Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday

Suki had travelled all over the world and she collected things on her travels. Not the sort of knick-knacks other people might collect. No, Suki collected amulets and precious stones, talismans from other cultures. Tiny jade buddhas, a little brass goddess she’d picked up in the Far East that somebody said had come from Bhutan. ‘It’s the goddess of hope and fertility,’ she’d been told. She wasn’t sure she needed the fertility, but the hope, she certainly needed that.

From trips to South America she had pre-Columbian gold-plated amulets. ‘Show me the feminine ones, the ones for female gods,’ she’d told the guy in the shop selling them. He looked surprised, maybe no one else had ever asked him this question. Usually tourists wanted the colourful lizards and the strange-shaped men who looked as if they were dancing to some unseen music. But Suki wanted something specific, something for joy.

There was no joy.

‘This one—’ Suki said, pointing to something that looked like a heart with beautiful scrolls on top of it.

‘This is for long life,’ said the man.

‘I’ll take it,’ said Suki.

From Canada she had beautiful Inuit dreamcatchers, with tiny shell wolves carved on them and dangling feathers; from the Native American reservation near Four Corners in the US, she had beautiful turquoise necklaces and bracelets on leather thongs.

And when she wasn’t shopping for her amulets on her travels, she was trawling for psychics. Stopping in some rural town on a book tour, she would ask any locals she met – the concierge, the maid doing her room, the staff in the bookshop – if they knew of anybody. The men were often startled by such requests, the women less so. Women understood the need to find out what the world had planned for them. To find out if it would all work out OK, if you would live long and be happy – which sounded like something Captain Kirk might say.

At the coffee shop she went to some days when she was visiting the other side of Falmouth, where the good bookshop was, Suki had seen a sign for a new psychic. It was a plain notice, nothing fancy, not even well written. A travelling woman, Suki suspected, in the trailer park, far out of town. Definitely the wrong side of the tracks. Suki always felt at home in trailer parks. She’d gone out with a guy once who’d come from a trailer park; he’d felt the difference between them was a chasm, but it hadn’t seemed that way to Suki.

‘I spent a lot of time in the trailer park in my home town,’ she told him. ‘Cabana-Land.’ She said it the way she’d always said it, like it was slightly dangerous, because it had been. For sixteen-year-old Suki Power, daughter of Avalon House, Cabana-Land definitely spelled danger, but she’d managed to sidestep trouble many times.

‘You just like roughing it, you rich broad,’ the guy had said, and he’d dumped her, his pride seriously dented. And that made Suki feel ugly and unloved. If her allure wasn’t able to overcome his basic insecurity, then she must definitely be losing it.

The trailer park on the outskirts of Falmouth, Massachusetts was the sedate sort of affair one would have expected: hidden behind lots of trees, screened off from the highway. When Suki had phoned to ask for directions, a young man answered, perhaps the son of the woman. The directions were pretty simple: second row, the trailer at the end, on the right-hand side. At least these days her car wasn’t the sort to attract attention. She drove a subcompact, an old one at that. Nobody would look twice at it. And when she pulled up outside the psychic’s trailer, which boasted a red Thunderbird no less, her car blended in nicely.

The door of the caravan was opened by a teenage boy, the voice on the phone.

‘Mom’s in the back,’ he said, before moving past her to go outside.

Suki had often wondered why so many psychics and fortune tellers were poor when they theoretically had a gift that could have made them rich. If only they could predict which horse would win a race or which lottery numbers would come up. She’d been told that it didn’t work that way; those who had the gift of sight couldn’t use it for themselves, only for other people. And if you managed to make enough money doing that, great.

This woman was probably Suki’s age, though she looked older. A bad dye job had turned part of her hair rich red, the roots greying. The woman looked at Suki, taking in her face and her clothes. Suki had instinctively dressed down. She didn’t want to be the femme fatale today or wear any of her designer clothes, things she’d bought a long time ago. People in trailer parks might not be able to afford Michael Kors originals or Donna Karan dresses, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t recognize them.

Suki fingered her pre-Columbian necklace with the talisman for long life.

‘Sit down, please,’ said the woman.

They were in the living-room part of the trailer, all veneer wood, plaid cushions. There were no crystal balls around. Although the woman had very old and well-used tarot cards to one side, she didn’t touch them.

‘It’s a hundred and ten dollars for a reading,’ she said to Suki.

‘Fine,’ said Suki, and passed the money over.

‘When was your last reading?’ the woman asked her.

‘I can’t remember,’ Suki said truthfully. She genuinely didn’t know. When she’d left Jethro, she’d been to see so many people: angelologists, fortune tellers, psychics, shamans … Once, she’d got her hopes up over a woman who was supposed to be ‘am-aa-zing’, in LA parlance. It turned out the woman worked out of a small premises on Hollywood Boulevard, wore a pink fur wrap and cowboy boots with rhinestone jeans. The day Suki turned up, the psychic was clearly out of her mind on drugs.

‘Wow, you’re kinda blue today. Blue haze around you. I like it,’ the woman had slurred. ‘Do you like it?’

At the time Suki was so desperate to make sense of it all, desperate to know when the pain would go, that she’d almost stayed. But she realized that a woman who was obviously hallucinating might not give her what she wanted: clarity about the future. That she had a blue haze around her was not exactly the kind of insight she’d been looking for.

‘I’d guess it’s been at least a year since I’ve seen anyone else,’ she said now.

