by Dana Cameron
There was a pause, followed by three more cards being placed, and then three more. “You are at the center of a lot of thoughts and intentions lately, many more than you know, but there are four very strong people in your life who are thinking a lot of you lately. Two men and two women.”
I obediently scratched this down on my pad, waiting for Julia to comment on them.
“The women…the women are very unclear to me,” Alicia continued. “Both of them are very strong willed, older than you—in authority, maybe, bosses, parents, teachers? One is working for you, but in a very clumsy way. You don’t always see eye to eye, but she is looking out for you. The second is outwardly very hostile and is trying to keep you back; her feelings are mixed though.”
I noted this down: possibly Morag and Jane? What about her mother, perhaps? But which was which?
Julia echoed my desire for details, pressing Alicia. “Do you know what their names are? Are they at work or outside it?”
“Names aren’t coming to me but they are both deeply interested in your work, for different reasons. And now the men…”
I heard more cards being put down, then it sounded like they were being rearranged. “Does the letter A mean anything to you?”
“My boyfriend’s initial,” Julia whispered.
“Are you involved now?”
My heart pounded as I waited through Julia’s hesitation. “I…I’m not sure. I’m not sure he loves me, but I think he might.”
Shuffle of cards. “He does, but he doesn’t know it yet. He doesn’t know why he loves you and not someone else. He feels a great deal toward you, but he is a confused, angry man.” Several more cards were put down. “Very angry. He is split, emotionally and psychically, and you should be very careful of him.”
“What do you see? For us?”
“To sit here and tell you that there won’t be troubles, well, I wish I could. I do see a new transition taking place, but you are both still connected.”
“We are in the midst of breaking up, I think.”
“That may be what is going on now, but what I see is the future, I can’t say how far ahead. Because the thing is, I think that he will finally come to decide that he loves you, and then everything will change for him. You too. Lots of change, and if you can hang on through all that change, stick to your guns, because you know what is right for you, you’ll be fine.”
“I hope so. I think we could be good for each other. I’m just honest enough for his good, he’s just strong enough for mine.”
Whoa, I thought. That was some pretty advanced emotional reasoning.
There was another flutter of cards. “Has he broken a date lately?”
“No, not him…but someone else has.”
“You’re also close to this other person?”
“Very. We don’t see each other as much as we’d like, but I was supposed to meet him for a drink and he didn’t arrive. We’ve got a fallback plan, and I’ll try again and meet him tomorrow night.”
I noted this down excitedly; this reading took place the day before Julia’s murder.
“Well, this is a younger man and he didn’t mean to miss the meeting, it wasn’t his fault. He is thinking of you often and he wanted to see you.”
I heard Julia sigh. “He’s not the second man, then?”
“No, that’s all I see of him.”
Who was that, then? I wondered. That first sounded like Andrew for sure, though. I wrote down “angry, dangerous, split emotionally.” It didn’t sound too far off from everyone’s opinion of him, so far, and I had his own admission of the affair. How dangerous was he?
“The other older man…he’s married…he sees you as the source of all of his problems, a thorn in his side, if you were not in the picture, he believes his life would be easier.”
I caught my breath. Could it be Greg?
“He too needs to decide where his heart is, because he is distracted by too many emotions that are outside his character. Do you know an older man who worries a lot?”
A short laugh from Julia. “Too many.”
“Well, keep an eye on them. This one will lead you astray. He wants to help you, but he’s going to lead you into trouble, however inadvertently. His work is terribly important to him.”
That made me think of Julia’s father, George Whiting, or, then again, perhaps it was Palmer—but of course, I was dealing with only the people I knew who knew Julia. Who knew who else I might be inadvertently omitting?
I heard a few more cards being flipped over and there was another worried, muted question from Julia, and I strained to hear her. It was so frustrating having to try to translate what Alicia meant and to try and guess what Julia was asking based on her responses.
“No, no. That card always worries everyone but when Death shows up in the array, it doesn’t necessarily mean death as we understand it.” Oh! But it had in Julia’s case, I thought sadly. “It means the end of something, and can often be a good indication of change that will be good for you, you making positive decisions, you removing yourself from harmful situations, and taking good, healthy, positive steps. In this context, I think that you will be able to resolve a lot of things very favorably in the next six months or so…I can only suggest that you try and put all that confusion behind you and do what your heart tells you.”
I shook myself, surprised at how lulled I’d become by the hypnotic effect of Alicia’s voice. Do what your heart tells you? That doesn’t help much, I thought. Apparently Julia didn’t think so either.
“I could have gone to the university counselor and got the same advice,” she said, nowhere near as relaxed as I’d become; she sounded quite annoyed. “I just wish I knew what to do. I mean, I’m only twenty-two—”
“Would you like to make another appointment, perhaps go back to working with Erin? Maybe she’d see things a little more clearly for you.”
“No, don’t bother—”
And with that, the tape ended.
