Paint the Wind

  I'll throw up if she touches me again, thought Fancy, forcing back the intense revulsion she felt toward this sadistic creature.

  "I'm not very hungry, thank you," she said, trying to sound obsequious and harmless.

  "Don't matter to me, dearie, if you're hungry or not," the woman replied, pushing a spoonful of food into her prisoner's mouth. The jab of the spoon cut Fancy's lip and scraped her teeth; she turned her head away and the food dribbled onto the bed. A stinging slap across the face jolted her.

  "Don't play no games with me!" the wardress hissed. She grabbed the breast nearest her and squeezed it viciously. Fancy cried out in shock and pain.

  "You wanna play games with me? I know other games we could play."

  She raked her ragged nails across Fancy's chest in a savage swipe that made Fancy twist and buck against the chains that held her. The pent-up terror of the past days gave her strength she didn't know she had, and she began to scream. The tray of food upended, scattering its contents all over the wardress and the bedcover.

  "I been waiting for you to pull something like this, dearie," the woman said, her grin malignant. "Guards!" she bellowed. "Guards! Patient out of control!" Two men in white coats burst through the door in answer to her summons.

  "Get her into the tub!" the woman boomed the order at the male nurses, and the men undid the wrist restraints, overpowering Fancy's struggles as if they were mere nuisance. They yanked the naked woman to her feet so roughly, she thought they'd dislocated her shoulder. She tried to pull away and run, tried to cover herself, to protect herself from the terrible violation, but the wardress lashed out at her; a resounding slap burned across her bare buttocks.

  "No!" Fancy screamed, beyond endurance. "Get away from me, you animal!" She shrieked the words over and over as they dragged her nailing body through the halls of the asylum. By the time they plunged her into the icewater-filled tub and tied her into it with a canvas covering that left only her head exposed, she was too exhausted to do anything more than sob at the pain of the freezing water—at the indignity and the hopelessness of her predicament.

  She was still sobbing and freezing hours later when they fastened her into the canvas straitjacket and bundled her, unprotesting, down to the ward she would inhabit; she was so grateful for the warmth, she almost welcomed the restraining garment. Her hair was matted from having gone uncombed for days, her face was black-and-blue from her struggle, there were streaks of blood across her chest; her nose and eyes were swollen beyond recognition. Her voice was so hoarse from screaming, it was little more than a croak. By the time that Françoise Deverell was led to the gray stone room filled with other men and women in similar condition, very, very few people would have recognized Fancy McAllister Madigan.

  No one will ever find me now, she told herself hopelessly, as the bleak reality of her plight enfolded her, inexorable and cold as the water in the punishment tub. No one will ever find me now.

  Chapter 119

  Jewel read the note Jason had sent her in reply to her query about Fancy's whereabouts, put it down on the table, thought about it, picked it up and read it once again.

  Dear Jewel,

  Fancy was feeling quite unwell after Aurora's troubles, and she has left Leadville with her daughter for an extended holiday. I'm sure she'll contact you upon her return.

  Yours,

  J. Madigan

  "Bullshit!" Jewel said, fuming, as she slammed the note down again. Fancy'd never leave now, not after what Wu had told her about Aurora. Not without asking Wu's advice. Not without saying good-bye. Something real bad was happening and Jason knew all about it.

  It took Jewel the better part of twenty-four hours to retrace Fancy's steps to Caz, and another twenty-four of searching before she, too, wired Hart in Europe.

  Fancy disappeared. Stop. Jason playing dumb. Stop. Need you in Leadville. Stop. Get here fast. Stop. Jewel.

  She also sent a wire to Ford in the Montana Territory, where he had bought a ranch after Dakota's death and was trying his hand at raising cattle. It said the same thing all their wires to each other had always said through all the years.

  Come. Stop. Jewel.

