Deadly Readings

by Laura Bradford

  The first pier, where the fortune-tellers were located, was much quieter. If she didn’t have work to do, this would have been an ideal spot to do some people watching.

  There seemed to be people who knew exactly where they were going at this end of the boardwalk. Regulars, no doubt. And then there were others, who hung around the booths trying to muster up the courage to consult the psychic inside.

  She read the names over each doorway until she found the one she was looking for, Madame Mariah’s House of Fortunes. “Learn about your future from the Queen of Visions” read the neon sign that was fastened to the wall. She took a deep breath and stepped inside.

  The waiting room was nothing like she had expected. But then again, she really hadn’t known what to expect. Astrological charts hung on the walls in an obvious attempt to cover the peeling paint beneath them. A variety of crystals dangled from the ceiling. Hushed voices could be heard from behind a red curtain, but other than that Elise was alone. She sat in a folding chair and waited.

  Suddenly, a man parted the red curtain separating the waiting area from the back room and walked toward the front door. She knew the face but couldn’t place him.

  “Thanks again, Mariah. As always, I feel like you are clearing my path and pointing me in the right direction.”

  “My pleasure, Ben. I’ll see you again.”

  “You can count on it.” He grinned and walked out onto the boardwalk.

  Elise watched the man leave, tried to put a name with the face. But couldn’t. She turned her gaze instead onto the woman who stood just inside the parted curtain. The woman was everything Elise had imagined, and more. The jet-black hair pulled into a tight bun, large gold hoop earrings, and long, flowing dress all added to the mystical aura the fortune-teller exuded.

  Elise looked the woman over once more from toe to head, stopping on the unreadable eyes that stared back at her. She shifted in her seat and then rose, surprised by the apprehension she suddenly felt.

  “I’m Elise Jenkins. With the Ocean Point Weekly.” She extended her hand to the fortune-teller.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Really? How do you . . .” Elise could feel her mouth drop open, her heart skip a beat. Maybe the lady really was psychic.

  “I know all. Plus I saw your picture in the paper when you started your job there.”

  Elise laughed. She was glad to see that the woman had a sense of humor. Hopefully it would make her job a little easier.

  “I am here because of the two girls who were murdered in Ocean Point,” Elise said. The woman’s face darkened instantly. “I was told that both girls had consulted you for a fortune the night they were killed.”

  “That is right.”

  “Evidently you had warned both girls of tragedy.”

  “That is also right.”

  Realizing the woman was not going to be very forthcoming, Elise got straight to the point.

  “Can you tell me what you saw when you told their fortune? What you believe may have happened?”

  “I did a palm reading on each of those poor girls,” Madame Mariah continued, her words spoken in a slow, deliberate fashion. “Their Life Line ended abruptly.”

  “Their Life Line?”

  “Your hand contains three main lines. The top line is your Heart Line and it can tell about your romantic life in the past, present and future. The second line is your Head Line and it can tell about your career, your goals, that kind of thing. The bottom line is your Life Line.”

  Elise jotted down everything the woman was saying.

  “Anything else?” she prodded.

  “They were punished for their visit.”

  Elise looked up from her notes and stared at the woman. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean just what I said,” the woman said gravely. “Now, I must go.”

  Confused, Elise thanked the woman and turned toward the door, the psychic’s words ringing in her ears. She looked around wildly for something to prolong the conversation, a way to get Madame Mariah to explain her cryptic words. Her gaze stopped on a strange assortment of scorch marks around the door, the kind of thing Elise would expect to see after a fire.

  “What happened here?” Elise pointed at the marks, hoping and praying the woman would say something.

  Madame Mariah walked over to the doorway and placed her hands, palms down, on the singed wall. Elise watched in fascination as the woman closed her eyes and began to speak.

  “Evil and greedy forces are trying to get rid of me.”

  “Are you saying that someone tried to set this place on fire to get you off the boardwalk?” Elise asked, her voice rising in pitch.

  “The fire department said it was caused by a cigarette that had been carelessly disposed of, but I know that none of my clients that day were smokers.”

  “Do you think it was deliberate?”

  “Evil and greedy forces will do whatever it takes to accomplish a goal,” Madame Mariah said. The woman walked toward the curtained room and turned. “Good night, Elise.”

  Chapter Ten

  Thursday, June 17

  4:00 a.m.

  He felt like a traitor. Chief Maynard had been nothing but supportive and understanding since the day he stepped into the top spot at the department. He always seemed to understand Mitch’s crusade to solve everything regardless of how small or trivial. And he lent a listening ear on more than one occasion when Mitch threw a tantrum over the latest perp to get off with a slap on the wrist from the county judge.

  Yet here he was in the middle of the night, getting ready to go through his boss’s personal file. Mitch shoved his hand against the file drawer, shutting what he had just opened. He couldn’t do it. There was no way he was going to turn on the chief like this.

  But what if the chief did do it? Could he really turn his back on the possibility because Maynard was a nice guy? Mitch raked a hand across his head. Would he have wanted the cops to overlook a suspect in his dad’s killing?

