Superstition by Karen Robards Read Free Book Online Page B

the necessity of making it to their destination in time, Nicky waited for the intersection to clear and then hung a left. They were almost there. . . .
    “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” Leonora moaned to Nicky, seemingly oblivious to the hubbub in the backseat. “I can’t do a séance if I can’t connect .”
    Her hands were sliding up and down her arms as if she was cold. Recognizing this from experience as a bad sign, Nicky started to feel the first real stirrings of alarm. Maybe there was more to her mother’s reluctance than sheer bloody-mindedness. Maybe she would get on camera and freeze. . . .
    “You can do this, Mama. You have a true gift, remember?” Nicky did her best to stifle her own budding panic and keep her voice calm and reassuring—which wasn’t exactly easy, given the fact that her sister was having a meltdown in the backseat, her uncles were arguing about which one of them was most to blame for upsetting her, and her mother was giving every indication that she was going to unbuckle her seat belt and bolt at the next stop sign.
    Not that Nicky meant to stop for it unless she absolutely had to. Number one, they were so late. Number two, she’d dealt with her mother’s histrionics before, and she was perfectly well aware of the lengths to which Leonora was willing to go.
    If these were just histrionics. Which, if she was really, really lucky, they were. Once a camera was on her, Leonora would be fine. Nicky knew how her mother worked—and, knowing she deserved every bit of what she was getting, she reflected dismally. She’d been a fool to let her mother anywhere near anything that involved her career. But Twenty-four Hours Investigates had been tanking in the ratings, the producers had been desperately casting about for some way to provide a big boost in the numbers for the May sweeps, and her mother had called to ask Nicky if she could use her influence (“What influence?” Nicky had wanted to snort; Nicky’s show was about a one-point drop in the ratings from being cancelled, and she herself was one of three not all that highly regarded on-air reporters) to get her mother a well-paying, short-lived TV gig. The timing of these three occurrences had been close, so close that Nicky had had a eureka moment and connected them.
    At the time, it had seemed like fate.
    Now she recognized it as the recipe for disaster that it was.
    Too damned late.
    “Nicky. I haven’t even had a visit from Dorothy. Not in ages,” Leonora confided in a hushed tone that riveted Nicky’s attention faster than a shout would have done.
    The glance she gave her mother was truly alarmed. Dorothy was Leonora’s Spirit Guide, and for as long as Nicky had been on this earth, Dorothy had been as constant a presence in her mother’s life as Nicky herself and Livvy and Uncle Ham.
    “Mother. Are you telling me the truth?”
    “Pinky swear.”
    Ohmigod. Pinky swear, that precious holdover from childhood. The pledge of truth that she, Livvy, and Leonora never violated. Pinky swears were never taken lightly. From one James woman to another, it meant that whoever said it was telling the absolute, total truth.
    “Don’t panic,” Nicky said aloud, as much to herself as to her mother, as visions of Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s empty vault danced in her brain. Leonora, naturally, took that as a cue to panic. Digging her nails into her wrists so deeply that dark crescents formed around them, she dropped her head back against the seat and started panting like a very large dog in a very hot place.
    Like hell? The way she was feeling right now, Nicky wouldn’t take any bets against it. She should have flown in from Chicago days ago, should’ve known that trusting an airline to get her to her destination within any reasonable definition of “on time” was trusting too much, especially when she really had to be there, should’ve anticipated the bad weather that had caused the delay that had caused her and