Page 51 of The Bride Wore White

“Yes,” she said. “There’s such a thing as knowing too much about someone else, isn’t there?”

“I hadn’t thought about it in that way, but yes.”

“That’s why I never liked dream reading,” she said. “I can do it for real, but I can also fake it. Mostly I faked it. So, in a sense, you’re right. I am a fraud.”

“Why fake it if you’ve actually got a talent for it?”

“Because I really don’t want to know that much about other people. The process of reading someone’s dreams is very... intimate. Unpleasantly so. It’s like flying into a terrible storm. You don’t know what might be lurking in the center, and you really don’t want to know. You can see just enough to realize you should not be there. You don’t belong there. Worst of all, you’re pretty sure that if you hang around too long you might get trapped in someone else’s nightmares.”

He exhaled slowly, stunned by the sense of relief that was washing over him. She understood.

“Sometimes I feel that way at crime scenes and when I’m working on my crime trees,” he said. “I start to see the world the way the killer does, and I don’t like the sensation.”

“I told you, what you can do with crime solving and what I can do with dream reading are very similar. Do you want me to explain your talent to you?”

“You mean give me your opinion of my observational and analytical skills? Why not?”

“Okay, here goes,” she said. “You have the kind of intuition that allows you to assemble facts and observations and use those things to get inside the minds of the bad guys. When you do that, you sense the killer’s most horrible, most uncontrolled desires. You see the monsters inside. You also comprehend that you can’t fix such people. But you are compelled to try to stop them. You have found a way to do that by consulting for law enforcement.”

Somewhere in another dimension, chimes clashed gently. The music of truth. Jack tried to decide how he felt about the unsettling insight. Part of him was relieved to be able to acknowledge the truth to someone who understood. But at the same time, it was unnerving. He was learning that a sense of disorientation was becoming a normal experience when he was around Prudence.

“I agree that intuition plays a role in what I do,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

She smiled. “Face it, Jack. Your intuition is off the charts when it comes to analyzing crime scenes. That makes you psychic, whether you want to admit it or not.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“It’s all there in the case studies you use to illustrate the Wingate Crime Tree—the way you make the leaps between clues and tie them all together. Your process in the course of the Cordell Bonner case is especially interesting.”

“That case ended in disaster,” he said.

“Because Bonner died in the explosion in his lab and took his secrets to the grave?”

“The FBI was desperate to question him about the experiments he was conducting. In the end, they got nothing. Bonner died in the blast. The fire afterward destroyed the chemicals he was working with and his notebooks.”

“I understand that not every case ends the way law enforcement would prefer, but your analysis of the criminal mind was correct. It led the authorities to Bonner and his lab.”

He shook his head, a little dazed. “You picked all that up from my manuscript?”

“Yep.” She swept out both hands. “No psychic dream reading required. I just paid attention to the words on the page. I’m almost finished, by the way. I’m working on some ideas for a new title.”

“What’s wrong with the one I’ve got?”

“It feels stodgy. Old-fashioned. The wordtreehas to go. It will make people think of an ancestry chart. You need a title that sounds more modern.”

“Let me know if you come up with something better.”

They reached the end of the beach. Jack glanced at his watch. He did not say anything, but Prudence gave him an amused look.

“I know,” she said. “You need to get back to your crime tree. I understand.”

“I’m concerned with the personality change that you noted during the confrontation with Clara Dover,” he said.

They walked back across the beach and started up the cliff path.

“You did more than consult on the Cordell Bonner case, didn’t you?” Prudence said.

The question caught him off guard. He had been thinking about the information he intended to add to Clara Dover’s square on the crime tree. He tried to refocus.

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