Itsy-Bitsy Spider Read online

  He’d loved her to the bottom of his heart. He’d thought he’d found forever, was willing to do anything to bottle it so he could keep it that long. But, like a puff of smoke, it had all blown up.

  Like her crazy abilities—which he’d admired—and how he had defended her and them to his colleagues. She’d been fanatical about acting on her information, but sometimes she expected Kirk to jump when he couldn’t. There was such a thing as needing evidence before picking up criminals. He was a cop and couldn’t go off the reservation or work outside the law. And, when he had been unable to help her with several visions, things between them became strained.

  But the Handkerchief Killer case took strained to a whole new level.

  That case had blown apart their lives, and they’d separated. Over two years later—a rough two years—he had walked into the station one day to hear she’d been hospitalized. Then he’d heard about her son. She’d never mentioned him, and he’d never asked. And now it was too late for all of them. His heart tugged at the thought of the little boy who’d been so sick. She had done everything she could to help him, but, when they had both collapsed, both were rushed to the hospital, her son dying before she’d ever awoken.

  Due to some mix-up with the paperwork, her son’s body had been cremated and buried. And when Queenie had regained consciousness, they’d almost lost her again when they told her the news.

  She couldn’t identify the signature on the cremation order—although it was her name. She didn’t remember signing the order, but the hospital staff said she had.

  He’d seen the signature. Hell, he even had a copy of the cremation order on his desktop. Something he couldn’t quite let go of. Somewhere along the line something had happened, as if she’d been unable to deal with the grief, so she’d fed on all kinds of conspiracy theories. She even wanted Kirk to open a missing person’s file. He’d tried to explain to her there was no way he could. Her son’s death, although painful, was aboveboard. It had been verified by several attending nurses and the physician. His supervisor, when he’d broached the subject of what to do, had said Queenie needed mental assistance and to recommend she get treatment—at least counseling.

  That he had privately agreed at the time wasn’t something he told her. She’d fought him on it for days as he distanced himself further and further. What did one do in the face of such pain? In the face of such disbelief and the high level of fantasy? She wasn’t willing to see his side. How could he possibly see hers? And yet the mystery remained. … Who had signed the cremation order? Queenie refused to believe she’d done it. Even more so, who had buried the remains?

  The mystery was just a little too unsettling for him, and he could see how it fed her own psychosis. But, at the same time, he didn’t dare let himself get sucked into it. Unfortunately he’d seen shit like this happen before, way too often.

  Maybe somebody had signed it as a good deed, realizing Queenie herself would not likely make it through her own illness. Again, any number of scenarios were possible, but, as far as Queenie was concerned, her son had disappeared from the hospital’s care, and they were ultimately responsible.

  And it broke his heart all over again. Because that same devotion, that same focus she’d had on various cases, was now something she was locked on to herself. To stay sane, to have any kind of life, she had to let it go.

  “Kirk, what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Startled, he glanced around and looked at Peter, one of his team of detectives. “Hey, sorry. Just got a weird phone call. Tossed me back for a loop.”

  “What phone call?” Peter looked at him with a frown. “It takes a lot to shake you. But you sure do look rattled.”

  With a quirk of his lips, Kirk said, “Queenie.”

  Peter’s eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. “That’s not just strange. That’s heading into psychotic territory. You stay away from her.”

  Kirk chuckled. “I haven’t had anything to do with her for years, and, out of the blue, she calls me.”

  “What did she want?”

  Kirk said, staring at his monitor moodily, “Nothing. At least she never said.”

  Peter asked, with a shake of his head, “She’s still out there, isn’t she?”

  “I know. I thought, after all this time, she’d have been better.”

  “I think, when mothers head down that path, absolutely nobody can do anything to help them. They see dead children because they want to see dead children.” He smirked. “And, for Queenie, that goes double, as she always sees dead kids.”

  “You mean, she sees their spirits,” Kirk corrected. “Because she wasn’t there, she didn’t see him die, see his body afterward, so she has no closure on her son’s death.”

  “Hell, when Melissa had a miscarriage,” Peter said with a heavy sigh, “I thought she’d gone off permanently. I can’t imagine what would have happened if she woke up in the hospital to find out her child was gone, and she not only didn’t get a chance to say goodbye but she didn’t even see the body or go to a funeral, … nothing.”

  “Exactly. And, because of that, Queenie couldn’t let go of the thought that maybe her son was stolen, maybe somebody did something, and maybe the child was still alive somewhere. But she didn’t say anything about Reese this time. It was a weird call actually.”

  “Can’t she contact him with her abilities?”

  Kirk nodded. “I imagine she tried. But you know what she was like. She would get all these weird hunches and psychic visions, and sometimes there’d be voices. Sometimes there’d be pictures.”

  “Nothing was normal about her visions or her abilities,” Peter said. “I’m not even sure I believe any of that shit.”

  “But she did help us close dozens of cases,” Kirk said. It had been phenomenal at the time. When she had information, it was usually good information.

