Chapter 9
Friday, Midafternoon …
Queenie walked around the amusement park. The day was over as far as she was concerned. After her crappy night, she’d struggled to get through her heavy line of customers. She was exhausted and chilled to the bone, even though it was the hot, sunny day the weatherman had promised. Clouds had covered the sun for most of the day; then, late in the afternoon, it rained. Most of the time that would have been fine by her.
But her tent developed a leak, and dampness had set in. She attempted contacting Carlos several times, but he hadn’t been too bothered about coming to rescue her. She’d taken the opportunity, after she’d finished a long line of people, to put up the Closed sign and escape. She sent Carlos one last text message, saying, Fine. I’m now closed for the day. And she bolted from the tent before he had a chance to stop her.
The only thing that mattered to Carlos, it seemed, was money. And, if she shut down her tent, then he wasn’t making money from her.
Now she was on the far side of the park, where he wasn’t likely to find her. The only good thing was, no uninvited spiders had showed up at the tent today. Perversely she found herself missing them. Maybe after their early morning message to her at her apartment, they didn’t need her anymore. They hadn’t been visible when she got up this morning. And she’d looked. Boy, had she looked. Did spirits connect to other spirits? Had her son connected to this little boy as she thought? And, if so, why?
She was still musing when she reached her destination. One of her favorite hot dog vendors was here. She picked her way around a puddle and came up on his blind side. “Did you save me one?” she asked hopefully.
Lugar spun around, caught sight of her and grinned. He manned the stand and could work the machines like a pro. He was one of those invaluable assistants, a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. He bent down, pulled out a tray from the open-ended warming shelf, lifted a plate from inside and held it out for her.
She clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, it’s pierogi day,” she cried out. “I forgot.”
“How could you possibly forget?” he joked. “It’s your favorite.”
The pierogies were massive. Three were on the plate, but she knew she’d be lucky if she could even eat two.
He motioned toward a stool and said, “Sit down and eat.”
She did. The pierogies were barely warm. He’d wrapped them in tin foil, but that had probably been a couple hours ago. She was famished and exhausted, and she knew it must have shown on her face.
Lugar took one look, shook his head and said, “What’s wrong with you, girlie?”
She made a face at him. “Carlos has been running Facebook ads, of all things. Drumming up business for me. And it’s been working too well.”
He stared at her, his mouth dropping open. “He’s been what?”
She nodded. “Who knew he was such a businessman?”
“And, even if he did, then what?”
She shrugged. “I’ve had lines outside the tent for days now. Not too sure how much longer I can keep going at this pace. I told him that he had to cut it back, but he said I should make up answers.” She scoffed. “And he wants me to run through the people faster, with less effort.”
Lugar looked at her sorrowfully. “And, of course, an answer like that would just piss you off.”
She chuckled. But she took another bite of the pierogi, moaning in delight. It was better not to answer questions like that.
“I should’ve saved you an extra one,” Lugar said. He nodded toward the plate she’d already half emptied. “You do need extra food when you’re so exhausted.”
“The trouble is, my stomach won’t handle any more right now.” She finished most of the second pierogi and just sat quietly.
A man came up beside her, looked at her plate, turned to Lugar with a frown and said, “Hey, I was just here asking for those, and you said there weren’t any.”
Lugar nodded. “She bought and paid for those earlier and asked me to hold them until she was done with her shift.”
The man puffed up like he would lunge at Lugar, but Lugar was no small man to take on. He just crossed his arms over his chest and waited for the man to decide what he would do. Spluttering angrily, he stormed off to a different stall.
She smiled at Lugar. “Thanks for saving me these.”
“No problem. What are you gonna do about Carlos?”
She sighed. “Is there anything anybody can do? Money drives him. It doesn’t matter if I fall over dead from the work he’s piling on me. The only thing he’ll care about is, if I stop, how he won’t make any more money.” She snorted. “Oh, wait. He’ll just hire somebody else to sit in there with that silly headdress and make him money. They’ll probably make him a ton more because they’ll be charlatans and will say whatever everybody wants to hear.”
“You really do have the sight, don’t you?” Lugar asked.
She tossed him a glance and nodded. “But, like anybody with the sight, there’s no guarantee it will cooperate and give you the answers when you need them.”
