The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Later I hear a quiet flicking sound coming from Enola’s room, the gentle slide of paper over paper. I look in. “Hey. You’re awake.”


She sits cross-legged, hunched in the center of her room. Her body sways slightly, as if in prayer. Lines of tarot cards spread across the floor, face up. She lays out six rows, each with six cards, quickly like a blackjack dealer. The cards move like a river. No sooner does she set the last card than she scoops the entire spread in one hand, shuffles, and begins to turn a new series on the floor.

“Enola?”

She doesn’t answer. She’s practicing. She doesn’t need to; her movements are ballet. The deck is heavily worn, the backs faded, dull and yellow. They might have been orange once, maybe red, but are now a suggestion with ragged sides. Old paper, the kind that shouldn’t be in this humidity. It’s difficult to see, but the faces look bold, rough, possibly hand painted. She clears the spread away again, methodical. I watch as she repeats the sequence, shuffling, turning, shuffling. It’s unseeing, compulsive.

I call her name again. She doesn’t hear. Doesn’t see me.

I pull the door closed. I’m in the living room looking at The Tenets of the Oracle when I remember. I’ve seen someone deal cards like that before—late at night on our square, metal-edged kitchen table, my father begging her to stop, to come to bed. She continued laying cards, swaying in her chair. The cards skimmed and swished. “Paulina,” he whispered. “Please.”

Something is wrong with Enola.

*

I take the phone outside. The night is warm and wet. He answers on the sixth ring.

“Simon? Heavens, it’s late.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“No, just one moment.” I hear him excusing himself and the gentle mumbling of a woman’s voice, presumably his wife. A few shuffled steps and a door opening and closing. “What is it?”

“I found something.”

“Something what?”

“It’s about my family. I think some of them are in the book, like you thought. But there’s more: they die. Of course they die, everybody dies, but they die young, very young. There’s multiple generations—they drown. Every single woman.” There is silence on the other end. I hear waves, cicadas, the blood in my ears. “Martin? You know about my mother. Her suicide.”

“She drowned,” he says after a pause.

“So did my grandmother, and her mother, and so on.”

“I—oh.” Little more than a dry whuff of breath.

“My sister came home today. She’s acting like my mother.”

After a short moment he says, “I’d imagine that could be disturbing, in light of your recent reading. I apologize for that.”

And because it is before dawn, because the wee hours make the improbable believable, because of the names, because of the drowned, I say, “I’m not a believer in curses. I like facts.”

A quiet swallowing sound, a thousand miles of telephone lines away. “Of course,” he says quickly. “And when presented with a certain evidence, investigation wouldn’t be unwarranted.”

“It’s seasonal affective disorder, most likely. Low serotonin levels.”

“In all likelihood,” he concurs.

“All the same, I’d like to find the start—the cause, if there is one. In case there’s anything I can do.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Provided there’s anything that needs to be done,” I say.

Churchwarry agrees. I can feel us both dancing around something, each other, waiting for the other to take the lead. “If you think I might be helpful…,” he begins.

“How long have you been in business?”

“My father opened the shop as a young man, so quite some time.”

“So you have contacts who might be amenable to finding some hard-to-find material?”

He coughs. “Simon, I tend to be the man people turn to when they need to find the impossible. Anything you need I’d be more than happy to assist you with. I’d consider it a bit of an adventure. Kismet,” he says, though there’s little joy to the word.

There are too many places to start—the book’s original owner, Hermelius Peabody, how he may have been related to Bess Visser, Ryzhkova and the tarot cards, and what a wild boy has to do with any of it. “I think I need to know something about curses,” I say.

In the background, Enola’s cards flick against her fingers, a soft snick with each turn.

It’s July 14th. I have ten days.





8


The heart of an aquatic act is torture—to drown without drowning—but Evangeline tolerated it. When the mute young man brought her before Hermelius Peabody, she knew it would not be without consequences, but the young man’s eyes had been so warm that when he took her hand she followed.