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  Candace was obviously a great distraction for my ex-husband, and it was shocking for me to find out just what really went on in the clubs he used to go to.

  You're no longer married to him. You don't care.

  It was this thought that helped me detach, to help the room stop spinning as much.

  "I always liked you, professor," Candace said with large, pouty lips that were a ridiculously shiny red. Her breath smelled like tic tacs, the green kind. I tried to concentrate on the details, one at a time. I found that when I concentrated hard on the details, I no longer felt out of control. It was like the part of Jackson who was laying half out of his mind on the soft leather couch of the VIP room was not the same as me. The details seemed to ground me to the place and not the person.

  Another figure came into the room. At least one. They were kind of blurry, but I was pretty sure the tall blonde blur coming over to me was Heather Telamario.

  Candace's mouth hit mine with unexpected force. It was sticky from way too much gloss as her tongue snaked its way through my lips. "Professor," she said. “How would you grade my performance so far?“ Both girls laughed.

  I turned my vision to the side, hoping to find what Destiny was doing while this fatal distraction was going on. I had a feeling none of what Jackson was experiencing right now was in compliance with the club's official policies, VIP room or not. Or I hoped they at least wiped down the leather couches in between clients.

  Through foggy vision, I saw Destiny standing by my margarita glass, tapping on a syringe to the beat of the Beyonce song playing in the background. First, a laced margarita and now a syringe? Jackson was right. He'd been given something, maybe poison. Or maybe he was into injecting drugs. I had no idea what my perverted ex-husband had been into.

  While Candace and Heather's hands explored Jackson's drugged-out body, Destiny sashayed over to me with the syringe. I could smell her perfume when she sat down on the floor by the couch and grabbed Jackson’s arm that seemed to have no resistance left in it. It flopped into her hands.

  "Jackson, honey," she said from some faraway place in my mind. She put something in my hand. "Hold this."

  Jackson's hand formed around an object. It was thin and long. At first I thought it was the syringe. It was a pen, maybe.

  "Sign your name here." She put my hand on the paper. "You remember how to do that right? Sign Jackson Bowman. Jack-son Bow-man,” she said, enunciating her syllables.

  My hand flopped to the floor like she'd let go of a dumbbell.

  "Come on," she said, her voice raising into frustration. She shook me a little.

  I tried to see what he was signing, but Jackson's eyes were barely focusing, and could see much better farther away. I tried to shake my head no. Nothing happened. No responses from Jackson at all, except maybe a little drool.

  "He's too out of it," I heard what was probably Candace say. "We can try it again later."

  Destiny smacked my face hard, again and again. "You've gotta be kidding me. Do you know how hard it was to get him here in the first place? I had to promise him a surprise." She lifted my sleeve up, stroking my arm gently along my elbow and up around my biceps. "This. This is your surprise."

  "He needs to sign first," a low voice said from the back of he room.

  "His eyes are still open," Candace replied. "Maybe he can still do it."

  I scanned the room to see if I could find the bottle Destiny had planned to inject me with before Jackson went farther under.

  Destiny put the pen back in my hand. The woman was desperate for me to sign this thing, whatever it was. She finally let my arm drop. "You're good for nothing." She smacked me hard across my face once again as she and the other girls laughed. My heart raced. My eyes twitched, trying to stay open.

  "Jackson," I yelled in my mind.

  Focus, Jackson, focus. We have to find the bottle before you're all the way under.

  He did not respond to me.

  My gaze went from the margarita glass to the women who were making out on the coffee table right by it, apparently done with Jackson at this point. They groped at each other's hair, at Candace's robe that was barely hanging onto her body. Destiny pulled it the rest of the way off with one swift movement. Voices and movement spun around me in nude-colored blurs of nausea. I thought I saw a strange blur walking around, but I couldn't really tell who it was.

  I realized that's where my ex-husband's last-fleeting attentive moments had been directed that night before he lost consciousness. His eyelids felt like little cartoon anvils had been attached to them. Then there, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the bottle when the three women moved their naked grope-session onto the large chair by the door. A little clear bottle sitting on the coffee table. Its label was only half toward me. Desperately, I tried to make out the words written on it.

  ehead

  um

  ide

  Suddenly, and without warning, my heart jumped into hyper-speed. My arms jerked uncontrollably by my side, spasming. With my throat quickly tightening, I tried to swallow, or even to remember the feelings and muscles it took to swallow, but I couldn't. My tongue felt about six times its normal size, my mouth grew drier by the second. Somehow, I managed to lean over just enough to throw up on the side of the couch.

  "Ohmygod, I think he's dying," a woman's voice screamed from the chair. I couldn't tell who it was.

  “Shit. Not yet. Not good.”

  "We need to call 911."

  "Oh yeah, so they can trace this back to us," a third voice said. It was low, same as the other low voice. Familiar too. A man's voice. "I told you not to give him too much."

  When I came to in my living room I was on the floor by the settee without any recollection of how I got there. It didn't matter. I was exhausted. My heart was still racing and my head felt like it had just been through a four-month binge-drinking session in Vegas, not that I knew what that felt like. I looked around the dark room for my ex-husband, mostly so we could go over what he remembered from that night. He was nowhere to be found. I remembered him saying something about needing to recuperate.