I shifted my weight off my legs uncomfortably. That last bit of Julia’s frustration was heartbreaking and it answered for me the question of why she might have gone to a card reader in the first place. She sounded confused, and who wouldn’t be, I wondered. She was very young, she was having an affair with one of her instructors, she was on the outs with her family, and at odds with her adviser, who seemed to hold most of her future in the palm of her hand. I had always had Oscar to talk to, then my sister Bucky, then Marty, and Brian, of course, later, but from what I could tell, Julia wasn’t close to or even casual friends with her classmates, and all the people who she might have reached out to—parents, lover, advisers—were ambivalent at best toward her.
And I believed that one of them had eventually killed her.
I didn’t actually believe anything that Alicia had told Julia, there were simply too many vague statements, things that could have been applied to anyone. Anytime she even came close to the mark, they were things that could have been clues available to any canny observer. But what I could do, I realized, was focus on how Julia had responded to those questions, and identify what she had asked about. Maybe there’s where I would find some sort of clue, through Julia, that would tell me what she was thinking about just before she died.
I listened to the tape several more times. Julia had asked about ghosts as opposed to spirits, her relationships, whether the women Alicia mentioned worked with her or not. She’d corrected Alicia in terms of her work and interests (and Alicia had immediately gone back to the last thing that had given her a positive response, I noticed). Julia’d admitted that she was involved with someone who wasn’t sure about her, but Julia wanted to know if it would last, whether he would decide he loved her. It sounded to me like she loved Andrew and hoped the relationship would continue, though she didn’t think it would. She was worried that people close to her didn’t have her best interests at heart and she wanted to repair the rifts that might be between them. She knew too many older men who were anxious. She’d asked abou
t the card depicting Death when it had appeared in the array.
Julia wanted specifics; she had questions she wanted answered but wasn’t getting the responses she sought; she sounded impatient. My take on it, based on how Lucy had described it at the pub, was that Julia had gone to the psychic on a lark the first time, had gone back the second time because she thought she was getting somewhere, and was becoming disenchanted with that source by this last visit. She was a kid struggling for answers and she didn’t know how to find them.
She and I both.
I got up and rewound the tape, then recovered it from the player. Sitting back down, I realized that I felt as though I’d been messing around with the cards or a planchette myself; the air in the parlor was full of guilty curiosity.
One thing was for certain, I needed to talk to Andrew again. I frowned. Actually I needed to talk to Andrew about a lot of things, including the first, modern, burial we’d worked on. He had said, however grudgingly, that he would let me see the report he prepared for the police, and it had been a week. Of course, he hadn’t been around much, but that in and of itself was something I wanted to ask about as well. I uncurled myself from the couch and rubbed my eyes. I really wasn’t looking forward to another interview with Andrew, especially not with the questions I knew I had to ask him. Where had he been, who had distracted him from Julia…
I thought a while longer, unproductively, and eventually heard the front door open and slam shut. I looked at my watch: it was eleven o’clock. I flipped the pages of my notepad so that the night’s notes were covered up.
“Hello?” I called.
“Bugger!” came Jane’s reply.
“I beg your pardon?” I went out to the front hallway, where Jane and Greg were staring at the front page of the newspaper. They looked tired and wrung out from their long talk, but now both were frozen with shock.
“I’m sorry, not you,” Jane said. “That poxy little reporter’s gone and splashed news of Mother Beatrice all over the front page! He promised he’d wait!”
“He promised he’d try,” Greg corrected. “I believe there are things called editors and deadlines that suck away personal volition.”
“Well, it’s too late to do anything about it now,” Jane said. She folded up the paper and threw it on the stand. “Everything was nice and secure when we left the site. But the crowds will be out tomorrow, that’s for sure.” She turned to her husband. “We’ll never get any work done.”
“Yes, we will. I’ll go out early tomorrow, to check on things as well. Everything will be fine, Jane.”
Jane looked very tired, but she smiled at Greg. “You’re right. Everything will be fine.”
“I’m going up. Coming?”
“Yes, in a minute.”
“Night, Emma. Sleep well.”
“Night, Greg.”
We watched Greg go up the stairs. “So how’d it go?” I said.
“I dunno.” It was strange to see Jane look uncertain about anything. “At least we’ve got to the point where we are saying out loud that there’s a problem. And I think, we’ve got it established that it’s on both of our parts—I mean, if Greg won’t speak up and tell me he’s upset or thinks I’m wrong or what have you, I have no way of knowing, right?”
“Well…”
“You know what I mean. And we’ve established that we do really know that we both want the same thing, which is good. We have a hard slog ahead of us, and the real bugger is that we have to figure out how to get there from here, isn’t it?”
You can’t get there from here, I thought, but had the good sense to keep it to myself. “So now what?”
“Counseling, I suppose.” She traced one of the patterns on the wallpaper. “But we’ve agreed to wait until we’re done in the field. No sense piling things on, Greg says, but I can’t help wishing we could just get into it and get it over so we can move ahead, strike it off the list.”
I looked at her.
Jane nodded halfheartedly and shrugged. “All right, all right. I suppose that’s part of the problem. I’m off to bed. Good night.”
“Night, Jane.”
