Better Read Than Dead by Victoria Laurie Read Free Book Online

psychics is that they’re scared to death we will tell them something bad. The truth is that very few of my clientele ever hear bad news but still the perception prevails. The flip side to this coin is the belief that we won’t tell a client about something awful when we see it. Instead we’ll filter it out and tell our clients only the good news. This, I reasoned, was where Cathy was coming from. She must have believed that I’d seen her imminent attack, and that I’d simply chosen to edit it out.
    I was quick to reassure her. “Absolutely not, Cathy. I swear to you, my guides didn’t tell me you were in danger of being harmed.”
    Cathy looked at me for a moment, assessing the sincerity of my face; then, with eyes full of accusation, she asked, “But why not? I mean, if you’re such a good psychic and all, why didn’t you pick up on this and warn me?”
    I took a moment to tramp down the defensive feelings burbling beneath my surface. It irked me to no end when people blamed me for the bad things that happened to them. It wasn’t my fault, and it truly wasn’t my responsibility to make sure that all my clients lived happily ever after.
    My personal feeling is that information comes to me only in a way that the client can handle. Like, if I’d told Cathy, “Don’t go to the grocery store because a psycho is going to rape you,” she probably would never go grocery shopping again for the rest of her life. How would that serve her?
    I went over in my mind what I had told her in the reading the day before. In hindsight, the message had been there, but she hadn’t taken the responsibility of listening and getting her shopping done before her job interview, when it was still light out. Instead she’d blown off the message and done the opposite of what I’d advised and was now paying the price.
    I couldn’t very well point that out to her in her present condition, however; she’d been through enough, and I guess if she wanted to transfer blame to me then I had big shoulders and I could carry it for a while.
    I finally looked at her and said, “Cathy, I think information comes to me so that it’s easy for me to interpret and pass on to my clients in a way that won’t shock them. It’s no good to live your life in fear of something terrible happening, so I think that most of my messages are given to me in a way that makes them palpable to the client. I think we had some of the clues yesterday, but without the context to put them all together. I’m so sorry you went through this, and I’m working with Detective Johnson here to help find the guy who did this to you as soon as possible.”
    Cathy dissolved into tears again, and I really felt for her. I couldn’t imagine what she was going through, and felt more powerless than I ever had in my life. After a few moments she nodded at me and struggled to regain some control, while carefully wiping her good eye with her crumpled tissue. Then she glanced up at Milo and said, “I remembered something else, Detective.”
    Milo quickly reached into his coat pocket and extracted a small spiral notebook. Flipping quickly to a blank page he nodded at her, and she said, “The last thing I can remember after he grabbed me from behind, right before he pulled me around the back of the building, was that he was wearing a mask.”
    “A mask?” Milo repeated.
    “Yeah, I had a really brief glance at it from the corner of my eye.”
    “Like a Halloween mask?” Milo asked.
    “No, not a Halloween mask. It was a ski mask, one of those Gore-Tex ones.”
    “The skier . . .” I said breathlessly, a little startled by the revelation.
    Cathy looked sharply at me, her mouth dropping open at the connection. “Oh, my God . . . yesterday you told me to be careful of the skier. After I left your office I remember thinking that you must have been talking about my next-door neighbor. I think he skis, and he’s always trying to hit on me.”
    “Could he have been your attacker?”