by Kater Cheek
“Well, it’s part of you now. It’s not a bad thing, it just makes you different.”
“I told you she’d accept you once she got used to the idea,” James said.
I nodded. Guess you could only see so many weird things before they all started to seem normal. Even Fenwick. Yeah. It was going to be okay. My final goblin, and he had pushed me into acceptance rather than the loony bin. “So, do you know mage-craft then?”
“Nay, nothing of merit.”
“Don’t be so modest,” James said. “You should see it, Kit, he can make himself invisible. You’ll probably have to take the bindi off though.”
“Really? This I gotta see.” The jewel was still tacky on the back, and stuck to my index finger. When I took it off, Ulrich looked human again.
“Well, ‘tis nothing like the witch-work that James is ken to; this is a faerie enchantment, such as our kind are famed for.”
“Okay, so show me.”
I blinked, and suddenly Ulrich wasn’t there anymore. He must have moved away. He wasn’t on the couch, he wasn’t behind the couch. And then he was there again, sitting in the same place.
“Whoa! How’d you do that?”
“Tis a lesser spell. I avert your eyes from the place where I rest. You see me, but you do not know what you see.”
“Can you teach me that?”
“It is not easy for your kind. I may show you the way, explain as I am able, but only through perseverance shall you master it.”
James went to get his shoes. “What he means is, he tried to teach me, but I didn’t practice enough, and now he doesn’t want to waste his time. If you don’t get it, you’ll have to hear ‘I told you so’ for the rest of your life.”
“So, will you teach me?”
“Have you aught to trade?” Ulrich took the hint from James and went to fetch his duffel full of rugby gear.
I followed him towards the door. “You like fake trees?”
A knock at the door interrupted whatever response he had planned. James opened it to admit a young woman with long, light brown hair in a braid, and large, plastic-rimmed glasses. A small gold pentacle hung from a chain around her neck, dipping into her pale blue ballet top. I’d seen her. She was Elaina, a regular at the café.
She hugged greetings to James and Ulrich, and blinked, as though she just recognized me. “Kit, right? Are you the one looking for a roommate?”
Whoa. “How do you know? I only told James this morning.”
“I cast a spell last week to summon a roommate, and I drew the page of pentacles in a tarot reading. That usually means either a young entrepreneur or a Taurus. I mentioned it to James, and he said your sun sign was Taurus, and that you work for yourself. We decided it must be you.”
“Wow. Really? You knew I was going to be looking for a place today?”
“I posted it on Facebook this morning,” James said. Elaina elbowed him.
Oh. Well that wasn’t nearly as mystical.
She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “James says you’re okay with witchcraft. You want to be my roommate?”
“You got a place already?”
“I’m looking. I want something particular, so it might take a couple of weeks. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you when I find what I’m looking for.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Email then?”
“She only checks it once a week,” James said, rolling his eyes as though checking email was like brushing teeth. “Just call or email me and I’ll let her know when I see her.”
Elaina gave me a slip of paper with her phone number on it.
“Kit, are you going to come and watch us play?” James asked.
“No, I promised to pay Madame R. back, remember?” I sat down on the couch and fished out the wad of money from my pocket. Larry’s cash would fill the gap (a roll of quarters, a delivery pizza, and some groceries) in Madame R.’s money, but laying each bill on the growing pile hurt like ripping out hairs.
“I’m proud of you, Kit.” James smiled at me before he walked out, and his approval made up for it. Almost. He was right, though. This was the right thing to do.
But he was naïve to think that Madame R. would just chuckle and shrug it off. She seemed like a sawed-off-shotgun-under-the-table kind of woman. If she just accepted the money back, fine. But if she demanded the real one, I’d better have a ‘real’ one to give her. And how hard was it to make a realistic fake?
For a crafty woman like me, all it took was a little bit of wire, a scrap of felt, a gold-tipped finepoint marker, and most of an hour’s work. A perfect replica.
Just in case.
