Simply Irresistible Read online

  The pounding continued. She flopped back on the mattress and pulled a pillow over her face, wishing her neighbor would answer the damn door. Who pounded at someone’s door this early in the morning anyway?

  “Vivian!” a female voice shouted. “Vivian, please. We know you’re in there. Please let us in!”

  The voice sounded panicked. In fact, it sounded so panicked that it kept changing tone. Soprano, alto, mezzo-soprano. How weird was that?

  Then Vivian pulled the pillow off her face. No one knew her here. No one except her landlord, and she had gotten the impression he hadn’t paid much attention to her application, only to her check.

  She hadn’t gone to the police yet to see their file on Eugenia, and she hadn’t gone to the lawyer. Vivian was waiting until Travers left, which had taken five days longer than he had promised.

  That mezzo-soprano/alto /soprano voice wasn’t his. And that was the only thing she could be sure of.

  She got out of bed, grabbed her robe, and shoved her feet into her bunny slippers. She opened the bedroom door and stepped into the combination living room/dining area. The floor-to-ceiling windows sent a cold draft across the hardwood floor. Sunlight poured in, making her glass-topped dining room table sparkle.

  Vivian braced one hand on a chair as she made her way to the door. The pounding grew louder the closer she got.

  “Vivian!”

  Maybe this was some kind of scam to get someone to open her door in the middle of the night. Or the earliest part of the morning, as the case may be.

  “Let us in!”

  Vivian peered through the peephole. Three women were crowded on the landing. Three gorgeous women, all the same height, with movie-star good looks.

  “Please!” cried the blonde closest to the door.

  The other two were looking over their shoulders down the stairs as if they were afraid of something outside.

  Vivian made sure the chain was on, then pulled the door open until the chain caught.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, peering into the hallway. The women looked in her direction. They had bright eyes and matching expressions—sort of a combination between exasperation and panic.

  “Of course you know us,” the redhead snapped. “Let us in.”

  “I don’t remember meeting you,” Viv said.

  “Please!” The brunette sounded terrified.

  Vivian was a sucker for terror. When she was a kid, she used to pretend that she would rescue people who were terrified and save them with her psychic powers.

  As if that would ever happen.

  But the fantasy was real enough to get her to consider unlatching the chain. “This isn’t some scam, is it?”

  “Scam?” the blonde asked.

  “No, it’s not,” the redhead said.

  “Please!” the brunette said again, in that exact same terrified tone.

  Vivian gave up. If they were going to mug her, they were going to mug her. Their frightened act was convincing. She closed the door to unlatch the chain—and heard squeals of dismay from the hallway. Then she undid the chain and pulled the door open again.

  She was nearly bowled over as the three women ran inside.

  “Oh, thank you!” the blonde said.

  “You’d better spell the door,” said the redhead.

  “Or maybe the entire building,” the brunette said.

  Vivian frowned. She was probably still dreaming. That was the only explanation. But her feet were cold despite the bunny slippers, and she had that woozy feeling she usually got when she woke up badly. To her recollection, she’d never had that feeling in a dream before.

  “What is going on?” she asked. “Who are you?”

  All three women gaped at her. Even though they looked very different—the blonde was blue-eyed and delicate; the redhead green-eyed and zaftig; the brunette brown-eyed and model-thin—they had the same expression on their faces.

  “What do you mean, who are we?” the blonde asked.

  “You know who we are,” the redhead said.

  “No,” Vivian said. “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “Oh, no,” the brunette said.

  “Are you telling me that Eugenia told you nothing?” the blonde asked.

  “About what?” Vivian asked.

  The women were very close to the door, huddled against it in fact, and it took Vivian a moment to realize that she was preventing them from moving deeper into the apartment.

  Downstairs something banged. She hoped it was only a door.

  “I’m Atropos,” the brunette said.

  “And I’m Clotho,” the blonde said.

  “And I’m Lachesis,” said the redhead.

  Then they all stared at her as if she should recognize their admittedly odd names.

  “I’m sorry,” Vivian said. “I’ve never heard of you.”

  “We’re the Fates!” they said in unison, and that was when she knew she was dreaming. Kyle’s comic book was coming back to haunt her. Either that, or Aunt Eugenia had been involved in something even stranger than usual.

  “Are you a rock group?” Vivian asked, deciding to play into the dream rather than fight it.

  “A what?” Atropos asked.

  “A rock group,” Clotho said quietly. “You know, like in those Beach Party movies.”

  “Annette Funicello?” Lachesis asked, and then shuddered.

  “We’re not that shallow,” Atropos said.

  “No, no, no,” Clotho said. “We’re the Fates.”

  “You know,” Lachesis said, just in case Vivian missed it. “The Fates.”

  Vivian was apparently staring at them blankly because Atropos said in exasperation, “Shouldn’t we have fallen into human mythology by now?”

  “I thought we had,” Clotho said. “The Greeks referred to us properly.”

  “And then the Norse,” said Lachesis.

  “Who got it wrong,” Atropos added as an aside, “calling us the Norn.”

  “The Weird Sisters,” they said in unison.

  “As if we’re sisters at all,” said Clotho.