  Even assuming that the telegraphed messages found the two men where they were supposed to be, it could take weeks for either Ford or Hart to return to Leadville. For all she knew, Fancy could be hurt or dying—it was certain she wouldn't have gone without a right. And where the hell was Aurora? Goddammit! She'd need a frigging mind reader to figure out what to do next. A mind reader! Of course. That was exactly what she needed now. Magda was in Denver and Denver was only eighty miles away. Jewel left the Crown to Rufus, instructed Caz to see that Hart got Chance's letter and hers the moment he arrived, and set out to find Magda to see what the Gypsy could offer in the way of help.

  Jewel walked down the steps to Magda's fortune-telling shop; she'd had a hard time finding it below street level. Without a clear description, a seeker could easily have missed the little room behind the glass window that was painted with a pharaoh's eye, a scarab, and a legend that read:

  Madame Magda

  Seer to the crowned heads of europe

  Find the future in your palm, the tarot cards,

  Or the magic crystal

  Behind the glass door was a beaded curtain that jingled when Jewel entered the candle-lit interior that smelled of exotic incense. Magda, resplendent in her Gypsy regalia, which this night included an intricately wrapped turban of some gilded cloth, sat behind a table with a client on the opposite side. She appeared to be finishing a reading from the crystal ball, but her intelligent eyes took in every detail of Jewel's arrival.

  Raising her head imperiously, the Gypsy called out, "What do you seek of Madame Magda?" Jewel presumed the theatrics were for the benefit of the customer.

  "If you're so good at this sort of thing," she replied, tired from her long ride and annoyed at such damned foolishness, "you tell me." The little lady at the table gasped.

  "If you had not come on such an important errand, I would send you on your way!" Magda responded, but she wasn't angry.

  What the hell does she know about my errand? Jewel wondered, or was this simply more theatricality.

  "Your reading is at an end, Mrs. Faye," Magda told her customer, pulling a black velvet cloth over the crystal ball with finality. "This woman's spirits are powerful ones... I must heed their call, for a friend is endangered."

  Obediently, Mrs. Faye rose from her chair and fled to the door, while Jewel pondered what the Gypsy had said so offhandedly. "I'll be back tomorrow," the little woman called back hopefully over her shoulder as she reached the exit.

  "Do that," Magda said, and Jewel could see she struggled to keep her face straight. Wind-bells tinkled prettily as the richly attired matron let herself out into the Denver night, where her carriage waited.

  "She is one of the wealthiest widows in Denver," Magda murmured in explanation to Jewel, when the woman was out of earshot. "She comes here to ask her dead husband's advice on the stock market."

  "Does he give her good advice?"

  "Not any better than when he was alive," Magda replied. "Just because one is dead does not make one any smarter or more well-intentioned than in life." The Gypsy put out her hand to her visitor.

  "You are Jewel. And you are here because of Fancy."

  "How'd you know that?" Jewel asked suspiciously.

  Magda only shrugged. "We will leave here and go to Wes and Gitalis. I fear this is a story we all must hear."

  She pulled off the elaborate turban with obvious relief and shook her still-dark hair out from under it, threading her fingers through the tangles.

  "Such a costume these fools demand! As if a Gypsy needed a hat to read the truth!" She laughed contemptuously. "In reality, prophecy is best done sky-clad."

  "And that is?"

  "Naked, of course. It frees the channels."

  "It always freed 'em for me," Jewel responded, and Magda laughed again.

  "Come, my
friend," she said kindly. "I know why you are here. We will go home and speak of this trouble together."

  Fancy had always sworn Magda's powers were genuine, but Jewel didn't put much store in magic; she'd never seen anything good in this life that came easy.

  The house the Gypsy, Wes, and Gitalis occupied was in no way imposing, but the accumulated artifacts filling their rooms were remarkable: a jewel-encrusted Russian icon, a Chinese enameled chest with bronze hardware of intricate design, an ancient glass bowl that Magda said was Etruscan... the treasures were as strange and varied as the triumvirate Jewel saw before her. Wes, white-haired and handsome, frail but imposing; Gitalis, incongruously elegant for his tiny stature; Magda, mysterious and majestic. All very worried about Fancy and all exactly as the girl had described them a thousand times over the years.

