by Kate Aeon
“Why don’t you let me tell you?” Phoebe suggested. “And maybe when you watch his reading, you’ll decide that you want to take another look at one about Chick, or about you. It’s not a spooky thing. Really.”
As she picked up her card bags, he stood and gave her a quick hug. “Not to you. But honestly, I’d love to see you do a cold reading of Brig. I know him pretty well, so I can tell if you’re on with him or not. And if it’s about him, it won’t be spooky for me.” He grinned a little. “In some regards, I’m a big chicken.” He headed out toward his kitchen table, then looked back over his shoulder. “And this way I can pass on anything cool that you get to him and see what he has to say.”
That impish grin took her breath away. “I can do that,” she said, thinking there were other things she’d really rather be doing.
She sat at his very sturdy dining room table and shuffled her Universal Waite cards. Seven times — always seven. Closed her eyes, feeling the cool cardboard slide against her skin, familiar as the air she breathed after so many years.
She put the deck on the table facedown, cut the cards into three decks, and with her left hand chose the deck from which she would read.
She started putting down the cards, looking at them as they fell.
“He’s alone right now, afraid to take chances, afraid to be made a fool of. Fool, reversed — Significator. Ick. He has some very hard feelings about that. His life at the moment is all about turmoil and change — the Tower, upright — stuff just crashing all around him so that he doesn’t know which way is up, where the ground is under his feet, or what is going to fall on his head next.” She put down the next card — Queen of Diamonds, reversed. “His obstacle is a woman. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that she’s young, pretty, confident, and money-grubbing. Has he been through a divorce recently?”
“Shit,” Alan said. “His wife walked out on him a couple of months ago and currently is trying to take him for all he’s worth. How the hell did you get that from the cards?”
Phoebe shrugged. She kept reading, but suddenly the tenor of the reading changed.
“I’m not reading for Brig anymore,” she said, feeling a chill run down her spine. “But this is something that is going to mean something to him.” She looked at the cards and started to feel scared.
“Alan — this is really bad. Write this down for me as I tell you what I’m getting here, will you?”
He said, “Hold on. I’ll get paper and pen.”
When he came back she started right in. “In his recent past, there is someone that Brig knows or is looking for. A pretty girl. Dark hair. Teenager, I think — definitely a young woman not yet in bloom. I think she’s... dead. Murdered.”
She was putting out cards, staring at them as they dropped into place. “Her father is responsible. He was...” She dragged out the round Motherpeace deck, because she’d been using the Universal Waite for Brig. “Hang on.”
Alan said, “I’m writing, I’m writing.”
The Ten of Swords popped up, and Phoebe felt her stomach flip. The image was one of her least favorite in the entire deck. Women holding swords and jumping off a cliff — committing mass suicide. Men behind pursuing, intent on— “He was raping her,” Phoebe whispered.
“What?”
She tried again, managed to say it a little louder. “He was raping her.”
“The father?”
“Yes.”
Then the image of the father, the Patriarch, the one in charge. In control. “He’s done a very good job of pretending he had nothing to do with this, and Brig may even like him. May think highly of him. Think he’s respectable, upstanding.” All the signs were there.
And in the back of Phoebe’s mind, two pictures, one after the other. A diary, hidden away. And a shiny silver locker.
She closed her eyes, trying to bring the images closer, to get more detail, but nothing was coming. “There’s a diary or a journal or a notebook involved in this — probably the girl’s, probably with incriminating evidence in it. It’s hidden, not destroyed. And I think... I think lockers are involved. Shiny. Silver. Like school lockers, except — this sounds silly — except chrome. They’re essential. Brig has to know about the lockers.”
She looked up to see Alan frowning at her. “Lockers?”
“I don’t know why. That was the image I got. Sometimes when I’m reading cards, I get pictures, too. Not often, usually not very clear. But when I get them, I’ve learned to make note of them. I saw two pictures — one of a diary with a lock hidden in a dark place. And the second, one big locker in a row of shiny silver lockers.”
