Shadows Out of Time

Starla had a point. The tea room stood on what was once called Terrill’s Neck, an isolated finger of sand and eel grass sheltered from view of land. No other dwellings were built within sight. No one ventured down Nightjar Lane except to have their fortune told.

“Interesting yarn,” I said, mentally classifying it with Thom’s ghost Clipper. But I got one useful nugget out of it: Miss Terrill wintered outside of Kingsport. This would fit into my plans— how I did not yet know.

I started to see the old salt hanging around the tea room the week before Thanksgiving. I found him loitering in the cellar one night as I replaced the remainder of the day’s tea. He was dressed like an Innsmouth lobsterman, his muscle-knotted face resembling a raw steak garnished with cold clam-gray eyes.

“Who are you?” I blurted out.

“Mind yer business,” he growled. He was horsing the empty tea chests from their pallets to the old disused coal bin. I had the feeling he intended to pull them up the chute with the ropes that lay about the dirt floor in confused coils.

I rushed upstairs to report the apparition to Miss Theresa.

“That’s old Cap’n Terrill,” she said. “Leave him be, and he will return the favor.”

“Relative of yours?”

“Every Kingsport Terrill is related to my family, distantly or otherwise.” The silence that followed told me I was dismissed.

Business was brisk that day. I saw little of Cap’n Terrill, and thought no more of him.

I was reading at Libra when a light dusting of snow swirling outside the window caught my gaze. Two readings later, the dusting was a thick pall.

Dorinda grabbed me as I was collecting a five-dollar tip from a matron who came in needlessly worried about a neck tumor. I had pronounced it as nonmalignant.

“We’re closing early,” she undertoned. “Nor’easter coming. I’ve locked the front door. Your next reading is your last.”

I took the slip, thinking: I’ve been waiting for opportunity. Here it is knocking.

The reading was difficult. Excitement made my mind race, and I kept popping out of Alpha. The tea leaves did most of the work anyway. I felt like the prop, instead of vice versa. Such is the potency of Kingsport tea.

“I see a bird on wing,” I told the woman. “A flight to warmer climes, perhaps?”

“I always winter in the Caribbean,” she said. She had that sun-bleached blonde look so many upperclass Kingsport women had.

I warned of her spousal infidelities, but she brushed that concern away. Obviously she had married for money. She didn’t seem to have any vital issues, so I told her she would outlive her husband. That brought a bloodless smile to her lips. She tipped me a twenty, and hurried out the door into the teeth of a gathering gale of sleety snow.

Dorinda locked the door after her, and the tea room stood in silence. It was the end of the season. And it had come like a stealthy thief.

We gathered in the kitchen. Miss Theresa came bustling down, looking fretful and impatient.

“Normally it is my custom to treat my readers to a Thanksgiving dinner on the night before the holiday season starts,” she said. “But circumstances prohibit it this year. Let me just wish you all happy holidays, and we will all gather here again on the second of January.”

Readers began filing out to find their cars in the blow. The abruptness of it all was unsettling. Not many goodbyes were said.

I was putting on my topcoat when Miss Theresa accosted me.

“Mr. Shaner, I will have my keys.”

I gave them up without a quiver of regret.

“Now you must go,” she said, showing me to the door. “I must shutter the windows and be away before this thricedamned storm gathers its full strength.” Her voice had lost its thin Yankee gentility. She was all business now. The door cracked open, letting in a gust of bitter air and freezing particles.

“Be happy to help,” I offered.

“That is Cap’n Terrill’s duty,” she coldly returned.

“See you in the New Year, then,” I said, exiting. But she was already locking the door behind me.

I pushed out into the snow. The Nor’easter pushed back. Squinching my eyes shut and lowering my head, I tried to make headway, but the wind was too stiff. I wasn’t planning to go far, anyway. Creeping back, I found the cellar window that once doubled as a coal chute. It opened easily. I had unlatched it when I got the day’s tea that morning.

Feet first, I slid down the coal-dust-smeared chute and awaited nightfall. I was still without a plan. Perhaps I would accost the old woman, and pry from her the exact location of the family tea plantation in modern Thailand. Possibly a more elegant solution would present itself. It didn’t much matter. As long as I got what I wanted.