Psychic Dreams: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Novel (Glimmer Lake Book 3) Read online

  She’s feeling the heat. Or it might be a hot flash. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell.

  Psychic Dreams

  It’s been four years since Monica lost the love of her life to a sudden and devastating heart attack. She’s held her family together and picked herself up with the love and help of her two best friends. Now Monica has a new business, a new wardrobe, and a new vision for the future.

  As in actual psychic visions. Dreams that manifest in reality? Monica’s still not sure why or how it happened, but she’s been seeing everything from unexpected visitors to visions of fire and destruction.

  Separating premonitions from morbid imagination is proving harder than Monica expected, and no one can tell her if these new, violent visions will become a reality.

  Added to that, there’s a new fire investigator in town, and he’s more than a little suspicious about the anonymous and frighteningly accurate tips someone is calling in. Monica is feeling the heat… or is that a hot flash?

  Is their town about to feel the burn of a serial arsonist, or can Monica, Robin, and Val figure out the dangerous secret smoldering at the heart of Glimmer Lake?

  Psychic Dreams is a standalone paranormal women’s fiction novel in the Glimmer Lake series by USA Today best seller Elizabeth Hunter, author of the Elemental Mysteries and the Irin Chronicles.

  Praise for Elizabeth Hunter

  I love the realness of the characters in this series…. Troubled marriages, dead-beat dads, small town gossip, death and hormonal teenagers. You know, life. It’s not always pretty, but sometimes it’s downright beautiful.

  Mac’s Meanderings

  I loved this book! I always expect amazing stuff from Elizabeth Hunter, but this was just above my expectations.

  The Blue-Haired Reader

  Monica’s story was sweet, heartfelt, down to earth. And try as I did, I could not guess the ending. The twists and turns had me guessing all the way till the end.

  Sassafrack’s Books

  Psychic Dreams

  Glimmer Lake Book Three

  Elizabeth Hunter

  Psychic Dreams

  Copyright © 2020

  Elizabeth Hunter

  ISBN: 978-1-941674-53-6

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Cover: Damonza

  Content Editor: Amy Cissell, Cissell Ink

  Line Editor: Anne Victory

  Proofreader: Linda, Victory Editing

  If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased for your use only, please delete it and purchase your own copy from an authorized retailer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Recurve Press LLC

  PO Box 4034

  Visalia, California 93278

  USA

  This book is dedicated to the wives, husbands, and partners of our brave firefighters. Thank you for your courage, resilience, and tenacity.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  First Look: Runaway Fate

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Hunter

  Chapter 1

  Monica woke from a dream of fire and darkness. She sat up straight in bed, gasping for breath, and reached for the glass of water sitting on her bedside table. She gulped it down as sweat bloomed across her heated skin.

  Looking at the clock on her bedside table, Monica realized the vision had come to her just past midnight in the small hot hours of the Glimmer Lake summer. Some women in their late forties woke in the middle of the night sweating from a hot flash. Monica woke up sweating from the visions that had tormented her dreams since a near-death experience three years before.

  The doctors told her she’d died for a few minutes, but what did that mean? There had been no bright lights or visions of peaceful tunnels. She hadn’t seen Gilbert, her husband of twenty-five years, who had died the year before the wreck.

  Monica didn’t remember much of anything from the car accident and near drowning. What she did remember was the first time a vision had come true.

  At first it felt like déjà vu. She thought she’d imagined it. Just a little thing, a phone call that came exactly when she knew it would.

  Then another thing happened.

  And another.

  Soon visions of places she’d never seen invaded her thoughts. Violent acts and secret pain became as clear to her as a movie. Instead of having the normal worrisome dreams of a widow and mother of four, Monica was haunted by everything from premonitions of everyday mundane encounters to visions of murder, death, and destruction.

  She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up straight, holding the sweating water glass against her cheek. Drops of condensation ran down her neck, over her collarbone, and between her breasts, trailing the drops of sweat brought on by the oppressive summer heat. She reached for the journal she kept by her bed.

  Though her heart was still racing, she mentally reconstructed the dream she knew was far more than a dream. Her ceiling fan beat a steady rhythm overhead, wafting air onto the sweat-soaked sheets as she closed her eyes to examine the memory before it faded.

  Fire and destruction.

  She’d been walking down Main Street, walking past shops and storefronts she knew well, walking calmly despite the ash and sparks that rained around her. She was alone in the dream. The only sounds had been the crack of burning branches and the wind as the town of Glimmer Lake burned around her.

