Three Sisters

by James D. Doss

  Daisy raised her chin, looked over the thin girl’s shoulder. “What’s coming on?”

  “Cassandra.” Sarah was clicking through the satellite channels.

  “Oh.” That’s pretty good. She turned the rocking chair to face the expensive “entertainment center” Charlie Moon had contributed, along with other furnishings for her new home.

  Sarah was perched on a footstool, her face close to the television screen. She would not miss a thing.

  Mr. Zig-Zag (Sarah’s spotted cat) padded in from the kitchen, stretched out on the floor beside her, yawned at the flickering picture.

  The broadcast began with a sooty-black screen, and an eerie strain of organ music that was the psychic’s trademark. Then, on the dark electronic velvet, a bloodred script was traced by invisible pen: Cassandra Sees.

  “Yes!” The girl clapped her hands.

  Having had its say, the title bled away. As the last crimson drop fell into an unseen reservoir, the psychic’s all-seeing eye appeared, filling the screen. Iridescent it was, and opalescent—the platter-size iris mimicking a blooming cluster of multicolored petals, turquoise blue, twilight gray, spring-grass green!

  That is so cool, Sarah whispered to herself. “But I don’t know how she keeps from blinking.”

  The enormous eye faded, Cassandra Spencer’s pale, masklike face appeared. The oval countenance, at once strikingly sinister and hypnotically attractive, was framed in long locks of raven hair, artfully tucked behind her ears. The psychic’s eyes were aglow with terrible secrets, arcane knowledge. They seemed to say: We not only See; we Know.

  “Oh,” Sarah breathed. “Cassandra just gives me goose pimples.” As she held out a skinny arm so Daisy might see the proof of this claim, her frail little frame shuddered with a delicious fear. “I wonder if she’ll talk to a dead person tonight.”

  The Ute shaman, who was certain she talked to more ghosts and spirits in a month than this uppity young white woman had encountered in her entire lifetime, offered a “Hmmpf.” But Daisy was leaning ever-so-slightly forward in her chair.

  Mr. Zig-Zag, who had his own visions to pursue, drifted off to sleep.

  As the psychic uttered her usual greeting, Sarah silently mouthed the words: Dear friends…welcome to my home.

  Her face faded off the screen. A camera panned the walnut-paneled parlor in the star’s Granite Creek mansion, sharing with the audience a cherry cupboard housing delicate bisque figurines of ballerinas on tiptoe, a miniature flock of crystal swans, a cranberry vase that held a single, gold-plated rose. Then, as an unseen technician threw a switch, viewers were transported out of the parlor-studio to a scene in the host’s dining room, where several enraptured guests were seated, smiling at images of themselves on a cluster of video monitors.

  “What a bunch of dopey half-wits,” Daisy muttered. You’d never get me on a dumb show like that.

  The psychic’s face appeared again, the lovely lips speaking: “This evening, we deal with the controversial subject of reincarnation. Our special guest is Raman Sajhi, a citizen of India, who is touring the United States to discuss his best-selling new book—My Five Thousand Lives.”

  Five thousand lives my hind leg! Daisy snorted at such nonsense.

  Camera 3 picked up the turbaned guest’s pleasant face. He responded to his host with a polite, semiprayerful gesture—delicate fingers touched at the tips, a modest bowing of the head.

  Daisy Perika eyed the bespectacled foreigner with no little suspicion. “Raymond Soggy don’t look a day over a half-dozen lives to me.”

  Sarah giggled.

  Mr. Zig-Zag, who still had eight to go, dozed on.

  Mr. Sajhi commenced to pitch his book with thumbnail sketches of selected previous lives. In addition to his miserable stint as a convict on Devil’s Island, the poor soul had also done time as a golden carp in a Shanghai pond, an Ethiopian dung beetle, a camel (of no particular ethnicity or distinction), a wealthy rajah’s hunting elephant, and a ferocious female Bengal tiger who had devoured several citizens, including a British subaltern who was a close friend of Mr. Kipling. Though a combination of jet lag, TV appearances, and signings at mall bookstores may have been contributing factors, the author reported that he was tired-to-the-bone from the hard labors of his many incarnations, the current of which was, by his meticulous calculations, appearance number four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.

