“You are ambitious,” she began. “Over-ambitious, actually, and need to curb that tendency, as you are inclined to overreach. I see great intelligence, but this is a difficult chart. You are used to it, but it would break a lesser man.”
“I consider myself strong,” I allowed.
“Scorpio Moon. Moon on the ascendant. Twelfth House Moon. Twelfth House Neptune. Pluto in Leo on the Midheaven. All powerful psychic indicators. You are in the correct profession.”
“I hope so.”
“I see an ocean voyage in your future, Mr. Shaner.”
I started slightly. Thom had seen that too. It wasn’t unusual for confirmatory information to surface astrologically after it had been picked up by other psychic means. In fact, it was more the rule than the exception.
“I have nothing planned,” I told her.
“I see you being impressed.”
“About what?”
“In reference to the ocean voyage,” she said thinly. “It is a long one. And quite challenging for you. Like nothing you have ever experienced.”
“Can you see where I’m going?”
“Asia. Have you ever desired to see the Orient?”
She was getting too close.
“Never. Furthest thing from my mind, in fact.”
She pursed her lips. I expected more, but she eased off into another subject. “Venus in Aries. You do not remain in love for very long, and I fear you may never marry.”
I let out my breath, realizing for the first time it was as pentup as if I were awaiting a judge’s verdict.
The reading told me little about myself that I didn’t already know. She wrapped it up by saying, “I see that you will remain in my employ for a very long time, and you will be a very agreeable servant of this enterprise.”
I smiled as sincerely as possible. That part was probably employer-employee encouragement, and not predictive. At least, I trusted not. The only way I would stay with Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room was if she bequeathed it to me. And I wasn’t getting that. I wasn’t getting that at all.
November was unusually brisk, business-wise. I found myself working six days a week. By this time, I had all but abandoned my cards. When I read clients, I read their tea leaves. And I read them superlatively. Some days it got so hectic, Miss Theresa would stir from her second-floor aerie and read clients as well. If required to read cards, she used ordinary playing cards. You have to be very good to do that. There’s not much help in a fifty-two-card Bicycle deck.
“Why are we so busy lately?” I asked Starla one day.
“Kingsport society knows we’re shut tight between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. They’re getting their New Year’s readings early.”
“What does the crew do during December?” I wondered.
“I go to West Palm Beach. There’s a New Age bookshop down there where I do progressed charts. I make almost as much money in December as I do the rest of the year here.”
“There’s a lot of money down there,” I admitted. “Where does Miss Theresa winter?”
“I really don’t know.” Her voice turned tight and bloodless, like a constricted artery.
“I’m getting a weird vibe from you,” I prompted.
Starla hesitated. If she hadn’t been so fried from doing too many readings, she might not have given me anything. But her guard was down. “One year I came back from Florida a week early,” she said, her voice growing furtive and whispery. “I took a walk, thinking I’d drop in on Miss T.” She looked around.
“And?”
She whispered it: “The tea room wasn’t here.”
I looked at her. Starla had been a practicing astrologer so long she could tell a person’s sun sign at a glance. If you asked her the planetary positions on a given day, she invariably rattled them off from memory. Consequently, she walked around in a state of perpetual Alpha spaceyness. She had surrendered to the timeless flow in return for the powers granted. I didn’t know whether or not to believe her.
“What do you mean—‘wasn’t there?’” I asked.
“There was just a wet cellar hole. I thought Theresa’s had been blown out to sea in a storm, and I was out of a job. But a week later Miss T. called me in. When I showed up, this place was sitting right here, where it always was.”
“Maybe Miss Theresa went to Florida, and took her house with her,” I joked. It fell flat.
Starla’s voice was thin as glass now. “I saw what I saw,” she insisted. “I told no one.”
“Wouldn’t someone have noticed a missing house and reported it?”
“Down here in this lonely back end of Kingsport?” she countered. A shudder seized her.
Starla had a point. The tea room stood on what was once called Terrill’s Neck, an isolated finger of sand and eel grass sheltered from view of land. No other dwellings were built within sight. No one ventured down Nightjar Lane except to have their fortune told.
“Interesting yarn,” I said, mentally classifying it with Thom’s ghost Clipper. But I got one useful nugget out of it: Miss Terrill wintered outside of Kingsport. This would fit into my plans— how I did not yet know.
I started to see the old salt hanging around the tea room the week before Thanksgiving. I found him loitering in the cellar one night as I replaced the remainder of the day’s tea. He was dressed like an Innsmouth lobsterman, his muscle-knotted face resembling a raw steak garnished with cold clam-gray eyes.
“Who are you?” I blurted out.
“Mind yer business,” he growled. He was horsing the empty tea chests from their pallets to the old disused coal bin. I had the feeling he intended to pull them up the chute with the ropes that lay about the dirt floor in confused coils.
I rushed upstairs to report the apparition to Miss Theresa.
“That’s old Cap’n Terrill,” she said. “Leave him be, and he will return the favor.”
“Relative of yours?”
“Every Kingsport Terrill is related to my family, distantly or otherwise.” The silence that followed told me I was dismissed.
Business was brisk that day. I saw little of Cap’n Terrill, and thought no more of him.
I was reading at Libra when a light dusting of snow swirling outside the window caught my gaze. Two readings later, the dusting was a thick pall.
Dorinda grabbed me as I was collecting a five-dollar tip from a matron who came in needlessly worried about a neck tumor. I had pronounced it as nonmalignant.
“We’re closing early,” she undertoned. “Nor’easter coming. I’ve locked the front door. Your next reading is your last.”
I took the slip, thinking: I’ve been waiting for opportunity. Here it is knocking.
The reading was difficult. Excitement made my mind race, and I kept popping out of Alpha. The tea leaves did most of the work anyway. I felt like the prop, instead of vice versa. Such is the potency of Kingsport tea.
“I see a bird on wing,” I told the woman. “A flight to warmer climes, perhaps?”
“I always winter in the Caribbean,” she said. She had that sun-bleached blonde look so many upperclass Kingsport women had.
I warned of her spousal infidelities, but she brushed that concern away. Obviously she had married for money. She didn’t seem to have any vital issues, so I told her she would outlive her husband. That brought a bloodless smile to her lips. She tipped me a twenty, and hurried out the door into the teeth of a gathering gale of sleety snow.
Dorinda locked the door after her, and the tea room stood in silence. It was the end of the season. And it had come like a stealthy thief.
We gathered in the kitchen. Miss Theresa came bustling down, looking fretful and impatient.