2 #2
Maybe they weren’t any of those things, but like her experience of looking at the legs of the wooden table, trying to focus on the women made her queasy, and that reminded her of how vulnerable she was in this place.
But not alone, Beth reminded herself. Captain Forrester knew where she was and would expect her to report to him when she returned. He would know if she didn’t return. Inquiries would be made.
Yes, inquiries would be made if she went missing, but that didn’t mean she would be found.
Swallowing fear, she approached the woman sitting at the first table and put the bone disc in the bowl.
From a decorated porcelain tray, the first woman picked up a long piece of polished wood that had a rounded top covered with what looked like fine black leather and handed it to Beth. Next, she chose one of the decks of cards and spread them in an arc.
“Choose three cards. Touch them with the wand.” The woman stared at Beth. “What happens here is not a game. Choose with intention.”
The words shivered through Beth, and the air in the room had a tang that usually signaled an oncoming storm.
Beth slowly moved the wand as she followed the arc of the cards, careful not to touch any of them as she thought about the reason she was here in this place, on this island.
Reaching the last card, she moved the wand in the opposite direction and felt…
something. A tingle. A pull. Something that made her hand dip until the wand touched a card. Touched another. Touched the third.
The woman pulled those cards from the deck but didn’t turn them over to reveal whatever images were on the other side. Instead, she gathered up the rest of the deck and set it aside before selecting another deck and spreading out those cards. “Choose two more.”
Beth did as she was told. When those two cards were selected, the woman turned over the first three, then the other two.
The first woman looked at the woman sitting at the middle table and nodded.
“Go to her now.” The woman with the cards held out a hand for the wand.
Beth gave her the wand. “Aren’t you going to tell me what the cards mean?”
“No.” The first woman pointed to the middle table. “She will tell you the cost for you to acquire what you seek.”
Scales of justice, Beth thought uneasily as she approached the middle table. The old-fashioned brass scale sat in the exact center of the table, its two bowls perfectly balanced. One side of the table held weights made of various metals and carved stones of various sizes and shapes.
“Put something you value on one side of the scale,” the second woman said.
Would she get it back? She wore an antique ring on her right hand—a ring set with a small moonstone and carved with odd symbols that were so worn down they were barely visible.
She didn’t remember where the ring came from, but she’d had it for as long as she could remember.
She did value it, but it was personal, and she wasn’t here for personal reasons.
Beth took her detective’s shield out of her pocket and set it in one of the bowls. The bowl sank until it almost touched the table.
“What is it you seek?” the woman asked.
“Answers about an incident that happened in Penwych,” Beth replied.
The woman stared at the detective’s shield as she reached for one of the weights—a weight that looked heavy enough to balance the shield.
The moment the woman set the weight in the other bowl, that bowl sank as if the shield weighed nothing.
The woman looked surprised, but her eyes remained focused on the detective’s shield while she tried a smaller weight. Then another.
Frowning slightly, the woman removed the weight, and the side of the scale with the shield once more settled close to the table. Then she set a bone disc in the bowl.
Too light to do anything, Beth thought. And yet…That side of the scale moved.
The woman put a second bone disc in the bowl and watched the scale. When she put a third disc in the bowl, the two sides of the scale were balanced.
Shouldn’t be. Beth had held one of those discs. No way three of them equaled the weight of her detective’s shield.
“The cost of receiving the answers you seek is your assistance to us on three occasions,” the woman said. “Three favors, if that is wording you prefer.”
Beth pushed words past a suddenly dry throat. “I can’t break any laws I swore to uphold.”
“We will not ask you to break any of your laws, but we do require that you respect the laws that apply here.” A pause. “These are the terms. Do you want the answers to your questions?”
She was here for answers. “Yes.”
“Then ask—but remember that words have power here.”
Heeding the warning, Beth thought for a moment before she spoke.
“A man named Gerry Palowski recently purchased the use of a ghost gun. He shot three people, one of them a child. They were seriously wounded, but they will live. Palowski was found on a park bench, dead of natural causes, with internal organs that indicated he was in his nineties. The police—Captain Forrester—would like to know how this is possible.”
