Foreteller Read online

  Zoey jerked her head toward him. “Why would he want to? And why now?”

  “Maybe he’s in step nine of Stalkers Anonymous and he needs to stalk you again so he can apologize.”

  As Zoey shook her head, Jake put his arm around her and slowed his pace. “Whatever it is, sweetie, don’t worry about it. You’ve got me in your life, and I’m pretty sure I can take this guy.” He puffed himself up and threw a few air punches. “How big did you say he was?”

  “Do I, Jake? Do I have you in my life?”

  They turned the corner just as Jake would have been forced to answer, but the sight of the prominent Alston Bank building dominated the moment, and Zoey tensed up.

  Jake noticed her reaction and squeezed her tightly. “Hey, stop worrying. Your mom probably left you a truckload of jewels or so much cash that we’ll need to rent a U-Haul to get it all home.” He grabbed the bank door handle, pulled it open and ushered her in. “Come on, let’s do this thang.”

  Zoey suddenly felt every hour of missed sleep in triplicate. She took a quick, energizing breath, squared her shoulders, and entered the bank lobby with Jake at her heels. They approached a diminutive bank teller whose perfect skin suggested a severe lack of experience with facial expressions. Staying true to the first impression she emanated, the teller gave them only a curt nod as they reached her window—no smile, no frown.

  “May I help you?” Her voice held a touch of a French accent and the tip of her nose moved up and down when she spoke.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jake said, shoving his face forward of Zoey’s. “We need access to one of your safe deposit boxes.”

  “Certainly. Do you have a key?”

  Zoey slid the key out from the envelope and pushed it toward the teller. Then she removed the letter certifying her name change and slid that forward also. She resented her trembling hand, and hoped Jake no one would notice it.

  “Two forms of identification, please.”

  Zoey grabbed her wallet from her purse, and pulled out a driver’s license and passport. She showed them to the teller who scrutinized them like a suspicious TSA agent.

  “Thank you, Ms. Kincaid.” She returned the identification, then called up some information on her computer screen. “This box carries with it a specification.”

  “And what would that be?” Jake asked, seeming to sense that Zoey would reach the end of her rope if another hurdle presented itself.

  The teller looked down her nose at Jake the way a socialite would scorn imitation caviar. She turned and addressed Zoey instead. “You must be alone when you examine the contents of the box, Ms. Kincaid.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Zoey said. “I want him with me.”

  “You don’t understand,” the teller said, her tone unwavering. “You must be alone when you open the box and when you examine its contents. That means that the person who left you the contents of the box trusts no one else to be present.” She shifted her head in Jake’s direction, then back to Zoey. “The contents may contain sensitive information.”

  Zoey let out a deep sigh of frustration. She did not want to abandon Jake, nor be abandoned by him at this point—and this teller’s attitude irked her. Then she caught something in the woman’s expression, something maternal and sincere. She realized that her mother must have had a good reason for going to all this trouble, hopefully one that didn’t involve paranoid mental illness. In any case, if her mother only trusted Zoey, the least Zoey could do was respect her final wishes.

  “I understand.” She turned to Jake. “I’d better go alone.”

  Jake looked like a little boy forced to leave the treasure hunt right before the chest was opened. There couldn’t be a bigger disappointment for a reporter than to miss out on the big finale to the story, but he smiled anyway. “No problem. I’ll be out here when you’re done.”

  The teller came around from behind the counter with its ridiculous, faux-prison bars. She unlocked a heavy door to Zoey’s right and pulled it open. “This way, Ms. Kincaid.”

  Zoey squeezed Jake’s hand. She felt like a pirate ship prisoner saying farewell to her true love before walking the plank. Jake gave her a reassuring wink.

