Dead Sleeping Shaman by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Page A

Eugenia would soon get over her current snit and leave. When the door to the restaurant opened, I turned to see who it might be. An old woman I’d never seen before stepped tentatively into the room. I figured she had to be with the cult but she was alone, not in a group of three and four as the others were. And she certainly wasn’t bald. Nor wearing a sexless robe. If anything, she looked more like Crystalline, or Marjory—kind of blowsy, kind of overdressed, kind of odd.
    I watched as the woman came around between chairs and tables, hesitating, searching for someone or something. She looked hard at Eugenia, who was too deep into her argument with Dolly to notice.
    The woman, sixty or seventy, wore a long black skirt. Her bright blue sweater was of, what looked like, cashmere. Probably not. Not from the rest of what she wore: a jumble of bright green scarves wrapped around her wrinkled neck; black string-gloves on her blunt, old hands; and worn but still stylish Gucci shoes on pudgy feet in black lisle socks with a hole above one ankle. She had applied almost clown-like makeup around her eyes, mascara seeping through wrinkles down to her cheeks, and lipstick that merged into feathered lines around her mouth. I had no idea what look she was going for, but what she’d achieved wasn’t particularly attractive.
    The woman stopped and put her hand on a chair back for support. She looked at Eugenia again, frowning. She patted nervously at the white hair piled on her head, caught with a rhinestone-studded comb that threatened to fall off to one side. She took a deep breath, as if for strength. After a few hesitant seconds, she turned to me, her almost opaque blue eyes giving me the once-over and leaving me with the odd feeling I should know her. She stared at my University of Michigan sweatshirt and worked her way down to my paint-stained jeans. With a sniff, and a firm set of her chin in the air, she brushed past me, pulling her calf-length skirt to one side as she made her way to a four-top Gloria, the waitress, was washing off while spraying crumbs into the air behind her.
    Another one of Eugenia’s indigent souls, I thought as she settled at the table and lost herself in Eugenia’s sticky menu.
    Eugenia looked up at me, her cheeks a high red with whatever anger was taking her at the moment. “You going out there tonight, to that revival thing, Emily?” she demanded, blowing out a sound of derision. “Woulda thought you were smarter than that. The old man’s a crook, you know.” She slapped one large hand on the tabletop and lifted her behind up an inch more. “You ask me, he’s trying to get everything those folks own. Scarin’ them for a reason, I’ll bet. I always say, you look where people are putting fear into other people and you’ll find a crook.”
    I shrugged, not wanting to give away too much information. When it came time to have news spread around the town, that’s when Eugenia would be useful. Right now no one needed to know why we were going to the meeting that night.
    “According to the Reverend Fritch, you’ll be caught deader than a doornail if you don’t get out there and listen,” Dolly, leaning across the table, warned.
    Crystalline leaned back and rolled her eyes at me.
    Eugenia’s ringlets bobbed and the loose flesh under her chin flapped as she laughed. “Yeah. Like dying scares me. You, me, everybody—we’ve all been dying since the day we was born. You realize that? The guy out there—that Reverend Fritch—he doesn’t know any better than me when I’m going to die. And I sure don’t have to sign over all my worldly goods to buy me a place to the left of a fiery furnace.”
    “You don’t know anything, Eugenia,” Dolly said, a couple of red spots blooming on her cheeks. “And I wouldn’t go around slandering anybody until you’ve got something to go on.”
    “Heard plenty already. His people come in here bragging about how they gave away all their money and wanting me