“So you were together—a couple—but you hadn’t seen him, didn’t know why he was in your office. It never occurred to you that the person who died in that fire, in your office, might have been your lover?”
“Our relationship was over,” Marina said. Her face was wet, but she hadn’t felt the tears fall. “It was over in January.”
“The romantic part of it or the professional part?”
“He wasn’t…There was no professional part.”
“When did you meet Mr. Black?”
“I met him…” The day she’d first seen Gideon sipping from a bottomless coffee cup across the street belonged to another life. “It was my birthday,” she said. “Election Day—November of last year. That’s when I met him.”
“You seem to have a very clear memory of that day.”
Mrs. Golden suddenly appeared close to Marina’s ear. Ask him about the ring!
“I can’t!” Marina gasped out loud and reflexively covered her mouth with her hand.
Detective Franks waited a beat, then two. “I’d like that glass of water now, if you don’t mind,” he said.
Mrs. Golden followed Marina to the kitchen, chattering as she never had before, stringing together an endless loop of words: The ringringring you have to ask about the ring the ring is everything you were supposed to protect him you were supposed to help him with the ring the ring is gone you have to ask him about the ring you have to protect him you have to save him—
“He’s dead,” Marina whispered. “He’s dead! Don’t you know—” She dropped the glass she was holding and it shattered, sending shards of broken glass and water in a sparkling starburst on the slate kitchen floor. Marina bent down to pick up the pieces and immediately cut her finger. Now there was blood and water and glass and for a moment Marina could do nothing except watch it all spread. Detective Franks appeared at the entrance to the kitchen, then rushed over to help her to her feet and over to the sink.
“Look,” he said as she washed her hand and fumbled in the kitchen drawer for a bandage, “I’m going to be very honest with you, and I hope that for everyone’s sake, you’ll be honest with me.” Marina looked over at him, pleading silently. She was starting to feel dizzy and unmoored. She needed him to leave. She needed to sleep.
“The story you just told me doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now, I don’t know exactly what your relationship was with Mr. Black, but I do know that there’s more to it than what you just gave me.” He sighed, whether for effect or to release tension Marina didn’t know. The ability to interpret gestures was one of the things that were now oddly unavailable to her.
“Some time ago, Mr. Black filed an insurance claim for a very valuable piece of jewelry. Apparently, he’d given it to his mother and it turned up missing from her estate after she died.” His emphasis on “estate” was sarcastic and bitter. “Mr. Black believed that this piece of jewelry might have wound up with a psychic his mother had been seeing. He believed that his mother had been taken advantage of and that she never would have given up this item willingly. Does any of this sound familiar, Ms. Marks?”
Marina heard his words as if they were coming at her through deep water. Detective Franks, the kitchen, even her own body seemed to fade to shades of gray and white as she watched a rapid series of images go by, as if she was flipping through a magazine. She saw the chain first, half melted and blackened with soot. It was unclasped and empty. Then she saw the ring being polished by a pair of thick, square male hands. Then a different pair of male hands held it; the fingers were long and pale. She saw it being placed carefully into a black velvet box and pushed to the back of a wooden desk drawer. The images speeded up. Still another pair of male hands—small and freckled—holding the ring, turning it around. A handshake. The ring on the left fourth finger of a woman—flesh puffing up around it. A close-up of the ring. A reflection in one of its deep red surfaces. Closer. A face. Gideon lying—
“Marina?”
Detective Franks snapped back into focus, the images gone, just out of reach. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know if this is an act or what, but…,” he said. He stared at her, as if trying to see inside her head. “But I know you know something about this piece of jewelry. We know you’re involved. He knew you before November. The smart thing to do is just come out with it now. Should we start at the beginning? Why don’t you tell me what happened in Florida?”
“I don’t have the ring,” she said.
“But you know the ring I’m talking about?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What do you know about it, Marina? Tell me.”
Somebody killed him. Somebody took the ring.
“Marina,” he said, this time softly, as if he felt sorry for her.
“Please,” she said.
“Marina,” he repeated. “I’m going to have to ask you to come to the police station with me now. We’ll continue our conversation there.”
Marina rubbed her eyes with her bandaged hand. Mrs. Golden had vanished. Detective Franks stood tall and solid, but unthreatening. There was nothing clairvoyant about the feeling she had looking at him now—that she could trust him, that he might even be able to help her—just basic instinct, and she had to believe in it.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll just need a minute to get ready.”
