Chapter 6
Once Eric left, Eden sat down to look up Stefan Kronos.
He had quite a reputation, and she was pretty sure that Debbie had contacted him about her parents.
Not giving herself a chance to think, Eden quickly dialed the number she found online, realizing that it was probably not even close to being valid anymore, as this was provided in a very old forum.
But then somebody answered the phone. “Hello, Eden.” She froze with a squawk, then a warm chuckle filled the air. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“What do you mean, you’ve been expecting me?” she cried out in horror.
“Easy,” he said, “it’s all right. I figured that, once you had a chance to calm down, you would call me.”
“Why would I call you?” she asked, about to hyperventilate.
He sighed. “I gather Debbie didn’t tell you very much.”
“No, she didn’t tell me anything,” she cried out. “When did you last talk with her?”
“Before she left for the weekend retreat,” he stated. “I had a message for her and tried to reach her, but she wasn’t picking up.”
“No, well, I had that experience with her too,” she muttered. “Why did you have a message for her?”
“She contacted me about her parents,” he shared comfortably. “I don’t do those kinds of calls, and I explained that to her, but then, over the weekend, I did end up speaking with her mother. I wanted to pass on the message to Debbie, but I missed her.”
Such deep regret filled his tone that Eden wanted to know what the message was, yet she was too petrified to ask.
“Yes,” Stefan continued. “It was a warning. The message would have been very helpful to her.”
“And what exactly was that message?” she asked carefully. “Because to tell me that it would have been a warning when I know she was struggling so much just makes it even harder.”
“Of course it does,” he replied, “and I’m not trying to make your life any more difficult. I have contacted the police about her as well. It was too much, too fast. I’m sorry.”
“What does that mean?”
He hesitated and then finally spoke. “I don’t think her death was natural.”
Eden closed her eyes, feeling the tears welling up. “I don’t think it was either,” she whispered, “but I can’t convince the police otherwise.”
“I spoke to Captain Louis, so that may or may not make a difference, but I hope it will.”
“Will you tell me what the message was?”
“Her mother wanted to tell Debbie that she shouldn’t trust somebody who she was about to meet. I understand Debbie went off to a weekend retreat.”
“Yes, she did. The two of us went.”
“And what happened? Would you mind telling me?”
“I’ll tell you, but it’s pretty crazy.” She snorted.
“She fell head over heels in love with the man running the meditation workshop. I told her to take things slow, and we argued. Later she told me that she was quitting her job, which she did by text. She had also terminated her lease, effective immediately. And she was planning on moving across-country to be with Richard, the love of her life. It was just bizarre. I mean, she went from being somebody I’ve known for decades to someone I didn’t recognize anymore.
She completely went off on me and became someone I didn’t recognize. ”
He sighed softly. “Sometimes we do things that affect life in a good way, and sometimes there’s just nothing I can do at all to stop people from doing things the bad way.”
“And yet, if you had gotten a hold of her, would she still be alive?”
“No, not at all. Just because I had a message for her doesn’t mean she would have changed anything. And, if you think about who she was as a person, and how she was behaving at that time, you would easily understand that too.”
Eden didn’t want to understand. She really didn’t, but he was right. “True, and, if you interrupted her at the wrong time, she would have been really angry at you for having spoiled what she considered to be something very special.”
“Exactly. However, we are left with the remnants of her life, which isn’t very much.”
She heard the concern in his tone as he spoke to her. “No, it isn’t,” Eden agreed, tearing up, “and it’s wrong. All of it is just so wrong.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Did you talk with a detective?” he asked casually.
“Yes, Detective Eric Kent,” she shared.
“Right, so that’s who I need to speak with next,” he said, a smile in his tone.
“Feel free to contact him. I don’t know that he’ll talk to you any more than he’s talked to me,” she noted, “because I’m the crazy one who thinks Debbie didn’t die from her own hand.”
“Is that what they think happened?” he asked curiously.
“That’s one of the things that they’re batting around. They are waiting for the tox screen. There was no visible sign of a struggle, no suspects who may have been seen or heard her that evening. There was nothing at all, except that her heart stopped.”