The two sat quietly as she nibbled away on the third pierogi. She had planned to take it home, but her stomach kept telling her it was still empty. She slowed down, hoping it would fill up, plus giving more time for her brain to get the message from her stomach. But evidently two pierogies weren’t enough. She continued to plow through the third pierogi until it too was gone.
She sat back, patting her tummy. “Now it’s feeling better.”
“Good.” Lugar nodded behind her. “Because Carlos just found you.”
She stiffened and glared at Lugar. He held up his hands and said, “I just caught sight of him myself. But it’s too late to run now.”
Her shoulders slumped, she pushed the empty plate toward him. “Any of that coffee left?”
He turned to look. “Yeah, you might as well have what you want. It’s lukewarm.”
“It’s still coffee,” she muttered.
He poured her a cup, and she’d just wrapped her hands around it, warming up her fingers and the palms of her hands, when Carlos snapped like a turtle at her. She let his tirade blow over her head and turned to look at him.
“Unless you want me to quit right now, you’ll back up five paces, and you’ll shut the hell up.”
Both Lugar and Carlos stared at her in surprise.
Her glare upped in wattage. “And that should tell you how exhausted I am. Because normally it would take a hell of a lot for me to start swearing at you, but right now I am so done.”
As if Carlos finally saw how exhausted she was, he frowned and said, “How many people did you have through there today?”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll tell me when you start counting the money,” she said, “but it was well over a hundred.”
He clapped his hands in joy.
She stopped it right there with her hand up in the air. “And don’t forget half of that’s mine.”
He nodded. “Of course it is. Of course it is.” But then he couldn’t resist doing a little jig.
“I presume you have my replacement ready,” she said, the fatigue evident in her voice.
He stopped and stepped forward. “Why would I replace you?”
“Because you haven’t done what I asked. You know I can’t handle that many people.”
“I told you how to handle them,” he cried out.
She just glared at him. “If you don’t want me to start broadcasting the color of your underwear all around this amusement park, plus who you slept with last night, then I suggest you shut up about asking me to fake it.”
Ever-so-slowly his jaw closed, and he pinched his lips tight. He stared down at her, drawing himself up to his full height, which was still only shoulder height for Lugar, and said, “You’d be making it up, and nobody would believe you.”
“Everybody here would believe me,” she snapped. “Because everybody who works here already knows I’m the real deal.”
Carlos hemmed and hawed but was obviously a little more conciliatory.
She wondered if she’d have to prove it to him. She knew he wore purple underwear. She didn’t give a damn. The fact that he slept with Jimbo the Giant was something he probably didn’t want the rest of the world to know. Jimbo was a teddy bear. But he could sure do with somebody a whole lot nicer than Carlos.
Carlos stepped back and said, “You’re bluffing.”
“Sure. I’ll go tell Jimbo that.”
He gave a horrified gasp and dashed forward. In a harsh whisper he said, “You can’t know that.”
“I know it. Now so does Lugar.”
Lugar stared at Carlos. And then over at Queenie. She held up a finger, wanting him to be quiet.
But Carlos was dancing in fury. “It’s not true. It’s not true. You can’t go telling lies like that.”
“I won’t tell anybody else, providing you cut back on those ads and give me more time off.”
He nodded. “Why don’t you take off two days a week? I’ll get somebody else in to take your place on Tuesday and Thursday.”
She slowly raised her eyebrows at him. “Somebody who can just make up the answers people want to hear?”
“Why not?” he wailed. “They want answers.”
“They want the truth,” she corrected. But inside her own mind she realized she wasn’t quite telling the whole truth. People wanted answers, but they didn’t necessarily want the answer she gave. They wanted the answers they wanted to hear. And that was a different story. She didn’t know how she felt about Carlos bringing in a replacement for two days. Could she afford to take two days off a week? In a way she could because she was making so much more money on the other five days, but she’d been wondering if he’d been cheating her from her half as it was. Now she wanted to see if he would give her the full amount of money.
“We’ll try it this week,” she announced. “But I need my pay today.”
He shook his head.
“You didn’t pay me yesterday either,” she snapped. “That was our deal. At the end of the day, you would pay me.”