  Jewel took a deep breath and started in at the beginning. She spoke of Aurora's addiction and disappearance, and of the damning letter Caz had shown her.

  "There is much danger afoot," said the dwarf, sounding sinister. "Why should we help you?"

  "For shame, little man!" Magda snapped at him. "It is Fancy we speak of."

  Gitalis smiled slyly. "I merely wished to see if you were paying attention, witch. What do I care of danger? 'He that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of fearing death.' "

  "It'll take weeks for help to get here," Jewel told them. "Fancy could be dead by then. There's no way in hell she would have left Leadville walkin'—not after Aurora went back to opium. You gotta understand, we're up against a real tough customer in this Madigan feller; he's not only ruthless, he's got all the money and power in the world behind him."

  " 'A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king,'" Gitalis replied. " 'And eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.' " There was a great brain in that small body, Jewel could see that real clear.

  "So you vote to 'memorize another Golgotha,' little man?" Wes said approvingly. "I, too, and with my whole heart. All that's needed is a plan."

  "We must go to Leadville," Magda interrupted them. "Whatever of the truth is available, is there."

  "You can stay at the Crown," Jewel offered eagerly. "There's plenty of room upstairs and nobody'll ask questions." She wondered even as she said it, how such a trio could possibly go anywhere without raising eyebrows.

  As Jewel took her leave of them, she heard the dwarf behind her say, " 'Verily, I swear, it is better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glist'ring grief and wear a golden sorrow.' " She thought it meant that Fancy had reached too high for safety, and if so, she couldn't have agreed with him more.

  " 'Harp not on that string, my little friend,' " Wes replied. " 'Twill be a 'good deed in a naughty world.' "

  The madam smiled in the darkness as she entered the carriage she'd hired. Fancy might be down on her luck, but not when it came to friends.

  Magda tossed and turned on the bed she shared with Wes on the upper floor of the Crown, then sat up abruptly and moved her legs out over the side of the bed, onto the cold wooden floor beneath. She grabbed the woolen night wrapper from the chair beside the bedstand, and pulled it on over her shivering body. She must not wake Jarvis. The only hope she had of accomplishing what she must was to perform this feat alone. She opened the door to the tiny parlor that separated them from the dwarf's bedroom.

  There was contact at last! Magda had seen Fancy, finally, in her dream vision, as she'd begged to do ever since she'd arrived in Leadville. For days she'd striven in vain to focus on the girl's whereabouts; she had cursed the inexactitude of her gifts, that could focus so clearly on distant places or events at one moment, and then enshroud them in impenetrable mystery, at another.

  Random powers, Jarvis called them—powers that chose when to manifest and when not. Maybe she was simply getting old.

  Magda passed the window and without conscious thought, checked the position of the planets in the night sky; the moon was full, she noted thankfully, the best time of all for opening the portals to other realms. She said a silent prayer for grace and lit the candles that stood beside her crystal ball.

  The energy from the crystal was lighter than it had been the day before; she'd cleansed it with salt and sage, then set it in the sun to recharge. The Gypsy smiled at the ancient crystal, nestled in a ring of bronzed tigers; its energy felt benevolent and anxious for her touch.

  Magda sat in her place at the table and centered her consciousness on the "third eye" in her forehead—the all-seeing eye of her astral self, the connection to the unknown and the unknowable. It blinked open in the darkness and she sighed with relief.

  Reverently, the Gypsy placed her hands on the ancient orb of quartz and felt its energy move swiftly up her left arm and into her etheric self; she felt the Light course through her, surging strength to her spirit bodies and her physical being. Down the right arm, the current pulsed, then back to the crystal's endless generator. She was one with it; the crystal and Magda were in harmony with the universal life flow... she saw briefly, in the eye of the soul, the old Gypsy who had nurtured her gifts when she was young. Tatiana had possessed not merely a crystal ball, but a record-keeper crystal that had access to the Akashic Record, the sum total of all planetary experience.

