Madeline finished her water and walked back into the kitchen. She was still hungry—ravenous even. She needed something substantive to eat. Something big. As she rummaged through her Sub-Zero, Madeline realized that everything would be so much easier if Andrew would just disappear. No, Madeline thought, shutting the fridge and reaching for a loaf of coconut banana bread, not disappear—cease to exist. If he were to suddenly just die, all her problems would be solved. She thought about the chances of that happening as she sliced a piece of bread and chewed it. Andrew was having all these health problems lately: high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and he was drinking way too much. But none of those things was likely to kill him anytime soon. The tropical bread was disappointing. She grabbed a skewer of vegetables and soy “chicken” that had been marinating in barbecue sauce and bit into it. Sauce dripped onto her tight white halter top, but she didn’t stop to wipe it off. She supposed he could be worked up into some kind of heart attack, but she wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. Of course, if he had an accident, like falling down the stairs while drunk, or crashing his car…
Madeline stopped herself midchew to allow for the full force of her revelation. The statistics always stated that you were most likely to be killed by someone you knew, someone close to you, but Madeline had never really understood why until this moment. It just made things so much easier. When you looked at it like that, murder didn’t require a huge mental leap.
But there was still time to make it look like Andrew’s baby—barely. She had to force him to have sex with her within the next day or two or else…She’d try again tonight, Madeline decided, after the party. She’d make sure he was well lubricated with alcohol, which she’d spike with Viagra. Even though Madeline had convinced herself that Andrew deserved whatever he got, she was willing to give him one more chance. Either way, this baby would end up with Andrew’s name and Andrew’s money. Nobody else would ever know.
Madeline heard the doorbell and was relieved. Finally, the caterers were here and she could stop shoving food into her face. She rearranged the food on the platter and ran water over her hands. The caterers rang again and then started pounding on the door. What the hell—why were they in such a damn hurry?
“Just a minute!” she shouted. “I’m coming!” As she walked to the entrance, Madeline thought about what she would wear later. Something sheer, she decided—and no bra. She was smiling, thinking about the effect her barely covered breasts would have on a drunk, Viagraed Andrew, when she opened the door. It took less than a second for the grin to fall right off her face when she saw that it was Eddie Perkins, not the caterers, who was standing in front of her. He looked her up and down—her stained top, bare feet, greasy fingers.
“Nice to see you open your own door,” he said. “I would have thought you’d have help for that kind of thing.”
“What are you doing here?” Her voice sounded raw and shrill.
“Woman,” he said, his own voice filled with menace, “you’d better let me in.”
Chapter 29
It was going to be another hot day in the middle of a very hot week. Before dawn, Marina had opened all her windows and closed all her blinds in order to keep the air inside cool. Rosa would be arriving soon and she wondered if it would be more comfortable for them to sit in her tiny living room instead of her larger but west-facing kitchen. She wasn’t too worried either way; the heat was intense, but there was no muscle behind it. Even as it swept in, cooking the landscape and upping the danger of wildfires, the heat felt temporary—like a sloppy houseguest who made a mess but didn’t stay long enough to create any permanent damage. It was so different from Florida, a place to which Marina’s mind returned often lately, where the scorching humidity was a slow torture. The air here was dry and less aggressive—it was as if she were being patiently baked as opposed to viciously roasted. The oven comparison was particularly apt since Marina’s body, growing heavier every day, was performing its own version of convection.
For some days, she’d been feeling movement inside, the flickers of tiny fists and heels deep within the bones of her pelvis. In the old days they used to call these flutters the “quickening.” Marina was now quick with child by those terms—a misnomer, she thought. The activity inside her body seemed to be unfolding in no particular rush. Sometimes, too, the baby talked to her in a language Marina didn’t understand, the whispers tickling her inner ear. This communication had started long before the physical movement, but Marina had only just realized what it was. She was trying to make sense of it now, trying to decode and understand it.
Accepting her gift and learning how to use it were now Marina’s main concerns. She’d been shown exactly what could and would happen if she refused to work with what she’d been given. She thought about how foolish she’d been the day of the fire; how stubborn, just like her mother had said. That unrelenting urge to explain everything away—to bring the world under her control—had been her undoing. “Go home,” she’d been instructed. If she’d listened…If only she’d listened.
She was listening now, straining her ears to interpret sounds she’d never heard before, her eyes to gaze upon visions that nobody else could see. Marina’s new learning curve wasn’t just steep; it was a ninety-degree angle. Her life had become a process of stripping away in earnest—of forgetting everything she’d believed was true and starting over with a completely new set of rules. She was learning to see, to walk, to talk as if for the first time. And she was doing it here—in this little house, in this little beach community, in this slow, pretty county at the bottom of California. Because the first thing Marina had decided after she’d regained consciousness in the back of the emergency vehicle, her incinerated office still smoking, was that she wasn’t going to run.
