[pirate witch]: 524.Novels.NaNoWriMo 2007 chapter 5

At eleven in the evening, the pillows were looking extremely tempting to Livia, who was seated at the desk with the phonebook open and the television on to a news channel. A ticker was running underneath the program about some basket ball player, and Livia continued checking it every few minutes, on the off chance that something came up about strange drugs, the police, or earthquakes. She wasn’t exactly sure why she cared so much about the earthquake that didn’t happen, but it bothered her. Something didn’t seem right lately, and Livia was damned if she wouldn’t find out what that was. 

By midnight, Livia couldn’t really concentrate and ended up watching an old black and white movie about Romans killing each other off. It could have been a Shakespeare play, she didn’t know because the words weren’t exactly registering in her head. Someone was dying a very violent death when someone knocked on the door.

“What?” Livia shouted, not bothering to get up and look through the peep hole. She was wearing her pyjamas and was thinking about brushing her teeth and going to bed when the noise woke her out of her stupor. “Who is it?”

“It’s Katrina,”

Livia groaned and clambered off the bed. She wondered what on earth had convinced Katrina that it was polite to knock on the door of someone at midnight, especially someone who hadn’t expressed any particular interest to become friends. 

“What do you need, Katrina?” she asked, poking her head halfway through the doorway, keeping the heavy door ready to slam at any moment. “I’m really tired, and we aren’t exactly the type of people who should need to see each other this much,”

Katrina didn’t look or smell good. There was the unmistakable scent of brandy surrounding her, and her hair was mussed up. To add to this strange array, the fortune teller had on an extremely long silky robe and a snooze cap. Had she not been disgusted by how drunk the fortune teller was, Livia would have laughed at her. Instead, she waited for Katrina to answer, trying her best to make her face anything but inviting. 

“Go away. You’re drunk,” Livia shut the door.

It sounded like Katrina was banging something large and made of teracotta on the door, and after a large crash and the sound of pottery hitting carpet Livia was positive that this was what happened. She through the door open, and Katrina was standing among the shards and remains of what once was a potted plant. 

“Couldn’t you go somewhere else?”Livia asked angrily. “Don’t you have any friends?”

“Who needs friends? I’ve got people who owe me favors, and that works so much better,”

“Like whom?”

“Like you,” Katrina said, and pushed her way through the door. Livia was so surprised that just shut the door behind her and turned back to her hotel room, where Katrina the drunk fortune teller was now seated very comfortably on her bed. It was twelve thirty in the morning.

“I think that I may have accidentally broken a flower pot or two outside the door. Perhaps the maidservants can clean it up,” Katrina slurred before falling asleep for a few moments, her mouth wide open and her eyes pressed against the pillow.

Livia stared at the woman in her room, a stranger fast asleep on her bed, and she began to laugh. She didn’t actually know what was so funny, but whatever it was absolutely cracked her up. Perhaps it was the fact that a teracotta flower pot was broken outside of her door, and a cactus was now homeless and dying. It could also have been the advertisement on the news for a psychic hotline, when a psychic was right next to her. Or, maybe it could have just been the exhaustion setting in. Not wanting to crawl into bed with a passed out drunk fortune teller, Livia lay down on the comfortable carpet and shut her eyes.

That night, she slept better than she ever did at her own house. There were no weird dreams for her to dwell on, or to toss and turn to. All Livia saw in her sleep was the comforting sight of a swirling gold river.


When Livia awoke, refreshed and feeling much more optimistic than she had been for months, she couldn’t find Katrina anywhere. This did not really worry her, as she hadn’t exactly been looking forward to hauling her out of her room, but she decided to look around anyway, on the off chance that she would find the fortune teller passed out in the bathtub. 

Katrina wasn’t in the bathtub, however, nor any other place in the room. When Livia opened the hotel room door, expecting to see a mess of cactus needles and fertilized dirt, all that she saw by her feet was an immaculately clean and geometrically decorated carpet. This was also a relief, as cleaning up cacti is never a fun thing to do. 

At one in the afternoon, Livia took a walk to a restaurant that she had never been to and ordered baked ziti, which was delicious. She picked up the previous day’s newspaper from the table beside her and started to skim it, searching subconsciously for any references to the drug that was still in the back of her mind. There weren’t any to be found, just regular news, so she pulled a pencil out of her pocket book and started to attempt the crossword puzzle. 

