1



I lay my palm flat on the picture. It covers a pile of bones.

I think her name starts with A or E.

Definitely a vowel.

She is embedded in the earth like a forgotten shipwreck on the ocean floor.

The voices of two men drift under the closed door—a childhood best friend who believes I brush shoulders with ghosts and a stranger who thinks I’m a joke. Both are cops. Both are agitated. I wish they’d burst in, get it over with, tell me to continue or not with this dead girl lying under my chewed pink fingernails.

The walls in this police interview room make me ache from the inside out. I’ve been here often enough lately that I’ve memorized every scar in this room. The ominous black marks on the walls, the handcuff scratches on the metal table, the tile floor with the big chip and brown stain.

I stare at a pale crescent line drawn between my thumb and forefinger, one of nine scars on my own body. It seems like a lot for a twenty-eight-year-old who still wouldn’t call herself brave.

My friend Mike feels differently about my fearlessness. He has enticed me to this interview room five times in the last couple of months, late at night, an open secret in the police station. I overheard my nicknames from two cops gossiping at the sink while I sat in a bathroom stall.

Mike’s Medium.

The Poltergasm.

The rumor is, after I look in my crystal ball of the dead, Mike throws me on this table and cheats on his wife.

All I’ve ever seen in a crystal ball is nothing. Mike would never cheat, not with me. He’d arrange this table the same way every time—with two chilled cans of Coke and a pile of unresolved case files—and then he’d leave.

No more than ten files, only photographs, that was our agreement. That’s all of the dead I could take in one sitting. At my request, no details of the crimes.

I’d examine each of Mike’s files carefully, sticking a Post-it on the outside after I closed it. Many times, the word I wrote was Nothing. Mike didn’t care. He said cops were thrilled with forty percent accuracy on psychic tips and that I was averaging forty-two.

Mike left an occasional surprise. A plastic bag with a little girl’s bloodstained pink bow. A man’s watch with the hands stuck at 3:46. A bone the size of a small fingernail that looked like part of a bird but was really the tiniest, most fragile bone in the human face. The lacrimal bone. Part of the tear duct. It helped the girl it belonged to cry while she was being tied up with torn pieces of her T-shirt.

It took about three hours in this room to trigger a headache that would stab my head for days.

I’d leave things in a neat pile afterward, including the plain brown envelope with cash inside, probably from Mike’s own pocket.

The outside of the envelope was always marked VIVVY ROSE, in the same block letters written on the get-well cards Mike brought to the hospital when I was eleven. Those cards stood like protective cardboard soldiers on my windowsill: a pig tucked under a quilt, a dog with a stethoscope, an alligator with a bandaged tail.

Today, Mike has graduated me to late morning, a public and busy one. I’m getting an official introduction to this skeptical cop I’m about to meet. I’m examining the photographs of a single important case, not ten.

The crescent scar has begun to ping. My hand is still flayed out on the dead girl. Anna? Eleanor?

The edge in Mike’s voice is rising, like right before he punched a high school jock who asked if I could predict his tongue down my throat.

I don’t want to be here almost as much as I never want to let Mike down.

I flip to the photograph of the girl’s skull, held by small anonymous hands in purple gloves. It looks as polished and cleaned as a marble bust in a museum.

I ruffle the stack of photographs like cards, halting randomly on the mourners at her second and final grave, the one where she wasn’t buried by a killer like a stray dog. Pull out my phone to switch on my magnifying glass app.

Outside the door, sudden silence.

My head jerks up when it opens. A uniformed young female cop with a bottle of water in her hand stands awkwardly in the doorway. DIY dye and nail job, a face with a sharp kind of Texas pretty that lasts only so long before the sun takes its toll.

“Hi. I’m Piper Sikes. Mike thought you might want a drink.”

I quickly flip over the stack of photographs before she moves closer.

“Thanks.” I unscrew the top, expecting her to leave.

Instead, she scrapes out a chair for herself, positioning it intimately in front of me. She pulls a small tube out of her pocket and begins to draw on pink lips with a steady hand. Bobbi Brown’s Hippy Shake, a color my sister wears sometimes, even though her hips are as flat as this girl’s. Seems like very odd behavior. But I can be odd, too.

