I woke the next morning with Dougherty’s words still resonating in my head. Skating on thin ice. I looked out the window, at the frost-covered paddocks and cracked, dirty puddles in the yard. You’d be hard-pressed to put your foot out there without stepping on some ice, thick or thin.
It was Saturday. I remembered Possum’s comment about the farmers’ market in town and I decided to wander in and check it out for myself. A bit of light relief, some friendly – or at least interesting – faces and fresh food wouldn’t go astray after all the dramas of the past few days.
The market wasn’t hard to find: a burst of exotic colour and movement – red and white tents, silky blue dresses and scarves, fluttering banners and Tibetan prayer flags – in a landscaped grove beside the pub. I ambled around. There were potatoes and pumpkins with the frost still on them, there were cupcakes and honey, sourdough seed bread, second-hand tools, essential oils. There was an Egyptian herbalist selling figs, frankincense and prune-like objects that turned out to be vultures’ testicles.
The crowd was a bustling, sizeable one, and, as Possum had promised, a more eclectic collection of misfits you’d have to travel a long way to see. There were scratch bands and Bolivian buskers, pot-bellied bikies and landlocked pirates. There was a bloke who looked like he’d just ridden down from the Snowies eating a falafel and a herd of hungry yuppies in North Face jackets. A pair of dreadlocked hobbits in Rasta hats sat on a low branch rolling joints and cackling hysterically at each other’s jokes – or, more likely, their own.
I said hello to the odd character who recognised me, ignored the regular whiff of weed or patchouli. I bought a few implements for the home – a heavy metal poker and a mattock – some handmade soap and a Thai curry. I stopped and watched a game of footy on the adjoining oval, took pleasure in the slap of wet leather on heavy boots, the flying bodies, the long, beguiling arms plucking the ball from the sky then sending it spiralling into the forward line.
I wandered along the back of the market until my attention was caught by a small, purple tent bedecked with long vines of jasmine, transforming it into a kind of bower. The sign over the entrance read: CRYSTAL VISION. I glanced into the opening and the jade-green eyes of a woman in a flowing red dress seated at a folding table. It was hard to give a more detailed description than that, given that the interior was swathed in shadow and her face was partially covered by veils.
I would have walked on by, marked it down as one of the odd little enterprises designed to separate fools from their money which spring up at events like this, but then I noticed the array of crystals laid out on the table.
Blame it on my upbringing if you will – my father was fascinated by geology – but I’m a sucker for a quality crystal and there was some quality on display here.
The woman flashed those fierce green eyes at me and invited me in. I did so warily.
She swept a hand over the crystals. ‘Which one would you like me to read?’ she asked.
I didn’t want her to read any of them, at least not without telling me how much I was going to be slugged for the pleasure. There were maybe twenty crystals of varying shapes and sizes spread across the table. I was struck by their diversity: there were the usual flashy blades-of-light quartzes and amethysts, but there were other, more subtle, specimens I could only identify because my father had enjoyed testing me with such displays – rocks and minerals of every description – when I was a teenager. I gave them a cursory glance and identified feldspar, aquamarine beryl, peridot, serpentinite, lapis lazuli.
Despite the array of colour, clarity and planes of symmetry before me, it was a modest little chunk of pegmatite rock on the right, the crystals embedded in it viridian, lustrous, that caught my attention. I hesitated for a moment, then touched it.
‘Interesting,’ said the woman. ‘What made you choose that one?’
‘I used to live in a street called Scheelite.’
Her brows rose. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘So you know your crystals.’
‘Some.’
She took the rock and gazed into it. Almost of its own accord, my bum found its way into the chair in front of her.
‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said.
‘Not that long. I live on the outskirts of town.’
‘But before that. I see a wild, sparse country where the minerals are laid bare and their messages radiate out to those of a mind to hear them.’
I was momentarily taken aback. Then I relaxed. It wasn’t exactly a secret that I was the new cop in town and local gossip could well have spread the word that I’d come from the outback.
But then she went on.
‘You’re on a journey,’ she said. ‘A dangerous journey.’
Yeah right, I thought. Who isn’t on a journey and aren’t we all fellow passengers to the grave?
‘But you need to be careful,’ she intoned. ‘There are dark forces out there and they’re watching you closely.’
Well, when you work in law enforcement, you do have the odd encounter with lawbreakers and they have been known to post lookouts. Maybe she’d heard I’d just had a tree fall on my house and was playing to my underlying fears. Something about this woman, though, was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. If she was a bullshit artist, she was a bloody good one.
She returned her attention to the scheelite but I’d heard enough. I made to rise. I was reaching for my purse and wondering how to get out of there without getting too badly stung when she spoke again, this time with a definite edge to her voice.
‘I see brutal spirits and bitter winds. I see a woman lost and drowning in the black bog hole of her own kin. A horseman attempts to rescue her but he, too, is dragged down into the depths.’
I froze. I couldn’t see much of the fortune teller’s face, but what I could see was enough to tell me she was genuinely horrified by what she was looking at.
‘You’re stepping into dangerous waters,’ she continued. ‘Be careful. You don’t want to end up like that poor woman. These people can kill you with a look, whisk you away from the face of the earth.’
I rose to my feet. I’d had enough of this woo-woo.
‘Where do I pay?’ I asked.
‘You don’t,’ she replied. ‘Just take care of yourself – that will be payment enough. The devil walks in a multitude of masks and guises.’
I put twenty bucks on the table and left. Why was my heart pounding?
I bought an espresso and a chocolate cookie from the coffee stall and took a seat at the top of a natural amphitheatre near the creek. There was a string band playing down on the little mound at the foot of the slope.
I took a slug of the coffee and a bite of the biscuit, still trying to shake the veiled woman from my mind. That had been a strangely disturbing encounter. Not only did it sound like she knew more about my activities than I did myself, she seemed to be speaking in a circuitous manner about the death at Wycliff Rise. Was the horseman Raph Cambric? If so, then who was the drowned woman? And what did the fortune teller mean by brutal spirits? Any of the men I’d visited the other day – the creepy priest, the stroppy tow-truck operator or the toxic waste dumper – could fit into that category.
I really should go back and ask the woman some more questions. If she had information about the Wycliff incident I needed to know about it.