“Is that good?”
“Nothing’s necessarily good or bad in astrology, John. But it’s good in that I enjoy working with Geminis. I find it to be an extremely interesting sign.”
“How so?”
“The duality. Gemini is the sign of the twins, you see.” She went on talking about the properties of the sign, and he nodded, agreeing but not really taking it all in. And then she was saying, “I suppose the most interesting thing about Geminis is their relationship to the truth. Geminis are naturally duplicitous, yet they have an inner reverence for the truth that echoes their opposite number across the Zodiac. That’s Sagittarius, of course, and your typical Sadge couldn’t tell a lie to save his soul. Gemini can lie without a second thought, while being occasionally capable of this startling Sagittarian candor.”
“I see.”
He was influenced as well by Cancer, she continued, having his sun on its cusp, along with a couple of planets in that sign. And he had a Taurus moon, she told him, and that was the best possible place for the moon to be. “The moon is exalted in Taurus,” she said. “Have you noticed in the course of your life how things generally turn out all right for you, even when they don’t? And don’t you have an inner core, a sort of bedrock stability that lets you always know who you are?”
“I don’t know about that last part,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Maybe it’s your Taurus moon that got you here.” She reached for another chocolate. “Your time of birth determines your rising sign, and that’s important in any number of ways, but in the absence of available information I’m willing to make the determination intuitively. My discipline is astrology, John, but it’s not the only tool I use. I’m psychic, I sense things. My intuition tells me you have Cancer rising.”
“If you say so.”
“And I prepared a chart for you on that basis. I could tell you a lot of technical things about your chart, but I can’t believe you’re interested in all that, are you?”
“You’re psychic, all right.”
“So instead of nattering on about trines and squares and oppositions, let me just say it’s an interesting chart. You’re an extremely gentle person, John.”
“Oh?”
“But there’s so much violence in your life.”
“Oh.”
“That’s the famous Gemini duality,” she was saying. “On the one hand, you’re thoughtful and sensitive and calm, exceedingly calm. John, do you ever get angry?”
“Not very often.”
“No, and I don’t think you stifle your anger, either. I get that it’s just not a part of the equation. But there’s violence all around you, isn’t there?”
“It’s a violent world we live in.”
“There’s been violence swirling around you all your life. You’re very much a part of it, and yet you’re somehow untouched by it.” She tapped the sheet of paper, with his stars and planets all marked out. “You don’t have an easy chart,” she said.
“I don’t?”
“Actually, that’s something to be grateful for. I’ve seen charts of people who came into the world with no serious oppositions, no difficult aspects. And they wind up with lives where nothing much happens. They’re never challenged, they never have to draw upon inner resources, and so they wind up leading reasonably comfortable lives and holding secure jobs and raising their kids in a nice safe clean suburb. And they never make anything terribly interesting of themselves.”
“I haven’t made much of myself,” he said. “I’ve never married or fathered a child. Or started a business, or run for office, or planted a garden, or written a play, or . . . or . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never expected to get . . .”
“Emotional?”
“Yes.”
“It happens all the time.”
“Oh.”
“Just the other day I told a woman she’s got Jupiter squaring her sun, but that her Jupiter and Mars are trined, and she burst into tears.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Neither did she.”
“Oh.”
“I see so much in your chart, John. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”
“I guess it must be.”
“Not financially. Your Jupiter—well, you’re not rich, and you’re never going to be rich, but the money always seems to be there when you need it, doesn’t it?”
“It’s never been a problem.”
“No, and it won’t be. You’ve found ways to spend it in the past couple of years—” Stamps, he thought. “—and that’s good, because now you’re getting some pleasure out of your money. But you won’t overspend, and you’ll always be able to get more.”
“That’s good.”
“But you didn’t come here because you were concerned about money.”
“No.”
“You don’t care that much about it. You always liked to get it and now you like to spend it, but you never cared deeply about it.”
“No.”
“I’ve prepared a solar return,” she said, “to give you an idea what to expect in the next twelve months. Some astrologers are very specific—‘July seventeenth is the perfect time to start a new project, and don’t even think about being on water on the fifth of September.’ My approach is more general, and . . . John? Why are you holding your right hand like that?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“With the thumb tucked inside. Is there something about your thumb that bothers you?”
“Not really.”
“I’ve already seen your thumb, John.”
“Oh.”
“Did someone once tell you something about your thumb?”
“Yes.”
“That it’s a murderer’s thumb?” She rolled her eyes. “Palmistry,” she said heavily.
“You don’t believe in it?”
“Of course I believe in it, but it does lend itself to some gross oversimplification.” She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. Hers were soft, he noted, and pudgy, but not unpleasantly so. She ran a fingertip over his thumb, his homicidal thumb.