Perhaps it was that her bruised bare feet were bandaged, a clear enough symbol of her inability to flee. Or perhaps it was just that the exhaustion Marina felt went straight through to her core. As the EMT leaned over her, asking questions like “Do you know where you are?” Marina didn’t know if she had even enough energy to sit up. But there was more to it than that. Marina knew, finally, that the fire signaled the end of the road she’d been on and the beginning of another. She also knew now that Gideon had come looking for her not for revenge but because he loved her. His fate had been meant for her. She’d been inside that vengeful, bitter mind, but Marina couldn’t tell whose body it belonged to. Nor had she been able to get into that mind again at will. Like everything else about her gift, the telepathic connections she’d made happened at random and never by her own design. She searched in the darkness for clues as to who it might be—who had such hatred for her. But there was never enough light to see.
But Marina couldn’t have articulated any of this in the ambulance even if she’d wanted to. Nor did she tell the paramedics she was pregnant or that she’d just been in a car accident. And they didn’t seem to want to know how she’d come to show up barefoot, bedraggled and half crazed right as the blaze was at its peak.
The cops were a different story. She was questioned as soon as she’d been cleared by the paramedics. She gave up that it was her office right away, but as for the rest of it, there was no explanation she could give that would make them understand why she knew what she shouldn’t have known. Anything she said was likely to make her look like the freak who had set fire to the building. As it was, her behavior was outright suspicious. They didn’t seem to know yet that there was a body—somebody, Gideon—inside the building, or else they were waiting for her to tell them. Marina was as out of it as she’d ever been at that moment, physically, emotionally and spiritually, but she knew to keep her mouth shut about Gideon. It would all come out soon enough.
Instead, Marina found herself telling the officer—Larson was his name—that the reason she was at the scene (the reason she knew there was a scene to be at) was because she was a psychic. No, really, officer, I am psychic. Marina had uttered those words, or some variation, many times before, bu
t that was the first time she’d truly believed them herself. And there, of course, was the irony.
“You’re a psychic,” the cop repeated back to her. He had walked her across the street to the café where she’d first seen Gideon and was making notations on a small pad. The light from the fire and all the emergency vehicles flashed blue, red and orange into the shadows. “You see the future? Dead people? That kind of thing?”
“I’m…I counsel people…intuitively,” she said. Old reflexes died hard. Marina realized she no longer had to pretend to be legitimate.
“You counsel people.”
So that was his strategy, Marina thought. Just repeat everything until it sounded worse than it was.
“Yes,” she said. “I can see certain things. I counsel people based on what I see.” At that moment, Marina was indeed seeing something that she knew nobody else could. A pale green glow, flecked with bits of purple and brighter on the left side, encircled Officer Larson. She cast her eyes downward to avoid staring into it and saw a black Labrador retriever sitting with its paws crossed at the officer’s feet.
“And so you saw…” He flipped back a few pages of his notebook and looked at what he had written. “You saw the fire before it happened? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I had a…it was a sort of dream,” Marina began.
The dog’s tag said “Buddy.”
“What is a ‘sort of dream’?”
“I was unconscious. I passed out for a while.”
“You were passed out. Have you been drinking tonight?”
“No, I haven’t had anything to drink.”
“So why were you passed out?”
“I had…I had a car accident. I must have hit my head.”
“Where is your vehicle, ma’am?” Buddy nuzzled Officer Larson’s leg and Marina wondered if the dog was real, dead or just a projection of the officer’s thoughts. She fought the urge to reach down and pet it.
“It’s back…I don’t know, I just ran. I had this dream. I saw an explosion.”
“An explosion? Can you tell me where you were earlier this evening? Is there anyone who can—”
“I went off the road. I had an accident.”
“And then you ran here from—?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t in the office?”
“No,” Marina said. “I told you.”
“Excuse me, what are you doing?”
The dog had stood up and padded over to Marina. She could feel its breath on her hand. But when she leaned down to stroke its fur, her hand went right through the animal. Reality was starting to break apart like one of those cheap cardboard puzzles where the pieces never truly fit together. “The dog,” she said. “I was just…” The glow around Officer Larson deepened and sparked. He tilted his head to the side, nonplussed, assessing her.
“The dog?”
Marina closed her eyes, but when she opened them Buddy was still there and sniffing at his master’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Would you mind taking a sobriety test to confirm that you haven’t been drinking?” the officer asked her.
“Yes—I mean, no, I don’t mind.”
It was the first time Marina realized that the police had little use for psychics who were actually psychic, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last.
Much later, when Officer Larson had finished with her, Marina saw a tiny black Lab puppy—lost, escaped or abandoned—approach the cluster of cops and firemen gathered on the street.
“Hey, little guy,” Marina heard Officer Larson say, “what are you doing here? Where’d you come from, huh, boy? Huh, buddy?”
