The Fortune Teller's Daughter

by Lila Shaara

  Miss Tokay beamed at Harry and held out her hand again, so he had no choice but to walk over to her and give her his. He hoped he wasn’t required to kiss her as well. Miss Tokay’s hand was cold and felt like little twigs encased in skin, and she didn’t let go until after she’d said, “So nice to see you again.” She asked him to sit, indicating one of the wing chairs. Maggie left the room, and Harry hoped she was coming back.

  Miss Tokay said, “I like you.”

  Harry waited, but she appeared to want a response of some kind. “Thank you,” he said. He thought he should probably tell her he liked her, too, but it seemed premature.

  Miss Tokay seemed satisfied with his thanks and went on. “Maggie wanted to take you for a walk on my grounds. I thought it would be nice to talk first. I don’t let many people on my property. You understand.”

  “Do you get pestered a lot?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Maggie came in then with a tray holding a stained thermal coffee carafe, spoons, and china cups in a purple floral pattern. She set the tray down on a small wooden table in front of the sofa and poured coffee into the cups, handing one to Harry. Miss Tokay accepted another from Maggie, thanking her. To Harry, she said, “Josie’s a nice enough neighbor, but when Maggie came to live with her, it was really a blessing.” Maggie smiled, took the third cup off the tray, and sat down in the remaining chair.

  Harry said, “When was that?” He was appalled at the things he still didn’t know about her, and hadn’t thought to ask.

  “When she came back from school. That was how many years ago, Maggie? Right after Dunc died, right? Or was it your mother?”

  Maggie said, “Mom died first, then Dunc, a couple of years later. It was right around then.”

  “That’s right. Poor Dee was still with us.”

  Harry said to Maggie, careful not to sound shocked, “You went to college?”

  “I never finished.”

  “What did you major in?”

  She smiled, but there was no heat behind it. “Getting away from Stoweville.”

  Miss Tokay added, “It’s so nice that she doesn’t go anywhere now. Unlike Dee, before she left us, of course.”

  Harry wondered if the old woman had any idea how that remark could be taken as a cruelty. She seemed not to have heard Maggie’s comment about wanting to get away, and her gaze at her young neighbor was nothing but beatific and happy. Maggie smiled back at Miss Tokay, but at the same time she looked heartbroken, too, and he remembered his first impression of her, that she had buried a crushing heartache. He hadn’t noticed it in her for a while, and he felt ashamed again, as though he’d been using her as a crutch without seeing how she bent under his weight. Then he looked back at Miss Tokay, wondering how he’d wandered so far from the society of his neighborhood and his university to get mixed up with all these eccentric country folk.

  “Have you ever seen ball lightning, Mr. Sterling?” said Miss Tokay.

  “No,” Harry said. “I’ve heard of it. I didn’t think it was a real thing.” He had been about to add “like UFOs” and was relieved to have caught himself in time.

  “We have a lot of it here. Tell him your story, Maggie.”

  Maggie looked a little uncomfortable at being put on the spot, but she said, “When I lived with my mother and father, the house was next to a farm. I was out on the porch one afternoon watching the heat lightning on the horizon. The sky was a funny greenish color, like it gets before there’s a tornado.” She said this as though it was common knowledge, though Harry had never heard of any such thing. “It came out of the sky and down to the ground, bouncing like a basketball made out of light. It bounced one, two, three times.” She put her cup down on the tray and moved her hands up and down to show him. “Then it flew into the barn next door. I ran after it. The vet was coming that afternoon to give the cows some shots, so they weren’t out in the field. As I came into the barn, I saw the ball of light fly out through the back wall. There were six cows in the barn. Three of them were standing, three were lying down. Cows don’t usually do that.” Harry nodded; that he knew. “I ran back outside, but the ball was gone. I went to tell my mother, who didn’t believe me, but later our neighbor found the three lying down were dead. The others were fine.” She shifted in her seat, animated. “The lightning bounced off every other cow. There was a little patch of burned straw between the last one standing and the wall where the light had disappeared. There were four scorch marks on the ground outside where I’d seen it bounce, each one perfectly round. The dead cows had them, too. I cried over them for two days.”