  Mr. Zig-Zag abruptly awakened, gaped his toothy mouth to whine.

  During a commercial break, Sarah Frank addressed Daisy Perika: “Do you think people can really come back to live more than one time?” The girl, who had once dreamed of returning as a butterfly, glanced at the cat. “Do you think we could come back as animals?” Before the Ute elder could respond, Sarah asked: “If we could, what kind of animal would you want to be?”

  Three questions too many.

  Resembling a ruffled old owl, Daisy scowled at the impertinent girl. Which settled the issue.

  Cassandra appeared on the screen. “Now we will discuss a particularly fascinating category of spirits—those who return for the sole purpose of communicating an important message to the living.”

  Daisy and Sarah watched the psychic introduce a second guest, who provided a fascinating account of how her deceased grandfather had, once upon a certain snowy night in December “nineteen-and-eighty-two,” appeared by her bed and told her where to find a Havana perfectos cigar box stuffed with rare and valuable nineteenth-century coins. The box was there, of course, under the loose floorboard in the smokehouse where the old fellow had stashed it, half full of coins. But that was not all. The mournful specter had also confessed several youthful misdeeds to his astonished granddaughter—including a colorful account of how he had dealt with a Tennessee sharpster who had made a pass at his first wife. Granddad had, so he said, used a scythe to remove the unfortunate fellow’s head from his shoulders. The lady explained to a rapt television audience that this was “very unsettling to hear.” No one in the family had the least notion that Grandpa had been married but once, to Grandma. The fact that he had “killed his man” was of little consequence. “Back in those days in the Ozarks, that was just the way things was.” The guest was about enlarge on how things was back in those days in the Ozarks, when—

  With an alarming suddenness, Cassandra dropped her chin.

  The psychic’s eyes seemed to be gazing blankly at her knees, which were modestly concealed under a black silk skirt—or, as the many viewers assumed, at something (other than her knees) that they were not able to see.

  “Murder.” This was what Cassandra saw, and what she said.

  A hundred thousand viewers (more or less) are holding their breaths.

  Let us leave them in that uncomfortable state while we visit another, more sensible Cassandra Sees fan, who is breathing approximately twelve times per minute.

  We fly over the Cochetopa Hills, the northern neck of the San Luis Valley, skim the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—halt at a location 172 miles east-by-southeast of the TV psychic’s home in Granite Creek. See, down there, that isolated spot glistening in the darkness beside Interstate 25? It is the Silver Dollar Truck Stop, which, in addition to dispensing diesel fuel, provides a large restaurant for hungry truckers—where we shall find our subject.

  His rig (tagged by the DEA as the “I-25 Pharmacy”) was parked among some two dozen other long-haulers. The driver, a heavyset ex-con known only as Smitty by his customers from Buffalo, Wyoming, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, was seated at the sixty-foot lunch counter. Having taken delivery of Dinner No. 39, he was applying fork and knife to a hearty supper of meat loaf, mashed potatoes (with brown gravy), and Great Northern beans. Smitty had planned the run from Casper down to Albuquerque so he would be here in the Silver Dollar Restaurant, astraddle his favorite stool, staring goggled-eyed at—as he had told a friendly trucker just this morning during a quick biscuit-and-gravy breakfast in Cheyenne—“the biggest doggone TV screen I’ve ever seen.” Smitty’s taste leane
d toward football and The Simpsons reruns, but he was to be counted among those Cassandra fans who rarely missed one of the psychic’s weekly appearances. Unbeknownst to Smitty, the “friendly trucker”—who had never driven anything bigger than an F-250—had tailed him south along the interstate, and was—at this very moment—outside. Looking in. Who might this be?

  An undercover DEA agent, tailing the trucker in the course of an investigation?

  Some kind of stalker-pervert, harmless or otherwise?

  Or, try this on for size—a hired gun, employed by another distributor to rub out the competition.

