Page 59 of It takes a Psychic

“Yes.” There was a short silence. “She did.”

“Do you want me to leave?” He was not holding his breath. Okay, yes, he was holding his breath. Such a simple question. Why did it feel like so much was hanging on the answer?

She appeared to give that some thought.

“No,” she said, “I don’t want you to leave. This feels…different.”

He started to ask the next logical question—Why is this different?—but he changed his mind and shut his mouth. She had sounded bemused or maybe unsure. He decided it would probably be best not to push the issue.

He lounged against the pillows. “Do you want to tell me about your nightmare?”

“It was just a bad dream.”

“You were talking in your sleep. Something about the need to rescue your sister.”

For a moment he thought she was going to slide away from an answer, but she didn’t.

“It’s an old dream,” she said. “It goes back to the day my sister was grabbed at the orphanage. I had that particular nightmare frequently when I was growing up but rarely in the past few years. It still comes back occasionally when I’m under a lot of stress.”

“Do you know why the dream became less of a problem?”

“Sure. The moms taught me how to use lucid dreaming to rewrite the script. But in the past few weeks I’ve started having the dream again, and I haven’t been able to get control of it.”

“As you said, you’ve been under a lot of stress.”

“Yes.”

Oliver glanced at her pendant. The glow was rapidly fading.

“Your crystal was brighter than usual when you woke up a moment ago,” he said.

“My crystal?” She touched the stone with her fingertips and then raised it so that she could get a close look at it. “I guess my dream energy rezzed it a bit.”

“Interesting.” He pushed the covers aside, got to his feet, and padded across the room. He picked up her messenger bag and brought it to the bed. “Let’s take a look.”

Leona opened the bag, reached inside, and took out the yellow pyramid.

The glow was fading, just as it was in the pendant, but the stone was still faintly luminous. He sat down on the side of the bed and took the pyramid stone from her fingers.

“Tell me about your dream,” he said. “The one that seems to be rezzing these crystals.”

“I told you the story. Molly was kidnapped by a madman, Nigel Willard. The moms rescued her. They had just opened Griffin Investigations. Molly was their first big case. The press loved it.”

“Yes, but you never told me how the Griffins got involved. How did they know Molly had been kidnapped? Who hired them?”

“I did.”

“You were six and a half years old. What made you call a private investigation agency?”

“I thought about calling the police but I was afraid Ms. Inskip, the director of the orphanage, would tell them I was just a kid playing with the phone.”

“So you called an investigation agency instead. Why Griffin?”

“It was the only one I knew about. There was a sign on the other side of the orphanage fence. Molly and I could see it when we were on theswings.Griffin Investigations. Want answers? We’ll get them for you. Call now. No waiting. There was a phone number. We had both memorized it because we had seen it so many times.”

“You called the number and the Griffins believed you? A six-and-a-half-year-old kid?”

“I’m told I can be quite…forceful.”

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