Mind Tricks by Adrianne Wood

animals’ thoughts and feelings than most people.”
    “Cool. You’re like that babe on Star Trek: The Next Generation . She
could sometimes read aliens’ feelings, which I guess is basically the same
thing as what you do.”
    “Basically,” Emma agreed. “No
aliens, though.”
    “So.” Jake made a grab at the
conversation’s reins. “The police must have asked you if you saw someone drug
my drink, right?”
    “Yeah. I didn’t, but it wouldn’t
have been that hard to, I don’t think.”
    “Why not?”
    “You had a lot of people over at
your table, remember? I swear, almost everyone in the room came by at one point
or another to say hi.”
    Jake shook his head. “I remember
almost nothing about that night.”
    “Oh, right. The Rohypnol.” Mark
made a face. “Duh. Okay, let me think for a second. I saw a bunch of people who
were at lunch today, too: Mrs. James and Mrs. Jeffries. And your uncle Mickey
was there, too, but I don’t remember if he left before or after you arrived. I
also had a party of ten that were drinking like fishes, so I was concentrating
on them.”
    Mickey had been at the Waterview?
Why hadn’t he mentioned that? Maybe he assumed Jake remembered.
    “You know,” Mark said, breaking
into Jake’s thoughts, “the police also asked me if I thought the Rohypnol might
have been meant for Ginny instead of you. But I don’t think so. You were
drinking red wine, and she was drinking martinis. It’d be hard to confuse the
two.”
    Martinis? Ginny usually drank vodka
tonics—light on the vodka. “How many martinis did she have?”
    Mark shrugged. “Oh, three, maybe.
That wouldn’t be a lot normally, but she tossed them down pretty quickly, and
you guys ate only bread and salads before you got up to leave. I tried to—”
    “Whoa—back up. We didn’t have dinner?”
    “No. You ordered dinner—”  
    Yes, a steak. He remembered that.
    “—but after her second martini,
Ginny canceled the order, said you were going to just do appetizers before you
went back to your place for dinner.”
    Back to his place for dinner? He
caught Emma giving him a sidelong glance, and he flushed, even though he had no
reason to.
    Leaving the Waterview after salads
didn’t make sense. He’d expected his conversation with Ginny about the
cash-flow rumors to be a long one, not one dealt with in twenty minutes. And
not one he would have had while cooking a cozy dinner at his town house. He and
Ginny had done dinner at his place a few times, but only when she was still
with the guy in Boston. After she’d been single, he’d avoided inviting her
over.
    “And I was okay with that?” he
asked Mark.
    “You didn’t object, but, well, you
looked pretty wasted—from the Rohypnol, I guess. Ginny wasn’t much better after
her martinis. I offered to call you a cab when you were done.”
    “Did you?” Jake demanded. If they’d
taken a cab somewhere, it could be traced.
    “No. After you paid the bill, you
both left before I could suggest a cab again.”
    Damn. He thought for a moment. “And
when we left, you still believed we were going to my house for dinner?”
    Mark nodded.
    Christ, no wonder he was square in
the police’s sights.
    Jake took a deep breath. He had to
ask the next question. “Were Ginny and I arguing about anything?” Had he even
started the conversation about the rumors?
    Mark half closed his eyes and
tilted his head back, obviously trying to recall details from that night. “I
don’t think you were fighting. You looked a little pissed off when you came in,
but I figured that was because you were wet from the rain, and you told me
you’d had to park way over on Chester Street instead of in the lot.”
    “Do you—” This was hard to say out
loud. “Do you think the police believe I killed Ginny?”
    Squinting a bit, Mark said, “I
don’t know, Mr. Vant. They talked to me about you getting drugged for a really
long time. But they also looked at the credit card receipts and our