Page 40 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

As they walked out, Henry having offered a ride, he said, “I went back to the café this morning, to see if I could get any more information.” He opened the car door for her, waiting in the drizzle for her to climb in.

“And?” she asked as he came around.

“No dice. I waited to get the son alone, but he was so jumpy about getting caught, I took pity on the guy.”

“Too bad.”

“Did the letters have anything?”

“I haven’t got them yet.”

A nod. “How’s Mariah?”

“Still hiding in her room. I think it might be time to make her get up.”

“Agreed. She’s gotta face it all, her grief and the lost dreams.”

A sympathetic arrow pierced her chest, and she pressed her hand against it. “Ow.”

“I know. But it’s time.”

“Have you ever had to make a new life?”

“Yeah,” he said, but offered no embroidery.

“Oh, come on, you can’t be all stoic and mysterious now.”

He grinned. “Is that what I am, stoic and mysterious?”

“Don’t try to get out of it.”

“It’s pretty dark.”

“And a mother murdered in a grocery store isn’t?”

“Fair.” He smoothly turned onto the street alongside the hotel. “But now isn’t the best time.”

“All right,” she said, gathering up her packages. “Thanks for cheering me up.”

“Anytime.”

Chapter Nineteen

In her bedroom, Mariah was frozen. Physically, but mostly mentally. She couldn’t seem to shake the swells of despair. She huddled under her blankets, shunning anything but tea and sandwiches. She watched Tyler Henry on her iPad and wished she could believe there might be something on the other side.

She’d found Tyler while she was still in the hospital, those first weeks when she was deeply drugged and unable to come to terms with anything that had happened, not the death of her mother or the wounds of her own body. She lay in a gray miasma of pain, day in, day out, unable to focus on anything.

One day, she discovered the streaming world of psychic mediums. So many of them! She loved the seat-belt guy, and the loud but somehow trustworthy Long Island lady, but it was Tyler Henry, a young psychic with kind eyes who helped people episode after episode, who caught her. A delicately made gay man whose mother accompanied him on many of his journeys, he had made a giant name for himself, and she loved to watch him, endlessly. She’d seen every episode a half dozen times, and sometimes liked to imagine what he would say if she could get an audience with him. “Did someone close to you die violently?” he’d ask, scribbling on the paper he always had. “Was it your mother?”

But she didn’t even know if he was doing that anymore. And he was so famous she wouldn’t be able to get anywhere close.

She’d been a little famous, too, once upon a time.

Her mother would be appalled that Mariah wanted to use a psychic to talk to her, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. It didn’t actually matter that she’d never be able to see Tyler herself. Just knowing that other people talked to the dead helped.

By the fourth day, Mariah knew she should get up, but she couldn’t seem to find the will. The encounter at the café had derailed her so badly because it made plain there were things about her mother’s life that she had never shared. And now, Mariah would never know about them, would never know why it was important. It brought home the truth that Rachel wasdead, and would stay dead no matter what quest Mariah engaged in.

Aching, she searched the internet and TikTok for more psychic readers. She could always watchMedium, based on a woman in Arizona who really had solved crimes with her abilities, but as she scrolled through the episodes, Veronica burst into the room.