The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,97

people who live by their wits on the street. She sighed, disappointed, and stepped back inside. The screen slammed behind her.

I stood there on the other side for a few moments, unsure of what to do, then raised my voice a little. “Excuse me?”

“Come on,” she said. It sounded like Cah-moan.

I found her sitting at a round table covered by a heavy red tablecloth with gold piping and tassels. She had a deck of tarot cards in front of her. The inside of the house was as crowded as the yard and not as clean. Emma was obviously a trash picker from way back.

“Mix these up for me.”

I took the cards and shuffled them a little. “Actually, I just came to ask you some questions about Anne Chambers.”

“You don’t want no readin’, I won’t give you one. Fifteen dollars either way.”

“Her mother said Anne used to come here.”

Emma was silent.

“The girl who used to live down the beach,” I pressed on.

“I know who,” she grouched.

I set the cards across the table in front of her and withdrew my arm before she took a bite of it. I wasn’t sure Emma had had her breakfast either.

“Did Anne keep in touch with you after she left for college?”

No answer.

“Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”

She put the cards out and studied them for a long while. Somewhere in the back of my head the music to Jeopardy! began to play.

“I saw it. I saw it coming,” Old Emma said finally. “I warned her when she came for a visit that she was in danger. She didn’t believe me, said she was happy. Said they was in love.” She said it with a pinched smile, clasped her gnarled hands in front of her heart, and twisted her upper body back and forth as if she were hugging something mockingly. She drew it out too, the word love, so it sounded like la-ooove.

“So you’re saying it was serious?”

“I suppose you could call getting kilt pretty serious, don’t you?” She laughed. It was a wet, crackly laugh, and I was pretty sure she was now openly making fun of me. Her face split into a mass of deep sun wrinkles.

“Her mother didn’t mention it,” I said.

“Nuh-uh. She wouldn’t.”

I waited, but it didn’t appear more was forthcoming, so I stood and dug around in the pocket of my jeans until I found a twenty. “Do you know the name of the person Anne was seeing? She show you a picture of him or anything?”

“Nuh-uh,” Emma said. “But you been real close lately too.” Her voice was gravel.

“Close to what?”

Her eyes narrowed again. “Same one got Anne.”

A gypsy’s cackle tumbled out of her and turned into a cough so deep and damp it startled me. I dropped the twenty on the table and headed for the door. It was half off its hinges like everything else I’d seen of Emma’s world. I looked back at the filthy ashtray, the tarot cards on the table in front of her, the long curtain she used as a backdrop, the cheap claret rug. She was looking right at me when my eyes reached her sun-worn face.

“You eat pussy too?” she asked, and the dry lips split into a stained smile.

Eeewww! Okay, Emma’s crazy. I slipped through the screen door, went back outside where there was air and yard art and junk and cats. I was trembling, I realized, and annoyed that I’d let the half-packed old duffel bag get to me.

Emma pushed the door open behind me, flicked a cigarette into the sand, where it lay smoldering. Smoke, heavy in the wet air, burned my sinuses. She held up a card. It was the Hanged Man reversed.

“Your Mr. Fancy Pants, he don’t love you. He can’t love nobody but himself. But the po-lice man do. He love you,” she said, and having given me my twenty dollars’ worth, disappeared behind the screen.

29

Coming home with little more than you left with is never a good feeling for an investigator. Two days and what did I know? Anne Chambers was shy and reserved, according to her former roommates. Didn’t make friends easily, according to her mother. In a relationship, according to a crazy old card reader. Studied hard, according to her records. Had some talent as an artist. Nothing there to help develop a clearer picture of her habits and routines, hangouts, lovers. No one seemed to have known the girl. No visible links to the other victims and no evidence