“To take a single anatomical characteristic,” she said, “and fasten such a dramatic name to it. No one’s thumb ever made him kill a fellow human being.”
“Then why do they call it that?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t studied the history of palmistry. I suppose someone spotted the peculiarity in a few notorious murderers and spread the word. I’m not even certain it’s statistically more common among murderers than the general population. I doubt anyone really knows. John, it’s an insignificant phenomenon and not worth noticing.”
“But you noticed it,” he said.
“I happened to see it.”
“And you recognized it. You didn’t say anything until you noticed me hiding it in my fist. That was unconscious, I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
“I see.”
“So it must mean something,” he said, “or why would it stay in your mind?”
She was still holding his hand. Keller had noticed that this was one of the ways a woman let you know she was interested in you. Women touched you a lot in completely innocent ways, on the hand or the arm or the shoulder, or held your hand longer than they had to. If a man did that it was sexual harassment, but it was a woman’s way of letting you know she wouldn’t mind being harassed herself.
But this was different. There was no sexual charge with this woman. If he’d been made of chocolate he might have had something to worry about, but mere flesh and blood was safe in her presence.
“John,” she said, “I was looking for it.”
“For . . .”
“The thumb. Or anything else that might confirm what I already knew about you.”
She was gazing into his eyes as she spoke, and he wondered how much shock registered in them. He tried not to react, but how did you keep what you felt from showing up in y
our eyes?
“And what’s that, Louise?”
“That I know about you?”
He nodded.
“That your life has been filled with violence, but I think I already mentioned that.”
“You said I was gentle and not full of anger.”
“But you’ve had to kill people, John.”
“Who told you that?” She was no longer holding his hand. Had she released it? Or had he taken it away from her?
“Who told me?”
Maggie, he thought. Who else could it have been? Maggie was the only person they knew in common. But how did Maggie know? In her eyes he was a corporate suburbanite, even if he lived alone in the heart of the city.
“Actually,” she was saying, “I had several informants.”
His heart was hammering. What was she saying? How could it be true?
“Let me see, John. There was Saturn, and Mars, and we don’t want to forget Mercury.” Her tone was soft, her gaze so gentle. “John,” she said, “it’s in your chart.”
“My chart.”
“I picked up on it right away. I got a very strong hit while I was working on your chart, and when you rang the bell I knew I would be opening the door to a man who had done a great deal of killing.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t cancel the appointment.”
“I considered it. Something told me not to.”
“A little bird?”
“An inner prompting. Or maybe it was curiosity. I wanted to see what you looked like.”
“And?”
“Well, I knew right away I hadn’t made a mistake with your chart.”
“Because of my thumb?”
“No, though it was interesting to have that extra bit of confirmation. And the most revealing thing about your thumb was the effort you made to conceal it. But the vibration I picked up from you was far more revealing than anything about your thumb.”
“The vibration.”
“I don’t know a better way to put it. Sometimes the intuitive part of the mind picks up things the five senses are blind and deaf to. Sometimes a person just knows something.”
“Yes.”
“I knew you were . . .”
“A killer,” he supplied.
“Well, a man who has killed. And in a very dispassionate way, too. It’s not personal for you, is it, John?”
“Sometimes a personal element comes into it.”
“But not often.”
“No.”
“It’s business.”
“Yes.”
“John? You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
Could she read his mind? He hoped not. Because what came to him now was that he was not afraid of her, but of what he might have to do to her.
And he didn’t want to. She was a nice woman, and he sensed she would be able to tell him things it would be good for him to hear.
“You don’t have to fear that I’ll do anything, or say anything to anyone. You don’t even need to fear my disapproval.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t make many moral judgments, John. The more I see, the less I’m sure I know what’s right and what’s wrong. Once I accepted myself”—she reached, grinning, for a chocolate—“I found it easier to accept other people. Thumbs and all.”
He looked at his thumb, then raised his eyes to meet hers.
“Besides,” she said, very gently, “I think you’ve done wonderfully in life, John.” She tapped his chart. “I know what you started with. I think you’ve turned out just fine.”
He tried to say something, but the words got stuck in his throat.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Go right ahead and cry. Never be ashamed to cry, John. It’s all right.”
And she drew his head to her breast and held him while, astonished, he sobbed his heart out.
“Well, that’s a first,” he said. “I don’t know what I expected from astrology, but it wasn’t tears.”
“They wanted to come out. You’ve had them stored up for a while, haven’t you?”
“Forever. I was in therapy for a while and never even got choked up.”
“That would have been when? Three years ago?”
“How did you . . . It’s in my chart?”
