The Fortune Teller's Daughter

by Lila Shaara

“What?”

  “You know. College. Where you go before you can go to grad school. She must have had letters, test scores, transcripts, all that kind of thing, with her application. I assume you keep files of previous students.”

  Silence, then, “Mr. Sterling, do you have any idea how many students have passed through this school?”

  “I imagine you must store the records for a variety of reasons. It can’t be that hard to find the file. Unless your record keeping is unbelievably sloppy.”

  He could almost hear the hissing sound of air through flared nostrils and pursed lips. “That information is confidential anyway.”

  “For someone who’s deceased?”

  “I don’t see why we should flout confidentiality for somebody who appears to be interested in smearing Charlie Ziegart. His second wife wasn’t worth the effort you’re putting into her, Mr. Sterling. You’d be much better served talking to Pamela.”

  “I intend to. Since you won’t let me see Emily’s file, will you at least tell me where she did her undergraduate work?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Not Cantwell?”

  “No.”

  “A state? A part of the country?”

  “I have no recollection, if I ever knew.”

  “Do you know how old she was?”

  “What?”

  “Her age. You know. The number of years she’d been alive before she died. Was she a normal-aged student? Or was she inordinately young, a child prodigy or something?”

  “Goodness, no. I believe she came to Cantwell directly after college, but she was the typical age, twenty-something, when she arrived. I can’t be exact. I never threw her a birthday party.” Before Harry could ask another question, she added, “We’re done, Mr. Sterling. Good-bye, and don’t call me again.”

  Harry hung up after she did and scribbled more on his pad, adding to his notes everything he hadn’t had time to write while he was talking. Unbeknownst to Gillian DeGraff, he’d recorded the call, which was illegal but nonetheless helpful when he looked at his notes later, trying to recall tone of voice and other nuances that he might have missed while scribbling notes. For ten minutes he wrote, then paused, his hand over his mouth, his thumb supporting his chin as he looked out his dining room window at the backyard, a slender red maple bent in the middle as though it was leaning back to look at the sky. The phone rang, startling Harry; he picked it up, thinking it might be Dusty. It was a hoarse female voice that he didn’t immediately recognize but knew given some time he would.

  “Mr. Sterling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grenier.”

  “What?”

  “Grenier. That was Emily’s college.”

  Now he knew who the smoky voice belonged to: Louise Glade, the administrative assistant in Ziegart’s department at Cantwell.

  “Ms. Glade?”

  “I’m not giving away state secrets, although you’d think I was. I’m calling from my cell phone. I’m in the bathroom. Gillian just came into the office screaming bloody murder about your nosiness. You’re supposed to protect the confidentiality of your sources, right? I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “You mean Grenier University in Virginia?”

  “Uh-huh.” He heard the click of a cigarette lighter and a faint intake of breath. Smoking in the girls’ room.

  “Thank you for the information. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because Emily got screwed over. And now she’s dead, and they’ve been slandering her ever since Charlie died, and she can’t defend herself, and that’s just wrong.”

  “Do you know anything else? Her maiden name? Where she was from?”

  “She was Emily Timms. From some southern town.”

  “Not in Florida?” Harry had a little thrill down his spine.

  “No. Alabama. I’m pretty sure. I’d have remembered Florida.” The thrill went away. But he thought, I’ve got to grill Josie.

  “Any family? Anybody I could talk to?”

  “She had a sister, because that’s who wrote to me to tell me that Emily had killed herself. The sister lived out west. Denver was where she wrote from.”

  “Do you remember her name or anything else about her?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Emily didn’t talk much about her home.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “She was a truly kind person. I’m Jewish, and she got me Hanukkah cards and always remembered my birthday. She watched the phones for me a few times. Let me tell you, nobody else here would ever have done that. Pamela Ziegart is a bitch. You won’t hear that from anyone but me, but it’s true.”

  “Ms. Glade, do you have a photograph of Emily?”