That was the end of the first night. But it was not the end of the questioning.
There had been several interviews (as the police called their interrogations), most of them in the weeks immediately following the fire. They followed a similar pattern with only minor variations in the questions (and those tossed in only to throw her off balance, Marina assumed):
“Can you tell us where you were the evening of March fifteenth, 2007?”
“I was driving home. I had an accident. I went off the road.”
“Do you know who set fire to your office?”
“No.”
“Did you set fire to your office?”
“No.”
“Do you know who was in your office when the fire started?”
“No.”
“Do you know why someone would want to set fire to your office?”
“No.”
“Have you been having any trouble with a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“The girls from the nail place next door say they’ve seen a man hanging around your office. Any idea who they might be talking about?”
“It could be anyone. I have—I had a lot of clients. Some of them were men.”
“You work as a psychic?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s how you knew your office was on fire?”
“I had a dream. I saw an explosion.”
“But your psychic abilities can’t tell you who set fire to your office?”
“No.”
“Can you explain that for us?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Can you tell us where you were the evening of March fifteenth, 2007?”
They never asked her about Gideon and she didn’t understand why. It was as if it hadn’t really been Gideon who had died in the fire. Sometimes Marina almost believed he hadn’t. Dead people with a far weaker connection to her visited her all the time now. Surely, Gideon would have come to her already. And, surely, the police would have identified the body by now—if they’d found the body—and made the connection between the two of them? But, of course, this wasn’t something Marina could ask them. It had been almost two months since the fire now, and while the investigation was ongoing, her part in it seemed to be getting smaller. This allowed her the thinnest shred of hope that maybe Gideon was still alive in the world and that the body in her office was someone else.
But then, and now, Marina would feel her heart sink—a physical sensation, as if the muscle inside her chest was falling, drowning, and could barely keep beating. She knew what she had seen. Many times since that night, when she was in the deepest part of sleep, she found herself in that mind again, in the repeating loop of that single moment. It was the ring she saw, lying against Gideon’s chest. Take it. Take it now. That was the thought. She woke every time, desperate for more than that glimpse, almost begging whoever it was to come to her. But as yet it hadn’t changed. As yet, she was still foundering in the dark. Waiting.
The scent of apple and cinnamon nudged Marina back to the present. Rosa was near. The delicious smell of whatever pastry Rosa was bringing always preceded her arrival by a few minutes. Being able to sense people approaching by scent or sound was just one of the new, if inconsistent, perception skills Marina was trying to get used to. So it was turnovers Rosa was bringing today. Marina would have to act surprised when she opened the fragrant paper bag, but her delight would be genuine. It had taken some practice to wait until people had knocked on her door before she opened it. Marina was learning that disrupting people’s expectations of reality made them nervous and unsettled, even if it proved that she was psychic. This was another irony that Marina had absorbed but still marveled at. People were much more comfortable with the kind of psychic readings Marina gave before she was actually psychic. Having the gift had effectively ruined her prior business. Once Marina was no longer able to deliver readings based on pure observation and she began telling her clients what she really saw, they became disgruntled at best and angry at worst. In both scenarios they dropped her within a session or two. Marina no longer saw a single one of her old regulars for readings, although they sometimes appeared to her in other ways and forms. This was all, Marina assumed, part of the fortune-teller’s message that she’d have to learn how to use her gift.
The knock was tentative, as always with
Rosa—as if she felt she was imposing—but it didn’t startle Marina, who heard it before it came. In the moments it took to walk to the door, Marina was transported back to her small whitewashed rental in Florida. The heat, the dead snake rotting in the birds-of-paradise, and Mrs. Golden clutching her purse and waiting for whatever calamity Marina would foretell. This was a memory, not a vision, but Marina was visited often enough by Mrs. Golden. The old lady looked in on her with Gideon’s eyes; silent now, but expectant.
Where is he? Marina had asked more than once, but the old woman just tapped at her neck where her ring had hung.
Hand on the doorknob, Marina shuddered with faithlessness. Had they cursed her with that snake? It wasn’t something she’d ever have believed could happen before, but all bets had long been off when it came to the territory of the unknown and the extrasensory. Marina shook her head. It was the first thing those Gypsy frauds said when you came to them looking for answers: You’ve been cursed. I need your money to pray on. Only that can free you. Marina used to think that people who believed and paid for that kind of blatant fakery were fools who didn’t deserve to have the money they parted with. Not anymore.
Marina opened the door and smiled at Rosa, who bowed her head quickly and then stepped inside. Rosa’s long dark hair was pulled back into an immaculate ponytail. Her clothes were spotless and tidy and would stay that way even after serving food and drink all day in the heat. She held a carafe in one hand and the bag of pastries in the other. There was both hope and trust in the look that they shared.
The Grift Page 23