Foreteller

by Anne McAneny

  As her eyes cut left to check the sender’s name, her gut clenched. She yanked her hand away from the mouse like it was a live grenade, then pushed her chair back from the computer and stared, trancelike, at the name of the sender: Cesar Descutner.

  Chapter 26

  Louisa, Virginia

  Zoey glanced down at the speedometer as a state police car loomed into view a quarter mile ahead in the oncoming lane. Her foot instinctively found the brake, lowering her speed from 65 to 45. It was a good wake-up call. She’d driven the last twenty miles in a daze and she needed to keep her eyes open for the senior center currently housing her charming Aunt Eva.

  After getting over the shock of Cesar’s email, she had finally dared to touch the computer mouse again, but only to log off. Worried about tracers on the message, she’d resorted to imagining its contents: Hello Kyra. I’m ba-aaack—and I’m coming to get you, or, Hi Kyra. Remember me? Your old buddy? I changed your entire life and sent you down the hellacious path you’re on now. Let’s catch up over coffee and scones.

  Cesar’s email was yet another checkmark in the foretelling column. His sudden reemergence added several powerful strokes to the kayak doomed to careen over the waterfall. If he was getting closer to finding her, he was that much closer to shouting out her nickname during the foretelling. At least she hadn’t opened the message. Had she done so, Cesar might have zeroed in on her exact location. He was the guy the nerdy geeks called when they got stumped, and she knew he owned that huge gaming company. She’d even gotten hooked on one of his company’s games when she developed an unexpected rivalry with a twelve-year-old Brazilian boy who’d kept kicking her butt. Who knew what Cesar was capable of when he put his mind to it? While the average Joe might simply attach a receipt to an email, Cesar could probably attach a GPS signal and a remote video enabler so he could watch his prey opening the message in 3-D. Wasn’t that half the thrill for these psychos—the horrified reactions of their victims? She tried to rush the shiver that ran the entire length of her spine, but it only made her shudder twice over. Not knowing the contents of that message was eating away at her.

  Wait a minute. What about Detective Farnham? He already knew about the stalker situation, and he’d seemed to take a shine to her. Surely the police employed communications experts who could peek inside a message’s contents without the sender knowing. Maybe they could even counterhack it and put a restraining order on Cesar.

  A huge sign seemed to rise up out of nowhere and declare, Watkins Senior Center: Where Senior Means Better. Nice try. Everyone still knew it meant old. She veered left into the parking lot and admired the surprisingly attractive, all-brick building with white pillars, windows-a-plenty, and respectable Georgian architecture. It reminded her more than a little of the hotel from The Shining, and she felt sure that Aunt Eva fit in perfectly.

  Not overly eager to see her sole living relative again, she seized upon a reason to procrastinate. She pulled out Farnham’s card from her purse and called his cell. Five rings and off to voice mail. She left a message: “Detective Farnham. Hi. Zoey Kincaid here, from the other night. I was hoping you could help me with something. That stalker from college sent me an email, but I didn’t open it. Do you know someone who could open it on the sly, without this guy knowing it reached me? I’m in Virginia now, by the way. Long story. Call me if you get this.” She disconnected, then programmed Farnham’s number into the phone with a specific ring tone before shoving the phone back in her purse.

  Reflexively, she primped in her rearview mirror, applying a fresh coat of lipstick and running a squirt of frizz control cream through her curls. The Virginia humidity was doing her hair no favors today. Finally, she opened her car door and sucked in a less-than-invigorating breath of moist air. She was as ready as she’d ever be to take on Aunt Eva.

  After a neutral greeting at the reception desk, a woman there directed her to the correct floor and recommended she check in with Nurse Mackenzie upon reaching the unit.

  Mackenzie, apparently a first name, turned out to be one of those matter-of-fact people who pulled no punches and took no bull. A stout, middle-aged R.N. with a slight overbite and unexpected spiky hair, she gave Zoey the quick and dirty lowdown.

