“Oh, god … this is why I’ll never have another damn kid. Got every symptom you could get. Swollen ankles, hemorrhoids, mood swings, my tits blew up like balloons but they hurt, nipples leaking through my blouse, threw up every fifteen goddamn minutes, and when I wasn’t hurling I was pissing.”
“Damn, girl.”
“Only blessing there was, was that the bun popped out of the oven just over seven months in. Just a red wrinkled piece of almost nothing. They had him on ventilators and incubators and all that. Always sick then and still sick all the damn time. Asthma, psoriasis, heart stuff—and you know I’m still paying off those bills. Health coverage in this state sucks the big one.”
“He’s a good kid, though,” said Gracie, and Owen leaned out just far enough to see his mother’s face. Looking for a smile. What he saw was the hard line of her mouth turn down into the ugliest of sneers. Then his mother looked away, so all he could see were her slumped shoulders and the curl of smoke reaching up above her untidy hair. He heard her take a hit, saw her back go rigid as she held it in, and then the long exhale.
“I wouldn’t ever say this in church, Gracie,” she said slowly, “but between you, me, and the wall … I wish the little fucker hadn’t even taken that first breath. No, don’t look at me that way. Not saying I wish him ill—not really—but there’s something wrong with that kid. He’s not right. Everyone sees it. You see it, and don’t lie … it’s just that you got a good heart and you won’t say a word against anyone. You see it, though. Owen was born wrong in every way you can mean that.”
Owen’s shiver turned to a tremble as he waited for Gracie’s rebuttal.
Which never came.
11
The storm wasn’t predicted. It came out of nowhere and got big and loud and it pissed Monk off.
The skinny blonde on Channel Six Action News out of Philadelphia said it was going to drizzle and then mostly clear. But it was raining harder than hell as Monk drove toward town. Big fat drops at first, splatting onto blacktop behind him. Monk saw them in the rearview and tried to outrun them. They caught up.
By the time he passed the sign for Dark Hollow Road, the rain was rapping on the hood like a million knuckles. The car was too old to have automatic headlights, so he punched the button and then turned on the high beams. The storm that had chased him out of New Jersey now barraged him here in Bucks County. Within minutes it was raining so damn hard he couldn’t see five feet in front of his headlights. On a twisty country road like this there were too many ways to get killed, so he pulled to the verge to wait it out.
He tried Patty’s cell again and got voicemail. Left a message. He popped the cassette and found a bootleg tape of Buddy Guy killing the crowd at his Legends blues club in the South Loop of Chicago. Singing about dying of a broken heart in the rain.
“Preaching to the choir, brother B,” murmured Monk.
The sky outside the car was raining hammers and nails, so Monk turned the sound all the way up. Then he sat there eyeing the stale butts in the ashtray. Weighing his options and making bad choices.
On either side of the road, the nightbirds stood in lines on the fences, huddled into their wings. Cold but curious.
12
“Um,” said Dianna, momentarily flustered, “have a seat.”
The man smiled an oily smile, hooked a foot around the leg of the guest chair, and slid it halfway around the table so he could sit closer.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said quickly.
“I’m a little hard of hearing,” he said. “And I don’t want to miss a thing.”
It was a normal statement but the way he said it was not. He almost sang those last eight words in an imitation of Steve Tyler from Aerosmith. He wasn’t loud or forceful about it, and he even half whispered it, as if making a joke for himself. He settled onto the chair and wriggled a little as if adjusting his buttocks down deep in the thin padding. That movement, like everything about Owen Minor, was faintly repellent. Not openly offensive, nothing she could comment on or bring to Ophelia. Nothing to cancel the session over. Merely wrong.
She immediately chastised herself for judging a total stranger—a reflex that warred with her trust in her own ability to read energy. But the whole day was a bit off anyway, so her instant dislike could be flavored by that. This man could just as easily have run afoul of someone else’s negativity and simply be carrying it around with him like a bad smell. That happened. The first time she met Chief Crow there was a whole cloud of darkness around him, and a bigger one around his adopted son, Mike. Both were, she learned over time, very good men, which meant that her initial reaction was spoiled. Untrustworthy.
Be in the moment, she scolded herself. Be fair and be open.
Dianna pasted on a pleasant and entirely meaningless smile. Like Ophelia’s customer service smile, bright but offering no actual insight.
She consulted her list. “I see you want a standard three-card reading?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Minor. “That would be … wonderful.”
An odd pause, and a bit of emphasis on the first syllable of wonderful.
“Is this your first time getting a reading?” she asked.
“No,” said Minor. “I’ve had many readings before.” He paused, then repeated, “Many.”
“Well … that’s great, then.”
“Yes.”
“I mostly use a standard layout,” she explained, hiding behind routine. “First, I’ll pick a deck for us to—”
“No,” said Minor quickly, touching her arm as she reached toward the stack of boxed cards. His fingers circled her forearm for just a second—less than a second—and then he withdrew. “Oh, dear … my apologies. I didn’t mean to do that.”
Dianna pulled back her arm and wished she could rub it down with hand sanitizer. Even though his action was fast and light, she could still feel his fingers on her. It wasn’t anything painful. More like an awareness of a smudge of dirt. She heard a buzzing and saw a fat fly on the stack of cards and waved it away in disgust.
The action sent the insect hurrying away, and also chased the memory of his touch from her mind as surely and completely as if it had never happened. She was distantly aware of the sensation that there was something on her skin, but that was all.
“First, I’ll pick a deck for us to use,” she said, unaware she’d already said this. Owen Minor smiled and nodded.
“Of course,” he said and watched as she ran her fingers down the stack of boxed cards, paused, moved on, paused again, and then finally settled, with a tremble of hesitation, on the Rider-Waite deck, identical to the one she had at home. She shook the cards from the pack and held them in her hands for a moment, then took a small breath and offered them to Minor.
“Please shuffle them any way you want. Don’t look at them, of course. Shuffle and think about any question or problems you have.”
“Of course,” said Minor.
Dianna frowned and looked around, trying to locate a faint sound, but unable to place where it was coming from. “Must be a couple flies in here.”
“I don’t hear anything,” he said, and Dianna had the odd feeling he was lying. He kept on shuffling and shuffling.