Into the Bright Unknown (The Gold Seer Trilogy #3)(47)

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not our timetable; it’s Hardwick’s.” I tell them everything I’ve learned over the past few days. Hardwick selling off his other properties in the state, wringing every dollar out of his San Francisco interests, bragging to me about getting out while he was ahead. “And then there’s this news: according to Melancthon, someone’s chartered a ship called the Argos to take valuable cargo out of San Francisco to New York. It has to be Hardwick, leaving town with all his gold.”

“Why would he do that?” Jefferson asks.

“People sometimes make rash choices when they’re in love,” Becky says. “He’s got that new lady friend, right? We met her at the law offices. What’s her name?”

“Helena Russell,” I say. My voice squeaks a little.

“So maybe he’s ready to get married and settle down. Maybe they want to start a family.”

I shake my head. “They have a closeness, an . . . intimacy, I suppose,” I say, thinking of the way she hung on his arm, drank from his whiskey glass. “But I don’t think they have marriage in mind.”

“Why not?” Becky asks.

“He calls her his associate, and she goes with him to all his business meetings.”

“Like a secretary?” Becky says.

“Not exactly like,” I say. “She watches everything. She . . .” I hesitate. I should tell them about her eyes, about my suspicions, but the words lodge in my throat.

“Last night I learned that she used to be a fortune-teller,” Henry offers. “A few months ago she was running a scam, mostly on miners, pretending to tell their futures, if they’d find gold, that sort of thing.”

I give him a sharp look. “Who told you that?”

“That girl Sonia.”

“The pickpocket?”

“She and Billy and their mob of runaways were hanging around the Eldorado last night. Looking for easy takes, I suspect. She didn’t have any information about Mr. Keys. But she and Helena Russell targeted some of the same people.”

“Marks,” Becky says.

“Yes, they targeted some of the same marks. So she knew all about Russell’s scam.”

The air around me is suddenly hot and tight. I’m not sure I’d discount Russell’s fortune-telling as a scam.

“I asked about Hardwick,” Henry continues, “but Sonia said they avoid him—his guards kill anyone who crosses them. Or worse. When I told her he was back in the private room she and her crew made themselves scarce.”

“That explains what Helena wants with Hardwick,” the Major says. “She’s trying to run some kind of scam on him and take his money. But what does he want with her?”

Silence around the table. Beneath it, Jefferson grabs my hand and squeezes, as if to say, “Go ahead. Tell them.”

Before I can change my mind, I blurt the previous evening’s events, leaving nothing out.

Another silence follows.

“The second sight,” the Major says at last.

“Huh?” I ask.

He wipes his mouth with a napkin; before keeping company with Becky, he would have wiped it with his sleeve. “I mean, what if Hardwick keeps her around because her fortune-telling powers are real?”

That’s exactly what I was thinking.

“I knew some women like that, not on the Craven side of my family, but the O’Malleys. Something passed down from the old country. We called it the second sight. They could find lost items, tell a person’s future just by looking at him, dream about things far away. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

I lean forward. “Seen what?”

He takes a sip of coffee and considers his next words. “When we were small, my little brother fell out of a tree and broke his right arm. The same day it happened, my mother got a letter from Aunt Lizzy, her sister, warning that she had had a dream about my brother breaking his arm, and telling my mother to be careful. It’d been written days before.”

“That’s not exactly proof,” I say.

He shrugs. “No, but there were other things, too. Even now, for example, there’s this girl . . .” He gives me a knowing look. “Who can sniff out gold better than a bloodhound on the trail. When she does, her brown eyes turn the most mesmerizing shade of gold.”

“Really?” Becky says. “I never noticed that!”

Everyone is suddenly staring at me, as if expecting my eyes to shoot daggers. Like I’m dangerous.

Something inside me breaks just a tiny bit. Sniffing out gold is the most valuable, wondrous thing I can do. But even the people closest to me, the people I love with all my heart, sometimes view my power with suspicion. And maybe they’re right to do so.

Mama was the same way. She loved me, for sure and certain, but she never wanted to talk about what I could do, even when it was just me and her and Daddy all alone by the box stove. Magic makes mischief, she always said, and left it at that. If she’d had her way, I never would have used my powers, even if it meant holes in the roof and a bare cellar.

She changed her mind at the very end, but it was too late. She was murdered for my gift. So I don’t blame my friends one bit for being a little bit scared sometimes.

“It’s one of the prettiest things I ever saw,” Jefferson says, breaking the silence.