“No,” she said immediately, surprising both Carlson and herself, too. “No, I don’t want the police involved. I can’t prove what happened and you heard me when I told you about it. I sounded like I was insane. I can’t go through that with the police only to find out that I really am just imagining things or that there really were people there but they’ve cleared out and the police won’t believe me. Just...just let it go. The only memories I want of New Orleans are these. You, and me, in this bed.”
He studied her for a long time, and then finally he nodded his agreement. “Very well. I will honor your wishes, but only so long as nothing else comes back into that pretty head of yours.”
His kiss on her forehead felt very, very nice.
So did his hand on her hip.
His leg slipping in between hers.
The gentle scratch of his chest hair against the tips of her breasts.
Everything.
Chapter 14
When the morning finally came, she felt much better. Carlson was gone when she stretched out a hesitant hand to his side of the bed. For a moment, she worried that she was lost, back in that nightmare or memory or whatever it had been.
He wasn’t there, but she was still in his bed. In his place was a letter that explained he had to go into the city for some errands. The note ended with an open invitation for her to come back. His bed would be empty without her, he said.
She smiled as she got up. That was the kind of man she needed in her life. Not that she expected this to turn into anything serious. There was always the possibility that Riley would come to his senses by the time she returned home to New England, too. For the moment this thing was nothing more than a fling. An amazing, exhausting, thrilling fling.
She felt like some breakfast. Of course, she was going to have to get dressed first. She found the dress that she’d come here in, cleaned and folded, in a drawer. Not exactly suited for a walk about New Orleans. Not unless there was a party of some sort at the end of that walk.
In the same drawer she found more clothes, just her size, just like the jeans and shirt he’d left for her yesterday. He really was amazing.
She selected out a pair of black khakis and a white tank top, and went for a shower. Before long, she was down on the street, and exploring again.
It still amazed her how many different kinds of shops there were along the street. Not just for the tourists, but for the locals as well. It was a chaotic riot of sounds and sights and brightly colored streamers everywhere. The people smiled at her and said hello, and it was like they could tell she was new here to the city and they wanted to greet her.
Katie found the idea of them being able to tell she was a tourist a little unsettling. At the same time, it was kind of nice not to know anyone, and have no one expect anything from you.
She passed by vendors selling fruit, and pieces of questionable meat on sticks, and t-shirts, and pieces of handmade jewelry. She checked out a pair of earrings from one vendor, set with some yellow crystal stone, but decided to pass on them. There was a silver ring, however, with a red and black banded stone in the middle, and it seemed to sparkle at her.
The man running the stand was tall, with deeply dark skin. When he smiled, two of his teeth were missing. “You like that one, pretty lady?” he said, his accent making her strain to understand him. “It look mighty pretty on your finger, I bet.”
She smiled at him. She didn’t want to appear too eager, or the price was sure to go up. It couldn’t hurt to look, though. “What is that stone? I don’t recognize it.”
“Very rare, this. Banded agate. This is used to repel the evil eye. It is protection from evil.”
Well, well. Voodoo superstition or not, Katie really felt like she needed some of that kind of protection. Other religions had their place, she supposed, even if it was just for fun--
When her fingers touched the silver band, she felt a snap, like an electric shock but a hundred times stronger.
She drew her finger back, sucking on it until the pain went away.
The vendor watched her closely, his eyes showing white all around. “Something wrong?”
“No. No, just...” Katie wasn’t sure. “Just not the ring for me, I guess.”
After a moment, the guy laughed. “Ha! Yes. This stone burns away the evil eye. Blasts it away with powerful magic. Too much for you, I think. Here. Try this one, pretty lady.”
He picked another ring up, with a simpler copper band, with a single round black stone in the setting. It was pretty, in its own way. Hesitantly, Katie let him drop it into her palm.
Nothing happened this time. It was just a ring.
“Onyx,” he explained to her. “Very valuable in its own right, but also protects from the evil eye when cut in circles, or domes. This will help you.”
Katie looked up at him. “Help me? Help me with what?”
He waved a hand in front of her face. “There is an aura around you. Something bad has happened. Those of us with the second sight can see these things. I see it in you.”
Katie didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t know about what she had gone through in the basement of that house. She didn’t even know all of it, apparently, if last night’s dream was any indication. He couldn’t know. Maybe there was something of it still written across her face. That was how street psychics reeled you in, after all. They made good guesses based on what they saw in your demeanor.
Well. It was still fun to pretend that magic was real. Besides, who couldn’t use a little protection from bad things in their life?
“How much is the ring?” she asked.
When they had settled on a price she walked away, whistling some random tune that came into her head. It mixed with the sound of music all around, bands on street corners and people on front apartment steps and just the general sounds of the city. With the ring on her finger, she felt better about things. As if she were wearing a wooden cross blessed by a monk, or something like that.
In her back pocket, her cellphone rang.
“Hi,” Carlson said to her. “Wow, it’s loud there. Where are you?”
