LITMIR.BIZ

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getting off the train in L.A. about now. She’ll be wearing a torn blue raincoat and one pink shoe. She’ll have enough money for a little food and a week or two in a hotel, provided it’s near the Grayhound Station and she doesn’t mind sharing a bathroom down the hall with washed up hookers and derelicts.

      Then again, with her angel face, she might nail a rich guy or a married businessman who can afford to keep a woman on the side. I wonder where she’ll be in a month or a year.

      I wonder if she will ever think of me.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      THE FORTUNE TELLER

      Five-fifteen on Saturday evening and Joseph Crisalli puts the rest of the glazed donuts in a box and climbs the indoor staircase to Madame Zarina’s apartment above the bakery.

      “Cookie, it’s Joe,” he calls.

      To Joe, she’s Cathleen Cook. They went to parochial school together more years ago than he cares to recall. In the ensuing forty years they married other people, watched children leave home and spouses pass away. They also became best friends.

      Her door opens before he reaches the top step. Her right eye is red and unfocused but she still manages a smile.

      “Not the migraine again,” he says, touching her hand.

      “When I was a kid, my doctor said I might outgrow them, but at sixty-five, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

      As a child she was knocked unconscious in a buckboard accident and has suffered with migraines ever since. She doesn’t get them often, but when she does, she has visions in her sleep that have no resemblance to ordinary dreams. They are insights into violent deaths of people she’s never met or heard of.

      “Is there anything I can do, dear?” he asks.

      “I wish there was, Joe.”

      “If you need to go to the hospital, promise to call me and I’ll drive you.”

      “I do promise, old boy.”

      “I think you just accepted my proposal,” he says. “I’ve been waiting to hear those words for years.”

      She punches him playfully on the arm, but the small gesture makes her head pound and she leans against the door frame.

      “Off with you now,” she says. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

      “I’ll leave these with you,” and he hands her the pink bakery box. “I hope you feel better in the morning.”

      He goes down the stairs. She hears the bell jingle above the door as he goes out and locks up for the night. Joe is a comforting presence. She feels a bit lonely after he’s gone, like the temperature in the room has dropped a degree or two. She steps inside and closes the door.

      Joe looks up at Cookie’s window through the rain-washed darkness. The sign below the sill reads:

      MADAME ZARINA

      FORTUNES TOLD FOR A DIME

      He doesn’t envy Cookie the dubious gift that has been visited upon her by the gods of calamity. He wonders what poor soul will die on this cold night at the tag end of the year. He makes the sign of the cross like he’s done since he was a small boy at St. Finnbar’s. He looks in the rear-view mirror, pulls into the street and heads toward home, home being that big empty house on the edge of town where his cat waits for him in the window.

      Cookie turns out all the lights except the lamp in the front window with the red glass shade. When she’s in the grip of a migraine, every light is too bright and every sound too loud. She walks through the parlor where an over-stuffed sofa and easy chair rest on an oriental carpet. Heavy red drapes are fastened with gold tassels and on a round table in the center of the room, her crystal ball sits on a cloth of midnight blue brocade. There’s a grandfather clock in the corner and Maxfield Parrish prints on the papered walls.

      The waves of nausea and dizziness that accompany the pain propel her toward the bedroom. She drinks her medication from a demitasse and changes into a white nightgown with high neck and long sleeves. As she sinks onto the canopy bed with its purple veils emblazoned the gold stars, she knows it will not be for a good night’s sleep.

      Dr. McBane says only childbirth and kidney stones come close to the pain of a migraine headache. He’s never charged her for the mysterious potion he drops in her purse when her head is turned. An opiate perhaps, since he doesn’t acknowledge dispensing it and she knows better than to ask.

      The medicine works quickly, dropping her down the fathomless well of sleep. At first there’s only darkness and the sound of blood rushing through her ears as she sinks beneath layers of receding consciousness. Then her inner eye opens like the lens of a camera on an unfamiliar landscape.

      The vision has begun.

      The wind and rain thrash the treetops, sending leaves and brittle twigs showering downward. A young woman carrying a hand-woven basket runs into the dream-frame. She loses her hat to a low-hanging branch. Her dark brown hair whips around her head like the mane of a horse. A vine reaches out to snag her toe and she lands on her hands and knees in the leaf litter, the contents of the basket scattering across the forest floor.

      A second person enters the frame wearing a big coat and carrying a knife. The scream of the fallen girl cuts across the warp of the wind like a bottle shattering against a rock. A heavy boot slams several times into her back and head.

      Raindrops glisten on the metal surface of the knife. The assailant drops to one knee and rolls her over to look at her face, the beautiful unconscious face that causes so much trouble. Now for a kiss on those cold, blue lips, not a lover’s kiss, but a kiss to seal a deadly deed. The knife plunges down again and again through the girl’s patched winter coat, blood oozing through the slashes.

      The hair on the back of the assailant’s neck rises like the hackles of a billy goat, every nerve on edge. Someone is watching. Wary eyes scan the surrounding woods and see nothing, but that doesn’t mean that someone isn’t there. What the attacker doesn’t know is that Zarina the Fortune Teller is watching every move.

      Cookie tries to see the face of the attacker but the vision is losing definition, like the image on an over-exposed photograph. The murderer runs into the woods and disappears from view.

      Cookie can’t take her eyes from the girl on the forest floor, from the serene face washed clean by the rain. Her eyes are closed, like a saint in repose. Rain soaks through her bloody clothes and drenches the long tresses of her hair.

      The young lady’s eyes open, wide green eyes with yellow flecks in the iris, eyes that reflect the sky. They gaze unblinking into the treetops. She doesn’t move because she can’t. Something is broken in her back.

      There’s a sound like a needle scratching the surface of a record and the vision is gone. Cookie sits up in bed, her head swirling with pain, her heart stuttering erratically. She fumbles for the vial of nitroglycerin on the nightstand and places a pill beneath her tongue until the rhythm evens out.

      Tonight’s vision is different from the others, full of gaps and voids. More importantly, this victim isn’t dead. This is a first. She knows neither the name of the victim, the identity of the perpetrator or the location of the crime. Miserable and frustrated she drops back on her pillow.

      * * * *

      Sunday morning and the headache is gone, leaving a visible bruising around one eye and a delicate webbing of red capillaries in the white. Cookie sits at the table with her coffee and donuts, her hands moving over the smooth surface of the crystal ball as if it actually had insight into life’s dilemmas.

      Cookie has unashamedly admitted to Joe that her crystal ball is no more than the focal point of her intuitive energies. It has no psychic or magical powers to impart. On the other hand, she’s no phony. People come to her when their concerns overwhelm them and leave feeling less lonely and more in control of their lives. She’s been privy to more sins and secrets than Father Doyle at St. Finnbar’s or Chief Garvey down

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