Semi-Psychic Life (Glimmer Lake Book 2)

Valerie Costa was pretty sure she was rocking her forties. She had an amazing coffee shop, two cool teenagers, and a new superpower that gave her insight into any random object she touched. Okay, she wasn’t thrilled about that last one.

Ever since Val and her two best friends had driven their car off the edge and into Glimmer Lake the year before, Val has struggled with her new abilities. She’s not exactly sure she wants to be psychic, she could live without her newfound glove addiction, and honestly no one wants to know that much about their teenage sons.

But when Val’s ex-husband goes missing, and police show up at her door with questions she can’t answer, Val, Robin, and Monica are going to have to use their sudden psychic abilities to solve a mystery none of them saw coming.

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

Chapter One

Val was battling a headache that had been brewing since she’d woken up that morning. It was just her luck that Americano Asshole handed her a refillable coffee cup. One that might hold traces of psychic energy. And one that he hadn’t rinsed out. Of course.

“The usual,” he said brusquely.

“Got it,” Val said under her breath. “Anything else?”

Scattered on the counter were baskets of fresh lemon scones, homemade energy bars, and decadent blueberry muffins that her baker, Honey, had made fresh that morning, but he ignored them all.

He was staring at his phone and fingering the zipper pull on his Patagonia vest. “Nothing. Just my usual.”

The usual for Americano Asshole was a café Americano diluted with so much milk and sugar that it would be impossible to detect the subtleties of flavor between espresso and the regular brewed coffee Val had sitting on the counter.

There was a valued place in the coffee world for the café Americano, but not when you drank it like Americano Asshole. That’s why he had his name.

“Café Americano, heavy cream, three sugars,” Val said, ringing up the customer. He had a name, it was Allan Anderson, but nobody at Misfit Mountain Coffee Shop used it. He was Americano Asshole or AA for a reason.

Val reached for the silver coffee mug on the counter. She didn’t notice the tiny hole in her glove until the flashing image of a woman pouring coffee into the mug filled her mind. The woman was wearing nothing but Americano Asshole’s button-down shirt. The woman was also not AA’s wife.

“Shit.” She sucked in a breath and AA looked up.

“Problem?”

Val knew the woman was not his wife because Americano Asshole was married to a genuinely lovely woman named Savannah who came into Misfit every other Tuesday night with her book club.

The unexpected vision hit her fast. It was as if Val had been plopped in the room with AA and his sidepiece for a split second, then yanked out.

“I said”—he spoke slowly—“is there a problem?”

She plastered on a smile and swallowed the ream of curses she wanted to throw at him. “It’s fine. Let me just rinse this out.”

She adjusted her glove to shift the hole to the back of her finger before she slipped up again. Then she turned to rinse out AA’s coffee mug so she could get back to the growing line.

It had been over a year since she’d experienced the car crash and near-death experience that had triggered her weird psychic abilities, and Val was still struggling.

Most days she was able to live normally. Thank God she only reacted to objects, not people. When she was home, her life was manageable.

She didn’t hear random voices or see ghosts like her friend Robin. She didn’t have scary premonitions or graphic dreams like her friend Monica. Val wore gloves at work and while doing chores around the house, and she could handle it.

Most of the time.

She handed the rinsed cup to her barista Eve and turned back to the register to get AA’s money for his Americano.

“Two seventy-five,” Val said, worrying the hole in her glove. She’d learned the hard way that touching money without gloves could be a nightmare.

AA noticed her glove and smirked. “You’d think with what you charge for coffee you could afford new gloves.”

Eve sucked in an audible breath, and behind AA, the next customer’s eyes went wide.

Val wasn’t bothered. They called him Americano Asshole for a reason. “I try to coast on the wealth I’ve built from twenty-five-cent tips like yours, but the struggle is real.”

Ramon, her cook, barked a laugh from the kitchen behind her, and AA’s eyes went cold.

“I’d give anything for a decent coffee shop in this shithole town.”

Eve handed her the Americano, and Val passed it over with a smile, along with the quarter AA usually left in the tip jar.

“But instead you’re stuck with us. Bite me! And have a nice day.”

He turned without dropping the quarter in the jar, and Val flipped off his back before she turned to the next customer.

“Hey, Mom.”

Marie Costa pursed her lips. “Honey, you really shouldn’t treat customers that way.”

“You worry too much. Where else is he going to go? There’s not another coffee shop until Bridger City.” She handed her mom a coffee cup. “Besides, that guy’s always in a bad mood. Dad coming in?”

“He’s parking the car.”

Val handed over another cup and pointed to the counter. “The counter is yours. You want your usual?”

“Please.”

Ramon yelled from the back, “You got it, Mama Marie!”

Val couldn’t hide her smile. “Grab some stools.”

