“Please,” Sadie pressed. “You know how much I loved Abby. I’m simply trying to puzzle together the last events of her life. Anything you could tell me would be helpful, anything at all.”
He shifted again and took a breath. When he spoke, his tone was reluctant as if he were speaking against his will. “She accused me of swindling her.”
Rex darted his head to look at him. “What? You didn’t tell me that.”
Johnny shrugged. “It didn’t seem right to talk about it when Abby was obviously struggling with some mental health issues.” To Sadie he added, “It’s true that I made some investments on her behalf, and they didn’t go well. But that’s the nature of the market, and the money she gave to me was a small part of her portfolio. I tried to explain as much to her, and even showed her the paper trail of how everything worked, but she was incensed and irrational. The meeting didn’t go well, I’m afraid.”
Sadie was dismayed, and she couldn’t hide it. None of what they told her sounded like the Aunt Abby she knew. Aunt Abby had a temper, but most of the time she spoke with comportment and kindness. They made it sound as if she had gone on a rampage, tearing into everyone she knew and loved. “Anything else?” she asked weakly. She wasn’t sure how much more she could handle.
Rex and Johnny shook their heads. She stood. “If there’s anything, anything at all, will you please let me know?”
“Of course,” Rex said. “Drop over any time to talk. You’re always welcome.”
I’ll just bet I am, creeper, Sadie thought. Outwardly she smiled, thanked them, and said goodbye. She went back through the house to say a final goodbye to the women.
“Are you going to talk to the Kaplans?” Misty asked.
“Yes,” Sadie answered, although probably not until tomorrow.
The women exchanged a look. The poor Kalplans lived around the corner, out of the central hub of the neighborhood, and had therefore never been a part of the central group of friends. “You might want to take an offering for Madame Zora,” Misty said. Penelope snickered and covered her mouth with her hand.
“What?” Sadie asked. She was tired and ready to go home, and she had always liked the Kaplans. She wasn’t up for going through a mean girls’ routine.
“Shirley Kaplan’s new hobby. I’m surprised Maddie didn’t tell you about it because everyone’s been talking. By chance, she got a job writing horoscopes for the newspaper, and now she fancies herself an astrologist.”
“Shirley Kaplan?” Sadie repeated. She pictured the chunky middle-aged woman who tended to wear her housecoat whenever she mowed the lawn, weeded, or retrieved the mail.
“Madame Zora,” Misty said. “That’s what she’s calling herself now.”
“Okay,” Sadie drawled. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you. I’ll see myself out.”
Misty and Penelope waved. They were still laughing over “Madame Zora.” Sadie felt a stab of pity for Shirley Kaplan. She was one of those women who always functioned on the outside and desperately wanted to be let in. Just like Mom, Sadie thought. Though, in her mother’s case, it had probably been more a case of keeping to herself and being standoffish than not actually fitting in. Victoria Cooper was always waiting for the next big thing to come along, never happy with what she had—not her house, not her husband, not her friends, and certainly not her daughter. Not until the end when she finally succeeded in making Sadie the person she always wanted to be. At least she had died before realizing what a failure her mini-me turned out to be. Sadie tried and failed to take consolation in that fact. At last she pushed all thoughts aside, crawled into bed, and fell into a fitful, restless sleep.
Chapter 13
The next day didn’t start well.
Once again Sadie’s breakfast was interrupted by the slap of newspaper on table. She was once again the headline, only this time her chicken head was off, her face exposed. Worse still, her arms were out mid-flap.
“What were you doing?” Gideon asked.
“There was a little kid in that car who wanted me to flap my arms when I clucked,” Sadie explained.
“And you did it?” he asked.
“I got an extra dollar,” Sadie said.
“You have no shame, apparently, but are you trying to humiliate me? I still have to live here after you’re gone.”
“Gee, Dad, aren’t you the one who told me there are no small jobs, only small people?”
“That was to motivate your sixteen-year-old self to get a job; that doesn’t apply to a college graduate degrading herself for a few dollars a day.”
Sadie was suddenly fed up with being her father’s doormat. She stood. Even though she only reached his shoulder, the height advantage made her feel more powerful. “What sort of job did you expect me to get for two weeks? It was your mandate that I find a job. I found a job, and now you’re not happy with it. You don’t like me; I get it. But for the sake of simplification, could you find a topic and stick to it? Because this constant switching of sides is making me dizzy. You want me to work, you don’t want me to work, you want me to make up with Luke, you don’t want me to make up with Luke. What do you want, Dad? What do you want?” The question had more weight than she intended.
“I want you to be the woman I raised you to be!” he shouted. “I want you to stop acting like your mother’s puppet. She’s dead, Sadie. You can stop trying to please her.”
“At least while she was alive, I made her happy. That’s a whole lot more than I can say for you!”
