by J A Whiting
Claire and Tony returned the greeting and while the man settled into one of the chairs, Tony hurried to the beverage counter to pour a cup of coffee for the judge. Augustus Gunther was the only person that Tony waited on, everyone else helped themselves.
Claire sat with Augustus, and Bear and Lady came to lie down at his feet. Topics of conversation touched on world events, books, documentaries, politics, and whatever was happening in the city. Augustus had recently picked up the hobby of baking and he enjoyed picking Claire’s brain about recipes and why something he’d done did not turn out quite right.
“You’ve heard the news?” Augustus looked pointedly at Claire and held his coffee mug up to his lips.
Claire nodded. “About the two shootings?”
“I mean the latest trouble.”
Bear stood up and edged closer to the man’s chair so that Augustus would pat his head.
Tony came over to the table. “What latest trouble?”
Claire held her breath and waited to hear what had happened.
“A woman was found in the Public Garden.” Augustus’s light blue eyes looked from Claire to Tony.
“What do you mean, Gus?” Tony was the only one who called the judge, Gus.
“A passerby found a woman facedown in the Swan Boat pond.”
“When?” Claire couldn’t hide her shudder.
“This morning around 5am.”
“Dead?” Tony scowled.
Augustus raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”
A barrage of questions ensued and the judge answered them with what he knew from the news reports. “The authorities believe the woman to be in her sixties. Dead, cause of death is unknown at this time.”
Tony made eye contact with Claire. “At least it doesn’t have anything to do with the recent shootings.”
Claire’s stomach felt queasy. She wasn’t so sure it didn’t.
10
Claire and Nicole stepped off the bus into Harvard Square in Cambridge and made their way around tourists and students to a house off of Brattle Street where the Tarot card woman lived. Walking past restaurants and shops, they began to enter a more residential area of the street which was lined with large Colonial homes fronted by green lawns and flower beds overflowing with blooms. On their right, the young women walked by the former home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow an American poet who lived in the house for nearly fifty years. From the summer of 1775 until April of 1776, General George Washington used that home as his headquarters during part of the American Revolution. The massive yellow house was built in 1759 in the mid-Georgian style and had white trim and black shutters and was now an historic landmark open to the public for tours.
Claire and Nicole turned onto the street they were looking for and found the home they wanted standing two houses from the corner.
Claire looked up at the large Victorian and swallowed hard before walking up the steps to the front porch where she rang the bell with a shaking hand. “I feel like running away.”
Nicole put her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay. It will be helpful.”
The front door opened and Tessa Wilcox, the Tarot card lady, stood before them with a welcoming smile. “Hello again. It’s nice to see you both.” Gesturing to the right of the foyer, she led the girls into a beautiful parlor where they settled onto a deep green, velvet carved-back sofa. The room was lined with cherrywood bookshelves and a side table with a large cut-glass vase full of flowers stood in front of a window with yellow drapes hanging on each side. A small rectangular coffee table sat on an antique carpet woven of muted rose and green colored fibers. There was a silver tray in the middle of the table with a carafe of ice water and three glass goblets next to a plate of sugar cookies.
Tessa sat in a comfortable high-backed chair across from the girls. “Please, help yourself.” Looking from Claire to Nicole, the woman asked, “What brings you to me today? A reading? Some questions?”
Claire and Nicole exchanged looks.
“I have a few things I’d like to ask.” Claire’s voice sounded raspy and she cleared her throat and poured some water into a glass so that she could sip.
“I thought you might.” Tessa nodded. Her eyes were friendly and warm. “What would you like to know?”
Letting out a sigh, Claire said, “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Nicole sat at the edge of the seat. “Claire has recently had some experiences where when she touches someone she gets a feeling from them. She sensed that we were in danger the other night and her actions saved the two of us from injury.”
The young women took turns relaying the tales of the shooter passing by the Old South Meeting House and the man who approached Merritt Handley at the office building with a gun in his hand.
“I sense that you’ve always had strong intuition about things. Is that correct?” Tessa asked.
Claire nodded. “I never paid much attention to it until recently when my feelings have become stronger. Thinking back on the past, I can see now that there were certain times when I had a sensation or knew something that others didn’t. But I don’t understand why this is happening. I’m thirty-five years old. Why is this, whatever it is, suddenly becoming stronger?” Claire’s eyes glistened with emotion and she blinked hard several times.
“Have you had a recent injury?” Tessa looked squarely at Claire who shook her head. “Have you lost consciousness recently, however briefly?”
Again Claire shook her head.
“Have you suffered an emotional upset?”
Claire froze. “My husband passed away a year and half ago.”
“Ah. I’m very sorry for your loss.” Tessa gave a slight nod. “Sometimes a person’s abilities increase after an emotional upheaval. Other times, a person who has abilities lose those skills after an emotional or stressful event. Why this happens, no one really knows. After the loss of your husband, did you notice premonitions or sensations becoming stronger?”
