Then I tousled my hair to look more intuitive, straightened my peasant blouse, tucked the book under my arm, and ran out to the main room. Not quite clockwork: I was thirty-seven seconds late. Susan Burke was waiting; she shook my hand with a nervous, birdy up and down, and the repetitive motion made me wince. I dropped my book and we banged heads picking it up. Definitely not what you want from your psychic: a Three Stooges bit.
I motioned her to a seat. I put on my wise voice and asked her why she was here. That’s the easiest way to tell people what they want: Ask them what they want.
Susan Burke was silent for a few beats. Then: “My life is falling apart,” she murmured. She was extremely pretty but so wary and nervous you didn’t realize she was pretty until you looked hard at her. Looked past the glasses to the bright blue eyes. Imagined the dull blond hair de-stringed. She was clearly rich. Her handbag was too plain to be anything but incredibly expensive. Her dress was mousy but well made. In fact, it could be the dress wasn’t mousy—she just wore it that way. Smart but not creative, I thought. Conformist. Lives in fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Lacks confidence. Probably browbeaten by her parents, and now browbeaten by her husband. Husband has temper—her whole goal each day is to get to the end without a blowup. Sad. She’ll be one of the sad ones.
Susan Burke began sobbing then. She sobbed for a minute and a half. I was going to give her two minutes before I interrupted, but she stopped on her own.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said. She pulled a pastel handkerchief from her bag but didn’t use it. “This is crazy. It just keeps getting worse.”
I gave her my best there, there without touching her. “What’s going on in your life?”
She wiped her eyes and stared at me a beat. Blinked. “Don’t you know?”
Then she gave me a smile. Sense of humor. Unexpected.
“So how do we do this?” she asked, tucking herself in again. She massaged a spot near the nape of her neck. “How does this work?”
“I’m a psychological intuitive,” I began. “Do you know what that means?”
“You can read people well.”
“Yes, to a degree, but my powers are much stronger than just a hunch. All my senses play a part. I can feel vibrations coming off people. I can see auras. I can smell despair, or dishonesty, or depression. It’s a gift I’ve had since I was a small child. My mother was a deeply depressed, unbalanced woman. A dark blue haze followed her. When she was near me, my skin plinked—like someone was playing a piano—and she smelled of despair, which presents itself to me as the scent of bread.”
“Bread?” she said.
“That was just her scent, of a desperate soul.” I needed to pick a new eau de sad girl. Not dying leaves, too obvious, but something earthy. Mushrooms? No, inelegant.
“Bread, that is so strange,” she said.
People usually asked what their scent or aura was. It was their first step to committing to the game. Susan shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But … I think this isn’t for me.”
I waited her out. Empathetic silence is one of the most underused weapons in the world.
“OK,” Susan said. She tucked her hair behind both ears—thick diamond-scattered wedding bands flashing like the Milky Way—and looked ten years younger. I could picture her as a kid, a bookworm maybe, pretty but shy. Demanding parents. Straight As, always. “So what do you read off me?”
“There’s something going on in your house.”
“I already told you that.” I could feel the desperation coming off her: to believe in me.
“No, you told me your life was falling apart. I’m saying it’s something to do with your house. You have a husband, I sense a lot of discord: I see you surrounded by a sick green, like an egg yolk gone bad. Swirls of a healthy vibrant turquoise on the outer edges. That tells me you had something good and it went very bad. Yes?”
Obviously this was an easy guess, but I liked my color arrangement; it felt right.
She glared at me. I was hitting on something close to the bone.
“I feel the same vibrations off you as my mother: those sharp, high piano plinks. You’re desperate, you’re in exquisite pain. You’re not sleeping.”
The mention of insomnia was always risky but usually paid off. People in pain don’t generally sleep well. Insomniacs are exquisitely grateful for people to recognize their weariness.
“No, no, I sleep eight hours,” Susan said.
“It’s not a genuine sleep. You have unsettling dreams. Maybe not nightmares, maybe you don’t even remember them, but you wake up feeling worn, achy.”
See, you can rescue most bad guesses. This woman was in her forties; people in their forties usually wake up feeling achy. I know that from commercials.
“You store the anxiety in your neck,” I continued. “Also, you smell of peonies. A child. You have a child?”
If she didn’t have a child, then I just say, “But you want one.” And she can deny it—I’ve never, ever even thought about having kids—and I can insist, and pretty soon she leaves thinking it because very few women decide not to procreate without some doubts. It’s an easy thought to seed. Except this one’s smart.
“Yes. Well, two. A son and a stepson.”
Stepson, go with the stepson.
“Something is wrong in your house. Is it your stepson?”
She stood up, fumbled through her well-constructed bag.
“How much do I owe you?”
I got one thing wrong. I thought I’d never see her again. But four days later Susan Burke was back. (“Can things have auras?” she asked. “Like, objects. Or a house?”) And then three days later (“Do you believe in evil spirits? Is there such a thing, do you think?”) and then the next day.
I was right about her, mostly. Overbearing, demanding parents, straight As, Ivy League, a degree that had something to do with business. I asked her the question: What do you do? She explained and explained about downsizing and restructuring and client intersects, and when I frowned, she got impatient and said, “I define and eliminate problems.” Things with her husband were OK except when it came to the stepson. The Burkes had moved into the city the year before, and that’s when the kid went from troubled to troubling.
“Miles was never a sweet boy,” she said. “I’m the only mom he’s known—I’ve been with his dad since he was six. But he’s always been cold. Introverted. He’s just empty. I hate myself for saying that. I mean, introverted is fine. But in the past year, since the move … he’s changed. Become more aggressive. He’s so angry. So dark. Threatening. He scares me.”
The kid was fifteen, and had just been forcibly relocated from the suburbs into the city where he didn’t know anyone, and he was already an awkward, nerdy kid. Of course he was angry. That would have been helpful, my saying that, but I didn’t. I seized an opportunity.
I’d been trying to move into the domestic aura-cleansing business. Basically when someone moves into a new home, they call you. You wander around the house burning sage and sprinkling salt and murmuring a lot. Fresh start, wipe away any lingering bad energy from previous owners. Now that people were moving back into the heart of the city, into all the old historic houses, it seemed like a boom industry waiting to happen. A hundred-year-old house, that’s a lot of leftover vibes.