The Fortune Teller Read online

  The card contained two words, written in bold black marker:

  Well done.

  Underneath the message was a phone number. The handwriting bombarded her with its angry back-slant and hard angles. A man had written this, a very disturbed man. Semele knew the message was meant for her.

  On the verge of hysteria, she put the card in her purse and headed to the lobby, where Theo was waiting. She found him sitting in the far corner. He read the panic on her face and stood up.

  “Sem?” Bren had just walked through the doors and was heading toward her. He saw Theo approaching and looked from Theo to Semele.

  “Bren, this is Theo Bossard, a client of mine.” She hurried to make introductions, still reeling over Cabe’s death and in a frenzy about the note. She needed to leave. Now.

  Bren gave Theo a measured look. “And I’m Bren, an ex-boyfriend.”

  A rush of anger hit her and she lowered her voice. “Really? You’re going to pull this now? Now?” Cabe was gone and she didn’t have it in her to deal with this. She stormed toward the doors.

  Bren looked taken aback and followed her. “What? You’re just leaving?”

  She whipped around. “I’m dealing with an emergency.”

  “Something more important than your best friend dying?”

  Semele stepped back as if he had struck her.

  “Sem, I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t.” She held up her hand to stop the apology. “I’m dealing with something you can’t understand. Go help Oliver. I’ll be back when I can.”

  She was holding a note from the killer. He had the cards and the manuscript. Now he wanted her to call him.

  “Sem, wait!” Bren called out.

  Semele didn’t turn around. She got into Theo’s car with Theo one step behind her.

  When the doors closed, she showed Theo the note. He agreed she should call the number from the hotel.

  Semele stared at the handwriting the whole drive there. The writing told her what she already knew. This was the mastermind, the monster behind it all, and now he was coming after her.

  King of Swords

  When Semele and Theo got back to his suite, they each picked up a phone so Theo could listen to the call.

  A man answered on the first ring. “Very good. You found the flowers.”

  “Yes.” Semele could barely get the word out.

  “Speak up, dear girl. It’s so lovely to finally hear your voice.” His breathing sounded labored and he spoke with a slight Slavic accent. “I’m so sorry about your friend. But you see, studies have shown precognition is triggered by tragedy more than anything else. Death being the utmost one, I’m afraid I had no choice. Is Theo there with you?”

  Semele couldn’t speak. She was about to be sick.

  Theo answered. “I’m here.”

  “Ah. The little ones together at last. Nettie and Liliya protected you well, but all good things must come to an end.” He stopped to take several wheezing breaths, then continued on. “You’ve suffered a great loss, Semele. But monumental achievements require sacrifices and so far you’ve achieved nothing.”

  Semele’s entire body was shaking. “What do you want?”

  “I now hold several things that are quite dear to you. Two items you know about and one is a surprise. Your chances of retrieving any one of them depend on how well you do on the test.”

  She was too petrified to speak. An image had already formed in her mind.

  “Why do you think the tarot starts with The Fool?” he asked. “Because we are all fools traveling on a road with no beginning and no end. Do you have the courage to be the fool, Semele?”

  “Please. Just say what you want from me.”

  “Every human has intuitive abilities. We see images in clouds, rocks, tea leaves … or cards. Symbols are the signposts, all around us if we are looking. Pareidolia is the ancient Greek word for this phenomenon, but you can see so much more. How good is your sight, dear girl, when there is something—or someone—depending on you?”

  He hung up with a click.

  Semele clutched the phone. Terror gripped her and she prayed she was wrong. In her heart she already knew what he had—who he had.

  Theo didn’t understand. “What did he mean?”

  She turned to him, her heart full of hopelessness. “My mother.”

  Message to VS—

  Beijing canceled.

  Friend is dead.

  Reply from VS—

  I sent flowers.

  Message to VS—

  Does this not mean anything to you?

  Reply from VS—

  More than you know.

  Ace of Swords

  On the drive to New Haven, Semele tried calling her mother’s cell and the home line countless times. With every minute that passed, her panic intensified.

  When they arrived, they found her front door unlocked and the lights on. Unfamiliar music was playing on the stereo. Helen’s purse sat on the kitchen counter next to her keys, and her Audi was still parked in the driveway.

  “Mom?” Semele cried out when she saw the dining chair on its side.

  The signs of a struggle echoed through the room.

  A coffee cup lay shattered on the floor, and a bowl of cereal was overturned on the table.

  “Mom!” She sank to her knees.

  Theo put his arms around her. “We’re going to find her. Semele, listen to me. We’re going to find her.”

  For minutes she cried gut-wrenching sobs, unable to calm down. She had reached her breaking point.

  “We’re going to find her.” Theo kept saying the words until they registered. Slowly, she calmed and attempted several deep breaths. “That’s it,” he encouraged.

  The house phone rang.

  “It’s him.” She sprang for the phone. “There’s another in my father’s study. Hurry!”

  Theo raced to the other room.

  Semele snatched up the receiver and yelled, “Where is she?”

