Page 68 of Wayfarers

She ignores him and continues. “You seek stability. You want a life off the road. You want a home,” she says, “a real home, and you’ll give it all away to find it.”

“I—” he starts to say, a note of fear seeping into his voice.

But Miss Tara raises her hand to cut him off. “You are distant from your mother—your father is absent from your life—”

Knox is inching closer to her, his hands trembling in his lap. Arms wide, Miss Tara squeezes her eyes shut. She’s summoning. She’s calling something up from the ground. “I hear it! Do you hear it? The reaching from the beyond—”

And there it is, under the drone of the music: a sharp chirp. I pull the collar of my sweatshirt over my mouth like a turtle retracting. Knox’s eyes narrow. Widen. Narrow.

Then I listen harder. And say, “Miss Tara, I think you need to change the battery in your smoke alarm.”

Knox

Miss Tara stares down Sylvie coldly. “Do you suppose the spirit realm to be so impotent that it cannot use the tools available to it to communicate with us?”

“No, no, not at all,” Sylvie stammers.

“I just changed that battery last week with a brand-new one from Dollar Tree,” Miss Tara says with an imperious tone, thus eliminating every possible explanation but supernatural intervention.

“I’ll be quiet,” Sylvie says.

Miss Tara gives a firm nod that says that would be best and turns her attention back to me. “I see a safe harbor for you. The stability you seek. A person advanced in years . . .”

“My grandma,” I murmur, my heart racing. I know better than to give her positive affirmation she can use against me, but it still slipped out.

Miss Tara closes her eyes tight. “A woman, yes. She is . . . ailing. Hurry to her. You must go quickly. She doesn’t have much time.”

My pulse accelerates. What if? “What about my sister?” I ask. “How is she?”

Miss Tara draws a long inhale. “Your sister,” she says with a little laugh. “Is a narcissist. And a taker. And I know what it’s like to have a sister like that. Her husband always nattering in her ear, You should go out on your own, we should do our own thing. Anyway, forget about her. She’ll never change.”

My heartbeat begins to return to its normal cadence.

I’m an only child.

“Now we turn to you,” Miss Tara says crisply to Sylvie.

Sylvie

I’m pretty sure this psychic hates me. And that this psychic, who hates me, is about to tell Knox all kinds of things I need him not to know.

“Me?” I ask, stalling for time. “But I’m sure there’s lots more to say about Knox—”

“Nope.” He leans back in his chair, crosses his arms.

“—we still haven’t gotten to his trauma. About the plane crash.”

Miss Tara’s eyes flick to him and back to me.

“And how”—I’m warming up to this now—“it stranded him and the other members of his high school choir in the Adirondacks for six weeks with no food other than what they could catch with their hands.”

Miss Tara’s left eye is blinking rapidly. Is she going to take the bait and leave me alone?

“But,” I say. “I’m sure everyone heard all about that on the news, right? So it’s not like you’ll have any new secrets to tell.”

With difficulty, Miss Tara says, “We will return to this subject later.”

“The post-crash cannibalism?” I ask sweetly. I am going to get out of this alive.