  “You want to know what she looked like?”

  “Yes. Is there one?”

  “This isn’t a high school, Mr. Sterling. We don’t have a yearbook.” Breath blowing smoke. “I could send you a JPEG of the last group shot with Charlie at the DeGraffs’. She was in that one.” Harry thanked her and gave her his e-mail address. She continued, “I probably won’t call you again. Gillian’s pretty mad at you and I don’t want her mad at me.” Before she said good-bye, Harry heard the cigarette lighter click again. Louise Glade was breaking more than one rule at Cantwell University.

  30

  KNIGHT OF CUPS

  REVERSED

  A young man who is not what he seems

  Harry went for a long walk in his neighborhood again, the weather being fine, hot but clear; the dry air felt as if it was tightening and refreshing his skin. When he got back to his house, he poured himself a tall glass of iced tea and sat down at his computer. To his surprise, there was already a message from Louise Glade. The text was far shorter than the banner above it: “Found it. Emily’s left of Charlie.” He opened the attachment with a curious excitement, and as he waited for it to appear on the monitor, he imagined the smell of stale cigarettes traveling from Louise’s undoubtedly tar-stained fingers through the wires and misting up at him around the keys.

  The picture had been taken outdoors; the sun must have been behind the photographer, since almost everyone in the well-dressed group was wincing blindly. Charlie Ziegart was at the center of a group of fifteen people. Harry would have had no trouble finding Emily, even if Louise’s directions had been ambiguous; to the right of Charlie was a grinning boy that Harry could see was the adolescent version of Jonathan. The grin was too wide, and Harry couldn’t imagine Dusty ever giving the camera the gift of such open glee.

  Emily Ziegart was a head shorter than her husband, and was the only member of the party not smiling. She was also the only one not directly facing the camera; instead, she was angled a quarter turn toward her husband, giving the impression of movement. Her eyes hadn’t reached his face yet when the shutter had clicked. The couple weren’t touching, but her hands were lifting, as though she was about to take his arm, but like her gaze, her hands hadn’t yet made contact. Her face was small enough relative to the rest of the scene that he doubted he’d recognize her in another picture if he came across one, but it was enough to get a sense of her. She was altogether rounded and soft-looking, her hair long and straight, some vague light color. She was dressed in brown trousers that were too tight and a wrinkled matching jacket buttoned up to her breasts that sat too wide on her shoulders. Her posture was rounded, too, giving her an air of weakness mixed with anxiety that was hard to look at for long. He examined her face more closely. Round cheeks and a small mouth, dark eyes in shadow. Harry thought, She doesn’t look like a genius.

  His eyes wandered back to Jonathan, and it was only then that he noticed the boy’s hands, clasped at crotch level. The left hand was underneath the right, and Harry rolled his chair back, then pulled himself closer to the desk again, staring at the screen from different angles. But after his eyes had recognized the images for what they were, there was no unseeing them; Jonathan’s left hand was giving either his father, his stepmother, or both the finger.

  Harry b
lessed the Internet when he found the main number for the physics department at Grenier University through the school’s home page. His call was answered by another female administrative assistant, causing him to wonder at the persistence of certain gender roles in the labor market. He’d never once seen a male secretary at a university. There must be some, he figured, but it was apparently like male nurses or male bank tellers; they existed, but in such small numbers that encountering one was cause for raised eyebrows and bemused shrugs. He identified himself and asked if he could speak to the chair or some other senior member of the faculty. The phone went silent and he was about to hang up, assuming that he’d been cut off, when a man’s voice broke the silence by saying, “I’m here.”

  “This is Harry Sterling. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Did Samantha put you through without telling you who you were going to talk to? She always does that, and it’s mighty annoying. She doesn’t screen my incoming calls either, and if I could fire her, I would.”

  “It’s okay,” said Harry, worried that complaint on his part might result in Samantha’s fourteen children going without food or health insurance. “And you are?”

