At 9:00 a.m. sharp a knock sounded on the motel room door, bringing Cleo back to her immediate problem-Police Chief Josephine Bennett and Cleo’s psychic commitment.

Chief Bennett pretty much fit the mental image Cleo had gotten while speaking to her over the phone. Her hair was short, gray, and tightly permed. She was large around the middle-not fat, but a shape that sometimes went with menopause. Unlike Daniel Sinclair and his civilian clothes, Josephine appeared to be regulation, from her tie to her holstered gun and her shiny black oxfords. On the pocket of her crisply pressed shirt was a silver badge that read Chief of Police.

For a moment, Cleo recalled when she and her brother, Adrian, had gotten badges like that out of a cereal box. They were shaped just like the one in front of her, and they could have been real if you didn’t look too closely.

Josephine stuck out her hand and introduced herself, insisting Cleo call her Jo. “Everybody calls me Jo.” She had one of those voices that fell somewhere between male and female. Not surprisingly, her grasp was warm and strong. “Have you eaten breakfast?” Jo asked.

Cleo nodded. She’d been able to get half the doughnut down before it began to taste like moldy grout. The last thing she wanted was for Jo to swing by some greasy spoon where they could both load up on bacon and undercooked eggs. “Stuffed,” she said, grabbing her bag and closing the door, the smell of the room following her.

“Ignore the mess,” Jo said as they got into the squad car.

That was a little hard when the floor under Cleo’s feet was littered with paper and unopened mail.

“Coke?” Jo flipped the lid on a small cooler that sat on the seat between them.

“No, thanks.” What was she doing here?

Tell her you have to leave. Tell her you got an emergency call and you have to leave, urged part of her mind. But another part of her countered, Don’t be a baby.

Cleo rolled down the window and took a deep breath. It seemed as if she couldn’t get away from the smell of the motel room. She sniffed her hair. It was in her hair. And on her hands. Even her hands smelled like some stranger’s body odor.

“So, what do you think of our little town?” Jo popped open the Coke, took a long swallow, then settled the container in the weighted cup holder on the dash. “I run on these things. If I don’t have my third Coke by nine-thirty I get a killer headache.”

“It’s nice,” Cleo said, answering Jo’s question.

“It was ranked one of the best places of its size to live and raise kids. Safest town in the country.”

Cleo wanted to believe that. But she didn’t. Small towns were never as innocuous as they appeared.

“Do you like calliope music?” Jo picked up a CD. “Come on. Be honest.”

Cleo felt too many things were being thrown at her at once. “I always thought there was something a little sinister about music that’s so perky.”

Jo let out a laugh and refrained from pushing the CD in the player.

On the way to the police station, she filled Cleo in on what she knew about the loss of the key, going into a little more depth than she had over the phone. “There’s only one master key, of course. It unlocks every public building in town-the schools, the courthouse, the police station, the fire station. The fire chief’s been after me to let him have the key. Says it’s more important for him to have it. And he has a point. But what if there’s a break-in in progress? The police department needs that master. So after two years of debating the issue, I decided to let Harvey have his way, but when I went to get the key, it wasn’t there.”

“Do you have any idea how long it’s been gone?” Cleo asked.

“Could have been weeks. Could have been months.” Jo smoothly executed a turn. “That’s the thing about a master key. It’s not something you use every day. We’ve never had a situation come up where we needed the master. But you never know. A town’s gotta have a master key.”

It had all seemed so easy in Portland. A missing key. What could be less threatening?

“I think that sneak fire chief took it and won’t admit it. He acted funny when I told him he could have it. Looked like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. ‘Don’t trouble yourself to get it now,’ he told me. And I said, ‘Better get it before I change my mind.’ And then, of course, it wasn’t even there.”

“Why wouldn’t he come forward if he had the key?” The whole thing was ridiculous. Cleo had landed herself in the middle of some petty little squabble. They needed a negotiator, not a psychic.

“Because Harvey Jamison is spineless and doesn’t want anybody to know he took it, that’s why. He’d rather the city pay a hundred thousand bucks to have all new locks put in than admit he took it in the first place. That’s the kind of person he is.”

“So you basically want me to prove that Harvey Jamison took the key?”

“That’s right. I tried myself. You know, clairvoyant stuff.” Jo waved her hand at the unseen. “But I couldn’t come up with anything. Guess I just don’t have it. I’ve been taking correspondence courses on reading runes and on telepathy. I know I can learn everything there is to learn, but if a person doesn’t have a sixth sense the way you do, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Sometimes even with it you can’t find an answer.” Cleo needed to clarify that right away. “I’m not promising you anything.”

“Oh, I know. I may not have what it takes, but all the same I just had a feeling about you after I read what you did in California.” She took a long sip of Coke then settled the can back in the holder. “When did you first realize you were able to do things most people couldn’t do?”

A simple question. A straightforward question. One Cleo should have been able to answer. Should she tell her that she’d first studied psychic phenomena because she wanted to prove to herself that she had no ability? Because if she had that kind of power, then she should have been able to save Jordan.

For a while she’d been able to convince herself that she was nothing special. During her brief stint on a psychic hotline, she’d been wrong more often than right, garnering some unsatisfied customers. I’m a fraud, she’d thought gleefully. I don’t have a shred of power. But then there had been the child in California.

A dream. A horrible dream. A vision. Of a little girl bound to an iron bed in a dark, damp basement. There had been more. A house with plywood over the windows. A huge, misshapen tree.

She’d told the police about her dream. Using her descriptions, they were able to find the house, find the child.

Cleo had begged them not to mention her involvement to anyone, but when the little girl was found in the spot Cleo had described, somehow her name was leaked to the press. The police department scrambled, trying to honor Cleo’s request for anonymity, but somehow everything got turned around and soon her integrity was being questioned-which was better than being hailed as the next Jeane Dixon. Cleo so wanted to be the fraud Daniel Sinclair accused her of being.

Chief Bennett repeated her earlier question. Cleo sidestepped it the way she always sidestepped it. “I think everybody has psychic ability. They just haven’t learned how to tap into it.”

That seemed to be the answer Jo was looking for, because she immediately switched subjects-from psychics to Daniel Sinclair.

“He was the head of a hostage negotiation unit in California,” Jo explained, as if Cleo had asked about him. For some reason-maybe it was the small-town way-Jo seemed bent on filling Cleo in on things that had nothing to do with the missing key and were really none of Cleo’s business.

“He was good at what he did. One of the best, and I’m not just saying that because his mother was my friend. Not every hostage situation can go the way we want it to.” Jo slowed for a turn, waving to a group of kids waiting to cross the street. “Danny had a high success-to-failure ratio. One of the highest in the country, I believe. But then one time-I don’t know the details-two kids and their mother got killed.”