  The teller closed the heavy door behind them, leaving Jake to fend for himself. She then led Zoey through a cold, barren hallway, and down a short flight of steps. The sterile atmosphere continued through a second hallway until they arrived at another door. She knocked. A short man with an obvious toupee opened the door immediately. Had he been waiting for them? Maybe he sat in his little room all day, watching a hidden camera view of the barren hallway, salivating at the thought of a customer approaching to stow a Savings Bond. Zoey could hardly imagine a worse job.

  The teller and the man led Zoey wordlessly to a sturdy door farther down the hall. After they each inserted a key, the teller punched in a code and placed her retina up to the scanner on the wall. The door popped open. With a hand gesture, she indicated Zoey should enter, something Zoey suddenly did not want to do.

  Noting Zoey’s hesitation, the teller said, “Your safe deposit box is inside, Ms. Kincaid. You will have the room to yourself.” She handed Zoey back her key. “Just insert this.” She flashed a minimal but unexpected smile. “There is a separate chamber off to the side, with chairs and a table, in case you need to sit down or peruse reading material. Will you be okay?”

  Zoey sensed that the teller had deviated from the usual routine by inserting that last question. The surprised look on the face of the wigged man confirmed her thoughts.

  “I’ll be fine, thank you,” Zoey said. “How much time do I have?”

  “As long as you need.”

  Zoey entered the room, the key in her hand now coated with a clammy sweat. The eerily sterile chamber felt more like something out of a disease control center than a bank. It was illuminated with that new lighting that could supposedly survive a nuclear blast, but it gave a depressing yellow tint to everything. Taking a moment to settle in, however, Zoey realized that she felt more comfortable in this room than she had in the ritzy office of Mr. Schmidt, or even walking on the street with Jake. In here, there were no expectations to meet, no false social niceties or civilities to force. And the slightly cold, dimly lit space reminded her of cool, cramped caves she’d enjoyed during digs. The biggest difference was the smell. A cave gave off a unique scent of dirt, mustiness, stone, and age, combined with the refreshing sting of frigid air that found its way in through cracks in the rocks. This room smelled metallic, with only a bare hint of humanity from the customers who had entered and exited, burying their pasts or securing their futures. Which had her mother done?

  Chapter 14

  To Zoey’s surprise, the contents of the drawer did not explode or result in the emergence of a fairy godmother in a sparkling ball of light. She chided herself for having built this drawer into something so monumental that it couldn’t help but be anti-climactic, especially when it consisted of nothing more than a single, slightly yellowed, 8.5” x 11” envelope. She smiled when she thought of Jake’s mock-disappointment over a lack of precious jewels.

  “Okay, Mom, what have you got for me?” she said aloud.

  She reached into the envelope and withdrew four stapled pages, neatly typed and double-spaced. A perfunctory glance showed lots of short sentences and a few spots where the typist had used the old backspace correction that automatically whited out an error. She read the first paragraph before she’d even put the envelope down:

  “Dear Kyra,

  “My name is Dora Santorini and I typed this for your mother, Susan Collette. She dictated it to me two days before she died. She labored over every word. Please don’t be scared. Use the information well and trust your mother. I loved her and trusted her with all my heart. I still cry myself to sleep when I think about her dying so young. Don’t listen to what other people say about her. They are jealous and they are liars and they don’t understand about her gift. But you probably know that.”

  Zoey’s stomach clutched at
her insides. Why should she be scared? What gift? A sense of foreboding surrounded her. She felt torn between wanting to race through the letter and wanting to throw it away, but with no idea why. Suddenly, she needed to sit. She found the table and chairs the bank teller had mentioned. Only when she was seated did she realize how weak her legs had become.

  With pale, cold hands—the temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees since she entered—she placed the long letter on the table, leaned over it hungrily, and read further with a sense of trepidation.

  “I have done the best I can with the words. Your mother couldn’t speak very clearly in her last days. I understood her better than others, but English is not my first language, so please forgive any errors.

  “As you know, your mother was a foreteller.”

