Ashley Bell: A Novel (16 page)

“That’s better,” Calida said, “much better.” A few minutes later, she said, “We’re done with this part, kid. Now let’s find out why you were spared from brain cancer.”

Fully dressed, feeling pleasantly wrung-out, Bibi opened a chilled bottle of chardonnay, poured two servings, and brought the glasses to the chrome dinette table with the red Formica top.

Calida Butterfly had moved some of the candles from the living room and distributed them on the table and countertops to provide the proper mood for the second thing that she had been hired to do.

Laying her ostrich-skin suitcase on one of the chrome-and-black-vinyl chairs, Calida said, “Do you know what divination is?”

“Predicting the future,” Bibi said.

“Not entirely. It’s also a tool for uncovering hidden knowledge by supernatural means.”

“What hidden knowledge?”

“Any hidden knowledge,” Calida said, as she opened the half of her suitcase that didn’t contain items related to massage therapy.

“I don’t believe in prognostication, all that stuff.”

Calida wasn’t offended. She said cheerily, “Well, the way it works is, you don’t have to believe in it for it to be true.”

Bibi saw, among other things in the bag, a Sig Sauer P220 or maybe a P226. She recognized the weapon because the P226, chambered for nine-millimeter ammunition, was the standard pistol issued to SEALs. Paxton had purchased his own P220, because it was chambered for .45 caliber and more likely to knock a bad guy down hard in close combat. The two guns looked all but identical.

Bibi had her own P226, which Paxton had taught her to use. An engagement gift.

The uneasiness about Calida, which Bibi had shaken off, now crept up on her once more. “Why the gun?”

Calida took the pistol from the suitcase and put it on the table. “Divination creates the psychic equivalent of seismic waves, shock waves. The vast majority of people can’t feel them or don’t realize what they’re feeling. But certain people can feel them—and sometimes locate the source.”

“What certain people?”

“The wrong people. That’s all you need to know. Mostly they let me alone. They’ve learned better than to mess with Calida Butterfly.”

Because eccentric people and the details of their obsessions were good material for fiction, Bibi was genuinely interested when she asked, “Do you have silver bullets in the gun?”

Taking from the suitcase a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a small roll of inch-wide gauze, and a self-dispensing roll of adhesive tape, Calida said, “Didn’t figure you for the kind of writer who would leap to a cliché. Good old American ammo will do the job.”

Bibi settled into one of the chairs, holding her wineglass in both hands. “What’s your real name?”

“Calida Butterfly, believe it or not.”

“I’ll buy the Calida, but who were you before Butterfly?”

“Okay, you’ve got me, I am caught, revealed. Before I was Calida Butterfly, I was of course Calida Caterpillar.”

The masseuse-diviner placed a small packet, twice the size of a matchbook, beside the rubbing alcohol and then turned to rummage in the suitcase once more. Bibi reached across the table, picked up this newest item: a seamstress’s kit of needles in a variety of sizes.

Replacing the packet where she’d found it, she said, “What are you going to sew?”

“Flesh.”

That answer required another question, but Bibi didn’t ask it. A session of fortune-telling, though pointless, had seemed to promise a little fun. But moment by moment, the weirdness mounted and the mood grew darker. Nancy and Murphy had gotten involved with some strange people over the years, but most of them were harmless surf dudes who had been clamshelled, prosecuted, and thoroughly rinse-cycled by so many monster waves that their common sense had been washed out of them. Calida didn’t seem crazy in a dangerous way, but she didn’t seem to be as tightly wound as a new spool of thread, either.

The last things the woman took from her bag were a folded white-cotton cloth, a silver bowl, and a flannel sack with contents that rattled softly when she put it down.

“I didn’t know my parents were into this. I mean, they never want to think about the future. You know—‘It’ll be what it’ll be.’ ”

Calida sat, picked up her glass, and poured half the wine down her throat as if she had no interest in the taste of it. “Like I said, divination isn’t only fortune-telling.”

“Oh, that’s right. It’s also for uncovering hidden knowledge by supernatural means. What knowledge did Mom and Dad want uncovered?”

“You’re a nice kid, but you’re nosy. I would no more divulge my experiences with other clients than a priest would tell you what someone said in confession.”

Bibi felt rebuked, but to no degree embarrassed. “When did you go into this divination business?”

Rather than answer, Calida finished the rest of her chardonnay in one long swallow. She put down the empty glass and met Bibi’s stare and seemed to want to see how long her client could tolerate silence between them. Candlelight ceaselessly fingered her face, as if trying to lift the shadows that veiled part of it. Earlier, the color of her eyes had seemed to fluctuate, depending on the angle at which the light entered them, but now they were a steady green—and striated in such a way that they reminded Bibi of the eyes of the tiger cub that her parents had given her.

After picking up the bottle and refilling her wineglass, Calida at last answered the question. “I started twenty-seven years ago. I was sixteen. My mother taught me.”

“What’s your mother’s name?”

“Thalia. Thalia Butterfly.”

“Butterfly and Butterfly. So it’s a two-diviner practice, like mother-daughter attorneys or something.”

“My mother died twelve years ago, and it wasn’t an easy death.”

Although Bibi didn’t know what to believe, she nonetheless felt bad for having been flippant. “I’m sorry. What happened?”

“One night, after a session like this, the wrong people showed up. They tortured and then dismembered her. If you think that’s just a story, you can check it out online. The crime was never solved.”