“Watch it!” he yelled. His index finger came up to point in her face. Sadie clambered backwards and tripped over the chair. Gideon lowered his hand and his voice. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” she said as she righted the chair and smoothed her hair. “You took me by surprise.”
“You backed up like you thought I was going to hit you. I’ve never hit you in your life.”
“Yeah, well, there’s always a first time,” Sadie said. She was aiming for a light tone, but it fell flat in light of her nervousness and Gideon’s inspection. Why did he have to be so perceptive?
“I’ve seen women act like that before,” he said.
“Just how many women have you yelled at, Dad?”
He ignored her attempt at humor. “The women I used to arrest, the ones whose husbands or boyfriends beat them, had that same sort of jumpiness.”
Sadie rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Dad, too many years as a cop made you paranoid. I have to go.”
He didn’t stop her, but he did keep a close eye on her as she grabbed her plate of cookies and let herself out of the house.
Sadie’s hands were shaking as she left the house, but the brief walk around the block helped her get everything back under control so that by the time she arrived at the Kaplan’s house, she was smiling.
“Sadie, I knew you were going to come see me,” were Shirley Kaplan’s greeting words. Sadie was momentarily stunned into speechlessness by her neighbor’s outfit. She was still wearing one of her many housecoats, but it was accessorized by a turban, an honest-to-goodness turban with a fake ruby in the center.
“How do you do, Mrs. Kaplan?” Sadie heard herself say and was glad years of good manners took over when original thought fled. Her old neighbor looked like a kook.
“Come in,” Mrs. Kaplan said. She made an expansive gesture with her hand as she stepped aside.
“I brought cookies,” Sadie said as she thrust the plate forward.
“I sensed that you would. Is this your mother’s recipe?”
Don’t you know? Sadie wanted to ask. She had far too much of Gideon’s cynicism to believe in what he had always called con-man mumbo jumbo. Even if she were a believer, it would be difficult to swallow her dowdy neighbor’s sudden transformation into a spiritualist. “Yes, it is,” Sadie answered. She followed Mrs. Kaplan to her kitchen and grimaced at the cloying scent of incense.
They sat at the kitchen table, but instead of setting out the cookies, Mrs. Kaplan pulled
out a packet of Tarot cards and began arranging them.
“Oh, Mrs. Kaplan, I’m not really into the occult,” Sadie said.
Mrs. Kaplan reeled back as if Sadie had slapped her. “Neither am I,” she said, and then she continued to lay the cards on the table.
“Those are Tarot cards, aren’t they?” Sadie asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Kaplan said.
“I don’t believe in them, nor do I believe in my horoscope or having my palm read.”
“No one believes until it makes a difference in their lives,” Mrs. Kaplan said. “I’ll show you, and you’ll understand.”
“I really just wanted to talk to you about Abby,” Sadie tried again.
“Abby was a believer,” Mrs. Kaplan said.
Sadie froze. “What?”
Mrs. Kaplan nodded, but didn’t stop doling her cards. “She came to see me for a reading two weeks before she died.”
If there was anyone more cynical than Gideon, it was Abby. Why would she suddenly throw off decades of debunking spiritualism in order to visit Mrs. Kaplan? “How are Mr. Kaplan and the kids?” Sadie asked.
“Sue Ellen just had another baby, but they want quiet time together as a family for a couple of months before I’m allowed to come see her. Toby is backpacking through Europe with some friends, trying to find himself. As for my husband, well, your guess is as good as mine. He still works long hours.”
Mr. Kaplan was an accountant. He owned his own business, and was a notorious workaholic. When Sadie’s mother was alive, Mrs. Kaplan had tried hard to make friends with her, figuring the two neighborhood outsiders could stick together. But Victoria Cooper hadn’t wanted friends, and Shirley Kaplan had returned to her lonely life, defeated.
Now she laid out several cards in front of Sadie and shook her head. “Your life is in transition,” she said. Sadie didn’t point out that everyone in the contiguous United States who had access to technology and had watched the video of her backside knew that her life was in transition. She wanted to protest the cards again, but she thought of her mother’s rejection of the woman and remained silent. She tapped another card. “And this one is the empress card. It means, um…” She moved away from the table, bent over, and rifled through a book. The glaring yellow cover told Sadie that the book was Tarot for Dummies, even if she couldn’t read the title. “Pregnant!” Mrs. Kaplan announced, closing the book with a snap. “You’re pregnant.”
“No, I’m not,” Sadie said.
“The cards are never wrong,” Mrs. Kaplan said.
“Neither is my body,” Sadie said. “Mrs. Kaplan, I am definitely not pregnant.”
“Symptoms can take a while to show up. Maybe it’s like those women on television who don’t know they’re pregnant until they’re in the delivery room.”
Sadie didn’t want to waste time arguing over cards she didn’t believe in anyway. She decided to try again to get to the heart of her visit. “What else did you and Aunt Abby talk about during her visit?”
