Freeks(30)

Gideon stared thoughtfully at the cards for a moment, then asked, “Do you get any other senses about what it all means?”

“It’s not clear, Gideon. There’s something … here.” She gestured widely around us, referring to Caudry as a whole. “I think that’s why my headache was so bad before I’d hardly even done any readings. There’s another energy fogging everything up.”

“So you can’t get a good sense of things?” he asked.

She shook her head grimly. “No. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right, love,” he brushed it off, and continued staring down at the cards.

“Do you feel it too?” I asked.

“What?” He looked up at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“Mom said she’s feeling foggy. What about you?” I asked.

He leaned back in his seat again. “I’m definitely getting a weird energy here, but I’m not sure if ‘foggy’ is how I’d describe it.”

“Then how would you?” I pressed.

“Do you know what a divining rod is?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“My grandfather used to use one,” Gideon explained. “He swore by it, though he swore by a lot of things I’m not so sure of. He would use a stick branched out in the shape of a Y, and that would be the divining rod.

“Then he’d grab on to each end of the Y and walk into fields,” he continued. “The idea is that the rod would be able to sense water or metal or oil or whatever other worthy substance it was searching for.”

“Did it?” I asked.

Gideon nodded. “Sometimes, yeah, he did discover something of value. And sometimes it works like that for me.”

“What does?”

“It’s how I was able to find Lyanka.” He pointed to my mom, a small smile playing on his lips. “And all the other special people in the sideshow. I’d get a sense about them. Just something inside, and I knew that they were like me. Like us. So I’d ask them to join.”

I crinkled my forehead. “So you’re, like, a supernatural divining rod?”

“Something like that,” he said, then wagged his fingers in the air. “Except now, I seem to be getting false positives everywhere.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked. “Maybe everyone here is secretly supernatural.”

“That I might consider, but I’m getting senses from things that certainly aren’t—like a rock or a bush or the tigers or Hutch,” Gideon elaborated. “The rock and the bush, maybe something had rubbed off on them, but certainly, the tigers and Hutch didn’t suddenly gain some kind of power in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Do you think the tigers had something to do with this?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Gideon shook his head. “There’s something strange about this town. Maybe that’s making the tigers act crazy.”

“There is something dark here,” Mom said.

Gideon stood up, startling both my mom and me. “And it’s about time I got to the bottom of it.”

“Where are you going?” Mom asked.

“To see Leonid Murphy.”





15. blue moon

For the second day in a row, I found myself in Gideon’s beat-up truck on the short ride from our campsite at the carnival on the outskirts of town to Caudry town proper. This time, Luka had been enlisted to join us, and I sat between him and Gideon.

Whenever Gideon went to deal with someone who might be trouble—like a vendor who refused to pay us our dues or an unsavory biker gang that kept messing with Roxie and Carrie at the peep show—he brought along Seth and Luka with him. Seth because he was so strong, and Luka because he healed so quickly, he could handle just about anything.

While I knew I wouldn’t be much of a replacement for Seth, I wanted to help. Truthfully, I think Gideon let me tag along on the off chance that I sensed something he missed, that I could pick up things like my mom did.

We drove through Caudry until we reached the other side, driving on a wide road lined with cypresses and willows until we reached a building nestled right up against the swamp. The porch out front looked like it had seen better days, but the fresh coat of navy blue paint and new windows suggested that it was in the process of being fixed up.

Along the top was a sign that looked brand-new, and the words Blue Moon Bar & Grill were written in big bold letters next to a painting of a crescent moon.

“This is it?” I asked as Gideon parked in front of it.

“This is a restaurant,” Luka said, pointing out the obvious. “Leonid can’t live here.”

“Well, this is the address he gave me.” Gideon picked up the tattered postcard from the dashboard.

The front showed an alligator, its mouth wide open and ready to snap down and take a bite. The back had Leonid’s chicken scratch, promising us riches if we came to Caudry. He tapped the address Leonid had scrawled on it—867 Brawley Boulevard, and the numbers on the side of the building were printed clearly as 867.

“He told me to look him up when I came into town,” Gideon added.

“I guess we should check it out, then,” I said, since there didn’t seem to be any other way to find Leonid, and he was our only real connection to this town.