Witch Water

“Eldred Karswell,” Fanshawe uttered. “That was his name, right?”

“He never said his name. Older guy, though, and nice enough, I guess. He paid well but he smoked the worst cigars.”

Fanshawe nodded. “Definitely Karswell.”

“So I take it you know him?”

“No, but—” Fanshawe deliberated over her exact words. Know him or KNEW him? “Didn’t you know that he was dead?”

Letitia’s face seemed to broaden in shock. “What?”

“His body was found two days ago, on one of the trails at Witches Hill.”

“The guy they found there was him? Holy shit. As of today, the paper didn’t give his name. I assumed it was just a transient or someone like that.”

“No, it was Karswell, the same man who spoke to you,” Fanshawe felt certain, “and he was no transient—he was rich.” Some psychic, he thought. Karswell was sitting right in front of her, but she didn’t predict his death. “Did you tell his fortune?”

“No, he just wanted to ask me stuff about Wraxall, said he was willing to pay for the information, which now that I think of it was kind of bizarre. He seemed to know a lot about the occult.”

“Well, he wrote about the occult; he was a writer, had a bunch of books published. He was also a Christian mystic.”

This took her aback.

“I have this feeling he was writing about Wraxall himself,” Fanshawe added.

“But if you didn’t really know him, how do you know he was an occult writer?”

Fanshawe gave the question honest thought. “You might say…I had some researchers pry into the dead man’s privacy.”

The look on her face told him: Why? Why would Fanshawe want to know anything about Karswell? “This is getting more interesting by the minute. I got bad vibes from the guy the minute he walked in here, and now I’m getting more.” She stared right at him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m just curious about some things.”

“Well, I’m curious too, about this Karswell man,” she said in a drier and almost demanding tone. “Do you know how he died? The papers just said he was found dead, said it was a robbery-related homicide. His wallet was missing.”

“His face was missing too,” Fanshawe said. He watched closely at her reaction.

Her mouth fell open, then closed.

“I’m not trying to make you sick but…Karswell’s face, scalp, and most of the flesh on his head had been torn—or chewed—off, as if by a wild animal.”

“Almost like…”

“Yeah, almost like he’d been ‘barrelled,’” Fanshawe said.

Another silence followed. Their eyes met, then flicked away, but Letitia made no comment. Fanshawe used the now-unpleasant silence to feign interest in some of the other pictures on the wall. One was a picture of Letitia holding an infant. She didn’t look any younger in the picture than she did now. “What a cute baby,” he offered.

When she didn’t reply, he turned.

Her appearance had changed completely. No longer the off-beat, quirky “palmist,” now she looked wilted, crushed.

Oh, no, Fanshawe thought, his guts sinking.

“His name was George Jeffreys Rhodes,” Letitia said in a dark wisp. “He died in May, he was only eight months old.”

“My God, I’m sorry,” Fanshawe struggled. He wanted to kick himself. Yet he had to wonder about the dead infant’s father, since he saw no trace of him in the pictures.

He didn’t have to ask, though. “The biological father left when I told him I was pregnant,” she said.

Fanshawe’s tongue seemed to adhere to the roof of his mouth. This time the silence turned excruciating, and for all he was worth he struggled for something to say, but before he could—clack!—the lights and air-conditioner shut off. Letitia shrieked at the initial startlement.

“Just a blown fuse, I think.”

“I should be so lucky,” she said with a long smirk. “The bastards could at least have waited till the end of the month.”

“Forgot to pay your power bill?”

Letitia, smirking, picked up several letters on the end table, then flapped them back down. “Yeah, I ‘forgot’ to pay a bunch of them—a delinquent customer is what they call me after all these years of giving them money. I’ve got bills stacked up till Judgment Day. It’s this damn recession. When there’s a recession, the last thing on anyone’s mind is getting their fortune told.”

“Sorry to hear you’re so having such a tough time,” Fanshawe said.

“The power bill’s the least of my worries,” she remarked with some cynicism. “I’ll be kicked out of the house before long ’cos I can’t afford the damn property tax. The bastards assess this house for three times what it’s worth, and nobody’s buying houses now anyway, not in this economy, so I couldn’t sell it if I wanted to. But they don’t want to hear that, oh, no. I gotta pay taxes on what they say it’s worth, whether I like it or not. Bunch of pirates, bunch of damn blood-suckers.”

Now Fanshawe felt twice the bad luck magnet. First, he reminded her of her dead child, and now this. Shit… But he still had questions, about Wraxall, about Rood. Can’t ask her about all that now.

She got up in the dimness, tried to laugh. “Well, this sure turned into a bad scene.” She opened the front door. “I can’t expect you stay to have the rest of your fortune told when I’ve got no a/c or lights.”

“It was very interesting,” he said. He took out his wallet.

“No charge,” she said. “I didn’t even finish.”

“I got my money’s worth. I was mainly here for the information about Wraxall anyway.”

“Just like Karswell…”

He smiled. “Yeah, just like Karswell,” then he gave her a $100 bill. “Keep the change.”

She sighed in relief. “Thanks, that’s—wow—that’s very generous.”

They both went outside into the sun.

“I’ll come back again,” Fanshawe said, “when things are better for you.”

She laughed. “Yeah, when I’ve got lights. But these days all you have to do is listen to the news people talk about the recession to think it’ll never get better.”

“Well, I happen to know some things about capitalism and the free-market system. It’s cyclic, it has to be. We have to go through the lows to get to the highs.” He shook her hand, preparing to leave.

“I don’t know why but…you’re pretty inspiring,” she said with a smile, and after she shook his hand, she turned it in her own palm. She raised it to look at. “Just as I thought: a quad-bifurcation. Curious.”

“That’s not a disease, is it?”

“No. It means that you will give to and take from the same—”

Fanshawe was instantly confused. “Give to and take—”

“—in a way that’s, well, connected to something of a recent revelatory note.”

He didn’t have a clue what she meant; nevertheless, he thought: The looking-glass?

Her fingertip traced lower on his palm. Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh, dear…”

“What?” he said with some force.

“Here goes. The best news all day. Your riches will increase a thousandfold.”

I’m a billionaire already, honey, he thought. That’s enough for me. The remark seemed ridiculous yet, somehow, she didn’t. He took his hand away, more interested in his questions than his fortune. What immediately came to mind was the pedestaled ball on the hill, and how little he knew about it.