Dark Demon Rising: Whisperings Paranormal Mystery book seven by Linda Welch Page B

was.”
    Bouncing
to her feet, she paced the room with fingers dug in her hair. “This is positively
creepy.” She spun on her heel; her gaze drifted until it focused on me. “You are real.”
    “You’d
prefer we weren’t?” Mel asked.
    Magenta
splayed her fingers on her mouth and grinned behind them. “Well, what do you
know!”
    “So
you didn’t communicate with David Williams?” I asked.
    Magenta
snorted. “No.”
    “She’s
a scam artist,” Mel huffed.
    The
girl’s brow puckered, so did her mouth. “I tell them what they want to hear,
and yeah, I do take advantage of them. But I’m not the worst thing out there.”
    As
if that vindicated her.
    “How
do you do it?” Mel sunk in the beanbag.
    “Not
as hard as you’d think. I can get a lot from the newspaper and public records,
and I make an appointment with a client at least a week beforehand, and follow
them from a distance. They meet friends or family sooner or later. If they’re
in a public place, a restaurant or café, or maybe a park, I move in and listen.
No one’s gonna recognize me as Madam Magenta.” She crossed the room and opened
a cupboard set flush with the wall. “If I can’t get close, I use this.” She
hauled out a long range, sound amplifying listening device.
    “You
stalk your clients?”
    She
exaggerated a wince. “Stalk sounds so . . . dirty . Can we say I
investigate?”
    With
Royal’s supersensitive hearing, we didn’t need to use a device to listen in when
we were on a stakeout, but the police, FBI and other agencies did. And yeah, we
called it investigation.
    “You
and Royal follow people and pry into their lives,” Jack said sarcastically. “But
it’s not stalking when you do it.”
    Whatever
she was, she could help us. “It’s like this, Magenta. Jack—” I began.
    She
interrupted. “Maggie.”
    “Maggie.
Jack and Mel are . . . ghosts. They’re my friends, we’ve known one another a
long time. I’m not a ghost. I got separated from my body but I’m not dead.”
    “No
way.”
    “Yes, way.”
    “Where’s
your body?”
    “On
life support at Clarion General.”
    Her
jaw dropped. She snapped her mouth shut and winced as her teeth clacked. “You’re
the woman who was shot in the head, the psychic.”
    I
didn’t say I’m not a psychic, not as people understand psychics to be. “Yup,
that’s me.”
    “You
work with Royal Mortensen,” Maggie said. “He used to be a police detective and
now he’s a private eye.”
    “I
know what he did and does now,” I snapped out.
    She
flushed. “Sorry. It’s just I’ve . . . noticed him.”
    “Who
hasn’t?” Jack crooned.
    Oh
lord, not another infatuated female. “He’s the reason we
came. I’m not dead, Maggie, and I need you to tell Royal what’s happened so he
doesn’t give up on me.”
    But
a thought hit me. I imagined Maggie, a stranger with claims of psychic ability
trying to persuade Royal I gave her a message. With Royal’s cynicism for all
things paranormal, and the state he was in, it would be difficult. You’d think
a man from another dimension, with his world’s history and the mind-boggling
way so much there operated, naturally accepted anything. It doesn’t work like
that. What is outrageous and extraordinary to one culture is business as usual
to another, and vice versa. The mystical stuff I’ve come to take for granted
has never been part of his life and is hard for him to accept.
    And
if Maggie got through to him, would he believe the rest, that I existed but was
not the shade of a dead person? If he recalled what I told him about shades, he
knew they experienced strong denial when they first woke. It was a dream, a
hallucination, they were ill and their mind played tricks on them. Anything,
except they were dead. He’d think I came up with an offbeat story rather than
accept the truth.
    Perhaps
the fact alone I communicated with Maggie would, in his mind, confirm the
doctors were right, I was beyond saving.
    “No,”
I said