“That’s energy,” he noted thoughtfully.
“What do you mean, that’s energy?”
He explained, “Depending on a lot of issues, sometimes—when people do a lot of energy work—they can impact another person in such a way that their hearts can stop.”
She stared down at her phone, not even sure what she just heard, yet it was the only explanation she could even begin to come to terms with. Still, she didn’t even understand how that was possible.
“I know that you want some answers,” he told her, “but I’m not sure that there’ll be much in the way of answers, at least not for a little while.” A contemplative tone filled his voice.
“Look. I’m really not sure—”
“Yes, I know,” he interrupted. “You’re not sure about any of this, and of course you’re not sure about me.
I get that. I respect that.” A gentle understanding resonated from his voice.
“But what I need you to understand is that, just because we want things to happen, they don’t always, and, just because we want to understand what is going on in the world, we don’t always get that option either. ”
“You talk in riddles. Has anyone told you that before?”
“So I have been told. What exactly was your relationship with her?”
“Best friends, for more than a decade, yet we first met about twenty years ago. She had had several rough romantic relationships, and she would call me. Then I would be the one to bail her out. We had other mutual friends too. I don’t want to make it sound as if she and I were an item.
We were not. We were very close friends.
Thus, when she told me that she didn’t need me anymore and that she would be with this guy who absolutely loved her, I didn’t even know what to say. ”
She stared off into the room, without looking. She needed to vent, and she had the feeling that Stefan of all people would understand that. “It was so foreign—and yet in many ways not—because she had done this stuff before, but not as abruptly, not as cruelly, never shutting me out permanently.”
It seemed as if Stefan still waited for more of an explanation, and she tried.
She floundered through several more attempts and then just gave it up.
“I don’t even know what to say,” she declared, frustration in her tone.
“Obviously this whole thing has been extremely difficult, and I am working very hard at getting through it. Yet I’m just so, I want to say angry, and yet angry isn’t quite the correct word. ”
“No, of course not,” Stefan agreed. “You’re feeling guilty. Was this something you could have somehow stopped? Would she have listened to you? Would anything you have said made a difference?”
“You are the psychic,” she quipped, trying for a bit of humor and failing.
“And the answer is no because of free will. We’re all here, and we’re doing the best we can in the circumstances we’re faced with. Debbie definitely had …”
“She definitely had what?” Eden asked, trying to calm her racing mind. “You can’t just stop like that.”
“Energy issues. At one point in time, she was also quite sick,” he shared. “Or did you not realize that?”
“I know that she was complaining about not feeling great and wanting to go off and do stuff, but I don’t really know that she was actually sick, outside of the longstanding heart issue that she told me was a nonissue, but what do I know?
” she snapped. “It seems as if everything I thought I knew, I didn’t know at all. ”
He made a small sound she could only describe as stifled laughter. “I won’t say that either, but did she feel better when she was with you?”
“Sure.” Eden sighed. “She was often very draining for me, but that was just because … I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything. Never mind. Just forget I mentioned that.”
“It’s not that I need to forget that, but I already understand a lot of what’s going on here. More to the point, the question is this. The person she fell in love with and was completely changing her life for, did you ever meet him?”
“Not formally. Not directly. He led the retreat so, yes, I knew who he was. I’m thinking about doing the same retreat again because I need to retrace Debbie’s steps and see if any clues of foul play were there,” she noted.
“I can’t imagine that there would have been, but I also don’t know, and it’s that not knowing that’s killing me. ”
He didn’t say much more after that, and, once he rung off, Eden sat back and stared, wondering how he even knew who she was and then expected her to call him. She felt a weariness creeping in, so she phoned Eric before she crashed for the evening.
“What’s up?” he asked, his voice distracted.
“That man, the psychic—”
“Stefan?”
“Yeah. I spoke to him a little bit.”
“What did he say?”
“That he had been trying to get a hold of Debbie, and she didn’t answer, but that she had come to him a while ago, looking for a connection to her parents. I thought she had stopped doing that, but I guess she never really did.”