“You left early yesterday,” he slid in smoothly.
“That’s fine. Now you owe me for two days.”
He glared at her.
She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “And no cheating me.”
In front of Lugar, he straightened and glared at her. “I never cheat.”
“You don’t like getting caught cheating, but, like everybody else, you fudge the line.”
His face went red.
And she got a vision of him sliding some money into his pocket before handing out a wage. It hadn’t been hers, or she’d have taken him to the cleaners for it. “I don’t particularly trust the person who’s so busy counting out money that he doesn’t care about the people making it for him.”
She must be tired. She never talked to him like this. Her filter was gone. It was also a sign she was getting ready to leave. Because she didn’t give a damn. And, when she didn’t give a damn, she shouldn’t be here. The trouble was, she didn’t really know what else she would do. This wasn’t an easy job to replace. Yet, she could do something else full-time. She wondered about opening up her own shop, having a website, something along that line, but it still took money to do that. Maybe if she did this gig for another few months, she could get enough money to set that up. She could do readings over the phone potentially too.
She sat here, contemplating what her options were, when Carlos said in a stiff voice, “Let’s go to the tent and check it ourselves.”
She nodded and then froze because she saw a vision in her head of Carlos going through her tent, taking money out of the jar and stuffing it willy-nilly into his right-hand pocket. And she hadn’t needed to touch him to get that vision. Interesting. Also a sign of her growing skills. A change that both intrigued her and worried her. She needed to learn to control her skills now before they grew any bigger. Catching Carlos right now would do a lot for her self-confidence—and would allow her to walk from here. She didn’t know to what exactly, … but time to let go of her past.
“Only if right now you empty that right-hand pocket on the counter and show me that ten, twenty and a bunch of fives.”
He cried out as if she’d injured him.
She shook her head. “No, while Lugar is here to watch, I want you to do that for me.”
He shook his head. “I will not.”
“Then I quit,” she said. “And the money in that jar is mine. What money you’ve left there. Because you just walked through my tent, picked a handful out of the money jar and stuffed it in your pocket.” She called out to the rest of the employees gathering around them, “Did you know Carlos here is cheating you from your full pay?”
He cried out, “No, no, no, no. You can’t say that.”
“I can say that,” she snapped. “Oh, but that’s okay. You’ll hire a charlatan to take my place and to make more money for you. If you do that, you do it without me. Because right now you’re cheating me, and I want my pay for yesterday and today.”
He glared at her.
But she wouldn’t let up. “And you empty that damn pocket of yours so everybody can see I’m telling the truth and you’re lying.”
“Hey, I picked up some money earlier today,” he protested. “No way to prove that money came from your jar.”
She closed her eyes for a brief second and saw the mess of fives. There was one twenty and possibly a ten in there. She opened her gaze, looked at Lugar and said, “It’s full of fives. There’s one twenty and one ten in there. They all came from my tent.”
Jimbo, standing behind his lover, stepped forward and said, “Carlos?”
Carlos was so furious he stomped his feet.
She glared at him. “Empty your pockets right now, or I’ll get Jimbo to help.”
Carlos scoffed. “Jimbo does what I say, not what you say.”
“Jimbo, do you realize why he doesn’t want anybody to know about your relationship?”
Jimbo looked at her, his huge brown eyes staring at her, but dread was in them.
“Any time you want to know,” she said, “I’ll break it to you gently. But right now you need to help me. He’s cheating all of us. And, if we don’t stop him, he’ll continue to do so.”
Jimbo slapped his palms on top of Carlos’s shoulders, his hands so huge they pretty well wrapped around the ball joints. “Carlos?” Jimbo said, his voice stern. “Empty your pockets.”
Carlos glared at her, and now she knew she’d made an enemy. But she didn’t give a damn apparently. She’d go wait tables before she worked for him again. Ever-so-slowly he put his fist into his pocket and pulled out money, dropping the paper bills on Lugar’s counter. And sure enough it was all fives, a twenty and a ten.
She looked at the crowd gathered around. “He walked through my tent and took a handful out of my jar so he didn’t have to split it with me.”
Angry murmurs now rose in an ugly crowd growing around him. Everybody here might have some problems, might be antisocial, might just want to be carnies, but they were all honest in their own way. Being part of this team, they were honest with each other. To think Carlos was stealing from them was about the worst thing he could ever do.