Chapter 31
She is lying on her back beneath the ground, looking up at a bright rectangle of cloudless blue sky. Three birds cut across the space in a fast-moving triangle of flight and are gone. It is dark down here and close with the smell of earth. She hears words coming from far above, falling down to her in fragments. “…my shepherd…not want…walk through…shadow…fear no evil…” A woman is sobbing. A trapped insect buzzes in an effort to escape. The first rose, sweet and white, falls on her face and that is when she realizes where she is. The white rose is joined by a pink one and then another white one. The smell is too sweet and holds the odor of rot within it. It fills her lungs. She can’t breathe, can’t stay here. She pulls herself up. The thorns press into her skin. The view shifts upside down. Now she stands above looking in. Roses pile on the coffin. She can see the sobbing woman, head bent and covered in a black veil, gloved hand to her mouth. Someone whispers, “That’s the widow.” A heavyset dark-haired woman approaches the widow, her back turned, and puts a hand on the widow’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” the woman whispers. “This must be so hard for you.” She looks at the hand on the widow’s shoulder. The ruby ring catches a ray of sunlight and sparks red laser beams of light. She turns her head to see—
Marina woke up gasping for air but was unafraid, wanting desperately to return to the dream, to the funeral she had just attended. She tried to focus on the details before they slipped away into the glare of consciousness, but caught only the quick gleam of the ring—that ring—and the birds flying over the grave. She couldn’t even get close enough to the widow’s veiled face to determine who it was, although Marina was sure she knew her. She was also sure that the dead husband, in whose grave she’d been lying, was someone she knew as well. But it was the mysterious woman wearing Gideon’s ring whom Marina most wanted to see. She closed her eyes, trying to will herself back to sleep, but it was a futile pursuit. Sleep and dreams came to her now when they wanted, not when she decided. She didn’t even remember falling asleep in the first place. She’d gone from sitting in her rocking chair reading a reference book about psychic phenomena (conveniently sorted in alphabetical order) to unconsciousness without so much as a blink. Maybe, she thought, she hadn’t been asleep at all but in some sort of fugue state, traveling somewhere between past, present and future.
She closed the book now, marking her place between cartomancy and chiromancy with Detective Franks’s business card. That encounter had certainly felt real enough. Marina felt a gathering tension between her shoulders as she remembered the interview from the day before. The police did not have enough evidence to arrest Marina
either for torching her office or for Gideon’s murder—but that didn’t mean that they weren’t still searching for it.
The questioning she received after she followed Detective Franks to the police station was less kind than what she’d gone through before. They were impatient with her, even though her story never wavered. Most irritating to them, it seemed, was the psychic angle, which stuck in their craws every time they mentioned it.
“If you could see that your office was on fire, why couldn’t you see who set the fire?” they asked.
“I can’t explain it,” Marina answered.
“Is that because you set the fire yourself?”
“No,” Marina said.
They asked her about Gideon; personal, intimate information that she wouldn’t have shared with her closest girlfriend even if she’d had one. But Marina answered because she had to. They had broken up, he had left, she didn’t know where he’d gone, and she hadn’t seen him in her office on the evening of March 15 or anywhere else that day. And as for the ring, yes, she knew about it. And yes, she’d known Gideon’s mother in Florida. The woman visited many psychics and Marina was only one of them. But Gideon had the ring in his possession the last time she’d seen him and she didn’t have it now. They were welcome to search her or her house.
It was a long session but in the end it was surprisingly banal, with none of the flash and drama these kinds of scenes had in film or television. Nobody yelled or leaned over her, trying to intimidate her. She didn’t demand to see an attorney and never lost control or started crying. The questions they asked were plodding, repetitive and occasionally rhetorical. After a while, they’d let her go home. They’d told her that they’d be in touch again, so if she was planning an out-of-town trip, she might want to rethink it. Detective Franks had given her his card.
Marina startled as if someone had come up from behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. Once again the smell of roses, strong and overly sweet, was thick in her throat. Someone was coming. She jumped up out of her chair and her book fell to the floor, splaying open at the entry for precognition. Marina picked up the book, threw it on the rocking chair and walked over to her front door. Her heart was racing. She knew who was on the other side before she opened it and saw Eddie standing there, a large bouquet of already-wilting roses perched awkwardly in his big hand.
Neither one of them spoke. For once, Eddie seemed to have been rendered speechless. For her part, Marina was too distracted by the sound and vision of breaking plates surrounding Eddie to greet him. She opened the door wide and he stumbled inside, his eyes sweeping her, confusion rolling across his face like a dark cloud. Behind him, Marina could see Eddie’s kitchen and his frightened wife half crouching and cringing as Eddie grabbed a hand-painted, salmon-shaped serving plate and hurled it against the wall. Marina felt the vibrations of the crash, felt the pain of its violent destruction.
“You broke the fish plate. She loved that plate,” Marina said. She saw Eddie and his wife walking through the streets of Ensenada, where they’d gone for their honeymoon, Eddie’s wife picking up the plate and laughing about how it was so ugly that it was beautiful. She heard Eddie saying that the paint was probably toxic, but he would buy it for her anyway, because it made her laugh and he loved her, loved her, loved her.
“Hey,” Eddie was saying, “how do you know that?”
She could see Eddie’s wife crying and understood that Eddie had broken more than just the plate. “You might have been able to talk to her if it hadn’t been for that plate,” Marina told Eddie. “That really hurt her.”
“Did you talk to her? Did you?”
Now the scene over Eddie’s shoulder was changing into that of an office where he was storing his clothes. She saw a toothbrush, fast-food wrappers and then Eddie arguing with a man in a suit. They were going to fire him. She could smell desperation on him, acrid and smoky. He needed money. The images started to come fast, another series of film clips on fast-forward. Hands holding a pregnancy test strip reading positive. A woman burying the strip in the trash, getting dressed. Her hands on her belly. Madeline. The woman was Madeline.
