Fortune (4 page)

Madeline flailed her arms. Her right hand connected with the cut-glass vase on the nightstand by the bed. The leaded-glass vase that had been a baby gift from a family friend. The one she kept filled with pink tea roses. She closed her fingers around it and swung. It connected with the side of Adam's head. He grunted with pain and eased the grip on her neck.

Oxygen rushed into her lungs; they burned and she gasped for air. She swung the vase again. This time when it connected she heard a sickening crack. Blood flew. Grace screamed.

Adam got to his feet. Red spilled down the side of his face and across his white dress shirt. He brought a hand to the side of his head, meeting Madeline's eyes, his expression disbelieving. Then, as if in slow motion, he fell backward, hitting the floor with a heavy thud. Blood splattered Grace, who was still screaming, one piercing shriek after another, like a burglar alarm gone berserk.

Madeline stumbled to her feet and across to Adam. He lay completely still, face deathly white, blood pooling around his head, matting his dark hair. She had killed him. Dear God, she had killed Adam Monarch.

She reached out to him, intent on checking his pulse, then stopped, realization hitting her with the force of a blow. Her vision, the one from the library earlier and the one from five years before.
Blood spilling across a gleaming floor.
Madeline brought her hands to her mouth.
Glittering ice and freezing water, a body being sucked down.

It wasn't over.

With a cry, she snatched her hand back. She had to go, now; before someone discovered what she had done. Before Grace was taken away from her.

Madeline scooped up her daughter, grabbed the suitcases and ran.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
1983

T
he countryside gently rolled. It was lush and green and fertile. Nineteenth-century farmhouses nestled amidst those rolling hills; corn silos and windmills dotted the landscape, horse-drawn buggies the roads.

It was picturesque. Quaint and beautiful. Every day tourists flocked to Lancaster County to soak up the atmosphere and to relive—if only for an hour or two—the ways of an earlier century.

Seventeen-year-old Chance McCord had experienced all of living in the nineteenth century that he could stand. Quaint and picturesque made him want to puke. He feared if he spent one more day in this all-for-one, one-for-all, plain-ways hell, he would go completely, fucking out of his mind.

Chance strode across his sparsely furnished bedroom to the open window, stopping before it and gazing out at the evening. He wanted to wear his blue jeans. He wanted to listen to rock'n'roll and watch TV. He wanted to hang out with his friends—hell, or anyone else who thought and felt as he did. Dear God, he even longed for school. The Amish didn't believe in schooling for children his age. By sixteen, Amish children were fulfilling their duty to the family and community by working on the farm. He had been fulfilling his duty for a year now; damn but he hated cows.

Chance braced his hands on the windowsill and breathed in the mild, evening air. A year ago he wouldn't have believed it possible to long for the big, rambling high school in north L.A. where he had always thought of himself as a prisoner. He wouldn't have believed it possible to wish to be sitting in first-period English with old man Waterson droning on about some poet who had died long before the birth of the electric guitar.

Now, Chance knew what it was to be a prisoner.

If he didn't escape, he would shrivel up and die.

It wasn't that his aunt Rebecca—his mother's sister—or her husband, Jacob, were bad people. Quite the contrary, they were good ones—to a fault. They had taken him in when his mother had died and his wealthy father—if Chance could even call him that, he had never even acknowledged his existence—had refused to take him. They had made room for him in this house, though with four children of their own it hadn't been easy.

And it wasn't that they hated him, though it often felt like it. They simply had their beliefs, and those beliefs were ironclad. They expected him to believe, and live, as they did.

He couldn't do that. It wasn't in him.

Chance began to pace, feeling as he often did, like a caged animal. They had buggied to town today, he, Uncle Jacob and Samuel, his aunt and uncle's ten-year-old son. There, Chance had seen it. A traveling carnival, complete with a Ferris wheel and a fortune-teller. A traveling show, the kind whose troupe went from town to town, the kind of show Chance didn't even know existed anymore.

An opportunity, he'd thought. Maybe.

While Jacob had been completing his business, he had looked it over, taking Samuel with him. When Jacob found them, he had been furious, though he hadn't raised his voice. The things he had said to Chance had hurt, though Chance had hidden it; the things his uncle had left unsaid, the way he had looked at Chance, had cut him to his core.