  Miss Tokay said, “We get a lot of ball lightning here. The scientists at the university think it’s all silliness we ignoramuses made up, but they think that about lots of things.”

  Harry said, “Like the Sky People.”

  Miss Tokay smiled. “Maggie told you about them? Well, they’re related, you know. Ball lightning is the residue from the light ships. When you see it, that means that they’ve been traveling around somewhere nearby.”

  “Do they travel around here a lot?”

  Miss Tokay looked at him, assessing. He willed his face to blandness, not knowing how sensitive she was to the scorn of strangers. She must have decided that he passed whatever muster she considered important, because she said, “Not so much nowadays. They came here a long time ago and buried their ships deep underground. They came to observe us and to help keep us from destroying ourselves. These are critical times. The Sky People are very disappointed in us. The way we’re raping the earth without thought of tomorrow or our children or our responsibilities to the planet. And each other.” She stopped and looked at Maggie, who smiled at her. “It’s distressing, but there’s still hope.” She seemed to be shrinking slightly, and Harry realized that her speech had tired her. “You understand now why I don’t let just anybody walk all over my land? Lots of nosy folks want to see into the sinks, get a look at them. But the Sky People only come out when they think best. And they don’t want to be seen by just anyone. When they show themselves, they mean business. Usually, it’s for an ascension, and those Wickers, or whatever, have no idea what they’re dealing with.”

  “Wiccans,” Maggie said absently, pouring herself another cup of coffee from the carafe on the tray.

  “Yes, well, the earth is alive and precious, and they do seem to understand that, at least. But I don’t want people trampling the edges of the sinks, get themselves drowned, get me a lawsuit.”

  Harry could feel his head swimming, getting itself drowned. “What ‘sinks’ are you talking about?” He imagined women in black hoods crowding into Miss Tokay’s laundry room, each trying to dive into the washbasin.

  “Sinkholes,” said Maggie. “I told you, Miss Tokay’s got two big sinks right on her property.”

  “Oh, sinkholes,” Harry said. “What’s an ascension?”

  Miss Tokay smiled; Maggie’s face was unreadable. “When you leave this plane, the Sky People have to choose you. Not just anyone gets to ascend.” She took a dainty sip of coffee. “Those who’ve ascended pass wisdom to us on this plane.”

  “How?” he said, vastly intrigued.

  “Some of us have been granted the ability to communicate with them. We take dictations and pass them on to interested parties.” She looked at Maggie. “I’ve thought for years that Maggie would be perfect as my successor, but she keeps putting me off.”

  “Maybe someday, ma’am, when I have the time to give it the proper attention.”

  Harry was surprised at Maggie’s diplomacy given her fear of always saying the wrong thing. Miss Tokay said, “The Sky People and the Ascended Masters choose you, honey. If they want, you’ll wind up listening to them whether you have the time or not.” She looked away at the walls, at the table. “Warner hasn’t been giving me as many dictations lately, since we don’t have services in the temple anymore. He’s not very happy about that.”

  Harry was grateful he remembered that Warner was the name of Miss Tok
ay’s disappeared beau. He was trying to think of a tactful way to ask more about him when Maggie said, “Do you want to see the sinks?” She looked at the tired old woman on the sofa. “May I show him, Miss Tokay?”

  22

  THE DEVIL

  REVERSED

  The Seeker comes closer to getting the point but is too afraid to take any real action

  Miss Tokay’s property was dense with pine trees and scrub oak. Maggie told Harry that the Tokay estate stretched out over nine hundred acres. He was so impressed that he whistled. Then she told him to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes and he stopped whistling. They walked on a flat, sandy path dotted with pine needles and cones for a while without saying anything more. Harry wanted desperately to know what Maggie thought about the Sky People but was afraid to ask; he also didn’t want to seem to be making fun of Miss Tokay the moment she’d graciously let them take a walk on her land. But after many minutes of silent walking, Maggie said, “I’ve never seen them. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I don’t have any intention of starting a dialogue with the Sky People or anybody who’s died. Or ascended.” She smiled. “In case you thought a cult was operating out in this neck of the woods.”

