He didn’t look like he believed her one bit. “Ramona.”
“Yes.”
I turned and stirred the chopped nuts, garlic, and spices into the sauce and turned off the burner.
Behind me, I heard Cindy say, “She’s a new friend. You haven’t met her yet.”
I assembled the eggplant slices onto a platter, then poured the sauce into a gravy boat. Incredibly, and luckily, I was invisible to the two of them again. Viktor and Cindy, whatever their supposedly “humble” upbringings, had an amazing capacity for completely ignoring the “help”—this was not a conversation I would have had within fifty feet and three locked doors of anyone, if I could help it.
“You listen to me,” Viktor said, capturing both Cindy’s attention and mine.
Now, believe me, I didn’t want to listen. I absolutely love a good story, and the gossipier it is, the better usually, but this was not a scene I wanted to witness. I’d learned a long time ago it was really hard to rebound from witnessing a personal scene in a client’s home because most people are well aware that the hired help tends not to be blind, deaf, and dumb. (And all too often, the hired help then goes out and tries to make a buck off what they see, hear, and can say for the right price … particularly if the client in question is either famous or rich enough to be blackmailed.)
That said, they were across from me on the counter that was my workspace. However much I tried to ignore them, it was impossible.
Especially when he swooped in closer to his wife’s face and said, “Make no mistake. I will see you dead before I will see you in divorce court.”
Ah. True love.
* * *
I was trying to bolt out the door and get away from yet more marital acrimony when the great Vlad Oleksei himself showed up in the kitchen.
This was a rare thing, believe me. Most of the time, people showed up at the door, as they had tonight, looking nervous and agitated, ready for an appointment with Vlad. Once I came up with the whole Russian Mob Theory, I imagined that they left as emotional basket cases—which at least half, maybe more, of them did—because their family’s lives or kneecaps had been threatened.
So when Vlad showed up in the kitchen, pointed a gnarled finger at me, and said, “You. I need to talk to you in private,” believe me, I was scared to death.
“Me?” I touched a hand to my chest and looked around, as if there were any possibility that he was actually talking to someone else.
I was, of course, the only one there.
“Yes, you.” He snorted, like I was an idiot. “Who you think I’s talking to?”
“Well…” There was no answer. Best not to try. “I don’t know.”
“Come.” He gave the universal come with me now arm gesture. “We talk.”
I didn’t want to talk.
I didn’t want to hear.
I didn’t want to die.
But this was more crazy stuff from my imagination. I knew that. I’d been working for them for ages; they knew I was a good employee, discreet and trustworthy.
Maybe he wanted to talk to me about a raise!
Okay, stop laughing. I know that sounds a little overly optimistic, but I didn’t do super well with middle ground. My imagination tended toward either the very grim or the very great. And there was no reason not to hope this could be great. I mean, for real, I’d made their Russian meals seriously kick-ass.
In any event, he beckoned and I followed, well aware that I was about to see, at last—for better or for worse—the locked room in which Vlad conducted the business that made people nervous coming in and, a good percentage of the time, weeping copiously on their way out of the house.
It smelled funny.
He paused outside the door. “I don’t normally do this,” he said to me with a significant nod of the head.
Trepidation gripped my chest. “Maybe you shouldn’t then?… I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
He shook his head with great impatience. “I have to. Sometimes God does not give choice.”
Okay, shit. God was telling him he had to do something here? That sounded like crazy “talking to the devil” stuff to me. I didn’t normally believe in that, truly, but my friend Jamie totally believed, and though I dismissed it out of hand over drinks at a nice restaurant, it was harder simply to dismiss it at this moment.
“What is … God telling you to do?” I asked as gently as I could manage.
Vlad was older, and definitely weird, but he knew when he was being condescended to. “God gives me vision. Vision for you.”
Okay, I don’t know if the rest of the world would have had this figured out by now, but all I can tell you is that I did not. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and if I was worth my salt at all, I would have told him I was uncomfortable with the meeting he was trying to coordinate and either we could do it in the open—and easy-to-escape-from—living room, or we could not do it at all.
Naturally, I opted for the wimp path.
So, thinking that Vlad might be a Russian Mafia kingpin, but fearing being rude above all else, I followed him back to the mysterious room where I’d seen countless people walk in smiling and walk out crying.
It was a small room, with deep mauve walls and no pictures or decorations. The only furniture was a utilitarian wooden desk—with no drawers or shelves—an orthopedic office chair, and three folding chairs opposite it. The only light came from one of those green glass banker’s lamps on the desk.
He indicated that I should sit in one of the folding chairs, while he creaked painfully over to the executive chair on the other side of the desk.
Any second now, he might start talking about that raise.
But no, he took out a deck of cards and handed them to me. “Shuffle.”
Yes, I was still confused. “I’m sorry, do what?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. In retrospect, I can’t say I blame him. “Shuffle the cards.”
“Why?”
“So they absorb your energy.”
“But—” Finally it dawned on me. “Wait, are you a psychic or something?”