  Monica scribbled down everything. She’d been wearing a sundress, the same dress she’d worn the day before, a light cotton outfit that kept her cool but still professional-looking while she was working at Russell House.

  She wrote down what she’d heard—the crackle of the fire, breaking branches, the wind. She wrote down everything she had seen—which shops were burning, which cars were on the road, which cars she saw in the lots, and how far she could see in the distance before the smoke swallowed her sight.

  She knew the town of Glimmer Lake intimately. She knew who drove each car she’d seen. She knew who owned the shops she’d seen burning. She also knew which firefighters would respond to the scene, risking their lives to save the small town in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

  She knew because her late husband Gilbert Velasquez had been one of those firefighters. But though she was a widow, Monica hadn’t lost Gil to the ravages of a fire. She’d lost him to the mundane, everyday tragedy of heart disease.

  Gilbert had been gone for nearly four years, struck down by a heart condition that had crouched silently until t
he morning it took his life.

  She slept alone and she woke alone. Her four children, the children she and Gil had raised, were all out in the world, living their lives. Only Jake, her oldest, remained in Glimmer Lake, working as a handyman, boat captain, and sometime ski bum during the winter.

  Until the year before, Jake been living at home. But once he gained a measure of independence by working at Russell House—along with a much more generous salary than he’d been earning at Max’s Pontoon Rentals—he’d moved out of Monica’s house and into an apartment with a friend.

  Monica glanced at the clock again, noted the time, and realized she wouldn’t be able to return to sleep. She finished writing as many details of the vision as possible; then she put her journal down, finished the last of her water, and stood up to go to the kitchen.

  She couldn’t deny that she missed having Jake around. Sylvia, her second oldest and her only daughter, was working on her master’s degree in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her two youngest boys, Caleb and Sam, were working in their own business, a construction company they’d started just after their father passed. They were only in Bridger City, and Monica got to see them every few weeks when they came home for Sunday dinner.

  But day to day, night to night, Monica remained alone. Her two best friends both had men in their lives. Robin had repaired her relationship with her husband Mark, and Val had started a new relationship with the local sheriff, Sully.

  She wandered through the three-bedroom, two-bath house she and Gil had bought so many years before. It was a good house, the first and only one she’d owned as a married woman. She’d been a teenage bride and mother, and she and Gil hadn’t been able to afford their own house for years.

  But once Gil was hired on full time at the local fire department, they bought it and then remained there for the next twenty years. It wasn’t fancy, but it had been enough. They were happy.

  They were so happy.

  Monica walked into the kitchen and put on water for tea. She reached into the cupboard and took down a bag of chamomile along with a jar of honey.

  She’d spent years listening to friends complain about inattentive husbands or neglectful boyfriends. But though she and Gilbert had hardly been more than children when they married, she couldn’t have asked for a better man. He was funny and romantic. He put her needs above everyone else, even above his own family. They’d had rough times, but those rough times had never even come close to a fraction of the good.

  They had struggled, but just when life seemed to be smoothing out—when they’d raised their kids and sent them out into the world as successful adults—the rug hadn’t just been pulled out from under Monica…

  The rug up and disappeared.

  Gil died, and Monica had been left alone. All the dreams of a joyful retirement—of the adventures they’d been waiting to take together—were gone.

  Poof.

  It was as if Life had said to her: “Oh, did you think you had a plan? How cute. That’s gone now. Figure it out.”

  As the water came to a boil, she measured out the tea and her mind returned to the vision of fire and destruction from which she’d woken.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed of fire. Monica didn’t know a firefighter’s partner who didn’t have nightmares about what their loved one might walk into.

  But there were nightmares, and then there was this.

  She poured hot water over the chamomile leaves, stirred in a bit of honey, and took her tea to the living room. She sat in Gil’s big old recliner that she’d hated from the moment he bought it. She hated the fake leather upholstery and the massive size. It took up too much space, she’d said, and it didn’t match anything else in the room.

  Nevertheless, Gilbert had loved that chair, and now that he was gone, Monica couldn’t bear to part with it. She sat in it and looked over the wooded yard. Monica knew that she didn’t need a big house anymore, but parting with it felt like losing another part of Gilbert, and she wasn’t ready for that.

  But as she looked into the dark, shadowed forest, she felt a sense of foreboding like she hadn’t felt in years.

  Maybe she’d never felt darkness like this.

  Monica had seen ghosts and helped capture murderers, but she’d never experienced a feeling of dread like she felt after waking up from that dream.