Claire’s eyes narrowed as she considered the question. Squeezing her hands together in her lap, she said, “I think you’re right. I thought the heightened feelings were due to my grief. I dismissed many of my feelings as nonsense, attributing them to my being in such an emotional state.”
“Tell me about the things you feel.” Tessa relaxed against the sofa.
Claire explained how, at times, she felt that something bad was going to happen, and at other times, she had premonitions about good things coming. “Sometimes when I hold a person’s hand, I can pick up a little bit about them, like I felt a colleague’s nervousness and knew he had an important audition coming up.” Claire made eye contact with Nicole. “I felt that Nicole might be harmed when we went out together the other night. Yesterday, I felt danger when I held the hand of the woman who was shot at outside the Jasper Building. Once on Nantucket, I sensed that an antique woven basket that was on display in a museum had been made right there on the island by a Wampanoag Native American hundreds of years ago. It hasn’t been proven, but I believe that I’m right about it.” Claire glanced out the window thinking about the past sensations.
Tessa spoke. “There are things that float on the air unseen.”
Claire turned her eyes to the woman.
“The unseen things are almost like electric currents or areas of high and low pressure. We don’t see those things, but they’re there. Some people feel the currents of information and are able to extract details from them.”
“Huh,” Nicole said. “That’s an interesting way to think about Claire’s skills. It makes it less weird.”
Claire gave her friend a scowl.
Tessa added, “The current stretches forward and backward, into the future and back into the past. Each person who has these skills, we might call them a seer or intuit, seems to have a certain distance available to him or her. For instance, I have a friend who is able to see decades into the past, but another person I know is only able to look back a few days into the past.”
Claire aske
d, “Can I control it so I don’t feel anything if I don’t want to? If I touch someone, I might not want to know about bad things because, really, what would I say? Oh, by the way, tomorrow you’ll be hit by a bus. How could I ever explain such a thing?”
Tessa smiled. “I understand. I can teach you some ways to block it. One way is to hold your breath and push down slightly into your chest. Sort of bear down. It will take practice, but you’ll be able to keep sensations at bay whenever you don’t want to look into the invisible current.”
A look of relief washed over Claire’s face. She wanted to be able to control this skill, not have it control her, and hearing that there were ways to prevent the thoughts and sensations from popping into her head comforted her.
Tessa told her guests about people she knew with many different kinds of skills and Claire and Nicole sat listening, enthralled, for over an hour. Tessa checked the time. “I have a client arriving in a few minutes. I’d be happy to have you both return again if there are other questions or concerns that come up later.” She smiled kindly at Claire and winked. “Practice your control and later, there are other things that I can teach you that might prove helpful.”
When they reached the front porch, Claire wrestled with a question that she’d wanted to ask. As Nicole walked down the steps, Claire turned around and whispered, “The woman who was found dead in the Public Garden this morning. Is she linked to the shootings?”
Tessa held Claire’s eyes. “Some things you have to find out on your own.”
“Did you ask her?” Nicole walked briskly along side Claire. “Did you ask her about the dead woman found this morning?”
Claire told Nicole how Tessa replied when asked about the dead person in the Public Garden and whether she might be connected to the shootings.
“She said you need to figure it out on your own?” Nicole frowned. “For Pete’s sake. That isn’t helpful. Wouldn’t it be in everyone’s best interests to tell if the incidents are linked?”
“Maybe she doesn’t know.”
“I didn’t think of that.” Nicole pushed her hair over her shoulder. “I thought this invisible current-thing that Tessa talked about seemed like a book that people like you could take a look at, but maybe some chapters are closed. Maybe you people can only read certain chapters.”
“Please don’t refer to me as you people.” Claire shuddered. “It’s like I’m in some sort of strange club.”
Nicole raised an eyebrow and gave Claire a look. “Well….”
Claire let out a groan. After a few minutes of walking, Claire said, “Talking to Tessa made me feel better about this … skill. Maybe I’ll be able to control it so I can’t feel anything if I don’t want to. Maybe I can eventually use it to help people. I need to figure it all out.”
“Did your mother have this intuition?” Nicole asked.
Stopping short, Claire stared at her friend and said slowly, “I don’t know.”
“Your mother might have had it, but might not have understood it. Maybe it frightened her, so she didn’t say a word.”
Although Claire missed her mom every day, this was one of the moments when she longed for her mother and wished that she was still alive. Did she have intuition? Did I inherit it from her?
The young women started walking again and Nicole asked, “What about your father?”
“I didn’t know him.” Claire’s voice was brusque and she stared straight ahead.
“Grandparents?”
“They died before I was born.”
“Any siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles you could ask about it?”
“There isn’t anyone. I’m alone.”
Nicole bumped her elbow against Claire’s arm and smiled at her. “No. You’re not.”