“And you don’t know what the locker picture could be about?”
“No. But it’s important.”
Alan sighed. “The reading you had on him was dead-on. But you know the odds are that Brig is going to look at this and shake his head and think you’re nuts.”
“I know that. But it might mean something to him, and I don’t want to not tell him. I have a high tolerance for scorn — and if I’m right on this, it’s something important to him. So I’ll take my chances.”
He shrugged. “We’ll give this to him the next time we see him, then.” He looked around the townhouse. “Do you want to stay here? Or go out to eat or something?”
“I want to sleep. Could we do that?”
“I don’t know that I can. I’m sort of wound up from everything today.” He reached over and took her hand and held it in his. “Some of it has been absolutely amazing.”
Amazing. Yes. That would pretty much sum up the doctors’ lounge. Everything before that — tense and frightening. Just about everything after that — tense and frightening. But that short time with Alan had been miraculous. And all Phoebe could think was that she wanted more.
“You wouldn’t by any chance still have a few of those condoms with you, would you?”
She loved the expression of hope mixed with lust that crossed his face. He replied by pulling several out of his pocket and spreading them across the table.
“Red this time?” she asked, pointing to one.
“I’ve always thought red was a fun color,” he told her. He kissed her, scooped her into his arms, and carried her into his bedroom.
Chapter Nineteen
Alan woke feeling remarkably good and wonderfully sated. His muscles were sore in interesting places, and he had a lovely woman dressed in nothing but one of his T-shirts curled tightly against his chest. When he closed his eyes, he could see her again — sitting astride him, wearing that enormous blue T-shirt, her dark hair curling and tumbling forward, brown eyes gleaming, white teeth flashing as she laughed. Then, of course, the T-shirt had come off for a while, and that was good, too.
He glanced over at his bedside table and saw that the message light on the phone was blinking. He’d turned off the ringer. He had remembered to set his alarm, but he was awake a good hour before that was due to go off. He was happy.
Holy hell, he was happy.
He would have thought he could never feel so good again.
He got up, brushed his teeth, and then, so he wouldn’t wake Phoebe, went out and took the message from the phone by the couch.
It was Brig, tense and frustrated, saying, “Call me the second you get this.”
Alan tried the station, and the switchboard put him through to Brig, who was less than enthusiastic to hear from him. “Where have you been?”
“Sleeping.”
“You’re a doctor. People are supposed to be able to reach you.”
“I’m an ER doctor. I work regular hours and get to turn off my phone when I’m not on duty or on call.”
“Must be nice,” Brig snarled.
“It is,” Alan said. “What’s the matter, Brig?”
“Phoebe with you?”
“No, but I can get her.”
“Don’t. I don’t want you anywhere near her right now. I want you to sit down, and listen, and don’t move until we’ve gone over everything. All
right?”
Alan said, “I don’t—”
“Friend to friend, Alan — just do this. All right?”
Alan sat, staring through the front window at clouds scudding by too quickly, at palms bending toward the west, and at the occasional bit of paper soaring past the window from the dumpster east of his place. “Fine. I’m sitting.”
“The guys found something in Phoebe’s townhouse that changes the situation. It explains what’s going on over there. They called me as soon as they found it, and I’ve spent the last God-only-knows-how-many hours double-checking everything. This is... bad.”
“What did you find?”
Alan heard Brig take a deep, slow breath. “I’m sorry that I have to tell you this, Alan.”
“What did you find?”
“A detective’s report, stashed in an envelope in a blue shoe box at the back of her closet. It’s all about you. Phoebe obtained it a few days ago — it’s very complete. Has details about your wife and daughter, your position at the hospital, your financial status, credit history, current friendships, lack of sexual involvement with anyone. Just about anything a woman looking for a sugar daddy would want to know.”
“No,” Alan said.
“That’s not all.”
