Carnival of Death Read Free Page B

picked it up and read it, and she was interested in a lot of things.
    One day Frances saw Gloria with a book on palmistry and said, “You could learn to read palms in about five minutes.”
    “It’s all a fraud,” Gloria said.
    Frances sniffed. “Of course it is, or at least the kind in that book is. But palmistry’s real enough, if you have the gift. Some people really can see a person’s future in those lines.”
    “Ha,” Gloria said, but she read the book, studied the charts, learned about the shapes of hands, and memorized all the lines and what they meant. After a while she tried out her new skills on Frances.
    “Not bad,” Frances said when Gloria had finished. “You almost had me believing you a time or two. You have a way of sounding convincing.”
    “I don’t have the gift, though,” Gloria said.
    “No, you don’t, and that’s a good thing. People shouldn’t know the future. It never holds anything good, not even for a pretty young girl like you, and especially not for an old woman like me.”
    “That’s not very encouraging.”
    “Wasn’t meant to be. You should know by now that life gives everybody a hard row to hoe. And then you die.”
    Gloria thought about her stepfather and about that police chief. Life hadn’t been so hard for them, as far as she knew, but maybe they were dead. It was pleasant to think so. She hoped they’d been run over by a bus or a train or some other form of heavy transportation and flattened out like roadkill. Serve the bastards right.
    Gloria was with Frances for another year or so after that conversation, and although she read many other books during that time, she kept coming back to the one about palmistry. She had it pretty much memorized by the time Frances died.
    In her last illness, Frances told Gloria the future, and as she’d promised, it wasn’t pretty.
    “My cousins never gave a damn about me before, but they’ll show up because they think I have money. I don’t, but they don’t know that and wouldn’t believe it if I told them so. They’ll run you off first thing, no doubt about it. I have a will, but all I really have is this house, so I’ve left that to them. Maybe they’ll be satisfied. I wish I could do something to help you, but all I can do is give you the money that’s in the metal box under the sink. It’s not much. I wish it were. You’ve been a big help to me, Gloria, so you take it and don’t tell anybody.”
    Sure enough, Frances’s prophecy came true. The relatives who’d never had anything to do with Frances while she was alive appeared and started squabbling right away. They kicked Gloria out of the house and told her that if she made trouble, they’d call the cops. They told her it would be a really good idea if she left town.
    Gloria had already had enough of cops, so she left town, but she left knowing a lot more than she had when she’d moved in with Frances.
    Gloria found a little over three hundred dollars in the box, and she put it in her purse. Tell anybody? Fat chance. It was all she had when the cousins kicked her out. They didn’t even let her stay for the funeral.
    The three hundred dollars lasted Gloria for a month, and just as she thought she might have to resort to stealing again, she happened upon Cap’n Bob’s Stardust Carnival. She saw the ads taped to telephone poles in a little town she was passing through and realized that a carnival might be just what she was looking for. What better setting for a skilled palm reader? OK, maybe not skilled, exactly, but good enough. Even Frances had said so.
    Gloria wandered around a bit, enjoying the crowds, the music, and the atmosphere. Not bad at all. She asked a barker how to find the boss, and he told her to look for a portly man wearing a ringmaster’s outfit. He wouldn’t be easy to miss.
    Gloria found him in about five minutes near the tent of the Seven Dwarfs. He had a big smile that looked only a little fake, and she told him she was looking for a