Page 1 of The Bride Wore White

Chapter 1

The moment she removed one long black glove and touched the rim of the crystal bowl, Madame Ariadne knew the client on the other side of the table intended to murder her.

Damn. As if she didn’t have enough problems at the moment. She’d had it with the profession. If she survived the night, Madame Ariadne, Psychic Dream Consultant, was going to disappear forever.

Her real name was Prudence Ryland, but those who paid to have her interpret their dreams knew her only as Madame Ariadne. She had never really felt that the dream reading business was her true calling. Yes, there was very good money in it, and yes, she had a talent for it, but she had never liked the work. Tonight it might get her killed.

“This is the first time I have consulted a psychic about the meaning of my dreams,” Thomas Tapson said. In the shadows of the darkened room, his eyes glinted with the reflected light of the old-fashioned lamp in the center of the round table. “I look forward to the experience.”

He had walked into the reading room with an air of amused curiosity. He had stopped in the center of the shadowed, heavily draped surroundings and removed his expensive fedora with a gracious gesture. The perfect gentleman. His hand-tailored suit, elegantly knotted tie, and gold signet ring were the hallmarks of wealth and high social status.

On the surface, his voice carried the unmistakable accent of an upper-class boarding school education. It was the voice of a man who had been raised in the rarefied world of San Francisco society. But if you knew how to listen, you could detect the sick lust he was working hard to conceal.

She knew how to listen—it was a requisite skill in the psychic trade. The question was whether or not she knew how to survive the night.

“I will certainly do my best to interpret your dreams, Mr.Tapson,” she said, managing to keep her own voice cool and professional with just the right touch of mystery and drama.

The ability to put on a good performance was another skill essential to success in her profession. She had been raised in the dream reading business. She was an accomplished actress.

“I apologize again for my late arrival this evening,” Tapson continued. “I was unavoidably detained at a meeting with some business associates.”

“I understand,” she said.

Tapson had been her last appointment of the day. When he had failed to arrive on time, she had assumed he was a no-show. She had been about to put the Closed sign in the window when he had appeared out of the foggy twilight of the damp San Francisco night.

Obviously it had been a mistake to open the door to him, but when she tried to tell him he would have to book another appointment, he immediately offered to double her already sky-high fees—if she would agree to consult for him tonight.

She had allowed herself to be persuaded because she could not resist the prospect of the extra cash. She intended to close down the business soon, and her future looked uncertain. She needed a comfortable financial cushion to see her through until she could reestablish herself in a new career in Southern California.

This was what came of allowing oneself to be tempted by money, she thought. One accidentally opened the door to a murderer. Lesson learned, but perhaps too late.

“If you would please place your fingertips on the rim of the crystal bowl,” she continued, “I will begin the reading.”

She thought she had braced herself for the nerve-jarring jolt she knew was coming—even the most fleeting contact with the stuff of another person’s dreams was deeply disturbing—but there was no way she could have protected herself from the horror of Thomas Tapson’s dream storm. She knew then that she would not be his first kill. The euphoric thrills he had derived from the terror and pain of his previous victims were infused into the hellish energy that slammed through the crystal. Her chest tightened. She suddenly could not breathe.

“I hope you can help me,” Tapson said. “I’ve had a very strange recurring nightmare for some time now. At first I tried to forget it, but now I’m starting to wonder if it might have some significance.”

She studied him from behind the veil of her wide-brimmed black felt hat. Unlike many in the psychic profession who conducted readings and séances swathed in exotic robes and colorful turbans, she preferred modern, fashionable attire, and she stuck with one color—black. She thought it reinforced an aura of serious professionalism. She was not a fraud. There was no need to dress like Hollywood’s version of one.

Marketing required some drama. She had an intuitive talent for reading dreams, but she had learned the business side of things from her grandmother, who had always impressed upon her theimportance of establishing a style that set one apart from the crowd. Selling psychic dream readings was no different from selling perfume or jewelry. Packaging was everything.

In addition to the veiled hat, she wore a sharply tailored black jacket, a slim black skirt, and black gloves. Her jewelry was limited to a small colorless crystal pendant, a family heirloom that had been given to her by her grandmother.

She had capitalized on the glamorous fashion for veiled hats because she thought the delicate netting covering her face added just the right touch of mystique and mystery without conjuring images of carnival fortune tellers.

“Our intuition often speaks to us in our dreams, Mr.Tapson,” she said. “It is always a wise idea to pay attention.”

“I don’t mind telling you I’ve developed insomnia because of this particular dream,” Tapson said. “It has become quite annoying.”

She forced herself to breathe with control while she fought to overcome her instinct to shield herself from the nerve-shattering intimacy of Tapson’s dreams. Using the crystal made it much easier to focus, but it also intensified her vulnerability to the psychic lightning that flashed in the heart of his dream storm. The only other means of achieving such clarity was with physical contact, but the thought of actually touching the monster on the other side of the table was more than enough to ignite an anxiety attack.

Tapson watched her across the rim of the crystal bowl with the glittering eyes of a large insect about to leap upon its prey. He tightened his grip on the rim of the bowl, his fingers like claws. The lamplight sparked on his signet ring, inexplicably drawing her attention. She glanced at it and saw that the front was engraved with a key.

“How does this work?” Tapson asked.

“Crystal is an excellent conductor for psychic energy,” she explained. In spite of her incipient panic, she managed to slipeffortlessly into the glib explanation. Clients always wanted to know the secrets of a reading. She told them the truth because there was no reason not to. It wasn’t as if they could do what she did, not without her kind of talent. “I cannot visualize your dreams, of course, but when you describe them, the crystal will transmit impressions of what your intuition is trying to tell you. My task is to interpret those impressions for you.”

“That sounds very scientific,” Tapson said. He smiled, displaying teeth yellowed by cigarette smoke. Here and there gold fillings gleamed in his mouth. “I was expecting a Ouija board.”

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