  “Cameron Jenner. I’m the chair. Harry Sterling? Name means nothing to me.”

  Harry went through his identification spiel again, explaining that he was doing a book on Charles Ziegart. “I understand that his second wife, Emily Timms, did her undergraduate work there. I was wondering if I could speak to someone who knew her or, better yet, worked with her.”

  “Ernie Thornburg was her adviser, but he died a couple of years ago. She took some classes from me. I wrote her a letter for grad school.”

  Eureka. “Would you mind telling me about her? Whatever you remember?”

  “She was memorable. And of course, with all the tragedy that happened later, that made her even more so.”

  “You’re referring to her suicide, I suppose?”

  “That, and Charlie Ziegart’s accident. And what happened to her career in general.”

  “Which was?”

  “All I know is that, after she went to Cantwell, we never heard much about her again. I expected her to get her Ph.D. in four years and to be out winning Nobel Prizes in six. But she went to graduate school and fell into a black hole. She married Ziegart, but it didn’t seem to do her any good. Shame.”

  “She was a good student?”

  “She was the smartest student I’ve ever had. She had a fantastic intuitive grasp of theory, but she was more of an engineer than a theoretician. She could take one look at a problem and within a few days have a practical answer.”

  “Did you know that her name was on the original Ziegart effect paper?”

  “I heard that. I expect his ego won out in the end, though. He wasn’t a big one for sharing credit, from what I understand.”

  “You wrote a letter for her?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t say enough about her, since she was as promising a student as I’d ever seen, and had no money to speak of, so it was important that someone give her a full scholarship, stipend, and so on. She got offered a spot everywhere she applied. I expected her to go to MIT or Berkeley or to one of the Ivy Leagues. But Cantwell wanted her something fierce, and showered her with money and a chance to work with Charlie Ziegart. They wooed her in a way that even MIT didn’t. So that’s where she wound up.”

  “Do you think that was a bad idea? For her, I mean?”

  “In hindsight, it sure seems that way. It’s not easy for a woman in the hard sciences, even today. But if she takes the MRS track, that often makes it harder.”

  “The what?”

  “You know. Getting married. MRS.”

  “Oh,” said Harry as Jenner laughed. “What do you know about Ziegart’s death?”

  “Car accident. Something about a bee.”

  “Did she have any contact with you, or anyone else at Grenier, after she went to Cantwell? Or after she left there?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. She just disappeared. She didn’t seem particularly stuck up when she was here, but she shed us like an old snakeskin once she married Ziegart.” Harry asked again about personal information, specifically a hometown. “I don’t know. Somewhere further south. Georgia or Alabama.”

  “Would you be willing to fax me copies of some of the documents in Emily’s file? High school transcripts, application, that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know that that’s strictly legal. If Samantha can find it, I guess you could look at it. But only in person.”

  Harry sighed. “I think I’ll be making a trip up there soon. My next question is a little delicate, but I have to ask. I’ve heard a few rumors that Charlie Ziegart was known to use his graduate students’ work and pass it off as his own. It sounds like that might have happened with Emily. Do you know anything about that?”

  A pause. “You’ve probably been told that it’s rarely that simple. I’m sure Charlie got his students to work on his projects; that’s the whole point of graduate school. His students were using his grant money, his equipment, his expertise, his supervision, his general concepts, his suggestions for experiments. So the results should have been his by rights.”

  “No rumors of overdoing it?”

  “I’m not comfortable with this conversation. There’s nothing I can tell you that will help you, although I’m not clear what you’re looking for anyway. I thought you said you were doing a biography on Charlie Ziegart. It sounds like you’re after him, which is pretty shitty of you, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I’m not after anybody. I’m doing a book on intellectual property. Charlie Ziegart’s name came up, and I got interested in his methods. And, to an extent, his wife.”