“No,” Alan said again. “She’s for real, Brig. I know she is.”
“Just hear me out,” Brig said. “And don’t move. Don’t confront her with this. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Alan had no words. He sat there, fists clenched, eyes tightly closed, breathing around the lump in his throat. And Brig said, “I’ve been calling and pulling records all night. What I have is still sketchy, but Phoebe was arrested in Ohio when she was nineteen years old. Some sort of confidence game charges, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, attempted fraud — I don’t have all the details yet. The case was eventually dismissed, but not before she got herself a lawyer. A young guy named Michael Schaeffer, who already had a reputation for being pretty slick.”
Alan said, “It’s some sort of mistake.” A chill spread through him. This was going to end with a fucking Scooby-Doo moment, when Chick was revealed to be nothing but a projected image on his wall, when the cops were going to pull the mask off Phoebe’s “stalker” and he was going to be her husband or her brother or some very close friend of hers who was good with electronics and who was helping her for a cut of whatever Alan had socked away. When Phoebe in handcuffs turned to him and said, “We would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you and your friend Brig.”
“I double-checked this before I called you because I didn’t want to find out that Phoebe was named after her mother and her mother was the one arrested. I didn’t want to screw up.”
Alan sat, not moving, while the old hell became the new hell. While the tendrils of new life inside him — tendrils that sprang from the hope that Chick was safe somewhere and from dreams of a woman who might love him for himself — withered and blackened.
“Alan? Are you still there?”
He swallowed hard. “Yeah.”
“Has she taken you for any money, Alan?”
“No.”
“Any chance you got her pregnant?”
Condoms, he thought. He’d trusted condoms. Idiot. “Always a chance, isn’t there?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re going to walk away from this, Alan, and you’re going to be fine. She isn’t going to get anything out of you.”
She already had, he thought. She stole my heart. She let me think she was special. She let me be happy. “I... let myself trust her,” he said at last. “I guess I shouldn’t have.”
“Definitely not. Every single thing that has gone on over there can be easily explained if she’s involved. The dead rose on her chest when she wakes up, the roses on the table, the mug that moves. None of it happens, but she says it does, and for some reason that I cannot for the life of me figure out you buy into it hook, line, and sinker. To the best of my knowledge, you’ve never been a big believer in the supernatural. Or if you have been, you’ve sure as hell hidden it from me.”
Alan said, “There are some things I didn’t tell you.”
“You mentioned that this morning.”
“I saw my daughter.”
The silence on the other end of the phone stretched out for what seemed like forever. “Your little girl who was killed in a car crash?”
“Yes.”
“When? And how?”
“I was sitting at my desk and suddenly the window in my office seemed to lead to someplace else. I stood up and it was open, but I hadn’t opened it, and it was raining outside, and my daughter was standing in our backyard in Kentucky looking up at me. I almost went out the window after her.” He stopped, feeling again the breathless impossible wonder of seeing Chick alive, whole, and the frantic urge to get her back. “And then she was gone.”
“Okay — think hard about this now. By any chance did Ms. Rain give you anything to eat or drink before you saw this hallucination?”
“I’d just run into Phoebe for the first time at that point,” Alan said. “I didn’t even know her name. In fact, it was after I saw Chick that Phoebe came over to the house and told me that my daughter had told her to come meet me.”
“Really?” Another long pause. “What the fuck... that doesn’t make any sense, unless...” And a sigh. “We’re going to have to come over and do a sweep of your place, too. See if your drinks have been drugged, too, or if her partner in this has access to your place.”
“Drugged too?”
“The lab found enough scopolamine in Ms. Rain’s tea water to knock over an ox.”
It was like being hit on the forehead by a solid steel door. “Scopolamine? Shit! Dry mouth, hallucinations, bounding pulse, enlarged pupils slow to respond, rapid breathing, nausea. Dammit, that’s what was wrong with her.”
“Alan, you’re not making a lot of sense.”