“Thank you, Valerie.” She pulled out her wallet and took out twenty dollars even though Val never took her money. “Thank you, Ramon!”

Val refused to let her parents pay for their weekly coffee shop breakfast when they’d been the ones to loan her the start-up money to begin with. So Marie, knowing Val wouldn’t take her money, put it in the tip jar every week.

“And this is why my employees love you more than they love me.”

“They’re the ones cooking for me,” Marie said. “Not you.”

“And be grateful for that.”

Ramon shouted, “Marie, you better grab one of those lemon scones Honey made before they’re gone.”

“Oh, that sounds delicious.” Marie’s eyes lit up. “I do love Honey’s scones.”

“She’s trying to make me fat.” Ramon was thin and wiry, the kind of guy who ran marathons and couldn’t put on weight to save his life. He was married to Honey, who was as sweet as her name and carried all the curves in the family.

“Likely story,” Val said. “If Honey didn’t feed you sugar, you’d blow away in a breeze.”

“Bite me.” Ramon winked at her. “Get back to work, slacker.”

Val had grabbed three more coffee orders and passed them to Eve before there was a break in the line. Two more tables had seated themselves, and her server Max was already getting them set up with coffee.

Long before she’d been a mom or a psychic, Valerie Costa had dreamed of being a rock star. Having zero musical ability had made her realistic about her chances with that, so being a rock star turned into having a place where rock stars hung out.

Unfortunately, she’d never taken more than a few administration courses at the community college in Bridger City. She’d married her high school sweetheart and spent her twenties partying up and down California with Josh, living for the next concert or road trip. Josh fixed cars, and Val got jobs at whatever office was hiring and didn’t mind her multicolored hair and tattoos.

Val wasn’t a purist. She tried lots of jobs. She worked in restaurant kitchens and accountants’ offices. She worked as a landscaper for a while, then at a big coffee chain in her late twenties just to get medical benefits.

It was during Val’s coffee stint that she got pregnant with her oldest son, Jackson. Faced with the inevitability of raising a brand-new person, she started to realize that while punk rock life was fun, having a house and a retirement account might be kind of necessary.

At first Josh was thrilled about the baby. He made all the right noises and dressed their newborn son in Metallica onesies, combing his fine baby hair into a Mohawk.

They were going to be different kinds of parents. Cool parents. Punk rock parents.

Life got more tense when kid number two rolled around. Val had to work, and she couldn’t do it without her parents’ help. They moved from Bridger City back to Glimmer Lake, which Josh absolutely hated.

“We’re moving backward, not forward,” he’d said.

Secretly, Val was relieved to be back. She was close to her parents and close to Monica and Robin, who could reassure her that she wasn’t a bad mother because she wasn’t a fan of baby talk or Wiggles CDs or fluffy blue diaper bags.

Val might not have been the average mom, but she adored her boys. And while Josh liked the fun stuff about being a dad, he didn’t do well with changing diapers, balancing work and parenthood, or losing his nights to crying babies.

Josh started to stay out later and later. He didn’t show up for school meetings, and more and more of his paycheck started going missing. By the time Jackson was seven and Andy was three, Val knew he was fooling around. She confronted him. He denied it; then he walked out.

And that was that.

Val was a single mother of two with no college degree, no steady job, and no resources except great friends and family.

She could work with that.

Val decided that if punk rock life was out of reach in Glimmer Lake, then she’d make her own oasis of punk in the woods. Her mother and father loaned her the money to start Misfit Mountain Coffee Stand. Val stuffed herself and her boys into the tiny coffee outpost while she figured out how to make better coffee than the chain where she’d worked. She stumbled and messed up a lot along the way, but she had a few things working in her favor.

Everyone in Glimmer Lake liked her, even if they didn’t get her. She was the weird mom who accidentally dropped f-bombs at the park, but her kids were cute and surprisingly well behaved. Plus she was Marie and Vincent Costa’s daughter. She made great coffee, she spoke her mind, but she always made you laugh.

The drive-through coffee stand turned into a café. Then Val met Ramon and Honey. Ramon was a kick-ass cook, and Honey was a baker. They’d grown up in Glimmer Lake but moved to the East Bay to work in the restaurant business, where they’d been blissfully happy. Then Honey’s mom got sick and there was no one else to take care of her.

Ramon and Honey had been the spark that started the coffee shop. They weren’t a full-service restaurant; the menu was limited to what Ramon could get delivered and what he felt like cooking that day. Honey’s baked goods became legendary. Along with Val’s personality and coffee skills, they’d been making it work for about three years, but they weren’t out of the woods yet.

Of course, it was Glimmer Lake. They’d never really be out of the woods.

And Josh?