“The weather, her roses, my kids, my husband, his job, things like that.”
“How did she seem?” Sadie asked.
“Warm and pleasant, even more so than usual. Abby was a nice woman, but she was especially nice that day. I think she was interested in what I had to tell her about her future.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I’m not sure I can break client confidentiality that way,” Mrs. Kaplan said.
Sadie fought the urge to shake her. Maybe there was a reason her mother hadn’t wanted to be friends. By all indications, Mrs. Kaplan had more than one screw missing. “I’m fairly certain that death nullifies confidentiality,” Sadie assured her.
Mrs. Kaplan’s fingers twisted nervously on the table. “Well, I’ve been feeling sort of guilty, actually, like maybe I should have done something more for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Abby got the death card,” Mrs. Kaplan said. Her tone was laced with self-recrimination, as if Abby’s death had been her fault.
“What was Abby’s reaction?” Sadie asked.
“She laughed and waved it off. She said that she was going into her eighth decade so of course death was coming for her soon. I regret that I didn’t make her see the imperative nature of the situation. The cards are never wrong.” She eyed Sadie’s belly, probably looking for signs of her supposed baby.
“Is there anything else you can think of, anything at all?”
“She talked to Abe for a while. I don’t know what the conversation was about. He’s not home, of course. Good luck tracking him down.”
The mean part of Sadie almost suggested that Mrs. Kaplan use the cards to find out where her husband was. The kind part of her won out, thanked her hostess, and left. Once outside, she breathed deeply to try and clear her head of the noxious odor of incense. That was when she noticed the sign in the window, slightly larger than an index card and printed with blue ink. “Madame Zora: Fortune Teller, $25, Walk-Ins Welcome.”
Had Abby paid the fee? If so, why? Sadie felt like there was something she was missing, but she didn’t know what. Regardless, it was time to go to work. I’d better be careful, she thought as she went home and donned her chicken suit. According to Madame Zora, I’m about to lay an egg.
Chapter 14
Thanks to the fact that Sadie had headlined the morning paper again, even more cars were lined up to hear her cluck, say hello, or take her picture. Sadie was happy to comply, not only because it meant extra money for her, but because a lot of the people who drove through the line were people she knew. Former teachers and dance instructors drove through with well-wishes and stories about Sadie from the past. Some wished her luck. To them she explained that the chicken gig was temporary until she moved and started the next chapter of her life. She assured everyone that she would soon move on to bigger and better things than the television station she had left. After so many times repeating the same thing, she almost started to believe it herself. She had been the weather girl for a miniscule station in Nebraska. Surely wherever she went next would be a step up.
Her optimism lasted into the evening because she didn’t have to go home and confront her father again. Instead she had a date with Hal. She assumed it was a date because he had asked and he was paying, but at the same time she didn’t have the sense that he was interested in her. He had seemed a little bit lonely and bored, and since that was exactly what she was, she was looking forward to the date.
Since she had been dressing like poultry for days, Sadie pulled out all the stops getting ready for her evening. She straightened her hair, applied her makeup so carefully that she was pageant-worthy, and picked one of her go-to date outfits, a navy dress that had been one of Rick’s favorites. Thoughts of Rick hurt less and less. From a distance of more than half the country, Sadie could finally see how shallow and self-involved he was. But he was handsome, wealthy, and famous—her typical pattern for selecting a partner. Next time she was ready to date, she definitely needed to think outside the box. She was tired of dating the same guy in a different suit. She wanted someone deep, but men who valued depth and character weren’t exactly knocking down her door. People misjudged her, and that was mostly her fault for putting up a front.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Hal drawled when she showed up at his door. Something about him put Sadie immediately at ease, and she wondered what it was. He certainly wasn’t her usual type. With his strawberry-blond hair, big brown eyes, and smattering of freckles, he looked like a perpetual little boy. Maybe because he was a friend of Luke, she knew he had already been vetted. Luke always hung out with fellow geeky nice guys like himself.
“How can I help?” she asked as she followed him into the kitchen.
“I’m good, thanks,” he said.
“I can cook,” Sadie said. Her tone was more defensive than she intended. He held up his hands in surrender.
“I believe you. But I think I have this one covered. Sit and take a load off. How was the chic
ken walk today?”
“The best. I’m thinking of making a career of it. How was the hospital?”
“Piece of cake. I don’t know why people say becoming a doctor is hard, especially if you hide in the supply closet all day while the nurses do all the work.”
“I admire your dedication,” Sadie said.
“It’s a calling,” he replied. She watched while he removed containers of what looked like leftover Chinese food from the fridge, sniffed them, and dumped them in containers to heat in the microwave.
“You went all out,” she said.
He gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry. That thing about med school is sort of true. I worked fifteen hours today. I was going to impress you with my mad cooking skills. Now I’m going to impress you with my capacity to sleep through even the most interesting evening.”
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