“On Avenue L’Orange, I think.” Katie had kind of lost track. She was starting to get the hang of the street layout and was pretty sure she could make it back to the club under Carlson’s apartment, but as far as what street she was standing on, that was a little iffy. “Did you get your errands done?”
“Yup. All set with those. I was wondering if you had plans for supper?”
“Nope. I was just wandering around, looking for things to do. I did have this really great offer to spend the night at a guy’s house, though.”
“Oh? Well, sounds like I should be jealous.”
“After seeing you naked, I don’t think you have a reason to be jealous of anyone.”
“Wait until you see what I can do with shrimp gumbo.”
“Oh? Are you going to cook for me?”
“Of course. How can I let you get away without showing you how handy I am in the kitchen?”
The man certainly did know how to woo a lady. If he was even half as good with a frying pan as he was between the sheets--or over the sheets, or in the shower, or on the floor--then she knew she was in for a treat. He made her promise to be back to his apartment by six, and she told him that wasn’t going to be a problem.
She wasn’t about to get into any more trouble in New Orleans. She was just a tourist, and this city was here to entertain her.
Chapter 15
Sometime in the afternoon, she really had gotten lost. All of the streets seemed to have been funneling her towards this one here, where things were quiet, and nobody smiled. Nobody waved hello. Instead of the bright colors everywhere else in the city, here things were all a drab gray, a dusty black. Business signs swung on rusty chains over doorways. It was all kind of creepy, actually.
She found herself twisting that onyx ring around her finger. It gave her a sense of comfort to know it was there.
There was nothing here tha
t caught her interest. She hastened her steps, wanting off this street. The real New Orleans was waiting for her. Somewhere.
Then she went past a building with no windows and a round sign, hand painted, with an eyeball staring down at her. The words Mystic Sight were written around it. It was a fortune teller’s shop. A real, live New Orleans fortune teller.
Katie decided to go in. Why not? She was here to explore all that the city had to offer. Magic was part of the city’s soul.
She pushed her way through the front door, and into a room dressed with tasseled rugs on the walls, and a beaded chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling. In the center of the room was a round table, with two chairs situated on either side.
In the middle was a red candle, already burning.
At the back, the curtains on the wall parted to let a woman in a heavy purple dress through. “Greetings,” she told Katie. “I know you would be coming to see me. I am Madam Parlander.”
Katie smirked, thinking that the security camera up in the corner of the room probably had more to do with this woman ‘expecting’ Katie to be here than any sort of mystical ability. She had dark hair piled up high on her head and dangly earrings in both ears. A mole stood out darkly on one pale cheek.
Her eyes seemed to reach across the room to pull Katie forward to the table. She sat down, and waited for Madam Parlander to settle her skirts under her as she sat down too. From somewhere, the woman produced a simple deck of Bicycle playing cards.
Taking them from the deck, Madam Parlander shuffled them, and folded them together, and shuffled them again. “Now, the first thing you need to know is that I’m not a full blooded Manbo. That’s a holy lady in the Voodoo religion. Not to be confused with a mambo. That be a dance.”
She chuckled softly at her joke, and then collected the cards together in her hands.
“You don’t use Tarot cards?” Katie asked her. “I thought that was standard in fortune telling.”
Madam Parlander eyed her with a knowing gaze. “Next thing we need to clear up. Tarot is for witchcraft. Voodoo is a real religion. We use the simple things in life to give us answers we need. I’m going to call on the loa to guide my hand, and these simple fifty-two cards are going to tell you what your fate is.”
Katie sat up straighter in her chair. “Loa? You said you call on the loa?”
“Oh, yes. The spirits help those who call on them. They be just like the angels and demons you see in church. Some of them be good. Some of them be bad. All of them got secrets to tell.”
“Yes. That’s what I want you to do.” Katie remembered that word from the chanting in the basement. Whatever had happened to her there, maybe she would get some answers here after all. Real or imagined, she needed to know. Either that, or she just had to put it all aside and forget about it.
Forget. Just forget about it...
She snapped her head back up with a little shake. For a moment there she thought she was going to fall asleep right here at Madam Parlander’s table. That wasn’t like her. Carlson must’ve really worn her out. She didn’t want to forget about any of this. She wanted to get answers.
“How do the loa work?” she asked. “I mean, do they just guide you? Can they do anything more?”
The woman’s dark hair wobbled as she nodded her head. “Oh, certainly they can. They can influence us. Good or bad. Got spirits for all sorts of things in the world. You think maybe you seen one of these spirits here in New Orleans?”
Forget about it, she was telling herself. Just forget about it.
She found herself spinning the onyx ring on her finger, and made herself stop.
“What does a reading cost?” she asked, pushing everything out of her mind.
“It be twenty dollars for the reading. Thirty, if you want me to cast the cowrie shells. If you need cleansing, well that be another twenty but we’ll get to that bit after the reading. You ready, then?”
