
“Zachariah,” Laura said cautiously, taking a seat opposite him and sliding across the booth. Not too far. She wanted to be able to make a quick exit if necessary.
“Zach, please,” he said, making a small movement of wry self-deprecation with his mouth. “The only people who call me Zachariah are my doctor and my mother, and I’ll be honest with you – I haven’t seen either of them in years.”
Laura’s mind was working overtime, analyzing and over-analyzing. He hadn’t seen his mother in a long while – well, at his age, that probably meant she had passed away. But the doctor? Was he trying to tell her that he was in excellent health? That he was poor, unable to afford insurance and therefore getting by and struggling on his own like so many people were forced to? Something more sinister that she hadn’t worked out yet?
Or, was she being too much of an FBI agent – and he was really just telling her that he hadn’t seen his doctor or his mother for years and he felt the use of his full name was too formal?
“Zach,” she conceded, figuring it was better to play ball until she could figure out more about him. She wasn’t sure how to start the conversation, now she was there. What did she say? There was so much she needed to know. Starting with niceties felt fake when she didn’t really care yet – she was still too preoccupied with figuring out if he had an ulterior motive.
“I can’t believe I’ve finally found you,” he said, his eyes creasing and his face relaxing into a relieved smile. He shook his head, wiping a finger under one of his eyes – whether to wipe away a tear or show that he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, Laura didn’t know.
That was a completely different tone than what she had expected.
“You’ve been looking for me for a long time?” she asked. When he’d turned up at her apartment, they hadn’t gone much into it. She’d just asked him to prove that he really was psychic by telling her something he wouldn’t have known otherwise, which he had, and then asked him a lot of pointed questions about who he was.
“Not for you, precisely, but for someone like you,” he said, waving a hand in her direction that he then turned towards himself. “Someone like me. Someone who could do what I could do. It’s been a lifetime’s search. I always felt that I couldn’t be the only one – but until now, I never found a single other person.”
Laura took this in for a moment, blinking. A whole lifetime. She’d also spent a long time searching, but he was older than her. If he’d gone all this time and never found anyone else…
What if they were the only two people out there?
It should have made her feel hope that she could find another. Maybe it would feel that way later, when she had processed everything. For now, though, all she could focus on was the fact that it seemed too desperate. Just two of them, after a whole lifetime. Not exactly the community of like-skilled individuals who could help her learn everything about her ability that she really craved.
Still. Maybe it would be enough.
Maybe he could teach her what she needed to know.
“Why me?” she asked. “You said you had a vision which led you to me. Why do you think that happened? Why me, why here, why now?”
Zach leaned his chin on his hands, clasped together with his elbows on the table, and seemed to muse on the question for a moment. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “I didn’t really get any clear information from the vision – just where you were and where I could find you. I don’t know if there’s a reason that I get certain visions at certain times, but these ones showed me what you could do and then led me to you, in a sequence.”
“Explain,” Laura said, staring at him intently.