“Really? She does?” I asked, lifting my gaze.
“Yeah. Anyway, her favorite psychic is this guy she met about two years ago named Kyle. He’s supposedly been really accurate with all his readings for her. Like, he told her she was getting a raise when the clinic where she works froze all salaries due to budget cuts, but three days after she sat down with Kyle, Mom’s boss called her into his office and gave her a raise because he said she was his most valuable nurse and he didn’t want to lose her.
“And Kyle also told Mom that my dad was getting divorced again, when we thought his marriage to his second wife was solid. He got divorced last May.”
“Wow,” I said. “He’s that specific?”
“He is,” Cole said. “But that’s not the freakiest part. The freakiest part is that the first time Kyle read for my mom, about two years ago, she had him over for a little psychic party she threw for a few of her friends. Kyle read for everybody at the party, and I tried to stay out of it, you know. It’s not my thing.”
“Sure,” I said, careful to suppress a grin, because clearly, Cole was a bit intrigued by this man Kyle.
“Anyway, at the end of the night I was sitting right here, eating some leftover pizza from the party, when Kyle came out of the back room where he’d been doing the readings and he just, like, started looking at me all weird. My mom was here, too, and she asked him what was up, and Kyle pointed to me and said that I was the reincarnation of a guy who’d been murdered who had a connection to our family. He said it was why I had a future in law enforcement. In a past life, I’d died unjustly, and my reincarnated soul had to work through that karma by getting a badge.”
“Whoa,” I said in a breathy whisper.
“Yep,” Cole agreed. “Anyway, the really weird part is that he said all that before I’d even told my mom that I wanted to join the FBI. And then, Kyle pointed to this”—Cole paused to reach up and touch the bead at his neck—“and said it was my lucky charm. He said it had a connection to the past and that it was an important totem. I’d made this that morning, Lily, and it wasn’t until Kyle mentioned it that I even connected that the bead I’d used was made of amber.”
I put a hand to my mouth, stunned. “He really said all that?”
Cole nodded. “Mom swears that she never told Kyle anything about my uncle. She never mentioned Ben in her session with him, and she said that I only came up when she asked him how I’d do in school.”
“He could’ve looked you guys up on the Internet,” I said, thinking that that’s how I’d learned that Cole and Ben Spencer had been related. But then I remembered that the article I’d read was less than a year old. Kyle had said all these things to Cole two years ago.
“Lily, I did a search on us and my uncle the second Kyle left,” he said. “There wasn’t anything online about Ben’s murder. He was killed before the Internet was a big thing, and no one has written or talked publicly about it in thirty years. There was nothing out there to connect us to Ben or Amber’s murder, not even our last names.”
“Is that why you got the file?” I asked.
Cole smoothed his palm over the folder. “Maybe,” he said. “It was like, once Kyle put the idea into my head, I couldn’t get it out, you know? I started asking Mom about Ben’s murder, but she was only eleven when it happened, and she doesn’t remember much. My grandma won’t talk about Ben at all. You mention his name and she changes the subject, starts talking about the weather. In her house, his bedroom is a shrine. She hasn’t changed a single thing in thirty years. Nobody’s allowed in. She keeps the door locked at all times, but I remember, when I was little, being at her house and she’d leave the room. I’d go looking for her and I’d find her in there, sitting on the bed, holding the pillow and just staring out into space and crying quietly.
“Mom says that Gram never got over losing Ben. She told me that he was her favorite, and the day he died something in her died, too.”
“That’s heartbreaking,” I said.
“It is,” he agreed. “More than anything I think I want to know who really murdered Uncle Ben for Gram. I mean, I know the police told her Amber did it, but I just don’t buy it. Mom doesn’t, either, and I don’t think Gram thinks she did, either. All these years, that’s gotta eat away at you, and I want to give her some peace about it.”
We fell silent for a moment and my thoughts tumbled over one another. “So what did you think about the part where Kyle told you that you were reincarnated?” I asked. It’d never occurred to me that Cole and I would share so many weird coincidences.
He shook his head. “It was the one thing I really wanted to shrug off, you know? Like, how crazy does that sound?”