by Elaine Viets
Helen hoped Madame Muffy could not read her mind. She was not happy about this charlatan living at the Coronado.
“Let me read your palm—both of you—as a gift for my new neighbors,” Muffy said. “You can ask one question, no charge.”
Helen started to refuse, but Peggy looked amused. “Come on, Helen, don’t be a stick. It will be fun.”
“Squawwwk!” Pete said. It sounded like a protest to Helen.
Three people and one parrot went upstairs to Muffy’s apartment. Her living room was as plain as her preppy outfits. There was a desk with a computer, a small round table covered with a brown cloth, three white wicker chairs from Pier 1, and a large poster with prices for tarot, palm, and crystal-ball readings. There were no pictures on the wall. The speckled terrazzo floor was bare.
“You go first,” Peggy said.
Helen sat down reluctantly and put her hand palm-up on the table. The table wobbled, and she realized it was plastic patio furniture. When Madame Muffy took her hand, Helen stiffened, although the psychic’s touch was warm and gentle. “What is your question?” she said.
“What about my job?” Helen said.
“That’s it?” Peggy said. “What about romance? What about your life?”
I can’t risk any revelations about my life, Helen thought. “My love life is fine,” she said. “I’m worried about work.”
“You have a powerful aura,” Muffy said. “As powerful as Martha Stewart’s.”
Helen saw her aura wrapped in white tulle and silk ribbons.
“You were meant to be a leader,” Muffy said. “You were meant to make money and hold a powerful position. You almost had it, and then you lost it.”
Helen could feel the blood draining from her face. In St. Louis she’d made six figures. She’d been director of pensions and benefits for a big corporation. Then she came home early one day and found her husband, Rob, who was supposed to be building a new deck, nailing their neighbor, Sandy. Helen had picked up a handy crowbar and ended her marriage with a couple of swift swings. She still remembered the satisfying crunching sound.
“I see you working with money. You like it. You understand it. But you are working below your capacity. Something in your past is blocking your success. Your life will not move forward unless you remove this block. For a thirty-five-dollar palm reading, I can find out the name of the person who is blocking you.”
I can save myself thirty-five bucks, Helen thought. I already know the name. And I know what Muffy is: a fraud. Of course she saw me working with money. She saw me standing at a cash register. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out I used to have money. I’m wearing four-year-old Escada. It’s a little threadbare, but better than anything I can afford now.
That’s what Helen hated most about bad psychics. They were good at messing with your mind. For a minute she’d almost believed the malignant Muffy could tell the future.
“You need me, sweetie, to straighten out your life,” Muffy said. “Come see me when you’re ready to talk.”
“I will,” Helen said, prying her hand from Madame Muffy’s grasp. Right after I marry G. Gordon Liddy on Las Olas in rush hour, she thought.
“And you can get me a discount at that bookstore,” Muffy said. “Next.”
Peggy sat down at the undercover patio table and presented her palm. Pete the parrot patrolled her shoulder restlessly, letting out earsplitting squawks.
“Calm down, boy,” Peggy said. She took back her palm to pet her parrot. Pete settled into a sulky silence.
“Now,” Muffy said. “What’s your question?”
Helen could predict that one. Sure enough, Peggy said, “When will I win the lottery?”
Madame Muffy took Peggy’s palm and said, “I can give you some lucky numbers if you—”
She stopped suddenly, looked closely at Peggy’s palm, and turned as white as the Pier 1 wicker. “I see death,” she said. “I see death, destruction, and murder.”
Then Madame Muffy fell face-forward on the table.
Chapter 2
Helen slapped Madame Muffy’s face. The little psychic moaned, but did not open her eyes. Helen hit her again.
“Maybe I should get her a glass of water,” Peggy said. Pete the parrot was silent, watching them with his beady, intelligent eyes.
“This is better,” Helen said.
“I didn’t know you knew first aid.”
“I don’t.” Helen slapped Muffy again. “But I feel better slapping her. She pulled a rotten trick, scaring you like that.”
“I’m not scared,” Peggy said, but her voice was high and a little shrill. Peggy was not her usual cool self.