  Or even a—But let us dispense with pointless speculations. Soon enough, the sinister presence on the dark side of the window will play out his hand. In the meantime, back to television land.

  Cassandra’s lips are moving, and those viewers who choose to may breathe again. “He’s a middle-aged man,” she murmurs. A long, thoughtful pause. “Reddish brown hair. Overweight.”

  As he chewed a mouthful of the dinner special, Smitty muttered: “Effs bess. At cuff be amos hemmygobby.” Including me. What our amateur TV critic was attempting to say, and would have, had not the mastication of ground beef and beans impeded his enunciation, was: “Hell’s bells. That could be almost anybody.” Including me.

  Which illustrates why well-mannered diners do not attempt to talk whilst eating.

  The pale face on the television screen continued to describe what Cassandra Sees: “I see a man who drives a truck.”

  Smitty, who liked to talk back to the tube, snickered. “Well, that sure narrows it down a whole lot.” From the clarity of his speech, it was apparent that he had swallowed his food, for which we may all be grateful. Moreover, he had forgotten the meat loaf, mashed potatoes, Great Northerns, et cetera that remained on his plate. Cassandra, who was hitting on all eight cylinders, had gotten the trucker’s entire attention.

  “There is a tattoo on his arm.” The psychic breathed a heavy sigh. “A knife of some sort. And a snake.” She shuddered. “And a horrible spider.”

  This is not meant as criticism, but Smitty was one of those persons who could not do two things at once. First, his jaw dropped. Then, he glanced down at his hairy left forearm, squinted at the art form the Tenderloin-district artist had adorned it with: a medieval Italian dagger with a spotted viper wrapped around the blade, a hairy-legged tarantula crouched on the hilt. Marveling at this coincidence, he returned his attention to the television image.

  Cassandra’s face was frozen, except for the pretty red lips, which moved: “I see a murderer—a brutal, cold-blooded killer!”

  The drug pusher shook his head. “I ain’t never killed nobody!” The almost-mute remnant of his conscience begged to disagree. In his defense, he murmured: “That ol’ woman I run over at that railroad crossing don’t count as no murder—I didn’t do that on purpose.”

  “I cannot make out the killer’s face,” the psychic whispered. “I can see only the back of his head…and his shoulders.” She caught her breath, stiffened. “But he is about to pull the trigger!”

  Smitty, who was not the brightest of his mother’s three sons, still did not get it. “I ain’t about to pull no trigger.” I couldn’t even if I wanted to. My .45 is locked in the truck, inside the backpack with my Buck knife and brass knuckles and the forty kilos of Mexican crack. So either she’s way off this time or she’s talkin’ about some other guy with a tattoo like mine. The marked man slapped a ten-dollar bill on the counter and was about to get up when—

  In the outer darkness…the hammer fell.

  The slug was expelled from a six-inch, stainless steel barrel.

  The plump missile drilled a neat round hole through the plate glass window, punched a larger one between Smitty’s shoulder blades, and opened a fist-size wound where it erupted from his shattered sternum. The “biggest doggone TV screen he had ever seen” was shattered into too many fragments to count.

  It is clear that the shooter is not your run-of-the-mill stalker-pervert. And we may safely rule out DEA agent; while initiative and spontaneity are valued in that U.S. government service—summary executions are not condoned. Not officially. Which narrows it down some.

  Cassandra’s hypnotic eyes looked through the camera, out of the television sets, into the souls of a hundred thousand viewers, more or less. Well, certainly one less.

  “He is dead.” She frowned, shook her head, appeared to address the deceased man’s loved ones from the depths of her heart: “I am so terribly sorry.”

  Fade to black.

  “Oh!” Sarah Frank said (more to herself than to Mr. Zig-Zag, more to her cat than to the wrinkled old woman). “How did Cassandra know about the shooting?”

  Unaware of her status as one notch below a spotted cat, Daisy Perika pointed out an indisputable factoid: “We don’t know that anybody got shot.”

  But they did, of course. Daisy knew and Sarah knew and thousands upon thousands of other viewers knew—Cassandra was never wrong.

