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By Root 663 0

he’d videotaped her sleeping. She went to the desktop computer in the den and pulled up his videos. They were numbered, but not otherwise labeled. She knew there was one of her sleeping, and then the very strange one of the girl that was probably from his school. It had been in the back of her mind to ask him about them, but she hated to push him on anything after what he’d gone through. Eleanor had told her to expect that he’d be like stone about his mother’s death for at least a few months until he got through a protective layer inside him. “And then expect Niagara Falls and some yelling and maybe some well-placed anger,” Eleanor had said, suggesting several therapists he could see if he still didn’t want to talk to her again.

Julie tried to open some of the videos, but none of them would open, and she wasn’t technologically advanced enough to figure it out.

Then she made a call to Michael Diamond’s office. They gave her the runaround and put her on hold (twice). She made sure all the doors were locked, windows closed and locked, checked the burglar alarm and got in the Camry and drove to the city.

In the backseat of the car, she’d tossed copies of The Mind’s Journey and The Life Beyond.

Chapter Nineteen

1

“I’m sorry,” the woman at the front guard desk said, looking at her with what Julie assumed was the kind of sizing up a security guard needed to do if they smelled a stalker. “His show tapes Mondays and Tuesdays. If you’d like to get tickets, the ticket window is—”

“I’m not here to get tickets,” she said, and then left abruptly. She got a bagel and bad coffee from a street vendor, and stood on the corner of 53rd and Sixth Avenue, wondering when she had transitioned from a widow to a stalker.

On her cell phone, she dialed the studio, got a recording, and on the recording was an eight-hundred number for buying Michael Diamond’s books and tapes. She called it, and got an operator.

“I need to reach him,” she said.

“I’m sorry. We’re a warehouse fulfillment service,” the man said on the phone.

She hung up.

Then she opened the book, and looked at the last few pages. Diamond was shilling his tapes and books and seminars and…consultations.

She called the number listed for the consultations. “I’d like a consultation. But I want it immediately.”

“I’m sorry,” the young woman said, her voice practically a chirp. “Mr. Diamond has a waiting list. The consultation price is $2,000 for one hour, and I can put you down for…how’s October 12th?”

“Listen. I don’t care about his schedule. You tell him—or his handlers—that this is Julie Hutchinson. The woman he had on the show recently. The one who he told that someone would die. That person died. You tell him that if I don’t see him, and fast, I’m bringing a lawsuit down on his head that will ruin him forever.”

2

He agreed to meet her at a restaurant called Pastis that was just outside the Village, toward Chelsea, in the meat-packing district. They sat outside, the restaurant’s awning shielding them from the sun. She ordered steak frites, and he ordered beans on toast and a glass of white wine.

“So, you’re threatening me,” he said.

“I had to see you.”

“I know.”

“What…what was that all about?”

“In the studio? It’s what I do. I viewed you.”

“Viewed?”

“I go inside people, sometimes. It’s like possession, I guess, only I’m not a ghost. It’s my mind—it’s not magic. It’s a genetic mutation, I think. My grandmother had this, too. One percent of the population has it. You know, I thought you hated my guts after our session.”

“I did. But…you said things that…well, they were accurate. I had buried them, but they were true. I’ve never admitted them to anyone. Not my mother, my sister, not my kids.”

“I know.”

“You know all?”

“No, I don’t. I know very little, in fact. What you consider normal intuition—I’ve got zero. Truthfully, if I didn’t have this ability—we call it Ability X—I’d be a bum in the street. In fact, I was, for several years. It goes in and out, depending on a host of factors. But it’s come on strong in the past six years, so…well, I’ve had to make hay while