Madame Muffy opened her eyes. She was white as unbaked bread, except for the red slap marks on her face.
“Are you OK?” Helen said.
“I must have fainted. I have low blood sugar. Please leave.”
“Can we get you some food?” Peggy said. “How about some orange juice? That’s good for low blood sugar.”
Madame Muffy turned even whiter when Peggy spoke. “Just go,” she said, herding them toward the door. “Please. Leave me alone. I’ll be fine as soon as you’re out of here.”
As they walked down the stairs, Peggy said shakily, “That was definitely weird. What do you think she means about seeing death, destruction, and murder?”
“She doesn’t see anything but the next buck,” Helen said. “At the store she told me I was Russian.”
“She was trying to hit me up for money for lucky lottery numbers, but then she turned strange. What if she actually saw my future?”
Helen picked up Peggy’s palm and said, “I see you winning the lottery and splitting six million dollars with your best friend, Helen.”
Peggy laughed, although she still sounded shaky. “How about giving me twenty bucks for lottery tickets, as an investment in my future?”
“How about a glass of wine instead?”
Helen went to her apartment and fed her cat, Thumbs. Then she brought out a box of white wine, pretzels, a cracker for Pete, and insect repellent. Florida mosquitoes were ferocious in June. The two women sank into chaise longues by the pool and sprayed themselves into a cloud of protective poison. Helen poured two generous glasses of wine. They crunched on pretzels and talked about everything but what happened that afternoon.
“Look at the sweat running off me,” Peggy said. “What’s the temperature?”
“It was eighty when I was in the apartment,” Helen said. “I know people complain about summer here, but the heat is worse in the Midwest. Those summers are like living in an oven. Florida heat feels soft, and there’s always a breeze. It must be the ocean.”
“Naw, it just means you’re a real Floridian,” Peggy said, crunching a pretzel. “Normal people can’t stand summer in South Florida.”
“I haven’t lived here long enough to be a real Floridian.”
“Nobody is from Florida,” Peggy said. “But some of us know we belong here. We can tell the moment we step off the plane or get out of the car. It feels right—the sun, the light, the humidity. June is the real test. That’s when the tourists go home. The people who live here but aren’t real Floridians go somewhere cool. The rest of us love it. No crowds at the beach, less traffic on the roads, and we can get a decent table at our favorite restaurant. Florida is ours again until winter.”
Helen reached for another pretzel and started to hand one to Pete.
“No, don’t. He’s on a diet. He gained two ounces,” Peggy said. Pete gave an indignant squawk.
Helen took a serious sip of wine before she asked her next question. “How long do you think Madame Muffy has been in Florida?”
“She’s got to be a new arrival,” Peggy said. “She’s still pukey pale with a sunburned nose. Anyway, she wears shoes.”
“Deck shoes.”
“Still, if she spent any time here at all, she’d switch to sandals.”
“Why did Margery rent to her?” Helen said.
; “I think our landlady needed the money,” Peggy said. “That apartment was vacant for months.”
“I don’t understand that,” Helen said.
“Nobody wants to live in these old places anymore, except nuts like us who think they have character. The window air conditioners are noisy and there are always heat pockets. The rooms are small and the terrazzo floors are ugly. The jalousie doors leak. The bathrooms are old-fashioned and the kitchens are cramped. Most people would rather rent the new condos. The walls are made of cardboard, but they have all the modern conveniences.”
“That explains why we’re here. But what about Madame Muffy? She strikes me as a modern-convenience type.”
Peggy intoned, “Only she knows. Only she can tell,” and laughed. This time it sounded genuine.
By the second glass of wine, Madame Muffy’s dramatic scene seemed funny. The two women talked until ten, when the mosquitoes began dive-bombing their arms and ankles. “It’s time to go in before I’m eaten alive,” Peggy said. She swatted another mosquito. It left blood on her arm.
“Yuck. Good night,” Peggy said. Pete squawked good-bye. Helen packed up the wine, the pretzels, and the useless insect repellent, and walked across the lawn to her home.