  He was a little ashamed at his relief. “Shucks, and I thought I had a great topic for my book. UFO cults are very marketable these days.” He breathed in the air, a deep smell of pine and something tangy, the pleasant funk of brackish water. “Spiritualist groups have a long history in the U.S. Mostly out west, though. You don’t see so many in the South. They have roots in the late nineteenth century. UFOs are a twentieth-century wrinkle, of course.”

  Maggie nodded noncommittally, and he wondered if he was boring her. She said, “Speaking of topics for your book, how is that going? You haven’t mentioned it in a while.”

  Harry said, “I was stalled for a bit, but I talked to a family member of the scientist I told you about, Charles Ziegart. I’m interested again, although I still don’t know if there’s anything there that would make a worthwhile book.”

  “A family member?”

  “His son.” Harry was about to tell her about Jonathan Ziegart’s visit when the brush to the right of the trail seemed to explode. It was a moment before he recognized the source of the commotion; two white-tailed deer burst onto the path about twenty feet ahead of them and dashed across and away through the trees to their left. Harry said, “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” in surprise.

  Maggie had stopped dead in front of him, and Harry came up beside her. “I haven’t seen deer that close in the wild since my foster father took Lawrence and me hunting when I was fourteen. I’m glad he wasn’t here or he’d be grinding out venison sausage by now.” Her hand was on her chest, and he realized that she’d been more startled than he was by the deer. “Hey,” he said, “I thought you were Nature Girl. Let’s hope there aren’t any gators or panthers in these woods or we’ll both have strokes.” She didn’t smile, and he added, “Are you all right?”

  She nodded a little jerkily, then took a deep breath. “I get a little twitchy sometimes when I don’t sleep, and I startle easily.”

  “Me too,” said Harry. “And it’s really hot. Do you have water?”

  She nodded again and pulled a bottle out of her fanny pack. She drank some, then offered the bottle to him. He took it and drank as well, pouring it into his mouth so as not to get his spit on the spout. He handed it back to her and said, “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s keep going.” The trail was wide enough for two people to walk abreast now, so Harry stayed next to her. “So you were saying?” she said.

  “I can’t remember. Oh yeah, the Ziegarts. Sounds like regular family dysfunction with a few twists. The son is from a first marriage. Ziegart married one of his graduate students, who nobody liked apparently. The son, Jonathan, told me that she murdered his father. All very high drama.”

  “You don’t sound impressed.” She took another drink and put the bottle back into her pack.

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It seemed to me she lost everything when he died. And she was in the car accident that killed him.”

  “How was she supposed to have murdered him? Did she shoot him or something while he was driving?”

  “No, it’s more baroque than that. He was allergic to bee venom, so he always carried an auto-injector syringe of epinephrine.” At her blank face he explained, “Severe allergies can make some people’s immune systems go into overdrive. They go into what’s called anaphylactic shock. They can suffocate if they don’t get an antihistamine in them right away. That’s what epinephrine is. Anyway, Emily allegedly tossed his syringe and somehow smuggled some wasps into the car.”

  “Sounds unlikely, and pretty dangerous for her.”

  “Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to seems perfectly willing to trash her good name, so you’d think if there was an obvious motive, adultery or gambling addictions or whatever, someone would have suggested it by now. Jonathan was vague but hinted that she wanted money.”

  “Did she get any?”

  “Not as far as I can tell. And the ex-wife didn’t seem to have to work very hard to make her give it up. I feel sorry for her. But maybe I won’t when I learn more.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dead. Suicide.”

  “So she can’t defend herself.”

  “No,” said Harry. “Maybe that’ll turn out to be my job. Or maybe to sully her name further. Or neither.”