She turned her gaze back to Lugar. “Can you count that please?”
Lugar counted it out. “There’s a hundred forty-five here.”
“Take out seventy-five please, for me.” He did so. She held out her hand.
Carlos snapped. “That’s not half.”
“No, it’s not. It’s two dollars and fifty cents more,” she said. “But you owe me that and more for trying to cheat me. And now, Jimbo, if you would please hold the other seventy dollars for Carlos, while we go to my tent. Jimbo and anybody else who wants to come can see what’s left in the money jar in my tent. Out of your half, Carlos, I’ll take the money you owe me for yesterday.” And she marched away.
She could hear heavy footsteps behind her as Jimbo and the rest followed her. It was a good seven-minute walk across the amusement park, but she was in a steaming hot mood, and she didn’t give a damn. She was so done with this. She stepped into her tent, picked up her jar and dumped it on the table.
As everybody watched, she counted it into two piles. The five dollars extra she put in Carlos’s pile so things had evened up. She pocketed her half and then looked at his. “And you owe me for yesterday. I had a hundred and thirty-two people through here, times five dollars each.” She quickly did the math, divided by two. “Jimbo, give me the money we allocated for Carlos earlier.”
Jimbo, who held the money in his hand, handed it over and she counted out the balance due to her.
She picked up what was hers, pocketed it, grabbed her lunch container, cell phone and purse, and said, “I’d say it’s been a pleasure, Carlos, but finding out you’ve been cheating me makes this a hell of a bad deal.” She turned to face the crowd of her friends and coworkers. “He’s not only cheated me for the last three months,” she snapped as visions kept rolling on like an endless feature movie in her mind, “he’s cheated Jimbo, Lugar and at least Betty. For the rest, I haven’t seen visions. But, if Carlos cheated the four of us, you know he’s cheated all of us. I bet he owes all of you at least a thousand dollars apiece in back pay.” Instantly numbers slammed into her mind. She winced. “No. It’s more than that.”
She turned to face Carlos. “I’ll come collect mine on Saturday. That’s tomorrow, asshole.” She leaned toward him and said, “Do you hear me?”
At this point, Carlos turned to say to them all, “I don’t have the money. The amusement park is losing money. It’s the only way I could pay the bills.”
“Not true,” Queenie snapped. “Yeah, you ran through a bad patch.” She easily read it on his energy. “But you haven’t been in that bad patch for the last month and a half. Once you made money off everybody, you decided to keep doing the same damn thing. So you had a little extra money in your own pocket. You fool. Every one of us would have helped. Every one of us would have pitched in if we’d known the amusement park was in trouble. But you didn’t give us that chance.”
By now a fury rode her. She wanted to smack him silly. And, just as quickly, all the fire went out of her.
She shrugged, looked at the others and said, “I’m so sorry. I thought I had a place here. I thought Carlos was decent.” She turned to look at him and spat on the ground in front of him. “But I was wrong.” And she marched from the tent. “Jimbo, I hope you’ll be here tomorrow morning when I come back to get the rest of my money.”
Jimbo’s voice was hard as he called out, “I’ll be here. Whatever money we can find, we’ll be splitting with everybody.”
“Good idea,” she said. “I’m not the only victim. We all are.”
Word had already traveled by the time she hit the ticket gate. Chuckie leaned forward as Queenie walked up and asked, “Did that really happen?”
She nodded. “He’s been cheating you too, kiddo. I’m sorry.”
Chuckie’s face fell. “Why did he do that? We had a good thing going here.”
“You’re right. We did. But once again, it’s greed. We’ve all worked for him, done extra hours, long days, taken all kinds of shit from him, and most of that only happened once he started cheating us. His attitude went downhill about six, maybe eight weeks ago.”
Chuckie nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right.”
“And that’s when he got back out of the red and took our money to keep for himself. He got greedy. He got arrogant. He got egotistical, and he thought he’d get away with it.” She gave him a sad smile. “Have a good life, Chuckie.”
And she walked away.
“Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” the Watcher said. He tried peering deeper into his vision, but he couldn’t. “She’s quite a spitfire.”
