Superstition Read Online Free PDF

her look like a teenager. Along with Mario García (hair and makeup), Karen had been sent to Twybee Cottage—all the old houses on Pawleys Island had names, and Nicky’s mother’s was called Twybee Cottage—to prep tonight’s guest star for her upcoming appearance and then accompany her to the site. “She says she’s changed her mind. She flat-out won’t go.”
    “Oh, yes, she will,” Nicky promised, sweeping past. Difficult and her mother were practically synonyms. Fortunately, over the years—her entire twenty-nine years of life, to be precise—she’d learned to cope.
    “Ni cole ! Sweetie! Oh, you look so good .” Having obviously heard her coming, a man rushed out of her mother’s bedroom, arms extended in welcome, a huge smile on his face as he blocked the hall under the pretext of greeting her. About five-ten, he was stoop-shouldered and thin except for a slight tendency toward a potbelly. Thanks to a lifetime’s worth of careful sunscreen use—a must, as he’d reminded Nicky countless times, for fair-skinned people like themselves—his face was, at fifty-seven, as pale and unwrinkled as a baby’s. He had thinning reddish hair; bright hazel eyes; an aquiline nose; big, puffy fish lips that he hated; and a soft, slightly receding jawline that he hated even more. He was meticulously dressed—for Pawley’s Island—in madras Bermudas and a grass-green polo shirt, tucked in and belted. Which told Nicky that whatever position her mother was taking now, she had, at some time in the recent past, at least planned to show up for the gig that her daughter had put her less-than-stellar career as a TV journalist on Twenty-four Hours Investigates on the line to get for her.
    “Get out of my way, Uncle Ham,” Nicky said grimly, shouldering past her mother’s brother—otherwise known as Hamilton Harrison James III—as he attempted to wrap her in a delaying bear hug. His face fell. “I know she’s in there.”
    “But Nicky, she says she can’t . . .”
    The rest of Uncle Ham’s protest was lost as Nicky reached her mother’s bedroom and threw open the door. It was a large room, done in soft, feminine turquoises and creams, with a queen-sized four-poster bed nestled against the wall to the left of the door, and a big window that looked out over the ocean at the far end—the end Nicky was looking at as she came through the door. The turquoise silk curtains were closed against the encroaching night, making a nice backdrop for her plump, flame-haired mother, who was sitting in one of the two cream velvet tub chairs in front of the window, puffing into a brown paper lunch bag that Nicky’s Uncle John—John Carter Nash, Uncle Ham’s longtime partner—was holding over her mouth and nose.
    “Mother!” Nicky glared at the pair of them. Not that Uncle John deserved the look particularly. It was obvious even without knowing any details where the problem lay.
    “Nicky!” Her mother and Uncle John gasped in almost perfect unison as they jumped, dislodging the bag, and looked at her nervously.
    “Your mother—she can’t go on. Look at her—the very thought of it is giving her so much stress, she’s hyperventilating,” Uncle John said. Except for being just about the same age, he was Uncle Ham’s polar opposite—bristly blond crew cut, deep tan complete with canyon-deep character lines, and the toned, muscular body of the fitness fanatic he was. He, too, was dressed as if he’d planned to go somewhere, in a snug black T-shirt and khaki slacks.
    “She has to go on,” Nicky said ruthlessly, pinning her mother with her eyes as she bore down on her.
    Her mother—otherwise known as Leonora James, famed psychic medium, once star of her own short-lived television show, author of countless books on communicating with the Other Side, prized consultant to police departments and private clients, recipient of dozens of fan letters a month—gave a despairing wave of her perfectly manicured hands.
    “Oh,