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The Fortune Teller's Daughter

Page 16

by Lila Shaara


  Harry smacked his forehead with his fist. “They aren’t shingles; they’re solar panels. If it’s as dangerous as you’ve said, it makes sense that there are good lights around the temple. But everyone around here seems to have the same thing on their roof.” He looked at Maggie. “How did that happen?”

  She had stiffened, looking at him now as though he was a state trooper and she was a drug runner. “They’re practical. You know. It’s cheaper in the long run. The power goes out a lot around here because of all the thunderstorms. This way, it doesn’t.”

  “But they’re expensive. How come everyone around here has them? You can’t afford a washer-dryer, but you can afford to cover your roof with solar panels?”

  “They were all a gift. Miss Tokay wants to save the planet. She says the Sky People are all about getting rid of pollution, okay? It was a gift to everyone who’s helped her out.”

  “She has that kind of money?”

  “Well, not anymore. Don’t mention this to her, all right? She gets embarrassed. Do you want to see inside or not?”

  “God, yes.”

  She pulled her keys out of her pocket. “Do you have keys to everything of hers?” he asked. She ignored him and unlocked the door. It made a loud, spine-skittering screech as she pushed it slowly open.

  “It’s only safe to go in about two feet. Then the floor starts sloping, and it’s only a couple more feet before it’s gone altogether. So you can take one step in if you want a better look. But that’s it. We haven’t had to fish anybody out yet, so please don’t be the first.”

  “I’m not that eager to meet the Sky People, believe me.”

  Maggie stepped through the door, making Harry’s heart beat a little faster at the thought that maybe she wouldn’t come out again. He followed, taking one careful step over the threshold, his foot coming down onto solid planks. The darkness was thick and hot, but the light from the doorway, mixed with the occasional strand leaking in from around the plywood on the windows, helped his eyes to make out details after a moment. The smell of dampness was almost overwhelming, and there was a soft rushing sound, along with the drips and trickles of nearby water.

  It appeared to be one very large round room, although Harry assumed it was actually six-sided. There were long, thick curtains hanging in shreds off the windows. In the dim light they looked black. Maggie was little more than a silhouette in the darkness, and she reached out a hand. “Don’t go any further than this,” she said. Harry almost took her hand; maybe because it was dark and dangerous and he could pretend that he needed her to guide him away from the edge, even though he had no intention of taking the slightest risk. If he were Judd Lippman, he thought, he would talk her into doing it right here, inches from death. Judd probably got off on that sort of thing. Harry found it depressing for God knew which time that he wasn’t more like someone else, maybe not the objectionable Judd Lippman but someone else. I’m like goddamned Hamlet, he thought. And not in a good way.

  He could see more details now that his eyes were adjusting. He took a sideways step closer to Maggie, feeling the need to keep his voice low even though he knew it made no sense. “It looks like all the people fell in,” he said; there were benches by the far wall, but he could see some of them tilted at insane angles, half of them dangling down, their legs caught on the wood floor where it simply stopped, raggedly black and gone, like a cartoon image of a black hole in outer space. The room was mostly empty because there wasn’t much floor left to hold anything.

  Maggie pointed at the windows. “All the curtains are purple velvet. Or they were. I’m not sure what color they are now.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” he said, watching the hand he hadn’t taken as she carefully turned around and eased it under his elbow, saying, “We should get out of here.”

  Out in the shaded heat, Maggie’s hand left his arm. “What did you think?” she said.

  “Creepy as hell,” he said. “Very H. P. Lovecraft. Does anyone read him anymore? This struck me as exactly the kind of place that he’d have huge alien monsters spurting from.”

  She smiled. “I never knew how you pronounced any of the places they came from, but they scared the crap out of me anyway.”

  He returned her smile with great approval. As they walked away, he looked back for a moment and said, “It must have been hard giving that up. You said they moved the services to the garage after it fell apart?”

  “Yes,” she said. She was walking fast in front of him, so he double-timed to catch up.

  “I’d be interested in seeing that one, too. Do you think she’d mind?”

  “There’s nothing in it. I told you, just old furniture and stuff stored there. All the temple stuff is gone.”

  “Huh. Okay.” He couldn’t imagine why she was lying. He figured something in there must be illegal, although he was slightly hurt that she thought he’d tell on her. But then, it might not be her secret; it might be that someone else, even Miss Tokay herself, was harboring something in the garage that it was best no one knew about who was supposed to be an officer of the court. He almost laughed at the image of Miss Tokay brewing white lightning or methamphetamine next to a Model T. Then he thought about the solar panels. He was pretty sure Maggie had been lying then, too. They’re not supposed to have them, he thought. They’re being hidden in plain sight. Maybe someone stole them.

  They said good-bye once again at their cars, parked in front of Miss Tokay’s house. Harry was about to ask Maggie if she wanted to go somewhere and get some coffee, or better yet, something cold, but before he could say anything, she said, “I have to go check on Miss Tokay. I’ll see you later.” He wondered if she was reading his mind again.