  And that’s when it occurred to him how much graceless young Emily Ziegart had come to mean to him. He remembered the movie Laura, in which the gruff detective had fallen in love with a beautiful murdered girl. Well, he thought, no one has called Emily beautiful. But something about her spoke to him and said “Help me.” In his mind she sometimes had Maggie’s face, sometimes a feminized version of Dusty’s. Irrational, probably stupid, and almost certainly unhealthy. Maybe Emily Ziegart had in fact been a murderer, or at least a manipulative opportunist. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. For the first time, he really felt it, that he was going to write this book. Whether it would get published was another matter. But, he thought, so what? I have a job.

  The trees broke open, and the ground ended in a ragged circle about thirty feet across. Maggie said, “Welcome to Tokay Sink.”

  Someone had built a low wooden barrier around the rim of the sinkhole. Maggie walked up to it and looked over, so Harry assumed the banks were sound. He joined her and peered into the giant hole. The sides were made of small jutting rock ledges covered with weeds and lichen. A live oak grew about ten feet down out of one of the cuts in the rock, curling upward in search of sunlight. The sink was filled to a few feet below the tree with dark green water, covered in spots with lily pads and sheets of yellow pollen. It looked to Harry like the mouth of an ogre-size shark, open and hungry.

  “You used to swim in there?” he said.

  “The water was higher then. Dee and I were too stupid to know how dangerous it was. The main problem is that there’s no bottom, not for sixty feet down anyway, so you get tired treading water. If you can’t get a good grip on something growing out of the side, you can drown pretty easily.” She smiled at him and said, “We were young and strong. And light. The weeds didn’t just pull out when we grabbed them.” She looked back at the water. “It’s nice and cold, but I wouldn’t advise it now, no matter how hot it gets.”

  Harry was about to comment how a nice, shallow swimming pool would be a much better idea before realizing that Maggie and Dee probably hadn’t had access to one. Certainly not the Olympic-size outdoor pool at the university. You couldn’t get in there without a university ID. He doubted Maggie had known anyone who had one.

  “The good old days,” he said. “Does anything live in there?”

  She shrugged. “Frogs. Turtles. Some snakes. Cave fish. It connects to miles of underground caverns that spread all over north Florida. Some people like to scuba dive in them, but that’s pr
etty dangerous, too.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Harry. “Good place to hide a body, though.”

  “Temple Sink would be better,” said Maggie.

  “Oh, that’s right. There’s another big hole like that.”

  “Yes. They all have names.”

  “Go ahead,” Harry said. “Scare me to death.”

  She led the way down another trail perpendicular to the one that had brought them to the monstrous hole.

  “Jesus, what the hell is that?” he said as the trees abruptly thinned and he could make out something enormous and dark ahead. It was the size of a large two-story house, but it was hexagonal, made of rough unpainted wood, and on one of the flat walls that he could see was a double window over ten feet tall. The finish of the building was gray and weathered, and as they got closer, he could see that the window rims weren’t joined properly; all the edges of the place had a fun-house, tilted quality that made him a little queasy. He stopped and stared, his hands on his hips. “I guess this is the temple.”

  He moved again when Maggie did, following her to the other side of the weird building. The giant hexagon had similar pairs of tall crooked windows on three of the six sides. On the far side of the temple, in a wall between the windows, was a heavy wooden door with an odd, bumpy texture. As Harry got closer, he could see that there were small pictures carved into the wood, all different from one another. He could make out an eye, a coiled snake, a pyramid, an ankh symbol, a peace sign, and the head of what looked like a dog. Each picture was in deep relief, approximately three inches across, ten to a row across the door. There were rows and rows of them up and down both panels; the thought of how much work went into the construction of the door itself made him tired. It was clear that the carvings hadn’t been done by professional, or even particularly talented, artists. The door itself must have been several inches thick, although it was difficult to tell since it was shut tight, another formidable brass doorknob and dead bolt gleaming on its right edge. Each of the tall windows had been covered with plywood. Harry now noticed that there were poles topped with spotlights at five-foot intervals around the circumference of the place. Each light pole had a green roofing shingle mounted at an angle below the light fixture.