In Too Deep

1

This is the perfect case for me to cut my teeth on here at Jones & Jones," Isabella said. "You know that as well as I do. You're just being difficult, Mr. Jones."

"I'm told that's a good working description of what I do," Fallon said. "Evidently I have some expertise in being difficult. And stop calling me Mr. Jones. The name is Fallon, damn it. You didn't start with the Mr. Jones thing until you went to work here. When you were pouring coffee for me at the Sunshine, it was Fallon."

"All right." Isabella paused a beat and then she smiled. "Fallon. Now, about my new case."

As always her smile and her energy seemed to light up the whole office. He had been struggling to comprehend the para-physics involved, but thus far he'd gotten nowhere. In theory, a smile was merely a facial expression, the result of small changes in the position of tiny little muscles and nerves. It should not have the kind of power that Isabella wielded with her smile.

There was no scientific way to explain how her personal aura could create a sense of well-being for others in her vicinity, either; no logical reason why her force field helped him clarify and organize his thoughts.

"Your so-called case," he said deliberately, "falls into the category of Lost Dogs and Haunted Houses. We try not to encourage that sort of business here at Jones & Jones. This happens to be a real investigation agency."

"Norma Spaulding just wants us to check out that old house she's trying to sell and declare it ghost-free."

"There are no such things as ghosts."

"I know that, you know that and so does Norma," Isabella said patiently. "She doesn't actually believe the place is haunted. She just wants to put the rumors to rest. She says the gossip about weird stuff going on at the house is killing sales. She thinks that getting a clean bill of health from a genuine psychic detective agency will take care of the problem."

He lounged back in his chair and stacked his booted feet on the corner of his desk. The desk, like the glass-fronted bookcases and the Egyptian-motif wall sconces, had been among the furnishings of the Los Angeles office of Jones & Jones when it opened for business back in the 1920s. Before that the West Coast office of J&J had been located in San Francisco. Unlike the London office, the West Coast office had been moved a number of times since it was established in the late 1800s. The directors tended to be a restless lot.

In the 1960s Cedric Jones, one in a long line of Joneses to inherit the business, had moved the headquarters to Scargill Cove for a time. The office had been moved yet again twenty-five years ago when Gresham Jones had taken charge. Gresham's wife, Alice, had flatly refused to live in the remote little village on the Northern California coast. At that point, J&J had returned to Los Angeles, where it operated out of Arcane Society headquarters.

But when Fallon had inherited the business, he had found Cedric's notes about the Cove and the unique energy in the area. Intrigued, he had come to the little community to check out the location and discovered that Cedric was right. Something about the energy of the Cove suited the business. It also suited him, Fallon thought.

He had unlocked the door of J&J and walked into a room that had been trapped in a time warp. Beneath three decades of dust, everything, right down to the desk and the wall sconces, was just as Gresham had left it when he had closed the office to move back to L.A.

In addition to the art deco furnishings, there was a scattering of other antiques reflecting the history of J&J. They included the Victorian-era clock on the desk, an old umbrella stand and a wrought iron coatrack. The only things Fallon had added were the computer and a new, industrial-sized coffee machine.

He contemplated his new assistant, trying for what had to be the millionth time to get a fix on the mystery that was Isabella Valdez.

Outside rain fell steadily. The Pacific Ocean was the color of tempered steel and the waves churned down in the Cove. But here in his small, second-floor office all was bright and relentlessly positive. Under other circumstances he would have found all the warm, cheerful energy irritating in the extreme, but for some reason things were different with Isabella.

She was sitting at the other desk, the new one that she had ordered from an online antiques reproduction store her first day on the job at J&J. It had taken two people—that would be the delivery guy and himself, he reflected—to muscle the heavy wooden Victorian-style desk and the chair that went with it up the narrow stairs to the second floor of the building. Isabella had supervised. He had to concede that she had a flair for organization.

But it wasn't her office management skills that disturbed and intrigued him. It was the fact that she had no problems with his talent. She acted as if there were nothing unusual about his psychic nature. That made her unique in his considerable experience. The core of his talent involved an intuitive grasp of patterns within chaos. It was a messy, complicated ability that he himself did not understand. Others often found his ability unnerving.

Within the Arcane Society there had always been rumors about powerful chaos theory-talents, especially those that popped up now and again in the Jones line. He was well aware that there were those who whispered that he was doomed to fall deeper and deeper into a web of dark conspiracy constructs of his own making. Some speculated that there would come a time when he would no longer be able to distinguish the boundary between fantasy and reality: the classic definition of madness.

If they knew the full extent of what he could do with his talent, the whisperers would be appalled, he thought. But he was a Jones. He knew how to keep secrets. He was pretty sure Isabella Valdez knew how to keep them, too. Always nice to have something in common with a woman who aroused all the basic instincts in a man. That, of course, was one of the big complications in his life these days. He had been fascinated with Isabella from the moment he had met her.

