"Wait, what?" Lily stammered. "You know who Carter Denning is?"
She was dumbfounded.
Cassie was equally confused.
"I know him," she said. "What do you mean, he's missing?"
"Grace said that he was visiting her last Friday. She was meeting him at the train station in Portland, but he wasn't on the train." Lily was confused. "How do you know him?"
"He was one of the keynote speakers at the conference this weekend," Cassie confessed. "He's spry for his mid 80s, let me tell you! How does Grace know him?"
"They worked together at some book company in the 60s." Lily was struggling to follow this development. Grace was sure Denning had disappeared, but Cassie insisted he had been in Boston the same weekend. It just didn't add up.
Lily realized Cassie was talking, but her attention was elsewhere. She needed to get ahead of things and figure this out.
"We need to go see Grace," Lily spoke up when Cassie stopped speaking. "But first, I need to run home and gather a few things. Give me an hour, I guess, and I'll be back to pick you up. Will that work for you?"
"I guess so," Cassie said with a quizzical tone. "I'll see you then."
"Great!" Lily said and let herself out.
The drive out of town toward home was a blur. Lily's mind raced as she struggled to focus on the road. She almost felt panicky. She needed to get it together. The last two years hadn't been great with the loss of business and constant fear of illness, but things had been looking up for the last 6-8 months. She was starting to see regular work, and though there had been the usual rust of inactivity to shake off, she had started to feel more normal than had seemed possible for a long time. Seeing everything unravel this morning was freaking her out. She needed to reset her mind, her emotions, her work habits.
The drive gave her a chance to calm down slightly. She pulled into her driveway and went inside. Feeling the sweat of her anxiety on top of yesterday sent her straight into the shower. She let the hot water pound her skin and the burn of steam purify her senses. Refreshed, she stepped out to get dressed, opting for a casual pair of slacks and her favorite coral tee. She felt better already.
Lily took a deep breath and headed for her office. She felt a pang of anxiety return, and fought to shake it off. There was a time she loved work, loved the detailed aspect of creating a file, organizing her thoughts and notes and cataloging them for reference. She knew she had a gift for it that served her well on the few cases she'd had to take the stand in court to describe her actions and findings. Knowing this was true and not supposition gave her a boost of courage that helped fight off the nausea rising within her that she had lost her touch.
There had been plenty of times in her twenties when she would have been right to doubt herself. Unable to find anything in college that worked for her to study, she had tried other subjects, other schools, eventually quitting to chase a mystical new age urge into the paranormal. Using meditation to attune to the psychic strains of the world, she visited with people troubled by their past or lost loved ones, guiding their spirits together again... for a price.
There was always a price. She thought of the sporadic choices in college and remembered the chemical inducements that had fueled them. She thought again about the 18 months as a medium, and the influence of drugs and deadbeat wanderer named Tresym Void. It was cringeworthy now, but at the time, she had hung on everything Void had told her like he was a divinely inspired guru. Was she really so vulnerable to suggestion?
When she first met him, she remembered finding him odd, but still felt attracted by his intensity. He had a way of holding your eyes when you looked in his that dismissed the world around you and drew her in. She could feel them on her now, feel her will escaping as she opened her soul to melt into his. A shudder ran through her spine at the memory. That was over a decade in her past, yet she still felt the raw vulnerability he could expose her to with a stare.
