by Mary Bowers
There was a stubborn silence, and I began to wonder if these kids were just socially awkward after all.
When nobody said anything for too long of a time, I said, “Did something happen? You guys seem to know something, and if it would help find Kendra –“
“Kendra isn’t missing,” Kady said. “She took off.”
“Shut up!”
“You know it’s true Rusty,” she shot back.
“Look, you two, if you know where Kendra is, you need to tell somebody. If you don’t want to go to the cops, I’ll do it for you. Now what are you two so nervous about?”
“They had a fight,” Kady said.
Rusty glared at her, then looked out the window.
“Who?” Asia said. “Aunt Eden?”
I waited. Beyond the fact that there had been a fight, I really didn’t know anything about it, but these two sure did.
“Kendra and Eden,” Kady said. “On Friday night. They were rolling on the floor. And don’t look at me like that, Rusty! You guys were loving it. Guys always love a catfight,” she told me in a worldly way. “They think it’s sexy. Anyway, that was the last time any of us saw either one of them. And now one of them is dead and the other one is in the wind. You do the math.”
“Kendra wouldn’t kill anybody,” Rusty said furiously. Then he lowered his voice. “Kendra wouldn’t take off without letting me know, either.”
“She would if she had something to hide,” Kady said.
“She’s got nothing to hide,” Rusty spat back. “It was all Eden’s fault. She was doing that thing Kendra hates. Hanging all over me, trying to make Victor jealous.”
“Victor was there?” I asked, startled. He’d made Eden seem like a co-worker rather than a personal friend. Strange he didn’t mention he’d been with both Eden and Kendra at a party not twelve hours before they disappeared.
“What was my aunt doing?”
Rusty seemed to suddenly remember that Asia was Eden’s niece. He mumbled, “Sorry, kid.”
“Don’t apologize. And I’m not a kid. I know my aunt could be wild. That’s part of what I loved about her. But if Kendra killed her, we need to find her, friend or no friend. You guys are hackers. You’ve got everything you need to track her down, right?”
“Don’t you think we’ve already done that?” Rusty said. Kady put a cautioning hand on his arm, and suddenly I realized just how tense they both really were. “Like I told you, she’s off the grid. Gone dark. Hung up the phone and ain’t calling back.”
“Do you think this was a personal thing, or a hacker thing?” I asked. “It was over Victor, right? Or was it?”
Rusty muttered, “Who knows?” and clammed up.
Finally, Asia said, “I don’t see why it would’ve been a hacker thing. Don’t get me wrong, Aunt Eden knew her way around the Internet. My mom did too, at one time. She was one of the original war-gamers, and kind of a recreational hacker, back in the day. But that kind of thing didn’t earn you a living, and when I came along, she had to get serious. I think she also got bored with it. She never talks about it now. Aunt Eden never talked about it much, either.”
“But she was good enough that Victor gave her work to do, right? And he was thinking of hiring Kendra, too?”
“I don’t know about Kendra,” Asia said, “but Aunt Eden used to work for him up in Atlanta sometimes.”
The other two, who would know better, just stared at the table and kept silent.
“I think we need to look for her in the real world,” Asia said. “What are the police doing? Are they searching for her?” She looked at me as if I’d know.
“I’ll make a few calls and try to find out,” I told her. “Give me your cell phone number. I’ll call you if they’re asking for volunteers.”
We all exchanged numbers, and I finished my cappuccino, the last, foamy, cold sip from the bottom of the cup, said it was nice meeting them all, and left.
Outside, I took a breath, then walked down the alley behind the stores toward my car. Once I was inside it and had it started with the air conditioning running, I paused before backing out. Something off-the-wall had come up in my encounter with the kids, something to do with Charles Dickens, of all things, and then it had slipped away.
No, it was gone. Well, it’d come back to me. I backed out and drove away.
Chapter 8
Pulling into Cadbury House, I got a sense of getting back to normal, and was grateful for it. With all the thoughts revolving around in my head, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to really get away from it all, but I had routine things to do around the shelter, and that would be soothing.
