Hidden Lake

During the first five or six years of our marriage, Rob and I got to know a number of South Florida psychics and people involved in the UFO field. Two of these psychics were extraordinary – Renie Wiley and Tony Grosso, both of whom have since passed on.

Renie was my astrology mentor and an empath. She worked with cops in Cooper City, Florida on the various cases, including the disappearance of Christie Luna and Adam Walsh.

Several days after our daughter was born, Renie interpreted Megan’s astrological chart for us – and just about everything she said 24 years ago has unfolded.

She was a large-boned redhead, a Sagittarian with a heart and talent as huge as the Pacific who never minced word. When she entered a room people felt it. If you messed with Renie or someone she loved, she never fought back; she simply got even.

Tony was a short, plump gay man and one of the few people I’ve met whose sign I don’t remember! He lived in a trailer in Pembroke Pines, Florida, and also worked with cops, sometimes in tandem with Renie. He and Rob co-authored The Rainbow Oracle, a divination system Tony developed with color.

Around this same time, we also got to know psychic Linda Georgian, who eventually hosted the Psychic Information Network with singer Dionne Warwick, one of the first infomercial TV shows.

So when I wrote my second novel, Hidden Lake, published by Ballantine, I wondered what would happen if you had a community of psychics in which a murder occurred. Would there be too much information to solve the murder? Would the info be faulty, filtered through a psychic’s subjective lens? How would the investigation differ from, well, an ordinary murder?

Ballantine gave the book an awful cover – some dude in a brown suit lying on the ground. First off, in the novel, the victim was a woman, not a man. Second, what man in his right mind wears a suit like this in the middle of a South Florida summer?  

I was paid less for this book than I was for my first and later learned why. Bob Wyatt, who was then editor-in-chief, had told my editor, Chris Cox, to advise me to ditch the paranormal. And for a long time, I did. For a long time, I wrote linear novels that hinted at the psychic unity of life, but never spelled it out.

When Chris died in the early 90s, Rob and I flew to New York for the memorial service. Megan was a year or so old and wailed throughout most of the service. I remember that Rob stood at the back of the auditorium with her in a stroller and I sat up near the front because Chris, in his will, had requested that I speak at his memorial service.

The lead speaker was actress Susan Sarandon, whom Chris had known for years. She spoke movingly of their friendship and I later learned that when he was dying of AIDS, she had paid for a private nurse to tend to him.  I have admired  this woman ever since.

When I went through the formatted version of this book, which I hadn’t re-read since I  submitted it in 1986, I felt Renie and Tony around, I felt my younger self struggling to evaluate what she was learning, I loved writing Hidden Lake because most of the players were based on real people.

And if I were to meet editor Bob Wyatt today, I would tell him just how wrong he was. We need to know that we are connected to one another, that what impacts you, impacts me, that what you learn eventually filters down to me. We are that closely aligned with one another.

Now Hidden Lake has a second life as an e-book and Crossroad gave it a cool cover, depicted above. Here’s an excerpt.