Free 2 Landscape in Scarlet by Melanie Jackson

her mouth bitter. Her eyes had a hard glitter. She was a gypsy full of curses.
    “I’d like a reading,” Juliet heard herself say , quelling the incipient feeling of alarm .
    “The palm is ten, the cards are twenty,” Madame Mimm said, wasting no time in seeing that silver crossed her own palm.
    “Let’s start with the palm,” Juliet said and then cursed herself for being frugal. She didn’t really want this woman touching her. She got out a ten - dollar bill and put it in the glass jar that would have looked more appropriate on a piano in a bed and breakfast .
    “Your hands please.”
    Juliet offered her hands, palm s up. It took some effort with the hostile gaze on her face . It was a relief when she finally dropped her eyes.
    Madame Mimm’s hands were small and pleasantly warm and her voice droning, a good combination if you wanted to make your client comfortable. After the usual predictions of long life and good health, Juliet stopped listening to her words and concentrated on her body language. Madame’s voice might be flat and calm as pond water, but her shoulders were not so relaxed. There was also tension in her face, dark circles under her eyes. Something had upset the lady.
    “ But a m I being haunted?” Juliet asked when Madame paused in her recitation. “Is there a ghost behind me?”
    “What?” The voice was startled out of its monotone.
    “I found Comstock’s body yesterday,” Juliet said , deciding to use blunt force in hopes of getting past the playacting . “I think his ghost is following me.”
    Madame Mimm then did something Juliet hadn’t expected. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted dead away, slumping in her chair and the n sliding to the floor in a heap o f shawls and beads.
    “Well damn,” Juliet said and then went to the woman’s aid. She hadn’t meant to scare her to the point of passing out . She just wanted the palm reader to think she was a kook and maybe tell her something about why the dead man couldn’t be a ghost.
    It took splashing her with cold tea from the plastic cup under the table and a few slaps on the face which had aged a decade and gone sickly gray , but Lois Alderman soon came back around and was again looking hostile .
    Juliet offered to fetch someone from the first aid tent, but Madame Mimm adjusted her turban and scattered shawls and then declined outside assistance.
    She also declined to discuss Michael Comstock or his ghost and Juliet didn’t press. It would have been cruel. T hough some people might have found it suggestive of a guilty conscience that the woman thought Michael’s ghost could be about, perhaps in her own tent even — ghosts in literature usually only hanging around to accuse the guilty party of murder most foul — Juliet didn’t read it that way. Madame Mimm believed in spirit survival and feared it. Her faint had been deep and real. Given her genuine belief in haunting , it seemed unlikely that she would do anything to attract a ghost. In Juliet’s mind, that probably let her off the hook as Comstock’s killer.
    That left Xander Lawson.
    “Oh goody,” she muttered once outside again , not thrilled with visiting the big man with the large hammer .
    Juliet went immediately to see Xander Lawson , betting that he would be more inclined to talk if Madame Mimm didn’t warn him away from her.
    “Hello,” she said, barely stepping into his booth and half hoping he would keep fussing with the forge. She didn’t care for the smell of the fire which was not made with wood and smelled a little like a car accident.
    “Look around if you like. You’ll have to choose quickly though. I’m packing up. ” The voice was gruff and, to Juliet, unpleasant. His profile as he glanced over his bulging shoulder wasn’t ugly, but his face looked like it was made of cured leather , and lit as it was with the glow of embers and with the filter ed light bleeding through the red awning, he looked like something out of a horror film. The