Shell Game – Chapter 11 – Evan’s Vision

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Evan turned south on Commercial toward the new residence of Molly Brandt or Wolf.  He hoped she could keep this new name long enough for them to meet again.

As he made his way through the foggy streets, he attempted to assemble the odd-shaped pieces of the past twenty-four hours.  The picture was missing more than a few pieces, and none of the existing pieces seemed connected.

Though he walked in fog, it was at least clear that his current client possibly held the missing links.  She, however, was behaving like every client that graced his office, it seemed.  Molly Brandt was just one person in a long line of clients who refused to shoot straight with him.  His clients’ lack of trust in him seemed as reasonable as the dog who snaps at the veterinarian working to heal it.  He knew it was often hard for his clients to know who to trust, especially in the kinds of circumstances that brought them to his door, yet he also knew it didn’t have to be as painful as it often was. 

Evan’s hands reminded him that the September air was a bit too chilled for their taste, so he shoved them in his pockets.  There, his fingers felt something hard and round.  They tried to communicate with his mind to identify the object and why it was there.  Then it connected.  The pearl.  The pendant.  After all the comings and goings of last night, he’d forgotten he put it there.  Evan’s mind quickly retraced the strange events of the man at the office door.  Then his mind drifted again to giving the pendant as a gift to Katherine.  He had burned one day already in his deal with her, and any offerings of love and reconciliation couldn’t hurt the cause.  Evan continued to roll the pearl in his fingers as he walked.  As he walked, he thought of Katherine and if there was any hope for them.

The feel of the orb felt good in his hand; soothing, comforting.  The fumbling action of his fingers unearthed memories Evan had of his grandfather.  The man used to swing on the front porch of his house and tell tall tales as Evan played with toys on the steps.  All the while, his grandfather rolled a loop of maybe a dozen wooden beads through his fingers.  His worry-beads, he used to call them.

Suddenly, the pearl became warm to his touch, and Evan’s fingers seemed to lock onto the sphere.  His mind filled quickly with a succession of images. It again was a review of the previous night’s events, but the visions were from angles he didn’t remember.  It was like watching a picture show at the Bijou, but whoever edited it was confused or medicated.

He saw his office.  It was night, and a man was inside looking, searching for something.  The man spread the neat stacks of paper on Evan’s desk all over the place.  Evan couldn’t tell what the man looked like.  Everything was in silhouette against the office window.  The man opened drawers and found the desk safe but had no success in prying it open.  Then, he moved to the gun safe.  Still no luck.

Without warning, Evan’s mind flashed to a vision of himself standing behind his desk.  It was like he was outside himself.  He saw him standing behind his desk lamp and grasping the pendant in his fist, all the while keeping his eye on a shadowy figure outside the office.  Then, as if his vision was a cinema camera, the vision traveled through the office to the sidewalk outside.  Evan saw the man looking in, trying to pick the lock.  Evan and the man saw the lamp click off in his office, and for the first time, he caught a glimpse of the man’s face in the light of the streetlamp as he turned from the office door.  It was the sweaty man from the bazaar.  It was the face of the man next to Gabe’s picture on the morning’s Athens Gazette.  Jason Charles.  In his vision, Jason Charles was very much alive, and his eyes confessed his desperation.  Evan’s blood ran cold.

Then the visions were wiped away and replaced by a voice.  Evan had never heard the voice before.  It was a woman’s voice, confident but with an edge of distress.  All the voice said over and over was a pleading not to turn her in.  “Don’t give me over,” the voice said.  “Don’t give me over.”

The pearl in Evan’s hand reached such a temperature that he quickly let go of it, yanked his hand out of his pocket, blew on his hand, and checked for burns.  To his amazement, his hand didn’t show any signs of damage.

Evan’s mind had come back to him, and he looked around to see if he had made a spectacle of himself.  For once, he was thankful for the fog.  He didn’t immediately see anyone nearby.  Evan took quick and shallow breaths and started to feel a little light on his feet.  He looked for a place to sit down.  An alleyway presented itself to him.  This was a good option; secluded, and even if people noticed him, they would pretend they didn’t.  

Was he alright?  Was the stress too much?  Was his mind breaking?  He needed some time to get himself together.