Now, here’s a fact you might want to keep in your back pocket: If you work for one of the most famous clairvoyants in the Metro area for almost a year and don’t realize it, you might want to keep that little bit of ignorance to yourself.
Unless you really want to insult them, that is.
“Is this joke?” he asked, his expression darkening.
“No, I”—I just didn’t know what to say—“I work in your home, so I try to mind my own business as much as possible when I’m here. More so than if I were, say, your neighbor, or—”
He snatched the unshuffled cards from my hands. “I try to help you!”
“Oh! Well, thanks, but I think I’m okay.…”
He scoffed. Actually scoffed. “You do not know what Vlad knows!”
I have never believed in psychics. At least not since I realized the gypsy at the carnival was Mrs. Rooks. I believe some of them might believe they’re psychic, so they may come at it from a well-intentioned place, but I think at best they are people who are very good at reading other people.
The rest are just thieves.
I’m not sure it’s that hard to be either one of those things. If you think about it, almost everyone you know is wrestling with either a money, job, or romance issue to some degree. Even most happy people would probably agree they’d like to better their lot in at least one of those areas.
Mrs. Rooks was one of the best examples of that, actually. Apart from the bitter tirade against men and marriage that she’d unleashed on me, she’d evidently done a pretty good job of convincing my classmates she was the real deal. Obviously, she’d had a few pat, universal “predictions” and she’d divvied them out to the amazement of my friends.
She knew I don’t like school!
She said a new boy was going to come into my life and ask me out!
How could she know my best friend wouldn’t keep my s
ecret?
It was all just basic body-language reading. Almost anyone could do it.
However, Vlad Oleksei did it for a living, and whatever his gift actually was, he was apparently good enough at it to have people coming to him all day long and taking him very seriously.
Besides which, I couldn’t afford to insult him and lose my job.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “You’re right, I don’t know what you know.”
He eyed me. “You need to know.”
“Okay—?”
He thrust the cards in my direction again. “Shuffle.”
So I shuffled. “Is that enough?”
He splayed his hands. “If you say it’s enough, it’s enough. Cut three times to the left.”
I wondered if he meant cut three times, to make four piles, or make three piles, but I didn’t dare ask. I made three piles.
Apparently that was right, because he gathered them up and spread them in a line in front of him. “I see a man here, a man in your life—”
And here we go.
“—it’s not romantic,” he added, looking sharply at me.
Okay, I’m a private chef. I work in people’s homes. Obviously, I interact with men on a nonromantic basis. Hell, he could have claimed to have been talking about any one of his sons, or even himself!
I waited for more.
After a loud rattle of breath, he said, “You’re making some sort of movie with him.”
“Movie?”
He nodded. “Film. You know, a—what do you call it?—a video, a movie.”
I frowned. “I don’t know what that could be.” I think it was the sheer unexpectedness of such a specific and odd detail, but I did find myself trying to imagine what he could be talking about. “You mean, like, at a family gathering?” We were sure to have a party once Penny’s baby was born.
Vlad frowned. “I don’t think so.” He pushed some of the cards around, looking at them like he was trying to read a menu without his glasses on. “It’s just two of you.”
I know what you’re thinking. But, no, I’m not a sex tape kind of girl.
“I seriously don’t know what that could be,” I said.
He shrugged. “It will reveal later. Also, there is a woman. Lighter hair than you. Light eyes. She looks close, you see her often. Do you know who this could be?”
“Maybe my cousin.” This is just how it works. He asks a vague question, I feed him the answer, and he turns it around and gives it back to me in a way designed to make me think he came up with it himself. It was dazzling, really.
“She’s very thin?”
“Well…” Normally, but she was pregnant. “She’s been up and down.”
“She’s angry.” He continued to scrutinize the cards.
“Angry?”
He nodded. “Do you know this?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t answer, just gave a shrug like that no longer mattered, and he was on to something else. “There’s another man here.” He sounded surprised. “You were married before?”
“No.” This was bullshit.
Vlad nodded, his forehead creasing like origami. “You will. Soon.”
I gave a laugh. “Nooo, I don’t think that’s going to happen.” In fact, my last gypsy experience had warned me specifically against it. Granted, it was Mrs. Rooks, but it had made an impression.
And soon? How could I marry anyone soon when I didn’t know anyone I’d even sleep with?
Except, of course, for Mack—whose last name I didn’t even know.
“You will,” Vlad insisted. He was not going to let me disagree. “It’s the man you’re with now.”
“I’m not dating anyone right now.” There you go, I was going to marry no one and spend the rest of my life with him. Mr. Nobody. That I could believe.
He looked at the cards again, then at me. “Yes, you are, I see him right here.” He pointed at the King of Clubs, like that would prove it to me. “You’ve been with him for quite some time.”
“Seriously, I’m not seeing anyone.” Though I didn’t want to, I thought of Mack again. I almost shook my head at the thought. He was a one-night stand. Our Affair to Remember moment had come and gone at the grocery store.
“But you are right here.” He thumped his index finger on the Queen of Diamonds. “And he is here. Next to you.” He looked at me like he’d caught me in a lie.