  Vivian’s head was spinning. She was beginning to suspect something was seriously wrong here—she was awake and this still wasn’t making sense.

  “And that Wagner,” Lachesis said, “dressing us the way he did.”

  “No sane woman would wear those clothes,” said Atropos.

  “I don’t think that was him,” Clotho said. “I think it was the director.”

  “I still didn’t like it,” Lachesis said. “I’d rather be a Valkyrie—”

  “Stop!” Vivian put a hand to her head. The spinning continued. “One at a time, tell me what’s going on.”

  The women stared at her as if she’d made an improper request. Another door banged downstairs—or was that a car backfiring outside? Vivian couldn’t tell.

  “I think the last time we spoke one at a time,” Atropos said.

  “Completing an entire thought on our own,” said Clotho.

  “Had to be three thousand years ago,” said Lachesis.

  They all looked confused. Or crazy. Or maybe Vivian was the crazy one.

  “I don’t care,” Vivian said. “Just tell me what’s happening.”

  “Oh, dear,” Atropos said. “This will be difficult if you have no idea who we are.”

  “Can you spell the building first?” Clotho asked.

  “I can’t spell anything,” Vivian snapped, and then she paused. “You don’t mean spell-spell, do you? As in spelling bee?”

  The women stared at each other, looking even more confused.

  “I suppose not,” Vivian said. “That would be too simple.”

  She marched across her floor and headed into the kitchen, pushing open the swinging door. The kitchen had been remodeled just before she moved in, and still had that new plastic smell appliances sometimes had. Her large blue teakettle, shaped like the Tick with his little antennae serving as a handle, looked out of place on the black stove.

  She gr
abbed the kettle, turned on the cold water, and shoved the kettle beneath it. Breakfast. She needed breakfast. And time to think.

  These women had mentioned Aunt Eugenia. So they were connected to Vivian somehow, and they thought Aunt Eugenia had told her something.

  Maybe Aunt Eugenia had. She had sent Vivian a box full of papers the week before she died. Vivian had scanned them to look for a new version of the will and had found nothing except hand-written notes, books, and newspaper clippings from the previous century. She planned to go through it all when she had more time.

  Cold water splashed on her hand. She shut off the faucet, dried off the teakettle, and set it on the stove. Then she slid out her toaster and put an English muffin inside.

  The women would be able to smell the food. Vivian sighed. She hated being impolite, even to strangers—and was there a better word for these women? Strange—ers?—so she supposed to ease her own mind, she’d have to offer them something.

  Vivian pushed open the swinging door and held it in place. The strange women were still standing in her entry, huddled together and talking quietly.

  “I’m going to have breakfast,” Vivian said. “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Food!” Lachesis said with relief.

  “Oh, yes,” Atropos said. “We haven’t had food in hours.”

  Clotho clapped her hands together. “How about some chocolate crepes, followed one of those egg-cheese things—”

  “An omelet,” Lachesis said.

  “Three omelets,” Atropos said.

  “And perhaps some freshly ripened grapes,” Clotho said. “You know the type. At the very peak—”

  “I have English muffins or Pop Tarts,” Vivian said, wishing she’d never made offer. “And if you want the muffins, you get a choice of peanut butter, margarine, strawberry jelly, or cream cheese.”

  The toaster popped. She went back into the kitchen and slathered peanut butter on her English muffin. She didn’t care what the women wanted.

  “And,” Vivian shouted so that they could hear her, “you make them yourself.”

  Her remark was greeted with silence. She poured orange juice into a MacDonald’s promotional glass from the third Batman movie, and carried it through the swinging door to the glass-topped table.

  The three women had gathered around her table in anticipation of food, and now that she had refused to give them what they wanted, they stared at her.

  Vivian set her glass down as if nothing were wrong. But something was wrong, and she just realized what it was.

  She had no sense of these women. She always had a sense of people—whether they were good or bad, whether they meant to harm her or not, whether they were self-involved or saintly.

  That was why she’d had no idea they were at her door—why she had assumed they were at someone else’s. And that was what bothered her the most about them. It wasn’t their odd way of talking or their appearance. It was that they made no impact on her psyche. As if they weren’t there at all.

  She almost touched one, then realized that would be a mistake. They were here, and present. They had moved her chairs, and they brought with them the faint scent of summer sunshine, not to mention all the noise.

  There had been only one other person in the whole world Vivian could never sense, and that had been Aunt Eugenia. Aunt Eugenia, whom these women claimed to know.

  “You really have no idea who we are, do you?” Lachesis asked quietly.

  Vivian looked up from her contemplation of her orange juice glass. “No, I don’t.”

  Atropos licked her lips nervously. “Do you have any chocolate? We’ll eat anything chocolate for breakfast.”

  The teakettle whistled. Vivian sighed. She did have some chocolate truffles that Kyle bought her the day before, and she hadn’t been planning on eating them. They looked too rich for her.

  She went back into the kitchen, took the teakettle off the burner, and shut it off. Then she made some Earl Gray, put the teapot, her muffin, the truffles, and some X-Men mugs on a tray, and carried the whole thing back to the dining room.

