“Thanks for the fashion advice. Now, please go.” But she didn’t budge. She seemed to be weighing something in me, measuring me, and it made me uneasy.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone, but I want to talk to you about something first.”
“Me? About what?” I had the feeling she was going to ask me for money or for a favor that could make me lose this stupid job.
“I don’t want to talk about it here. Meet me somewhere?”
“I don’t know, Clara, Emily warned me about you. And that thing after the reading, how I felt …”
“Emily’s a hypocrite!”
“Shhh! Keep your voice down. Okay, okay, fine. If you leave right now, how about I come by after work? I get off at six.” I glanced up at the women again, now just a few feet from our door; I felt flustered and annoyed that Clara had manipulated me. But then I reconsidered. How different my life at sixteen had been compared to hers. Maybe she needed help: Going to the cops. Finding a way to get away from Des.
“Meet me at the shop,” she said. “Des will already be gone for work by then.” She sauntered away, and I watched the trio of women sneer at her as she left. I sighed. I had planned on doing more research on the paintings when I got off work—whatever research meant, when I only had a single legible initial, a broad range of dates.
But after I checked the women in and walked them to their lockers, I wondered if Clara might be able to help me there, too. It was a ridiculous, almost feverish thought, and yet—she knew things she shouldn’t know. She saw things she shouldn’t have been able to see. Would she be able to tell me something about the paintings? Maybe not. But I had next to nothing to go on. If she was going to rope me into meeting her anyway, it was worth a try. I felt a flush of shame at my selfishness, how quickly my motivations had flipped from altruistic to self-serving. Maybe Matthew and Ramona had rubbed off on me more than I had thought.
* * *
I WAS hungry from another depressing lunch break in the cafeteria, and the smells of fries and soft pretzels and fudge on the boardwalk made me ravenous. I approached Clara’s shop and saw a new message on the chalkboard sign out front. A picture of a crystal ball in the center, and in the corner, a tiny star. I looked in and saw she was alone, sitting on the floor in front of an oscillating fan with streamers tied to the grate, turning the pages of a People magazine. I pushed through the curtain, the beads tangling in my hair.
“Ah, good. You’re here.”
I picked a jade Buddha statue off the counter and turned it over in my palm. Embarrassingly, I was nervous again. In the spa, I had authority, I could enforce the rules. But not here.
She flipped the magazine closed. I noticed that the mailing label on the cover was addressed to the spa, under Deidre’s name. Of course.
“Have you seen these posters around?” She rustled behind the counter where the old register sat and handed me a piece of paper. It was the poster about the missing teenager, Julie Zale.
“Yeah, I’ve seen them.”
“What do you make of it?”
“What do I make of it?” If I were being honest, I would have to say that I hadn’t thought about it much. But it was different, looking at the girl’s photograph up close. According to the date of birth on the poster, she was eighteen. I remembered what it was like to be eighteen. The year before was when Steffanie and I had started sneaking into clubs. A girl that age was hungry for all kinds of experiences, even ones she knew might hurt her. I’d done a lot when I was eighteen that I had told myself I would laugh about one day. The night I let a stranger finger me in the mosh pit of a concert. The time a couple of guys Steffanie and I had crushes on convinced us to kiss and feel each other up in the middle of a crowded party after too many hard lemonades. The pill I took with a boy I hardly knew, thinking it made me look brave and bold and carefree not to ask what it was before I washed it down with a mouthful of Bacardi Razz. Julie Zale was any of us. But one of the mistakes that she told herself would build her character, make her into a woman, had destroyed her somehow.
“I feel sorry for her. Whatever happened to her—whether she chose it or not—probably happened faster and more easily than she ever could have thought. Why? Do you know her or something?” I thought about finding Steffanie on the bathroom floor that night, her face pale, pressed against the tile. By the time she died, it had been four years since we talked. I had heard rumors, though, about her drug use. From New York it was easy enough to dismiss, pretend that it was just hearsay. But at the funeral I couldn’t avoid seeing how gaunt her face had become. I knew that whatever had happened to Steffanie since we left high school had everything to do with that night at the club. I knew, even though we had never talked about it, that she spent the rest of her life feeling like she’d been used up and thrown away.
“Her uncle came to me, asked me if there was any way I could help him find her. But things don’t really work that way for me. I can’t just solve mysteries. Or else I’d be a cop, or detective. Famous, probably. Rich.” She smiled at the idea. Selfishly, I felt disappointed: it didn’t sound likely that Clara would be able to help with the paintings after all. “But things have been weird ever since he came by.”
“Weird how?”
She rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Ever since, I’ve been having weird visions. Not the usual stuff. Normally I get a glimpse of something, of someone, but they have to be … available to me. They have to be near me, close enough for me to see them, to get a sense of them, the way they move in the world. But this … I don’t know. I’ve been having visions that don’t have any context.”
“What kinds of things are you seeing?”
She hesitated. “A few days after he showed up, I started seeing things and hearing things, but I couldn’t tell why, where they were coming from. Music, mostly, but also this weird vision of a bloody tooth that was like … knocked loose.” I couldn’t help but wince and touch the tips of my fingers to my mouth. “Then another woman came to me and she was acting really weird. She ended up leaving before I even read her cards. A few days later, I started hearing a baby, crying, screaming.”