With a very convincing fake bindi on my forehead and the stinky wad of cash in my pocket, I set out to make reparations to the wholly undeserving Madame R. Okay, not wholly undeserving. Cheating her had been kind of a crappy thing to do.
The Old Town, and its cluster of trendy and expensive boutiques, was bordered by the high rises of downtown to the west and the university campus to the east. Images of this scenic district, the pride of Seabingen, graced every postcard, tourist guide, and city map ever printed.
Technically, any address on one of the cobblestone streets lay within the Old Town, but when most people referred to this district, they meant the pedestrian free chunk on the west side of the river. Madame R.’s parlor was just east of the glaringly modern Cineplex theater, on the other side of the plaza, past shoe stores, galleries, fashion boutiques, and trendy bars. It lay well within the pedestrian zone, so I was surprised to see cars parked on the plaza outside.
They were cops and ambulances, and a crowd of rubberneckers craned their necks to spot a woman being wheeled out on a stretcher.
“What happened?” someone asked the crowd.
The woman next to me held a cranky toddler in one arm and a white shopping bag in the other, and seemed just as curious as the rest of us. “I think someone got shot.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“It was that fortune teller lady,” a man in a white apron said. “She got mugged.”
“Madame R.?”
“Yeah, that’s her there in the ambulance.” His apron had an embroidered salami on it; he must work at the nearby deli.
“Is she hurt?” the woman with the toddler asked. “Who found her?”
“One of her clients found her and called 911,” said the man with the salami-apron.
The ambulance took off with sirens blaring, so at least she wasn’t dead. The cops came along to disperse the crowd, but with neither a body nor juicy speculation to hold their interest most of the spectators wandered off on their own.
I waited.
An hour and a half later the police left and everyone went back to their shops. No one saw me climb the stairs to her parlor. The door was locked, but on my toes I could see inside through the small window in the door.
The place was trashed. The purple curtains had been torn down, the furniture toppled, and even her crystal ball was off its stand. She must have surprised whoever it was while they were searching her place. Eddie and Jojo again?
If so, how did they find out that she had the fake bindi? Was she stupid enough to tell someone? Would they have sent me to the hospital if I hadn’t been at the UPub when they came to trash my place?
Who was Madame R.? Who were her enemies? Who did she tell about the bindi?
Next to the door hung a small plastic rack with space for four business cards. The first slot held Madame R.’s cards. The second was empty, and the third held cards for Annette Spedowski, mehndi artisan. A daughter? A sister? I took a card and stuffed it in my pocket. I should pay Annette a visit.
Chapter Eight
Annette Spedowski plied her trade in the back of a metaphysical bookstore in a strip mall so far east it was almost in Newhaven. The cavernous and brightly lit display area held wind chimes, sand-filled geckos, miniature Zen gardens, boxes of incense, hand made cards, reflexology posters, raku sushi-trays, aromathe
rapy candles, and even a few books. Forty bucks got me an appointment for a henna hand-painting with only a fifteen-minute wait. A smile and a little chit-chat revealed that Annette also did palm readings.
Annette bustled in five minutes late, looking more like a re-incarnated hippie than a wise old crone. Her tie-dyed headband covered hair with no gray, and the caked-on mascara surrounded eyes that had never seen a rotary-dial phone. She had the same nose as Rena Spedowski though, and when she spoke, the same voice came out of her mouth.
“You here for mehndi?” At my nod, she managed a smile. “I’m Annette. Come on back. I just need a moment to set up.”
Annette unlocked the closet-sized room and gestured towards a plastic chair and table. She pulled a three-ring binder from the cabinet and handed it to me. “Here’s my portfolio. Why don’t you look the designs over, and see what you like?”
Annette’s portfolio had photocopies of stencils and photographs of completed artwork, protected inside plastic sleeves. Tribal and Celtic designs were most popular, but she had some with an Indian look.
Those were actually nice. Maybe this wouldn’t be wasted money after all, even if she couldn’t tell me much about her mother.
