Foreteller Read online

  “Is there reason to believe it won’t?”

  Farnham tilted his head and squished his face up. “My faith in the system is a little jaded.”

  “Plus, this Corbin Black guy,” Wilkinson added, “he got himself a good lawyer.”

  “The police have already used up time tracking you down,” Farnham said. “Can you give us a blood sample tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “We have a 24-hour lab we work with, just a few blocks from here. It won’t take long.”

  “It’s hardly the time commitment I’m worried about, Detective.”

  “I know. Just trying to make things easy.”

  Zoey snorted, then looked apologetically at the detective. “This was already a heck of a night before you guys showed up. But you’re right, Detective. The giving of blood is easy. They could take hair, skin, and saliva, for all I care.” She stood then, grabbing an old mug to return to the kitchen, desperate to be in control of some small element of her life. “It’s the consequences I’m worried about.”

  Chapter 8

  Detective Farnham’s car found a smooth stretch of road and the ride grew quiet as he drove Zoey home from the lab. She lowered the passenger-side window and let the rushing air hit her in the face. The distant sound of an empty bottle smashing on pavement rang out and she immediately pictured a disheveled drunkard staggering away from the shattered results. The pungent smells of the city then worked their way into the car. A whiff of fresh tar, probably to patch a years-old pothole, blended together with the scent of burnt pretzels from a vendor’s late-night wanderings. The contrast made her queasy, but she didn’t mind.

  Farnham pulled up to the curb alongside Zoey’s building, where only a smattering of lights remained on.

  “I’ll walk you to your apartment,” Detective Farnham said, turning off the car.

  “That’s okay, Detective. I’ve done it a few times before.”

  “Listen, Ms. Kincaid—

  “Please, call me Zoey. After all, you know more about me than I do at this point.”

  He smiled. “I doubt that. You seem like a person who’s about a lot more than a few mysteries from a quarter century ago. And please, call me Farnham.”

  “No first name?”

  “Not one I like. Too much teasing as a kid.”

  Zoey fingered the leather purse on her lap, a bit embarrassed for the detective who seemed unaccustomed to light conversation.

  “Listen,” he continued, “I’m sorry if I didn’t handle our earlier discussion in the best way.”

  “There’s no good way to deliver that news. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  “Guess you’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

  “About more than you know,” she said with a sigh. “Thanks for being so gracious about everything. You’ll be in touch?”

  “Of course.”

  She stepped from the car and gently closed the door behind her.

  “Hey… Zoey,” he called after her.

  She leaned into the still-open window. “Yes… Farnham?”

  “Happy birthday?” He posed it as a question.

  Zoey thought about the answer for a second, then almost smiled as she came to a conclusion. “Okay, yes, happy birthday. I guess things could have gone a lot differently. At least I have a birthday, don’t I?”

  Farnham let the weight of the statement sink in, and he apparently knew better than to attempt a response. He settled for a nod.

  She raised herself up from his window, gave him a small wave, and headed into her building.

  An hour later, Zoey laid down to a fitful night’s sleep, juggling thoughts of her mother’s rape with worries about Jake, the pregnancy, and the mysterious safe deposit box awaiting her in Virginia. She reflected on the idea of yet another secret being revealed, one that her mother had hidden away for over 25 years. She flipped over in frustration, punching her pillow since she couldn’t strike out at the maddening whirl of thoughts upending her life. She’d known so little of her mother; she had no idea what to believe or what to expect from some safe deposit box. Aside from years of virtual silence from Grandma Magda on the subject, there hadn’t even been a stash of Susan Collette’s childhood items around the house. An old piece of artwork, maybe, or an A on an important test, but not much from the teen years or adulthood. It didn’t help that Magda hadn’t been the sentimental type.

  Zoey felt a sudden pang of guilt, so strong that it managed to break through all the other clutter. Here she was, an archaeologist who spent weeks, and sometimes months, uncovering the stories of others, yet she knew almost nothing of her own past. She thought back. Had her own lack of curiosity caused this dearth of information—or had it been Magda’s vague answers and habit of changing the subject whenever Zoey brought it up?