The other baffling aspect of Isabella's personality was that she did not have a problem with his moods or a temperament that required a lot of time spent walking alone on the beach down in the Cove. She simply accepted him as he was.

He understood the physical attraction. Isabella lacked the generic perfection that made so many female movie stars and fashion models look as if they had popped out of the same mold. But her strong, striking features and mysterious golden brown eyes had riveted him from the start.

She wore her shoulder-length dark hair in a severe, no-nonsense twist that highlighted the sharply sculpted angles of her chin, nose and cheekbones. She was curvy in all the right places but he had yet to see her in a skirt or dress. Her daily uniform invariably consisted of jeans or dark trousers, a long-sleeved shirt that she wore with the sleeves rolled up, and low boots or flats. She carried a backpack instead of a purse. The backpack was not a fashion statement. It was sturdy and functional, and it was filled with stuff.

It was as if Isabella was always dressed to go for a hike. Or maybe dressed to run? The thought had floated through his head on more than one occasion during the past month.

He was quite certain that she was a strong intuitive talent of some kind, although she seemed reluctant to discuss the exact nature of her ability. Fair enough. She did not press him about his talent, either. In addition, she had no problem with the concept of working for an investigation agency that specialized in the paranormal. In fact, she acted as if she'd had some experience in that line. That was not a huge surprise. A lot of powerful intuitives found themselves in the investigation or security business. If they didn't follow that career path, they sometimes wound up as shrinks or storefront psychics.

When he had pointed out that Jones & Jones was closely affiliated with an organization devoted to research into the paranormal, she had simply shrugged. She had then proceeded to inform him that every office, even one run by a psychic detective, required sound, efficient management.

"I realize that you are a bit obsessed with control," she said. "But I believe we have established that the time has come for you to learn to prioritize and delegate. You should be devoting your talents to investigation, not to keeping your office organized."

He had no clear recollection of having actually hired her. True, he had been toying with the notion of employing someone to help him get a handle on the heaps of papers, books and computer printouts that littered the small office. Even the thought of having someone around to make sure he did not run out of coffee had become an increasingly attractive notion. But he had not gotten to the point of advertising the position. For one thing, he had no idea how or where to go about the business of finding the kind of office assistant he needed.

But Isabella had taken the matter out of his hands. She had quit her job as a waitress at the Sunshine Cafe across the street, walked into J&J and announced that she was his new assistant.

The transformation of the headquarters of the West Coast office of Jones & Jones had happened within a matter of days. Where once controlled chaos had reigned, there was now efficiency and order. Isabella had even managed to unearth the small kitchen off the main room of the office.

The only problem in the arrangement as far as he could see was that, having accomplished her initial objectives, Isabella now wanted to do some real investigation work.

"Norma is willing to pay us for our time," Isabella said. "The house is only a few miles from here. Why not let me check it out?"

"There's nothing to check out," Fallon said. "Norma is new to the local real estate scene. She'll soon figure out that the reason she can't sell the old Zander mansion isn't because of the rumors. It's because the place is more than a hundred years old. Every potential buyer who walks through the front door realizes immediately that it would be a nightmare to remodel the house and bring it up to code."

"Norma thinks it's the mansion's reputation that is killing the deals. She's convinced that if she can advertise that she had the place certified as ghost-free by a real psychic investigation agency she could sell it."

"This is a joke, not a legitimate case. It's bad for the image of J&J."

"J&J is so low profile it doesn't have an image," Isabella said in a tone of sweet reason. "Why not take the easy money? I'll spend an afternoon at the house and report to Norma that all the ghosts have been dispatched. She'll write a check that will go straight to our bottom line."

"Arcane keeps J&J on retainer," Fallon pointed out. "We get plenty of other business from members of the Society. We don't have to go after the Lost Dogs and Haunted Houses trade. And on the rare occasion when we do take on that kind of job, we hand it off to one of our contract agents who doesn't mind the work."

"Norma's office is over in Willow Creek. She says the Zander house is about three miles from there somewhere out on the bluffs. There are no other J&J agents available for a radius of nearly a hundred miles. We're all she's got."

"Forget it," Fallon said. "I need you here."

"This will only take an afternoon. I think we should develop new revenue streams."

He wasn't into the zone. Nevertheless, his intuition went ping, sounding a lot like his computer when a new bit of data arrived.

"You were a waitress before you took this job," he said thoughtfully. "Don't tell me you picked up the term revenue stream in the food-and-beverage business?"

She ignored that. "You said yourself that the Governing Council or whatever it is that runs the Arcane Society is starting to whine about the costs of the recent operations against that Nightshade conspiracy you're chasing. It would be sound policy for J&J to find other sources of income in case our budget gets cut by the Council."

