Floor lamps featuring silk shades with beaded fringes, chairs in the Stickley style paired with plump Victorian footstools upholstered in tapestries, Maxfield Parrish prints, colorful carnival-glass vases and bibelots: The mix should not work, but it does. Her rooms are the most welcoming that I have ever seen.
Time seems suspended in this place.
In these rooms I am at peace. I forget my worries. The problems of pancakes and poltergeists are lifted from me.
Here I cannot be harmed.
Here I know my destiny and am content with it.
Here Stormy lives, and where she lives, I flourish.
Above her bed, behind glass, in a frame, is the card from the fortune-telling machine: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
Four years ago, on the midway of the county fair, a gaudy contrivance called Gypsy Mummy had waited in a shadowy back corner of an arcade tent filled with unusual games and macabre attractions.
The machine had resembled an old-fashioned phone booth and had stood seven feet high. The lower three feet were entirely enclosed. The upper four feet featured glass on three sides.
In the glass portion sat a dwarfish female figure attired in a Gypsy costume complete with garish jewelry and colorful headscarf. Her gnarled, bony, withered hands rested on her thighs, and the green of her fingernails looked less like polish than like mold.
A plaque at her feet claimed that this was the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf. In 18th-century Europe, she had been renowned for the accuracy of her prognostications and foretellings.
The mottled skin of her face stretched tight over the skull. The eyelids were stitched shut with black thread, as were her lips.
Most likely this was not the art of Death working in the medium of flesh, as claimed, but instead the product of an artist who had been clever with plaster, paper, and latex.
As Stormy and I arrived at Gypsy Mummy, another couple fed a quarter to the machine. The woman leaned toward a round grill in the glass and asked her question aloud: “Gypsy Mummy tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”
The man, evidently Johnny, pushed the ANSWER button, and a card slid into a brass tray. He read it aloud: “A cold wind blows, and each night seems to last a thousand years.”
Neither Johnny nor his bride-to-be regarded this as an answer to their question, so they tried again. He read the second card: “The fool leaps from the cliff, but the winter lake below is frozen.”
The woman, believing that Gypsy Mummy had misheard the question, repeated it: “Will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”
Johnny read the third card: “The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit.”
And the fourth: “A stone can provide no nourishment, nor will sand slake your thirst.”
With irrational persistence, the couple spent four more quarters in pursuit of an answer. They began bickering on receipt of the fifth card. By the time Johnny read number eight, the cold wind predicted by the first fortune was blowing at gale-force between them.
After Johnny and his love departed, Stormy and I took our turn with Gypsy Mummy. A single coin produced for us the assurance that we were destined to be together forever.
When Stormy tells this story, she claims that after granting to us what the other couple had wanted, the mummified dwarf winked.
I didn’t see this wink. I don’t understand how a sewn-shut eye could perform such a trick and yet fail to pop a single stitch. The image of a winking mummy resonates with me nonetheless.
Now, as I waited under the Gypsy Mummy’s framed card, Stormy came to bed. She wore plain white cotton panties and a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt.
All the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, in thongs and skimpy teddies and peekaboo bras, collectively possess a fraction of the erotic allure of Stormy in schoolgirl briefs and SpongeBob top.
Lying on her side, cuddling against me, she put her head upon my chest to listen to my heart. She got an earful.
She often likes to be held in this way until she falls asleep. I am the boatman she trusts to row her into restful dreams.
After a silence, she said, “If you want me ... I’m ready now.”
I am no saint. I have used my driver’s license to trespass in homes to which I’ve not been invited. I answer violence with violence and never turn the other cheek. I have had enough impure thoughts to destroy the ozone layer. I have often spoken ill of my mother.
Yet when Stormy offered herself to me, I thought of the orphaned girl, then known to the world as Bronwen, alone and afraid at the age of seven, adopted and given safe harbor, only to discover that her new father wanted not a daughter but a sex toy. Her confusion, her fear, her humiliation, her shame were too easy for me to imagine.
I thought also of Penny Kallisto and the seashell that she had handed to me. From the glossy pink throat of that shell had come the voice of a monster speaking the language of demented lust.
Though I didn’t confuse my clean passion with Harlo Landerson’s sick desire and savage selfishness, I could not purge from memory his rough breathing and bestial grunts. “Saturday is almost here,” I told Stormy. “You’ve taught me the beauty of anticipation.”
“What if Saturday never comes?”
“We’ll have this Saturday and thousands more,” I assured her.
“I need you,” she said.
“Is that something new?”
“God, no.”
“It’s not new for me, either.”
I held her. She listened to my heart. Her hair feathered like a raven’s wing against her face, and my spirits soared.
Soon she murmured to someone she seemed pleased to see in her sleep. The boatman had done his job, and Stormy drifted on dreams.
I eased off the bed without waking her, drew the top sheet and thin blanket over her shoulders, and switched the bedside lamp to its lowest setting. She doesn’t like to wake in darkness.
After slipping into my shoes, I kissed her forehead and left her with the 9-mm pistol on her nightstand.
I turned out the lights elsewhere in the apartment, stepped into the public hall, and locked her door with a key she’d given to me.
The front door of the apartment house featured a large oval of leaded glass. The beveled edges of the mosaic pieces presented a fragmented and distorted view of the porch.
I put one eye to a flat piece of glass to see things more clearly. An unmarked police van stood at the curb across the street.
Law-enforcement in Pico Mundo involves few clandestine operations. The police department owns only two unmarked units.
The average citizen wouldn’t recognize either vehicle. Because of the assistance that I’ve provided to the chief on numerous cases, I have ridden in and am familiar with both.
Of the white van’s identifying features, the stubby shortwave antenna spiking from the roof at the back was the clincher.
I had not asked the chief to grant protection to Stormy; she would have been angry at the implication that she couldn’t take care of herself. She has her pistol, her certificate of graduation from a self-defense course, and her pride.
The danger to her, if any, would seem to exist only when I was with her. Bob Robertson had no beef with anyone but me.
This