After Johnny and his bride-to-be left in a snit, we asked Gypsy Mummy the question that the other couple had posed. Into the brass tray slid a card that read YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
Stormy framed it behind glass and hung it above her bed, where it remained for a few years. Now it was in a smaller frame on the nightstand in my guest-tower bedroom.
When I lost Stormy, I never considered destroying the card in anger. I have no anger. I have never raged at man or God about what happened. Sorrow is my legacy from that terrible day, and as well a humbling awareness of my inadequacies, which are beyond counting.
To keep the sorrow from overwhelming me, I remain focused on the beauty of this world, which is everywhere to be seen in rich variety, from the smallest wildflowers and the iridescent hummingbird that feeds on them to the night sky diamonded with fiery stars.
And because I am able to see the lingering dead, I know that something lies outside of time, a place to which they belong and to which one day I will go. The prediction of Gypsy Mummy, therefore, has not proved finally wrong; it may yet be fulfilled, and I keep sorrow in check by anticipating the fulfillment of that much-desired destiny.
Since leaving Pico Mundo, I had taken the fortune-teller’s card with me when I traveled where my intuition propelled me. But for fear of losing it in some moment of desperate action, I didn’t carry it on my person all day, every day.
Recent events had led me to believe that the evil in Roseland was of an unprecedented nature. Annamaria was a help to me but not a shield, and my chances of surviving until morning didn’t seem to be good. I had no silly notion that as long as Gypsy Mummy’s seven words were in my possession, I would be invulnerable. But I felt, perhaps foolishly, that were I to die and step out of time, the powers that be on the Other Side would feel more obliged to lead me directly to Stormy if I carried with me evidence of the promised destiny.
I don’t mind being considered foolish. I’m as much a fool as anyone, more so than some, and keeping that truth always in mind prevents me from becoming cocky. Cockiness gets you killed.
I pried up the fasteners on the back of the frame, removed the rectangle of chipboard, and retrieved the card. I put it in one of the plastic windows in my wallet.
Otherwise, those windows were empty. I carried no photo of Stormy because I had no need of it. Her face, her smile, her form, the beauty of her graceful hands, her voice were all vivid in my mind, indelible. In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.
Over my sweater, I put on a sports jacket that I had bought during my shopping trip to town. I wasn’t trying to spiff up my image. A sports jacket provided pockets and concealment.
As Noah Wolflaw had instructed, I locked the narrow, barred windows and drew shut the draperies. I turned on all the lamps so that much later, when nightfall came, the light leaking around the draperies would suggest that I was in residence.
After locking my suite of rooms, I climbed the winding stone stairs from the vestibule to the second floor. The knuckles of my right hand chased the door as it swung open before they could quite rap the wood.
Raphael, the golden retriever we’d rescued in Magic Beach, was lying on the floor, holding a Nylabone in his forepaws, gnawing it with gusto. He thumped his tail in greeting, but the Nylabone was at the moment of greater interest to him than any chest scratch or tummy rub he might get from me.
Boo was either elsewhere in the suite or had gone out to explore Roseland. As a spirit dog, he could walk through walls if he wished and do any of the usual ghosty things. But I had previously observed that, like any living dog, he had considerable curiosity and enjoyed exploring new places.
As before, the draperies were closed, and the only light came from two stained-glass lamps. Annamaria sat at the same small dining table. No mugs of tea stood steaming for either her or me.
Instead, on the table rested a shallow blue bowl eighteen inches in diameter, filled with water, in which floated three enormous white flowers. They were somewhat like magnolia blooms but larger, as big as cantaloupes, lusher, the petals so thick they seemed artificial, as if made of wax.
I had seen these flowers before, on an immense tree that grew outside the place where she had lived for a while in Magic Beach. We had eaten a meal together at a table where three blooms floated in a large shallow bowl like this one.
Knowing the names of things is a way of paying respect to the beauty of the world that sustains me and keeps my sorrow in check. I know the names of many trees, but not the name of the one from which these flowers came.
Approaching the table, I said, “Where did you get these?”
The lamp glow fell upon the flowers, the waxy petals bounced it softly to Annamaria, and this indirection played a trick on the eye, so that it seemed the light on her face shone from within her.
She smiled and said, “I took them from the tree.”
“The tree is back in Magic Beach.”
“The tree is here, Oddie.”
I had only ever seen one tree with these blooms, the nameless one in Magic Beach, with its great spreading black branches and its eight-lobed leaves.
“Here in Roseland? I’ve been all over the estate. I haven’t seen anything with these flowers.”
“Well, it’s here as surely as you are.”
Less than a week earlier, she had performed a trick with one of these white flowers. A friend of mine, a woman named Blossom, her only audience, had been wonderstruck by it. Now it seemed that she likewise impressed Noah Wolflaw, although the illusion apparently disturbed him in a way it didn’t disturb Blossom.
“In Magic Beach, you promised to show me something with a flower like this.”
“And indeed I will. Something that you will remember always.”
I pulled out the chair in which I had been sitting earlier.
Before I could settle, she raised a hand to stop me. “Not now.”
“When?”
“All things in their time, odd one.”
“That’s what you said before.”
“And it’s what I say again. You have a pressing matter to attend to, I believe.”
“Yeah. I found the one who needs me. A boy who won’t tell me his name. I think he really might be her son … if that makes any sense.”
Reflections of the blooms in the bowl flowered in her big dark eyes. “You have no time for an explanation, and I don’t need one. Do what you must.”
Something nuzzled my hand, and I looked down to see that Boo had materialized. He felt as solid to me as any real dog, as all spirits felt to me. His tongue was warm as he licked my fingers, but my hand did not become wet.
Annamaria said, “And remember what I told you earlier. If you should doubt the justice of your actions, you could die in Roseland. Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.”
I understood why she counseled me with those words. Mere days earlier, in Magic Beach, I had been caught up in a series of events that required me to kill five people involved in a terrorist plot, one of them a lovely young woman with large pellucid blue eyes. They would have murdered hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if I had not killed them, and they would have murdered me. But the killing, especially of the woman, even though in self-defense, had left me dark inside and sick of myself.
That is why I told you at the start that I had recently been in a mood, not as buoyant and quick to find the humor in any moment as I have usually been. That was surely why I dreamed of Auschwitz, too, and worried about dying twice.
“The boy needs you,” she said.