“Honestly, I don’t know who that is. I don’t recognize him.” Obviously. I almost laughed at the idea of the little cartoon man being someone recognizable. “I mean, I can’t even imagine who it could be. Unless you’re getting my cousin and me mixed up, and that’s her husband.”
It’s easy to get wrapped up in this stuff and try to make it make sense.
“No, this is you.” He shook his head. “I see it clearly.”
“Well … all right.” This was getting boring. I just wanted it to end. “I guess … I don’t know.”
“If you don’t now, you will.”
He went on to say a few more things. Something about minor car trouble, look out for getting speeding tickets, the kind of warnings you could reasonably issue to anyone as they were leaving the house in anything other than a plastic bubble surrounded by armed guards.
When he finished, maybe twenty minutes after we’d sat down, he drew the cards back up into a single pile and plopped it down on the desk.
“That’s all I see right now.”
I stood up. “Well, thanks. I appreciate your taking the time to do this for me.”
“The woman is very angry. Be careful.”
I racked my brain again, even though I didn’t believe a word of this, and came up with Marie Lemurra. But she didn’t care about me. I’d seen her get angry time and again; it blew over as soon as she removed the source of her anger. In this case, firing me.
There was no way he was seeing any sort of real future. At best—at absolute best—he could get me so psyched out about certain things that I’d start to expect things like speeding tickets, and I’d drive faster subconsciously, get a ticket, and then think he was right.
But there was no point in trying to debunk the man to his face.
“I will watch out,” I said, and gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Thank you.”
I left, but cooking their meal had left a bad taste in my mouth this time.
Chapter 10
No one was there when I got to the Van Houghten house, but Angela had left a note with very specific instructions. Apparently, she suspected something I’d cooked the week before had hidden soy in it and she wanted me to be triple sure there was no soy or soy derivative in any of her food, since it would “wreak havoc” on her skin.
We couldn’t have that.
So I looked at the ingredients I’d just bought for a sushi-grade raw tuna Caesar salad—no croutons (gluten), cheese (dairy), or anchovy (garlic oil)—and scanned the labels for soy.
I was making the dressing—a difficult task, given my additional restrictions—when Peter came in.
“Hey, there.” He was dressed in his running gear: long-sleeved Under Armour shirt and running pants that, mercifully, were not too tight. “What’re you making? Smells good.”
“That’s probably the tuna you’re smelling.” I gestured with the whisk to where the tuna was sitting on the counter. At this point, Angela’s food sensitivities had reached such epic proportions that all I could use to season her meals was salt and pepper. Tonight I’d put multicolored peppercorns into my grinder with the hopes that what the food would now lack in taste complexity it might make up for a little bit visually. And that was going to have to carry the whole meal, I was afraid.
“Mmmmm.” He walked up behind me to take a look. He smelled like cold air. “You are the best, Gemma. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
“You’re reaching the point where I’m not sure I make much of a difference,” I said. “Soon you’ll just be having raw celery for dinner, I’m afraid
.”
He laughed. “But you’d be able to make that taste good.”
“I don’t know.”
I reached for the pepper grinder at the same moment he did, and our hands knocked. I drew back liked I’d touched a snake.
He handed it to me. “So she’s still allowing pepper.”
I laughed. “So far.” Pepper was pepper. She didn’t have an allergy or anything like that, but it was all too easy to imagine her getting a gander at the colorful flecks on the chicken tonight and imagining there was some hidden allergen in them.
“Well, it looks good to me.” He smiled and leaned back on the counter. “So, tell me, what is your favorite food to cook?”
“Oh, wow, I don’t know. I like cooking just about anything. Every time it’s a challenge, you know? But if I had to pick, I’d probably say comfort food. Full fat, full butter, sour cream, the whole nine yards. Almost no one eats like that anymore.” Mr. Tuesday was the only exception I knew of. And me, on Tuesdays, when I couldn’t help taste-testing an unnecessary amount.
He nodded. “I would just love a good old-fashioned pot roast one night.”
I laughed. “That will never happen in this house, right?”
“Oh, hell no.” He laughed, too. “But I bet you make a killer pot roast.”
“Maybe if Angela goes away sometime.” I used the heel of my palm to move a piece of hair from my eyes. “My pot roast is excellent. Well, all my food is.”
“Lucky for me.” He smiled faintly and looked off in the distance. “I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary,” he said suddenly, moving toward the fridge. “Do you want one?”
“Me?” This was weird. “No thanks. Not while I’m working. But I appreciate the offer.”
“I haven’t had one in ages, but I think it would really hit the spot tonight.” He poured the tomato juice into a glass, then asked, “Can I use some of that pepper?”
“Sure!” I handed him the grinder. “Have at it.” I transferred the tuna to a cutting board.
“Angela can be tough to work for, huh?”
“Oh, she’s not too bad,” I said, slicing the tuna. I was mindful of the fact that (1) I was talking to her husband, and (2) she could walk in at any moment and overhear whatever we were saying. “It would be boring if everyone wanted the same thing every single night.”
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