Sugar Skulls and Specters by Christine Pope

Author:Christine Pope [Pope, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 10

Stalkarazzi

I headed down to the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil. Quite possibly, I wasn’t feeling as serene and grounded as I should have been when attempting a tea-leaf reading, but I’d promised Max I would do this, and I still had some time before I had to take the current load out of the dryer.

Besides, I was curious to see what the leaves might tell me.

Because the kettle was only half full, it didn’t take too long for it to boil. I placed the customary scoop of gunpowder green tea in the antique teacup I always used for these readings, then waited for it to cool enough so I could start sipping.

During this part of the proceedings, I knew I needed to let my mind grow calm, to allow myself to open up to whatever messages the leaves might want to send me. I also had to focus on the question I wanted answered, and to make it as clear as possible.

In this particular case, that wasn’t too difficult.

Who killed Mandy Carson?

I sipped the tea, holding that question in my mind, until the tea was mostly gone. Then it was time to tip the cup over onto its saucer in order to get the last bits of liquid out of the teacup, and finally, turn it right-side up so I could get a clearer look at the shapes of the leaves left behind.

They’d mostly settled at the bottom, not telling me very much…but there was a definite blob in the center that looked almost exactly like a key. In tea-leaf readings, a key was generally a symbol of opportunities that needed to be unlocked, or possibly missed opportunities, if the tea leaves had clustered near the bottom of the cup.

How was Mandy Carson in a position to unlock opportunities when she’d been dead for almost forty years?

I released a breath and peered back into the cup, hoping I might have missed something, but it was pretty clear that the key-shaped clump of leaves on almost the equator of the surface was the only thing even approaching a defined shape.

Maybe the leaves were trying to tell me one particular clue was the key to unlocking the mystery of Mandy’s death. If that was the case, though, they were going to have to work a lot harder to show exactly which clue was the center of the conundrum.

Just as I set the teacup down, the dryer buzzed inside the laundry room. That seemed to put a period to my reading, and I got up from my chair, rinsed out the cup, and went to retrieve my load of darks.

Either the answer would come to me…or it wouldn’t.

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