Chapter One

“I see two men around you,” I said as I pushed my long dark hair back over my shoulders, closed my almond shaped, sapphire  blue eyes, and inhaled deeply through my nose.  “One is a blue collar worker.  He works with chemicals.  Tar, I think. I can smell tar.  The other is white collar and works around computers in some capacity. The blue collar worker looks to be in his early thirties while the white collar worker looks closer to forty.”

The woman sitting opposite of me smiled with satisfaction and eagerly leaned forward as she said, “Yes.  That’s right!  My husband, Jim, works on a road crew. He’s thirty-three.  The man I’m seeing works in IT.  Do you know what that is?  It’s information technology.”

“I’m aware,” I informed her with a controlled, bland sounding voice.

It was rare that I turned people away once I agreed to do a psychic reading for them, but I could already tell that I was going to do exactly that with this woman and my mind was whirling as to the correct way to reject her.  She struck me as someone who didn’t read between the lines, so I’d have to be blunt and direct.

Shrugging her shoulders at my response, the woman’s eyes looked starstruck as she continued with, “He’s a bit older than me.  He’s forty-one and I’m twenty-six, but he’s so… so...”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t read for you,” I said as I slid the folded bills that the woman had presented as payment upon sitting down back across the table to her.

“Why?” she asked with dismay. “What’s wrong?”

“I had trouble in the past after reading for a woman who was having an affair with a married man,” I said with solemnity.  “The wife of the husband accused me of supporting the affair. No matter what I said to convince her otherwise, I received the bulk of the blame.  She incessantly telephoned both my home and cell phone to harass and threaten me.  At one point, she even tried to run my car off the road with her SUV. I was forced to get a restraining order against her.”  Slowly shaking my head while memories of the ordeal flitted about in my mind, I continued with, “So much negativity.  It was annoying, uncomfortable, and a little frightening.  I made a promise then and there never to go against my principles and read on situations like that again.”

“You don’t need to worry about that, George isn’t married,”  she explained with satisfaction.

I instantly knew that was not the truth.  What I wasn’t sure about was whether she’d been lied to by this man and believed him to be single. With my resolve to stay clear of this mess,  I had no intention of going deeper into the subject to find out.

“I’d rather not,” I said as I pushed the money even closer toward her.

“But I just found out that I’m pregnant and I need you to tell me who the father of my baby is,” she insisted.  “It’s my first child. I have to know if it’s my husband’s or George’s.  I have to know what to do.”

I was outraged with the situation.  Perhaps I was raised with a moral compass that was outdated, but it infuriated me to think that someone would ask me to use my gifts for something like this.  It felt low and degrading.  When I was with Rob,  he’d have insisted that I do it even if I complained that it made me feel like a circus act.  Now that he was out of the picture, I was free to decline.

“There are medical tests for such matters,” I said with veiled disgust as I pushed my chair back and stood up.

“Humph,” the indignant woman snorted as hands with red nails that looked almost claw-like grabbed her money and haphazardly shoved it into her oversized designer knockoff handbag.  Leaping out of her chair with obvious indignation, she snipped, “I’ve never heard of a psychic with morals.”

My blood boiled from the insult, but I managed to remain stoic as I walked to the door and pulled on the doorknob.  Holding the thick wooden barrier that separated us from the outside open as wide as I could, I said in a tone that said far more than my facial expression let on, “Please leave.”

We were about the same age, but that’s where the similarities ended.  Samantha Greene was a bottled bleach blonde with a height that made her stand an easy head taller than me.  Her large boned structure and appreciation of good food made her easily three times as wide as my slender, petite form, but, at that moment, it was my energy that dominated the space between us.

I pursed my lips as the frustrated woman pushed past me while muttering indignations in such a low level that I didn’t bother to try to understand them.  Her  body language and tone of voice were enough to clue me in to the meaning of the words spewing from collagen infused lips that were painted a brilliant ruby red.

Standing in the doorway, I watched as Samantha aggressively marched to a grey Volkswagen Jetta that was parked along the curb in front of my house.  The sound of the car door slamming after she slid behind the driver’s wheel was only exceeded by the screeching of tires as the vehicle raced away.

After closing the thick oak exterior door to my circa eighteen hundred home as if it weighed a ton, I leaned against it and sighed.  I’d grown weary of the life I’d foolishly created for myself in the small Pennsylvania town that was located on the edge of the Pocono Mountain region.

Having moved there three years earlier after a rough breakup with, Rob, my overbearing fiancé, I’d hoped to find peace and balance within the life of a small town.  Instead, I simply attracted more of the same. The only difference was that I was now picking and choosing who I did psychic readings for.

I’d made up my mind to completely stop doing the readings.  I’d taken up writing novels and I wanted to only focus on that, but, somehow I’d get talked into doing just one more.  It was enough to drive me mad at times.  I was furious with myself for not having the where-with-all to say no to these people.  I felt like I was trapped on a hamster wheel that wouldn’t slow down enough for me to get off.  My sanity’s saving grace was the friendship I’d developed with the town veterinarian, Kenzie McGovern.