Later(69)

“But you are on the edge of great sorrow.” She paused, doing the old emphasis thing. “And, perhaps, danger.”

“Do you see a beautiful woman with dark hair in my future?” Wendy was a beautiful woman with dark hair.

“No,” Rozzie said, and what came next stopped me dead. “She is in your past.”

Ohh-kay.

I walked around her in the direction of Pup-A-Licious, being careful not to touch her. She was a charlatan, I didn’t have a single doubt about that, but touching her just then still seemed like a lousy idea.

No good. She walked with me. “In your future is a little girl and a little boy. The boy has a dog.”

“A Happy Hound, I bet. Probably named Howie.”

She ignored this latest attempt at levity. “The girl wears a red hat and carries a doll. One of these children has the sight. I don’t know which. It is hidden from me.”

I hardly heard that part of her spiel. I was thinking of the previous pronouncement, made in a flat Brooklyn accent: She is in your past.

Madame Fortuna got a lot of stuff wrong, I found out, but she did seem to have a genuine psychic touch, and on the day I interviewed for a summer at Joyland, she was hitting on all cylinders…