  A violent and destructive force was coming to Glimmer Lake. She didn’t know when, she didn’t know why, but she knew in her gut it was coming.

  Chapter 2

  Monica pulled into Russell House a little after eight a.m. She had just under three hours to meet with Jake and Kara about the week, have a financial meeting with Grace and Philip, then oversee checkout and turnover before their largest party of the summer came in. It was an end-of-summer bachelor party with some very wealthy businessmen from the Bay Area, and they had a schedule of activities that would keep the guests very busy.

  She parked her creaking minivan in front of the kitchen, next to a shiny new luxury minivan that served as the shuttle for the hotel. Then she jumped out of the car and hustled into the grand old house.

  “I’m here! Sorry I’m late.”

  Russell House had been the familial home of Monica’s best friend, Robin Brannon. She hadn’t been raised in Russell House, but her mother had. In fact, just after the car accident, Russell House had been the site of their very first adventure banishing a ghost.

  It had been Robin’s grandfather, and it hadn’t been fun.

  But that was over, and since Grandma Helen had passed, Russell House had undergone a massive transformation into a boutique hotel. The family bedrooms had been converted into ten luxury rooms and suites. They hosted conferences, parties and fancy dinners, and weddings on the massive front lawn. Since Russell House sat directly on the edge of Glimmer Lake, the views couldn’t be beat, and they had perfect waterfront access.

  Their first season had been a test run, but this season they’d gone all in, and Monica had been thrilled with the results.

  “Jake?” She set down her purse. “Kara?”

  “Coming!”

  She heard Kara approaching from the dining room, which had been converted into a small café where a branch of her friend Val’s Misfit Mountain Coffee had taken residence.

  Monica heard Val’s manager Eve and Kara exchanging a few quiet words before the swinging door pushed into the kitchen and Kara came through.

  She was a tiny young woman with a giant smile; Monica had hired her last winter when she realized she needed someone with more hotel experience than she had. She knew how to run a busy household and a business, but the high-end hospitality aspect was still new.

  “Good morning!” Kara’s dazzling smile spread across her pale, heart-shaped face. She had dark brown hair clipped into a pixie cut and beautiful green eyes.

  Monica sometimes got the urge to pinch Kara’s cheek, but she resisted. The girl—the young lady—was a year older than her daughter Sylvia, and she bubbled. She had impressed Monica with her energy, organization, and references. Kara loved hospitality and she loved the outdoors. It was the perfect combination.

  “How are you this morning, Mrs. Velasquez?”

  “Please.” Monica squeezed Kara’s shoulder. “How many times have I asked you to call me Monica? You make me feel old.”

  “Sorry.” Kara’s cheeks went a little pink. “I was just speaking with a guest who was asking for your card, so I was calling you Mrs. Velasquez to her.”

  “Event interest?”

  Kara smiled. “Her daughter just got engaged.”

  “Nice!” Monica did a little fist pump. “Gimme that sweet, sweet special-event cash.”

  Kara laughed. “It’s not until next summer, but I told her we were already filling up, so don’t wait too long to call.”

  Monica mentally paged through her calendar. “June is filling up. July is still good. May’s got space too.” Spring could come late in the mountains, so a May wedding would be be
autiful. The dogwood trees that surrounded Russell House would be in bloom, along with all the tulips and daffodils that Helen had planted.

  Thinking about weddings still made Monica think of Gilbert and their rushed wedding at the county courthouse. She’d been embarrassed then—eighteen and pregnant—but she could smile about it now. She and Gil had gone all out for their twentieth wedding anniversary, but Monica still had the cream-colored dress with puffy lace sleeves she’d gotten from the prom sale rack at Macy’s department store in Fresno.

  Her baby was twenty-nine now, and as he walked through the door from the garden, her breath caught just for a second.

  Jake was the picture of Gilbert at that age. A little taller, but with the same barrel chest and thick dark hair. He’d start growing his fall beard soon; he liked having a beard during ski season.

  “Hey, Mom!” The broad smile was Gil’s too. Dimples were the only thing Jake had inherited from his mother. “You need a new car.”

  “I like my car—stop trying to get me trade it in.”

  “Trade it in?” Jake glanced out the window. “I’m not sure anyone would take the old van at this point.”

  “It’s not that old.” Monica looked at her old minivan. “It still runs great.”

  “Tell me that this winter when the heater is giving you problems again.” Jake poured himself a cup of coffee. “Kara, you want one?”