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quite pin down, but there’s almost a violence to them. It’s frightening me.”
    Jennifer sat quiet for a moment, took another sip of coffee. She didn’t know about the color of auras or what they meant. She was a psychometrist, a “feeler,” sensing impressions and emotions through things people touched. Past impressions, past emotions, never the future. As long as she could remember, she’d had this gift. When she was just seven years old, Jennifer found her friend Emily’s necklace lying on the ground near the girl’s house a couple of doors away. Emily had been missing for a week. As soon as Jennifer picked up the tiny heart chain, images invaded her mind—Mr. Jakins, his eyes strange, unfocused, his head sweaty; Emily frightened, crying and bleeding. She’d told her mother that Mr. Jakins had hurt Emily, but her mother scolded her for making up lies about their neighbor. No one ever found Emily. When Mr. Jakins finally moved away a year later, Jennifer had been relieved. She was never comfortable around him after the necklace, never comfortable with the way he looked at her and the other children, even though a lot of the kids liked him because he let them use his backyard pool.
    Growing up, Jennifer realized that many of the smiling neighbors waving to her hid a lot of sordid sins behind those smiles. By the time Jennifer became a teenager, she knew whom to avoid, whom never to be alone with.
    She never told anyone about her gift, not even her parents. But the kids at school must have sensed something about her because they taunted her with “witch bitch” and other cruel names. Jennifer suffered in silence until the day she met Mrs. Carvelli. An old friend of her mother’s, Mrs. Carvelli visited their home one day when Jennifer was just fifteen. And that day changed everything. Jennifer said hello to the woman and hadn’t said much else. She hadn’t needed to. Mrs. Carvelli looked at the young girl and recognized something in her. Jennifer never knew how. Maybe the woman had read her aura that day. Or maybe she saw something from Jennifer’s future. Whatever it was, Mrs. Carvelli had taken the teenage girl aside and told her they had to talk.
    That was nearly fifteen years ago. Mrs. Carvelli had kept in touch with the young psychic. But this was the first time the woman ever asked for help. Although she had never met David, Jennifer was glad to help because Mrs. Carvelli had done an extraordinary thing for a young girl not sure of herself or her gift. She had made her feel OK about herself.
    “I don’t pick up auras,” Jennifer said, “but I felt something when I touched the tie clip you gave me. It was strange.”
    “What?” Mrs. Carvelli leaned forward, a mother’s worry and a psychic’s curiosity playing on her face. She hadn’t asked before, maybe not ready to know then. Now she was.
    Jennifer stared into her cup, not wanting to meet the fervor in those brown eyes. The coffee was black the way she liked. Dark enough to reflect her face up at her. The reflection looked fifteen all over again, but she hadn’t been that age for a long time.
    “Jen, stop stalling. Tell me.” Jennifer was used to the commands. Mrs. Carvelli—Jen could never seem to call the woman by her given name, Carmen—didn’t like people who dawdled.
    The young woman looked up. “I see your son, but it’s not his face I’m envisioning. Not like he looks in the picture in the living room. Or rather, when I look at the picture, it’s another face superimposed over his. Yet it’s him. I’m sure of it.”
    Mrs. Carvelli leaned back, her expression unreadable, and Jennifer wondered if she had said too much.
    “I know that sounds strange…” she started.
    The older woman quickly shook her head, her eyes fixed in concentration as though trying to catch something fleeting through her mind. She got up from the chair, scraping it along the linoleum, opened a drawer at the counter and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.