  Live in the present; live for the present. That had been one of Grandma’s go-to sayings, as well as her preferred method for shutting down Zoey’s questions. Kind of a weird response to a curious orphan. Had Zoey always simply accepted that her mother’s head was filled with wacky ideas she couldn’t keep to herself, as Grandma Magda had said, or had Zoey, as a child, never been allowed to confirm it? Maybe the safe deposit box would clear things up. If it contained a bag of marbles or a dead cockroach, then maybe Mom really had been bonkers. But what if it revealed an alternate side to her mother, or something disconcerting? Zoey knew one thing for sure: she didn’t feel an urge to rip the wrapping paper off this surprise.

  At some point, she must have dozed off because her cell phone’s dong tone awakened her. Text message. She glanced at the clock but found it difficult to read the time with the sun streaming in. Normally, she kept her blinds down, but last night’s spying escapade on Jake had come back to haunt her. She squinted enough to finally make out the digital numbers: 6:42 a.m. As the previous night flooded back to her mind, she wondered how a Stone Age woman would handle the current situation. Was it easier for them without the subtleties of language? Did they experience the same levels of emotion as current women, but simply throw a rock against the wall to end their frustrations? Maybe, like her, they held on to resentment, and found their boyfriends’ psychological issues daunting, and worried about the next generation. Or maybe, they just hurled a rock.

  She reached to the floor, picked up a lacrosse ball she used for working out hamstring cramps, and flung it against the far wall. When the display case of weapons on the opposite side rattled, she cringed, awaiting the crash.

  Nothing. And oddly, she did feel better.

  Her cell phone donged again. “All right, all right.”

  She found her phone amongst the covers, which had wrangled themselves into a knot during her fitful night of sleep. A message from Jake glared back at her: Knew U couldn’t wait. U have appt at law firm. 3:00 today. In Richmond. See Alexander Schmidt.

  Schmidt? Wasn’t that the lawyer mentioned in the letter? How had Jake gotten an appointment with him on a Saturday? Pretty impressive. She read the message again and, this time, smirked. No “Lv U”? No “Sorry”? And she didn’t appreciate his presumption that she could drop everything and rush to Richmond, Virginia. He really needed to show up at her door with chocolate and a new attitude to make up for last night’s abrupt departure and this morning’s unsentimental text.

  She caught a glimpse of her clock again. Appointment at three? Not much time, and no chance of staying awake for a five-hour drive. Ten minutes of laptop maneuvers later, she lucked into a flight leaving for Richmond in an hour and a half. Frequent flier miles racked up quickly on trips to Egypt and Peru; with her platinum status, she could be in Virginia for free in plenty of time. She booked a seat and packed for her southern jaunt, and for what felt like a second encounter with her mother in less than 24 hours.

  Chapter 9

  Richmond, Virginia

  The fat-assed guard had completed his shift, but an equally rotund, dead-eyed Indian dude clanked the keys today, as if the weight and noise of them conferred some status on these min
imum wage losers. Shit, Black thought, I make more on a busy Saturday night than these guys make in a week.

  “Corbin Black, you got a phone call.”

  Black pulled his eyebrows low, creating a slope in the left one that paralleled the scar running from the corner of his mouth to his cheekbone. The disconcerting effect caused the male hooker next to him to inch back and give him room to exit the crowded cell.

  “Who is it?” Black asked as he tried to avoid bodily contact with the guard’s gut.

  “Phone’s around the corner.”

  Black slinked over to the piece-of-crap phone. He looked at the years’ worth of grime caking the earpiece, then wiped it hard against the sleeve of his shirt. Not clean—not even close—but better.

  “Yeah? Black here,” he said into the phone.

  “Mr. Black, I thought you told me you’d never been in trouble with the law before.” Virgil Lasseter sounded personally offended.