  “Not at the end,” Peter reminded Kirk. “It was stuff somebody else could have gotten from a newspaper or something. Hell, maybe Queenie was listening in at the closest coffee shop where the cops hung out and getting tidbits from there.”

  Kirk didn’t bother answering. They’d had this conversation before, although not for years. He stared at the number on his phone, jotted it down on a sticky note and stuck it to the base of his monitor. He couldn’t quite let go of the feeling that something strange was going on—and not just with her phone call.

  Her voice had been strained, as if some major trauma had occurred. She’d already been through more than most people had. Yet, he also knew that to go down that path, to even pick up the phone and call her again, was to open up a hornet’s nest in his own life, and he didn’t want that either.

  “You better stay away from her,” Peter warned. “She’s bad news for you.”

  Not much Kirk could say to rebut that. She’d been his everything until she broke down and sent him away. But he hated to look at that time too closely. Nor could he forget about her all these years. He’d kept tabs on her after she had lost her son but always from a distance. Then he’d lost track of her. Every six months his calendar reminded him to do another search for Queenie, to find out where she was, if possible. This exercise kept him somewhat connected to Queenie and also reassured him that she was somehow still okay.

  “You know what happened when your last girlfriend found out about Queenie.”

  That had Kirk wincing. His ex-girlfriend Lorraine and he had been going out together for over eight months, with her angling for a ring and permanency, when she found out about Queenie after she’d called him. Lorraine had been horrified about her occupation and him by association. They’d broken up soon afterward.

  His email dinged with a new message coming in. He clicked on it.

  It was from Queenie. He read the garbled note and realized it was about a vision of some kind. But, once again, no names, no dates, no locations. But she also added the description of a woman who owned property on a mountain who was lying cold under the surface of her nearby lake. The property b
ordered that lake, and some man was trying to take the property and had murdered the woman to get the property.

  Kirk sat back and picked up his cup of coffee, his heart sinking.

  The trouble was, he had become a cop because he wanted to help. He then became a detective because he wanted to do more. Queenie had abilities that had allowed him to do even more. He had turned down a promotion because he wanted to remain in the field. He didn’t want to manage people. He didn’t want to manage coworkers. He just wanted to do his job.

  The others had thought he was crazy. He would get a bigger paycheck, but the job would have been a much bigger headache too. He didn’t deal well with the brass above, and he would have become the middleman between them and the detectives, so not a position he wanted. But he’d been given raise after raise. Not to mention respect and multiple commendations for a job well done.

  Yet, no doubt his record of solving cases had eased back because he no longer had Queenie’s assistance.

  How sad was that? Most of the guys had no faith in psychics. Except the department knew and worked with a couple who were too good to not believe. Stefan Kronos was one of them. Queenie was another.

  He’d asked Queenie about Stefan a time or two, and she’d just given him a blank stare, as if she didn’t know anything about him. Kirk would have thought they had an inside line to each other.

  Not knowing how to reply to her current email, he shut it down. His reply would expose a door he didn’t dare open.

  Chapter 2

  Sunday, Early Morning …

  The next morning, Queenie walked back into her tent at the amusement park. Her gaze searched the floor, the curtains, the tabletop. Where was the spider? Feeling like a fool, she called out quietly, “Are you here?”

  No response came. Just the wind, which blew through the thin fabric sides of the tent, making the interior gloomy and lonely. She groaned, pulling out her chair, searching underneath the cot and covered table.

  Yesterday had been beyond unnerving between the people who had come for messages and the big man who she suspected had murdered that poor woman in the lake. And then, of course, there was what she thought was the child’s voice and the very real phone call to Kirk.

  She had barely slept all night.

  Any contact with Kirk was guaranteed to jar her nerves for days. He’d been her lifeline, her grounding rod, in a chaotic world of murders and lost children and desperate family members searching for the truth to terrible crimes. Kirk had been instrumental in closing more than a dozen cases for people who had come to her for help. But she’d cared too much … She hadn’t any defenses against the wounds of what humanity would inflict upon itself. When the last case blew up, it had broken her. Sure they’d gone on to find the serial killer but not before he’d taken his final victim—a woman she’d been desperate to save … and failed.

  She went into hiding, like any animal, refusing to talk to anyone—including Kirk. She’d chased him away—and had further splintered her fragile emotional state into pieces.

  She had turned her back on him and the other cops, desperately needing to find some peace inside. She’d ended up at a seaside community, renting a small place. Every day she had just walked the beach, trying so very hard to let go of all the pain and the trauma that had taken up residence in her mind, her brain. The memories were like a disease, festering away at her—she wasn’t eating, barely drinking. Her body was a bone rack. But somehow, walking the beach, watching the waves roll over her feet, listening to the seagulls cry above, she could feel some of her own sense of calm returning. But it hadn’t been long afterward that another truth had finally sunk in.

  At the time, the trauma circling through her brain was so all encompassing that she hadn’t seen the signs, hadn’t even listened. But a miracle had happened among all that chaos. She was pregnant.

