The tea leaves were a little trickier—and also a little easier. They were tea leaves, for God’s sake. No one could predict exactly how they would appear when a client had finished her cup of tea, and a clever reader could see anything she wanted in them.
Ady Murphy had been coming to see Kendall for years. She was a seventy-year-old widow, small and spry, and as sweet as could be, and she loved to have her tea leaves read. Luckily Kendall loved making up stories to tell her. Ady had six children, nineteen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. Almost anything Kendall said would connect to one of them. Mostly, however, Kendall—just like Marie Laveau—listened. And then she carefully crafted what to say.
They were chatting now as they went back to the little room with the pretty cloth-covered table, crystal ball and stack of cards. Ady carried her teacup with her. She always had the same tea: Irish cream.
“So that rascal Amelia did have relatives!” Ady said. She and Amelia had met and gotten to know each other at the tea shop. They always wore similar cotton dresses, pillbox hats and little white gloves, and they had gotten on famously from day one. When Amelia was born, the family had been rich. She had died with only her house and a few trinkets. Ady had been born on a plantation, too—in a shack where her father had worked the cotton fields. There had been no running water or electricity. Amelia had never had a child; Ady had produced a football team, with all her descendants. But the women shared something special: a love of the same manners and morals. One had been white, one was black, and each one had counted herself lucky to have the other as a friend.
Actually, Ady wasn’t all black. Her skin was a lovely copper color, and she had bright amber eyes. She liked to say she knew white because she had some in her, and she was always telling Amelia and Kendall that they should have had a little black in them, that it would have made them stronger. “Nothing strong as a black woman, honey. Not even the biggest he-man out there,” Ady would say.
“I met the Flynns. They seem decent enough,” Kendall said now.
“Hmph. What decent boys wouldn’t visit a lonely great-aunt?”
“They didn’t know she existed,” Kendall explained.
“Now that’s just strange.” Ady hmphed again. “Now let’s see what the tea leaves say. Maybe they’ll tell me I’m about to win the lottery. I don’t play the lottery, of course. But maybe I will. What do you think? Should I?”
Kendall laughed. “Now, you know I won’t give that kind of advice, Miss Ady.” Though a widow, Ady was always “Miss” Ady.
“And you know I don’t gamble, child,” Ady said, and laughed. “Come on, tell me what’s in my leaves.”
Kendall rolled the cup and studied it. The leaves did seem to be forming into a very definite swirl. It was just the way they had landed on the bottom of the cup, she told herself.
She stared at them. As she did, the room seemed to…go out of focus. Of course it did, she chided herself. She was staring so hard into the bottom of the cup that her vision was blurring.
But she couldn’t look away. Her vision kept on blurring, and then it was as if she were seeing a picture at the bottom of the cup. No, she was seeing a picture. A whole scene. She was back at the plantation on the day Amelia died. And there was Amelia, so frail, comatose in her bed. The nurse had said that she probably wouldn’t regain consciousness.
But she did. She sat up, and Kendall started forward, taking her hand. Amelia looked at her, told her that she loved her…then looked toward the foot of the bed and smiled, and said she was ready. She reached out, and…
In the teacup picture, in the vision swimming before her mind’s eye, Kendall saw something there. Someone. Someone wrapped in a sheen of light was reaching out to Amelia.
Kendall almost dropped the cup as she heard a voice—Amelia’s voice—whisper in her ear.
Help Ady. Please help her.
Ady suddenly jumped to her feet, and the movement broke the spell—no, memory, Kendall told herself.
“Miss Ady, what is it?”
“I will not go to the doctor,” Ady said.
“What?”
“You just said, ‘Get to the doctor, Ady. Go right away, and they’ll be able to stop it.’”
“No, I—no. I didn’t say anything,” Kendall protested. She reached for Ady’s hand.
As she took it, she felt as if a shaft of lightning shot through her. It was knowledge. Deep, certain knowledge. Ady had cancer.
The older woman was looking at her in horror, and she herself was shaking inwardly. She’d had no idea she had spoken. And the way Ady was staring at her was frightening.
But she knew.
“Miss Ady, I’ll take you myself. You have to get to the doctor right away.”
“I don’t like the doctor. He pokes and prods me.”
“Miss Ady, I think you’re sick, but the sickness can be stopped if we just get you help fast.”
Miss Ady looked around, clutching her little handbag to her chest. Then she stared at Kendall and frowned. “Is Luther Jr. going to win that football game Saturday night?”
Kendall told her, “I don’t know. I do know you have to go to the doctor. I’ll go with you, I promise. But you have to go.”