  23

  DEATH

  REVERSED

  Catastrophe.

  Everything changes.

  The old rules are swept away

  Darcy Murphy dreamed of Josie Dupree. She had fangs and a great black cape, but she looked good, like Morticia Addams or some other vampish creature, dark and sexy and possibly lethal. In the dream her head grew wide till it looked like that of a beautiful, wild-eyed cobra; it bit him and he screamed, but he woke up aroused and sweating. When his wife asked what the problem was, he told her he’d dreamed of beating the Little Shit to death.

  He thought that the sky was starting to gray up as he rang the doorbell. Josie opened the door, not as surprised to see him as she should have been.

  “What do you want now?” she said.

  “Another look around,” he said. “I missed a few details in my report. My boss is on my ass.”

  “Okay,” Josie said. She gave a dramatic sigh and opened the door. He walked in, taking in the cheap green carpet, the stained flowered sofa, the scratched coffee table. Then he saw the cards laid out on the small dining set in the corner of the main room. Big cards, bright colors. They didn’t look like normal playing cards.

  “What are those?” he said.

  “Tarot cards,” she said.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “They’re cards for doing readings. About people’s lives.”

  “Fortune-telling cards?”

  “Sort of. I can’t really claim to predict the future. Just what’s likely, given current circumstances. My niece says it’s like when they use radar and such to predict the weather. The predictions are only good for a little while ahead, and only for conditions as they are right now.”

  Darcy couldn’t take his eyes from the bright colors of the cards on the table. “Devil worship bullshit.”

  “Don’t be an ass. Isn’t anything devilish about it.”

  “You wanna tell my future?” he said.

  “If you got fifty bucks.”

  His attention turned to her. His eyes slitted as he looked at her cleavage, her messy hair, her loud lipstick, her heavy earrings. “Girl, I got your future in my hands. You want me to like you.”

  Her hands went to her hips. “But I don’t.”

  Darcy felt anger fl
aring in his chest and in his groin. His wife could have told Josie that anger was a tonic to him. “I don’t care if you like me, girl. It don’t matter if you think I stink like dog shit. You just better act nice, that’s all.” He looked around the shabby room. “Where’s that blond girl? She your daughter or what? You got different last names.”

  “She’s my niece. She got off work a half hour ago. She’ll be home any minute.” Darcy could smell the lie on her; the stink of it and of her growing fear spread through the sad little room.

  Darcy Murphy had never raped anyone, unless you counted the times he’d talked his wife into sex when she really didn’t want to and he’d pushed, even shoved a little, until she gave in, or at least didn’t push back. He’d been unfaithful more than once, mostly back when he was a meter reader; he was still amazed by what easy pickings some women were, alone in the daytime with nothing on but nighties and boredom, even for a raggedy straw man with hemorrhoids. But now this woman with her hair and her incense and all that color, he’d asked around; she knew what was what. There was no point in her being all prissy; he’d wager she’d been around more than he had. Some women liked to fan the flames with a little nonsense here and there. That was okay with him, but only to a point.

  Josie said, “I think you should leave.”

  “Do you now?”

  She looked around him as though he were fuzzy somehow, as if she was looking at something just over his shoulder. He turned involuntarily to see if there was something there.

  “My niece will be back in just a few minutes.” She was lying, he could tell, and nervous, too, which made him happy. Nervous was good, she had been so cocky and bitchy. He felt the shift in power like a dial turning in his chest.

  “No, she won’t. No need to be scared, honey. Just be nice. I’m a nice man, you’ll see, honey, you’ll see.” Darcy was crooning at Josie now, moving toward her as if she was beloved, as if all he wanted to offer was comfort and sweetness. Josie backed up, the coffee table and couch behind her. Darcy walked toward her again, arms out to enfold her. The rain was coming down now outside, hard, in thick sheets, and there was a crash of thunder that shook the double-wide so hard it seemed it might skitter off the cement blocks that held it off the ground. Darcy expected the lights to flicker, maybe go out altogether, but they didn’t so much as wink at him, not the slightest hum, and part of his mind remembered the solar panels and the windmills at the same time as he expected the lights to blink off. When Josie picked something up off the coffee table that looked like a flashlight, he wasn’t alarmed or even mildly curious what she was up to. When she pressed the button on its side and brought the front of the flashlight toward him, he was about to tell her that the lights weren’t flickering so there was no need; it made no sense to him at all when she pressed the flashlight against his outstretched arm, and while he expected to feel some warmth from the bulb, he had only a second to realize that it wasn’t warm at all. He was never to remember exactly what happened next, but in his nightmares for some time to come, he dreamed that his hair exploded away from his scalp, taking his ears and eyeballs with it while lightning cut the sky and thunder crushed the ground. He usually woke up screaming. Somewhere the irony was dancing in the very bottom of his mind; now he finally believed that they weren’t stealing anything.

  24

  DEATH

  REVERSED

  Catastrophe.

  Everything changes.

