Page 4 of The Bride Wore White

After making the call, she put the receiver back into the cradle and went to the door of the reading room to take another look atTapson. He had not moved, but he was still breathing. The light glittered on the blade of the fallen knife. She wondered briefly if she ought to get rid of it but decided not to worry about it. There was no evidence that a crime had been committed.

She heard the siren wailing in the distance and turned to go back across the reception area to open the door. But she paused again when she saw the lamplight gleam on Tapson’s gold signet ring. She did not know why it was important, but her intuition was whispering to her.Pay attention.

When the ambulance arrived, she explained to the two men who loaded the patient onto a stretcher that the knife belonged to the client. They shrugged and took it with them.

“The streets can be dangerous at night,” one of them said.

She closed the door, locked it, and went upstairs to pack. It was definitely time to find a new future.

Chapter 2

The following morning Prudence descended the stairs dressed for travel in an unmemorable brown tweed suit and a small plain hat. It felt like the right costume for slipping out of San Francisco unnoticed. She did not move in society, but she had several clients who did. There was also a very efficient rumor network among her colleagues and competitors. Sooner or later the news that a gentleman client had collapsed in her reading room would circulate. She wanted to disappear before the telephone started ringing.

She crossed the front room of the town house, a suitcase gripped in one gloved hand. She had packed only the essentials. She was no longer Madame Ariadne, but she was not yet sure who she was going to become. Regardless, she doubted she would need her psychic dream reading costumes for her future self. She did not want to go back into that line of work.

When she arrived in Los Angeles she would contact thehousekeeper and ask her to pack up the rest of her personal possessions and hold them until she had a new permanent address.

Her handbag was stuffed with the cash she had stored in the small concealed safe in the bedroom. The habit of keeping a sizable sum of money conveniently available had been passed down to her from her grandmother, who had lost her savings at the start of the Depression several years earlier. Yes, everyone said President Roosevelt had made the banking system safe, but her grandmother had never entirely trusted banks again.

At the front door she took a moment to say farewell to the comfortable little town house that had been her home since she and her mother had moved in with her grandmother. That had been after her father was killed in the Great War. Her mother had died of the flu the following year.

She and her grandmother had been on their own. They had done well in the psychic business. But a year ago her grandmother had died and Prudence had found herself utterly alone in the world. For a while a strange sense of despair and desperation had come over her. It was during that terrible, crushing time that she had made the biggest mistake of her life. She had rushed into marriage.You learned from that experience,she reminded herself.You won’t make that mistake again.

She paused at the front door to take one last look around. She wasn’t sure what she ought to be feeling in that moment. A sense of melancholy, perhaps, or sadness, maybe.

But for some reason what she experienced was akin to a feeling of relief. She was escaping San Francisco and the life she had lived there. She was going to reinvent herself. By the time she reached L.A. she would be a new woman.

She went out into the damp early-morning fog that had seeped in off the Bay, locked the door, and hailed a cab to take her to the train station.

She did not see a newspaper until that evening when she carried her suitcase off the train in Los Angeles. She dug some coins out of her handbag and purchased a couple of local papers and two Hollywood gossip magazines. It was time to get to know her new home. There were a number of small towns, neighborhood enclaves, and communities scattered around the city proper. She needed to decide where she wanted to live while she looked for a job. It would be lovely to rent an apartment by the beach.

She scanned the newspapers with a sense of anticipation. The front-page headlines consisted of the usual fare—tensions were continuing to rise in Europe, trouble was brewing in the Far East, the FBI was investigating more gangland killings, and a divorce lawyer had been accused of falsifying a judge’s signature on some annulment papers. She paused to read the details of the fraudulent annulment but relaxed when she concluded it did not affect her.

It was the lead story on the society page of one of the papers that stunned her.

Heir to Tapson Mining Fortune Collapses in Nightmare Psychic’s Reading Room. Dies in Hospital.

“He’s dead?” Prudence whispered, horrified. Belatedly the label the press had branded her with registered. “Nightmare Psychic?”

The cabdriver caught her eye in the rearview mirror. “You okay, miss?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I was just rather shocked by a news story.”

“I know what you mean. I get shocked every time I pick up a newspaper. That’s why I usually stick with the racing form. By the way, I got a tip from a jockey about the next race at Santa Anitathat I don’t mind passing along. Rising Star in the seventh on Thursday.”

“Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She plunged into the article with a sense of dread.

Last night Thomas J. Tapson III, grandson of the founder of Tapson Mining Company, collapsed during the course of a psychic dream reading. An ambulance was called and Mr.Tapson was rushed to the hospital, where he later died.

The tragedy occurred on the premises of a fashionable psychic known to the city’s upper crust as Madame Ariadne. Rumors of what may have caused Mr.Tapson’s death are currently swirling among the city’s psychics and their many clients. Some have taken to calling the dream reader the “Nightmare Psychic.”

Mr.Tapson has not circulated in San Francisco society in recent years, having been on an extended tour abroad, where he engaged in such pursuits as big game hunting and mountain climbing. His family was apparently unaware that he had returned.

Your correspondent went to Madame Ariadne’s address with the intention of interviewing her, but she was not at home. A neighbor reported seeing her get into a cab with a suitcase early this morning.

Madame Ariadne claims to be a psychic who can reveal the meaning of dreams. There is bound to be a great deal of speculation about her unusual techniques in the wake of Mr.Tapson’s death. Some are asking if it is possible to murder a man with the paranormal powers of the mind. Others suggest that, in addition todream readings, Madame Ariadne offered more intimate services...

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