“Okay … ” What was she getting at? Was I falling for a ruse?
“Like I said, that’s not how things work. But for days, I was hearing this crying sound. When I was on the boardwalk, when I was in the casinos, at night when I was trying to sleep.” She smoothed her hand over her upper arm. “And I keep getting this feeling, like something is crawling over my skin.”
“You’re not on drugs, are you?”
“No! Come on, be serious. I never ask anyone for anything. But I feel like I’m going crazy. And I need help.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Can’t all of those … visions … just be some kind of … I don’t know, fluke? Like you’ve got a signal crossed or something?” The absurdity of the situation wasn’t wasted on me, sitting there parsing out problems with a psychic’s sixth sense. I didn’t even have the vocabulary for a conversation like that. But Clara seemed genuinely upset. The detached, composed girl I had met on my first day of work was gone. She was asking for help.
“Yeah but then, a week later, another woman comes and she has this first woman’s purse. Said she found it on the side of the road, which makes me think something happened to the first woman. Maybe the crying was, like, a warning. Maybe there was something I was supposed to do. Or that I’m still supposed to do. A few days ago, I started having visions of blurred streetlights. Like I was in a car. And I felt sick, like I was going to throw up. There were other things, too, sort of random. Someone’s hands, with lots of little cuts around the knuckles. The floor underneath a bed.”
“But those things have nothing to do with one another.”
“I know. But I can’t get over the feeling that this might also have something to do with her.” She nodded to the poster of Julie Zale.
I couldn’t help but sigh. “I thought you said you weren’t in the business of solving mysteries.”
“I know
, and I probably wouldn’t be thinking about it so much if Peaches hadn’t just shown up with the other woman’s bag.” She reached under the tablecloth and produced a little tooled leather purse. A prop, a ploy?
“Peaches?”
“I don’t know if that’s her real name. I guess it’s not, but she’s got this tattoo on her chest of a peach and it says Peaches in big cursive letters on top.”
The woman from the valet. The prostitute who mocked me. “Her. Yeah, I’ve seen her around.”
“Wait—where? I need to find her. I was too surprised to even ask her any questions. Like when she found the bag, and what road she was on, and maybe if she saw anything else nearby.”
“She hangs around at the casino. Sometimes she’s at one of the bars at the end of the day when I’m there. I saw her once early in the morning. I guess she had spent the night. She gave me the finger.”
That got a smile from Clara. “She doesn’t come into the spa, does she?”
“No. Or at least she hasn’t since I’ve been there.” She stared at the poster, tracing her fingers over the phone number at the bottom. “Clara. Why did you ask me to come here?”
She blew a puff of air out of her cheeks. “I guess I didn’t want to carry all this around by myself anymore. I wanted someone else to know what I see.”
“But why me? Why not Des?”
“Des doesn’t give a shit about anything as long as there’s money coming in. She believes in my gift and all, but if I tell her that I’m seeing things that don’t make sense, the first thing she’s going to worry about is whether I can still work. You know when you came in earlier this month? After I took your bracelet? I could tell, when I first met you, that you believed me. That you would listen to me. And I felt that way even though you were mad at me. Some people, even when I tell them things, about what I see, they don’t believe it. They think I’ve cheated. That I’ve looked them up online or something, I don’t know what. You’re not like that. I think you want to tell yourself that I’m crazy because what I do is weird and scary to people. It’s weird and scary to me sometimes, too. But you’re still sitting here, right?”
I wondered if it was my father’s superstition that let me believe in what Clara said. When you grow up believing in lucky dollar bills, maybe you’re agreeing that there are things about the universe that you can’t know or control. Maybe, maybe that’s what Clara’s gift was, too. Something I couldn’t rationalize or explain, but that existed. And whether or not I believed her story, I believed in her distress. “So, what do we do?”
“Well, that’s what I thought you could help with. Can’t you see things at the spa? You have all of those cameras Emily is always threatening me with. And so does the casino. Can’t you see the videos? Maybe you could watch the footage, see if Peaches has been hanging around. Or you can at least see who has stayed in the hotel, right? Can you check to see if she’s come in lately? Maybe we can find her and warn her … just tell her to leave town. She might not believe me, but she will probably believe you. If you tell her you agree …”
I cut her off. “You have to be a supervisor to access the security system. Emily might be able to, but I can’t.” I didn’t want to tell Clara that it would probably be impossible to find Peaches that way, that the sheer number of hours and angles that the security cameras represented created an insurmountable amount of footage. Because, of course, I had had the same thought already, about finding my father somewhere in all that tape.
“Well … can you get her password? Figure out how to get in there?”
It was strangely revealing what glimmers you could see of someone’s life in seven to ten characters. I would have loved to know what little scrap of herself Emily used for hers. “I don’t know about that either.”
“Please, Lily. At least try? I’m worried about Peaches. I gave her a reading, and it was dark.”
“That seems to be your specialty. But sure. Fine. I’ll see what I can do, but I’m definitely not making any promises.”