“Not therapy per se, but I saw there was a period when you were ready for self-exploration. But I don’t believe you stayed with it for very long.”
“A few months I got a lot of insight out of it, but in the end I felt I had to put an end to it.”
Dr. Breen, the therapist, had had his own agenda, and it had conflicted seriously with Keller’s. The therapy had come to an abrupt end, and so, not coincidentally, had the doctor.
He wouldn’t let that happen with Louise Carpenter.
“This isn’t therapy,” she told him now, “but it can be a powerful experience. As you just found out.”
“I’ll say. But we must have used up our fifty minutes.” He looked at his watch. “We went way over. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“I told you it’s not therapy, John. We don’t worry about the clock. And I never book more than two clients a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We have all the time we need.”
“Oh.”
“And we need to talk about what you’re going through. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”
Was it?
“I’m afraid the coming twelve months will continue to be difficult,” she went on, “as long as Saturn’s where it is. Difficult and dangerous. But I suppose danger is something you’ve learned to live with.”
“It’s not that dangerous,” he said. “What I do.”
“Really?”
Dangerous to others, he thought. “Not to me,” he said. “Not particularly. There’s always a risk, and you have to keep your guard up, but it’s not as though you have to be on edge all the time.”
“What, John?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You had a thought, it just flashed across your face.”
“I’m surprised you can’t tell me what it was.”
“If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say you thought of something that contradicted the sentence you just spoke. About not having to be on edge all the time.”
“That’s what it was, all right.”
“This would have been fairly recent.”
“You can really tell all that? I’m sorry, I keep doing that. Yes, it was recent. A few months ago.”
“Because the period of danger would have begun during the fall.”
“That’s when it was.” And, without getting into specifics at all, he talked about his trip to Louisville, and how everything had seemed to be going wrong. “And there was a knock on the door of my room,” he said, “and I panicked, which is not like me at all.”
“No.”
“I grabbed something”—a gun—“and stood next to the door, and my heart was hammering, and it was nothing but some drunk who couldn’t find his friend. I was all set to kill him in self-defense, and all he did was knock on the wrong door.”
“It must have been upsetting.”
“The most upsetting part was seeing how upset I got. That didn’t get my pulse racing like the knock on the door did, but the effects lasted longer. It still bothers me, to tell the truth.”
“Because the reaction was unwarranted. But maybe you really were in danger, John. Not from the drunk, but from something invisible.”
“Like what, anthrax spores?”
“Invisible to you, but not necessarily to the naked eye. Some unknown adversary, some secret enemy.”
“That’s how it felt. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Did he?
“I changed my room,” he said.
“Because of the drunk who knocked on your door?”
“No, why would I do that? But a couple of nights later I couldn’t sleep because of noise from the people upstairs. I had to keep my r
oom that night, the place was full, but I let them put me in a new room first thing the next morning. And that night . . .”
“Yes?”
“Two people checked into my old room. A man and a woman. They were murdered.”
“In the room you’d just moved out of.”
“It was her husband. She was there with somebody else, and the husband must have followed them. Shot them both. But I couldn’t get past the fact that it was my room. Like if I hadn’t changed my room, her husband would have come after me.”
“But he wasn’t anyone you knew.”
“No, far from it.”
“And yet you felt as though you’d had a narrow escape.”
“But of course that’s ridiculous.”
She shook her head. “You could have been killed, John.”
“How? I kept thinking the same thing myself, but it’s just not true. The only reason the killer came to the room was because of the two people who were in it. They were what drew him, not the room itself. So how could he have ever been a danger to me?”
“There was a danger, though.”
“The chart tells you that?”
She nodded solemnly, holding up one hand with the thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “You and Death,” she said, “came this close to one another.”
“That’s how it felt! But—”
“Forget the husband, forget what happened in that room. The woman’s husband was never a threat to you, but someone else was. You were out there where the ice was very thin, John, and that’s a good metaphor, because a skater never realizes the ice is thin until it cracks.”
“But—”
“But it didn’t,” she said. “Whatever endangered you, the danger passed. Then those two people were killed, and that got your attention.”
“Like ice cracking,” he said, “but on another pond. I’ll have to think about this.”
“I’m sure you will.”
He cleared his throat. “Louise? Is it all written in the stars, and do we just walk through it down here on earth?”
“No.”
“You can look at that piece of paper,” he said, “and you can say, ‘Well, you’ll come very close to death on such and such a day, but you’ll get through it safe and sound.’ “
“Only the first part. ‘You’ll come very close to death’—I could have looked at this and told you that much. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that you’d survive. The stars show propensities and dictate probabilities, but the future is never entirely predictable. And we do have free will.”