The Coronado looked romantic under the subtropic stars. Palms whispered in the soft air. The bougainvillea shook more blossoms into the turquoise pool.
Helen inhaled the sweet, sticky scent of burning marijuana from her next-door neighbor. She’d never seen Phil the invisible pothead, but she always knew when he was home.
Helen opened her front door and was hit with a wave of trapped heat. She flipped on her air conditioner so it would be cool enough to sleep. It sounded like it was about to take off. Water dripped steadily down one side.
She loved her furnished apartment, but she had to admit the fifties decor was not everyone’s taste. She could imagine what her suburban St. Louis neighbors would think of the boomerang coffee table, the lamps that looked like nuclear reactors, and the turquoise Barcalounger.
She knew exactly what they’d say about Helen living in two rooms with a drippy window air conditioner. But she was happier here than she’d ever been in her twelve-room St. Louis house, with her perfect Ralph Lauren fabrics and her imperfect husband. She liked the people at the bookstore better than the ones at her high-powered job. All she missed was her six-figure salary.
Now Helen could barely make ends meet. She paid her rent in cash, a deal she made with her landlady, Margery. Helen explained that her ex-husband was looking for her and she didn’t want to give him any way to trace her, which was mostly true. She left out the part about the court.
Helen did not want her name in any computers. She had no phone, no credit cards, no bank account, and no paycheck. Page Turner paid her in cash, too, another reason why she put up with him. The big chain bookstores wouldn’t do that. Lucky for her, Page had a slightly crooked streak.
Now that she was alone, the scene with Madame Muffy gave her the shivers. She wondered if the little fraud got a real look at the future and it was too much for her. Helen decided that was ridiculous, but she double-locked the front door and put the security bar in the sliding glass doors.
Then she settled into her turquoise Barcalounger with a new hardback mystery. That was the best perk of her job. She could borrow books from the store, as long as she returned them in salable condition.
Thumbs, her six-toed cat, curled up beside her. Helen scratched his ears and he purred and kneaded her thigh with his giant paws. The big gray-and-white cat looked so much like a stuffed animal, Helen expected to find a tag on him. Only his enormous feet spoiled the illusion. They were the size of catchers’ mitts.
Thumbs was supposed to be a descendant of Ernest Hemingway’s famously inbred six-toed cats. At least that’s what the guy who bought him in a Key West bar said. But the man lied a lot. Still, Thumbs did love to curl up with a good book.
The next thing Helen knew it was midnight, and she was awakened out of a sound sleep in the Barcalounger. The book was resting on her lap. Thumbs was in the bedroom, howling, loud, insistent howls. Something was wrong.
Helen threw down her book and ran into the bedroom. Thumbs was pawing frantically at the sliding glass doors. There were flying bugs, pale beige things with wings, outside the doors. No, wait, they were inside, crawling up the glass, and Thumbs was trying to stop them.
They were everywhere, coming through the crack in the sliding doors and crawling through the vents. They were squirming on the floor, squeezing through the jalousie glass, frying on the lightbulbs, flying at the pictures. They were crawling up the walls and across the ceiling.
Oh my god, they were in her bed. Hundreds, no, thousands of them. Helen wrapped her hand in a towel and tried to wipe the bugs off her spread, but there were more on her pillow. They were creeping through the fur of her teddy bear, blind, wormlike things. A chain of them dripped off the bear’s ear.
Helen ran to the closet and pulled out her vacuum cleaner. Shoeboxes and purses fell out with it, and were soon writhing with the awful insects.
She began vacuuming up the bugs. She sucked them off the ceiling and pulled them off the light. She vacuumed them off the floor and swept them off her bedspread. And still they kept coming, waves of blind, beige, winged worms, like something that crawled on corpses.
Now they were in her hair and down her blouse and crawling over her feet. Their wings came off and fluttered through the air. Their bodies squished and crackled under her sandals. They crawled blindly over her naked toes and up her legs. Helen brushed them off and kept vacuuming.