“Pick up your shield and go to our sister for your answer.” The woman made a graceful gesture to indicate the woman sitting at the third table.
This woman’s eyes were heavily filmed and she stared at nothing. Yet she seemed to be filling a page on a sketch pad with multiple drawings. When Beth approached her table, she closed the sketch pad. Then she closed her eyes. When she opened them, her eyes were clear and her gaze sharp.
She rose and opened a pair of pocket doors that formed a wall behind her. There were shelves filled with paper on both sides of a room that seemed to go on forever.
Maybe it did.
The woman ran a finger along the edge of the papers on a shelf closest to the pocket doors. Removing a single sheet, she returned to the table and held up the paper for Beth to see.
Two…timelines, for want of a better word, both beginning with Palowski as he had been—a twenty-five-year-old man who lived hard and cared for no one but himself.
In the first timeline, Palowski was sketched with his daughter and two other children, the hardness in his face slightly softened as he looked at the children.
That sketch blended with another where he wore a hard hat, seemed to be working a construction job.
That sketch blended with a middle-aged Palowski, still wearing a hard hat but looking more like a foreman or management.
That sketch blended with an elderly Palowski smiling at his daughter while he held what might have been a grandchild.
That sketch blended with an old man who had found death in his sleep.
In the second timeline, Palowski, looking dark faced and furious, held a gun aimed at a woman and child. That sketch blended with three gravestones that were partly drawn. That sketch blended with Palowski sitting on a park bench—exactly as he’d been found.
Beth studied the sketches that filled the page, then looked at the woman.
“He wanted a gun that couldn’t be traced by the police,” the woman said. “He wanted a weapon from Wyrd. The price for the use of the gun was ten years of his life. The price for each bullet used was twenty years. You will have to ask Ethan Sharpe, but it appears the man used three bullets.”
Beth swayed, dizzied by what she’d heard. “Gerry Palowski aged seventy years in a matter of hours as payment for this ghost gun?”
“For the use of the gun.” Lucas Frost had stayed near the archway while she made her transaction with the Ladies Three.
Now he stepped up beside her. “He aged ten years the moment he walked out of the pavilion with the gun. Even if he’d changed his mind before reaching the ferry and brought the gun back here, he had already forfeited a decade from his potential ninety-five years.
But he left, and he chose to use the three bullets he’d been given and spend the sixty years he could have had to live a different life. ”
That was an explanation, of sorts, for Palowski. But…“Even if he’d never fired a gun before, Palowski was too close to his victims to miss, and yet the bullets…” Did crazy things that shouldn’t have been possible based on any law of physics.
The woman pointed to the gravestones in her sketch. “It wasn’t their time. But for one of them, their time will be shorter because of this.”
Beth studied the gravestones. One stone was little more than the base and a lightly penciled arch that indicated the final size. One was completed halfway, so finely wrought she could see the texture of stone on the paper. The third stone’s form was between the other two.
“Do you know whose time will be shorter?” she asked.
“No,” the woman replied. “They didn’t stand before us. He did.”
She thought for a moment. Even if Palowski doubted that payment really would be deducted from his potential lifespan, he would look for a way around paying. “What if he got the gun here but purchased the ammunition from a sporting goods store in Penwych?”
“The guns that come from here only work with bullets that come from here,” Frost said. “When you deal with us, you must pay what is owed.”
“Why couldn’t he buy ammunition that was the same caliber and get around your price that way?” Captain Forrester had told her not to argue or question, but she was trying to understand. And Frost? Did “cartridge” and “bullet” mean the same thing to him, or was he using the word he meant to use?
Frost gave her a predator’s smile. “If someone tried that, the gun would turn on him—or her—before returning home.”
One of the cases she’d been given to review.
A man with a grudge against someone, standing in a parking lot waving a gun while he shouted obscenities.
Witnesses agreed on that much. They also agreed that the man took aim at someone—but as he pulled the trigger, the gun twisted in his hand, and the bullet he’d intended for someone else hit him instead, killing him instantly.