“Hydrogenated polyisobutene, isodecyl isononanoate, oxycoccus palustris,” I murmur.

“Is that some kind of incantation?” Piper’s voice is slightly above a whisper.

“Sure.” I take a swig of water. Piper has no idea how many chemicals she applies to her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, her hair, all in pursuit of beauty. My sister knows because I’ve been reciting them to her off labels since I was eight. She just doesn’t care.

“You’re the psychic, right?” she presses. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up before Mike brings in Jesse Sharp. He is the last detective to believe in somebody like you. I had him for class three years ago. The first line and last line of every lecture was, ‘Feelings manipulate facts, so don’t have any.’ And psychics are all about feelings, right?” She taps on the stack of photographs. “You should know—this case right here, it’s not the one Mike … they … want you for. It’s a test.”

With the last three words, her eyebrows hike into pointy mountains. I never let a single quirk of my face telegraph anything. I hide my own eyebrows with bangs.

Piper lays a translucent white arm on the table, palm up, like I’m going to draw her blood. Now I understand. She wants me to pull her future from the lines on her hand. She wants reciprocation for the things she just told me and shouldn’t have. It’s the act of a desperate woman, not a good cop.

“Do you mind a quick reading?” she asks tremulously. “I’m not sure I should marry Waylon, the guy I’m living with. My mom and sister don’t think I should, anyway. Should I not have said his name? Is that bad? How does it work?” Not like this. Not with me.

But her face. It’s so puckered with worry. I draw my finger along the Life Line on her palm, which ends way too short if you go by those sorts of things. I lightly trace all the lines on her palm until chill bumps pop on her skin. The Marriage Line. The Heart Line. The Fate Line.

I act like I don’t see the ugly, dark blue fingerprints painted in the soft crook of her other elbow or the makeup that almost succeeds in hiding a faint pink line on her right temple. I know an expert job of covering a scar because I’ve done it. I don’t think female cops hide a scar they’re proud of getting on the job.

I gently remove her engagement ring, a diamond the size of a sunflower seed. I press the ring into the inside of her wrist until it makes a small red circle.

“Metal,” I say, “is excellent at conducting two things. The truth. And evil.”

I shut my eyes. I ask Piper to close hers.

I tell her that if the imprint of the ring’s circle stays more than ten seconds, Waylon will kill her if she doesn’t leave.

All of this is bullshit. But so is the idea of Waylon as a decent man.

I’ve counted to nine when my eyes flip open and I realize that the soft breeze on my face at count five was not the air-conditioning bumping on.

A man is leaning against the open door, arms crossed.

I don’t need a red circle on my wrist to know he is trouble.

* * *

Piper leaps up, her eyes glued to the indentation on her skin.

I’m on my feet too, certain that this is Mike’s detective friend, Jesse Sharp, wondering how much of my bullshit he heard. Whether Piper was a setup. If Piper was the real test, and, in fact, the better actress.

Photographs are scattered all over the floor. I’m fuzzy on whether it was Piper or me who accidentally swept them off when we jerked out of our chairs; all I know is that my phone flew too, painfully smacking the floor.

Only three steps in and Jesse Sharp feels on top of me. Body, dense. Ego, denser. The gun at his waist, inconsequential, a prop he doesn’t need.

Mike is right behind him, an apology on his face. He’d told me that Sharp was tough, persistent to the edge of reason, as black and white as Escher. But he said nothing about this kind of domination. There’s much less of everything while he’s in the room. Less air, less space, less me.

My phone. I don’t see it anywhere near my feet, setting off a little panic. It must have slid under the table. I’d temporarily disabled the password this morning, so I didn’t have to repeat punching it in, a bad habit of mine. I refuse to enable face recognition.

I don’t want either of them traveling through the photos I’ve snapped of strange objects, scrambled notes dictated by whispers, an internet search history that has Google analytics in a tailspin about whether to target me with ads for the antipsychotic Latuda or Jordan Peele horror movies.

I drop to the floor, crawling all the way under the table until my fingers find my phone’s slick surface.