He chuckled, rubbing his hands together. She provided no end of amusement for him. It still bothered him that she couldn’t see him the same way he could see into her world. There had to be a way to make that more of a two-way mirror, not just his one-way version he had now. Yet, this way, he had the upper hand.
It still smarted that he’d been bested over his other victim; that little boy had been a great trial. The Watcher had gone back and tried again with the little boy but had no luck reaching his intended victim. He did find faint traces of two trails, meaning two individuals had been there recently. He’d admit defeat with Timmy, realizing there was a lesson in all this: two people out there knew something he didn’t. At first he thought it was only one, then felt the difference in the energy and realized there were two who had bested him …
That grated. As long as the pair didn’t know about his other victims, the Watcher was okay with it. But they bore watching … He could learn much from them.
He wanted to find them. Get that information. It ate at him. The balm to his soul was to play with those below him. Like Queenie. Her life was such a mess that it made him feel so much better about his. And that was a hell of a display he’d just watched. What an asshole Carlos was. Like, really?
The Watcher shook his head and thought about it. Maybe he’d have to do something about Carlos. It really wasn’t fair for him to cheat everybody in the park like that. And they were all working for peanuts anyway. When you took away the peanuts, what did they have? Nothing but the damn shells. And they couldn’t subsist on that.
The Watcher imagined there’d be a hell of a rampage at the amusement park in the next couple days. If they didn’t all just walk out today. Carlos would have a hell of a time keeping anybody on staff.
The Watcher chuckled, backed out of Queenie’s view and returned to Timmy’s view. The Watcher glanced over at the clock in the hospital hallway outside Timmy’s room. The Watcher still had another couple hours of work himself to do. But at his day job, not here. And not on Timmy. That sucked. But this hospital was one hell of a feeding ground. He really enjoyed applying his new skills in this place. People were dying here anyway. And the doctors weren’t looking for any unusual causes of death.
Still the Watcher had to be careful.
It was almost euphoric to take so many lives. Of course, it wasn’t him taking them. That was the beauty of it. He could never be charged with murder. Although he might make an exception with Carlos. That man was damn irritating. The Watcher couldn’t believe Carlos had treated Queenie like that. She did work damn hard; the Watcher had seen several of the answers she’d given people. He wasn’t sure he could sit there all day and do that.
He tried to calculate her earnings as she just had, then gave it up, chuckling. “I always sucked at math. Guess that’s why I’m not an engineer.” He drew in a big breath, exhaled and brought his focus back, centered on himself now.
He walked up the hallway, his arms full of files, and plunked them down at the receptionist’s desk, gave the girl a bright breezy smile and kept going. His coworkers had no clue either. Just the way he liked it. It was one thing to let Queenie know. But that was because she had the ability to see. Queenie, the one who had tapped into him first. She couldn’t really be upset with him. He had just followed the same energy back home again.
But then he already knew about her energy. He’d been watching her work for years.
He swept his way through the double doors and marched to the cafeteria. He still had a few hours. He would need coffee and a snack. She might manage her whole day without food, but he couldn’t.
*
Kirk stared into the water. He was leaning over the bow of the boat, had been for the last two hours. But they’d been out at least five hours already. They were across from Bonnie’s place, going slowly through the weeds. The problem was, the motor would get caught up in those same weeds if they got any closer. They had already stopped twice, shutting down the engine to clean out the props on the motor. Also sunken logs hid just beneath the surface, and that was never a good thing. But he didn’t want to give up yet. He let the boat direct itself along the shoreline. He had no reason to go one way or the other.
He grabbed his phone and called Queenie. “I know you’re busy, but if you could possibly give me a little more direction.”
“I can’t see,” she said in exasperation.
He heard the temper and the frustration in her voice. “Bad day?”
“The worst.”
“Well, brighten mine by helping me find this poor woman.”
“Just a minute.”
There was silence. He glanced back at the sheriff, who was staring down at the lake himself. It was just the two of them in the Zodiac, and, if it wasn’t for the job they were doing, it would be a stunningly beautiful event. It was only about four o’clock in the afternoon, maybe even an hour or two later. He’d lost track of time being in the water. He should have thought about that. “Are you still at work?”
“No, I’m not,” she snapped. “That has changed.”