  “Miss Eva, yup, you’ve caught her at a challenging time. A bit gruff, but that’s evident even during the good times. The afternoons find her more lucid than the mornings, so you’re in luck there. But whatever you do, don’t touch her. Tends to set her off and she starts yelling and grabbing and throwing and talking about the end of days. She gets confused about timelines and what decade she’s in. Sometimes mixes up the order of things. But all that comes and goes. When’s the last time you saw her? You’re the niece, right? I don’t recall seeing you here before.”

  Well, after that description, could anyone really blame Zoey for not making it onto the frequent visitors list? Still, she felt the need to offer an excuse. “I’ve, uh, been out of the country quite a bit. I haven’t—”

  “Seen her since she sobered up?”

  According to Bernadette, Eva had been sober almost two years.

  “That’s right,” Zoey murmured.

  At least Mackenzie didn’t seem invested in inducing guilt. What kind of normal home was she raised in?

  “I imagine this visit will be an improvement over the drinking days, then,” Mackenzie said in high spirits. “I’ll take you in. Let’s see what we get.”

  Zoey followed Mackenzie’s short, brisk strides into a two-room suite, subtly decorated in warm pastels with comfortable furnishings. A bone-thin woman sat in a recliner, thumbing through a NASCAR magazine. Zoey knew that many Virginians lived and breathed the popular racing circuit, but she hadn’t figured Aunt Eva for a fan.

  Her aunt sported shoulder-length, uncontrolled curls of mixed colors as if she couldn’t settle on one out-of-the-box shade. Several pieces of hair were pinned up with elaborate barrettes, but in a random, patchwork way. Zoey got the impression that Aunt Eva had committed serious time to styling the ‘do, and was probably proud of it. Her face looked too thin, and her yellowed skin resembled phyllo dough stretched over fragile bones. Not a healthy specimen.

  “Eva, you have a visitor,” Mackenzie said.

  Eva neither looked over nor raised her head. “No thank you,” she said, her tinny voice grating on Zoey’s nerves as it instantly reignited negative memories.

  “Eva,” Mackenzie said, “Zoey has come to see you.”

  Zoey tapped Mackenzie on the shoulder. “She knows me as Kyra.”

  “Right. Sorry.” Mackenzie leaned down to get closer to Eva’s level. “Kyra has come a long way to see you. She’s here now. See?”

  Mackenzie stepped aside and gestured to Zoey who felt like a disappointing showpiece at a gallery.

  Eva folded the corner of her magazine page as if marking her place in a book, although Zoey noticed it had been opened to a two-page cigarette ad. After making a production of closing the magazine and placing it on the table to her left, Eva deigned to look up at her visitor.

  Zoey gazed into the rheumy eyes of her aunt. Their hard expression quickly softened into a show of surprise and joy. Mackenzie must have noticed, too, because she piped up. “You remember her, huh, Eva?”

  “Mother,” Eva said in awe. “I knew you’d come back.”

  Chapter 27

  Nurse Mackenzie smiled, shrugged at Zoey, and made a subtle exit as she whispered, “Good luck.”

  Zoey felt lost. “Hi, Aunt Eva. It’s me, Kyra, Susan’s daughter.”

  “You look so young,” Eva said, the childish expression of awe and fascination removing years from her face. “Is that what happens after you die? You return to an age when you were young and beautiful? I think I’d like to be, well gosh, Mother, I don’t think I was ever beautiful, was I?”

  Eva seemed to be sincerely asking the question, not hoping or begging for a positive response, but inquiring matter-of-factly. Zoey recalled her own supposed resemblance to Magda at the same a
ge, so she decided to play the role. Heck, if it made Eva more compatible and cooperative, she’d play a jackrabbit if necessary.

  “Yes, Eva, you were. To me, you were always beautiful.” Zoey cringed, worrying she’d overplayed her hand because Magda would never have said something so sentimental and kind. She waited for Eva to curse her out, to rant about how she knew it was Zoey all along. But no, the frail woman remained illusory. Eva broke into a smile, revealing worn, grayish teeth. Years of alcohol abuse had not been kind to her.

  “I know what age I’ll go back to after I die,” Eva said.

  “What age would that be?” Zoey asked, taking a seat across from her aunt. She reached out to pat Eva’s bird-like leg, but saw Eva tense up and glare at the approaching hand. Zoey quickly remembered Mackenzie’s no-touch warning and withdrew the threat.

