For a moment, Heather thinks she sees two dark-haired slim figures standing on the far side of the basement, but when she looks more closely they’re only a baglady and Geordie’s friend Tanya, talking.
For a moment, she thinks she hears the sound of wings, but it’s only the murmur of conversation. Probably.
What she knows for sure is that the grey landscape inside her chest is shrinking a little more, every day.
“Thank you,” she says.
She isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Jilly or to crow girls she’s only ever seen once, but whose presence keeps echoing through her life. Her new life. It isn’t necessarily a better one. Not yet. But at least it’s on the way up from wherever she’d been going, not down into a darker despair.
“Here,” Jilly says. “Let me help you put them on.”
Wild Horses
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
—Ovid
1
The horses run the empty length of the lake shore, strung out like a long ragged necklace, perfect in their beauty. They run wild. They run like whitecaps in choppy water, their unshod hooves kicking up sand and spray. The muffled sound of their galloping is a rough music, pure rhythm. Palominos. Six, seven . . . maybe a dozen of them. Their white manes and tails flash, golden coats catch the sunlight and hold it under the skin the way mine holds a drug.
The city is gone. Except for me, transfixed by the sight of them, gaze snared by the powerful motion of their muscles propelling them forward, the city is gone, skyline and dirty streets and dealers and the horse that comes in a needle instead of running free along a beach. All gone.
And for a moment, I’m free, too.
I run after them, but they’re too fast for me, these wild horses, can’t be tamed, can’t be caught. I run until I’m out of breath and stumble and fall and when I come to, I’m lying under the overpass where the freeway cuts through Squatland, my works lying on my coat beside me, empty now. I look out across a landscape of sad tenements and long-abandoned factories and the only thing I can think is, I need another hit to take me back. Another hit, and this time I’ll catch up to them.
I know I will. I have to.
There’s nothing for me here.
But the drugs don’t take me anywhere.
2
Cassie watched the young woman approach. She was something, sleek and pretty, newly shed of her baby fat. Nineteen, maybe; twenty-one, twenty-two, tops. Wearing an old sweater, raggedy jeans and sneakers—nothing fancy, but she looked like a million dollars. Bottle that up, Cassie thought, along with the long spill of her dark curly hair, the fresh-faced, perfect complexion, and you’d be on easy street. Only the eyes hinted at what must have brought her here, the lost, hopeful look in their dark depths. Something haunted her. You didn’t need the cards to tell you that.
She was out of place—not a tourist, not part of the bohemian coterie of fortune-tellers, buskers, and craftspeople who were set up along this section of the Pier either. Cassie tracked her gaze as it went from one card table to the next, past the palmist, the other card readers, the Gypsy, the lovely Scottish boy with his Weirdin discs, watched until that gaze met her own and the woman started to walk across the boards, aimed straight for her.
Somebody was playing a harp, over by one of the weavers’ tables. A sweet melody, like a lullaby, rose above the conversation around the tables and the sound of the water lapping against the wooden footings below. It made no obvious impression on the approaching woman, but Cassie took the music in, letting it swell inside her, a piece of beauty stolen from the heart of commerce. The open-air market and sideshow that sprawled along this section of the Pier might look alternative, but it was still about money. The harper was out to make a buck, and so was Cassie.
She had her small collapsible table set up with a stool for her on one side, its twin directly across the table for a customer. A tablecloth was spread over the table, hand-embroidered with ornate hermetic designs. On top of the cloth, a small brass change bowl and her cards, wrapped in silk and boxed in teak.
The woman stood behind the vacant stool, hesitating before she finally sat down. She pulled her knapsack from her back and held it on her lap, arms hugging it close to her chest. The smile she gave Cassie was uncertain.
Cassie gave her a friendly smile back. “No reason to be nervous, girl. We’re all friends here. What’s your name?”
“Laura.”
“And I’m Cassandra. Now what sort of a reading were you looking for?”
Laura reached out her hand, not quite touching the box with its cards. “Are they real?” she asked.
“How do you mean, real?”
“Magic. Can you work magic with them?”
“Well, now. . .”
Cassie didn’t like to lie, but there was magic and there was magic. One lay in the heart of the world and was as much a natural part of how things were as it was deep mystery. The other was the thing people were looking for to solve their problems with and it never quite worked the way they felt it should.
“Magic’s all about perception,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?”
Laura shook her head. She’d drawn her hand back from the cards and was hugging her knapsack again. Cassie picked up the wooden box and put it to one side. From the inside pocket of her matador’s jacket, she pulled out another set of cards. These ones were tattered around the edges, held together by an elastic band. When she placed them on the tablecloth, the woman’s gaze went to the top card and was immediately caught by the curious image on it. The card showed the same open-air market they were sitting in, the crowds of tourists and vendors, the Pier, the lake behind.
“Those . . . are those regular cards?” Laura asked.
“Do I look like a regular reader?”
