The Fortune Teller

by Gwendolyn Womack

  And she had found it. What was going on?

  The vendor was a young Rastafarian preoccupied with his iPad. He finally looked over. “Mama, that necklace is brand new. I sell it to you for two hundred euros,” he said in French.

  Semele picked up the pearls, too distraught to speak. Theo didn’t need to be told whose necklace she was holding.

  “How did you get this?” he demanded in French.

  The vendor shrugged. “Guy sold it to me. You want it or not?”

  The man seemed oblivious; he was just a pawn. Theo quickly paid him and guided Semele away by the arm. She was in a daze as she held the pearls in her hand, barely able to walk.

  Her cell phone rang. She answered with shaking hands, already knowing it was him. “Hello?”

  “Dear girl, you’re not trying hard enough,” he said.

  “Yes, I am!” Semele couldn’t stop the shrill in her voice. “I found the necklace!”

  “Please don’t delude yourself. You’re running out of time.”

  Desperation, adrenaline, and fear hit her in a heady mix. She started to shake. “Then tell me where you are and we can end this game.”

  “Oh, this isn’t a game, Semele. It’s empirical evidence.”

  Semele had no idea how to handle this deranged man. She just didn’t want him to hang up. The more he talked, she might get a clue to her mother’s location. “So this is an experiment?”

  “All psychic events are fifty percent coincidence and forty-five percent fraud, fabrication, and selective memory. That leaves five percent that cannot be explained. A five percent we call the ‘something else.’ You are that something else.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong person.”

  He chuckled. “And yet you found the necklace,” he said, throwing her words back at her. “Do you know what entelechy is? The sense the acorn has of the oak tree. Sixth sense is actually the first sense, but our conscious minds keep us separated from it. Entelechy is the first step to remembering.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. Her rage and frustration got the better of her. “You crazy bastard! Where is my mother?”

  “About to die.”

  Her breath caught. “No, please,” she begged, desperate.

  “Did you dream about your father before he died? Call him without knowing why? You’ve had dreams all your life. Make no mistake, future events cast their shadows.”

  “Please don’t hurt her.” She began to cry. This man would kill her mother if he had to. She was certain.

  “That’s not up to me. I’m afraid talent such as yours requires extraordinary proof.”

  “You don’t need proof.”

  “Oh, the proof is not for me, Semele. It’s for the world. Right now I have you under a microscope. But soon I’ll be sharing you with my colleagues. There are many scientists back at the institute in Moscow who will be so fascinated to know that Nettie survived the war after her escape from Makaryev and that her granddaughter is alive. Nettie’s case study is infamous. But it will be nothing compared to yours. Your life is about to change, dear girl.”

  Click. He hung up.

  Semele looked to Theo helplessly. “He wants to experiment on me like they did to my grandmother.” She put her hands on her head and sobbed. She didn’t care that she was standing on a street corner in Paris having a complete meltdown. “I can’t do this—oh my God.”

  “Semele,” Theo said firmly, taking her hands. “Look at me. He’s trying to get in to your head. Don’t let him. You’re going to find your mother. Believe that.”

  Semele fought the hysteria threatening to overwhelm her.

  “Go over everything he said,” Theo suggested.

  She could barely recount the call. Evanoff had stolen Nettie’s life, and now this man wanted hers. Her terror threatened to suffocate her until finally something inside her pushed back, a survival instinct, a will to live, and it turned her fear into anger. The spark that was lit at Cabe’s bedside fanned into a flame. She would not let this man harm her mother.

  The pearls grew warm in her hand. “He left this under a seashell for a reason,” she said. Then she realized. “It’s the shell that holds the message. The shell.”

  She and Theo looked at each other and said the answer at the same time.

  “Simza.”

  Two of Cups

  Within hours Semele and Theo were en route to Admont, Austria, the place Simza had stayed every winter and the only place during her lifetime where she could be found on the lungo drom, “the road with no destination.”

  Semele looked out the plane’s window, unable to fathom that the madman who had killed her father and Cabe now had her mother. She didn’t know if she could survive losing all of them.

  She thought back to the day before her father died. She really had called him on a whim, just to say hi. Right before they hung up he had said, “There’s something important your mother and I want to tell you when you take the train up next week.”

  She hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but looking back she knew he had meant to tell her the truth about her adoption. He and her mother had gone to their favorite neighborhood restaurant the night before, a little Italian joint, and discussed it at length; her mother had cried as they walked home hand in hand. Semele had no idea how she knew all this, but she did. She could see the moments strung together like a movie of someone else’s life.

  “What are you thinking?” Theo asked her, taking her hand.

  “Just thinking about my father.” She looked over to him, not sure how she could explain.

  “Was he the one who encouraged you to work in antiquities?” he asked.

  Semele gave him a sad smile, knowing he was trying to distract her. “I was fascinated by handwriting as a teenager. I used to study it as a hobby. For a while I thought about becoming a professional graphologist after college.” She shook her head at the idea. “I used to give all my friends handwriting analyses.”