Later, Chance had heard his aunt and her husband arguing.

Chance crossed to the window, looking toward town. In the distance he could see the faint glow of the carnival's neon light. Frustration balled in the pit of his gut. Regret with it. He had brought tension to this house, had brought friction—between his aunt and her husband, between the children and their parents, the family and a community that didn't like or trust outsiders.

He was an outsider here.

He always would be.

Chance rested his forehead against the windowsill, thinking of freedom, thinking of traveling from town to town with no one telling him what he could think or how he should act.

A traveling show. An opportunity. A way out.

His heart began to pound. He didn't fit in here, he never would. The feeling wasn't a new one; he had never fit in, had always been an outsider, even with his mother in L.A. But he had big plans, dreams that he intended to make reality.

His mother.
As always when he thought of her, her image filled his head. He pictured her pretty face and smile, remembered the faraway look she so often had, recalled her habit of staring into the distance just over his right shoulder. With her image came a tightness to his chest, a pinch, an ache. Chance fisted his fingers against the smooth, cool glass. Connie McCord had longed for so many things, things life had kept beyond her reach, things death had denied her ever obtaining.

They wouldn't remain beyond his reach. He knew what he wanted, what he needed and deserved. He would grab it with both hands. He would not end up like his mother, always disappointed and unfulfilled, always on the outside looking in.

He would not die without having obtained all that he desired.

Chance swung away from the window. He would make his dreams a reality. Starting now, this moment. Somehow, he would find a way.

A traveling show. The chance, the opportunity he had been waiting for.

The time had come to go.

M
arvel's Carnival was a seedy, tired affair, one of the last of its kind, a dying breed. Forty years prior, before the proliferation of high-tech, big-bucks amusement worlds like Six Flags, Marvel's had been in its heyday. Part amusement park, part circus, the carnival and its troupe traveled from town to town during the summer months, staying a few days or a week, then moving on.

These days, a carnival like Marvel's was in less demand than during that glorious heyday. Now the troupe only traveled to small rural areas. Places with little access to big, fancy theme parks, places where the kids—young and old—were hungry for something to do, some way to fill the long summer nights.

Marvel's gave them plenty to do, plenty to gawk at. The fire-eaters and snake charmers were a big favorite with the preadolescent crowd, the teenagers gravitated toward the rides and games of chance, the adults to the food, acrobats and contortionists. Everybody loved the fortune-teller, especially this summer, as the show's owner had managed to snare a really good one.

Claire Dearborn—known as Madame Claire on the circuit—was the real thing, the genuine article, not a scam artist or slick fraud like most of the other sideshow acts. If Abner Marvel had had any doubts about that when he'd hired her, those doubts had quickly disappeared as word spread and the towners began lining up to have their fortunes told.

Abner Marvel, one of the last of the born-and-bred showmen, had quickly given the woman and her daughter their own trailer and raised the cost of a five-minute reading from two dollars to five. Additional time could be purchased, of course. At a premium.

In twelve-year-old Skye Dearborn's opinion, her mother could make a lot more money with her ability than she did working for this third-rate, traveling fleabag, but the one time Skye had suggested it her mother had said she liked traveling with Marvel's and that money didn't buy happiness.

Skye supposed she liked the traveling, too, but she didn't follow the bit about money and happiness. From what she had seen of life, rich folks seemed a whole lot happier than poor ones.

Skye ducked out of her and her mother's trailer and headed toward the midway. Living accommodations for the entire troupe, the trailers were positioned on the northern-most edge of the lot, as far as possible from the activity of the show. Even so, she could hear the carousel's calliope and the screams of delighted terror coming from the Screamin' Demon, the show's rather modest roller coaster.

She and her mother were traveling with Marvel's for the summer; come fall they would settle somewhere, some little town where her mom would get a job at the local diner or drugstore and where she would go to school. Skye made a face. School sucked. She hated everything about it except art class, and some of the schools she had gone to had been so small and backward they didn't even have art. Then it totally sucked.

In truth, whether the school had art or not never really mattered, 'cause she and her mom never stayed in any one place too long. Just about the time she had gotten her reputation as a smart-mouthed troublemaker good and fixed, they would move on. Skye could count more than a dozen schools she'd attended in the last couple of years.