Stacey, my teenage volunteer from Tropical Breeze, was in one of the old outbuildings doing laundry. There was a table on the front porch that we used for folding during the summer, when it gets humid and almost unbearable inside by the dryer. In late October, it wasn’t that bad, but most of the volunteers still liked to do the folding outside. She was working on the table with her back to me, her chestnut ponytail whisking around prettily, and I walked over to help. When she saw it was me, she didn’t even say hi.
“I knew that wasn’t Eden,” she said, stopping me in my tracks. It was like she’d been pent up, just waiting to get it out. “I know I should’ve said something at the time, but I figured you must have made a last-minute substitution. You know, no big deal.”
“I wish you had spoken up. We could have outed the fake right away and grabbed her.” Her face fell, and I quickly said, “It’s not your fault, Stace. Anyway, they know who the fake was, for all the good it’s doing them. Turns out it was a girl who works at the bank: Kendra Constantine. She’s missing. Do you know her?”
Stacey shook her head. She paused, holding a raggedy old towel, clean, but still looking dirty with all the stains on it. “Everybody’s talking about the mark on her hand, and Angie figured out who it was, but not many people around here know her. She’s not one of the shelter’s volunteers. She lives in town.” The part of Tropical Breeze Stacey lived in was in the outskirts, with man-made canals that connected with the Intracoastal Waterway, for people with boats.
“So you had your fortune told by her. Did you notice the tattoo?”
“Yes. I was one of the last customers, and the cover-cream was pretty much all rubbed off by then. She should have brought more of it with her. She could have re-covered it between readings. Guess she didn’t think of it.”
“Guess not. What kind of fortune did she give you?”
“Huh! You should have heard it! Like, death was stalking the elders of my tribe – she actually said ‘tribe’ – and I needed to be brave and endure and stuff like that.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. And she told my friend Alana to warn her boyfriend to be more careful when he’s driving, because she saw a car crash in the future for them, but the future wasn’t set in stone, or whatever. She said it was sent as a warning, and we must heed the warning or pay the consequences. Real scary-movie stuff.”
“Oh, lord! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Things were shutting down by then, and you were busy, but I was going to let you know next time I saw you; tell you that next year, we needed to get a new fortune teller, definitely. Let Eden scare people in the Haunted House.” She stopped. “Anyway, that’s what I was thinking halfway through the reading, but then I figured out it wasn’t Eden at all. Whoever it was, I didn’t like her.”
I didn’t like Kendra as a fortune teller either. As soon as they found her, if they did find her, I was going to give her a piece of my mind. Unless she was under arrest by then.
Stacey flapped the towel, getting it straightened out for folding, and across the yard a tiny volcano erupted. I looked across and saw Carlene trying to reason with something that looked like a black mop-head on a string. It was a Yorkshire Terrier, a very alpha female named Sparkles, and the snapping sound of the towel had insulted her somehow. She wanted it dead. The way she charged and bounded and flounced around a
t the end of the leash would have been cute, if Sparkles hadn’t been deadly serious about dealing with that towel.
“It’s always the little ones,” Carlene called across to us and shaking her head.
We laughed, and I helped Stacey finish folding.
I’ve always had a weakness for Yorkies. My first dog had been an arrogant, four-and-a-half pound male Yorkie named Magoo. He wasn’t fond of snapping towels, either, but instead of wanting to go to war with them, he just stared at them with disdain. He couldn’t even be bothered to bark at squirrels. When we took a walk, any dog in a fenced-in yard who wanted to trade insults with him would just get the royal snub.
When we finished folding the laundry, I walked into the yard and shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun. Somebody was sitting in the cemetery, up on the hill. As I stared, I saw him wave at me, and muttered, “Edson. Can’t keep that man out of a graveyard.”
He was motioning for me to come up. On impulse, I decided to take Sparkles with me.