  “I’d be seven,” Eva said. “Seven years old.”

  “That’s awfully young. What made seven so special?”

  “It’s a secret,” Eva giggled. “Something I never told you.”

  Zoey’s interest was piqued. People with Alzheimer’s or senility often remembered their earlier days with more clarity than their recent years. She didn’t know the precise dementia from which Eva suffered, but she was curious to hear about Eva’s childhood, a subject nearly forbidden during Zoey’s youth.

  “You can tell me now, Eva. It’s okay.”

  “No, Mother. You’ll punish me. Because it was my idea, and Susan wouldn’t have killed Daddy with her prediction if I hadn’t made her play.”

  Zoey felt her stomach leap to her throat, but she remained calm, true to the role of forgiving mother. She noticed that Eva’s voice had grown more childlike. Had the older woman regressed completely?

  Zoey then remembered a nickname Magda had used for Eva when Eva was younger. “Peach,” Zoey said, invoking the nickname, “I don’t blame you for anything. Besides, I know all about that game you and Susan used to play.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course. Mothers know lots of things. And I forgive you, Peach. It wasn’t your fault, and I don’t want you to go on thinking that way. But tell me why you thought you were responsible in the first place.”

  “I’m the one that found the well.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. In the Sampson’s yard, just beyond our fence.”

  Eva was referring to the property where she and Susan had grown up. Zoey remembered seeing pictures of it in her grandmother’s house. It had been a working farm in previous generations, filled with ponds, hills, and fields, but had been subdivided into ten-acre plots by the time Eva and Susan lived there as children. The Sampsons must have owned the neighboring plot.

  “Oh yes, the well,” Zoey said.

  “Susan and I pretended to be Jack and Jill. I was eight, making Susan four. I got to be Jack because I had short hair then. Remember, Mother? I had gotten gum all stuck in it so you cut it into a pixie.”

  “I remember. You looked very cute.”

  “I looked like a boy, but I didn’t care because I got to be Jack, and I loved rolling down the hill pretending to break my crown.”

  Zoey quickly recalled the nursery rhyme: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. She imagined that would have been great fun for two little girls to reenact.

  Eva continued, lost in her past. “You told us to stay away from drainpipes and deep holes, and I don’t know if you said wells, but you probably didn’t want us playing there because a well is a sort of hole, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it certainly is,” Zoey said, careful to keep her comments neutral.

  “So we kept it a secret, but I guess you knew anyway.”

  “I sure did.”

  “And that’s where I drank the bad water from Golden. You remember that, Mother?”

  “Of course. Golden.” Zoey’s stomach did a flip. Oh my God, Eva had drunk directly from a contaminated well? At such a young age, in undiluted concentrations, Zoey couldn’t imagine what that water might have done to her. Then her mouth fell open as she realized exactly what it had done.

  “It was after that when the voices started,” Eva said, “and I saw those stories in my head. Remember I told Mrs. Reese about her baby and you got so mad at me?” Eva’s tiny face filled with painful regret, but then the regret turned to pride. “I was a good girl, though. I stopped. I never talked about the stories in my head again. Ever.”

  “That’s right, Peach. I’m sorry I got so angry.”

  “You hit me with a belt.”

  Zoey fought tears that rose up quickly. She grabbed a tissue from her purse and pressed it to her face, pretending to blow her nose. “I lost my temper, didn’t I?” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m sorry I did that. And you know, I’ve forgotten what you told Mrs. Reese exactly.”

  “Oh. About the baby in her belly. How he would come out with a rope around his neck and his face all purplish.”

  Zoey stared at the floor, shielding her face, the salty liquid in her eyes still bubbling up. Eva, only a child herself, must have predicted a neighbor’s stillborn baby, the rope being the umbilical cord.

  “Remember?” Eva said. “On Easter Sunday, in the fifth pew from the front, Mrs. Reese put her hand on my shoulder during the Our Father and the story came into my head clear as day. I didn’t mean to blurt it out, but if I’d kept it inside, I thought my head would explode.”

