Cloaked in Malice Read Online Free

canal.”

Three

Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
—QUENTIN CRISP

    How Paisley Skye managed to make being born sound like good news, I couldn’t say, but I felt better about it myself. “I get that you didn’t know your parents as a babe. But you didn’t know you lived on an island growing up?”
    “The water surrounding us wasn’t visible from the farm. And I couldn’t go beyond the fences, that was the rule. I never left the property. Though I heard the gulls, it wasn’t until I read about them that I knew where they came from, so I suspected the sea couldn’t be too far away, but I had no concept of the distance.”
    “What about television? The telephone?”
    “We lived in the last century. No TV, no telephone, nocomputers, no means of communicating with the outside world.”
    “Did you never get sick?” I asked. “Need a doctor?”
    “Mam practiced medicine her own way. I don’t think they needed to die so young, but they seemed to accept that as their fate. They would never talk to me about doctors or hospitals. It was like they were afraid of the outside world. I don’t get it. I never did, and I broke out as quickly as I could, once they were gone.”
    “Where have you been staying?”
    “At a bed-and-breakfast, the Carriage House, on Pearl Street, here in Mystic. I’ve been watching television and catching up with the world.”
    “Television is a far cry from the real world,” I cautioned her, trying not to let my shock over her life show, but she read my horror anyway while I caught the scent of chocolate—my mom telling me to tread lightly. Or that’s how I took the sign of my dead mother’s unexpected presence. She had only ever showed herself, like Dante often does, at the one momentous family occasion, my sister Sherry’s wedding. Mostly, the scent of her favorite indulgence in life told me of her presence in death.
    She’d passed when I was ten. But I still missed her.
    And poor Paisley, she had no one to miss. “What’s the name of your island?” I asked.
    “I couldn’t find it on a map, but it’s small—nothing therebut our farm. The nearest charted island is Fishers Island, so neither is far from here.”
    “How did you get off your island?”
    “I walked the beach every day until I found a fisherman offshore who heard my shout. I grabbed the bags I’d packed, and here I am.” Paisley released the double clasps on the carpetbag and opened it wide, different types of fabric spilling out, all white. Satin, fur, silk ruffles. Seeing them made me as nervous as a cat, excited, too, with new vintage treasures to feast my eyes upon, and lose my soul inside.
    Chakra returned to me, jumped to my lap, rubbed her head against my solar plexus, and played with my fingers. Then she settled into my arms like a babe for a snooze, both paws on her little pink kitty nose.
    Chakra’s comfort became a good excuse not to touch any of Paisley’s clothes and take a chance on getting a psychometric reading that could embarrass us both. That often happened when I touched something vintage, I zoned straight to a fixed point in the item’s past, checking out of my own mind like a tuckin’ zombie.
    In the process, I’ve been known to do anything from speaking in someone else’s voice to slinking to the floor, with no recall of those acts, and only the shock of scary once-upon-a-time ’s to show for my freaky mind-trips.
    According to Fiona—my mother’s fellow witch, who’d hugged me regularly, after Mom’s passing, unlike poor unhuggedPaisley—I have a psychic gift, bestowed by a universe that decides which significant events I get to see. Now what I do with the visuals is up to me, but it’s usually connected to some obscure, often illegal episode, of some import to people like Paisley Skye herself. So I’d best get to it, in case she was in trouble and didn’t know it any more than she knew her real name or parentage. “Were there albums with baby