Astragalomancy was a method of divining the future or learning hidden knowledge by rolling dice. A ceromancer dropped melted wax into cold water and interpreted the figures thus produced. Halomancy required the reading of the shapes made by casting a handful of salt on a flat surface. A necromancer sought answers by communicating with the dead.

When Calida pulled the drawstring on the small flannel bag and spilled the familiar lettered tiles onto the dinette table, she said, “My mother devised and perfected the occult art of Scrabblemancy.”

Bibi almost laughed, but then she remembered the brutal murder and dismemberment that could be researched online. She swallowed the laugh and washed it down with a sip of wine to conceal how close she had come to giving offense. Even in such vain and silly pursuits as divination, you could unwittingly encounter a sociopath and become the object of her wrath. In fact, the more fruitless and outré the subject of your interest, the more likely it might be that those without a moral compass and with a taste for violence, empty and wandering in search of convictions, might cross your path. Besides, she didn’t want to hurt Calida’s feelings.

“We are told that in the beginning was the word,” Calida said, “and that the world—the entire universe—was
spoken
into existence. My mother speculated that the best material with which a diviner could work would be words, not human entrails or lines in your palm or a handful of salt cast on a table, but words. And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers…well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view. Now I’m going to ask you a question, Bibi Blair, and you must answer truthfully, frankly, because I’ll conduct the session in different ways depending on your response. Does Scrabblemancy make sense to you—
not
do you believe it will work, but does it make sense, and to what degree?”

When Calida leaned in to the table, tilting her head toward Bibi, her blond hair shimmered forward and flared slightly to each side of her face, like golden wings, and her eyes were disconcerting in their hawkish intensity and predatory focus. As much as Bibi wanted to like the woman, moments such as this made her feel as though they had been born on different worlds and could never fully relate to each other.

“Does the theory make sense, and to what degree?” Calida repeated in a whisper, and in the glass cups on the table, candles popped and hissed as the flames found impurities in the wicks, as if the melting wax were speaking in sympathy with the diviner.

“It makes a little sense, I mean, in the context of divination,” Bibi said, striving to be truthful without being dismissive. “But I’m more interested in things being spoken into existence than I could ever possibly be in using the occult to discover hidden knowledge.”

“What if things spoken into existence, who spoke them and why, is the same thing as hidden knowledge?”

“But I don’t believe they are,” Bibi replied.

The hawk-eyed diviner seemed to search the depth of Bibi’s eyes as a real hawk, gliding in its gyre, would scrutinize a meadow far below, seeking a mouse to hunt down and snatch up. Then she sat back in her chair, and the wings of flaxen hair closed against her face, once more curtaining her ears. She drank from the refilled glass, again finishing half the wine in one long swallow.

When she put down the glass, she said, “Did you lock the front door when you came in?”

Bibi nodded. “Yes.”

“Is there a second door?”

“No.”

“Are the windows locked?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s begin and finish quickly. The less time we’re at it, the safer we’ll be.”

As the diviner swiped the Scrabble tiles off the table and into the silver bowl, rings sparkling with candlelight, Bibi sipped the wine and savored it, considering whether her parents would be insulted if she refused the second part of their gift and sent this woman away.

Calida returned the bowl to the table. From the seamstress’s packet, she selected the largest needle, held it in a candle flame, and then placed it on the folded white-cotton cloth. She removed the cap from the rubbing alcohol, stuck the thumb of her left hand into the bottle, let it soak for a minute, and then screwed the cap on once more.

When the diviner picked up the two-inch needle with her right hand, Bibi said, “You’re not serious.”

As she began speaking softly in a language that Bibi didn’t recognize, Calida thrust the needle through the plump pad of her own thumb, not through the nail but behind it. The crown with its eye protruded from one side of the thumb, the gleaming point from the other, and about a third of the shank could not be seen because it was buried in the flesh.

“Why the hell did you do that?” Bibi demanded as blood oozed from the entrance and exit wounds and dripped onto the cotton cloth.

Calida spoke a few more words in the arcane language and then, through clenched teeth, hissed in distress before answering: “Your skepticism prevents you from being involved enough for this to work. So I have to be more intently focused to compensate for your doubt. Nothing focuses the mind quite like pain.”

“This is nuts.”

“If you keep up your useless commentary,” the diviner warned, “I’ll have to put a second needle through the meat of my palm.”

“Not if we stop this right now.” Bibi pushed her chair back from the table.

Calida grimaced. “We’ve begun the session. We must complete it, close the door I’ve opened. Or those psychic shock waves I mentioned earlier won’t stop. They’re a beacon. An irresistible summons. You’ll have visitors you do not want.”

Bibi’s skepticism wasn’t absolute. The piercing needle and the blood argued for Calida’s sincerity, if not for her sanity. After a hesitation, Bibi sat. She pulled her chair closer to the table.

Her mother and father had not become strangers to her because of their interest in divination and this bizarre gift. The fullness of her love hadn’t diminished whatsoever. Her comfortable image of them, however, was evidently an inadequate likeness, and her long-held assumptions about their interior lives now seemed deficient, immature, if not naïve.

Stirring her right hand through the wooden tiles in the silver bowl, Calida seemed to speak to an invisible presence. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” To Bibi, she said, “How many letters should I draw?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“You’ve got to participate, girl.
How many letters?
”

Bibi looked at the kitchen window above the sink and was only somewhat relieved to see that indeed it had been locked. “Eleven,” she said, though she had no reason why that number and not another. “Eleven letters.”