Thumbs was howling so loud he drowned out the vacuum’s scream. Then suddenly there was silence. The vacuum had stopped, clogged with insects. But still the blind beige things invaded her home, her bedroom, her bed, her body.
Helen could stand it no longer. She grabbed Thumbs, ran across the lawn, and pounded on her landlady’s door.
“What the hell is going on?” Margery Flax said, yanking open the jalousie door so hard the glass rattled. In one hand she had a screwdriver—the drink, not the tool. In the other she had a Marlboro. Both had contributed to her lived-in face. Margery was an interesting seventy-six.
“What are you doing on my doorstep with that cat?” Margery bellowed. She was not a cat person, possibly because they did not come in the color she cared for. Margery loved purple. She was wearing a purple chenille robe, violet feathered mules with lavender sequins, and poppy-red toenail polish, which matched the bright red curlers in her gray hair.
“Bugs,” Helen said. “Hundreds of them. No, thousands. Maybe millions. They’re flying and crawling all over my apartment. I tried to stop them, but they keep coming. They’re on my walls. They’re in my bed and down my blouse. They’re horrible.”
Margery stubbed out the cigarette and took a deep gulp of her screwdriver. “What do they look like?” she said.
“They’re kind of wormlike. Beige with wings, except the wings fall off and they start crawling.”
Even now Helen felt them crawling on her. She looked down and saw one inside her shirt, on her bra.
“Here,” she said, and handed an indignant Thumbs to Margery. He extended his claws.
“That cat scratches me and you’re out of here,” Margery said.
Helen shook out her blouse and gingerly picked up the ugly beige insect.
Margery looked at it and took another drink. “Shit,” she said. “We’ve got termites.” She handed the cat back to Helen.
“But you can exterminate them, can’t you?”
“Depends. They can exterminate this building if there are too many. It could be the end of the Coronado. When they swarm like that, it means there are so many already, they’re moving on to find more food. I’ve seen it happen before, old buildings like this. They get so riddled with termites it would be cheaper to tear down the place than fix it. That’s what did in the Sunnystreet Motel.”
“Where’s that?” Helen said. She st
ill felt itchy and crawly, but she couldn’t see any more bugs on her.
“Where that vacant lot is now.”
“The one with the sign ‘Luxury Condos Coming Soon’?” Helen said.
“That’s it. The termite inspector’s foot went right through the roof. That was the end of the place. Betty sold out to a developer and moved to Sarasota.”
The old buildings on the streets near the Coronado were disappearing to expensive high-rises. Soon the people who worked in the shops along Las Olas would not be able to live near their jobs. Helen felt a terrible pang of fear. She loved the Coronado. She didn’t want anything to happen to it. She’d never find a place like this again. She’d have to live in a hot shoebox along the highway.
“But what if we’re lucky?”
“Some luck,” Margery said with a snort that should have blown out her sinuses. “We’ll have to move out while they kill the termites.”
“You mean I’ll have to leave my apartment?” Thumbs let out an indignant yowl. Helen had been clutching him too tightly, hanging on to her cat to help her through the bad news.
“I mean we’ll all have to leave. Every last one of us. They pump the whole place full of poison gas. It’s the only way to kill the little bastards.”
Madame Muffy was right, Helen thought. Here was death and destruction. Now all they needed was murder.
Chapter 3
Helen woke up. She did not know where she was. She could not move her arm.
Her cat, Thumbs, gave an indignant yowl and hit her in the face with his tail. The ten-pound tom had been snoozing on her elbow, and he did not appreciate this abrupt awakening. Helen realized where she was now. She’d been sleeping on Margery’s sofa. After the termite attack last night, she had not wanted to go back to her apartment.
She looked at her watch. It was six a.m. She’d slept in her clothes. Her mouth felt stuffed with cat fur. She pulled on her shoes, folded the sheets and blanket, and picked up Thumbs. She should get out of Margery’s before her landlady woke up. Officially the Coronado had a no-pets policy. That meant everyone had to pretend Pete the parrot and Thumbs did not exist, except in emergencies like last night. No point in waving the illegal cat in Margery’s face.