  I was pretty sure the margarita had been laced with GHB, a club drug. GHB was why guidance counselors warned young girls not to leave their drinks alone for even a second. It was the stuff frat boys cooked up in their bathtubs so they could take unsuspecting girls behind a dumpster and later claim it was consensual. People on GHB were not only drugged senseless, but they'd also do whatever someone else commanded them to do, and they'd have no recollection of it the next day. Who knew the only time I'd experience GHB firsthand would be through the memory of a 50-something-year-old man?

  Destiny gave Jackson the drug so he'd sign something, probably a new will or an amendment to her prenup. Whatever. Destiny needed to explain herself. She was clearly about to commit murder right there.

  Had Candace and Heather blackmailed her or gotten in the way somehow? Had she murdered them too?

  I sat down on the settee again, letting my head throb into my fingertips. The name on the bottle was still standing on the edge of my mind, like it couldn't decide if it wanted to dive in and commit itself to being a memory or if it wanted to remain a forgotten piece of life. I bolted up, ran over to the credenza in the dining room, and yanked open the top drawer. I pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil and began scribbling down everything while it was still fresh in my mind. The two women. The words on the bottle. The exact feelings I had after being drugged.

  Of course, that's when the house started to shake just like it had when Mrs. Harpton was cleaning, only stronger. I looked around for the housekeeper. My third written reprimand was laying on the dining room table beside me.

  Dear Ms. Taylor,

  As detailed in the house agreement, after three formal reprimands, appropriate actions can be expected. These corrective actions will take place tonight.

  Great. This must be the punishment for not following the agreement.

  Somehow, I staggered to the
kitchen even though the floor was shaking so hard I could barely get one foot to shuffle in front of the other. I leaned over the sink and threw up. Again and again. The shaking, and the nausea, lasted all night.

  Chapter 22

  Clinically Evaluated

  I was really surprised not to have a hangover the next day when Rex woke me up, gently nudging my hand with his nose, reminding me to feed him, already. I'd fallen asleep on the settee somehow. Everything was a blur, and like most things in my life, I had more questions than answers. The channeling still reeled in my mind, but not in the same way it had last night.

  Jackson had known he'd been drugged. And he knew who'd done it. Maybe all that drinking at the dinner had morphed into the drugging at the strip club, but what he'd forgotten in his fogged-up memories was pretty clear to me. Destiny was the killer. And the two now-deceased girls she was with were her accomplices.

  "Sorry, Rex," I said, grabbing my phone from off the coffee table. "I'll feed you in a minute. I know I'm late." He put his head down, obviously disappointed. This was going down on my permanent record, another corrective action would probably be taking place soon.

  I looked up everything I could about GHB before the internet conked out on me. The more I read, the more I knew that's probably what Jackson had been given the night he thought he'd been poisoned. I also looked up poisons that ended in ehead um ide, the only words I could read on the bottle. The results were weird, especially when I added heart attack to my search. Sodium fluoride came up along with a dart gun the CIA apparently made in the 1970s that would cause victims to have heart attacks. I bookmarked that one for a click-bait article if I ever went back to the dark side of writing again. Then, I came across an interesting article about potassium chloride, one of the injections they give death-row inmates when they euthanize them. Apparently, it was too painful to be given alone. The person would have to be given a knock-out drug first -- GHB! It made sense if there was also an ehead involved, which there wasn't.

  I took Rex's bowl from the microwave and set it down for him. The kitchen clock said 10:18. Shoot. I'd have to leave for the Purple Pony soon. No part of me wanted to go, but I couldn't call in sick on my second day.

  I dragged myself over to bathroom and splashed water all along my face, fully expecting to see Jackson behind me. I was dying to go over all the details of our channeling session, along with my new suspicions, but he wasn’t there and wouldn’t be for a while.

  On my way out, I noticed I had a message on the answering machine. I hated using that archaic devise, mostly because I never remembered to check it, so my messages were usually super old. But because coverage on my cell phone up here was pretty much nonexistent, I had to deal with it.

  It was Brock. "Hey you," he said, making me smile at the warmth in his voice. "I talked to Justin, and, anyway, I’m sorry I took you to the Bulldog last night. Let's plan something more fun for you. Like I don't know, dancing or wine-tasting or something. Call me."

  Maybe it wasn't a bad thing I saw Justin in the alley of the Starlight. And here I'd thought the deputy was staring at me because I'd looked suspicious, or that he hated me for dating his friend. Justin wasn't Jackson. He wasn’t jealous or controlling.

  Maybe I could talk to him about Destiny being a murderer. Somehow, telling law enforcement that I saw a woman in a channeling session about to inject my ex-husband with something called "ehead um ide" didn't seem like enough evidence, or such a good idea.

  I thought Rosalie was going to check my vital signs when she found out I'd spent all night doing a channeling with my awful dead ex-husband. She was the only person, other than Jackson, I could talk to about this; a fact that would have been comforting if it didn't feel like I was being clinically evaluated.

