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

He gawped at me. “Really? Then why do they bother?”

I would never be able to make him understand. Instead, I went into the economics of the thing. “We’re charging five dollars a pop, and Orphans is going to get every cent of that five dollars. Marian didn’t even charge us for the tent. So if the psychic from Spuds wants in, she’s going to have to do it for hot dogs and burnt cupcakes like the rest of us, and that’s that.”

I held a hand up because my cell phone was ringing.

“Oh, good,” I said, looking at the Caller I.D. It was Chrissie. “Eden must be home.” I looked at Ed and said, “She never made it home last night.”

Ed didn’t know Eden as well as I was beginning to, and his eyes widened in alarm.

“Hey, Chrissie. Is she back yet?”

“No,” she said. She didn’t exactly sound frantic, but she was finally taking it seriously. “I can’t get ahold of her. After we talked this morning, I started getting uneasy. I made a few calls to her friends, but none of them know where she is. Listen, did you talk to the Sheriff yet?”

“No. Bernie’s seeing him this afternoon. She said she’d mention it to him.”

“Maybe I’m just being a worried big sister, but after you said you didn’t think it was her last night, I went and looked through her things. Her fortune teller costume is gone. It
must
have been her, but if it wasn’t . . . .”

“She just gave somebody else her costume and asked them to sit in for her. It might be as simple as that.” I was starting to feel guilty for getting her upset and worried, but at the same time, I was beginning to think there was something to worry about.

There was a pause. “I’ve called everybody I can think of, and nobody knows where she is, or has seen her since yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday
morning?
The event started at 7:30 at
night!
”

“I know. I can’t find anybody who saw her after about nine in the morning. Her friends got together at Rusty’s the night before, and she got into a fight with another girl. She got a black eye or something.”

“Well, that could be one explanation for why she’d get a friend to sit in for her. A fortune teller with a black eye would sort of kill the air of mystery. These girls were
hitting
one another?”

“I’m sure they were drunk. Who knows what they were fighting about? Rusty managed to get them apart and the other girl left. Rusty put Eden on his couch and put a bag of ice on her eye. He said she left yesterday morning; he’s not sure what time, exactly, but well before noon. I was in St. Augustine all day. I don’t know what was going on at home.” There was a long pause, then she said, “I don’t know what to do.”

I checked my watch; it was already three o’clock. “If that wasn’t her in the tent last night, then nobody has seen or heard from her in about thirty hours. It might be time to call the cops.”

“You’re right. If she’s just out there crashing at somebody’s house, I’m going to kill her,” she muttered. Then she gasped. “
Oh!
Oh, you know what I mean. That girl . . . .”

“Of course I do.” She sounded more worried than angry by then. “Good luck. Let me know if you need anything.”

I ended the call and put the phone away.

“The fortune teller is missing?” Ed asked.

“I’m sure she’s all right,” I said, in a tone of voice that said I didn’t really think so.

About an hour later, I was working in my office when my phone rang. I looked at the Caller I.D., and it said, “Flagler County Sheriff.”

“Oh, no,” I said. I had a terrible, sinking feeling, and before I could even ask any questions, Kyle cut me off and said me he wanted to see me right away.

The Sheriff’s office at the south side of Tropical Breeze is kind of a satellite station at a blip on the map called Beverly Beach. A volunteer in a program called “C.O.P.” (Citizens Observer Patrol) usually mans the place during the day, talking call-ins from patrolmen and generally maintaining a presence for the law enforcement, but 911 calls and dispatching is done from the main Sheriff’s Office in Bunnell.

I parked my SUV on the grass in front of the little frame building, and Kyle came out of the door and waited for me. When we got inside, I was surprised to see two men stand up from at a table and watch me walk in with those hooded eyes that police sometimes have. Before we sat down, Kyle introduced us. They were detectives; the older one was Marty Frane, and he seemed to be the senior partner. The other one was Bill Weyer, a young man who’d volunteered at Orphans as a teenager. He’d made detective earlier in the year.

Marty Frane gave me the willies right away. His eyes were almost no color at all – a very light gray-green – and he had a way of looking at you appraisingly, as if he knew all about the Twinkies you ate back in 1960, after your mom told you not to.

I took the seat facing all of them and looked at Kyle for the first question, but Detective Frane took over, and I found myself staring into his pane-of-glass eyes and feeling unsettled.

“Mrs. Brown tells us you were running the event last night where her sister, Eden O’Sullivan, was the fortune teller?”

“Yes. Chrissie and I were talking about it this morning. I wanted to talk to her about something else, but when I found out that Eden hadn’t come home last night, I sort of forgot the other thing.”

“What was the other thing?”

I shrugged. “A friend is looking for somebody to hook up her Wi-Fi. Eden said she knew a guy. I wanted to ask Chrissie about him.”

He made a disinterested grunt and switched gears. “What time did you open the Halloween event?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“Everything was running smoothly?”