  The old rules are swept away

  They had just passed the rose garden, approaching Maggie’s favorite spot, the little wooden bridge, when the rain started. There’d been some warning; the clouds had been slowly darkening for the last fifteen minutes, with red and yellow flashes on the horizon, a few closer, but it hadn’t seemed particularly sinister until the last few minutes, when the sky had grown a dark blue-gray and Harry had tried to get Maggie to head back to where their cars were parked. But she had ignored him and instead run back to where the path opened onto the cemetery. She was standing next to a small headstone, looking up with a strange expression, waiting, almost hopeful. He wondered again if she were quite sane, if her shyness and eccentricities were symptoms of something deeper and more desperate. Then he saw what she did, a floating blue sphere, like a glowing sapphire the size of a soccer ball. It was falling from the sky in a gentle arc, landing and then balancing for a moment on the top of a headstone. It floated up again, leaving a silver and blue trail in the air; a small part of Harry’s mind reckoned that the trail was on his retina, not in the air itself. Then the sphere arced back down to the ground, bounced and flew again, and disappeared into the trees of Gunhill Park.

  Then the rain hit, beginning with a great wind sweeping through the trees, making it look as though they were consciously forming a huge wave, fans in a forest stadium, up and down and sideways, with a great whooshing sound that was as loud as a jet engine, loud and grand. Maggie’s hair blew in all directions, circling her head in a dancing display that didn’t make her look any saner. Harry briefly wondered how that was physically possible, that nature could move the air around you and blow parts of you not in one direction but in all of them. Then he could feel wet drops on his shirt, fat ones, whole cupfuls in each drop, hitting first his shoulders, then his head, then pounding the ground and the leaves and the surface of the stream. Roaring blankets of water fell in long, graceful loops around them and on them; all Harry wanted in the world at that moment was to be in his car with the heater on high, maybe already in his driveway so he didn’t have to navigate the torrents on the roads.

  Maggie’s arms went out to her sides, her head lifted, and Harry saw that she was smiling. Not a ghost-smile, nothing sad or halfway about it. Her face was turned into the rain, being beaten by the great washes of water from the sky, and her eyes seemed to be asking a question of the clouds and she was laughing and grinning in the bellowing, blowing wind. He’d only caught glimpses of her real smile before, a smile that made him think of Marilyn Monroe, not because that was who Maggie looked like but because her smile was the same, young and pure and sweet, utterly joyful. Her clothes were pressed to her, her slight frame and perfect breasts as visible as if she were naked. She was the most beautiful woman Harry had ever seen in his life. He thought she might be singing, and he was terrified.

  He had his hands on either side of her face before he had a chance to think about anything else. He kissed her mouth with such ferocity that the sane, dry part of him, the part that always stayed sober no matter how much he drank, that part of him was worried that he might be hurting her or that she might slap assault charges on him later, after the rain. But even the sober part of Harry went silent when her arms found his waist, wrapped around him, and she kissed him back.

  He would have taken her on the nearest headstone if that internal judge hadn’t piped up again. They were outside, anyone could see, they’d catch pneumonia, she’d hate him later, he had no condoms. But he kept kissing her and she kept kissing him back, through rain so thick it seemed that white-water rapids were pummeling them from the sky. Harry stopped breathing for too long, and then he and Maggie were both gasping for air, faces dripping and slick, and he thought for just a moment of dragging her to his car, maybe doing it in the backseat, but the judge wagged a mental finger at him. Their eyes caught, and she started laughing again, and this time his fear of her didn’t stop him from laughing back until the rain stopped.

  25

  ACE OF SWORDS

  REVERSED

  Winning at a terrible price

  By the time Maggie came in, Josie had been sitting on the couch for a half hour with an unconscious man on their living room floor. Maggie was so wet that her clothes were wrinkled and clinging; she was shivering with cold even though the rain had stopped a quarter of an hour before. Josie assumed she was intent on getting to the bathroom, to a warm shower and dry clothes, but the body on the floor stopped her. Josie had seldom seen Maggie nonplussed; a faraway place in her mind found some gratification in M
aggie’s frozen surprise.

  “I actually had to use it,” Josie said. “He was trying to rape me.”

  “Oh God,” said Maggie.

  “Exactly,” said Josie. “We’ve got to park him somewhere.”

  “Okay,” said Maggie, looking around the room as though there was an answer to be found lying on an end table. “Oh God,” she repeated.

  Josie took a moment through her panic to look more closely at Maggie’s face, seeing the reddened skin around her mouth and her stunned expression. It didn’t take Josie more than a heartbeat to understand the situation, possibly better than Maggie did. But she filed it away for later and said, “Where are we going to put him?”

  Maggie chewed her lower lip, her hands in her wet denim pockets. “Downtown, maybe. Somewhere near the university?”

  “As good as anywhere. Minnesota might be better, but it would take too long.” Josie moved to the phone. “Calvin Crane is coming over in a half hour. I’ll call him and put him off.”

  “What if his wife answers?”

  Josie gave Maggie a look. “I’ll tell her I almost killed a man today. It’s all in a day’s work for a heathen fortune teller.”

  “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

 

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