The screen jumps to life, revealing a new hairline crack, like a bad luck mirror. The tips of Sharp’s boots are a foot from my face, pointy black omens so close he could kick the phone out of my hand. The sadistic Brothers Grimm taught me early to ignore warning signs like this at my own peril. Fairy tales are where “special” girls like me are hacked to pieces. Magic and foresight are a curse that could chop off my hands, paralyze my voice, impale me in the gut with a steel-toed boot.

I snatch up the photographs under the table and scramble out, all knees and feet and butt. I smell a whiff of dung on his boots. I don’t like this perspective, him hovering, me at the bottom of the tree.

Sharp is holding the photograph of the crime scene shot from the air, peering at the dump site, a rectangle of fresh brown in a lush bush of green, the one where three blurry white figures in CSI jumpsuits around the grave look like angels have touched down.

“I startled you,” he says. A fact, not an apology. He’s offering a hand up. Calloused fingertips, short nails. I see a brief flash of that hand in urgent motion, clutching the hair of someone in the water, going under.

I ignore the hand and the image, pull myself to my feet.

“Thank you.” I snatch the photograph, tucking it with the others.

The door is shut. Piper, a lucky escapee. Mike has braced himself against the opposite wall, holding a few more pictures from the floor. Silent. Ceding control, even of introductions.

“Tivvy, right?” Sharp is asking. I flip my head back to him. “Or should I call you Vivian? Vivian Rose Bouchet. Pretty name for a psychic. Imaginative. Something I expect you’ve had to live up to. Like Sharp.”

“It’s Vivvy. With a V.” I’m immediately sorry I responded. He’s not a man who makes mistakes like that unless it’s on purpose. The only t in my name is the silent whoosh in Bouchet. French genes, my mother claims. She made it up for our birth certificates, says my sister.

“Vivvy doesn’t call herself a psychic,” Mike interjects. The I’ve told you is unspoken.

“It has a bad connotation,” I stutter. “Like how the word Christian is sadly devolving. Not all psychics speak the truth. Even when they truly believe they are.”

“Are you a Christian?” he asks pointedly. “Is that why your eyes were closed when we came in? Were you and Officer Sikes praying? Do you prefer for people not to know you’re a … Christian? Is it something you don’t want to admit?”

Jesse slides out a chair and props a boot on it. “I’ve interviewed a lot of people who play with the truth. Pathological liars. Oscar-worthy actors. Christians, Jews, Muslims. Eighty-six of them now in prison. Seven on death row. Two executed. Thirteen still free.”

“Let’s get this moving,” Mike interjects impatiently. I’d almost forgotten he was there. “Vivvy, Sharp wants to get your take on these photographs. He has asked that I leave the room. He thinks you’ll make more progress.” Sarcasm, like syrup. “Is that OK with you?”

None of this is OK with me, Mike. My mother died only ten days ago, and now you’re dragging me into this.

“Of course,” I say. The battle in the hall, Mike lost.

“I’ll call you later.” Mike hands me the rest of the photographs, tosses off a salute, and shuts the door.

I picture my face right now, bright angry spots burned high on each cheekbone. Red roses, my sister has called them since she first held me as a baby and my wails practically blew out her eardrums.

I turn away from Sharp and begin to lay the pictures in neat, perfect rows.

“You keep track of those thirteen liars?” I ask under my breath. “The ones who got away?”

“Until they are marks on my bedpost,” Sharp drawls. “Until I’m buried myself.”

All this bravado makes him hard to read. Especially when I sense he’s about to poke a knife in my belly to test how tender I am.

I summon up the little girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains who turned out to be brave when she needed to be.

We’ll see. Some people are better at twisting a knife in me than others.

* * *

I’ve finished setting up the board for Sharp. The photos shiver in place as he slides into the chair on the opposite side of the table. He gestures for me to do the same.

I am now in my sweet spot, where even the most cynical are holding their breath for me to speak. Everybody believes a little in something they can’t see.

I travel his face boldly. His eyes, a murky sea. My sister has eyes like these, scary little changelings, cold then warm, gray then green. True, then false. She doesn’t pretend to be psychic, but she is the best of us at lying. Her big lie, the one between us, is a jagged crack I step over because it seems too deep to fill.

“Mike told me the story of how you and he met,” Sharp begins.

The first prick of the knife.


Copyright © 2023 by Julia Heaberlin