  Zoey did not want to put Eva through any pain with her next question, but she had to know, and Eva didn’t seem to be reliving the emotions of the story. If anything, Eva had found her confessor. Zoey was glad to be here for her aunt, if only to grant forgiveness. A frigid chill engulfed Zoey as she envisioned Magda reacting cruelly to little Eva’s revelation. Oh, the humiliation Magda must have suffered! Public perception meant the world to her. Why hadn’t Zoey ever realized before how shallow and cruel her grandmother could be?

  “I forget what ended up happening to Mrs. Reese’s baby, Eva.”

  “Really? It happened just like I told it. Remember? They all called me witch-girl and demon-child because they thought I made the baby die. But we never talked about it because we moved the next month, remember? To Virginia. To where no one knew about the little witch-girl.”

  Now Zoey knew why Grandma and Grandpa had left their beloved North Carolina home. The stigma of Eva’s foretelling must have scarred Magda permanently. No wonder she’d isolated Susan when word of her foretelling abilities seeped out.

  “I still feel bad about that baby,” Eva said in a wisp of a voice. “If only Mrs. Reese hadn’t touched me. Why did she do that?”

  Zoey’s heart sank. Of course Eva didn’t like to be touched. Look at the misery it had brought her. Belt whippings. Banishment. Accusations of sorcery.

  “I don’t know, Peach,” Zoey said. “But none of it was your fault. And you didn’t hurt that baby. You were just an innocent little girl. I am so sorry I punished you.”

  “It’s okay, Mother. The scars faded, and after that, I made the stories stop. I even made the voices kind of blurry.”

  “Blurry? How?”

  “I would hit myself in the face, or pinch myself real hard. Like this.” Eva pinched the papier-mâché skin on her arm hard enough to make an immediate bruise. Zoey flinched and nearly reached out, but Eva released herself just in time. “And I stopped touching people as much as I could. That made most of it go away. But when I got a little older, I found a better way to make everything go blurry.”

  “How was that?”

  “You already know that secret.”

  “Can you tell it to me again? I’ve become so forgetful.”

  “I started with Daddy’s whiskey, but then I found that vodka you kept behind the preserves.” Eva lowered her voice confidentially. “You kept it in a jelly jar, remember? Told us it was white grape juice!” Eva laughed, an abrasive sound like pebbles grinding into a pane of glass. “I liked that white grape juice b
est.”

  “You were always clever, Eva. And I guess little Susan drank that well water, too.”

  Eva, jarred for a moment, seemed on the verge of turning nasty. “What?” she said sharply.

  “Susan drank the Golden water, too, didn’t she? From the well?”

  “Always about Susan.” The familiar bitterness had returned.

  Zoey persisted. “She got stories in her head, too, but you were such a good big sister. Maybe you helped her deal with them.”

  Eva’s face relaxed and she rested her hands on her legs. She inhaled, sniffing. “Susan’s hair always smelled pretty when she ran in front of me.”

  Zoey knew that smell acted as the strongest of the senses in evoking memories. She wondered if Eva could smell the anti-frizz product she’d applied earlier. If only the scent would keep Eva in the right mindset.

  Eva stared into the distance, her voice less childish now. “Susan was better at it than me.”

  “Better at what?”

  “Foretelling. That’s what they ended up calling it. Susan told me her stories sometimes.” Eva looked pointedly at the woman she imagined was her mother, admonishment coating her face. “Because I didn’t punish her when she told me.”

  “You were very kind to her,” Zoey said.

  “Her stories were so good, they came alive in my head.” Eva leaned forward in her chair, close to Zoey, a grin stretching her thin lips. “And then they came alive for real, right, Mother?”

  “They often did, yes.”

  “A lot more came true than you knew about.” Eva cackled. “We even started to think Susan was making the things happen, like how the neighbors thought I killed that baby.”

  “I don’t think it was like that.”

  “I taught Susan never to tell you her stories. But me and her, we’d wait and watch. And almost always, they did come true. Sometimes we couldn’t find out because the people were in their own houses, or the stories were so far ahead in time, but we saw a lot of them come true.”