Free Superstition by Karen Robards Page A

eyes dared him. This, Joe decided dispassionately, was a woman on the edge. All it would take was one tiny little push to shove her over.
    And he wasn’t about to be the one doing the pushing—not without a much better reason than he’d been given so far. Not with a live TV audience getting ready to tune in at any second. No way. No how.
    She must have read the answer in his eyes. With a final warning look at him, which she then widened to include Vince and Dave, she turned on her heel and hurried toward the door.
    “You gonna let her buffalo you like that?” Vince demanded under his breath. “Quit pussyfooting around. Arrest her ass.”
    “Ten, nine, eight . . .” The countdown, in a woman’s voice, was coming from somewhere behind the cameraman.
    “Vince, we don’t want to do this. Trust me,” Joe said, grabbing Vince by the arm when the mayor, with a fulminating look that made clear his opinion of his police chief’s lack of resolve, started to go after her himself.
    “Not on live TV.”
    “. . . four, three, two, one . . .”
    Vince hesitated. “Goddamn it,” he said bitterly.
    “This is Twenty-four Hours Investigates ,” Nicky said into the camera, and Joe realized that she was on the air. Her body language had changed completely in the last few seconds; she now looked comfortable, relaxed almost, and even managed to produce a smile for the audience at home. “Thank you for joining us for this special live broadcast. I’m Nicole Sullivan . . .”

4
     
     
     
     
    “ T HERE IS NOTHING IN the hall . . . nothing in the living room . . . nothing in the dining room,” Leonora intoned.
    As Nicky had anticipated, once the camera was focused on her, Leonora had turned into the consummate professional. She was no newcomer to TV, after all, and she’d been a practicing professional psychic since the age of sixteen. Only someone as intimately acquainted with her as, say, her younger daughter, would have caught the nervous flicker in her eyes, the tension in her jaw, the jerkiness of her gestures. For whatever reason—psychic’s block or something else—Leonora was not on tonight. But she was trying, gamely walking through the house with increasingly rapid footsteps that Nicky knew signified her impatience with the lack of paranormal activity to pick up. The camera panned the magnetometer—standard ghost-hunting equipment that measured the magnetic field generally associated with the presence of spirits—that had been set up in each room: nothing. The temperature sensors likewise revealed a steady 72 degrees: no cold spots to be found. Since the house had no air-conditioning, they couldn’t even hope for a temperature drop due to a helpfully positioned vent, Nicky reflected gloomily. They were going au naturel, whether they liked it or not.
    The plan was for Leonora to walk through the house, room by room, encountering and interacting with whatever ghosts were present, while the cameras rolled. So far, the plan had yielded approximately twenty-two minutes of the opposite of must-see TV: just nothing, nothing, nothing. And more nothing.
    Call it Al Capone’s Vault Part II: the ghostless séance.
    And Nicky’s worst nightmare.
    “This is the library,” Nicky said quietly into the camera as her mother glided toward the small room next to the dining room. Despite the tall light set up in one corner specially for this broadcast, it was gloomy as all get out with its empty, dark shelving and shuttered windows. Dust lay over everything, and a cobweb adorned one corner of the coffered ceiling. Like the rest of the house, it smelled faintly musty, as if it had been shut off from light and air for a long time. If she’d been a ghost, Nicky thought, she would have wanted to hang out here.
    Like the camera, her eyes followed as Leonora moved around the room, touching the fireplace mantel, a windowsill, the paneled wall itself. Behind her, out of range of the camera, Nicky was conscious of Karen and the rest