World Tree Girl

by Kerry Schafer

  Ravenna takes out the spectacles and rubs them clean with a cleaning cloth, perches them on her nose, and surveys us all, but the grandmotherly air no longer fits. “The dead girl’s name is Aline Montgomery, or at least that is the name she gave me. I met her in Seattle. No, I don’t know the names of her parents or where they live, or the girl’s birthday or Social Security Number or anything useful for finding them.”

  “It takes a long time and a high pain tolerance to achieve a full body tattoo like that,” Jake says. “How old was she when you got started?”

  Ravenna answers him with silence.

  Matt leans forward. “We’re not here to get you in trouble. We just want to find the killer.”

  She sighs and her eyes focus on distance. “You’re not going to arrest me?”

  “Not for tattoos,” Jake says.

  “Fair enough. Let me show you something.” She reaches over to open a drawer.

  I grab my pistol out of my open purse. Matt’s hand goes to his hip, Jake’s to his service belt.

  When Ravenna turns back, holding something wrapped in a silk handkerchief, so old the fabric is thin as cobweb in places, all three of us are holding weapons.

  Her eyes widen, and then she laughs. “I’m flattered, but I’m unarmed, as you can see.” Removing the bit of silk, she reveals a deck of cards. Tarot, I think, in the brief instant before her hands begin to move. The deck becomes a living thing, the cards flowing fluidly back and forth in an unbroken stream.

  “Cut the deck,” she says, offering the cards to Matt.

  I reach for them. “I’ll do it.” The cards are over-sized, the edges worn feather-thin with use. I split the stack and Ravenna lays out a spread.

  “Oh dear,” she says. She didn’t so much as flinch when she turned to see three guns aimed at her. Now her face pales to a shade of gray that makes me think of the morgue, and her hand wanders back to her heart.

  This is no ordinary Ryder’s tarot, maybe not tarot at all. The colors are jewel-bright, the forms stylized, like art during the Renaissance. Only a few of the cards bear a resemblance to the familiar.

  One is clearly the Death card. A woman in a flowing black robe sits astride a skeletal horse. In one hand she grasps a scythe, in the other she holds a chalice emitting beams of golden light. All around the horse, human forms cower in terror. I’ve been told that the Death card in tarot doesn’t necessarily mean death and isn’t a bad card, speaking only of endings and natural cycles.

  This card blows all of that out of the water.

  It’s accompanied by another one I recognize, altered as it is: A towering castle on a cliff, struck by lightning. Smoke rises up from the towers and turrets. Stones tumble into the sea. Human forms dive out the windows, as if something within the castle makes a death on the sharp stones far below a welcome ending. The Tower, also a symbol of a sudden, unexpected dissolution of old things. I’ve never liked that damn card. It’s showed up in both of the readings I’ve had done, once shortly before my ill-fated venture to the experimental lab with Phil that ended up in a lifetime of secrets and a parting of our ways, the other before the paranormal slug did damage to my body that will never fully be repaired.

  The rest of the layout means nothing to me, but does nothing to allay my fears.

  One portrays a shipwreck deep beneath the sea. Sharks swim through the wreckage. A crab holds a gold coin in one claw. The colors are dark and ominous. Another portrays an individual so richly robed in brocaded scarlet, gold, and purple it’s impossible to make out whether it’s male or female. In one hand it holds an hourglass, turned so that it is empty, all of the sand run out. The other holds a mask to hide the face.

  The next card depicts a gigantic male form, human but distorted, sporting long curling horns and holding strings that make a marionette dance. The last shows a graveyard under a gibbous moon, lurid red light shining on graves that are opening to release their dead.

  “I don’t understand,” Jake says, ever the pragmatist. Matt says nothing.

  I understand more than I care to.

  Ravenna touches the cards by the edges, gingerly, as if they burn her. Her forehead is furrowed in worry lines. “I don’t like this. At all.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I’d have to guess. I hesitate to say until I’ve thought about it more.”