“You’re having a baby,” Marina said in wonderment.
“What are you talking about?”
Marina started laughing, but Eddie wasn’t amused. She could see all the women in Eddie’s life circling around him, each one angry with him in a different way. She supposed she should have known about Madeline, but she’d been so caught up in her own drama with Gideon.
But there was something else. Marina could see Eddie’s own anger taking a physical shape inside him, rearing up to strike like a snake. She saw him at the door of Madeline’s house. Saw him walking inside.
Eddie handed over his roses and the heavy smell triggered another vision. Once again she was looking up from within a grave. The roses falling on her face. Of course, it was Eddie’s grave. The widow…the woman with the ring…
“Don’t go there, Eddie. Please. You’re going to get hurt. Please listen to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Go where?”
He didn’t understand. She had to make him understand. If he went to Madeline’s house, he was going to die. And somehow Gideon’s ring fit into all of this, but she couldn’t see how. It was all just out of reach and floating away. Marina felt the heat of frustrated tears at the backs of her eyes. Help me, she wanted to scream, but she didn’t know who or what would be listening. Not Eddie, who was staring at her with stubborn incomprehension forming a thick mask on his face. If only she could get through to him.
“Listen, this is important. Does your wife have a friend with…with a ruby ring? Do you know?”
“I’m sorry, Marina, I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“Eddie, please…”
But he was going and then gone. Marina stood staring into the roses until she could no longer stand the smell and went to the kitchen to throw them away.
The call came as Marina was sitting at her kitchen table riffling through two New Age magazines and the P section of the yellow pages. Her search had started with Physicians but had branched out into something else entirely. Minutes after Eddie left, Marina’s emotional uneasiness had given way to physical pain. There was strong cramping first and then sharp stabbing pains in her abdomen. It didn’t feel like the stretching and pulling of ligaments she’d been experiencing lately, nor did it have anything to do with nausea. Marina felt the first twinge of maternal fear—What if something is wrong with my baby?—and realized it was time to find a doctor.
But once she’d pulled out the phone book and settled herself with a cup of Rosa’s tea, the pains dissipated and Marina found herself flipping past Physicians and into Psychic Consulting and Healing Services. Every psychic had a psychic and Marina needed one of her own. She needed help. For psychics, this person was usually a relative or a mentor, but neither option was a possibility for Marina. She’d decided to call all the numbers listed in the phone book and in the magazines and rely on her own intuitive abilities to choose one. She had the phone in her hand, but its sudden ringing stopped her before she had the chance to dial.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is this…? I’m looking for Marina? Is this Marina?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Oh good, good. I worried that maybe I had the wrong number or maybe the number was changed because I was given this number a long time ago, and you know people change their numbers so often. I had this number written down on a piece of paper in my desk for forever, so you know…”
The silence went on long enough for Marina to ask, “How can I help you?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry! My name is…um…Claire? I was given your number by my friend a long time ago? She said you do…um…readings?” The woman’s voice got lower and lower until her last word was a whisper.
“Yes,” Marina said, waiting for more information.
“Well, I was wondering…if I could get a reading?”
“Who is your friend who reco
mmended me?” Marina asked. This was an important piece. If it was one of her old regulars, Claire might be expecting something Marina was no longer able to provide. She thought about what Detective Franks had said about people wanting the winning lottery numbers. Many of her old clients weren’t too far off that mark.
“Um…she’s…her name is Frederika? I don’t think she’s been to see you for a while. Like I said, it was a long time ago. But she thought you were great. She says you really helped her…”
The woman kept talking, but Marina had stopped listening. There was a loud static buzzing in Marina’s head and an almost physical sensation of being pushed to the edge of her chair. She rarely forgot the names of her clients, even if they came only once, so she was confused by why the name Frederika didn’t conjure a visual memory. At the same time, she knew it was important and that Claire, whoever she was, would be able to help her discover why.
“…so that’s why I really need to see you today,” Claire was saying. “Is that possible?”
“Today,” Marina said, trying to catch up with the conversation.
“It’s just that I…I’ve never done this before,” Claire said. “You probably hear that a lot. Anyway, I don’t know…Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all.”
“No,” Marina said, struggling to keep the anxiety out of her voice. Claire was a flopping fish about to dive back into the sea and Marina couldn’t afford to lose her. “I mean, it’s natural to feel a little hesitation. You’ve called me and I’m still here. That should tell you something, right?”
“I guess…”
Marina closed her eyes, her hand gripped tight around the phone, and focused. She tried to fix on the caller, to pick up any detail. Her mind’s eye flashed quickly on the dark-haired woman from her dream. “Claire,” she said quickly, “do you have…I mean, I’m seeing a ring. Does that mean anything—”
“You are? Really? Because that’s—”
“I think it would be better if we did this in person,” Marina said. “I can see you today, but it will have to be soon. This afternoon is—”
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