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are?” Tina asked in faintly accented English.
    “No,” Marilyn answered evenly, picturing her dog Rowley in her head to steady herself. But she knew that the two people were afraid of her now, even though they wanted something in her, something she normally kept hidden.
    “You’re an instrument,” the half sister said. The man nodded and repeated in his silky voice, “A most beautiful instrument.”
    The two of them then got on each side of her and began speaking softly together. The woman twisted the antique lace in her claw like hands, “There’s a lot of money to be made. People won’t be able to help themselves once we get started in this town but oh, we could make a lot of money.”
    At the same time Ham the brother was whispering, his mustache beaded with perspiration, “You are the one we were looking for, you could teach us so much, we know you could. Would you like to join us?” he asked and put his hand on Marilyn’s shoulder, not able to help himself. There had been so many false starts, snake oil days, and card tricks; they couldn’t let this one get away.
    “Join us,” the skinny one repeated and Marilyn felt like they were each talking into one ear and the words were charging negative and positive against each other. She stood up suddenly and the room tilted and the candelabra slid across the room as a wind came up and whirled dust balls, salt particles and dried flower petals around them. She knew they were weaker than her, and darker too, angry and confused, she could resist them and all she had to do was leave. She shook Ham off and they followed her to the door like bleating children but wouldn’t cross the threshold that had the thin line of white table salt like a barrier to the normal world. When she passed through the beaded curtain she had a momentary vision of a rock wall lined with hundreds of empty vials that made her sick to her stomach and then hot shame burned in her gut. There had been another vial, this one full of dark amber fluids in a beautiful glass case, forbidden and then when the pain smashed across her temple she let the image go and the plastic red beads swished and she pushed through the curtain and she was back in the tawdry front room.
    “They’re kind of country gypsies, I guess,” is what she said to Mona when they were back in the car. True, she had come through to the front parlor with her eyes like huge black smudges in her white face but walked out the door without another word to Madam Josie and Mona, feeling awkward, just put another five down on the ten she had given the woman and followed her. It was clear Marilyn wasn’t going to talk about what had gone on in the back room with Madam Josie’s relatives, at least not with her. Mona decided driving her home that trying to be helpful was a little too expensive for her purse and Marilyn didn’t appreciate it anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Scientific Study
    The dinner crowd was always light at the Surrey but just enough for Scott, the manager, to insist that one girl always stay on with the busboy and Walt until the bitter end at 7PM. Marilyn was on the dinner shift most nights of the week as she would come in at eleven after the lunch set-up was done by Mona and Betty, but it would be her marrying ketchups in the fading prairie light at the end of the day. The menu at that time of day, typed up with the same painstaking mistakes every week by Scott on the little Smith Corona and then mimeographed in purples with the peculiar smell that only he was allowed to breathe in the tiny office just upstairs from the dining room, was “limited” with the few things that Walt could make reliably on his own without Amanda’s help: grilled pork chops with candied canned crab apples, deep fried frozen fish with lemon slices and a sirloin steak with grilled onions. You could get applesauce or coleslaw on the side and, of course, no liquor was served.
    Marilyn saw the loping figure of the professor as soon as he came