I was thinking about Sandy, and by extension our apartment in St. Louis, while I said goodbye to Art. We saw him leave with a mutual feeling of relief. Art was kind of proud of having us as clients, as if we were show business people; but at the same time, he wasn't at his easiest or most relaxed when he was alone with us.
After he left, and the staff had removed the lunch things, I asked Tolliver if he thought we could go out for a walk. I still hadn't forgiven Tolliver his huge error in judgment, but I was willing to put it on the back burner until I'd calmed down. A good walk might restore our sense of companionship.
Tolliver was shaking his head before the sentence even got out of my mouth. "We ran this morning in the gym," he reminded me. "I know you don't want to be cooped up in this hotel, but if we go anywhere, someone'll spot us and want a statement."
I called down to the front desk to ask if there were still reporters waiting outside the hotel. The deskman replied that he couldn't be sure, but that he suspected some of the people loitering in the coffee shop across the street were members of the press. I hung up.
"Listen, put on your dark glasses and a hat and we'll go to the movies," he said. He found the complimentary Commercial Appeal we'd gotten that morning and looked up movie times. I found myself looking at my own picture on the front page of the Metro section. I'd only looked at the front section this morning, on purpose. There I was: thin, dark-headed, with big deep-set eyes and an erect posture, arms wrapped across each other under my breasts. I thought the picture made me look quite a bit more than twenty-four and that made me a little shivery. Tolliver, right beside me in the photo, was taller, darker, and more solid.
We both looked desperately troubled. We looked like refugees from middle Europe, refugees who'd fled some kind of persecution, leaving behind all they held of value.
"Want to read it?" Tolliver asked, extending the paper. He knew I didn't like reading the few stories in the press about us, but since I'd been staring at the picture, he offered it to me.
I put out my own hand in a "stop" gesture.
He handed me the movie section instead, and I began scanning the ads. We liked space movies and action movies. We liked movies with happy families. If they got threatened with danger, we liked them to get out of it more or less intact, maybe shooting a couple of bad guys in the process. We didn't like movies about miserable people who became more miserable, no matter how brilliant they were. We didn't like chick flicks. We didn't like foreign movies. I didn't want to go to the movies to learn a damn thing about human nature or the state of the world. I knew as much as I wanted to know about both those things.
There was a movie that fit our profile, which wasn't too surprising, I guess.
I put on a knit cap and my jacket and my dark glasses, and Tolliver bundled up, too. We got the doorman to call a cab instead of bringing our car around. We actually got a silent cab driver, my favorite kind. He could drive well, too, and he got us to the multiplex in time to buy our tickets and walk right in.
I love going to big multiplexes. I love the anonymity, and all the possibilities. I loved the teenagers who kept it clean, in their bright matching shirts and silly hats. Tolliver had had a night job in such a place in Texarkana, and he used to slip me in so I could hide in the darkened theater for a while, forgetting what waited for me at our home.
When the previews started running, I was as content as I could be. We sat together in the dark, passing the popcorn (no butter, light on the salt) back and forth.
We watched our pretty-pathologist-in-danger movie quite happily, knowing that everything would be okay in the end (more or less). We poked each other in the ribs when she was having a lot of trouble determining the cause of death of a very handsome guy. "You could have told her in a second," Tolliver said, in a whisper only someone as close as I could have deciphered. The theater wasn't empty, but there was plenty of room at this weekday afternoon showing. No one was talking out loud, and no child was crying, so it was a good experience.
When the movie was over, the bad guy killed several different ways after we thought he was dead initially, we strolled outside, chatting about the special effects and the probable future of the main characters. That was our favorite game. What would happen to them after the action of the movie was over?
"She'll go back to work, even if she said she wouldn't," I told Tolliver. "Staying at home will be too boring after all that shooting and chasing. After all, she bashed that guy in the head with her iron."
"Nah, I think she'll marry the cop, stay home, and devote herself to making her family supper every single night," Tolliver said. "She'll never order Chinese takeout again. Remember, she tore down the menu that was tacked to the wall by the phone?"
"She'll probably just order pizza instead."
He laughed and fished the receipt from the cab out of his pocket so he could call for another one to take us back to the hotel.
Suddenly, my left arm was seized in a strong grip. To say I got a scare would be a large understatement. I turned to stare at a woman holding me. She was wearing a voluminous coat with a loud plaid pattern. She had dyed red hair pulled up on one side of her head to cascade over to the other side in a waterfall of curls. Her lipstick was not exactly within the lines of her actual lips, and her earrings were huge chandeliers with glittery stones that caught the afternoon sun.
Tolliver had swung around and his free hand was heading for her throat. "I just have to talk to you," she said, in a hurried, abstracted way.
"Hi, Xylda," I said, trying for that calm, level voice you use when you're talking to someone you know is over the edge.
"Xylda," Tolliver said, almost in a growl. He'd been ready for action, and now he had to be tolerant. With more force than necessary, he shoved his phone back into his pocket. "What can we do for you today? How'd you come to be here?"
"You're in such danger," she said. "Such terrible danger. I felt I had to warn you. You're so young, dear. You can't know how terrible this world can be."
Actually, I thought I had a pretty good idea. "Tolliver and I aren't young in experience, Xylda," I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. "Look, there's a restaurant over there. Shall we go have a cup of hot chocolate, or some coffee? Maybe they have tea?"
"That would be good, really good," she said. Xylda was as different from me as she could be: shorter, bulkier, and at least thirty years older. She'd been in the psychic business ever since she'd quit prostitution, which had been her first profession. Xylda's husband, Robert, had been her handler, and his death the year before had thrown Xylda for a real loop. I didn't know how she was going to survive unless someone else took her in hand. She sure didn't look or behave like someone I'd want to employ if I were in the market for a psychic. Then again, maybe I was overestimating the public. Some clients actually believed that Xylda's odd manner and dress reinforced the fact that she was a living, breathing psychic.
I disagreed. I knew that a lot of psychics, both real and fake, were also emotionally unstable or out-and-out mentally ill. If you're born psychic, you're going to pay a price, a high one. It's a terrible gift.
Only two of the psychics I'd met managed to live just like ordinary people, but those two were exceptions. And neither of them was Xylda, of course.
Looking gloomy but resigned, Tolliver led Xylda into the cafe and helped her take her awful coat off. He left to get our drinks, while I settled Xylda in at a little table as far from other patrons as I could manage, given that the coffee shop wasn't a large business. I took a deep breath and tried to fix an understanding smile on my face.
Xylda clutched my hand, and I had to bite my lower lip to keep from yanking it away. Casual touching is not comfortable for me, and she'd already held onto me twice; but I reminded myself that Xylda must have a reason for the deliberate contact. As I knew from her own account at a previous meeting, Xylda was being bombarded with images from me. She'd explained it to me once when she'd been having a good day, back when Robert had been alive. "It's like watching a very fast slide show," she'd said. "I see pictures, pictures of the life of the person I'm touching, some from the past and some from the future and some…" She'd fallen silent and shaken her head.