Cookie turns out all the lights except the lamp in the front window with the red glass shade. When she’s in the grip of a migraine, every light is too bright and every sound too loud. She walks through the parlor where an over-stuffed sofa and easy chair rest on an oriental carpet. Heavy red drapes are fastened with gold tassels and on a round table in the center of the room, her crystal ball sits on a cloth of midnight blue brocade. There’s a grandfather clock in the corner and Maxfield Parrish prints on the papered walls.
The waves of nausea and dizziness that accompany the pain propel her toward the bedroom. She drinks her medication from a demitasse and changes into a white nightgown with high neck and long sleeves. As she sinks onto the canopy bed with its purple veils emblazoned the gold stars, she knows it will not be for a good night’s sleep.
Dr. McBane says only childbirth and kidney stones come close to the pain of a migraine headache. He’s never charged her for the mysterious potion he drops in her purse when her head is turned. An opiate perhaps, since he doesn’t acknowledge dispensing it and she knows better than to ask.
The medicine works quickly, dropping her down the fathomless well of sleep. At first there’s only darkness and the sound of blood rushing through her ears as she sinks beneath layers of receding consciousness. Then her inner eye opens like the lens of a camera on an unfamiliar landscape.
The vision has begun.
The wind and rain thrash the treetops, sending leaves and brittle twigs showering downward. A young woman carrying a hand-woven basket runs into the dream-frame. She loses her hat to a low-hanging branch. Her dark brown hair whips around her head like the mane of a horse. A vine reaches out to snag her toe and she lands on her hands and knees in the leaf litter, the contents of the basket scattering across the forest floor.
A second person enters the frame wearing a big coat and carrying a knife. The scream of the fallen girl cuts across the warp of the wind like a bottle shattering against a rock. A heavy boot slams several times into her back and head.
Raindrops glisten on the metal surface of the knife. The assailant drops to one knee and rolls her over to look at her face, the beautiful unconscious face that causes so much trouble. Now for a kiss on those cold, blue lips, not a lover’s kiss, but a kiss to seal a deadly deed. The knife plunges down again and again through the girl’s patched winter coat, blood oozing through the slashes.
The hair on the back of the assailant’s neck rises like the hackles of a billy goat, every nerve on edge. Someone is watching. Wary eyes scan the surrounding woods and see nothing, but that doesn’t mean that someone isn’t there. What the attacker doesn’t know is that Zarina the Fortune Teller is watching every move.
Cookie tries to see the face of the attacker but the vision is losing definition, like the image on an over-exposed photograph. The murderer runs into the woods and disappears from view.
Cookie can’t take her eyes from the girl on the forest floor, from the serene face washed clean by the rain. Her eyes are closed, like a saint in repose. Rain soaks through her bloody clothes and drenches the long tresses of her hair.
The young lady’s eyes open, wide green eyes with yellow flecks in the iris, eyes that reflect the sky. They gaze unblinking into the treetops. She doesn’t move because she can’t. Something is broken in her back.
There’s a sound like a needle scratching the surface of a record and the vision is gone. Cookie sits up in bed, her head swirling with pain, her heart stuttering erratically. She fumbles for the vial of nitroglycerin on the nightstand and places a pill beneath her tongue until the rhythm evens out.
Tonight’s vision is different from the others, full of gaps and voids. More importantly, this victim isn’t dead. This is a first. She knows neither the name of the victim, the identity of the perpetrator or the location of the crime. Miserable and frustrated she drops back on her pillow.
* * * *
Sunday morning and the headache is gone, leaving a visible bruising around one eye and a delicate webbing of red capillaries in the white. Cookie sits at the table with her coffee and donuts, her hands moving over the smooth surface of the crystal ball as if it actually had insight into life’s dilemmas.
Cookie has unashamedly admitted to Joe that her crystal ball is no more than the focal point of her intuitive energies. It has no psychic or magical powers to impart. On the other hand, she’s no phony. People come to her when their concerns overwhelm them and leave feeling less lonely and more in control of their lives. She’s been privy to more sins and secrets than Father Doyle at St. Finnbar’s or Chief Garvey down at the station. People are more inclined to open up to someone who lacks the power or the inclination to relegate them to hell or jail.
Cookie looks out the window at the rain falling on Cork St. This morning she has a dilemma. Years ago, she led police to the lifeless body of three year old Bucky Chapelle. It was revealed in a vision that he’d had been beaten to death and hidden in a culvert on Silver Creek. Rather than gratitude, she was suspected of complicity in the crime. How could she know so much if she hadn’t been part of it? She was exonerated when Bucky’s stepfather confessed to ‘maybe going overboard’ when he disciplined the boy for dropping his pack of cigarettes in the toilet. After that, she kept her visions to herself.
She didn’t call the station about the waitress who disappeared two years back. They found her remains in a ditch near the city dump where Cookie knew she’d been since day one. Nor did she call when she envisioned thirteen-year-old Gretchen Frey give birth to a baby girl at home and extinguish the child’s brief flame of life. The remains were discovered buried under the floor of the chicken coop six months later. Whether Cookie reported these incidents or not, the victims wouldn’t have been any less dead, but the young lady in the woods was different. She was alive.
* * * *
Sergeants Don Swackhammer and Bruce Green are on duty at the station. Sundays, especially rainy ones, are quiet. The troublemakers who frequent the watering holes of Santa Paulina on Saturday nights are home nursing black eyes and hangovers and trying to recall the name of the woman in the bed beside them. That is hunky-dory with Don and Bruce who are both as lazy as hell and won’t take accident reports in bad weather unless serious injuries are involved.
The Chief is home with his wife and six kids, so they put their feet up on the desks and kick back with their auto, hunting and girly magazines, drink coffee, smoke and tell jokes. Oh yes, life is good until the phone rings. Nobody wants to pick up no matter who‘s on the other end, each hoping to outwait the other. Don finally caves in.
“Officer Swackhammer. What can I do for ya?”
“Good morning, Officer. This is Cathleen Cook.
Madame Zarina. Wouldn’t you know it! Don looks over at Bruce, mouths her name and rolls his eyes. Bruce chuckles silently. He can rib Don for a week on this one.
“Yes, Madame Zarina, I’m listening. A young lady injured in the woods? Really? The victim of foul play. No, I can’t say anyone has reported a girl missing. Yes, of course I’m taking notes.”
“Without a pen in your hand, Officer?”
“Well...I...how?”
“Not everything requires a crystal ball, Officer Swackhammer,” she says. “Does The Chief know you’re scuffing up public property with those cowboy boots of yours?” Don looks around like she might be peeking through the window, thumps his feet to the floor and picks up a pencil. How does the old biddy know this shit?