11
The woman who had been shot outside the Jasper Building was identified in news reports the next morning as Siobhan Ellis, thirty-six, a paralegal who worked at the same firm as Merritt Handley. Despite having been shot in the upper right chest, Siobhan’s condition had been upgraded and she was now allowed visitors. Claire had decided to make a detour to the hospital after work. She didn’t know why she kept it to herself, but she didn’t share her intentions with anyone else.
Picking up a floral arrangement in the hospital gift shop, Claire took the elevator to the fourth floor and found Siobhan’s room at the end of the corridor.
The trim-looking woman had shoulder-length auburn hair and was sitting up in bed looking out the window. Her right arm was in a sling. She turned her head when she saw Claire coming into the room, noticed the flowers, and nodded to the empty bed next to hers assuming Claire had come to visit the person who had occupied the room with her. “Eliza was discharged this morning.”
Claire looked confused for a second and then said, “Oh, I came to see you.”
Now it was Siobhan’s turn to look confused. “Have we met?”
Claire placed the flowers on the side table and gestured to the chair next to the bed. “May I?” Claire sat. “We haven’t met. I hope you don’t mind that I came by to see how you’re feeling. My friend and I were in the line of fire the night before the shooter showed up at the Jasper Building yesterday. We were near the Old South Meeting House when a car drove by and shot at us as we stood on the sidewalk. I hope you’re okay. I was worried when I heard what happened and since we were both caught up in similar situations, I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and wishing you well.”
“That’s very nice.” Siobhan smiled. “I guess you’re better at ducking than I am.”
Claire returned the smile and introduced herself. She asked how the woman was doing and Siobhan gave her an account of her injuries and her prognosis. “The bullet missed everything important, thank heavens. It hurts like heck though.” Narrowing her eyes, she said, “You heard about the dead woman they found in the Public Garden? You think it’s connected to the person who shot at us?”
“It seems quite the coincidence, doesn’t it?” Claire frowned. “Three shootings, three days in a row?”
“I’m suspicious.” Siobhan leaned her head back against the pillow. “The detective said I probably wasn’t the target, so at least I don’t have to be looking over my shoulder once I get out of here.”
“Did he tell you who he thinks the target is?”
“He didn’t want to say, but since Merritt Handley was standing right near me, I’d venture a guess that she might be the one.”
Claire nodded. “I’d bet the same thing since Merritt was near me and my friend the night of the shooting. You and Merritt work at the same firm. Do you have any idea why someone might be trying to kill her?”
Siobhan’s face clouded. “There are probably lots of reasons.”
That wasn’t what Claire expected to hear. “Why? Because of the cases she’s worked on?”
Siobhan sighed. “That, yes, and because she can be difficult. She isn’t a team player. She only looks out for herself. She’s cutthroat. She’d run over her own mother to get to the top. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if people were waiting in line to take Merritt Handley down.”
“Does she get along with anyone in the firm?”
Cocking her head and raising an eyebrow, Siobhan said, “The partners.”
“How do you feel about her?” Claire wondered if Merritt was only in competition with the other lawyers and treated the office staff differently.
“She isn’t pleasant with anyone. She doesn’t make small talk. She’s demanding and rude to the paralegals and the office staff. People would prefer to avoid her.” Siobhan shifted against the pillows. “A person can progress in a career without being awful to colleagues. One of the lawyers, her daughter got sick at school and she asked Merritt to cover for her for an hour. Merritt told one of the partners that the woman left without asking anyone to cover. She went on to say that she had reservations about the woman’s dedication to the firm. She planted seeds of doubt about the woman in the partner’s mind. That’s what she is li
ke. Subtle things, but consistent little things add up. There isn’t any reason to do that. None at all.”
“But are those things enough to make someone want to kill her?” Claire couldn’t believe that someone would risk all they had to commit murder against a conniving colleague.
Siobhan shrugged. “People can get pushed beyond reason.”
“Is there someone you think might be responsible for the shootings?”
“I have no idea.” Siobhan shook her head. “I really hope it isn’t someone I work with. God.”
“What about her cases?” Claire asked. “Could someone be so angry about a law case that Merritt handled that they might want her dead?”
“It’s law.” Siobhan’s face was serious. “Legal decisions can infuriate people.”
“Did you get a look at the shooter?”
Siobhan’s face lost its color and she looked across the room at nothing. Claire didn’t think she was going to reply, but then she said in a voice just above a whisper, “Something about him seemed familiar. What it was, I don’t know. The whole thing took a few milliseconds. I was running out for a quick errand to the pharmacy to pick up something for one of the partners. I hurried through the lobby and pushed through the glass doors.” Siobhan hesitated. “It seemed like everything slowed, like things were in slow motion. I barely noticed Merritt. We didn’t say anything to each other. She had a look on her face, like something was terribly wrong. I stepped past her just as I noticed her expression.” Siobhan sucked in a deep breath and winced from the pain in her chest. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. The gunman had his hand up. He was holding the gun.” A shudder ran through the woman on the bed. “I whirled. I heard the roar of the gun being fired. That’s all I remember. I woke up here, in the hospital.”