  “I’ll have to show you mine,” he offered and kissed her hand.

  “That’s not even negotiable.” She couldn’t wait to analyze his handwriting, to see which way his words slanted, how sharp the angles were, how hard he pressed to impose his will on the page. Every little idiosyncrasy had meaning.

  “So that led you to manuscripts?” His finger absently stroked her palm in a soothing motion.

  She nodded, staring at their joined hands. “I’d request volumes of antique letters from Beinecke to study the penmanship, but over time, I became more interested in the letters themselves.” This had prompted her interest in paleography, the study of ancient writing and manuscripts. Slowly, she began to find her niche. “My father was the one who suggested I learn Greek my freshman year in college.”

  “Funny, that…” Theo murmured, shaking his head.

  Now she wondered if Nettie had asked Joseph to make sure she learned Greek, or if his encouragement had happened naturally. With both of them gone, she would never know for sure. He had kept her mother in the dark; had that been to protect her? How much had Nettie told her father?

  Semele was surprised by how much she wanted to talk about her parents. Since her father’s death and learning about her adoption, she had tried to shut them out. Now the memories were flowing freely again.

  “While other kids were at the beach, we would visit libraries and tour collections on our vacations.”

  “Where you saw countless treasures,” Theo surmised with a smile.

  “The earliest known copy of the I Ching, Shakespeare’s First Folio, the Magna Carta, the Dead Sea Scrolls. We went everywhere. The Bodleian Library, the Vatican Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale…”

  “So you traveled the world and stayed home for college?”

  “I moved to Michigan for graduate school, Ann Arbor,” she pointed out. Ann Arbor had the largest collection of ancient papyrus and parchment in North America and a top conservation program. That program had launched a career in which she handled eve
ry kind of rare book and manuscript—early printings, maps, atlases, heirloom books, and first editions. She’d worked with libraries, museums, and private collectors around the world. Looking back, she could see that everything had led, one stepping-stone at a time, to finding Ionna’s manuscript, and Theo.

  Strange how she and Theo barely knew each other and yet she felt as if she’d known him forever. Now they were forty-one thousand feet in the air, on their way to find the place where her ancestors once lived. She had the seashell from Paris in her purse and the necklace in her hand. Ever since she had found her mother’s pearls, she had yet to let them go.

  Message from VS—

  You’re angry.

  One day you’ll understand.

  Reply to VS—

  Flying home tomorrow. We can talk when I arrive.

  Message from VS—

  No longer there.

  I love you.

  Reply to VS—

  What have you done?

  Ace of Wands

  In Admont, Theo followed two steps behind Semele with the faith of a shadow. He never said a word except when he thought her frustration got the better of her. Then he would put a soothing hand on her back and murmur words of encouragement. She walked the streets of Admont for hours with no idea what she was looking for. The beauty of the historic town, the glistening Enns River and Ennstal Alps were all but lost on her.

  They finally stopped at a café. Theo bought them coffee and a sandwich and they sat outside. She tried to eat, but the bread tasted like cardboard, the coffee like bitter water.

  Theo’s cell phone rang. “What did you find?”

  Semele watched him as he listened intently.

  “Good. We’re in Admont. I’ll let you know if we need anything else.” He hung up and explained. “I had my IT specialist see if he could dig up anything else on Evanoff—my guy’s thorough. Evanoff did have a son, Viktor Salko, born during the war. He changed his name.” He noticed the color drain from her face. “What is it?”

  Semele knew that name.

  “He’s on the board of directors at Kairos.” She had never met him, though. He lived in Moscow. Now he was out there somewhere with her mother.

  She scanned her surroundings, beginning to panic. Was her mother in Russia? Had they been looking in the wrong places?

  She took in the family crossing the street, the little girl holding her father’s hand, and the two men on bikes whizzing past her, bringing a fresh breeze in their wake. Then her eyes landed on the man reading a book at the table next to them. He was wearing a Geiger watch.

  “The watch,” she whispered. “That’s it.”

  If synchronicity was life’s way of sending messages, it had just delivered several. She looked down the street and found the shop right away. There was a reason this street, and this corner, looked so familiar. When she was nine, her father had bought his Geiger while they were here on vacation. Semele remembered waiting outside the shop, eating ice cream with her mother. Afterward they had toured the library at Admont Abbey.

  This city was the place she had dreamed about that night back in New Haven. She and her parents had been in the car heading here when they saw the accident. Her heart began to race with urgency. “I need to go to the library.”

  Theo’s eyebrows rose, but he stood up with her and they quickly left the café.

  The library was only meters away. All day, she had been walking in circles around the one place she needed to be.

  * * *

  The Admont Abbey Library was an exquisite masterpiece of Baroque architecture and the crown jewel of the city. The moment Semele stepped through the doors, a wave of calm descended on her. Every stone and piece of marble had been laid for one purpose—knowledge. Semele could feel its light shining all around her.