  “Good.” The man chuckled. “Good! You are awake now. I can hear your passion.” He took a labored breath. “It’s amazing what losing your friend has done for you so quickly. You knew right away to run home to Mommy. Bravo,” he taunted her. “But isn’t this what you wanted after you found out the truth about your birth? To give Mommy away, so that she’d know what it was like?”

  “No.” Semele’s voice trembled.

  “Intuition can be triggered by many kinds of crises, Semele. My father, in his extensive studies, found a threat to a loved one most effective. But such parameters are hard to duplicate in a laboratory. So I’ve got you out in the real world, where I can conduct this experiment with high confidence. And the messiness of life can do wonders. Like your father, his death was the tragedy that started you on this yellow brick road. How I’ve enjoyed watching.”

  Semele slid to the floor.

  “I saw her that night at the gala—your mother. We met at the bar. Such a lovely woman, Helen. I got her and Joseph drinks. She was so talkative, never suspecting what I had done.”

  Semele covered her mouth to keep from crying as she listened to his confession. He went on.

  “But she couldn’t have saved him that night, dear girl. Yet you still blame her. I think it’s because, deep down, you blame yourself for not foreseeing his death. Time to own up to the truth, because there’s no hiding it from me.”

  Semele gripped her stomach.

  “Nettie chose your parents quite carefully, knowing her granddaughter would grow up under the guidance of a brilliant scholar who would encourage her to embrace history and challenge her to learn Greek until she could read it as well as he could. Nettie wanted you to find Ionna’s manuscript and recognize yourself within the pages. But I knew that Joseph Cavnow would have only gotten in the way now. His part had been played, and strokes can happen at any age.”

  Tears fell from Semele’s eyes as she listened to him.

  “You were lucky, though. The two of you shared a close bond whi
le he was alive. I was my father’s worst disappointment.”

  It took all her will to speak, but she had to know. “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you know?” When she didn’t say anything, he laughed again, drawing heavily on his oxygen. “That’s the shame of family secrets. You’re supposedly one of the great seers, the Keeper of the Gift. Your grandmother grasped this power but did not live to pass her insights on to you. Pity, since you’re the one who will need them most. For years you’ve been unwilling to believe. And without belief you have nothing.”

  He hung up again.

  “Wait!” she yelled, but he was gone. She slammed down the receiver. “Dammit!”

  She took the phone and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and crashed to the floor. She sank down to her knees crying, now a heaving mess.

  She tried to think—she had to calm down. This psycho had her mother and God only knew what he was going to do to her—what he had already done.

  Theo hurried into the room with a strange expression on his face.

  She looked up, meeting his eyes. “What?” She gritted her teeth in desperation.

  “What he said … about his father. Nettie and Liliya were always afraid Evanoff would find them, even after they created new identities for themselves in Austria.”

  “Now his son has found us.” Semele’s body tingled. She knew that was the answer.

  The song playing on the stereo looped and the same music filled the room again. The melody pulled at Semele and surrounded her.

  Then the harp solo began.

  She stood up, feeling light-headed.

  “This music…,” she said, approaching the stereo.

  Her parents never owned music like this. And suddenly she understood. “He left this music when he took her.”

  She ejected the disk. The CD wasn’t from a store. It was burned from a computer, and on the disk was a handwritten message.

  Very good. Now find her.

  Seeing his handwriting again gave her chills. Unlike the note at the hospital, this message included a lowercase y and g that showed a glaring personality trait: the letters had been written with a straight line down and an angry slash to the side instead of a loop. This was a rare occurrence that experts called the Felon’s Claw, and it showed a dangerous propensity for manipulation only seen in extreme criminals.

  Semele stared at the note a long minute, the music filling the silence. She turned to Theo with utter certainty.

  “Aishe played this music. He wants me to go to Paris.”

  Page of Swords

  Theo chartered a private plane out of Tweed New Haven Airport, a Challenger 300 that sat eight. They would arrive at Paris–Le Bourget Airport in less than seven hours.

  Semele tried to dissuade him, but Theo insisted on taking care of their travel, explaining it was the quickest way to get there. The flight attendant gave her a glass of cabernet before takeoff, and the wine helped calm her nerves. Semele hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours and needed to rest. But before she could she needed to know what had happened to Nettie and Liliya after they escaped.

  “They went to Austria?” she asked Theo, who was settled into the seat across from her.

  “To a displacement camp.” He nodded. “Camps were set up all over Europe. People flooded in from the Nazi concentration camps. Many survivors traveled from camp to camp looking for their families, but Nettie and Liliya didn’t have anyone. They stayed at one camp and pretended to be sisters under a false name, keeping mostly to themselves. They were terrified of being discovered.”

  Semele couldn’t begin to imagine. “How long were they there?”

  “A year. Things changed when they started helping a group of nuns who ran an orphanage in Vienna. Working at the orphanage was a kind of self-imposed penance. My grandmother told me she and Nettie suffered terrible guilt from leaving the other children behind at Makaryev. It’s something that stayed with them the rest of their lives.”

  Theo grew quiet a moment, remembering. “My grandmother never spoke of her time in Russia. I never even knew about our heritage until I translated the manuscript and my grandmother told me her story. That was days before she died.”

  Semele hung on to every word. Part of her was jealous that Theo had gotten to hear the story firsthand.

