Mind Tricks Read Online Free Page B

having Brutus inside only at night. But a big dog in the
house might dissuade Jake from any hasty actions if he discovered that he had
killed Ginny Lamberton.
    “Makes sense,” Jake said, but his
tone was a bit dry.
    Feeling her cheeks heat, Emma
opened the back door and gestured for Jake to precede her. Brutus tried to
charge inside at the same time, leading to a tangle of dog and legs. Not one to
miss any opportunity, Brutus shoved his muzzle into Jake’s crotch.
    “Wow, what a greeting.” Jake pushed
the dog’s head away and squeezed through into the kitchen. “The UPS men must
love delivering packages to you.”
    “I’m sure they’ll learn to stop at
the end of the driveway and honk.” Emma shut the back door behind her and waved
Jake toward the dining room. “We’ll work in there.”
    Brutus had already torn out of the
kitchen, thrilled to investigate new rooms and new smells. He’d been in the
dining room/exam room before, so he barely paused to give the table a sniff
before dashing into the hallway and up the stairs. His toenails clicked on the
hardwood floors above as he methodically made his way through each of the three
bedrooms.
    When she entered the dining room,
Jake was staring at the stainless-steel-sheathed tabletop. He turned to her.
“One: I don’t think I’m going to fit on that. Two: It looks really cold.”
    “It’s not cold.” But he was
right—he wasn’t going to fit on the table. His head or his feet—or maybe both,
she thought, sizing him up—were going to hang over the edge. Hardly a
comfortable situation, and she needed him to be physically at ease for her to
have any hope of loosening his blocked memories.
    “Maybe the couch will work,” she
said, crossing the hallway to the living room. Nope—the couch was too short, as
well.
    She took a deep breath, conscious
of Jake standing close behind her. “I have a single bed in one of the guest
rooms upstairs.”
    “Hey, this is your show. Whatever
you want to do is fine with me.”
    This
is your show. A subtle dig at her? Instead of going up the stairs, she
turned on him and braced her hands on her hips. “We have to get one thing
straight. If you go into this believing with all your might that there’s no way
I can help you, then I can’t. You have more mental power over yourself than
I’ll ever have. Hope and faith are fifty percent of healing. Pessimism prolongs
sickness.”
    “What about you?” he asked. “You
don’t seem totally confident this is going to work. That isn’t helping my
confidence levels any.”
    He had a point. “I’ve never done
energy work on a person before,” she admitted. And it had been a long time
since she’d deliberately gone into a person’s thoughts. Almost two years, ever
since she’d been run out of Maryland. She’d limited herself to pets ever since.
    Looking back, she knew she should
have limited herself to pets long ago—right after Trisha killed herself. But
she’d been young and stupid and convinced that people who did bad things shouldn’t
get away with it. All that she had to show for that attitude was a dead best
friend, a town full of people in Maryland who thought she was a witch, and a
very limited social life here in Maine, where she’d come to lick her wounds.
    She started up the stairs,
motioning for him to follow her. The sound of his footsteps on the treads
echoed in the tiny stairwell and through her body, shaking loose a realization
she wished she could stuff back into a dark corner: Jake was the only
attractive man who’d ever come up here with her.
    Scratch that: the only man,
attractive or no.
    But that wasn’t so odd, right?
She’d been busy putting together a business, putting down some roots.
    Sure. Keep on telling yourself
that, Emma.
    They reached the second floor, and
she turned down the hall, walking past the half-open door to her bedroom.
    Her plan for Jake was simple. For
safety’s sake—okay, and because she was curious—she’d look into