The Fortune Teller (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 5) (16 page)

BOOK: The Fortune Teller (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 5)
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“What do you mean, my friend? I don’t know him any better than any of the rest of you do. What do you think, Rita?”

“I don’t see him as capable of violence,” she said. “We’ll never get to discuss it with him, though. His business line has been disconnected and the police have been unable to locate his van. He’s done with Tropical Breeze.”

I looked pensive and said, “I think you’re right. We’ve seen the last of him.”

Which turned out to be true. I never
saw
him again.

 

At least we could look ahead to Christmas with all the mysteries solved, I told myself. Well, all the mysteries but one: I still had a Recipes file on my computer’s desktop. I wondered if it would magically disappear the next time I booted up, but somehow, I doubted it, and I turned out to be right.

As I got myself into my lioness costume, I thought about hiring an I.T. guy to purge that folder, but from what I already knew know about Victor, he ate I.T. guys for breakfast. The minute that file was erased, Victor might get macho about it and be back with something even more intrusive, so I decided to leave it alone, at least for now. Heck, maybe I’d even try some of the recipes.

After I got into my costume and had my whiskers on, I gave myself a little growl and air-cat-scratch in the mirror. Rita had already gone out to the volunteers’ table on the lawn, and as I came out of the powder room where I was dressing, I found Bernie waiting for me.

“It’s such a nice night, I think I’ll sit with Rita at the table instead of wandering around taking pictures for
The Beach Buzz
,” she told me. “Let the kids come to me this time. I always leave my Halloween candy on my front porch in a bowl, with a sign saying, ‘Take only one, please.’”

“And does that work?” I asked.

“You’d be surprised. I always want to get rid of all of it, and most years I’ve got leftovers. Listen,” she said, putting a hand on my arm when we were halfway across the lawn, “I know you were listening to some of Chrissie’s statement, but you had to leave early. Kyle just called me. Have you been worried about your friend Victor being involved in the credit card theft ring?”

She was giving me an elfin grin, and I bristled. “Again with the friend thing. What makes you think he’s my friend?”

She shrugged. “Just a little idea of mine. Anyway, the cops have scoured Eden’s computer, and they haven’t found any evidence that Vincent was part of that little gang. There’s too much history there for him to have simply overwritten it and not left any gaps. He was never a part of it. Just thought you’d want to know. Oh – and did you know what it was that Chrissie killed Kendra with?”

“She said it was a heavy statue. Something that had been sitting on Eden’s dresser.”

“They got her to go into more detail after you left. It was a statuette of the Egyptian vulture goddess, Nekhbet. It came from Vesta’s collection of Egyptiana. She must have gotten it at Girlfriend’s. There’s one similar to it in here, in the dining room,” she said, angling her head back toward Whitby House, “but that one is the cat goddess, Bastet.”

“Oh. Yes. I’ve seen it.” At the séance. Glowing in the candlelight. The memory disconcerted me, and I found I couldn’t talk about it.

Bernie was watching me closely; she knew I was holding something back. Then her wizened face pulled into a slow smile.

“I think it was a bad idea,” she said, “messing with one of Vesta’s things. I think she was . . . offended. Listen, I’ll do this shift with Rita at the volunteers’ table. Why don’t you get some fresh air and have a walk around town?”

I nodded, still half-absorbed. “Yeah, I think I will. Thanks.”

 

It was dusk, and the air was filled with an unnaturally clear light for the last few minutes before darkness fell. The houses were decorated with jack-o-lanterns, the lawns were full of plastic tombstones, and the trees were hung with ghosts. At a house on Palmetto, a party was going on, complete with fog machine and weird music.

As I headed toward Locust Street, I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see figure with a cape billowing out like the wings of a vampire.

“Taylor, wait up,” Ed said.

I stood where I was, watching his busy steps as he caught up to me. Beyond him, at Whitby House, I could just see the corner of the lawn where we had set up the fortune teller’s tent, exactly one week before. When Ed caught up, we turned and walked slowly down 5
th
Street, side by side.

