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Again, the pendulum swung back and forth, but there was something uncertain about its movements, as if it wasn’t sure where it wanted to land. I waited, knowing I couldn’t do anything until it came to a stop.
Which it did…in between “yes” and “no.”
I frowned. How could you live in a place and not live there at the same time?
That seemed to be what the pendulum was trying to tell me, although I couldn’t quite figure out what that answer was supposed to mean.
Time to move on.
Will she kill again?
The arc of the pendulum seemed even more hesitant this time, and once more stopped in between “yes” and “no.”
Meaning…what? That she wasn’t planning any other murders at the moment, but she might decide to bust out the atropine again if the situation warranted it?
That particular scenario didn’t seem very reassuring.
One more try.
Will I be able to find her?
The pendulum trembled once and was still. Apparently, it wasn’t too sanguine about my prospects…and at the moment, neither was I.
Knowing that I probably wasn’t going to get any more coherent answers out of the little fluorite drop, I took it and the scrying mat over to my bookshelf and returned them to their designated places. My gaze fell on the crystal ball that sat two shelves down, and I hesitated.
Should I?
Well, I hadn’t bothered Grandma Ellen for months. I had to hope she wouldn’t be too annoyed by me barging in on her afterlife with some questions.
I took the crystal ball over to my altar, carefully dusted it off — I hadn’t had much time lately to keep up with housekeeping in my office — and then said, quietly but urgently, “Grandma Ellen, I need you.”
The crystal ball remained quiescent, but I told myself I needed to be patient. Sometimes she appeared right away, and sometimes it took her a few minutes to respond to my call, as though she was off somewhere doing something much more important, and had to find a good stopping place before she appeared inside the crystal.
And sometimes…sometimes she didn’t show up at all.
As the seconds ticked by and the crystal ball remained stubbornly clear, I worried that this would be one of those times. Eventually, though, a pale, swirling mist formed inside the crystal, and then I saw my grandmother’s face looking back at me.
She’d been in her early forties when she died from uterine cancer, so the woman I saw now appeared to be in the prime of life, pretty and blonde like my mother, with the same blue-gray eyes we all shared. When she spoke, she sounded amused rather than alarmed.
“It’s been a while,” she said. “How are you and the baby doing?”
“Just fine,” I replied. “I feel like I’m getting bigger every day. He or she must take after Calvin.”
Although I hoped my baby wouldn’t take after him too much. My husband had weighed ten pounds when he was born, and I wasn’t much looking forward to giving birth to a bowling ball.
“That’s good,” my grandmother said. Then her head tilted — well, as much as it could within the confines of the crystal ball — and she added, “I suppose this is about that mess with your friend Victoria.”
I didn’t bother to ask how Grandma Ellen knew about the current situation. While those who’d passed weren’t omniscient, they still saw a lot more than we mere mortals did…which was the whole reason why I always came to her for help when the regular forms of divination didn’t seem to be helping me very much.
“It is,” I said. “I’ve pretty much figured out that the killer is a blonde woman, but I can’t seem to get past that to find out who she actually is. I was hoping you could give me a few clues.”
My grandmother lifted a perfectly arched brow. She always wore makeup, or at least appeared to me that way, with soft brown shadow on her lids and her favorite Cherries in the Snow lipstick on a full mouth whose shape had been passed down to both my mother and me. “You know I can’t come right out and tell you that.”
I’d been halfway expecting an answer along those lines, even as I had to wonder who was calling the shots in the afterlife, telling the spirits of those who’d passed what they could and couldn’t say to the living. However, I had a feeling if I tried to ask her about that, she’d just shut me down.
Better to stick to the problem at hand.
“No, but you can give me a couple of hints, can’t you?”