Katie knew the tactics of high-pressure salespeople like fortune tellers. She dealt with much the same thing in the world of home renovations and contractors who wanted her to buy the most expensive materials because it represented an upsell for them. No way was she paying for a cleansing. She only wanted the reading, and to see what else Madam Parlander could tell her about loa.
She took out a twenty dollar bill from her wallet and slid it across the table. It was quickly snatched up and slid into whatever pocket space the deck of cards had come from.
Then the cards were dealt.
They went down on the table, face up, in a pattern that was impossible for her to discern.
In the middle of the cards was one placed face down.
Madam Parlander waved her hand over the cards. Her lips were moving as she mumbled something.
Then her hand stopped over the unturned card.
“The loa,” she said, eyes closed, body rigid, “they say you are hurting. They say you had an emptiness in you but it has been filled by something disagreeable.”
Katie wasn’t sure she heard that correctly. “Disagreeable?”
“That is what the loa say. Yes. The say--”
She stopped talking. Her hand began trembling.
Without looking, she dropped her hand to that unturned card. Her fingers found the edge, and turned the card over.
Her fingers felt over the king of spades.
When she did, she jumped up from her chair, her purple skirt swirling. There was panic on her face. Her gaze focused on Katie with fierce intensity.
“What is it?” Katie asked. “What did you see?”
Mama Parlander finally looked away as she began quickly scooping the cards up from the table. “You must go now. Yes. The reading is over. The loa say you will be fine. Yes. You will be fine but you need to go. Now.”
“But you saw something.”
“Not always. We don’t always say anything. I mean, see anything.” She scooped up more cards, sending some of them flying off the table. “We don’t always see anything. You will be fine. You must go.”
“I paid you for a reading, Mama Parlander. You can’t just throw me out.”
Katie’s twenty dollar bill came out again and was promptly thrown in her face.
“There is your money back. Now. You go. Goodbye. Saints preserve you. Goodbye.”
Just like that, she went back through the curtain of the hanging rugs. Katie followed after her, knowing without a doubt that there was something more Mama Parlander wanted to say. There was something stopping her. Katie wanted to know what was going on here.
She pushed aside the curtain, and found a solid wall.
“What the hell?” She put her hand against the wall, felt across it, and found the seam of the door Mama Parlander had used to make her entrance and exit. From this side, there were no hinges. No doorknob. No way for her to follow the fortune teller.
“Well. That’s just great.”
With no other choice, Katie turned to leave. Passing by the table, she saw a single card on the floor that Mama Parlander had missed. She bent down and picked it up.
The joker. He was wearing a floppy crown and carrying a short scepter with his own head as the topper.
It was a funny little card. A little bit of humor that she could carry with her.
Sticking it in her back pocket, she walked back out into the afternoon sunlight.
Chapter 16
Dinner was amazing.
Carlson was just as good of a cook as he promised. The food was spicy and sweet. There was bread, too, that Carlson had made from scratch. Katie’s taste buds were in Heaven.
After the plates had been cleared, he brought out slices of pecan pie for both of them, as well as a nice bottle of Chablis to pair it with. They sat very close together and just talked for a while. It was nice, this sort of intimacy.
“So,” he said to her. “Tell me what you were up to today.”
“I just wandered around, mostly. I have a feeling there’s parts of New Orleans that I haven’t even seen yet.”
“Well, you know what they say.” He smiled, and waved around a bite of the pie on his fork. “You haven’t lived, until you’ve lived in New Orleans.”
Katie stopped with her own fork in her mouth, the pie sweet against her tongue. Then she swallowed, and set her dessert aside. “That’s exactly what Xavier said.”
Carlson kept at his pie, bit by bit. “You can’t keep letting him get to you,” he said with a smile that was meant to be heartening. “I always thought him a friend. I’ve known him half my life. Now I have to rethink all of that, ma chere, but you don’t see me sitting and thinking on it over and over, no?”
She hadn’t looked at it that way. Something had happened to her down there in that basement. Something unpleasant, whether it was real or imagined. If it was ghosts, or real people who put her through something, or whatever, she would have to live with that. But, she would get to leave New Orleans soon. Carlson had to stay here and deal with it.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I thought I’d put it all behind me last night but then I went to see a fortune teller today and she kind of brought it all back up again for me.”
His fork clattered onto his empty plate. He had finished the dessert with a gusto that she found oddly attractive, and now he was turning that intensity on her. “You saw a fortune teller? To get your palm read?”
“Cards, actually. She used playing cards. I didn’t realize they did that here.”
An odd look crossed his face, and he took her hands in his. “It disturbed you, what this fortune teller saw?”
“Not so much what she saw.” Katie found it hard to explain exactly what had happened. “More like what she wouldn’t tell me. When she was reading the cards she was talking about loa, and about there being a space inside of me that got filled up, and that was just so much like my dreams...or memories...or whatever I’m experiencing that I wanted to learn more but then she touched the card in the middle and she told me the reading was over and basically threw me out of her shop. She even gave me my money back.”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 88