  It would be reported on early-morning news broadcasts all over the state, then in newspapers, and by tomorrow evening the major television networks, radio talk shows, and Internet news sites would be buzzing with accounts of the Colorado woman’s amazingly accurate vision of a drive-by shooting at a truckers’ restaurant on the interstate. As the authorities conducted a thorough investigation, Cassandra would be questioned by the Huerfano County sheriff, Granite Creek Chief of Police Scott Parris, several state-police detectives, agents of the United States Department of Transportation, and an attorney representing the National Truckers Association. What they got out of the psychic, which wasn’t much, can be summed up by Cassandra’s remark to Parris: “I see what I see; it’s as simple as that.” Which was true. More or less. Well, less. There was nothing simple about it.

  Oh, by the way: The ratings on the quirky television program increased nine points following the lady’s uncanny, real-time vision of the trucker’s shooting. When Nicholas “Nicky” Moxon (Cassandra Spencer’s enthusiastic business manager) saw the numbers, he whistled, shook his shiny bald head. “This is dynamite, Cassie. Absolute dynamite.”

  Three

  Granite Creek, Colorado

  Since November, the unseasonable weather has confused man and beast alike. Following a hard winter, the approach of springtime has produced a series of balmy, shirtsleeve days suitable for roof repairs, softball games, and leisurely strolls in the park. Robins are afoot in search of earthworms. Bears have left cozy dens to break a winter-long fast. The chirp of the hungry chipmunk is heard in picnic grounds.

  On this Monday in mid-March, as the solar system’s gigantic thermonuclear furnace sinks to its nightly rest in the west, silent pools of twilight seep into valleys, a soothing coolness envelopes granite mountain, pine forest, the soon-to-be-sleeping town. For many, the pleasant end of a perfect day. But for one unsuspecting soul, the ultimate misfortune is only a few hours away.

  After the calamity, Cassandra Spencer, the eldest of the sisters, would declare to Nicholas Moxon that she had been caught quite off guard—such a violent event had not been “in the stars.” (Among her several esoteric pursuits, which include spirit photography and Persian numerology, the television psychic also dabbles in astrology.)

  Beatrice Spencer (by age, the middle sister) was more reserved than her psychic sibling, and kept a tight lip about an act of violence so utterly excessive as to be considered an obscenity.

  The third, and lastborn, of the Spencer sisters?

  Patience. Nothing shall be withheld. Momentarily, Astrid Spencer-Turner shall make her appearance—in a manner of speaking. The antithesis of that ideal child of yesteryear, Astrid will be heard but not seen. Listen for the telephone to ring.

  Brrriiiinnnng!

  The sound is made by the instrument that Andrew Turner usually carries in an inside jacket pocket. Usually. At the moment, which is late in the evening, the communications device is in his leather briefcase, which is in his hotel room, which
is on the fourth floor of the Brown Palace, which is where it has been since 1888—on Seventeenth Street in downtown Denver. As it happens, Mr. Turner, husband of Astrid Spencer-Turner, is not in his hotel room with his briefcase, wherein the telephone resides. He may be found in the Brown’s famous Palace Arms Restaurant. Having finished his lobster enchiladas, the diner has his attention focused on the dessert menu. Ah, so many delectable delicacies to titillate the tongue—but too little time to taste each one.

  This is why he does not hear his cell phone ring. Nine times.

  The agitated caller, Astrid Spencer-Turner, his wedded wife of barely one year, is in their home on the so-called Yellow Pines Ranch, which is situated approximately ten miles northwest of Granite Creek, Colorado. The family homestead is a five-hour-and-twenty-minute drive from downtown Denver, which is precisely how long it took Andrew Turner to get to the Brown Palace after he kissed his wife goodbye at 10:00 A.M. on the dot. Turner, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech (the clever fellow graduated in the top 10 percent of his class), is one of those types who does everything by the clock. Precision is his thing. Somewhere, there must be women who appreciate these qualities in a man. Astrid is not one of them. What she appreciates is a husband who remembers to keep his telephone in his pocket and turned on—and answers it when she calls.