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“I’m not deaf, Lester,” she replied at last. “And work will have to wait.”
“Am I missing something here?” I asked, confused.
“You need us, I think, Mr. Cross,” Minerva Frost replied.
“No. I’ll be fine. Just get me to New Orleans.”
“You have a car, Detective Cross? Shoes?”
That surprised me. How did she know I didn’t have shoes on?
“No shoes, but I’ll get them,” I said. “Really, there’s no need for you to miss work on my account, Mrs. Frost.”
“I disagree,” she said sharply. “And that is that.”
“Fuck,” Lester said under his breath.
“What was that, son?” his mother demanded.
“Truck ahead, Ma,” Lester said, and changed lanes to blow by an eighteen-wheeler as if it were standing still.
“What do you do for work, Mrs. Frost?” I asked.
“Never you mind about that,” she said. “Glad to help.”
“What, are you ashamed or something?” Lester asked his mother.
“No, I am not,” Minerva Frost retorted. “Just don’t know where Mr. Cross stands, and I don’t want to make it an issue.”
“Make what an issue?” I said, twisting around in my seat again and wincing at the soreness that went from the tips of my fingers to my arms and up into my shoulders.
She didn’t reply, and I looked at Lester, who eased off the gas, causing rumbling backfire, before he said, “She’s my mom and all, Detective Cross, and you may believe in this kind of thing or not, but that little old lady behind you has got the gift, man, like for real.”
CHAPTER
85
MINERVA FROST GOT HER gift the summer after her ninth birthday, eighteen months after she was splashed with battery acid and lost her eyesight in a terrible accident in the automotive repair shop her father ran in Galveston.
“She started seeing things, hearing things,” Lester said, downshifting as we approached Baton Rouge. “We call ’em her notions.”
Over the years I’d heard of police working with psychics, of course, and I’d heard of some of them having success, but I’d never worked with one personally.
I said, “Is that right, Mrs. Frost?”
“Kind of,” she said softly. “I just spent so much time alone that year. I mean, what child wanted to be friends with someone who looked like this? And in that loneliness, I just started to hear voices and see things in my mind. I used to brush them off as my imagination going crazy because of the blindness, but then some of the things I saw seemed to come true.”
Mrs. Frost claimed that she hadn’t told anyone about the voices or the visions for nearly twenty years. But then the economy went bust in the late seventies, and her parents needed money, so she had gone to New Orleans and set herself up as “Madame Minerva, Palm Reader.”
“She don’t read palms, by the way,” Lester said. “Just makes it look that way. People like it, for some reason, and they pay a lot of money to see her. One long day a month in the Big Easy, and the rest of them folks on the phone, and we got all we need.”
My skepticism must have shown, because Lester said, “Hey, man, her gift is real. Like I said, I barely saw you standing there, but she did, and she told me you were in trouble and to stop.”
“That true?” I asked her. “You saw me?”
“An image of someone in need,” Minerva Frost said.
“How did you see me?” I asked.