The question was academic. Cassie didn’t look like a regular anything, not even on the Pier. She was in her early thirties, a dark-eyed woman with coffee-colored skin and hair that hung in a hundred tiny beaded braids. Today she wore tight purple jeans and yellow combat boots; under her black matador’s jacket was a white T-shirt with the words DON’T! BUY! THAI! emblazoned on it. Her ears were festooned with studs, dangling earrings, and simple hoops. On each wrist she had a dozen or so plastic bracelets in a rainbow palette of Day-Glo colors.
“I guess not,” the woman said. She leaned a little closer. “What does your T-shirt mean? I’ve seen that slogan all over town, on T-shirts, spray-painted on walls, but I don’t know what it means.”
“It’s a boycott to try to stop the child-sex industry in Thailand.”
“Are you collecting signatures for a petition or something?”
Cassie shook her head. “You just do like the words say. Check out what you’re buying and if it’s made in Thailand, don’t buy it and explain why.”
“Do you really think it’ll help?”
“Well, it’s like magic,” Cassie said, bringing the conversation back to what she knew Laura really wanted to talk about. “And like I said, magic’s about perception, that’s all. It means anything is possible. It means taking the way we usually look at a thing and making people see it differently. Or, depending on your viewpoint, making them see it properly for the first time.”
“But—”
“For instance, I could be a crow, sitting on this stool talking to you, but I’ve convinced everybody here that I’m Cassandra Washington, card reader, so that’s what you all see.”
Laura gave her an uneasy look that Cassie had no trouble reading: Pretty sure she was being put on, but not entirely sure.
Cassie smiled. “The operative word here is could. But that’s how magic works. It’s all about how we perceive things to be. A good magician can make anything seem possible and pretty soon you’ve got seven-league boots and people turning invisible or changing into wolves or flying—all sorts of fun stuff.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
>
“Oh, yeah. Now fortune-telling—that’s all about perception, too, except it’s looking inside yourself. It works best with a ritual because that allows you to concentrate better—same reason religion and church works so well for some people. Makes them all pay attention and focus and the next thing you know they’re either looking inside themselves and working out their problems, or making a piece of magic.”
She picked up the cards and removed the elastic band. Shuffled them. “Think of these as a mirror. Pay enough attention to them and they’ll lay out a pattern that’ll take you deep inside yourself.”
Laura appeared disappointed. But they always did, when it was put out in front of them like this. They thought you’d pulled back the curtain and shown the Wizard of Oz, working all the levers of his machine, not realizing that you’d let them into a deeper piece of magic than something they might buy for a few dollars in a place like the Pier.
“I. . . I thought it might be different,” Laura said.
“You wanted it all laid out for you, simple, right? Do this, and this’ll happen. Do this, and it’ll go like this. Like reading the sun signs in the newspaper, except personal.”
Laura shook her head. “It wasn’t about me. It was about my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“I was hoping you could, you know, use your cards to tell me where he is.”
Cassie stopped shuffling her pack and laid it face down on the table.
“Your brother’s missing?” she said.
Laura nodded. “It’s been two years now.”
Cassie was willing to give people a show, willing to give them more than what they were asking for, sometimes, or rather what they were really asking for but weren’t articulating, but she wasn’t in the business of selling false hopes or pretences. Some people could do it, but not her. Not and sleep at night.
“Laura,” she said. “Girl. You’ve come to the wrong place. You want to talk to the police. They’re the ones who deal with missing persons.”
And you’ll have wanted to talk to them a lot sooner than now, she thought, but she left that unsaid.
“I did,” Laura told her.
Cassie waited. “And what?” she asked finally. “They told you to come here?”
“No. Of course not. They—a Sergeant Riley. He’s been really nice, but I guess there’s not much they can do. They say it’s been so long and the city’s so big and Dan could have moved away months ago. . . .”
Her eyes filled with tears and voice trailed off. She swallowed, tried again.
“I brought everything I could think of,” she said, holding up her knapsack for a moment before clutching it tightly to her chest again. “Pictures. His dental records. The last couple of postcards I got from him. I. . .” She had to swallow again. “They have all these pictures of. . . of unidentified bodies and I. . . I had to look at them all. And they sent off copies of the stuff I brought—sent it off all over the country, but it’s been over a month and I know Dan’s not dead. . . .”
She looked up, her eyes still shiny with unshed tears. Cassie nodded sympathetically.
“Can I see one of the pictures?” she said.
A college-aged boy looked back at her from the small snapshot Laura took out of her knapsack. Not handsome, but there was a lot of character in his features. Short brown hair, high cheek bones, strong jawline. Something in his eyes reflected the same mix of loss and hopefulness that was now in his sister’s. What had he been looking for?
“You say he’s been missing for two years?” Cassie asked.
Laura nodded. Showing the picture seemed to have helped steady her.
“Your parents didn’t try to find him?”