‘You have an addiction,’ the woman said bluntly.

Suki stared at her, thinking of the years with Jethro and the drugs. There had been lots of drugs. Suki wasn’t entirely sure what they’d all been, because it seemed so un-rock’n’roll to ask. She’d swallowed all kinds of little tablets and, well, who knew what the heck they were, they just kept coming, along with lines of coke and vast hash cigarettes fat as cigars. But she’d been able to give them up. Had given them up the day she finally regained some of her pride. The day she’d walked out of the beautiful hotel in Memphis with nothing but a collection of suitcases to show for two years of her life, and nobody to help her into a cab, apart from a disinterested concierge who’d clearly seen many dishevelled women leaving in the wake of rock bands.

‘No,’ the woman said, ‘not drugs, not drink – men. Powerful men, that’s your drug.’

Suki stared at her, astonished. Nobody had ever said this to her before. The woman was clearly as crazy as the girl in the pink fur wrap. It didn’t make any sense.

‘You didn’t come for fancy language, did you?’ the woman asked.

‘I came to see if I could finish my book, get some money and get my life back on track,’ Suki blurted out without meaning to. She tried not to tell them anything: that way, you could tell pretty easily if they were genuinely psychic or merely clever mentalists.

‘You will,’ the woman said thoughtfully, ‘but not in the way you expect it to happen. You have to face your demons first. You try to pay them off with jewellery,’ she gestured at the amulet and instinctively Suki grabbed it. ‘That will only work when your spirit is well. There are two wolves inside you. The wolf who leads you to pain, and the wolf who leads you to happiness. Which wolf will prosper?’ The woman smiled as if this was a story she had told a hundred times before. ‘The wolf you feed.’

‘But how can I do it?’ Suki asked, feeling desperation rise. This wasn’t going the way she’d expected at all. She wanted to hear that it was going to be all right, that she was strong enough, that she would find success, and maybe a little bit of self-respect and possibly some fame and money. Damnit, she wanted money because she hated being poor, she’d been poor too long. And now it was back again, gnawing away at her insides the way few pains ever could. She didn’t want to shrivel into old age in poverty, she knew what that would mean. Going home to Avalon at best, ekeing out an existence on State benefits, thinking of what could have been.

‘I can see lots of futures for you,’ the woman said, ‘but you must deal with the spirit inside. Let go of the addiction, and then you can be the woman you want to be. What did you expect to hear? To beware of dark strangers? Always wear the colour green?’

The woman reached for a packet of cigarettes, tapped one out, lit up and inhaled with the practice of a forty-a-day smoker. For once, Suki didn’t feel like a cigarette.

‘You’re not a run-of-the-mill psychic are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m a psychic who can’t follow her own advice,’ the woman said laconically. ‘Look at this place.’ She gestured around her. ‘It’s no palace. Bad men: that’s what I go for every time and it’s brought me nothing but trouble, despite seeing all that I can see. And I can see, sister. But every time you think it’s going to be different, doncha? That’s it,’ said the woman. She motioned with the cigarette hand that it was time for Suki to go.

Suki was at the door of the trailer when the woman spoke again.

‘Oh yeah, you need to call your sister.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Suki anxiously.

Her reply was a shrug. ‘That’s all I saw. Call her.’

Suki left. She didn’t see the teenage boy and she wondered was he the only thing left from a lifetime of bad men. She slammed the door behind her, took out the keys to her car, backed out of the road and sped on the highway back to town.

Ring your sister and Give up powerful men. That was it?

Well, what did you expect for $110?

After twenty-six years of poverty, Suki Power Richardson had loved having money. It wasn’t hers, essentially, it was her husband’s. But she got to use it, to spend it. And spend it she did. She had accounts at all the big stores: Saks, Bloomies, Bergdorf Goodman. She found that she didn’t really like the old rock-chick clothes she’d worn for years, she’d been kidding herself when she said she preferred old jeans and scuffed leather jackets. It turned out that she loved new, elegant clothes made from luxurious fabrics that clung to her hourglass figure in all the right places and cost more than a month’s rent on her old apartment. Her failsafe tight black polyester pants went in the garbage and she bought beautifully cut pants off the rack at Donna Karan, along with marvellously draped jackets, and rabbit-soft knits. Her shoes were Italian, her fair hair was no longer given added oomph with a store-bought highlighting kit applied in a washbasin in her apartment: she went to a chichi hair salon where ordinary joes couldn’t even get an appointment.

Kyle loved to see her spending money on her appearance.

‘You need to look the part, honey,’ he’d say. ‘Daddy always says, “Look the part, son, and they’ll think you are the part.”’

For the first year of their marriage, Suki didn’t care what ‘the part’ was, she was simply pleased to be able to indulge in an orgy of spending. After a childhood of scraping by in draughty old Avalon House, it was like being released from prison and relishing the freedom. She bought art for the walls of the house on D Street, perused antique auctions with a gimlet eye and repainted the hall four times before she’d achieved the right shade of subtle grey. She bought flowers – too many for the house, sometimes. But she didn’t care about the excess: the Richardsons had serious money; nothing she could do could put even the slightest dent in it.

She and Kyle went to charity balls, dinner parties, and Republican party fundraisers where the wives of party bigwigs wore Chanel suits and worked the room. Even Antoinette seemed to be thawing towards her. Suki had been brought up in an important Irish mansion, she was clearly from upper-class stock and she knew how to behave.