  "How many hours do you think you were under Jackson's control?" she asked. She had a large black book opened in front of her with thick yellowed pages that looked like they were made out of some sort of animal hide. The Purple Pony had just opened and there weren't any customers yet, thank goodness. This book and her facial expressions were a little frightening.

  "I'm not sure. It couldn't have been more than three hours," I said.

  "Three hours?" she shot back like I'd said a million. "The longest I've ever heard of was an hour. One hour. And that person had to be hospitalized afterward." She looked me over. "You sure you're okay?"

  I nodded.

  "Three hours, huh?" she said again as she scanned the pages of her large book. "I hate to tell you this, honey, but that is not normal."

  I laughed. “Like channeling with a ghost is ever normal.”

  She ignored my joke and continued in a softer tone. “This is very high-level stuff. Your mediumship is probably one of the strongest on record. It's beyond my scope or what I'm reading in any of these books. There has to be a reason you can connect with ghosts like this. Do you know anything about your parents, your biological ones, I mean?"

  I tugged at the hangnail poking out on the side of my thumb. This was a sore subject, and one I didn't talk about too often. Any time I even tried to bring up my adoption with my mother, it led to "the face." "The face" was what I called my mother's hurt look: her cheeks lost their color, a soft weird voice took over her usual gruff one, her eyes half-closed into painful sad slits. It was such a difference in the person I knew to be my mother, I couldn't get myself to go into anything that caused the face to happen. So I told Rosalie the only answer my mother ever gave me whenever I got up enough nerve to ask.

  "She doesn't know. It was a private adoption with a private lawyer. My biological mother doesn't want to be found or looked up. That's all she knows. Why?” The words came out in one breath. I hadn't meant to shout them, though.

  Rosalie hugged me so hard her dangly earring caught in my curls. "Some things in life are harder than you think they're gonna be. So don't do them until you're ready, you hear?"

  She hadn't heard me right. It wasn't my fear. It was my mother's, one of my mothers. Either my biological one or my adopted one, or both. They were the ones who didn't want me to discover this part of my life. Not me.

  She didn't let go of her hug for a good thirty seconds. "I told Brock that same thing when he looked up his birth mother a few years back. You never know what can happen. He wasn't ready either, but he heard she was dying in hospice, so he went. Strung out, no teeth, no hair, literally rotting away. It broke his heart. Once an addict, always an addict. There might be a good reason this woman doesn't want to be looked up, or your adopted mother doesn't want you to look her up. You might have to be prepared for what you find, is all."

  She was right. Some things were hard, and you needed to be ready for them. It was probably why I hadn’t seen Tina yet. I wondered if I’d ever be ready for that, or looking up my birth parents.

  Deciding to change the subject before I dug my hangnail out so far it bled, I told Rosalie about the amazing steak I'd eaten during the channeling and how everything smelled, tasted, and felt just like it would have if I were really experiencing them. "Only no calories," I said. "I highly recommend it for that reason alone. But then, the Starlight was a little awkward for those same 'way too realistic' reasons."

  I had her mesmerized. She leaned over the opened book, her thick arms curling around the pages. "We are going to make a lot of money," she said, in the same tone I pictured P.T. Barnum using with Jo Jo. Still, I hoped she was right.

  I told her about the road the Bowmans wanted to build through Gate Hill and the real reason they wanted the Victorian.

  When I got to the part about Destiny, Candace, and Heather, I hesitated, stumbling over my words, stopping myself. Everything seemed to point to them in Jackson's poisoning that night, an attempted murder that was only halted because Jackson hadn't signed his papers yet.

  These girls tried to kill Jackson. Period. That part seemed certain. What was still uncertain was how and why two out of three of them ended up in our yard. Had Jackson figured it out and retaliated?

&nbs
p; I blurted out all the details before I had time to worry if I should mention them or not.

  "So what are you going to do?" Rosalie asked me.

  "I don't know yet. I can't tell the police I got my information from a channeling. They won’t believe that and it’ll just make me seem suspicious. I'm pretty sure I need Destiny to confess."

  "That's not going to happen," she replied as the wind chimes on the door clanged together and our first customers meandered in, an older couple wearing designer everything.

  "I have a plan," I said. She looked even more worried than before.

  Chapter 23

  Reading Between the Lines

  I grabbed a shopping cart and threw my purse into its basket the next day, my head slumped awkwardly to the side to keep my phone up to my ear as I waited for my mother to pick up. A cool breeze blew through the parking lot along with the smell of diesel from the large trucks traveling through Landover to get to the more important cities. I pushed my cart through the automatic doors, pulling the list I'd written on an old receipt from my pocket:

  Recorder, plain journal, mace, check the price of Swiss army knives (make sure they are sharp)...

  "Hello honey," my mom said, answering. “How’s the retail business?”

  I tried to remember to keep my voice down. I had a tendency to yell when I was on my cellphone in a loud public place, especially when I was talking to my mother. “Great,” I replied, ignoring her attempt to pick up where we'd last left off. "I was just calling because I want to know more about my adoption."