“Where are you?”
“In my car,” she said, the fatigue evident in her voice. “Never mind. Right now you’ve got a dead body out there.”
“Can we do hot and cold?”
That was a game they’d played when she’d been in a deep trance, and he had men out searching for a child buried underground. “You’re getting cold,” she whispered. “And colder.”
He pointed his arm in the opposite direction, and the sheriff turned the boat around, gently nudging it that way.
“Better,” she said, “but it’s still just tepid.”
“Any idea how much farther?”
“At least a mile,” she said.
He turned to the sheriff and said, “I suggest we ignore this section as we’ve already searched it.”
He nodded and picked up speed, sending the Zodiac faster in the direction he wanted to go.
After five minutes Kirk said, “Queenie, now?”
“Warm,” she said, but her voice was fading.
He frowned. “I wish you were at home.”
“So do I,” she said. “I might not be able to drive home.”
“Take the bus,” he said, urgently getting a horrible sense she was in danger in some way.
“Can’t. It takes forever.” And then, as if giving herself a mental shrug, she said, “I’m leaving now. I’ll be fine.”
“No, I need help still.”
There was silence, and then she said, her voice sad, “She’s up about forty-five feet in front of you on the right.”
Pocketing his phone, Kirk motioned to the sheriff to cut down the speed and do a very slow idle. Kirk leaned over the bow and studied the left side, then the right side of the boat. No way to know if Queenie was 100 percent. Sometimes rights and lefts got mixed up, depending on her viewpoint. He remained leaning over the keel, trying to watch both sides, until something pink caught his eye. He held up a hand. “Stop.”
He grabbed an oar from inside the boat and plunked it down, slowing their progress. With the engine killed, he paddled toward the gleam of pink in the water. He came up against a tree and peered over the side of the boat. What was that? Using the paddle, he brought the Zodiac ever-so-slightly closer and then turned a grim face back toward the sheriff. “I think we’ve got her.”
The sheriff clambered forward with the other oar. Together the two men came alongside the female body just a few feet under the surface of the water. And, indeed, she had on a pink shirt.
“Wow, you must have caught a flash of that pink. No way we would have found her without it.”
“I did,” he lied. “But look at her face. It’s almost completely covered.”
“Like a scarf or something is over it.” The sheriff frowned. “Like a bandanna.”
They studied the body, now bloated and distorted. “We can’t even ID her face because of it.”
“No,” the sheriff said. “I have to get a team out here. If there’s any forensic evidence, we need it.”
As it was now the sheriff’s domain, Kirk sat back and thought about how far away the body was from the property. “It’s almost like whoever it was took the same path we did directly across the lake and just dumped her.”
“Too early to tell. I understand you come from the big city and all, and chances are, in your mind, this is a murder. But I can’t be too sure of that.”
He nodded. “True enough. But it’s pretty hard to come up with very many scenarios that explain why she’s fully dressed but miles away from her property in the water.”
“Aye, that it is,” the sheriff said. “That it is.”
*
The little boy once again sat on his bed, the blankets tugged around his shoulders. Today had been a good day. He got to play, and he had ice cream. But, when Daddy came home, he yelled and screamed at Mommy and had hit her hard. The little boy had made himself scarce, knowing the next blow was for him. He’d run down here, shut the door and curled up on his bed. He’d heard his father laugh and shout, telling him to run away like the little scaredy-cat he was. But then it had gone quiet. Now he just lay here, not wanting to go anywhere.
“Mommy, find me soon please,” he whispered into the night. “Please, Mommy.”
One lone spider crawled on the bedpost. He looked at it and smiled and reached out a hand. The spider hopped onto the back of his fingers and raced up his arm. As it crawled up his neck, the little boy chuckled because it tickled so much. He gently moved it onto the back of his other hand.
“Did you stay to keep me company?” he whispered. He didn’t know if the little spider understood him or not. But, when he leaned forward to take another look, it rose up on his back legs and reached out a front leg to touch him on the nose. He whispered, “Thank you. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”
Feeling much better, he curled up on the side of the bed, careful of the spider on his hand, pulling the blanket up around him, almost closing his eyes.
The spider appeared to settle down right there on the back of his hand and to fall asleep.