“They never really got along. It’s—I don’t know why. They were always fighting, arguing. He left the house when he was sixteen—as soon as he could get out. We live—we lived just outside of Boston. He moved into Cambridge, then maybe four years ago, he moved out here. When I was in college he’d call me sometimes and always send me postcards.”
Cassie waited. “And then he stopped?” she said finally.
“Two years ago. That’s when I got the last card. I saw him a couple of months before that.”
“Do you get along with your parents?”
“They’ve always treated me just the opposite from how they treated him. Dan couldn’t do anything right and I can’t do anything wrong.”
“Why did you wait so long?”
“I. . .” Her features fell. “I just kept expecting to hear from him. I was finishing up my master’s and working part-time at a restaurant and . . . I don’t know. I was just so busy and I didn’t realize how long it had really been until all of a sudden two years have gone by since he wrote.”
She kept looking at the table as she spoke, glancing up as though to make sure Cassie was still listening, then back down again. When she looked up now, she straightened her back.
“I guess it was pretty crazy of me to think you could help,” she said.
No, Cassie thought. More like a little sad. But she understood need and how it could make you consider avenues you’d never normally take a walk down.
“Didn’t say I wouldn’t try,” she told Laura. “What do you know about what he was doing here?”
“The last time I saw him, all he could talk about were these horses, wild horses running along the shore of the lake.”
Cassie nodded encouragingly when Laura’s voice trailed off once more.
“But there aren’t any, are there?” Laura said. “It’s all. . .” She waved her hand, encompassing the Pier, the big hotels, the Williamson Street Mall further up the beach. “It’s all like this.”
“Pretty much. A little further west there’s the Beaches, but that’s all private waterfront and pretty upscale. And even if someone would let him onto their land, I’ve never heard of any wild horses out there.”
Laura nodded. “I showed his picture around at the racetrack and every riding stable I could find listed in the Yellow Pages, but no one recognized him.”
“Anything else?” Cassie asked.
She hesitated for a long moment before replying. “I think he was getting into drugs again.” Her gaze lifted from the card table to meet Cassie’s. “He was pretty bad off for a few years, right after he got out of the house, but he’d cleaned up his act before he moved out here.”
“What makes you think he got back into them?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling—the last time I saw him. The way he was all fidgety again, something in his eyes. . . .”
Maybe that was what she’d seen in his picture, Cassie thought. That need in his eyes.
“What kind of drugs?” she asked.
“Heroin.”
“A different kind of horse.”
Laura sighed. “That’s what Sergeant Riley said.”
Cassie tapped a fingernail, painted the same purple as her jeans, on the pack of cards that lay between them.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“The Y. It’s all I can afford. I’m getting kind of low on money and I haven’t had much luck getting a job.”
Cassie nodded. “Leave me that picture,” she said. “I’ll ask around for you, see what I can find out.”
“But. . .”
She was looking at the cards. Cassie laid her hand over them and shook her head.
“Let me do this my way,” Cassie said. “You know the pay phone by the front desk? I’ll give you a call there tomorrow, around three, say, and then we can talk some more.”
She put out her hand and Laura looked confused.
“Um,” she began. “How much do you want?”
Cassie smiled. “The picture, girl. I’ll do the looking as a favor.”
“But I’m putting you to so much trouble—”
“I’ve been where you are,” Cassie said. “If you want to pay me back, do a good turn for someone else.”
“Oh.”
She didn’t seem either confiden
t or happy with the arrangement, but she left the picture and stood up. Cassie watched her make her way back through the other vendors, then slowly turned over three cards from the top of the deck. The first showed a set of works lying on worn blue denim. A jacket, Cassie decided. The second had a picture of an overpass in the Tombs. The last showed a long length of beach, empty except for a small herd of palominos cantering down the wet sand. In the background, out in the water, was the familiar shape of Wolf Island, outlined against the horizon.
Cassie lifted her head and turned to look at the lake. Beyond the end of the Pier she could see Wolf Island, the ferry on a return trip, halfway between the island and the mainland. The image on her card didn’t show the city, didn’t show docking facilities on the island, the museum and gift shop that used to be somebody’s summer place. The image on her card was of another time, before the city got here. Or of another place that you could only reach with your imagination.
Or with magic.
3
Cassie and Joe had made arrangements to meet at The Rusty Lion that night. He’d been sitting outside on the patio waiting for her when she arrived, a handsome Native man in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, long black braid hanging down his back, a look in his dark eyes that was usually half solemn, half tomfool Trickster. Right now it was concerned.
“You don’t look so good,” he said as she sat down.
She tried to make a joke of it. “People ask me why I stay with you,” she said, “and I always tell them, you just know how to make a girl feel special.”
But Joe would have none of it.
“You’ve got trouble,” he told her, “and that means we have trouble. Tell me about it.”
So she did.
Joe knew why she was helping this woman she’d never seen before. That was one of the reasons it was so good between them: Lots of things didn’t need to be explained, they were simply understood.
“ ’Course you found Angie too late,” he said.