Val’s ex was around, but he wasn’t. He flitted in and out of her boys’ lives like a punk rock fairy godfather, missing for months, only to show up with brand-new iPads for everyone or drunkenly professing his eternal love for Val after he’d broken up with yet another girlfriend.

Val ignored him. She had two kick-ass kids, amazing parents, and the two best friends anyone could ask for. She had her coffee shop, a good tattoo artist, and was paying her own bills. Just barely, but she was making it.

Okay, and now she had weird psychic abilities that were kind of complicating her life, but she’d figure out how to handle that eventually.

Or she’d go insane. Some days she really thought it could go either way.

-------------------------------------

Just after ten o’clock, Val’s two favorite people in the world walked into Misfit.

Robin, Monica, and Val were as different as three best friends could be. If they hadn’t all been put in Mrs. Cowell’s advanced reader group in fourth grade, they might never have been friends. But that reading group had turned into a lifeline in junior high, then a united and unbreakable front in high school.

Val was the crazy and slightly dangerous one. Monica was the nurturing big sister of the group, and Robin was the planner with the heart of an artist. They’d seen each other through marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, crying babies, hormonal teenagers, divorce, and death.

Monica waved Val over to their table. She handed the register over to Eve and walked to the corner table where Robin already had some notebooks spread out.

“I have fifteen minutes,” Val said. “That’s it.”

“We can work with fifteen minutes.” Robin spread her hands on the notebooks as if she was bracing herself. “What do you think about opening a mini version of Misfit at Russell House?”

Val blinked. “That’s sudden.”

“Kind of, but you’ve already had a coffee stand.”

“A drive-through coffee stand is not Russell House.”

Russell House was Robin’s family home that they’d de-ghosted the year before. Robin’s grandfather had been haunting her grandmother, and there’d been another ghost involved, the man her grandfather had murdered, and it was a whole thing.

But then they got rid of Grandpa Murderer Ghost, Grandma Helen passed peacefully, and Robin’s mom and uncle were left with a giant house that neither knew what to do with, so Robin’s mom and Monica had gone into business to turn the old mansion into a boutique hotel and event venue.

The first events had been hosted, but they were still working out the kinks of having real hotel guests.

“Hear me out, because this is not a stretch,” Monica said. “We’ve already nailed down baked goods from Honey. She’ll be doing an exclusive Russell House scone for the room bakery boxes every morning. But then we were thinking, do we want to have coffee makers in all the rooms? Or would it be better to have an espresso bar in the lobby and do in-room deliveries?”

Robin said, “It would basically be a coffee stand like you started out with. The hotel would just be paying you a certain amount to make coffee in the morning. Anything above that would be yours.”

Hmmm. Could be interesting.

Monica said, “We’re doing a lot of business day-conference things since Jake finished building the ropes course. You know you could make extra money during events like that.”

Val perched on a chair. “I like the idea, but I just went through that whole expansion drama last year that didn’t work out, so I’m feeling a little wary, and also—no offense—but I want to make sure I don’t cannibalize my business here, you know?”

“Makes total sense.” Robin slid a folder across the table. “I put a couple of ideas and numbers together for you to look at.”

Val took the folder. “Of course you did.”

“It’s just some thoughts about how you could make it work if you wanted to.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “I had time.”

Monica and Val exchanged a look.

“How’s life without Emma?” Monica asked.

Robin’s youngest had shipped off to university in Washington State the previous fall, leaving Robin and her husband Mark official empty nesters.

“It’s good.” Robin nodded. “It was nice to see her and Austin over the holidays, but… it’s also nice to have the house back to ourselves again, you know?”

Monica whispered loudly, “They’re having freaky sex in whatever room they want now.”

Val whispered back, “That’s what I figured too.”

Robin rolled her eyes. “Listen, weirdos, this is me and Mark, not…” Robin’s eyes lifted when the bell over the door rang. “So, speaking of freaky sex…”

Val whipped her head around, only to see Sullivan Wescott, sheriff of Glimmer Lake and a partial source of Val’s headache, walking into the coffee shop.

She immediately spun around. “Shut up, Robin.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You were thinking it.”

Monica raised her hand. “No, that was me, actually. I was the one suspecting you and Sully of having freaky sex.”

Val hissed, “In what universe do I have the time to have freaky sex with anyone?”

“That wasn’t a denial.” Robin held her fist out to Monica, who bumped her knuckles. “We were right.”

“You’re both ridiculous.” Val glanced at her watch. “And your time is up.”

Monica leaned over to Robin. “She’s leaving us so she can get his order.”

“Of course she is,” Robin said quietly. “I mean, who else is going to make flirty eyes at Sully? She can’t have Eve doing it. She’s young enough to be his daughter.”

Val turned, flipped both her best friends off, then walked back to the register.