  No.

  His hand shook as he turned the key in the lock. This time he didn’t stop the drawer as it rolled open. Instead, he ran his fingertips across the names of his fellow officers, their personnel records bulging with references, psychological evaluations, and background checks.

  He wondered what his dad would say if he were still alive, what he’d think of his son investigating the department’s chief. But he knew the answer. Dad had been a firm believer in loyalty through the ranks. He would be ashamed of his son and Mitch knew it.

  But Mom would have wanted the truth, no matter where that led. It was the not knowing that had been the hardest for her.

  Mitch sucked in a deep breath of air and reached for the file belonging to his commanding officer, Kevin Maynard. For several long minutes he stared at the file, toying with the idea of putting it back and disregarding his fears. But he couldn’t.

  He shut the drawer and locked the cabinet. Once inside his private office, he locked the door for added privacy and then flipped open the folder.

  Kevin Maynard. Former military. Served a tour in Vietnam in 1970 at the age of eighteen. Retired from active duty after twenty years. Followed his father’s example and entered civilian law enforcement in Sumter, a small town about thirty miles away. Worked his way up from patrolman to detective to captain. Was next in line to become that department’s chief. But left and came to Ocean Point instead.

  “Now, why would he do that? Why would he give up his seniority to start fresh in a comparable department?” Mitch said aloud. He flipped to the application the chief had filled out when he applied to the Ocean Point Police Department.

  According to what the chief had written, he had felt compelled to leave his former department because of a difference of opinion regarding a missing person investigation.

  Mitch searched each subsequent piece of paper in the chief’s file for particulars on the difference of opinion, but there were none. In fact, the chief’s file seemed unusually thin consideri
ng his position in the department.

  “Hmmm. Why wouldn’t the council have pursued this before they hired him?” He shook his head as he realized he was speaking out loud again. Using a recorder so much had given him a nasty habit that he needed to break.

  Mitch glanced at the clock and realized Chief Maynard would be arriving shortly for P.T. He pushed back his chair, closed the file, and headed back to the records room. It wasn’t until the chief’s file was safely back in the locked cabinet that his breathing slowed to normal for the first time in hours.

  The missing person case the chief had referred to on his application had to have occurred during his last year with the Sumter P.D. And it had to be a pretty major disagreement to make a person walk away when he was next in line for the top job. Mitch needed answers and he knew just where he could find them.

  His lunch break would be a perfect time to visit the Sumter Public Library.

  11:30 a.m.

  It was becoming more and more difficult to read the stack of papers in front of him over the loud gurgling from his stomach. The slice of toast he’d eaten some six hours earlier wasn’t cutting it anymore.

  “Here you go, sir. Here’s one more issue with articles about that case.”

  Mitch looked up long enough to smile gratefully at the elderly librarian who had attached herself to him from the moment he requested information on a missing person story from two years earlier.

  Maynard was quoted in several stories from that time period while he was a captain with the Sumter Police Department. His quotes all concerned leads and clues. All very professional. All very innocent.

  Mitch flipped carelessly through the next five or six issues in front of him, feeling foolish for driving all the way to Sumter for something that was apparently nothing.

  He turned another page and stopped.

  Psychic Consulted in Disappearance of Local Boy

  Intrigued by the headline, Mitch read the article. Three paragraphs down, he found it. Kevin Maynard was quoted as saying, “Psychics and fortune-tellers are all lunatics. They are simply trying to make a fast buck at the expense of innocent people.”

  Mitch was surprised by the strong words. Particularly to a member of the press.

  Several issues later, his boss was made to eat those words when the missing youngster was found—safe and sound—exactly where the psychic had told them to look.

  “That had to be humiliating.”

  “What was that, hon?” the librarian asked.

  He was doing it again. He really needed to work on keeping his thoughts inside his head instead of on the tip of his tongue for everyone to hear.

  “It must have been a real shock when that psychic was able to nail down the location of the missing boy.” Mitch pointed to the article he was reading.

  “Oh, it was! It was amazing! That little boy’s parents were beyond thrilled.” The woman sat down in a chair next to Mitch and continued, obviously thrilled to be able to rehash a story she would never forget. “The whole town was excited. Except, maybe, for a gentleman that was working for the police department at that time. He thought it was ludicrous to give a psychic the time of day. But then, a few days later, it was that very psychic who solved the case.”

  “Do you remember the name of the officer?” Mitch asked. He didn’t know why, but he needed confirmation of what he had just read. Someone to validate a motive for murder taking shape in his mind. A motive for two murders.

  “Maynard—that was his name. Good officer by all accounts but all of that was forgotten when that little boy was found. Suddenly he was ridiculed in the press for his skepticism. I imagine he hates the mention of a psychic these days.”

  Mitch quickly stacked the newspaper issues on the table in front of him and stood. He squeezed the woman’s hand gently.

  “Thank you. You have been an enormous help.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Thursday, June 17

  1:00 p.m.