“Is this your first time getting henna painted on you?” Annette bustled around, pulling things out of a locked cabinet.
“Yeah, but I’ve always wanted to get it done.” Never heard of it, actually, until I saw a do-it-yourself kit for sale at Heidi’s Bazaar. Temporary tattoo, they called it. “Is this an original design? This is really cool.”
“Thanks. That’s one of my favorites.” Annette put a small plastic applicator filled with green goo on the table. Next to it she set a ceramic dish with cotton balls in a sugary paste. “I can do something like that if you like.”
“Sure, that’d be great.”
And while you're at it, would you please tell me whether or not your mother is trying to kill me?
Annette rubbed some oil on my palms. Then she began to draw with goo squeezed from the applicator, making parallel bands interspaced with small spirals and dots. She worked quickly, and after a few moments she had encircled my wrist with henna paste.
“So, they say you do palm readings too?”
Annette nodded, concentrating on her design.
“I always wanted to learn that, but I don’t have the gift.” Was that too heavy handed? I crossed the fingers she wasn’t looking at.
She pursed her lips slightly, as though she had made a mistake in the design, or perhaps because of a touched nerve.
Emboldened, I continued. “Which do you like doing better, palm readings or henna designs?”
“I like palm readings better.”
Annette had completed an inch-wide path of goo around my wrist, and she had begun to bedeck the pad of my thumb with a paisley, but she was concentrating on the design for a long time, and too quietly. How much information would forty bucks buy? “So, how come you do this too?”
“It’s too hard to make a living doing just that. I learned how to do mehndi from the girl who used to work here, and when she quit I got her spot.”
“Oh?” If it was too hard to make a living doing fortune telling, how could her mother afford her lease in the Old Town?
“Where did you learn palm reading?”
“From my mom.” Annette frowned, and for a moment she closely resembled the woman who had handed me a grubby wad of bills in exchange for the fake. A tightness appeared around her mouth, and she swore silently as a line of green henna gook on my finger went astray.
Yeah, and this was getting me nowhere. Maybe trying a different tack would work better. Push rather than pull.
“I moved out of my mom’s house when I was a teenager. She and I got along all right, but I couldn’t stand her boyfriend.” She didn’t need to know anything about me, or about my mom and Dave, but few women can resist the chance to confess intimate secrets with a safe stranger.
Annette pulled my hand slightly closer. She was silent, concentrating on the green henna paste coming out of the plastic applicator. Only the tense line from the corner of her mouth marked her as a secret sister in the shitty stepfather club.
Confession was good for the soul, right? “My step-dad used to beat my mom all the time. He’d beat me too if I tried to interfere. I hated him.”
“My mom’s seeing an asshole druggie.” She bent closer over her chain of spirals. Annette spoke quickly now that the seal was broken. “I think he’s got her dealing for him. I could see her doing that. Anything to make money. He doesn’t beat her, but he threatens her. She thinks she controls him just because he does favors for her, but he’s got her selling drugs for him.”
“Pot?”
“Mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?” Eye of newt, toe of frog?
“You know, shrooms. They grow them in the basement. I don’t know what else they’re dealing, but I saw the shrooms. I told her she’s going to lose her shop if someone narcs on her, but Jason and his lowlife brother need my mom too much. They won’t let her stop dealing.” At that she felt silent, like a balloon run out of air.
What if it wasn’t Eddie and Jojo who trashed Madame R.’s place? What if it was the boyfriend Jason? Dave could have easily done that to Mom in one of his drunken snits. So, maybe there was no connection.
But there probably was a connection between my place getting ransacked and the jewel. My apartment was trashed the same day that Madame R. bought the fake. If it wasn’t her, it was someone else who knew about the bindi. Had someone been following me, or was Madame R. the one who hired people to search my apartment? But who? Mr. Thorn? Unlikely. Monica Delcourt? Possible. Madame R? Most probably. If so, she might do it again when she got out of the hospital. If not, I’d better keep my new address a secret.