  “While you’re thinking,” Jake suggests, “maybe you could tell us about how you came to tattoo Sophronia. And the other girl.”

  She draws a visible breath and lets it out with a whoosh that lifts the edges of the Tower card and skitters it across the others.

  “Not good,” she mutters. “Not good at all. I will tell you what I know. What the cards tell us may yet be altered.

  “This girl—the one you call Sophie—yes, I know her. But I did not send her that message. I have given her only the one tattoo—that of Anubis. The cards told me she would come to me, and which tattoo would be right for her. The Death card, as you see. And a card of new beginnings.” She shuffles through the deck and turns over a card that features a single blossom open on a tree heavy with buds.

  “This card”—her finger taps the bud—“was also in the spread for Aline.”

  “And what other card for Aline?” I ask, leaning over to see better.

  Again the gnarled hands fly through the deck, producing, as if by magic, a card that portrays an old-time sailing vessel. Men are climbing the rigging and leaning far out to look at something on the rocks. Several of them have taken a header into the sea; another is launching himself over the bow. The object of their attention sits on the rocks, not even looking in their direction.

  “A mermaid?” Jake asks, incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “A Siren,” Matt corrects, picking up the card and sliding it back and forth across his palm. He tilts his head to one side, as if he’s picked up a distant sound and is trying to figure out what it is.

  I can’t hear anything, and I’m impatient with riddles.

  “Tell us about Aline.” Jake is on the same page. His voice is dry and professional. I know his moods by now. Enough with mysteries, he wants some good old-fashioned detective facts he can sink his teeth into. I want more than facts. I want something I can fight. I’d been hoping Ravenna would turn out to be a black-hearted paranormal in need of killing, but no such luck. The woman doesn’t seem to be evil, although her eyes are unsettling and I don’t like the way she looks at me and smiles, as if she’s privy to some secret information about me that she’s not sharing.

  She sobers again, quickly, and the girl’s name crosses her lips like an invocation. “Aline. Such a beautiful child. But so lost. So perilous.”

  “Less poetry,” I tell her. “More story.”

  “You are a bloodthirsty soul, Maureen Keslyn. I will tell this story, but I will tell it in my own way. He knows why.” She gestures at Matt, who still has that distant expression on his face. There’s a line down the center of his forehead now, as if he’s trying to see far off into the distance.

  “Three years ago, Aline found me. I had set up a business telling fortunes as well as doing tattoos. Nance, my assistant, kept turning over the same run of cards—the Moon, all of the Aces, the Tower, the Devil. She wasn’t a true reader and she hated it when the cards started to talk. She’d try to assert her will, to silence them, poking them back into the deck, cheating, but they’d jump out at her, fall out onto the table, leap onto the floor. When Aline came in and asked to have her fortune told, the child drew them out of the deck herself and laid them out on the table.

  “‘You must start with a question,’ Nance had told her, the way I taught her to say it. Unlike most of the seekers who come in, Aline didn’t ask whether she could keep the question to herself. She looked up, huge blue eyes crystal clear to the depths, and asked, ‘Do I have a soul?’

  “The heartbreak, the longing in her voice went straight to my heart. I didn’t even wait for Nance to come get me. The girl needed a real re
ader, someone who could understand, so I sat down to talk, heart to heart.

  “She asked me the same question she’d asked the cards. ‘Do I have a soul, do you think?’ And then, ‘What am I?’

  “And I had to tell her I didn’t have an answer. She was a smart girl, though. The cards scared her. ‘Is this me? All this fear and death?’

  “‘The cards talk in riddles,’ I told her. ‘Sometimes they tell parts of secrets. I think what they are saying is that you are something new, shaking up the order of things. Whatever you are can go two ways—creating great beauty or causing heartache.’

  “‘But there is so much death.’

  “I couldn’t lie to her.

  “I wanted to give Aline something. A gift. A symbol with meaning. The Ape is an incarnation of the Egyptian god, Thoth, a mediator between the darkness and the light.”