“When I heard Phoebe screaming and ran over to her house, she was in bad shape. I told you about that. I checked her and the house for drugs, couldn’t find any. She didn’t have any track marks or other signs of addiction, and she insisted that she didn’t do drugs.”
“You really think that she took this scopolamine? We’d figured it was in there to make us think that someone was drugging her.”
“She must have taken it. Too much of it, at that. Some of her symptoms couldn’t be faked.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Maybe for the hallucinations. Maybe it makes reading the cards easier.” Alan closed his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe to make her story that much more real. But I do know that I didn’t have any of it. And... Chick...”
“It was some sort of trick, Alan. But we’ll go over your place with a microscope, and whatever she did to you, we’ll find it.” He said, “I talked to her ex’s parents. They’re pretty distraught right now, of course, since their son just died and they have the funeral to get through yet. But they had plenty to say about Phoebe Rain. They said she had her hooks in Michael Schaeffer from the moment he took her case. That she was charged with doing phony tarot readings and had pulled some little kid into her con game to help her as a shill. That she was guilty as hell. That their son felt sorry for her because she was young and pretty and she did a very good impression of innocence. They said their son had moved on, finally, but that Phoebe used her family’s deaths to reconnect with him, and once she had him back in her life, they suspect that she pulled the old ‘I’m pregnant’ trick on him to get him to marry her.”
And Alan could see Phoebe on the loft floor, saying, “I could vote for complete irresponsibility right now,” knowing already that a baby would be an almost certain way to control him. And suddenly Alan wanted to throw up.
Brig was saying, “They said that she used him for everything she could get out of him, and when he finally mentioned divorce, she stole his credit cards and ran with them and told a lot of people a lot of horrible things about him in an attempt t
o ruin his reputation.”
But Alan still didn’t want to believe Phoebe could lie to him. Use him. Use Chick. Maybe even plot to use a new baby against him. “This is still the same monster who burst into a classroom and murdered two kids and shot Phoebe?”
Brig sighed. “I know his parents have a biased point of view. I know Schaeffer was a shit-weasel. Look, to me this feels like finding out that Mother Teresa ran a crack house on the side. But what the Schaeffers say about Phoebe Rain adds up, too. Her ex might have been the typical big-shot criminal defense scumbag, and he was definitely a psychotic killer, and the fucker deserved what he got. But that doesn’t mean that Phoebe Rain hadn’t figured out a way to take him for a ride first. Think, Alan. She claims her dead husband is stalking her, she has some guy who’s in on this with her who is going to help her make you believe that she can talk to your dead kid, and no one can verify a single goddamned thing she’s said. The only things anyone can verify right now are that she did a real good job of checking you out and that she’s out of her piss-poor little townhouse and sound asleep in your nice one.”
Alan wanted to cry. He’d believed in Phoebe — not as a psychic but as a woman. As someone special. He’d let himself believe. “You want a laugh?” he said instead.
“If you have one right now, I could use it.”
“I had her do a card reading on you. She was dead-on — your business with Kathie, the way you were reacting to it, Kathie’s personality. Guess that detective of hers has been really busy. Anyway, in the middle of the reading, she gets all mysterious. Says she isn’t reading for you anymore. And — hang on. I wrote this down. She insisted.”
He got up, got the notes he’d made on Phoebe’s reading, and read them off to Brig. “In his recent past, there is someone that Brig knows or is looking for. A pretty girl. Dark hair. Teenager, I think — definitely a young woman not yet in bloom. I think she’s dead. Murdered. He was raping her — the father. He’s done a very good job of pretending he had nothing to do with this. Brig may like him. May think highly of him. Think he’s respectable, upstanding. There’s a diary or a journal or a notebook involved in this — probably the girl’s, probably with incriminating evidence in it. It’s hidden, not destroyed. And shiny silver lockers of some sort are involved — they’re like the ones in schools, but chrome. They’re essential. Brig has to know about the lockers.”