She and her mom had been traveling this way for as long as she could remember. Her mom said they were nomadic adventurers; Skye kind of thought they might be criminals or something. All the moving around, to her mind, just didn't add up.

Skye frowned and kicked at a discarded Coke can. Still half-full, the beverage spewed out, splattering her shorts and T-shirt. Making a sound of annoyance, she swiped at the drops of cola. If only her mom would tell her the truth. The few times Skye had confronted her, her mother had denied keeping anything from her; she had denied having any secrets.

She was lying; Skye was certain of it. She had the feeling that her mother was running, that she was constantly looking over her shoulder. That she was always afraid.

And that made Skye afraid, too. Her mother was all she had.

She climbed over the rope barricade that circled the perimeter of the show and separated what was called the front yard from the back yard, the towners from the troupers. Up ahead lay the midway, with its bright lights and raucous laughter, its frenetic mix of music, games and tasty treats. The rides flanked either side of the midway; the sideshow tents—including her mother's—were located at its far end.

Skye didn't have a set job with the troupe, but helped out as she was needed, filling in for troupers who were ill, helping set up and tear down, but mostly, she worked as a sort of shill on the midway, drumming up business for the various games of chance.

A “sort of” shill because Marvel's was a one-hundred-percent Sunday-school show—no overcharging or shortchanging customers, no rigged games. Skye had played each game about a million times; she knew the trick to winning at each, so she made it look easy. So easy, in fact, that as she walked away, arms full of prizes, folks lined up, eager to win one of the big stuffed toys.

As Skye stepped onto the midway, the scent of popcorn hit her in a mouthwatering wave. Nearly 8:00 p.m., the carnival was in full swing, the midway packed, even for a Saturday night. Skye moved her gaze up, then down, the aisle of game booths, noting that most were busy.

All except the quarter toss.

She ambled over, stopped at the booth as if sizing it up, then dug in her pocket for a quarter. “What do I do?” she asked Danny, an obnoxious zit-face of a boy who seemed to have made tormenting her his life's work. But still, this was business. She had to get along with him for the good of the troupe.

He sidled over. “See those platforms there?” He pointed at the three levels of platforms topped with round pieces of thick, slick glass. She nodded. “Just toss your quarter. If it lands and sticks to the low platform, you win a small prize, the middle platform a medium prize, and the high platform a grand prize.”

“That's all?”

“That's it.” He grinned slyly. “Easy as pie.”

Skye tried, deliberately missing twice for the sake of realism. The third time, she expertly flipped the coin so it would land flat on one of the glass tops.

It did, and she clapped her hands together. “I won!” she squealed. She swung, as with excited, disbelieving delight, toward the people in the aisle behind her. “I won! I can't believe it!”

“Here you go, little lady,” Danny said, and handed her a stuffed parrot. “You wouldn't like to give it another try, would you? And go for one of the grand prizes. You seem awful good at this.”

“Sure.” Skye grinned. “I'll try again.”

A handful of quarters later, she walked away from the now-crowded booth, her arms loaded with stuffed toys. She went to the supply wagon to dump them—she never kept what she won, that wouldn't be right—then skipped back to the midway for some more fun.

A commotion at the concession stand caught her attention. A teenager stood at the front of the line, clutching his stomach and holding out a half-eaten hot dog.

“This made me sick,” the boy said loudly. “I think it's bad or something.”

Skye inched closer to get a better look. She saw Marta, a big woman with steel gray hair and a personality to match, eye the boy suspiciously. “What do you mean, it made you sick?”

“Sick. You know.” He groaned and clutched his stomach, then doubled over as with cramps. The people behind him in line stirred and moved backward. He raised his voice a bit more. “Isn't it against the law to serve rotten meat?”

“We don't serve rotten meat,” Marta said, her voice shrill. “We're very careful.”

“Smell it.” He held it out. “It smells rotten.”

Marta leaned away, her face twisting with distaste. “I don't want to smell it. If it's a problem, I'll give you back your money. Or another hot dog.”

“Another hot—” He moaned. “I want to talk to the owner or manager or something. This isn't right.” He doubled over, groaning. “If I die, it's going to be your fault.”

The line stirred again; several people turned and walked away. Someone said something nasty about carnivals. Skye frowned, studying the boy. He looked kind of weird. His jeans were strictly high-water, his hair cropped unevenly, as if done by hand with a pair of kitchen shears. The front of his T-shirt was emblazoned with the name of a rock group that hadn't been popular in a year, and instead of tennis shoes, he wore some kind of funky work boots.