"The Council can grumble all it wants. Zack is the Master of the Society and he understands what's at stake. He'll see to it that I get the funding I need."

"Fine." Isabella gave him another radiant smile. "Then I'll take Norma Spaulding's payment as a commission for my work. I could use the money, given the lousy salary you're paying me."

He felt like a deer in the headlights when she used that smile on him. It was more dangerous than the crystal gun that had turned up in the Hawaii case. His finely tuned brain seemed to short-circuit when she glowed the way she was glowing now.

"You're the one who told me how much to pay you," he said, grasping at straws. "If you wanted more money, why didn't you ask for it?"

"Because I needed the job," she said smoothly. "I didn't want to scare you by asking for what I'm really worth."

"I don't scare that easily."

"Are you kidding?" She chuckled. "You should have seen the look on your face when the new desk and chair arrived."

"If I flinched, it wasn't because of the price of the damn furniture," he said.

"I know." Her tone gentled. "It was the shock of realizing that you were going to be sharing your working space with me. I understand."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You're accustomed to being alone," she said. "By now you've probably convinced yourself that you need solitude in order to do your work. And it's true, up to a point. But you don't require as much of it as you think you do. You've built a fortress around yourself. That's not good."

"Now you're analyzing me? I sure as hell didn't hire you to do that."

"You're right. You don't pay me nearly enough for that kind of work. Do you have any idea how much a psychologist charges per hour these days? And good luck even finding one who understands those of us who are psychic. Most respectable shrinks would take one look at you and conclude that you're crazy."

He went cold and still.

"Oh, for pity's sake," Isabella said. She made a face. "Don't look at me like that. You're not crazy. Not even close. I wouldn't work for you if I thought you were. Now let's get back to the Zander house case."

He exhaled slowly. "Fine. Your case, your commission. But don't spend too much time on it. Like I said, I'm not paying you to chase ghosts."

"Right." She got to her feet and plucked her yellow raincoat off the Victorian wrought iron coatrack. "Norma told me that there is a key box on the Zander house. She gave me the code to open it. I'll drive out to the mansion now, check it out and pronounce it a ghost-free zone."

"Have fun."

Isabella flew out the door, taking all the light and energy that had illuminated the office with her.

He contemplated the closed door for a long time.

I need you here at the office. I need you.

He listened to her light footsteps on the stairs. After a moment he got up and went to the window. Isabella appeared on the street. She paused long enough to hoist her umbrella against the rain and then hurried along Scargill Cove's twisted little main street to Toomey's Treasures. Toomey's window was filled with a lot of New Agey, so-called metaphysical tools, chimes, tarot cards, crystals and exotic oils.

Instead of going up the outside stairs to the rooms she had rented above the shop, Isabella disappeared around back. A short time later she emerged behind the wheel of a little yellow and white Mini Cooper. She had bought the car from Bud Yeager, who operated the Cove's sole gas station and garage. No one knew where Yeager had obtained the vehicle. In the Cove you did not ask those kinds of questions. Fallon braced one hand against the windowsill and watched Isabella drive out of town toward the road that would take her to the old highway.

She had not arrived in Scargill Cove in a car. She had appeared, as if by magic, late one night, carrying only the backpack. That was not so unusual in the Cove. The tiny community had always been a magnet for misfits, drifters and others who did not fit in with mainstream society. But most people moved on. The Cove was not for everyone. Something about the energy of the place, Fallon thought.

The aura of power that shimmered around Isabella Valdez had sent up a lot of red flags. He did not like coincidences. Having another strong talent move into town and take a job at the cafe directly across the street from J&J had struck him as highly suspicious. The fact that he had been blindsided by the sudden and acute physical attraction he had experienced had been even more disturbing. He had not been able to explain away the sensation by reminding himself that he had been living a celibate life far too long.

His first thought was that Isabella was a Nightshade spy. When he researched her online, he found a very neat, very tidy bio that, as far as he was concerned, only added to the mystery. Nobody had such a pristine personal history. According to what few records existed, she had been raised outside the Arcane community by a single mother who had died when Isabella was in her sophomore year in college. Her father had been killed in a traffic accident shortly before she was born. She had no siblings or close relatives. Until her arrival in the Cove, she had made her living in a series of low-level jobs, the kind that did not leave a lot of footprints in government databases or corporate personnel files.

Hungry for answers and the need to make certain that Isabella was not a Nightshade operative, he had brought Grace and Luther, his best aura-talent agents, all the way from Hawaii, just to take a look. They had detected no signs of the formula in Isabella's energy field. Grace's verdict was that the town's newest resident was just one more lost soul who had found her way to a community that specialized in lost souls.

But Fallon knew that there was more to Isabella's story. Sooner or later he would get the answers. For now he was left with his questions.

And an inexplicable need to keep Isabella close and safe.