Shadows Out of Time

“You know,” Thom said suddenly, “this place is haunted.”

I countered, “What tea room worth its salt isn’t?”

“We have the usual ghosts — some of them readers who don’t know they’re dead — but that’s not what I meant.” His voice grew low and gravelly.

I leaned in close.

“One night I was cleaning up after the night crew had gone home and I looked out the window. I saw a ship — a tea Clipper. It was the old Blue Moon.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Thom shook his head solemnly. He pointed to one of the bay windows that overlooked the ocean. “It lay right out that window. If you look closely, you can make out the rotting piles of the old Tea Room dock.”

I drifted over to the window. The water was lapping against a double row of broken black pilings. I could also see that the window reflected the painting of the Blue Moon over the mantel. In the right light, at a certain angle, the painting could reflect in the old glass. So much for ghost ships, I thought. But Thom didn’t need to know that. Psychics love our superstitions.

I did two readings that day, both routine. The tips were good. They doubled my money. I went home thinking I had to get into that basement. But I needed to bide my time, too. The door to opportunity opens widest when it opens of its own accord.

By varying my shifts, I got to know the day and night crews. They were not much different than others I had worked with over the last twenty-odd years. Their stories sounded all the same. Pain makes people psychic, and Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room was awash with personal horror stories guaranteed to open your third eye — or close your earthly eyes in death. These people were survivors. I got to know every one. But I needed their trust. So I awaited the perfect opportunity.

It came just after Labor Day.

I had a bad feeling the moment I laid eyes on the man. He was Asian. Short. Brutish. There was an aura of contained violence about him, like a snake tightly coiled to strike.

“Who wants him?” Dorinda asked, dangling a slip between two bloodless fingers.

Thom almost shuddered. “Not me.”

“I read him last month.”

Starla sniffed, “Let Carl have him.”

I snapped up the slip.

The moment I sat down with him, I knew he was a dead man. I think he knew it, too. I got violence and drugs around him. Not that he used them. He dealt in them. He eyed me in a challenging way. Death was in his cold, otherwise-unreadable eyes.

I decided to go for broke.

“There is an old saying,” I began. “Perhaps you have heard it: ‘A shred of time is worth a bar of gold.’”

His hematite orbs gleamed.

“Gold you have in plenty,” I went on. “Time you have little. It is running out. You have a grave choice before you. To flee or to stay. To meet your fate, or to escape your fate.”

His voice came out of his slack mouth in thick whispers. “I cannot alter my destiny. I am tied in with family. They are my blood, and I am theirs. If I run, I die.”

“Blood relatives in this life may be blood enemies in the next,” I countered. “Why not recognize them for what they are in this, and preserve your life so that in the next, Karma is reversed?”

His thin lips became a thoughtful seal. I hammered the point home from every angle I could intuit, but I saved the best for last. I showed him what lay at the bottom of his cup.

The skull inside was a crude black curse. The client’s eyes opened, narrowed, then sank to veiled slits. A hundred dollar bill fluttered to the table top as he slipped out.

“I don’t think he’ll be coming back,” I told the others.

And he never did. That made me a hero, even though I had violated the cardinal law of psychic reading. Karma is an immutable force in the universe, but I believe in observable justice. Sometimes you have to be the instrument of such justice in this life.

Week by week, month by month, I insinuated myself into the warp and woof of the tea room. And kept a sympathetic ear open for gossip — which is just a vulgar word for information.

The day-to-day running of the tea room was left to the hostess, Dorinda — a burnt-out retired reader the owner had kept on out of charity. She was useless as an information source, refusing all offers of a free reading. I concentrated on cultivating Thom, who every morning took the empty teak coffin from the plum pantry into the padlocked cellar, brought it back brimming with loose dry tea, and who every night returned what remained to the basement store.

“I notice the special blend is tasting kind of stale lately,” I said one Autumn afternoon as we were cooling our heels in the north sunroom. The floor was empty. It was eighty-six degrees. The tourists were taking in a last look at Martin’s Beach, or if they could afford it, busy shopping down on Cape Cod.