  “I ain’t been.”

  “Then why are they running your DNA against some woman in Philadelphia? What are they going to find?”

  Black placed one hand high up on the wall next to the phone and leaned his skeletal frame forward so that his forehead almost touched the dialing pad. “Philadelphia?”

  “That’s right. Do you have sealed juvenile records up there or something?”

  Black’s features turned to stone as he concentrated. “Listen here. I got no idea what they’re doing. I ain’t never been to Philadelphia but that ain’t to say someone else didn’t move up there who’s got a bone to pick with me. Who’s the woman?”

  “I don’t have a name.”

  “Well, ain’t that what I’m paying you to find out? Thought you was the best.”

  “I can get the name.” Lasseter’s voice took on a note of conspiratorial sleaziness. “It’ll cost you, though. I know a guy up there. Doesn’t come cheap.”

  Black’s face contorted into a grotesque grin. Although he never really anticipated being taken into custody for any of the lessons he’d taught these smug whores over the years, he had followed his father’s early-in-life instructions to always cover his ass. He’d stayed up to date on the best lawyers, and every week, he’d set aside a share of the pooled tip money and invested it in what he called his Insurance Fund. Finally, it was paying off.

  “No problem,” Black said. “I can pay. Find out who she is. But Lasseter?”

  “Yes?”

  “You get me out of here. Sooner than later. I don’t like the way they’re stackin’ things up against me.”

  Chapter 10

  Richmond, Virginia

  As Zoey’s plane descended, the cityscape of Richmond, Virginia, came into view. She’d last seen it almost a decade ago in her rearview mirror—the day she’d headed north to Philadelphia on a whim. What a life-changing trip that had been. It had all started with a phone call the last week of her sophomore year at Georgetown University, when Zoey Kincaid was still called Kyra Collette…

  #

  “Kyra!” yelled Kyra’s Georgetown roommate from the far end of the long dormitory corridor. “Your phone’s ringing. Want me to answer it?”

  Kyra popped her head out of another room. “No! Don’t answer! It might be Cesar.”

  Her roommate glanced at the phone. “It says Aunt Eva.”

  Kyra’s eyes went wide with surprise and disappointment. “Yeah, go ahead and answer. I’ll be right there.” She turned back to her friends and told them she’d return in a minute. They’d all been sitting around trying to figure out how to block Kyra’s obsessed friend, Cesar Descutner, from emailing her anymore. When she got to her room, her roommate pointed to the phone and made a gesture of someone sipping from a flask and lolling about like a drunken pirate.

  Kyra’s face showed little surprise as she extended her hand to take the dreaded call. There could only be one reason for Aunt Eva to call, let alone go to all the trouble of digging up Kyra’s phone number.

  “Hello?” Kyra said warily.

  “It’s about time,” Aunt Eva’s voice slurred. “Didn’t I call your damn room?”

  “Sort of. It’s my cell.”

  “Well how big could that damn room be that it took you half an hour to get to the phone?”

  “Sorry, Aunt Eva,” she said, ignoring the ridiculous exaggeration. “How are you?”

  “It’s not a matter of how I am. When’s the last time you called your grandmother?”

  “I, um, it was a few—”

  “Well I hope it was a good conversation because it was your last.”

  And that was how Kyra Collette, a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., learned of the death of the woman who’d raised her. Grandma Magda had finally succumbed to her bad heart at age 72.

  With final exams completed the day before, Kyra packed up, hugged her friends good-bye, and headed home to Grandma Magda’s house in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia.

  Legal and insurance matters, as well as funeral arrangements, filled the next several days as Kyra closed the estate and dealt with lawyers and neighbors.

  “Such a lovely woman,” Mrs. Wray said about Grandma at the funeral.

  “Magda was always there for us,” Mr. and Mrs. Clayton said.

  “Never hesitated to bake a pie for the church or give a few dollars to help the children,” Father Riley said.