  “When the orphanage started planning to open another location in Switzerland, Nettie urged Liliya to go and start a new life there. She moved to Lake Geneva and met my grandfather a year later.”

  “And what about my grandmother?” Semele asked, her voice barely audible.

  “Nettie stayed in Vienna. The orphanage was right next door to an academy for the blind, where she met your grandfather, Elias.”

  Semele’s stomach did a somersault when she heard her grandfather’s name.

  “He was a music professor there. He taught the children how to play instruments reading Braille. He was blind too, and an incredibly empathetic teacher.”

  Semele began to form a strong picture of Elias in her mind: tall and elegant, even in a simple suit. His hand held a cane with the long, graceful fingers of a pianist, and he carried himself with a quiet countenance.

  “Nettie wrote to Liliya that, in many ways, Elias could see more than she could. After they married, they stayed in Vienna and had one child—your mother.” Theo hesitated. “Carina.”

  Carina. At last her mother’s name. Semele held her breath, waiting to hear more.

  “My grandmother said Nettie let her run wild. When she was a teenager Carina would stay out late or not come home at all. She had a new boyfriend every month.” Theo added, “That is, according to Nettie’s letters.”

  Semele raised her eyebrows. At least she knew who to blame for her rebellious streak. If her mother were here she would say it all made sense. “So they were in Vienna all this time?”

  “No.” A shadow passed over Theo’s face and he looked away. “Someone pushed Elias in front of a moving train when he was on his way home from the academy one day. They never found out who did it. But Nettie believed his death was connected to her past at Makaryev—that Evanoff had found her. She went into hiding and forced Carina to come with her. Carina was two months pregnant with you, no longer with the boyfriend, and distraught over her father’s death. Nettie told her they were going to the States to get away, to heal. So they came to New York.”

  Semele’s hands gripped the armrests. She was glued to every word.

  “Carina was an actress in Vienna and had ambitions of being on Broadway. She wanted to stay in New York and pursue that dream, but…” He hesitated. “She died giving birth to you.”

  Semele could feel a part of her pain release, like a breath held too long and at last expelled. Her mother hadn’t abandoned her. She had died giving birth.

  “I’m sorry,” Theo said softly.

  Semele cleared her throat, her voice husky from the emotion swimming inside her, the anguish, the guilt, the relief of knowing the truth. “You found all this out from the letters?”

  “Liliya and Nettie wrote to each other for years. The last letter my grandmother received was right after Carina died. Nettie was still in New York.”

  “Do you still have them? The letters?” What she wouldn’t give to read one, to see more of her grandmother’s handwriting. She felt an ache for Carina, Elias, and Nettie—the family she would never know.

  “I’ve never seen them,” he said. “But we can look.” Theo reached out and took her hand.

  Semele looked down as Theo’s hands joined hers. They were a “we.” She knew that now. They had been long before they ever met.

  Queen of Pentacles

  Mme Helvétius’ salon had been at 24 Grande rue d’Auteuil, but it was no longer there. Though she was originally buried in her garden as she had wished, she had been moved to a nearby cemetery years later. The village of Auteuil was in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, nicknamed “le 16e,” a prestigious area filled with mansions, historic buildings, and museums.
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  Semele looked at the building that stood in place of the old salon and felt as if she’d time-traveled to the future.

  “My mother’s not here,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Theo pressed.

  Semele shook her head. She wasn’t sure about anything. She thought the harp music had been a sign to go to Auteuil, but maybe they were meant to go to Russia instead, where Aishe and Andrej had settled.

  She closed her eyes and tried to focus, her body tingling as she entered a state of hyperawareness. The stories of the past that Ionna had so vividly painted for her flashed through her consciousness, filling all her senses. The blue of the salon lived in the sky, the smell of the lime trees in Mme Helvétius’ courtyard wafted down the road, and the sound of Aishe’s harp echoed in the air.

  The music grew louder. It sounded like the song playing at her mother’s house.

  Semele opened her eyes and did a full 360, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Theo looked around, clearly not hearing anything.

  “Listen.” She began walking, following the melody. Every note beckoned her like a finger pointing the way.

  A soft breeze picked up and the song intensified.

  Semele realized it was Simza’s song, “Find Me in the Wind.”

  She took off, running down several blocks, turning corners and dodging pedestrians. She didn’t hear the angry swears or Theo’s apologies in French as he tried to keep up.

  She raced to the end of a street corner and found a lively outdoor market under a canopy of century-old buildings.

  What had brought her here? Had there been music? Because she couldn’t hear it anymore.

  Theo caught up with her, slightly out of breath. “What is it?”

  Semele shook her head, her senses still tingling. Then she looked behind her. There was a vendor with ornamental seashells for sale, including jewelry and purses made out of shells.

  Semele walked over to the table, to the shell that was calling her, a spiraling conch with a blue iridescence that dazzled in the sun.

  She lifted the shell up to find her mother’s pearl necklace resting underneath. Her body froze in shock, and for a suspended moment she was unable to accept what she was looking at. This was the necklace her father had given her mother on their anniversary, the one with the heart locket. Now here it was under a seashell, on a table in the middle of Paris.