Weird, she thought again. This kid wasn't for real. He was trying to scam Marta, no doubt about it. She had seen a hint of a smile tug at his mouth as he bent over the last time. Skye cocked her head, indignant. But why? What did he hope to gain?

Money, no doubt. She folded her arms across her chest, disgusted. The lengths some people would go to for money.

“Abner Marvel's the owner,” Marta was saying, obviously anxious to get rid of him before he tossed his cookies. “You can probably find him at the little top. That's the sideshow tent.” The woman pointed. “At the end of the midway. If he's not there, try the main ticket booth.”

Still clutching both his stomach and the hot dog, the kid turned and hobbled in the direction she'd indicated.

Skye narrowed her eyes. She made it her business to know everything that went on at Marvel's. She knew what all the members of the troupe were up to, including who was doing what and with whom. A person couldn't burp on the lot without her finding out about it.

She meant to get to the bottom of this, too. Nobody was going to pull a fast one on Marvel's, not if she had anything to say about it.

She started after him, keeping him in sight but keeping her distance, too. After he had gone some distance, he straightened, glanced back at Marta and the concession stand, then smiled. A moment later, he tossed the hot dog into the trash can and started walking again—this time both upright and quickly.

Skye made a sound of triumph. She knew it, the creep was up to something.

“Hey! Brat-face!”

Skye stopped and glared over her shoulder at Rick, the kid who ran the shooting gallery, a particularly odious creature. When she and her mother had first joined Marvel's, he and a couple of his equally gross friends had tried to scare her by locking her in the fun house after closing. Instead of scaring her, he'd made her mad. When one of the roustabouts discovered her and let her out, she'd found Rick and popped him square in the nose, bloodying it. He had never forgiven her for that. But he'd never tried to scare her again, either.

She propped her fists on her hips. “What do
you
want?”

“I gotta take a break.”

“So take it. I'm busy.”

“Marvel sent Benny to cover the coaster for a while. If I don't get to the john, I'm going to piss on one of the customers. Get over here.”

Skye looked at the mystery kid's retreating back, then at Rick. She sniffed. “Do you always have to be so gross? You're disgusting. Find somebody else.”

“If you don't get your ass over here, I'm gonna beat the shit out of you.”

“Yeah, right. I'm so scared.” She cocked her chin up. “Pretty clever, the way you sneaked off the lot last night to meet that girl. Hardly anybody saw you. Except me. What do you think Marvel would say about that?”

His face turned beet red. He glanced at her, and shoved his hands in the back pockets of his blue jeans. “You're such a little twit. I wish you'd fall off the face of the planet.”

“And you're a brainless butthead.”

“You're just jealous 'cause no boy's ever going to want to sneak out to meet you. You're probably a queer, you act more like a boy than a girl.”

For a moment, Skye couldn't find her breath. Her eyes burned and her chest ached. Horrified, she struggled for a comeback, struggled to keep Rick from seeing how much his comment hurt.

She tipped her chin up again, as much for show as to keep it from wobbling. Why should she care if Rick thought she was ugly and unlovable? So what if he thought she was a…queer. He was gross and stupid, and she hated him.

“You better watch it,” she said, “or I'll get my mom to put a curse on you.”

Rick snorted with amusement, but only after a moment's telling hesitation. Showmen were notoriously superstitious. They believed in bad luck and gris-gris and witches. And the truth was, her mother's ability scared them silly. They thought that, somehow, if Madame Claire could see their future—which she could—she could also change it. For the worse.

Because of that, they kept as far away from Madame Claire as possible.

Skye grinned. Silly, superstitious delinquents. It didn't work that way, of course. But if they wanted to believe it did, that suited Skye just fine. Her mother wasn't interested in being one of them, and Skye liked being able to yank their chains every once in a while. Sometimes a girl needed a little threat to hang over a bully's head; it was a way to even the odds a bit.

Skye knew using the other trouper's fear of her mother's ability that way didn't make her too popular, but that was tough nuts. She was used to not being liked, to not having friends. Besides, when she and her mom left, she wouldn't be leaving anyone behind. Goodbyes were a real bummer.