Fortune's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

them poppyseed cakes and mint tea, then proceeded with a reading that was dead wrong. To Carolyn, who had a real distaste for boats, she promised a sea voyage. For Rae, a miserable student, there was a scholar’s future. Rae and her mother had looked at each other across the table; in spite of themselves, they smiled. Clearly, this fortune-teller would tell them whatever she imagined they wanted to hear. Of course Rae asked about Jessup. “What about my boyfriend? Will we stay together?”
    â€œOh, yes,” the fortune-teller had said, and for a moment Rae saw her mother draw back. “Your boyfriend,” the fortuneteller had gone on, “is tall and handsome and extremely shy. Polite, wonderful with children, could become a doctor or a lawyer—an all-around darling boy.”
    That misreading had made Rae and Carolyn so giddy that they’d fallen out the door of the tearoom and into each other’s arms. Afterward it was a joke between them: when things seemed dark there was always a place near the Copley Plaza Hotel where it was possible to hear good news for only five dollars.
    Good news was exactly what Rae wanted to hear right now, so she went to The Salad Connection, past a buffet table offering only the coolest food—lettuce leaves, cucumber, slices of avocado. Sitting in a leatherette booth, she ordered lunch and decided to skip dessert—if Jessup was thinking about gaining weight, she might as well think about it too. After she’d finished her salad, the waitress brought an empty cup and a pot of Darjeeling tea. There was a white business card on the edge of the saucer:
    L ILA G REY
    47 Three Sisters Street
    Readings and Advice—Limited Private Consultations
    25 dollars per hour
    Good news, Rae saw, had gotten more expensive.
    After scanning the room for the fortune-teller, Rae realized that the psychic was at the next table. She had expected something more than a few silver bangle bracelets and a small silk turban. The psychic appeared to be in her forties, with thick gray hair cut on an angle at her jawline, so that when she leaned over to peer into a teacup no client could see her expression or her eyes. But across the aisle separating them Rae could see the psychic’s hands resting on a tabletop, and the long, delicate fingers made Rae uneasy. A woman who picked up a teacup so cautiously might actually be searching for more than good news.
    By the time the psychic sat down across from Rae it was nearly one o’clock, and Rae had the sense that if she weren’t careful she might just believe anything she was told. Out on Hollywood Boulevard it was now so hot that the asphalt melted. Whenever people crossed the street their shoes got coated with tar, and the smell of tar made them remember summers in whatever town they grew up in, and they found themselves yearning for lemonade, just as they had on hot days back home when the air hung above them and clouds had the burning, sooty edge of August. Inside the restaurant the air conditioner was turned up higher, and as the psychic raised her arm to pour the tea, Rae felt an odd chill along the backs of her legs.
    â€œYou can ask me anything,” Lila Grey, the psychic said. “Just don’t ask me when the heat wave will break because I don’t do weather.”
    The fortune-teller in Boston certainly hadn’t asked them for questions; she had taken one look and had quickly decided what they wanted to hear.
    â€œI’ll bet everybody just pours out their whole life story to you,” Rae guessed.
    â€œNot really,” Lila Grey said.
    â€œI’ll bet once they start talking about themselves, they can’t stop,” Rae insisted.
    Lila Grey, who had three more tables to go, a dentist appointment in the late afternoon, and a stop at the market before she went home, was not as careful as she might have been. She might have at least looked at her client, but instead she glanced down at