Sparkles took the hill at a gallop, burning rubber as I trudged behind her. As I walked under the iron archway, Ed squinted at Sparkles and said, “Is that a dog?”
“Of course it’s a dog. She’s even big for a Yorkshire Terrier. She’s ten pounds, at least.”
“Really,” he said doubtfully, still examining the little beast with suppressed alarm. He scooted to the end of the stone bench to make room for me, and Sparkles began to shriek.
“Good grief,” he muttered as he shuffled some papers together, stuffed them into his messenger bag, then quickly snatched up the bag and held it against his chest as Sparkles demanded to know what was in the bag.
“Calm down, Sparkles,” I said. “He doesn’t have anything to eat in there.”
“Actually, I have peanut butter. Would it calm her down if I gave her some?”
“Don’t you dare. And why did you bringing sandwiches with you? Are you spending the night in the cemetery again?” It’s sort of a thing with Edson.
“I didn’t say I had a sandwich. I said I had peanut butter. I always have it with me, for emergencies.” He showed me a small jar. “It’s the perfect food. Doesn’t need refrigeration, is nutritionally complete, and tastes very good. Two tablespoons and you’re good to go for hours.”
I didn’t tell him how weird that sounded, because I was the same way about cheese pizza. Now that’s the perfect food. If it weren’t for the fact that it does need refrigeration, I’d have some cheese pizza on me at all times. Except then I’d be kind of like Ed. Okay, never mind.
After closing the gate in the fence that surrounded the cemetery, I let Sparkles off the leash and settled down next to Ed. Once she was sure we were going to stay put, she began to ramble around among the tombstones, pausing every now and then to stare at us and gargle.
Keeping a wary eye on the dog, Ed told me, “I’ve been doing research on chiromancy.”
“On what?”
“Palmistry. Reading a person’s fate by studying the lines on the palm of the hand.”
“Oh. And you came up here just for the inspirational atmosphere.”
“I came to Cadbury House to see you,” he said briskly. “You were out, but while I was here, yes, I decided to take advantage of the fresh air and sunshine. I’ve been cooped up in my office ever since we finished the Halloween event. This time of the year is always exciting to me. I think our ancestors were right: it’s the close of the pagan year, you know. The end of the bountiful harvest, and the beginning of the long, hard winter. The time of smoking bonfires whose rising vapors reveal the faces of the dead as they watch us. In these dying days of the year, it’s easier to believe that the partition between worlds has worn thin, and that we can reach out for loved ones and find them reaching back from beyond the veil.”
I blinked. I knew, of course, that this was a pretty good description of the landscape of Edson’s mind. He’d always been fascinated by these things, and had spent his life trying to record and measure them. But he had learned long ago, probably as soon as he could talk, that other people were not so open, and not nearly so poetic. They were more inclined to joke about concepts that were too big for them.
But I knew exactly what he was talking about. Something in the air during the last week of October seemed to sharpen the senses and warn the soul of what might be coming. Frightening things were closing in around us, greedy for what little we happened to have. Even if our only treasure was life itself, something might lurk nearby, waiting to snatch it away. We were alive. And around us, the last season of the year was dying.
I suppose it was knowing that the seasonal cycle was ending, and that no man was promised another, that gave you that last burst of energy as October ended. That urge to get out the knitting needles and create warm things, to work your hands into warm bread dough and make satisfying things to eat, to wrap yourself up and go out into the cold, exhilarated, and yet worried about the long winter to come.
During the previous weeks, I had spent more time in the cemetery myself, though I didn’t tell Edson that. I had known some of those buried there. Vesta Cadbury Huntington, my landlord’s mother, was a special friend, and had been very generous to Orphans of the Storm. And of course, her grandfather, Kingsley Danvers Cadbury, was a legend, one of the gentlemen Egyptologists of the golden age. Back in the day, his friends had called him Waffles. I don’t know why. But knowing his nickname had always made him seem more human to me. His grave marker said that he’d died in 1928. Waffles. You gotta like a guy who’d let people call him that, even in an era full of nicknames like Peachy and Pongo and Tuppy.
