Ashley Bell

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.”

34 (#ulink_b082d132-3af4-50fa-a1d5-179a1c0bd069)

The I of the Needle (#ulink_b082d132-3af4-50fa-a1d5-179a1c0bd069)

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