Ashley Bell. Dean Koontz
malicious in the extreme. With St. Croix still asking for help and warning everyone about her dangerous assailant, Bibi made her way among the shoppers in line behind her and turned left, crossing the front of the store. Rattled as she rarely was, mortified, she didn’t know where she was going—that is until she put down her handbasket of vegetables on a display of Coca-Cola, said “Excuse me” to a young mother and child with whom she collided, and headed for the nearest exit.
So much for floating.
“You tensed up all of a sudden,” said Calida Butterfly.
“Just a bad memory.”
“Men,” said the masseuse, making a wrong assumption. “Nothing we can do about them except shoot them, if it was legal.”
Bibi hadn’t gone back to Gelson’s for a year, although it was her favorite market. Even to this day, she imagined an employee now and then recognized her and, to be safe, kept out of her way.
She hadn’t seen Dr. Solange St. Croix since. Hoped never to see her again. With no slightest clue to puzzle out the reason for the professor’s bizarre behavior, Bibi had decided it must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.
A draft stirred the candle flames for a while, and fluttering cascades of soft amber light spilled across the room, which smelled sweetly of roses. Bibi took slow, deep breaths and exhaled through the face hole in the massage table.
“That’s better,” Calida said, “much better.” A few minutes later, she said, “We’re done with this part, kid. Now let’s find out why you were spared from brain cancer.”
Waiting for the Wrong People to Show Up
FULLY DRESSED, FEELING PLEASANTLY WRUNG-OUT, Bibi opened a chilled bottle of chardonnay, poured two servings, and brought the glasses to the chrome dinette table with the red Formica top.
Calida Butterfly had moved some of the candles from the living room and distributed them on the table and countertops to provide the proper mood for the second thing that she had been hired to do.
Laying her ostrich-skin suitcase on one of the chrome-and-black-vinyl chairs, Calida said, “Do you know what divination is?”
“Predicting the future,” Bibi said.
“Not entirely. It’s also a tool for uncovering hidden knowledge by supernatural means.”
“What hidden knowledge?”
“Any hidden knowledge,” Calida said, as she opened the half of her suitcase that didn’t contain items related to massage therapy.
“I don’t believe in prognostication, all that stuff.”
Calida wasn’t offended. She said cheerily, “Well, the way it works is, you don’t have to believe in it for it to be true.”
Bibi saw, among other things in the bag, a Sig Sauer P220 or maybe a P226. She recognized the weapon because the P226, chambered for nine-millimeter ammunition, was the standard pistol issued to SEALs. Paxton had purchased his own P220, because it was chambered for .45 caliber and more likely to knock a bad guy down hard in close combat. The two guns looked all but identical.
Bibi had her own P226, which Paxton had taught her to use. An engagement gift.
The uneasiness about Calida, which Bibi had shaken off, now crept up on her once more. “Why the gun?”
Calida took the pistol from the suitcase and put it on the table. “Divination creates the psychic equivalent of seismic waves, shock waves. The vast majority of people can’t feel them or don’t realize what they’re feeling. But certain people can feel them—and sometimes locate the source.”
“What certain people?”
“The wrong people. That’s all you need to know. Mostly they let me alone. They’ve learned better than to mess with Calida Butterfly.”
Because eccentric people and the details of their obsessions were good material for fiction, Bibi was genuinely interested when she asked, “Do you have silver bullets in the gun?”
Taking from the suitcase a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a small roll of inch-wide gauze, and a self-dispensing roll of adhesive tape, Calida said, “Didn’t figure you for the kind of writer who would leap to a cliché. Good old American ammo will do the job.”
Bibi settled into one of the chairs, holding her wineglass in both hands. “What’s your real name?”
“Calida Butterfly, believe it or not.”
“I’ll buy the Calida, but who were you before Butterfly?”
“Okay, you’ve got me, I am caught, revealed. Before I was Calida Butterfly, I was of course Calida Caterpillar.”
The masseuse-diviner placed a small packet, twice the size of a matchbook, beside the rubbing alcohol and then turned to rummage in the suitcase once more. Bibi reached across the table, picked up this newest item: a seamstress’s kit of needles in a variety of sizes.
Replacing the packet where she’d found it, she said, “What are you going to sew?”
“Flesh.”
That answer required another question, but Bibi didn’t ask it. A session of fortune-telling, though pointless, had seemed to promise a little fun. But moment by moment, the weirdness mounted and the mood grew darker. Nancy and Murphy had gotten involved with some strange people over the years, but most of them were harmless surf dudes who had been clamshelled, prosecuted, and thoroughly rinse-cycled by so many monster waves that their common sense had been washed out of them. Calida didn’t seem crazy in a dangerous way, but she didn’t seem to be as tightly wound as a new spool of thread, either.
The last things the woman took from her bag were a folded white-cotton cloth, a silver bowl, and a flannel sack with contents that rattled softly when she put it down.
“I didn’t know my parents were into this. I mean, they never want to think about the future. You know—‘It’ll be what it’ll be.’”
Calida sat, picked up her glass, and poured half the wine down her throat as if she had no interest in the taste of it. “Like I said, divination isn’t only fortune-telling.”
“Oh, that’s right. It’s also for uncovering hidden knowledge by supernatural means. What knowledge did Mom and Dad want uncovered?”
“You’re a nice kid, but you’re nosy. I would no more divulge my experiences with other clients than a priest would tell you what someone said in confession.”
Bibi felt rebuked, but to no degree embarrassed. “When did you go into this divination business?”
Rather than answer, Calida finished the rest of her chardonnay in one long swallow. She put down the empty glass and met Bibi’s stare and seemed to want to see how long her client could tolerate silence between them. Candlelight ceaselessly fingered her face, as if trying to lift the shadows that veiled part of it. Earlier, the color of her eyes had seemed to fluctuate, depending on the angle at which the light entered them, but now they were a steady green—and striated in such a way that they reminded Bibi of the eyes of the tiger cub that her parents had given her.
After picking up the bottle and refilling her wineglass, Calida at last answered the question. “I started twenty-seven years ago. I was sixteen. My mother taught me.”
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Thalia. Thalia Butterfly.”
“Butterfly and Butterfly. So it’s a two-diviner practice, like mother-daughter attorneys or something.”
“My