  What? A foreteller? Well, that explained why everyone called Susan Collette a quack. As far as Zoey could remember from a college course on the fringe sciences, foretelling had been a little-known but somewhat respected fad in the 1960’s. It was based on alleged brain changes that had taken place due to some unproven chemical exposure. Solid science stood behind the theory—for a while. Foretellers supposedly showed freakishly high levels of activity in parts of the hippocampus and the occipital cortex of the brain. The former acted as a catalyst for long-term memory while the latter could be regarded as the memory center, especially for visual/spatial memory. Foretellers were purported to possess an overdeveloped amygdala, the part of the brain that managed reactions to fear and emotional memory.

  A few edgy scientists had theorized that acute activity in these areas created hypersensitive memory and perception abilities that went beyond the accepted time-space continuum. They believed that for foretellers, all points in time—past, present, and future—existed simultaneously and were unlimited by the concept of order as humans understood it. It gave them the ability to see the future as if it were happening right then and there.

  Few of these foretellers existed, so test results on them were not considered statistically significant. And the secrecy surrounding their identities only added to the dubiousness of the claims.

  Some theorized that foretelling stemmed from a type of autism that enhanced the ability to analyze probabilities. One article compared it to a master chess player’s ability to predict the next ten moves of his opponent, multiplied a thousandfold. With foretellers, the chess pieces were living people and their lives the game board.

  Of course, conspiracy theories abounded about the government scooping up these foretellers, manipulating their gifts for selfish gains, and then destroying them. Meanwhile, the public had started to look at them as freaks, and when scam artists came along, as they always did, they diluted any real science behind the claims. The more shucksters that materialized, the schlockier the science became. Within a few years, any foretellers who might have existed did their best to hide their abilities and remain anonymous.

  Zoey returned to the letter with a jaded eye. This oughta be good, she thought.

  “Your mother was so gifted, but after her stroke, she didn’t have many foretellings because she didn’t see many people (just you, me, Matthew, and a few friends.) But she did have one foretelling—a very clear one—that I must unfortunately tell you about.

  “I look at you now, Kyra, sleeping in your bed—”

  This mention of herself stopped Zoey short. She reread the line. So she’d been asleep in the room while this woman typed? That meant this letter had been in the room that she’d slept in as a baby. Without thinking, Zoey lifted the letter to her nose and sniffed. Disappointed by the lack of baby powder scent, or anything at all familiar, Zoey stroked the paper as if it were an old teddy bear discovered in the attic on moving day. She swallowed back a lump in her throat borne not only of the exhaustion that gripped her, but of a sentimentality she rarely felt. Warmth filled her soul. Wow. Was she that desperate for a connection to her childhood, to the part of her life that included parents? She swiped away a single tear with the back of her hand, mindful of damaging the letter, no matter how silly its contents.

  Her archaeology instincts kicked in then and she placed the letter down gently, reminding herself to handle it only by its edges. Something valuable might lie within its margins, or its typeface, if not its message.

  She resumed reading while imagining a setting for the letter: a child’s room, decorated with love. Well, a child’s room anyway, with a nanny to look after the little girl whose mother had just passed away after yet another tragedy.

  “I look at you now, Kyra, sleeping in your bed, and I can’t believe what I must write. You are going to miss your mother in a terrible way, but she is leaving you with a gift that will save your life. If you trust and listen.

  “A couple weeks before she died, your mother had a foretelling while sleeping, which was unusual, but the foretelling was extremely clear. She didn’t know what to do with it because she didn’t know who it was about, so she asked me to write it down in case she figured it out. She was quite desperate to warn the woman in the foretelling.”

  “I wrote it all down and set it aside—your mother needed lots of care and you were very lively those days.

  “The next day, we pulled out a photo album because your mother wanted to show you your family from long ago. She wanted to give you some roots because she knew you might not have the feeling of a sturdy family unit in your life. Do you, Kyra?”

