she was troubled by guilt.
Occasionally she considered giving up fortunetelling. She could take a
partner, someone who had done the palm-reading scam before. It meant
sharing the profits, but that didn’t worry Zena. She also owned a
bottle-pitch joint and a very profitable grab joint, and after overhead
she netted more each year than any half-dozen marks earned at their
boring jobs in the straight world.
But she continued to play Gypsy fortune-teller because she had to do
somethirlg, she wasn’t the kind of person who could just sit back and
take it easy.
By the age of fifteen, she had been a welldeveloped woman, and she had
begun her carnival career as a kootch dancer. These days, as she
became increasingly dissatisfied with her role as Madame Zena, she
frequently considered opening a girl show of her own. She even toyed
with the idea of performing again. It might be a kick.
She was forty-three, but she knew she could still excite a tentful of
horny marks. She looked ten years younger than she was. Her hair was
chestnut-brown and thick, untouched by gray, it framed a strong,
pleasing, unlined face. Her eyes were a rare shade of violet–warm,
kind eyes. Years ago, when she’d first worked as a kootch dancer,
she’d been voluptuous. She still was.
Through diet and exercise, she had maintained her splendid figure, and
nature had even cooperated by miraculously sparing her large breasts
from the downward drag of gravity.
But even as she fantasized about returning to the stage, she knew the
hootchie-kootchie was not in her future. The kootch was just another
way of manipulating the marks, no different from fortune-telling, in
essence it was the very thing that she needed to get away from for a
while. She would have to think of something else she could do.
The raven stirred on its perch and flapped its wings, interrupting her
thoughts.
An instant later Conrad Straker entered the tent. He sat in the chair
where the marks always sat, across the table from Zena. He leaned
forward, anxious, tense. “Well?”
No luck,” Zena said.
He leaned even closer. “Are you positive we’re talking about the same
girl?”
“Yes.”
“She was wearing a blue and gray sweater.”
“Yes, yes,” Zena said impatiently. “She had the ticket that Ghost had
given her.”
“What was her name? Did you find out her name?”
“Of course. Laura Alwine.”
“Her mother’s name?”
“Sandra. Not Ellen. Sandra. And Sandra is a natural blonde, not a
brunette like Ellen was. Laura gets her dark hair and eyes from her
father, she says.
I’m sorry, Conrad. I pumped the girl for a lot of information while I
was telling her fortune, but none of it matches what you’re looking
for. Not a single detail of it.” “I was sure she was the one.”
“You’re always sure.”
He stared at her, and gradually his face grew red. He looked down at
the tabletop, and he became rapidly, visibly angrier, as if he saw
something in the grain of the wood that outraged him. He slammed his
fist into the table.
Slammed it down once, twice. Hard. Half a dozen times. Then again
and again and again. The tent was filled with the loud, measured
drumbeat of his fury.
He was shaking, panting, sweating. His eyes were glazed. He began to
curse, and he sprayed spittle across the table. He made strange,
harsh, animal noises in the back of his throat, and he continued to
pound the table as if it were a living creature that had wronged him.
Zena wasn’t startled by his outburst. She was accustomed to his
maniacal rages. She had once been married to him for two years.
On a stormy night in August, 1955, she had stood in the rain, watching
him ride backwards on the carousel. He had looked so very handsome
then, so romantic, so vulnerable and brokenhearted that he had appealed
to both her carnal and maternal instincts, and she had been drawn to
him in a way she never had been drawn to another man. In February of
the following year, they rode the carousel forward, together.
Just two weeks after the wedding, Conrad flew into a rage over