“How does this look. Good?” Annette had made a vine creep up my palm to the tip of my ring finger. It was going to smear terribly at work tonight, but for now it looked pretty.
“Great. Can you do the other hand the same?”
“Sure.” Annette reached for my right hand. When she took it, she paused for a moment and stared at the lines. She traced the lines with her nail, apparently intrigued by what she saw. “You’re going to have an interesting life.”
“You saw something in my palm?”
“I do palmistry readings too. Maybe you should come back to have your fortune told.” Annette began the design on my right hand, curling the fingers she wasn’t using, as though reluctant to see any more of my destiny.
Had she really seen something, or was it a ploy to make her mehndi customers also pay for palm readings? Either way, I had to clench my mouth shut to keep the money from flying out of my wallet.
When she finished the design, Annette plastered a sticky paste of lemon and sugar on it and wrapped the whole thing in swathes of cotton, making me look like I’d been bandaged from grabbing a hot iron with both hands. She told me to keep it wrapped so it wouldn’t smear, and to leave the paste on for 24 hours, or as long as I could.
I managed to keep the henna intact until I got to my van. Grabbing the handle and steering wheel smushed it, and I thought for sure it would be ruined, but when I unwrapped the cotton at work, scraped the rest of the dried paste off to keep it from getting in customers’ drinks, and washed it with soap and water, the reddish-brown design still remained.
Chapter Nine
“What’s that stuff on your palms?” James asked.
“Henna. It’s decorative.”
“That’s new. And are you actually wearing make-up?” James asked me. “Got a hot date tonight?”
“No, not exactly. I’m just going out for drinks and maybe a game of pool with Rob and Fenwick.” And maybe, just maybe, Julie wouldn’t be there.
“Rob again, huh? Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”
“He does, but I don’t think it’s that serious.”
Jolene sat behind the register, trying to pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping. Jolene, as she had told
us all casually seven or eight times, was going to play the part of Nora in “A Doll’s House” at the Seabingen Little Theater. You’d think she was playing opposite Ryan Reynolds by the way she carried on about it.
“So, where are you going?” James asked.
“Sharpe’s. That’s where we always go.”
“You should go to the Pygg and Wassail sometime. It’s a great place to see, what’s the word you used?”
Jolene yawned, covering her mouth with one hand to hide the fangs, and picked up her script.
“Otherfolk,” he said, looking at Jolene.
I was staring at her too. “I don’t have to go to a bar to see otherfolk.”
Jolene was mouthing her lines over and over. Her fangs blended in seamlessly with her other teeth. I’d seen acrylic fangs that looked perfectly real, but hers weren’t acrylic. She had been a vampire this whole time, and it wasn’t until I
saw that dark smudge that I really knew. Incredible. How dumb could I be?
The bell tinkled and a crowd of students came in. Jolene reluctantly set down her script to take their orders. I hopped off the stool to earn my slightly-above-minimum-wage.
Three mochas, two cappuccinos, an espresso and a chamomile tea later, Monica Delcourt walked into the café.
“Millie?” she asked. “I hoped I’d find you working tonight.” She still had the fake tan and too-blonde hair, but her suit had been replaced by a more comfortable looking gray sweater and tweed skirt. “What’s that on your hands?”
“Henna. And I’m done with my shift. I was supposed to get off ten minutes ago.” I had already taken my apron off, and was replacing it with my jean jacket. “Guess you still want the bindi.”
“Yes, I do. Why don’t we have a chat?” She held the door open for me. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
“Sure.” I clocked out and followed her, waving goodbye to James and Jolene.
We exited into the crisp autumn air, stepping around puddles on the sidewalk left by that afternoon’s rain. The wind had blown leaves into the water, making a slick brown sludge.
Monica lifted her suede boots well over the muck and swung her bag in front to where she could root through it. “Do you have the jewel with you? I brought my checkbook.”