  Zoey wiped another tear away just in time to keep it from falling to the letter. She’d answer Dora’s question another time; it would be too overwhelming right now.

  “I sat on one side of your mother, in her bed, and you sat on the other. She pointed out people with her right hand. As she explained the photos, I repeated her words to you in case you didn’t understand (but I think you understood her best of all).

  “We came across a beautiful picture of your grandmother, Magda, as a young woman with long, red hair and wearing a fashionable bathing suit for the time. Your mother stared at the photo for a long time and got very upset. I thought she was having a fit from the stroke, so to give her time to get through it, I talked to her. I said how much I thought you—Kyra—looked like your grandmother. Then I went over to the antique hutch where your mother kept framed family photos (even though your grandmother and aunt weren’t nice to your mother at all). I brought over a picture of your grandmother Magda from when she was four years old. I said, ‘See, Miss Susan? See how much our little three-year-old Kyra looks like your mother? I bet Kyra will look just like Grandma Magda when she is grown.’

  “Your mother turned to me then, and I tell you, Kyra, she had the gravest look on her face. I even did the sign of the cross upon seeing her expression. She told me to put you in your bed and to go get those notes about the foretelling she’d had.

  “You see, Kyra, your mother had realized that the foretelling she’d had was about you as a grown-up. On the night she had the foretelling, you had crawled into her bed, so it made sense to her now. She was certain the foretelling was yours. And she had to save your life.”

  Chapter 15

  Zoey had come to the end of the page, her head spinning. Save her life? Her mother had seen her future and now was going to tell her about it—or, worse, warn her about it? Zoey looked away from the letter and shook her head, disgusted.

  For goodness sake, entire civilizations revolved around superstitions. Zoey had studied them most of her adult life. Alternate beliefs existed so people could explain things that science had yet to decipher. Gods of thunder and lightning eventually gave way to meteorology. Gods of fertility to hormone injections. Gods of love to matchmaking websites. Zoey planted her feet firmly in the camp that trusted science.

  But now to discover that her own mother had believed herself a full-fledged foreteller? At least her mother had been smart enough to stop talking about it in public.

  The memory of Mr. Schmidt’s story from less than an hour ago poked at the edge of Zoey’s doubts—how Susan Collette had saved his
sister’s life. Okay, Zoey thought, but dogs can sniff out cancer. Maybe her mother had a gift that could be explained by phenomenal olfactories. Perhaps her mother had been hyper-attuned to some nearly imperceptible attribute common to cancer patients, and it had made her subconsciously aware of the disease.

  Another poke skewered Zoey’s skepticism: What about the mole on the doctor’s face—the one her mother had predicted? Well hell, thousands of people had moles.

  Zoey turned to the next page, feeling close to anger now, but forcing herself to go on with the letter.

  “Susan hopes that with this knowledge of events, you will be able to save yourself, Kyra. Here is every detail of the foretelling in your mother’s own words:

  “It is a deeply wooded setting with moist ground and earthy aroma. From the nearby river comes the sound of water splitting itself in two against the jagged rocks. I see large, callused hands reach out, probably belonging to a man. The hands appear aged or damaged before their time. And they seem destined for evil. The right hand holds a long, glistening blade with a sharp crook in its middle, as if to plunge inward and down into a victim. A blinding ray of sun above the wooded river bank reflects off the weapon and into the man’s eyes. It feels as if it slices my own. I try to catch a glimpse of the man’s reflection in the knife blade, but the glare prevents it.

  “The man approaches an athletic, auburn-haired young woman in oddly cut, blue shorts. He comes at her from the side with a deliberate but awkward gait. I sense rage seething within him but he disciplines himself to take cautious, precise steps.

  “The young woman faces a huge boulder that somehow defies erosion as it juts out above the river. A massive divot in the boulder’s face offers a cave-like refuge to those who might seek shelter. The woman seems intent on something—or someone—within the divot, unaware of the man’s approach.”