  "The crystals are a gift of the gods, Magda," the old crone had admonished. "You will pay through eternity for the way in which you use their power. Use it for the good, child, or suffer damnation through a thousand lifetimes for your arrogance."

  Magda pushed the unwelcome thought away for she had stumbled gravely on the Path of Light... she sought to clear her mind of all unnecessary baggage. Finally, centered and in tune with the singing energy of the quartz sphere, Magda opened her eyes to perfect darkness, and no longer seeing the room around her, she let her consciousness drift outward wherever the crystal energy would take it. Probing, seeking, questing, she let the Higher Self of Magda float fearlessly into the cosmos in search of Fancy.

  Cold. Dark. Unsafe. The focusing point within the glass began to show movement, form. Fear, so powerful it could not come from a single human, welled up within the crystal consciousness. Pain. Loneliness! Fancy was held in a fearsome place, against her will. There were others there. A place of confinement, terror—a prison, but not a jail. Sick people. Damaged people. Strange distorted mind-waves were disorienting Magda. An asylum! A place for the mad. Of course that is what he would do to hide her from the world! At least she was alive.

  But where? Magda pushed her consciousness out, out, beyond the confining walls of the sanitarium. It took immense psychic strength to do so, for the thought-forms of the inmates were heavy with entrapment. Help me! Help me! she prayed to the angelic guardians. I cannot do this alone.

  She felt her soul break free from the ensnaring boundaries; the way had been cleared for her. Air. Mountain air. Pine scent. Rock strength. A Victorian house in the mountains. A private asylum. She strove to read the name on the stone pillar at the entrance to the drive, but the mists were rising around her again and she couldn't see. She cried out, but the cry reverberated into infinity and was not answered.

  Magda felt her strength recede—felt the drain of energy drag her back toward the little room and the flickering candle. Not yet! she pleaded, but she knew even as she did so that if she did not return to the body, the silver cord would be broken and the earth-Magda would die.

  Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be sucked back into time and place. She said a prayer of gratitude for the extraordinary feat she'd been allowed to accomplish. Had she known the approximate location where Fancy was hidden, she could easily have visited her in an out-of-body state. But not knowing the locale had necessitated a quest of the whole immensity of the universe... the difference between finding a lost ship, knowing the latitude and longitude of its course, or having to explore all the oceans of the world before going to its rescue.

  Magda laid her weary head onto the table near the crystal, and let tears of exhausti
on flow down her cheeks.

  "You have found her, Magda," said the quiet voice of Gitalis from the doorway. She nodded without lifting her head.

  "The search has cost you dearly, has it not?" he pursued. Again the barely perceptible nod.

  Gitalis moved behind the Gypsy's chair; Magda felt Gitalis' strong fingers caress her neck gently at first, moving the long, dark hair aside, then firmer and more insistent. It was very strange, for in all the years they'd known each other, the dwarf had never before touched her. She felt him knead the aching muscles, willing strength into her enervated body... felt him touch the pressure points that released the energy from her body's meridians... -felt him flood her flagging consciousness with good will and the powerful strength of friendship. Wonderingly, gratefully, she allowed the proffered gift of life-force to buoy her spirit.

  "She is in a madhouse, Gitalis," Magda whispered, raising her head and arching it backward toward him. He grasped it firmly in his hands. She felt the throbbing pain lessen as his iron-strong, sensitive fingers massaged and pressed and unknotted the tensed muscle and tissue with painstaking care.

  "I couldn't find out exactly where," she said despondently. "I must try again when I am stronger."

  "No," he answered with authority. "It is my turn now."

  The exhausted woman turned questioning eyes to his; because she was seated, their eyes were at the same level. "She could not be committed to an insane asylum without legal papers," he said, gazing steadily at her. "A judge must sign such commitment forms."