“Whoever sees her first can ask her about the purse, what day it was that she found it, and where it was. Maybe that will clarify what happened to the other woman, the first one. I wish I knew her name.”
“What about Julie?”
“I don’t know what to do about her yet. Let’s just start with Peaches and see where we get.” She pulled out one of her business cards and scribbled a number on the back. “I just added minutes to my phone, so you can text me if you find out anything. Here, give me yours. Oh, and what do you think about that guy you work with? The janitor?”
“You mean Luis?”
“Yeah. I see him around a lot. He gives me a bad feeling. Something’s up with him.”
“I mean, he’s mute and deaf, so I guess I don’t really know him well? He’s a little strange but no more than you’d expect.” Luis? What did Luis have to do with any of this?
“Well, that at least explains why he didn’t rat me out, I guess.”
I was about to ask her what she meant when a shadow crossed the shop and we both turned: a man stood in front of the window. Clara’s posture sagged. “Shit. You should probably go.”
“What’s that about, Clara? Another date?”
“It’s complicated. Let’s just say fortune-telling doesn’t pay the rent anymore.”
“How do you find them?”
“Can we talk about this another time?”
“I mean, you’re worried about Peaches, but look at you. Also, how do you know that these guys aren’t cops?”
She laughed, a cynical chortle. “Some of them are cops. But most cops prefer the Asian massage parlors.” I knew the kinds of places she meant. The ones decorated with cheap bamboo screens and thwarted-looking bonsai trees. “We’re not the only ones. Take a look next time you go for a walk around here—every single one of them has the same door in the back. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But right now I really do need you to go.” Every nerve along my body tightened when I stood to leave, but what else could I do?
Instead of walking to my car right away, I stood across the boardwalk and waited. I remembered what it was like, to be thirteen, fourteen, and notice that men started looking at me in a new way. Like they understood something about me that I didn’t know yet. But I wanted to see what kind of man would walk into that shop and arrange to buy someone that young. Who had no qualms about doing it so openly. A man who felt like he had nothing to fear.
A man in a suit who had been standing against a light pole looked at his watch, glanced over his shoulder, and went into the store. Clara came out a moment later, picked up the chalkboard sign, carried it inside. I watched as she switched the hanging sign on the door from Open to Closed and drew the curtains across the window.
I listened to the tick-tick-tick of the Crazy Mouse crank up the tracks. I wondered if she was making up everything else. Was all this about the missing girl and the inexplicable visions, the strange sensations, the bad dreams, a way to ask for help without having to talk about the other things that were really going on? I could tell her fear was genuine, even if she was masking it behind this search for these women. And I even believed that she saw things sometimes. But this, with the women, could it be true? I sat on a bench, rubbed my temples. My life here was supposed to be simple, even dull. And now here was this girl—a thief, a con, a prostitute, and maybe a psychic—insisting she needed my help. I didn’t know what Clara could actually see or not, but either way, I didn’t want to fail anyone the way I had failed Steffanie.
I stayed like that until I had the sense that I wasn’t alone—that I was being watched. I looked up and scanned the boardwalk, and the loose, loping gait, the narrow shoulders. Luis. He had already turned his back on me, but I was sure it had been him. What was he doing here? It wasn’t strange that he might come to the boardwalk, but why, when I lifted my face to look at him, had he turned away? Was there something off about him, something I should be worried about? A sense of dread bloomed in
my gut, souring the evening’s beauty: the light on the ocean, the creamy-looking sand. Across the boardwalk, the sign on Clara’s door still said Closed. The curtains remained shut. I lingered for another twenty minutes, but nothing changed, except the steady sense of worry that crimped my shoulders and my neck.
JANE 4
YOU DON’T KNOW HOW HE’S tracked you down. You left no trace, no clues. And then one day you see your own face on a poster at the boardwalk, on telephone poles, in the windows of stores. It’s your old face, the face of a girl who still believed she could live a different life, who believed she could hide from her shadow-self forever. At the bottom, the phone number your uncle had you memorize when you first moved in. You’ve still got the rhythm of the numbers in you—you could call that number from the middle of a dream.
How did he know you were here? You’ve been so careful. You don’t like this, the inversion of things, your second, better life reaching to haul you back. You’d made up your mind about who you are and what you deserved.
Who you are: a girl who sleeps at the shelter, listening to the others cry in their sleep.
Who you are: a girl whose mother wrote to her from prison, only to ask for money in her commissary account.
Who you are: someone who is running out of money to wash her clothes at the Laundromat on Kentucky Avenue.
Who you are: not too numb yet, to not feel afraid.
* * *
YOU REMEMBER, moments after you see the first poster, the time you left your wallet next to the sink in the bathroom. You had no plan to use the cards, so you only checked that the cash was missing. Two hundred dollars, gone. You had been so worried about that that you hadn’t thought about the Amex for days. The one your aunt signed you up for in case of emergencies. Chances are, she would call everything since you’ve left an emergency. You realized eventually that if someone had used it here, you could be traced. You hoped whoever stole it would wait until they got to another state. You would have canceled it, but you liked the idea of throwing everyone off. It’s not that you wanted anyone to look for you. (Or … or did you? Do you?)
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