Read Online VEILED MIRROR by Frankie Robertson - Free Book Online

in front of her chair with a contented sigh.
    “That never did latch right.” Jason looked at the door that was now ajar and thought about closing it again for privacy, but what good would that do with Beth curled up in the chair? A blare of music changed his mind and he got up to shut the door. “What about you?” He asked as he sat back down. “I’ll bet you loved school.”
    “Not really. We moved too much. We went to twelve different schools in six years.”
    “After your mom died.”
    Beth cast him a surprised glance.
    “Chris told me a little. He said your dad never got over it.”
    “That’s one way of putting it.” Then her expression softened. “Dad did the best he could, but he pretty much left me and Ell to ourselves. You probably know all about that.”
    “No. Chris didn’t go into detail.”
    Beth hesitated, clearly deciding how much to tell him. He held his breath. It came to him suddenly that he really wanted her to trust him with her story. He wanted to know who she was, and why.
    “Mom died in a car wreck when we were eleven. Ell and I were at school. When they called me to the principal’s office and I saw Dad standing there with his face all stiff, I knew something horrible had happened. All the clichés are true. The bottom dropped out, the world stopped turning, I knew my life was never going to be the same.”
    “I’m sorry.” It was fifteen years too late, but it was all he could of think to say.
    “It was so sudden.” She grimaced and glanced at him. “As car accidents usually are.” Her gaze slid back to the fire. “None of us knew what hit us. I couldn’t remember if I’d kissed her goodbye that morning. Ell was upset because she’d been complaining that Mom hadn’t washed her lucky shirt, and Dad …” She paused as if she didn’t often talk about this, took a swallow of beer, then went on. “Dad didn’t handle it well. He refused to have a service for her. Two weeks after she died, he went to a psychic. He wanted to say goodbye. As you might suspect, he was disappointed.”
    Jason nodded but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to stop the flow of words.
    “He kept finding mediums that promised him what he wanted. At first we went with him, but after a while Ell and I couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes they’d say something that sounded like it could have come from Mom, and for a moment we’d feel a little like we had her back with us, but then they’d always screw it up, and we’d feel the loss all over again: Mom was gone. It was like ripping a scab off over and over again. But Dad kept on hoping. He must have gone to every psychic in Colorado, Nevada, and California. We lived like gypsies and every spare dime went to pay those people. Some of them were better than others, but they were all fakes.”
    A long buried anger flared and Jason gripped his bottle so tight his knuckles turned white. “There’s no shortage of those bastards, is there?”
    Beth looked at him, startled.
    “My mom got taken too. Not by psychics, but they were the same kind of scumbags. They played on her dreams too.”
    “What happened?”
    He hadn’t meant to reveal so much. It wasn’t something he usually discussed. He didn’t like to think too much about the mistake his mom had made, but what had happened to his mother had happened to him as well. And Beth’s story had rekindled that old impotent fury. He had a feeling Beth would understand.
    “She wanted us to have a place of our own. It wasn’t enough for us to live in an apartment. ‘We’ll never get ahead paying rent,’ she’d say. She worked her ass off, saving a down payment. Then one day she saw an ad for a new condo that was going to be built in a great part of town. The people who qualified and put down a deposit before they broke ground would get a special low price, and they’d be eligible for a prorated portion of the income from the units put aside for rent.
    “It was perfect. A place of our own at a