  Kyra accepted the condolences and responded appropriately, but found it difficult to summon the proper emotion for the event. Her grandmother had raised her well; Kyra had rarely wanted for anything. So why did she feel empty inside about Magda’s passing?

  Her sole remaining relative, Aunt Eva—her mother’s sister—had been a raging alcoholic as long as Kyra could remember. The past couple days, she’d only served to get in the way of packing boxes, preparing items for sale, and giving away oddities to neighbors that neither of them could conceive of wanting.

  “Aunt Eva, do you want Grandpa’s old collection of model rockets?”

  Eva turned and spat out her response. “Ha! What do they know?” Eva’s long red hair had thinned and turned a wiry gray over the past two years, while her once-pretty face now looked perpetually spiteful.

  “What does who know?” Kyra asked. Even in Eva’s sober hours, usually between eight and eleven in the morning, she could be downright confusing. Now, past noon, Kyra had to brace herself for the usual onslaught of Eva’s nonsensical babblings.

  “I’ll tell you who,” Eva said. “The rocket people. Fools! They think they’re so smart. Like I wasn’t good enough? I deserved investigation, too, you know!”

  Eva both marched and stumbled to where Kyra was dusting off a two-foot tall, rusty model rocket. She cornered her only niece, her greenish-brown eyes crazed and distant. With rum-infused breath mere inches from Kyra’s face, she blurted, “You need to show me the respect I deserve. I might not have the accuracy or the super-clear stories, but that doesn’t mean you can laugh at me behind my back.”

  “I never laugh at you,” Kyra said, struggling to find a spare inch in the wall behind her to escape the pungent odor of Eva’s breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Damn water,” Eva said. “It was the water’s fault.”

  Eva backed off and returned to the kitchen to drown her sorrows, but Kyra doubted it was with damn water. For some reason, the encounter stuck with Kyra in vivid detail and she knew that for the rest of her life, she would never be able to smell rum without thinking of it.

  With the estate settled and the funeral over, Kyra felt alone but free in the world. She spent one hour of her last day at Magda’s sifting through an old photo album in the attic and noticed, for perhaps the first time, a strong family resemblance in the female line of the family. From Magda to her two daughters—Susan and Eva—and then from Susan to Kyra. The same shining auburn hair, greenish eyes, full lips, squared-off chin, and rectangular facial shape had carried through three generations. In the back of one picture, where Susan and Eva looked
to be in their twenties, Kyra spotted the blurred profile of a uniformed man. In his hands, he held a paintbrush, but he’d just turned his head as if someone had called to him. Could it be her father, Matthew Collette, from the days when he and her mother had been dating? It irked her that she couldn’t see him more clearly in the picture—or in her mind.

  Suddenly, an unusual but strong instinct to drive to her father’s last known whereabouts overtook her. She didn’t pretend she’d find that odd closure psychiatrists touted, but she did feel a strong obligation, in the wake of Grandma Magda’s death, to put all her ghosts to bed. She’d always visited her mother’s grave three times a year—on her mother’s birthday, on the anniversary of her death, and on Christmas Eve. The treks to the simple headstone had been Grandma Magda’s one display of sentimentality in regard to Susan. But Kyra, as far as she could remember, had never attended a funeral or a memorial service for her father. She didn’t even know if either had been held. According to Magda, her father’s long-dead parents hadn’t even buried his ashes, having considered his suicide shameful.

  Kyra stared at the blurred profile of a man she couldn’t remember. Didn’t she owe it to him, or perhaps to herself, to pay a modicum of respect to his death, and maybe even his life? If nothing else, the trip to Philadelphia, where he’d been born and where he’d died, would give her a small connection to a piece of her family, which now consisted only of Aunt Eva. Not a real treat at holiday time.

  The decision made, she arranged a two-week visit to her close friend, Marcie, from Georgetown University, who lived by herself in a rented Brownstone in Philadelphia. With her VW Cabriolet packed up, Kyra left Virginia and traveled to Philadelphia for the first time.