I barely got a lick of sleep that night, despite the late hour and the eventful day. When I did sleep, I was wracked by dreams that afforded no rest; when I wasn’t dreaming, I was staring at the clock in a decidedly wakeful fashion. Finally, around four o’clock, it was as though someone had hit me with a sledgehammer. I fell dreamlessly asleep and stayed that way until Jane pounded on my door the next morning. I fumbled into my clothing, drank Jane’s bad coffee until I could see straight—despite my protestations, she wouldn’t let me make my own (“nonsense, Emma. You’re on holiday. Let me spoil you a bit.” Spoil me a bit of coffee, I guess she meant)—and then followed her out into the gray morning.
Jane, in spite of the gloomy light and threat of a drizzle, in spite of yesterday’s events, was practically skipping to the site. When I caught her smiling at her reflection in a shop window, for no particular reason that I could see, unless it was to bestow a beam of radiance on a display of socket wrenches at the ironmonger’s, it all became dismally clear to me.
“You know, you might want to tone it down a bit, or everyone will know you didn’t go right to sleep last night,” I suggested grumpily.
“God, I hope we didn’t bother you. Something—stress, catharsis, something—just lit us up. Shagged ourselves stupid, we did.” Jane giggled, and I resisted the urge to slug her. “It was magic.”
“And on a school night, yet—”
But the look on Jane’s face stopped me. I followed her horrified glance to the site itself, where a police car was parked, blue lights swirling.
“Oh, my God, Greg!” Jane began to sprint toward the gate, the door of which was hanging open. “Greg!”
I took off after her and we arrived at the gate at almost the same time.
Greg was talking to a cop, his face ashen. Jane threw herself at him. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, but…Jane. When I got here, the gate was opened—” Greg swallowed. “I’m fine, but someone’s dug up the site…and they…”
“They what?”
“They took Mother Beatrice’s bones.”
Chapter 18
JANE SEIZED GREG BY THE SHOULDERS. “WHAT DO YOU mean they took her bones? Who took the bones?”
“We don’t know yet.” Greg ran a hand through his hair. “When I got here about seven o’clock, I found the chain had been cut clean through and the gate was open. As soon as I got in, I could see that there was some disturbance by Emma’s unit, burial nineteen. And when I got over there…”
He shook his head in amazement. “It was just a mess. It was just torn apart, like a bomb had gone off there.”
That image actually reminded me of something, but I had no time to concentrate on that. Jane had already decided who was responsible. She paced back and forth, and finally pounded her fist into her hand.
“It was that bloody Morag! She must have—”
“Morag didn’t do it,” I said.
She whirled on me. “Of course she did, Emma! It was to get back at me, for yesterday. And plus, her sort, she was probably just dying to get her hands on some human bone—”
“Jane, hang on a second, it doesn’t make sense,” I interrupted. “Greg said it looked like a bomb went off. For one thing, you know Morag’s feelings about Mother Beatrice are reverent, more than anything else. Do you think she would have torn things up like this?”
She stopped in her tracks, staring in disbelief. “Emma, she’s a witch!”
“Come on, Jane, listen to yourself. From the little that I know about neopagans and witches, they don’t mess around with necromancy or anything like that. It’s just not what they do, it’s more of a worship of nature and its order—”
“Bollocks!”
“Pardon me.” The youthful-looking PC interrupted us for the first time, his slight form filled out by the strict lines of his uniform. “I’m P
C Whelton. Am I correct in assuming that you are talking about Morag Traeger?”
I nodded.
“Yes, we bloody well are!” Jane said.
He scratched the tip of his nose with his pen and I was again struck by the idea that the constable resembled a schoolboy. “Well, I can assure you that she wasn’t involved in this in any way. Can you suggest anyone else who—”
“What do you mean, she wasn’t involved?” Jane demanded. “How the hell can you tell?”
“For one thing, your friend is right.” He nodded toward me. “Wicca is an ancient matriarchal earth-based religion worshiping the Goddess in her three aspects of maiden, mother, and crone. Some also worship her Consort, the Triple God, to maintain an idea of balance in all things. The principle tenet of Wicca is, ‘An you harm none, do what you will.’”
I noted that PC Whelton was very well informed, reciting these facts with considerable ease.
“Since Wiccans believe that every action you take, good and bad, affects you and others on many levels, they are very careful and very thoughtful not to do harm. So when you get down to it, I’d say it was a lot more restrictive than some of your more better-known religions.”
He pursed his lips like a disapproving teacher. “And as for the sort of thing you’re suggesting, well, it’s as dirty a notion, as bad an insult as accusing a Christian of eating babies. The worst sort of misguided prejudice, you might say.”
Jane wasn’t convinced; she looked like she was one breath away in search of Morag herself. “Whatever, I don’t really care. Morag has plenty of reason to—”
Oh, Jane, stop, I thought, all of a sudden. Don’t go there. “Jane, I think—”
She didn’t even hear me. “—Want to get back at me.”
PC Whelton clicked the top of his pen, ready to write. “Oh? And what might that be?”
Jane, too late, realized what she’d gotten herself into. “We…ah, we had a disagreement yesterday. Got a bit tetchy.”
“Did you indeed?” the PC said with polite interest. “How tetchy?”