Jinxed by Beth Ciotta

Author:Beth Ciotta [Ciotta, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780974363943
Publisher: Medallion Press
Published: 2004-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Jake attributed his rounding the corner of the house just as Marty had pried open the back door to exquisite timing. That Marty had turned when he’d beckoned him, rather than continuing over the threshold toward a white-faced Nancy, he chalked up to human reflex. His ability to coax the inebriated bastard into the backyard was due to his police training and superb bullshitting skills.

It was the black cat that had lunged out of nowhere, streaking across Marty’s path and tripping the bastard just as he’d aimed a revolver at Jake that had him presently cruising the Internet. The bullet that had whizzed by his ear might have gone through his chest if not for that cat. A cat that had duly disappeared. A cat that no one in the neighborhood claimed.

Coincidence or luck?

Jake sat at his desk, eyeing the polished cat charm on Afia’s bracelet while typing SUPERSTITIONS into the search engine and contemplating his brush with disaster. Marty Ashe was a bully. A man who attacked with obscenities and fists. The fact that he’d obtained a gun was a surprise and, in a warped way, a blessing. Unlike Nancy, Jake wasn’t afraid to press charges.

Marty was looking at some deserved jail time.

A multitude of listings came up on the computer screen. Jake clicked on one after another, noting in particular the superstitions pertaining to black cats. Depending on the culture, beliefs differed. In the Orient, black cats symbolized poverty and ill-health, while Scottish superstition claimed a strange black cat on your porch brought prosperity. Though considered unlucky in the European and European-American traditions, in the African-American sporting world, the black cat granted invisibility and the return of lost love as well as money luck.

The clichéd and most common belief was that black cats conjured bad luck, while others touted exactly the opposite. Apparently there was an “evil” black cat and a “good” black cat.

To see a black cat cross your path brings bad luck.

To see a black cat walk toward you brings good luck.

And assorted variations.

Any way you looked at it, if one was given to superstition, Marty Ashe had been foiled by a black puss. The bastard’s bad luck had been Jake and Nancy’s good fortune.

Jake’s skeptical brain spun in circles as he fingered Afia’s bracelet. A gift from her father. A father she adored. A father who’d told her that she needed all the luck on earth, not because he believed her to be jinxed, but because her mother had an absurd fear of Friday the thirteenth, amongst other things. He wondered what an intelligent man like Judge Bradley St. John could’ve seen in such an irrational woman. He typed PARASKEVIDEKATRIAPHOBIA into the search engine only to learn that over twenty-one million Americans suffered from the phobia. Amazingly, fear of Friday the thirteenth appeared to be the most widespread superstition in America. So it wasn’t as if Giselle was a freak of nature. As for the judge, well, whether the man was superstitious or not he’d given Afia a gift that perpetuated the belief in lucky talismans.

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