“People have been telling me your mysterious stand-in fortune teller had quite a few hits on Saturday night,” Edson said indulgently, as if he were talking about children. “People do so want to believe. A good fortune teller doesn’t need to guess. He or she just studies the sitter and finds all the answers there; it’s call ‘cold reading.’ And of course, whoever she was, she’d probably lived in Tropical Breeze all her life and knew all her customers. But people have no idea how much they give away about themselves by tiny facial expressions and general body language. The psychic says something suggestive, then carefully reads the sitter’s reaction. Immediately, she knows if she’s made a hit or a miss, and adjusts her spiel accordingly. Many of their customers will even sit down and tell a psychic the whole story of their lives, then be genuinely surprised when she knows all about them. Funny.”
“By the way,” I said, “they know who it was. A young woman named Kendra Constantine, who works at the bank in town. And I hope the fortune she gave me doesn’t come true, because she was moaning about the dead rising and walking among us.”
“I’m not interested in the stand-in, Taylor. I’m glad she generated some income for your shelter, but that was not a serious demonstration. No, I had rather hoped to interview that woman, Eden. For some time now, I’ve been planning a little monograph on chiromancy. She seemed like a good subject for the chapter on fakes, although I’d have had to handle the interview carefully. One wouldn’t want her flouncing out if I took the wrong tone. But she was, without a doubt, a fake, and possibly had reached the point of deluding even herself. It would have been interesting.”
“I don’t care whether or not she was a fake,” I said. “I’m upset about her. After all, she’s been murdered.”
“Well, yes, there is that,” he said, actually waving it away. “Law enforcement will deal with all that, thank goodness. Very sordid, and probably not very interesting, when the details come to light. A failed love affair, no doubt. But it would have been interesting to see how far she’d gone towards convincing herself she had special powers. Well, that won’t be possible now.”
I wanted to smack him. “Not unless you get your friend Purity to throw a séance.”
Ed assumed the look of martyrdom he so often wore when talking about his colleagues. “Actually, she is the reason I wanted to talk to you. We need a fourth.”
I closed my eyes and
assumed my own look of martyrdom. “I’m guessing you’re not talking about poker or tennis?”
“No, indeed. I have been hired by a fairly difficult client, and she insists on a séance, although I consider it unnecessary. I explained the technology I normally use in ghost hunts, but she was adamant. ‘Modern electronics are all very well, but there’s a reason for the traditions that have come down through the centuries,’ she told me. I could have debated her on that, but it was our initial interview, and I didn’t want to annoy her. I’m hoping to build up my practice so I can quit that stupid reality show. My client had actually approached Purity directly before talking to me, which explains her attitude. But while I was preparing her house for your Halloween event, she impulsively decided to balance the investigation by hiring a skeptic, i.e., me.”
“Wait – the difficult client is Rita?”
“Yes. She’s launching an investigation into the question of the spectral presence of her grandmother in Whitby House. If the lady is indeed present, my client wishes to have an expert, in this case, Purity, ascertain her wishes. Is she trapped? Is she unhappy? Does she wish to proceed into the light, or is she content to live amid happy memories, in the company of her granddaughter?”
“Rita is considering making herself cozy with the ghost of her own grandmother?”
He eyed me owlishly. “You’ve seen her haunted village collection. Her paranormal leanings are what most people would consider dark. So she wishes to have a séance, and I’ve convinced her that in order to balance the circle, we need a fourth person, and since you are discreet and she already knows you, I suggested you.”
“Me. You do realize that a séance in Whitby House could raise any number of discontented souls, don’t you? How Violet died I don’t know, but I know of at least three other deaths in that house, and they were all pretty hair-raising. The original owner and his daughter both committed suicide, and the last owner was murdered, all in the foyer. What if we throw a séance and everybody shows up?”