  “Well, I’ve told you all I know. If you want to pay us a visit, Samantha can help you out with the file.”

  “I’ve been told that Emily had some unpopular ideas about electricity.”

  Jenner laughed. “The Tesla stuff. That was something she came to her senior year. Undifferentiated transmission of electricity.”

  “What was wrong with the idea?”

  “Well, she thought it should be free, like oxygen. But someone still had to pay for the infrastructure. Have you heard of Nikola Tesla?”

  “Yes. He was the real inventor of AC power and radio. Edison and Marconi essentially stole all the credit.”

  “That’s good. Not many people know about him, even though he invented most of the technology we use today before everyone else could catch up. Emily had a bit of an obsession with Tesla’s work. He built an enormous tower whose purpose was to broadcast electricity to anyone who wanted it. He’d developed a cheap and efficient way to do it, too. But the infrastructure was gargantuan, and no one wanted to pay for it and get no profits.”

  “But Emily wanted to revive the idea?”

  “She did revive it. A lot of Tesla’s data was lost after he died, and how he managed to generate all that power isn’t well understood. Emily figured out how he did it, or claimed she did. She’d talk about it with anyone who’d listen. But there was no point, really. No one was going to fund building anything like that.”

  “Poor doomed girl,” Harry said before he could stop himself.

  “Well, yes. I guess that’s a poetic way of putting it. She was an oddball in all sorts of ways. When she first got here, she was interested in testing some psychic phenomena, a notion from which she was disabused pretty quickly. If her scores hadn’t been through the roof, we’d have kicked her out, but it all worked out in the end.”

  Not for her, Harry thought. Psychic phenomena. Josie had to have known her. He thought, Maybe she doesn’t remember. It’s possible, it was years ago, and Josie’s a drunk. Maybe she liked her and has blocked all memory of Emily because it’s all so sad. But the fact that everyone in Josie’s neighborhood had solar panels on their homes couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. He had that prickling feeling again. He wrote on his pad “Talk to Josie” in large block letters. “What do you mean,
it all worked out?”

  “Her college career. It was remarkably successful. She was incredibly productive, published a number of papers. I don’t remember how many, but on at least two of them, she was the sole author. That’s pretty amazing for an undergraduate.”

  Josie was about to lie down for a nap when there was a knock at the front door. A handsome young man with a clipboard stood on the porch. He smiled when she asked him what he wanted and said, “Another inspector from the power company, I’m afraid.”

  She wondered why he was in a suit, then thought, This one’s higher up than Darcy Murphy. Fear lanced through her. Not police? No, from the power company, he said. She wished she hadn’t had so much to drink. She couldn’t think properly, couldn’t read him clearly, and knew that she needed to.

  “Not again,” she said, trying to adopt her usual annoyed tone. “What do we need to do to convince you folks that we’re not stealing anything?”

  He smiled wider. “I know it’s a nuisance. But it’s just a matter of paperwork. Do you mind if I have a look around? Inspector Murphy did a thorough job, I’m sure, but I’m one of his supervisors and he’s up for review, and I need to double-check his work. Nothing to be alarmed about.”

  She could make out some colors, a sickly brownish orange shot through with streaks of dark red. His aura looks bloody, she thought. I’m glad I’m not his wife. She said, “I guess you can look around, but you’re the fourth one to do that. I can’t imagine what you’re looking for that your other people haven’t already seen.”

  The new inspector said, “Nice solar panels you have on your roof.” He pointed upward with his pen. “How long have you had them?”

  “It should be in your paperwork, honey. A few years, I don’t remember exactly how long. Since you can see ’em so clearly, it should be obvious to you how we’re getting our power. They call it the Sunshine State, remember?” Maggie was always telling her that she should be nicer to these men. After all, she thought, he’s good-looking, even if he does look like he’s fifteen years old.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “That it is.” At least he’s more polite than the last one, she thought, then remembered why she should be afraid of that thought.