  “It’s a long way from one small ape to a full body tattoo.” Jake isn’t mollified at all by her rendering of sympathy for a bewildered child. If anything, his tone is harsher, more acerbic.

  “I meant only to give her the Ape. She was underage, yes, but it would be a talisman for her, and she seemed to need one. You judge me, all of you. I see what lies behind your eyes. You think I took advantage of innocent children, went behind their parents’ backs, marked them for life before they knew who they were or what they would be. How could they know? Neither one of them had an adult to guide them. And both of them, drawn away from the balance to the dark, could become a terrible force of evil in the world. Have you not seen this? I see the fear when you speak of this Sophronia. Something has turned her—she is running wild and loose and you are afraid of what she can and will do.

  “I gave Aline the Ape. A month later she came back to see me. Terrified, embarrassed, ashamed. She had a skin problem. She didn’t want to show her parents or the doctor. She was so distressed I agreed to look. The skin around her navel had changed. It was smoother, almost rubbery, and it shone in the light. She begged me, pleaded, with tears, that I do something to cover it. She was on the swim team at school. The girls in the locker room would notice.

  “‘They will also notice a tattoo,’ I told her. She shrugged that off. A tattoo would be cool with the other kids. Her parents would never need to know.

  “I had a sinking feeling that this was only the beginning. She was just reaching puberty, and with the change of her body, so would come the physical manifestation of what she is that is other. In case, just in case this should be so, I began the tree. Just the roots, for starters. A little green grass and a flower for color. The vine for beauty. She came back the next weekend, begging for more.

  “‘What of your parents?’ I asked her. ‘Surely they aren’t going to be happy about this.’

  “She smiled at me, the most beautiful and terrifying smile imaginable. ‘They already think I’m the devil’s child. Who cares what they think?’

  “‘I care,’ I told her, very gently. ‘I care what they think.’

  “She deflated at that. ‘As of yet, nobody has noticed.’

  “‘Go away,’ I told her. ‘You’ve had two tattoos completely free. What do you think this is, a charity house?’ I was cruel. She frightened me.

  “A light went out in her eyes and I felt as if I’d killed something. All that week I went through my days with the taste of ashes in my mouth. But the next weekend she was back.

  “‘Please,’ she said. And then she pulled a wad of tangled bills out of her pocket and set them on the table. ‘It’s all I’ve got, but I can get more. I can babysit now. If anybody will let me.’

  “The way she said that last, and the smudge of a bruise on her cheek, aroused my suspicions. ‘People are always looking for a babysitter.’ I picked up the money and straightened it all to lie flat, to give me time to think. Fifty dollars. Not even enough to pay for the Ape, not that I wanted her money.

  “‘Not from a demon spawn like me,’ she muttered.

  “‘Who calls you that?’ I demanded.

  “She didn’t answer, but she wouldn’t look at me, either. ‘Are they beating you, child?’

  “‘What if they were?’

  “‘We could get you some help.’

  “She made a terrible, heart-wrenching sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. Have you ever heard a child make a sound like that? Yes. You have, Sheriff. I see it in your eyes. ‘There is no real help for me,’ she said. ‘Please. More ink. The skin thing is spreading.’

  “And so I added the rest of the tree trunk, making it strong and brave, pushing up from the center of her toward her heart, her brain. She was young, but she understood the significance of it. After that she came back often. Both of us became caught up in the art of it and she began to request little things. Birds, squirrels, flowers.”

  “And you’re sure you have no clue as to her parents?” Jake persists. “Last name, address, any identification at all?”

  Ravenna sighs and leans back in the chair. “Too late now to help or harm,” she says, speaking more to herself than to us. She plays with the cards. I watch, half mesmerized. It’s as if they have a life of their own. She pulls out a card, looks at it, puts it back into the deck. With slow, deliberate motions, she wraps them back up in silk and tucks them into their wooden box.