  “All right,” she said, as she set the tray down near her orange juice glass. “Sit down. Tell me what’s going on, and convince me not to call the police.”

  “Well, for one thing, your police can’t help,” Clotho said.

  “They lack the power.” Atropos reached for a truffle.

  Lachesis slapped her hand. “We haven’t been invited yet.”

  “Yes, you have,” Vivian said. “The chocolate is for you.”

  “Thank you.” The three women said in unison, and it was as if she had given them the world. They each took a truffle, bit into it at the same time, and got the identical expression of joy on their faces.

  Vivian ate her muffin, the peanut butter making her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth. She drank some orange juice to dislodge it. “You do owe me an explanation.”

  Clotho nodded. “We’re trying to think of the best way to tell you.”

  “What did Eugenia tell you about the magical world?” Lachesis asked.

  “The magical world?” Vivian repeated. “Eugenia told my parents I’m psychic.”

  “And?” Atropos asked.

  “And to tolerate what happened to me, saying that it was pretty normal for someone with my abilities,” Vivian said.

  “And?” Clotho asked.

  “And that Eugenia had been psychic when she was a kid, so she understood what was going on.” Vivian frowned.

  Eugenia had said had been, as if being psychic was something someone outgrew. She never exhibited any psychic powers around Vivian that she could remember, but maybe Eugenia had had different talents. Maybe she could foresee the future. Maybe that was why she had sent Vivian that box the week before her death.

  Maybe that was what Eugenia had meant when she used to invite Vivian to Portland, claiming they were running out of time. I’m not young any more, Eugenia would say during their phone calls.

  Nonsense, Vivian used to say, you’re going to live forever, Aunt.

  “And?” Lachesis asked.

  “And what?” Vivian said.

  “What else did she tell you?”

  Vivian shrugged. “Bits and pieces here and there. So I wouldn’t feel like a freak. Even though I did. Because I was. Am. You know. You do know that I’m psychic, right?”

  “We know everything about you, child,” Atropos said, and Vivian started. She never had anyone her own age call her child before.

  “Or we used to,” Clotho said.

  “And we will again,” Lachesis said, her voice rising the way people’s voices did when they were trying to cheer other people up.

  “How old are you?” Atropos asked.

  “I thought you knew everything about me,” Vivian said.

  Clotho waved a hand in dismissal. “We’re never great with details.”

  “I’m twenty-six,” Vivian said.

  “Twenty-six,” Lachesis said to the other two. “That’s old enough. In fact, that’s too old. Eugenia should have started the training long before that.”

  “Training?” Vivian asked.

  “She did tell you that she was your mentor, right?” Atropos said.

  “Well, it was obvious,” Vivian said. “No one else I ever met could have been my mentor.”

  “No, for your magical training,” Clotho said.

  “My what?” Vivian asked.

  “Your training, you know, how to control your powers,” Lachesis said.

  “My what?” Vivian asked again.

  “Your powers, you know, the ones you’ll come into after menopause,” Atropos said.

  “What are you talking about?” Vivian asked. “Are you saying I’ll be Super Hot-Flash Woman?”

  “Your magical powers,” Clotho said.

  “I can’t believe Eugenia didn’t tell you,” Lachesis said.

  “She’s always so responsible,” Atropos said.

  “Except lately,” Clotho said.

>   “She could have told us about losing the house,” Lachesis said.

  “And her change of address,” Atropos said. “If she had planned better, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  She addressed that last to Vivian. Vivian, who felt like she was only getting half of this conversation anyway, set her English muffin down.

  “Um,” she said cautiously, “you do know that Eugenia died at the beginning of the month.”

  “She what?” All three women spoke in unison.

  “Impossible,” said Clotho.

  “We would have known,” said Lachesis at the same time.

  “We should have known,” said Atropos a second later.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this way,” Vivian said. “She was murdered.”

  The three women didn’t respond to that. Instead they looked at each other, and for the first time, Vivian got a sense of them. The sense was fleeting and odd, as if they were communicating with each other telepathically.

  They were frightened. That much she could tell, even without her gifts.

  A car alarm went off in the street. All three women jumped. So did Vivian, but she pretended that she hadn’t. To cover her own nervousness, she poured tea into all four mugs.

  “You were going to explain things to me,” Vivian said, her hand shaking. She set the teapot down. She was more on edge than she had thought.

  “We were,” Clotho said.

  “But first,” Lachesis said.

  “Explain why you weren’t studying with Eugenia,” Atropos said.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” Vivian said.

  “Surely she invited you up here,” Clotho said.

  “She wanted me to spend some time with her, yes,” Vivian said. “But I had a business to run, and she wouldn’t come to L.A.”

  “A business?” Lachesis said. “You mean that psychic hotline?”

  “You thought that was more important than your training?” Atropos asked.

  Vivian felt her cheeks flush. If she had known Eugenia was going to die so soon, she would have made a point of coming here. But she hadn’t known. That wasn’t how her gifts manifested.

  “I think I did some good with that hotline.” Vivian’s voice sounded small.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time—a psychic hotline with real psychics, not people who traced your phone number or used your credit reports (gleaned from your credit card number) to give them their “special” knowledge.