Oh, how exciting! A brand new never-before-seen chapter!
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Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 12 – Strange Tales of Foreign Lands
Tom stood in his room in his sister’s farmhouse. The drive from Naval Station New York to Acra gave him much to think about and none of it made any sense. Stacey even admitted none of it made any sense. She told him every inch of her legal training and years on the Bar told her to get herself checked into a psychiatric hospital.
“Just so I’ll know, Sis, what’s stopped you?”
She didn’t answer and started in on her story. He listened and started a regimental inspection checklist in his head..
She’s disillusioned with the clients Osborne, Nash, and Vogel are getting – check.
Hank Ingram pulls her aside one day and confides he’s had moments in his fifty-five year history with the firm, too – check.
He tells her to take a sabbatical, go on vacation, go on a cruise, he even says, “May Jesus forgive me, go fall in love for a weekend,” and that was one of the few times he ever mentioned his faith in the office, so Stacey knew he was concerned – okay, and check.
She went on a sabbatical – check.
To Rio.
“Rio? You’ve never shown any interest in anything south of Trenton before. What prompted Rio?”
“You going to let me tell my story?”
He shrugged and rubbed Frank Sinatra’s ears. They left I-278 long behind and were on a straight shot up 87 towards Albany.
She has no idea why Rio, and she’s doing the tourist thing, and there’s a little hidey-hole stall like a newspaper dealer’s in the middle of town between two skyscrapers that’d do The City proud, and there’s this little old brown-skinned, wizened-face woman with this beautiful long black hair with flares of gray in a thick braid all the way down her back wearing a black bowler hat and a verdant billowy blouse and skirt that feels like a deep Amazonian forest –
Tom mentally threw the checklist out the window. “Verdant? Verdant? I never heard you use that word before. You take vocabulary classes or something?”
“Can I finish?”
“And feels like the Amazon? Not reminds you of or makes you think of?”
Stacey ignored her brother and continued. “Over all this she’s wearing the most beautifully multi-colored coat, like Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors. It looks like a patchwork but it’s not, more like a Pollack painting than anything else, and she’s sitting in the stall behind a table smoking a pipe.”
“The table’s smoking a pipe?”
Stacey rolled her eyes. “People are walking past like she’s not even there. There’s a sign arcing above her written in lush rainbow colors: Profesora Anna. She smiles at me and waves me over. I feel sad for her because everybody’s ignoring her.”
Tom gently scratched under Frank Sinatra’s chin. “And she pulls out a deck of cards and starts a Three-Card-Monty hustle on you, right?”
“Shh! There’s a chair on the other side of the table from her. I sit and she pulls out this ancient looking pack of the most bizarre looking cards each with six sides and all sorts of pictures. I thought it’s some kind of jigsaw puzzle but each hexagonal piece has stars and moons and planets and animals and all sorts of other symbols.”
“Russian Tarot. I’ve seen a set before. They’re passed down through families, though. I don’t know if you can buy them anymore. Was she selling them?”
“No, she hands me the cards face down and tells me to pick as many cards as I’d like from anywhere in the pack, so I took a couple here and a couple there and three or four from the middle and two or three from near the end.
Tom kept his eyes on Frank Sinatra. “She spoke English?”
“No, not a word.”
“When did you learn Brazilian Portuguese?”
Stacey looked out her window. “I didn’t.”
Tom rubbed Frank’s ears. “But you understood her?”
Stacey turned back to face traffic. “I notice you’ve lost that “let’s tease the kid sister” tone in your voice, big brother.” She reached over and tugged on Tom’s seatbelt.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure you’re buckled in. You think what I’m telling you has holes in it so far?”