  It was obviously Kirk’s child, and, yet separated from the man, she clung to that little bit of Kirk, that part of her just so desperate to find some good in all that had gone so wrong. Overjoyed, she’d started to eat better, to sleep more. She knew she looked instantly better just because she was always smiling now. She walked for miles, hours on end, working through the emotional baggage she’d picked up from all her work, read fanatically on how to let go, how to release all the bits of energy clinging to her so she’d be as healthy as possible for this next part of her life. Her pregnancy was important to her, and she planned to do everything right.

  She also worked at a retail store part-time, and tried to rest and relax and look after herself the remainder of the time. She had vowed to walk away from the work she’d been doing to keep her stress levels down and to hopefully create a better future for her and her child.

  To that end she had sought out free group therapy—from PTSD counseling to handling grief and stress—all to rid herself of the nightmares, and the daytime ones too. She had attended various such meetings around town, run by local doctors who donated their time. She had to laugh how Kirk had earlier urged her to do this, and she had adamantly refused at the time. If only he knew …

  Even odder was that more than a couple of those doctors had asked her out. Dr. Jamison was particularly good-hearted, and then there was Dr. Steel. He was all ego. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t ready to replace Kirk. She wasn’t sure she would ever be ready for that.

  Regardless, the group meetings were a necessary diversion and had Queenie among living, breathing people. After all, there was no group therapy for broken psychics. Yet, her biggest improvements came from her discussions with two people not here with her.

  It had taken her months of healing—months of talking to the child growing in her womb, months of talking to Kirk in her mind, always apologizing for not letting him know about his child, not letting him know this special person was coming into being. Her connection to her child grew in multiple ways daily.

  The pregnancy had been rough. She’d been sick for months, had cramped constantly but had no medical insurance, so her checkups had been nonexistent. Reese’s birth, more than three weeks early, had been the most painful and the most magnificent event of her life. Because of the birth’s accelerated timing, she had decided to go to the hospital, in case of any complications, then gave birth and awaited the initial medical checkup of Reese, saying all was good with him. She and her son were gone within hours.

  She and Reese had slipped out without notice, leaving what little money she had to cover a paltry part of her bill. Upon admittance, she’d given a fake address and phone number, being so broke that she’d been living in a slum hotel. That didn’t stop her from dreading any mail that arrived, fearing it would be the rest of her hospital bill. But, when it never materialized over the next year, she finally relaxed.

  Her son’s arrival was so personal, and their connection was incredible and so damn deep. When Reese had stared out of those huge magnificent dark eyes, her heart had completely melted, and she’d vowed to do everything she could to keep him safe and to show him a whole lot better world than the one she lived in.

  But it wasn’t to be.

  She’d worked steadily, trying several menial jobs, attempting to find a balance between enough money to live on and to raise her son on and yet, not so much work that she was away from him too long. She preferred to take jobs where she could keep him with her. She had cleaning jobs and phone-answering jobs, gardening jobs, always with the condition that her son could come with her. But then she’d gotten sick, and so had he.

  Without enough money for early medical treatment, she kept working, doing everything she could to get him the best that he could have, until one night when her landlord had come looking for the overdue rent. Queenie had managed to open the door, and then she’d collapsed.

  When she awoke, it was too late. Her son was gone.

  She would have done anything to have left this Earth with him because the pain of being left behind was so torturous. She went into a spiraling decline that nobody could talk her out of. Added
to that was the hope that her son was alive. She swore she could hear him crying out for her, as if their intimate connection was unbroken—only there was no response on his side. She was knocking, but no one answered. Kind of like her relationship with Kirk.

  When her fever broke and she’d finally come to in the hospital days later, her body exhausted but over the worst of it, Kirk stood there to break the news to her. She could see his own pain as he was the one delegated to tell her the harsh truth. While his sympathy was vividly real, and he was helpless but to watch her endure this horrible loss, she also glimpsed his questioning glances, looks. He was doing the mental calculations, wondering …

  Not only had her son died but his body had already been cremated. She couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the shock, the loss. In her mind all she heard was his cries of pain when she had collapsed at the front door of her apartment. Added to that was the fear her son was alive, taken from her by unknown someones.

  Reese’s death and funeral already completed, Kirk paid for it as a favor to her. His own son … and he didn’t know.

  Her recuperation had been slow and lonely. As soon as she returned to her home, she’d set about reawakening her abilities for the sole purpose of contacting Reese. “Didn’t I?” she murmured softly.

  Yep, and it worked, didn’t it? Her son’s light laughter around her made her smile, as always, but now she wanted to cry at the same time.

  It had taken her a long time to contact Reese, her own abilities rusty and the tunnel between the two that she’d forged was subsequently broken through illness and death. But she’d survived and that connection—different now than it had been—was more precious than anything anyone else could imagine. To know he was there, not always and not for long, but those few moments gave her a sweetness she’d thought she’d lost forever. This kept a smile on her face when nothing else could.

  Terrified that if she didn’t continue to use her abilities, she’d lose her connection to her son, she worked at the amusement park as the Queen Seer to provide answers for five dollars a question. A misfit of all misfits, she’d felt right at home. And she’d been here ever since.