“Pretty much. Except I thought for a while there I was going to have to be the fortune teller. Eden was late.”

“Do you always have a fortune teller for Halloween? Have you always played the part in the past?”

“We never had a fortune teller before. We always have a meeting about a month before an event so we can plan, and this year I had nine volunteers. We met over at Don’s Diner and threw some ideas around. The Haunted House was already part of the plan, because Rita Garnett called me and offered her new house a couple of days before, when she heard we were going to have a Halloween thing. Other than that we didn’t have much in mind. It was too cold for a dunk tank, and I just don’t like carnival games in general. We were using the Whitby House grounds, so we didn’t have infinite space to work with. We always have ‘ghouls’ wandering around, and tables of easy-sell stuff, like jewelry. Mostly, it’s a Haunted House, though, and we make most of our money on admissions. And of course, we always sell the usual stuff from the four major food groups: popcorn, hot dogs, soda and ice cream.”

Not even a chuckle. “Was Ms. Garnett at the meeting?”

“No. I told her we were using a professional to prep the house, and she trusted us.”

“A professional?”

“Edson Darby-Deaver.”

“Oh, him,” he said dismissively. “Who else was there?”

Bill Weyer prepared to write, and I recited the names slowly. “Well, Ed was there – Edson Darby-Deaver – and Angie Kelly. She’s my receptionist at Orphans of the Storm, so technically, she’s an employee, not a volunteer. Ditto for Florence Purdy – she’s an employee. She runs the resale shop, Girlfriend’s, on Locust Street. Let me see . . . Bernie Horning was there. She was going to do a spread in
The Beach Buzz
, so I invited her. My friend Michael Utley was there. He’s a retired lawyer.”

“They live together, out at Cadbury House,” Kyle confided, leaning toward Detective Frane. Bill smiled, wrote, said nothing and kept his eyes on his notepad. Like a bunch of high school boys.

“Other than that, I think it was just Myrtle – my housekeeper – she’s Florence’s sister, and she always wants to get in on the act, but usually she’s not much help.” I caught Kyle’s eye and remembered this was an official interview about a missing person. “Barnabas Elgin; he was our creepy butler. And, of course, Eden. I think that’s everybody.”

Bill counted and said, “Eight.”

“And I made nine.”

“And whose idea was it to have a fortune teller?”

“It was Eden’s idea. She was all worked up about it. Brought the meeting to a standstill while she went on and on about how psychic she is, how she’s got the whole act worked out, how she’s always telling everybody’s fortune, and she always dresses up as a fortune teller for Halloween. Then she started giving us examples of how she’d read the futures of her friends and told them what celebrities were going to die soon, and she was always right. At least, that’s what she claimed. If the food hadn’t come right about then, she would have hijacked the whole meeting. Fortunately when she started eating, Ed began to work out the details of what he was going to do for the Haunted House, and if anybody can hijack a meeting, it’s Ed. Eden never got another word in until the end, when we decided what time we’d set up her tent, how Ed would do the lighting, and what time she’d open for business.”

“What time did she show up?”

“I’m not sure she actually did.”

They just looked at me.

“I mean,
somebody
showed up,” I continued. “It was around 7:20. We already had a line. I was hanging around waiting for her, getting ready to go in and tell fortunes myself if she didn’t show. I hadn’t seen her costume yet, and Eden tends to dress . . . uh, revealingly. She’s got a cute little figure, and she likes to show it off. I wanted to make sure her costume wasn’t X-rated. I had some gauzy material on hand to drape around her if she showed up nearly nude, and some of the tinkly bits from my old belly-dancing costume – don’t ask – it was a class I took about ten years ago. Just as I made up my mind to start getting dressed, here she came. As it turned out, her costume looked great. Everything covered up decently. Only now that I’ve had time to think it over, I’m not sure that was Eden.”

“Why not?”

“Well, she was wearing that get-up, but she had a veil pulled so it almost covered the sides of her face. You don’t wear a veil like that. At least I don’t think you do.” I stopped to think. The nuns back at Annunciata in Chicago had worn some sort of white hoods snugged around their faces, with the black veils draped over the top. In the face of authority, I suddenly became precise. “Actually, I don’t know how you wear a fortune teller’s veil, but it didn’t look right. She was all eyes and mascara and glittering jewelry. And then there was her voice.”

“What about her voice?”

“She was almost growling.”

“So you think she was trying to disguise her voice?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. At the time I thought she was doing it for effect.”

After a few seconds, Frane said, “Do you have any idea who it was?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, feeling chills start to creep up my spine. “You’re not surprised, are you? You already knew it wasn’t Eden, didn’t you? Did Chrissie tell you what I said?”

“No, she just called and said her sister was missing,” Frane said. “We like to interview people ourselves, instead of taking things second-hand. Can you remember anything else about the woman who showed up last night? Are you sure it
was
a woman?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, suddenly desperate to know, though I was already pretty sure. I couldn’t go on until he actually said it. “How did you know that wasn’t Eden last night? Because you already knew.”