  Everything she could possibly want to know about Ocean Point was right there at her fingertips. Pages and pages of the town’s history were neatly bound in large volumes and arranged on the shelves by decade.

  “I see you found the morgue.”

  Elise spun around. Dean stood in the doorway, a camera bag slung over his arm.

  “The morgue?” she echoed.

  “You just can’t learn everything in those journalism colleges, can you? This room. It’s called the morgue. Because it holds all the old copies that get thrown into a book and forgotten.” He set his bag on the ground and walked into the room. He ran his finger across a dusty maroon cover on the 1950s shelf and held it up to her. “I think Sam forgot to pay the housekeeper.”

  She narrowed her eyes at Dean, looked him over from head to toe.

  “If the photography thing falls through, you could pass for a Swedish maid,” she teased.

  He tried to hold it back, but she saw it. The corner of his mouth twitched in an upward movement.

  It felt good to goof around with Dean. It helped ease some of the troubling thoughts that had been plaguing her mind since she left Madame Mariah’s place last night. The burn marks around the psychic’s doorway were hard to ignore on their own, and when you threw in her eerie response, it was enough to cause insomnia.

  “You look tired, missy,” Dean said, looking her over. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I just didn’t sleep real well last night.”

  “Take it from me. Warm beer works every time.”

  She crinkled her nose at the thought. “I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

  He picked up his camera bag once again and walked back to the door. “I’ve got a shoot to do, so I’m outta here. Don’t work too hard.” Elise was almost sad to see him go. His presence had kept her from the task at hand, helped lighten her mood. But she needed to get moving.

  There was only one person she could come up with who would have a reason for wanting Madame Mariah off the pier. A fire seemed a bit extreme, but it was possible.

  She located the book with last year’s papers and pulled it off the shelf. Opening it, she flipped to the beginning of last summer. She skimmed the back issues looking for the first article she could find regarding Johnson and Associates’ proposed luxury condominium complex.

  She found it in an issue from mid-June.

  According to Daniel Johnson, president of Johnson and Associates, a new luxury condominium complex would enable Ocean Point to accommodate seventy additional families each week during the tourist season—bringing more revenue to the town and its businesses.

  The proposed condominium complex would require demolition of the first pier of the boardwalk . . . a pier that has not been a huge revenue maker in recent years.

  “The vast majority of Ocean Point’s tourists are attracted to the various games, food booths and thrill rides that are found only on the second pier,” Johnson said. “And it doesn’t take much research to realize that the majority of police calls to the boardwalk are to those establishments on the first pier.”

  The article went on to quote council members, as well as tourists themselves, about their opinion on the proposed project.

  One council member said that Ocean Point was doing just fine in the number of vacationers it could accommodate each summer. Another said that demolition of the first pier would be an easy way to get rid of the “less than desirable” people it attracted. A vacationer from northern New Jersey felt the boardwalk as a whole was sentimental to her family—fortune-tellers and all.

  Elise continued to turn the pages that chronicled the tourist season in Ocean Point the previous summer, looking for anything that might catch her eye. And then she saw it. It was mentioned briefly in a blurb on the second page of a July paper.

  A small fire on the boardwalk was quickly extinguished last night by a fast-thinking passerby. Joseph Copetti of Brooklyn was walking down the boardwalk with a friend when he saw flames climbing the outer wall of Madame Mariah’s House of F
ortunes.

  “I still had my beach blanket from earlier in the day, so I ran down to the beach and dipped it in the ocean and then ran back onto the boardwalk with it,” Copetti said. “I smacked the wall over and over with the wet blanket until I got the flames out, while my friend Vinnie went and called the fire department.”

  Madame Mariah’s, which was closed during the incident, sustained only cosmetic damage and no one was injured. A spokesperson for the Ocean Point Fire Department blamed a smoldering cigarette, just under the doorway, for the fire.

  Madame Mariah had been certain none of her customers that day smoked. So how could a lit cigarette get inside and go unnoticed from the time the woman closed until the fire was spotted hours later?

  Maybe Madame Mariah was right. And if she was, it sure seemed like Johnson and Associates had a motive for trying to burn her out.

  She closed the book and returned it to the shelf. Maybe Sam could shed some light on the whole matter. She wandered out into the hallway and headed toward his office.

  Sam appeared to be deep in thought when she turned the corner and stopped in his always open doorway. He was pushing buttons on his calculator and writing numbers down in a large notepad. Tomorrow was deadline day for Sunday’s paper and it was time for Sam to calculate the amount of space advertising would have to fill and how much space editorial would get.

  Not wanting to interrupt his concentration, Elise stood in the doorway and studied him. The florescent light fixture above his desk cast a bright shiny spot on his head. She found his baldness to be endearing. It fit him perfectly.

  During her interview for the job, Sam had told her he had always wanted to be a fiction writer but had to hold down a day job in order to pay the bills. Working in the newspaper business had given him a way to get paid for writing. After eighteen years with the paper, he had taken over as editor—a position he still held twelve years later.