When Elise Golden goes in for a cornea transplant, the last thing she expects to come out with is a psychic eye! But, as she recovers from surgery, she begins to realize that she can see things she couldn’t see before. If the eye is the window to the soul, Elise is practically a Peeping Tom! She can gain insights into people’s actions just by looking them in the eye. Ace Aunt Elise lives in a cozy small-town courtyard with her twenty-something niece Val, a polyamorous pansexual who is currently recovering from an untimely stroke. When Val’s wheelchair is stolen, Elise realizes she’s in a unique position to investigate which of their neighbours played a hand in the theft. The psychic eye is on the case, but the culprit might be the last person anyone would suspect! I Spy a Psychic Eye is the first book in The Courtyard Clairvoyant Mysteries, a small-town paranormal cozy mystery series featuring a great cast of LGBTQIA characters! |
Excerpt
“What’s all this about hallucinations, Auntie?”
Elise felt rather put on the spot. “Nothing, doll. Nothing at all.”
“What kind of hallucinations have you been having? And why didn’t you tell me about them?”
“I haven’t been hallucinating. I swear to you. Only…”
“Only what?” Val asked when Elise failed to complete her thought.
Elise sighed. “When I accused Sebastian and Cadence of playing on your chair, when I said I’d witnessed them jumping all over it…”
Val took a seat at the foot of Elise’s bed. “Yeah. What about it?”
“I didn’t actually see that happening with my eyes. Or, I did, but not when it happened.”
Val shook her head. “What are you talking about, Auntie?”
Elise closed her lids and took a deep breath. How to explain the strange visions she’d experienced?
“Auntie,” Val said, grabbing Elise’s ankle over the covers. “You’re scaring me.”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Elise assured her niece. “I only mean to say… sometimes I have these visions. Second sight, you might call it. Or some brand of clairvoyance. I see things in my mind’s eye… but not in my mind’s eye. I see them in my right eye, through the haze. I see things happen that have already happened.”
Val seemed utterly perplexed. “I don’t get it. You see the future?”
“Not the future,” Elise clarified. “I see the past.”
“Isn’t that what memory is?”
“No, because I’m seeing things I’ve never seen.” Elise could sense herself getting frustrated when Val insisted on challenging every statement she made, but she kept her emotions in check to say, “When I looked at the twins, I saw them jumping all over your chair. I didn’t see it happen with my own eyes. I saw it happen with… I don’t know. It’s all so new. I don’t know what it is.”
Val had this expression on her face like she felt sorry for her aunt. “Auntie, don’t you think your brain was just connecting the dots? Of course the twins were playing on my chair. We’ve both seen them play on it before. They’re kids. That’s what they do.”
“But I saw it,” Elise insisted. “I saw them in my eye, in the eye I just had surgery on. I saw it!”