“You don’t believe in it?”
“Of course I believe in it, but it does lend itself to some gross oversimplification.” She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. Hers were soft, he noted, and pudgy, but not unpleasantly so. She ran a fingertip over his thumb, his homicidal thumb.
“To take a single anatomical characteristic,” she said, “and fasten such a dramatic name to it. No one’s thumb ever made him kill a fellow human being.”
“Then why do they call it that?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t studied the history of palmistry. I suppose someone spotted the peculiarity in a few notorious murderers and spread the word. I’m not even certain it’s statistically more common among murderers than the general population. I doubt anyone really knows. John, it’s an insignificant phenomenon and not worth noticing.”
“But you noticed it,” he said.
“I happened to see it.”
“And you recognized it. You didn’t say anything until you noticed me hiding it in my fist. That was unconscious, I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
“I see.”
“So it must mean something,” he said, “or why would it stay in your mind?”
She was still holding his hand. Keller had noticed that this was one of the ways a woman let you know she was interested in you. Women touched you a lot in completely innocent ways, on the hand or the arm or the shoulder, or held your hand longer than they had to. If a man did that it was sexual harassment, but it was a woman’s way of letting you know she wouldn’t mind being harassed herself.
But this was different. There was no sexual charge with this woman. If he’d been made of chocolate he might have had something to worry about, but mere flesh and blood was safe in her presence.
“John,” she said gently, “I was looking for it.”
“For…”
“The thumb. Or anything else that might confirm what I already knew about you.”
She was gazing into his eyes as she spoke, and he wondered how much shock registered in them. He tried not to react, but how did you keep what you felt from showing up in your eyes?
“And what’s that, Louise?”
“That I know about you?”
He nodded.
“That your life has been filled with violence, but I think I already mentioned that.”
“You said I was gentle and not full of anger.”
“But you’ve had to kill people, John.”
“Who told you that?” She was no longer holding his hand. Had she released it? Or had he taken it away from her?
“Who told me?”
Maggie, he thought. Who else could it have been? Maggie was the only person they knew in common. But how did Maggie know? In her eyes he was a corporate suburbanite, even if he lived alone in the heart of the city.
“Actually,” she was saying, “I had several informants.”
His heart was hammering. What was she saying? How could it be true?
“Let me see, John. There was Saturn, and Mars, and we don’t want to forget Mercury.” Her tone was soft, her gaze so gentle. “John,” she said, “it’s in your chart.”
“My chart.”
“I picked up on it right away. I got a very strong hit while I was working on your chart, and when you rang the bell I knew I would be opening the door to a man who had done a great deal of killing.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t cancel the appointment.”
“I considered it. Something told me not to.”
“A little bird?”
“An inner prompting. Or maybe it was curiosity. I wanted to see what you looked like.”
“And?”
“Well, I knew right away I hadn’t made a mistake with your chart.”
“Because of my thumb?”
“No, though it was interesting to have that extra bit of confirmation. And the most revealing thing about your thumb was the effort you made to conceal it. But the vibration I picked up from you was far more revealing than anything about your thumb.”
“The vibration.”
“I don’t know a better way to put it. Sometimes the intuitive part of the mind picks up things the five senses are blind and deaf to. Sometimes a person just knows something.”
“Yes.”
“I knew you were…”
“A killer,” he supplied.
“Well, a man who has killed. And in a very dispassionate way, too. It’s not personal for you, is it, John?”
“Sometimes a personal element comes into it.”
“But not often.”
“No.”
“It’s business.”
“Yes.”
“John? You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
Could she read his mind? He hoped not. Because what came to him now was that he was not afraid of her, but of what he might have to do to her.
And he didn’t want to. She was a nice woman, and he sensed she would be able to tell him things it would be good for him to hear.
“You don’t have to fear that I’ll do anything, or say anything to anyone. You don’t even need to fear my disapproval.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t make many moral judgments, John. The more I see, the less I’m sure I know what’s right and what’s wrong. Once I accepted myself”-she reached, grinning, for a chocolate-“I found it easier to accept other people. Thumbs and all.”
He looked at his thumb, then raised his eyes to meet hers.
“Besides,” she said, very gently, “I think you’ve done wonderfully in life, John.” She tapped his chart. “I know what you started with. I think you’ve turned out just fine.”
He tried to say something, but the words got stuck in his throat.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Go right ahead and cry. Never be ashamed to cry, John. It’s all right.”
And she drew his head to her breast and held him while, astonished, he sobbed his heart out.
Ten
“Well, that’s a first,” he said. “I don’t know what I expected from astrology, but it wasn’t tears.”
“They wanted to come out. You’ve had them stored up for a while, haven’t you?”
“Forever. I was in therapy for a while and never even got choked up.”
“That would have been when? Three years ago?”
“How did you… It’s in my chart?”
“Not therapy per se, but I saw there was a period when you were ready for self-exploration. But I don’t believe you stayed with it for very long.”
“A few months. I got a lot of insight out of it, but in the end I felt I had to put an end to it.”
Dr. Breen, the therapist, had had his own agenda, and it had conflicted seriously with Keller’s. The therapy had ended abruptly, and so, not coincidentally, had Breen.
He wouldn’t let that happen with Louise Carpenter.
“This isn’t therapy,” she told him now, “but it can be a powerful experience. As you just found out.”
“I’ll say. But we must have used up our fifty minutes.” He looked at his watch. “We went way over. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“I told you it’s not therapy, John. We don’t worry about the clock. And I never book more than two clients a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We have all the time we need.”
“Oh.”
“And we need to talk about what you’re going through. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”
Was it?
“I’m afraid the coming twelve months will continue to be difficult,” she went on, “as long as Saturn’s where it is. Difficult and dangerous. But I suppose danger is something you’ve learned to live with.”
“It’s not that dangerous,” he said. “What I do.”
“Really?”
Dangerous to others, he thought. “Not to me,” he said. “Not particularly. There’s always a risk, and you have to keep your guard up, but it’s not as though you have to be on edge all the time.”
“What, John?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You had a thought, it just flashed across your face.”
“I’m surprised you can’t tell me what it was.”
“If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say you thought of something that contradicted the sentence you just spoke. About not having to be on edge all the time.”
“That’s what it was, all right.”
“This would have been fairly recent.”