The Clairvoyant Countess by Dorothy Gilman Read Free Book Online Page B

warm-hearted boy who loves his family, but if he had gone he would be dead too. I wonder if I have done him such a favor after all. So many gone!” She shook her head. “What will happen to Gavin now?”
    “Well, I visited the school and they plan to offer Gavin anything he needs: legal guardianship, a scholarship, counseling, surrogate parents … a rather nice outfit, Bonaventure’s. The Princeton police tell me there’s an uncle too—his mother’s brother—in the Peace Corps somewhere in Africa. He’s flying back to handle things, but under the circumstances I believe Gavin’s life will continue uninterrupted at Bonaventure’s.”
    She nodded. “At least you can assure them, Lieutenant, that there will be no more thefts at the school. I can safely guarantee that now.”
    Pruden looked at her in astonishment. “You mean Gavin
did
—? You mean
he
—? But I thought you said—”
    “When I first saw the list I began to wonder,” she said. “I thought at first of someone with a fetish. Did you not find it odd that so many of the stolen objects were crosses? Perhaps you assumed they were stolen only because they had monetary value. Gavin took them for protection, not for profit.”
    “Protection?”
    “The cross is still believed to be a protection against evil, is it not? Gavin believed he was doomed to die, and by some kind of demonic violence. Oh, he stole several other items to make it less obvious, but he stole the crosses to carry about with him on his person.”
    “But with all that he would have gone
willingly
home?” protested Pruden. “For God’s sake, why?”
    “How is your father these days?” asked Madame Karitska gently. “I trust he is recovering well?”
    Pruden looked startled and then thoughtful, and was silent.

Chapter 6
    Madame Karitska was going shopping this morning at Banmaker’s, a delight very new to her, and although she intended to buy only a few yards of silk she had arranged her adventure as if it were a trip to Europe. She agreed with Gurdjieff, whom she had known at one point in her life, that one of the most important foods, second only to plant foods, was the ingestion of new impressions to stimulate and nourish the spirit. She chose to walk to the store by a route that was colorful to the eye, and upon arriving at Banmaker’s she stood transfixed at the entrance, absorbing the marvels before her: broad aisles, brilliant lights and colors; books in bright jackets with letters fairly catapulting from the page to catch the eye; purses of leather and velvet and tapestry heaped in piles; a ribbon counter dazzlingwith stripes of fuchsia, melon, scarlet, pink, orange, blues.
    Like a bazaar in Samarkand, she thought, taken back to her youth for a moment. Dreamily she began to stroll the aisles in search of her silks until bolt after bolt of rich fabric caught her eye near the Eighteenth Street entrance. As she moved toward them her mind was already sketching the long skirt she would cut and stitch out of an as-yet-unmet rainbow color. The essential problem behind frugality and poverty, she reflected, was that it denied such whims as these small ventures into elegance. She planned to feel very elegant indeed soon.
    She fingered the materials: there was a taffeta that moved with a sound like running water, a velvet that lay warmly, solidly, in the hand.… Abruptly Madame Karitska turned, aware of a crackling hostility in the air, an almost physical feeling of tension nearby.
    She saw a man standing not far away from her in the niche beside the elevators. He was solidly built, coatless, and narrow-eyed. He wore a dark suit with a carnation in his lapel and he stood his ground with an air of authority. His gaze was fixed upon someone in the aisle beyond. Turning further, Madame Karitska followed his gaze to the next aisle and saw that it was the jewelry counter. At one end a sleek woman in mink was slanting her head to study more closely the effect of a glittering bracelet