In For a Penny Read Free Page A

pulling the covers up to her chin so that she looked like Kilroy.
    “You already had a story,” Art told her. By her bed lay the shoe box, empty except for the parakeet feather. “This is a good collection,” he said.
    “It’s only one. Mom says one’s not a collection.”
    “Maybe we should go feather collecting.”
    “Do you know where?” she asked.
    But just like that he had lost the thread of the conversation. In his mind’s eye he saw the possum again, returning to haunt him, its hairless tail vanishing into the oleander. Everything had been identical in his mind and on the road—the angle at which it crossed, the grove off to the left, the way the headlights picked it out of the darkness, the way the creature had been swallowed up by the shrubbery and the shadows. …
    Something struck him then, something he hadn’t thought of before.
    “Do I know where what?” he asked, finally reacting to Nina’s question.
    “Where there’s feathers?”
    “Sure. I know a place. We’ll go looking.” He tucked her in and went out, hurrying into the family room where Beth sat watching
Jeopardy!
He saw right away that the Double Jeopardy categories weren’t up his alley. “Listen to this,” he said to Beth, sitting down next to her on the couch. “The two incidents aren’t the same thing.”
    “Okay,” she said, her eyes on the television screen.
    “With Anthony, his name came into my mind the instant the phone rang. At the
same time.”
    “I still say it’s coincidence.”
    “That’s all right. It might be. But listen to what I’m telling you. With the possum it was different. I
predicted
the possum. You see the difference? I forecast it. There was a five- or six-minute lag between when I pictured it and when it appeared.”
    “I do see the difference. I don’t know what it means, but I see what you’re saying. The possum is kind of … psychic.”
    “Yeah, I guess so. Actually they’re both kind of psychic, aren’t they? Unless you really think the phone call thing was coincidence.”
    “I don’t know what I think. What’s the Santa Maria?”
    “What?” he asked, utterly baffled by this.
    “The name of Columbus’s ship,” she said. “Explorers for six hundred.”
    “Oh.” He watched the game show for a minute. It was winding up. “You know why it’s not a coincidence? Because of the possum. That would make
two
weird things on the same night, which would be a double coincidence.”
    “The Final Jeopardy subject is British History,” Alex Trebek said, looking shrewdly at the audience, and the program cut away to a commercial.
    “Oliver Cromwell,” Art said, the name almost leaping out of his throat. This time he was sure of it. It was like the possum and like Anthony Collier. He hadn’t guessed. He hadn’t had time to guess. The name had simply come to him. Beth looked at him wonderingly and he nodded his head. “That’s it again,” he said. “At least I think it is.” Instantly he had come to doubt himself.
Was
this another guess, like the five of spades? Or was this the possum, crossing the road to get to the other side?
    There were half a dozen commercials, interminable commercials, but finally the show was on the air again. Trebek read off the answer: “This Puritan Prime Minister of England was so hated by the populace, that after he was dead and buried his body was exhumed and …”
    Art didn’t hear the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open, his mind swimming. Beth stared at him when the answer was revealed. “Now you’re giving me the creeps,” she said.
    . . .
    On Friday evening he tried again with the cards, and again he couldn’t make them work. He rolled dice, but that was a washout, too. He made a mighty effort to blank out his mind, to open himself to psychic suggestion, but it was no good. The harder he tried, the more he understood that it wouldn’t speak to him, whatever it was, and he tried hard not to try as hard. When the phone rang at eight