“No, this happened long ago. But I also see yellow in your aura, although it’s slipping away, disappearing, as if the lights are going out very slowly. Is it a streetlight? I don’t know. It’s gone now.”

Maddie put her hands in her lap, breaking the connection, just in case. “Do you ever feel guilty about what you do?”

“Why would I feel guilty?”

“Your reading for Cleo Sherwood’s mother gave her hope. But she was almost certainly dead by the time she consulted you. You couldn’t give her any real answers.”

“I did not ask for the gift and I don’t make people come to me. I did not make you come to me. And I don’t promise answers. People ask me what I see and I tell them. It’s not my fault that the otherworld is indirect, that the visions don’t come with explanations.”

“Can you tell me anything about my future? So far, you seem to be looking only at my past.”

Madame Claire took a deep breath and held it, staring into Maddie’s eyes, her pupils dilating. Maddie felt like a cobra facing a snake charmer. Finally, Madame Claire exhaled.

“Danger,” she said. “I see danger.”

“I’m in danger?” Her voice was shrill, the walk home on her mind.

“No, you are danger. You’re going to hurt someone terribly, cause all kinds of trouble.”

Oh, she thought, disappointed in spite of herself. That was the past again, Milton. She had hurt him. Seth, too. Sometimes, she wondered if she should have told Milton everything, if exposing her fraud at this late date would make him feel better about her leaving.

Still—yellow, disappearing. The eclipse. That damn eclipse.

She walked home in the June twilight, feeling like a character in Greek mythology, perhaps Orpheus going into hell to retrieve Eurydice. She held her spine straight, carried her pocketbook with the strap across her chest as women were cautioned to do now. She tried not to walk too quickly, in part because her heels were not made for a fast pace, but also because she wanted to appear as if she feared nothing. But she was such an obvious outsider that the men she passed seemed to fall back, allow her extra room. Did they see danger, too?

That night, she left her window open, a risky thing to do, but the late-spring air was fresh and sweet, perhaps because of the gardens at the cathedral. There were so few natural scents in this part of Baltimore. It was as if the seasons bypassed downtown altogether. She slid into bed, not a stitch on. About two a.m., she heard soft footsteps on the fire escape, listened as the window was pushed wider open. A man’s body covered her, possessed her.

“We’ve talked about this, Maddie,” Ferdie said afterward. “Don’t leave that window open. Someone other than me could get in.”

“Maybe I left it open for someone else.”

A pause. The room was dark; she could not see his expression. “Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like, well, some stripper or some lady who goes with anybody.”

“Like Cleo Sherwood?”

“You still talking about that?”

“I’m going to write about her. A woman is dead. Maybe I can make people see that they should care about that.”

He sighed. “I doubt it.”

“Did you know her?”

“Hell no. The Flamingo Club wasn’t part of my beat.”

“Do you think she had a boyfriend? A secret one?”

“More than one, no doubt.”

He smacked her rump, but lightly, his sign for her to roll over and get on all fours. She had told him once that she had never had sex in anything but the missionary position, that Milton wouldn’t hear of it.

That had been true, but also a lie. She and Milton had done it only one way, but Milton was not, despite what he still believed, her only lover, and her first lover had been a bold man who could, alas, convince her to do almost anything. A green silk sofa. The yellow sliver of a moon during an eclipse. Ah, but that was Madame Claire’s trick, right? Whatever colors she saw, the client filled in the story.

The Medium

The Medium

It is hard for people who don’t have the gift to understand it. Yet maybe necessary, too. If you knew what I see, how I see—well, there was a time when they burned women like me, and maybe that was a kindness.

I can tell that the woman who has come to see me today is not a believer. So I decide to throw a little scare into her. She isn’t worthy of my gift, she doesn’t want to use it for good. I tell her she has a secret, because who doesn’t? I did see the aura of yellow around her, though, almost in spite of myself. What I couldn’t tell was whether it was connected to her or something that has hung in the air since Cleo Sherwood’s mother visited me, asked me to stroke that piece of fur. At the time, I was so sure the girl was still alive. And maybe she was, who knows? Her body could have gone into the lake in late February. But if she was still alive—where was she? Why couldn’t I save her? Was the green the color of the walls in a room where she was kept? Was the yellow I saw a lone bulb in someone’s basement prison?

I was eight when I first realized I had second sight. I had a dream. In it, my aunt, who was only a teenager, was riding in a car with a man, someone she barely knew. He was driving too fast. She begged him to slow down. The car went out of control. My aunt was injured, the man died. I woke up that morning and those very things had happened. My aunt was in the hospital with a broken leg, the man driving the car was dead. I told my mama that I had dreamed this thing. At first, she tried to talk me out of it. She said, “No, honey, you must have heard us talking in the night.” Or: “Maybe you had the dream the next night, but it’s jumbled in your head, the order of things, because things were so crazy that day after it happened, so many people coming and going, and we were so worried she was going to die.”

I believe now that Mama feared for me. She knew the gift would exact a price, and it has. I cannot control it, I cannot summon it. People would think I was a fake if I admitted this part, so I don’t mention that. The thing is, anyone who comes to see me gets good advice. They get their money’s worth. But not everyone has a true psychic experience. That’s not in my control.

Cleo Sherwood’s mother—she got the real thing. There was green and yellow, all around. I thought it might be the sun, I thought she was someplace where she couldn’t turn her head and was forced to look into the sun. Maybe it was a room, or a ceiling. But her last living, waking minutes were surrounded by yellow, I am confident in that.

After the lady leaves—I don’t need my powers to realize she felt dissatisfied—I turn off my light and decide to close up for the day, although I usually do more business in the evenings. Most people, especially churchy ones, prefer to visit me when it’s dark. But I am drained. Even the smallest vibration takes a lot out of me.

I am forty-seven years old. I have been married three times, each time a disaster, but I never talk about it because, again, people would doubt my abilities. How does a psychic pick such bad husbands? By listening to her heart. The heart knows nothing, sees nothing, but it kicks up a ruckus, throws tantrums to get what it wants. No one understands this thing I do, who I am, how my power works. It’s not a machine that can be plugged in and turned on. The gift is sensitive. It prefers dry weather to wet, cold to hot.

Cleo’s mother came to me on a good day, cold and bright and dry. When the air has that thin, hard edge, I can feel things I can’t on other days. I could see inside Mrs. Sherwood’s soul and it was the saddest thing I have ever glimpsed. She loved that girl of hers, she wanted me to see something that would suggest she was alive; maybe that was why I thought it possible. I don’t think she loves her husband or her other children as much as she loves this girl, the one who’s been so much trouble to her. Some mothers are like that. As I stroked that stole, it almost seemed to come to life, like a cat getting its back scratched. And a scent rose from it, sweet and stale, some kind of perfume. It smelled like—yearning. She had wanted something awfully bad, that girl.

I saw yellow, bright, blinding yellow. I saw a woman whose face was turned to the sun, maybe flew too close to it, as that old story goes. We are not meant to fly. We’re not meant to see the things I see. I’m a good woman, a churchgoing woman, and there are Sundays when—I would never tell my preacher this—I pray to God to let me see less. But God says, Suzanne—my real name is Suzanne—I don’t give the gift to people who can’t handle it.