“So, this Stefan guy, what did he say?”
“That he doesn’t really connect to the dead these days, but then afterward Debbie’s mother managed to connect with him.
So he was trying to contact Debbie with the message that he had gotten.
It was a warning, but he didn’t get through to her.
So now I’m left wondering if Debbie could have survived, had he gotten through to her. ”
“Crap,” Eric muttered. “What was the warning?”
“That she shouldn’t trust someone she would soon meet.”
“That’s ominous.”
“Yes, thank you for that deep analysis,” she muttered, “and that’s how I feel.
Anyway, he asked if I was talking to a detective, and I gave him your name.
He’ll be calling you. It was a very strange encounter, but he seemed to know an awful lot about Debbie, and, in a way, he made me feel both better and worse. ”
“I get that. I don’t suppose you told him you’d heard from Debbie yourself.”
She stared down at her phone, a little embarrassed because she hadn’t thought to ask. “Oh my God, no, I didn’t. Should I have?” she cried out. “I mean I’ve been talking to her but it’s not like a normal question and answer conversation.”
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “You do whatever you want to do. But if he could …”
“Oh my God, oh my God,” she muttered, “how could I have been so foolish?”
“Look. I have to talk to Stefan anyway, so let me do that, and then we can talk about it afterward.”
She went to hang up but added quickly, “Get back to me soon. I’m leaving in a few minutes to go to the same retreat seminar as before.” With that, she ended the call.
She had lied. She wouldn’t leave in a few minutes. In fact, she wasn’t leaving until tomorrow, but, for whatever reason, this seemed to be urgent, and she had no freaking idea why.
Feeling more than a little foolish over all this, she waited and waited for his call but got nothing. Just her sense of urgency remained.
*
Eric had been shocked by what she just told him. Surely she didn’t mean to return to the retreat. Yet, considering how upset and distressed she was about everything, it was probably exactly what she meant. That just gave rise to more of his panic.
He had no reason to suspect that either of the two men who ran the seminar had anything to do with the death of one of the attendees of the retreat.
However, Eric had absolutely no way to rule it out either.
He made the umpteenth phone call to get through to Stefan.
When somebody finally answered this time, he didn’t even know what to say.
“Hello,” a man answered. “Ah, hello, Detective.”
Eric sighed. “How did you know it was me? Psychic much?”
“For one thing, you’ve left numerous messages,” Stefan pointed out, with a chuckle.
“That’s true. I have. I heard that you spoke to Debbie recently and that you’ve just now talked to Eden Landon.”
“I spoke with Debbie last week, and unfortunately I did not connect with her again before her death, and, yes, I have spoken to Eden today.”
“Okay. She seems quite concerned that you may have had a message for her friend that would have saved her life.”
“I don’t think it would have, given the circumstances,” he admitted, “but I can see how she might be thinking that, and, for that, I’m sorry.”
Eric added, “My captain has also spoken to me regarding the message that you appear to have.”
“Yes, and, Detective, I really don’t care if you listen to me or not. I can only tell you what the message is, and you will do what you will with it.”
“And yet you wanted to connect Debbie with other murdered women.”
“Yes, that’s the most recent message that I have received, and, no, before you bombard me with questions, psychic messages are never clear.
They’re never meant to tie up a case in a neat and tidy bow,” he explained and then chuckled, as if he had sensed Eric’s skepticism.
“I can see that, for you, this would be beyond frustrating. However, … or maybe not, Detective. I’m sorry. ”
“About what?”
“I thought you were na?ve, intolerant of the gift, but you have and utilize similar energy, don’t you?”
He stared down at the phone. “Sorry?”
Stefan laughed again. “You can hide that stuff from a lot of people, but you cannot hide it from me.”
Eric raised his eyebrows and pressed his fingers to his brows. Yet he couldn’t help but want to trust that voice, his silky tone. “That’s very disconcerting.”
“Of course it is,” Stefan stated. “You thought you were well and truly hidden, and you were, … until you spoke to me. Now we’ll have a completely different conversation, Detective.”