  She remembered her visit to the abbey as a child with crystalline clarity. She had broken away from their tour to go look at the books.

  One particular book had drawn her attention, and she’d pulled it off the shelf. The text was in German so she hadn’t understood the words, but the pictures of children from World War II had mesmerized her. They were black-and-white photos; the children dressed in old-fashioned clothes that were ratty and torn. Aid workers, nuns, and nurses stood hovering in the background of each of the pictures, but it was the children whose images broke the heart. They stared straight into the camera lens with eyes that said they had suffered too much.

  Her father had found her sitting on the floor next to a bookshelf.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered. When he saw what she was holding, he took the book away. “Darling, this is a historical archive, very precious. We can’t touch.”

  “What is it about, Dad?”

  He glanced at the title with raised eyebrows. “Orphanages in Austria During the War.” He returned the book to the shelf and led her back to the tour. Semele had thought about those pictures for weeks afterward. It was as if every image had been imprinted on her mind.

  The moment returned to her with a strong feeling of déjà vu, showing her a memory carefully preserved within these walls. In that book was a picture of Nettie standing with the children in front of the Engel House Orphanage in Vienna.

  Semele had found her grandmother twenty years ago, and she knew without a doubt it was the place where her mother was being kept.

  Ten of Wands

  They were en route to Vienna when Viktor called again.

  “Semele, I grow tired.”

  “We’re coming! We’re on our way to Engel House. Is my mother all right? Let me speak to her!”

  Viktor ignored her. “Your words fill me with profound relief. Your little field trip took longer than I expected. We are almost done with this phase of the experiment. Now don’t let us down, dear girl. And come alone, just you two, or you will never see your mother again. You have until sunset, and then she dies.”

  He hung up. Semele began to shake.

  Theo looked over at her in concern. “What did he say?”

  “My mother’s there. We don’t have much time.”

  * * *

  The next few hours were an intense whirlwind. Theo chartered a helicopter to take them to Vienna, brushing off Semele’s lingering concerns about the cost. “Your family is my family,” he insisted.

  Semele was choked with gratitude and could only nod her thanks. It was true that Nettie and Liliya had become sisters at Makaryev, bonded by something stronger than blood. It was a bond that would survive well beyond their deaths.

  Semele looked out the helicopter window at Vienna, a sprawling city of over a million and a half people, where her grandmother had spent her years after the war. This was where her mother was born.

  Another feeling of déjà vu enveloped her.

  The dream.

  She knew this moment—had experienced every second before—a moment so powerful, the memory had imprinted itself in her mind before it ever took place. Just as she had in the dream, Semele leaned over and kissed Theo.

  He pulled away, their lips inches apart, and whispered, “You know you’re not going to get rid of me after this.”

  She kissed him again as her answer, for the first time understanding her gift. Her intuition had been her shadow all her life, always there, always a part of her, speaking to her in dreams and thoughts and inklings. Because of the darkness surrounding her now, she could finally see.

  * * *

  The Engel House orphanage and the Academy of the Blind stood side by side, and when she saw them, Semele felt like she was meeting her grandmother and grandfather for the first time.

  The orphanage was boarded up and had long since shuttered its doors. Several buildings on the block had construction signs posted outside them, and the four-story building that had once housed the orphanage would likely soon be refurbished.

  The heavy wooden doors resembled the entrance to a church. A bolt and chain wrapped around the wrought-iron handles like a snake. It had been cut by someone to allow them
entry—an ominous welcome.

  Semele felt like she’d located a needle in a haystack. She couldn’t believe she had managed to find her mother in all of Europe with the sheer force of her mind. She watched Theo take the chain off, and her pulse began to race. Whoever—whatever—was waiting on the other side of those doors terrified her.

  “Semele, you can do this,” Theo said.

  She nodded, knowing she had no choice.

  Ionna had foreseen these events and had tried to prepare her: The road must be walked whether you are ready or not.

  The World

  Semele stepped inside and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The boarded-up windows allowed in little light. She moved through a hallway filled with cobwebs and dust. Cracks riddled the walls like veins.

  “Apropos. Don’t you think?” Viktor’s voice rang out from a room up ahead. “Nettie’s sanctuary for years. The place where she tried to forget. The place where you must remember.”

  Semele walked toward the voice, leaving Theo to follow behind.

  She found Viktor Salko in what could only have been the library, though its bookshelves were now empty. He sat on the far side of the room in a high-back chair, like a king at court waiting for an audience. An oxygen tank stood next to him and a mask covered his mouth. He had thinning hair, and a pained expression dulled the hawkish lines of his face; he wore an ivory suit with a matching shirt and tie, as though he were dressed for a wedding … or a funeral.

  Her eyes landed on her mother.

  Helen was gagged and strapped to a chair twenty feet away. Wires had been hooked up all over her body and led to a strange contraption at the center of her chest. Semele had no idea what she was looking at.

  Her mother’s eyes watered when she saw her, and she tried to call out through the gag. The sound brought Semele out of her stupor and she took a step forward.