“We’ve come a long way from the fortune teller’s tent, haven’t we?” I asked.

“Have we? People still yearn to know the future.”

“I don’t mean in terms of civilization as a whole. I mean us, since the night of the Halloween Haunted House. We went from the fortune teller’s tent to somewhere deep in cyberspace and back again. Looking back on the conversations we had with Victor still gives me a headache. I think I’m more comfortable with crystal balls.”

“Me too. And if you really think about it, computers haven’t heralded any profound change in human behavior. It’s a new way for people to connect with one another, but we’ve always looked for ways to do that. It’s another way for people to amuse themselves, but that’s not new either. In the end it’s just a new way to juggle information. Saving it, storing it, sharing it . . . sometimes with the wrong people. We just do it faster now. Sure, a palm-reader can cheat by checking social media pages, but the one thing she can give you that a computer can’t is a look into your future. Nothing in cyberspace can tell you the future, not in the literal sense we all crave.”

“So we’re back to the fortune teller, trying to see what’s going to happen to us. I, for one, am happy to wait and let my life play out. I don’t think I’d like to know that my future is all set out, waiting for me to go through the motions of living it, only to get where I was always destined to go in the first place.”

“You’re in the minority, then, Taylor. Most people, I think, want to know.”

“Why? It’s so much more exciting to have a whole world of possibilities than to know that only one narrow path is there before you.”

He gently shook his head. “It’s not really about the future – it’s about hope. There’s always hope: that by this day next year, you might be in love, or you might have achieved some lifelong goal, or you might have won the lottery. Every birthday, when we blow out the candles and make a wish, we’re giving voice to a hope. Maybe by the next birthday . . .”

“Our dearest wish will have come true.”

“And with a fortune teller, you don’t have an open-ended wish. You have a prophesy. You
will
find that one true love, you
will
see Paris, you
will
have an adventure. And so we will always have fortune tellers, if only to give us hope.”

“That’s kind of sad, Edson.”

He looked at me and smiled, then set the top hat he’d been holding onto his head. “I’m a skeptic, not a disbeliever. I’m doubtful about it, but I realize that we don’t really know for sure. Perhaps there are some among us who can see the future. Who knows?”

 

We parted ways then. He crossed Locust and continued down 5
th
, and I turned the corner and headed toward Girlfriend’s.

On Locust, the old-fashioned lamplight of the business district cast a golden glow down the street and dimmed the shop-window art that would be scrubbed off in a few days. Florence sat outside Girlfriend’s gossiping with Justine and handing out candy and cookies. As I came walking up, she looked me over and said, “A cat?
Again?”

I shrugged. “I gotta be me. So how’s it going? Lots of princesses and pirates again this year?”

“Oh, yes. And there was a whole family of bumblebees a minute ago,” she said, looking around, but they were already gone. She looked like a deranged princess herself, in her fairy godmother costume. Her wig with the bun on top made her head look like a big, gray pumpkin.

“Don’t forget the zombies,” Justine added. “They’re staggering all over town, groaning and dangling eyeballs.”

I waxed nostalgic. “Back when I was a kid, the boys who didn’t want to bother with costumes would just smear dirt on their faces and come as bums. They were too old and dignified to wear a costume, but young enough to still want the candy. I guess zombies are more interesting than bums, anyway.”

The sky had become an indigo dome over the golden light of the streetlamps, and as we stood idly watching a group of kids charging up the other side of the street, a Tropical Breeze patrol car cruised slowly down it. The officer waved to us.

We waved back, and I called out, “Happy Halloween.”

Everybody answered me – the cop, the kids, and Justine and Florence.

“Happy Halloween, Taylor.”

Happy Halloween, Tropical Breeze.

AND HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO ALL OF YOU

The End

BOOK: The Fortune Teller (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 5)
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