Evan pulled up a discarded bottle crate and eased down on it.  He felt his forehead.  Cold beads of sweat rubbed off onto his palm.  Perhaps he had a fever, and that’s what caused the visions.  He took off his hat and fanned himself for a moment.  Then he remembered the sudden heat of the pearl.  What was this thing he had purchased?  He wasn’t sure if it glowed.  He’d seen that, right?  But he couldn’t deny the remaining feeling of intense heat on his fingers.

Evan wanted to get a better look at it.  He reached in his pocket and pulled out the pearl.  The orb was back to looking and feeling like a regular pearl.  Evan pulled the gold chain from the setting’s loop and let the pearl rest in his palm. As he examined it, he felt it warm up slightly, and then it began to glow faintly — a faint blue against the grey fog.

The woman’s voice returned to Evan’s head, “What I showed you is true, Evan Gold.  Some people want to find me.  Please don’t let them.  Please don’t give me over!”

Evan stared at the milky orb in his hand, and without a thought to what someone might think if they caught him, he dared to ask the pearl, “Are you talking to me?”

Then, all the heat and the glow of the pearl left in an instant.  Just as if a switch flipped off.  A moment later, Evan heard footsteps approaching and tucked the pearl back into his pocket.  The silhouette of a married couple passed just a few feet from him.  As far as he knew, the couple had no idea he was there.

Evan sat there on the bottle crate for a long while.  There was too much for one mind to think about.  His mind was both full and empty at the same time.  He desperately needed to get some clarity.  Did this pearl just talk to him?  Was Jason Charles the man at the bazaar and his office?  Was Molly Whatever-her-name-was tied up with the pearl?  And what did all of this have to do with his partner ending up dead under the Memorial Bridge?

The more he tried to tie his thoughts together into something that resembled sanity, the more it all fell apart.  The best he could come up with, if he were still a proud member of reality, was that the valuable item at the junk dealer’s table was the pearl.  Jason Charles somehow knew that.  His obsession with it got him killed.  Is it what got Gabe killed?  Would it get him killed?  Get him killed before he could make things right with Katherine?  The more Evan turned the visions and facts over in his mind, the more like a fairy tale, and the scariest tale of them all, it sounded.

Evan tried to push these thoughts from his mind.  He had to get to Molly.  She knew Charles.  She was with Gabe.  She might be able to link up the unlinked puzzle pieces in his mental picture of what happened the night before.  He stood up, finally confident he wouldn’t pass out.  After placing his hat back on his head, Evan took a couple of full, humid breaths to screw up his courage.  If he understood things appropriately, Evan Gold would have to juggle solving his partner’s murder before the police did, get the truth of last night out of his nomadic and name-changing client, and figure out the truth of this mysterious pearl while not letting anyone know he possessed it.

“What a racket,” he said to himself, shaking his head.  Evan stepped back out into the flow of the town’s foot traffic.  He tried as best as he could to walk at an average pace and not run down the street in a panic.  He placed his hands back in his pockets and began to hum no song in particular while mindlessly rolling the pearl in his fingers.  His own worry bead.

After progressing a couple of blocks, the pearl warmed slightly, and Evan became aware of a shadow following him.  Without turning his head, he saw that this person was a woman.  Evan knew that the vision came from the pearl, but was it the truth?  Better safe than sorry, Evan thought and forced his head not to turn to see if the woman was following him.  He also wondered if this was how paranoia felt. 

He got off the main walkways as soon as possible.  Evan worked to lose his shadow by ducking into shops and eateries, heading out the back door, making his way down multiple alleys, and then doubling back on his route unexpectedly.  After the pearl had cooled back down, Evan finally permitted himself to turn around.  There was no woman there, but had she ever been there at all?

Evan continued to weave through the streets and alleys like this for a half-hour till he was confident whoever had been tailing him was thoroughly lost and scrambled.

He tucked himself into another alleyway and pulled the pearl from his pocket.  It seemed so normal as he saw it sitting in the hollow of his palm.  “I don’t know what or who you are,” he said to the sphere, “but I’m going to figure it out.  In the meantime, if we can work on the same team, we might just save both of our skins.  What do you think?”  Evan looked at the pearl for a moment or two longer.  He didn’t know what he expected to happen.  Maybe the woman’s voice would say something, but nothing happened.

Disappointed, Evan put the pearl back in his pocket and stepped into the flow of pedestrian jetsam, made sure he was no longer followed and continued to make his way, now west, on Copley to The Walnut Grove Apartments.  He had no idea what tangled web Molly Brandt was caught up in or luring him into, but he was now convinced she was involved in something bigger than anything he’d experienced before.