After only filling in three words, (spy, oatmeal, and Tolkien), Livia heard someone speaking very loudly at the table behind her. She turned around to see who it was, and saw a middle aged man in a business suit speaking with a discernable French accent to the empty chair next to him. Livia rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands and looked again, just to be sure, but he was indeed talking to thin air. All around the restaurant, people were staring at this strange man, who did not seem to notice a single thing wrong with what he was doing. 

After a slight pause in his one sided conversation, the man seemed to get angry and stood up. He pushed his chair back on the slate floor, which made a horrible screeching noise, and stomped his foot. “You might laugh!” he shouted to the invisible person, “but I am actually going places! You are still stuck in the past, look at you! You look ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed to be seen with you. It’s not the Victorian age, you know,” he started to leave, but whipped around after he touched his hand to the door.

“Are you alright sir?” a woman at a nearby table asked, wiping the tea that she had spilled when he stood up suddenly off of the table cloth with a paper napkin. 

“Ask him,” the angry man replied, pointing to the empty chair without looking at the woman. He had returned to his table and picked a very small bottle up from under it. Inside the little bottle was a cloud of swirling gold dust.

“Wait!” Livia shouted, jumping up from her seat and running after the Frenchman, but he had already left the restaurant. She pushed the door open and saw him across the street, climbing into a silver, nondescript car. Cars and busses zoomed over the crosswalk by Livia’s feet, but she heard the man’s car start and had no real choice. 

A taxi beeped its horn for the entire time that she ran across the street, holding her arm up in an attempt to alert the approaching cars that she was there. One bus almost squished her flat, narrowly missing rolling over her toes. Livia reached the opposite sidewalk shaking but without any bruises just in time to see the man with the gold dust’s car edging its way into traffic. 

“Stop! Stop, I need to speak with you,” Livia called to the man, but his windows were up against the cold and he couldn’t hear her. Not wanting to loose what could possibly be the answer to many of her questions, Livia ran up to the car. It was stuck at a red light, so she brazenly went up to the driver’s side window and beat her hands against the glass.

“What do you want?” The man asked, rolling down his window. He was lighting up a cigar with one hand and rolling down the window with the other, so when the light turned green he didn’t move. Livia saw this as her chance and, ignoring the honking of horns behind his stopped car, she grabbed onto the door, refusing to let him go.

“That gold dust,” she said, ignoring the angry look he gave her for mentioning it, “I need to know about it,”

“What is there to know?” he asked. The green light finally caught his attention, and he attempted to go but Livia reached her hand through the window and turned the steering wheel sharply to the left, putting the man in an unpleasant situation. If he didn’t want to squish this insistent girl, he would have to pull over and listen to her.

“Just park your car and listen to me!” Livia begged, fixing her best sad child eyes on the man. On his dashboard was a glossy photograph of a woman and two children, and she figured that as a father he wouldn’t be able to resist that look.

Livia was right, and he parallel parked on the side of the busy road. He was still looking grumpy when he got out of the car, but she didn’t mind as long as he knew something about the drug that he was on. 

“Make this quick,” he demanded, checking his fake Rolex watch. 

Livia took a deep breath but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t actually planned on interrogating someone from the streets about gold dust, and now she figured that introducing herself as a police officer’s daughter would not be the best of ideas. Instead, she decided to go with a different approach, one that her father had used many times.

“I’m sorry sir, I’m just having the worst withdrawal symptoms,” she lied, fluttering her eyelashes and coughing a little. She thought that the cough would add a good effect, but instead it only made the man raise an eyebrow. Livia quickly started speaking again. “All that I’m asking is the place where you got your gold dust.  My dealer was...” she thought about it for a minute, trying to make herself sound choked up to cover the slip of creativity, “he was arrested.”

“Umm...really?” the man asked,
looking suspiciously at her. 

She nodded, attempting to keep herself from just beating the information out of the man with the briefcase that was in the back of his car.

“Yes, he was, and I really need to know where you got your gold dust before I completely lose it right here on the street,” these words came out in a rush, babbled together into one word. To her credit, Livia could speak very quickly, which appeared to work in this situation.

“Well, then, it was outside this apartment building,” the man wrote an address on the palm of Livia’s hand. The ink bled slightly into the lines of her palm, causing a spider web to appear on her skin. She ignored this ominous sign and closed her hand into a fist, hiding the address until she was alone. 

After the silver car managed to squeeze its way through a green light and Livia was quite alone, she opened her hand to look at the address on her palm. The ink was starting to fade already, and she had to squint to get the street name right.