“We know because a woman’s body was discovered along State Route 1 this morning. From the description Ms. Brown gave when she reported her sister missing, we determined it was Eden O’Sullivan. She had been dead for about 24 hours.”

“Oh.” It was all I could manage to say. Eden had been dead for hours before the event had even started. I stared at them. “What happened? I mean . . . you don’t think she was hit by a car, do you?”

“No. Now, Ms. Verone, would you answer the question, please? Are you sure it was a woman in the fortune teller’s costume last night?”

“No,” I said forlornly. Then I quickly said, “Yes. I think it was a woman.”

“Why? With a disguised voice and a costume and a lot of make-up, how would you know? A man might have pulled the veil tightly around his face to hide a beard.”

I was shaking my head as he talked. “I know because she took my hand. I looked down at her hand as she held mine. I think I would have known if it had been a man’s hand. And there’s something else. I think she had a tattoo or a birthmark on her hand. She was covering it with make-up, but the more I think about it, I think it was a tattoo. It seemed to be a design of some kind.”

“The body didn’t have any hand tattoos. There was one on the upper back, and one on the right leg. Nothing on the hands.”

“Oh.”

“Can you describe the tattoo?”

“It was small. Blurry. Kind of rounded. Lots of people had their fortunes told after I saw her, and the make-up seemed to be rubbing off. Maybe the other customers were able to see it better.”

“We’ll check it out. Can you think of anything else?”

“Well . . . she chose the fortune teller’s name herself. I suppose that’s not important, really, but it seemed to mean something special to her. Madame Domani. Actually, she wanted it to be Madame Felice Domani, but we didn’t want a first name. I recognized right away that the name meant something in Italian. I happen to be Italian myself.”

“You don’t look Italian,” Frane said.

“My family was from Verona, in the north of Italy. I’m a green-eyed blond, like a lot of northerners. Anyway, that’s why I immediately recognized what the name meant. It’s Italian for ‘happy tomorrow.’ I didn’t point it out at the time, because she was already taking up too much time at the meeting, and I really didn’t care. I needed to keep things moving along, but I did wonder why she’d chosen that name. And she pronounced it the Italian way – Fay-
lee
-chuh Do-
mon
-ee, not the American way – Fil-
ees
Dom-
inee, so she must have known what it meant. So, why Italian? With a name like Eden O’Sullivan, it doesn’t figure.”

“She’s probably been using it for years,” Frane said without much interest. “You said she liked to play fortune teller.”

The detectives got up to go, and I was relieved. After they were gone, Kyle asked me to stay a few minutes, and then sat back with his arms crossed and looked at me.

“So, Miz Taylor,” he began like a wiseguy, “whatcha going to do about this?”

I did a double-take. “What am I supposed to do about this, Kyle?” I shot back.

“You got a nose for trouble, don’t you? And this hits close to home, her being your volunteer and all.”

“And it being my Halloween event and all. What’s your point?”

“You planning on trying to get to the bottom of all this?”

“All this? Are you telling me she was murdered?”

“She was.”

“How?”

“Suffocated. And she was moved after she was killed . . . quite a few hours after she was killed. She was taken out to the highway in the middle of the night and dumped. A builder on his way to work found her. She didn’t have any identification on her, but with that blue hair . . . people are dyeing their hair a lot of weird colors these days, but we don’t find many bodies with bright blue hair. When Chrissie Brown called to report her sister missing, she told us about the hair color and described the tattoos. With that information, there wasn’t much doubt, but we had her view the body and she confirmed it’s her sister.”

“Oh, how horrible!” I stopped and looked at him. “It’s so creepy, knowing I was sitting right there in the fortune teller’s tent with somebody who might have been a killer.”

“We don’t know that yet. Eden might have decided she had better things to do and got a friend to sit in for her. In that case, the person she had better things to do with probably killed her. We’ll sort it all out.”

“Did Chrissie tell you about the fight Eden had Friday night?”

“She did. We’re following up on that, too. We actually know what we’re doing, Taylor.”

I hitched myself up and stared at him. “Are you telling me to stay out of it?”

“Not at all,” he said, surprising me. He stood up. “But you will tell me anything you happen to find out, right?”

“Of course. If I think it’s relevant.”

“You let me decide if it’s relevant. And don’t go getting yourself killed,” he added, ushering me to the door. “Bernie would never forgive me.”

As soon as I was back in my car, I tried to call Chrissie, but my call went straight to Voicemail. Somehow I couldn’t just go back to Cadbury House and take inventory, like nothing had happened. I was pretty badly shaken. I left a message for Chrissie to call me if I could do anything to help, then called Edson Darby-Deaver and told him what had happened. Why Ed, I didn’t know. I have friends I’m closer to. Maybe it was some kind of a knee-jerk reaction, because we’d been through traumatic events together before.