  Without another word, she hefts herself to her feet and walks out of the room, without the cane this time, but as if every step exacts a price. She draws a slider as she passes into the bedroom, and I can hear her rustling around on the other side. She’s gone long enough for the three of us to start to fidget. Jake and Matt search every visible inch of the room with their eyes. I get up and start moving things around.

  Somewhere in that freaky deck she’s already read me and understands perfectly well what I’m capable of. I’m all right with that.

  “Maureen, you can’t—” Jake breaks off, knowing that I can and will. Matt says nothing. Something weird is going on with him. He’s got the look of a deer in the headlights, dazed and mystified, like that look he had in the coffin room, only more so. I’ll worry about that later. Right now, I’ve got a tiny window of opportunity I don’t intend to waste.

  The first set of cabinet doors, when opened, reveal well-stocked bookshelves. Ravenna’s tastes run to romance, heavy on the erotic side, but she has some literary tomes and a few esoteric and strange books that draw my interest: an old copy of Budge’s translation of The Book of the Dead; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Greek; a small, cheaply bound volume titled Mythology and Genetics. Either she is a collector, or has an IQ that is a point of interest.

  A small handgun, a .22, loaded and with a bullet in the chamber, nestles in a drawer with a pair of scissors, a flashlight, spare batteries, and other odds and ends. The antique wooden trunk against the wall is half full of clothing, but there is one cloth-wrapped bundle, round and heavy, that feels interesting.

  I unwrap it and sigh with disappointment.

  Just a gazing ball. It’s as big as my head, cobalt blue, and reflects everything in the room around me. I’ve got no use for fortune-tellers. Paranormal is one thing. Spirits might know things going on around us that we can’t see, given their invisibility, but even they can’t travel into the future.

  The ball is a beautiful thing, though, and I hold it up to the light to see it better.

  A hissing intake of breath from Matt freezes me, the ball held aloft.

  “Put that thing away.” He’s lost the dreamy look.

  I open my mouth to tell him it’s just garden decoration, but at that instant the door cracks open at the end of the hallway and I drop it back into the chest and close the lid.

  “Well, did you find anything interesting while I was gone?” Ravenna asks. “I assure you I have a license for the gun.”

  “It’s not the gun that interests me.”

  She gives me a knowing look, lips quirked in the hint of a smile, and hands a small, plastic rectangle to Jake.

  “School ID. She dropped it once. I meant to give it back to
her, but that was the last time I saw her.”

  Ravenna sinks into a chair, as if her little trek down the hall has been completely exhausting. “When you meet her parents, brutalize them a little, would you, please? They did not treat her right.”

  I nod at her, a silent promise that there will be retribution. “If Sophronia should come looking for you…”

  “Bless your heart, my lamb, I have no intention of staying here any longer. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Maybe I can hold her. Maybe I can explain something, offer her comfort. One does not explain things to an emotional teenager. This girl has a moral compass. She will have to make her own decision. If she lives long enough to do so.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “You really must be going if you hope to catch a plane. If I’m right, you’ve got just enough time to make it to the airport. Don’t drive. I see you considering that. Trust me. Bad idea.”

  With that, she shoos us on out the door and I hear a deadbolt as she locks up behind us.

  “Do we trust her?” Jake asks, once we’re back in Matt’s pickup.

  “About as far as I can throw her.”

  Matt says nothing. He moves like a robot on autopilot, as if his body is with us, but his brain is elsewhere. He starts the truck, shifts into gear.

  “Matt?”

  No answer. I jostle his arm with my elbow. “Matt!”

  “Hmm?”

  “Pull over.”

  He looks at me then, as if surprised to notice I’m there, even though I’m smashed in beside him with my shoulder pressing into his ribs. “Why?”

  “Just do it. Pull over.”

  I wait until he’s parked to turn off the ignition and take the keys. Both men stare at me like I’m the one that’s crazy. “Now, Matt, start talking.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Don’t bullshit me. You’ve been acting weird ever since we walked into Lysander’s showroom. Either you can explain yourself, or I’m going to believe that you’ve been hijacked and put you in protective custody. Which is it?”