Boys Life

question she was used to asking.
    “I guess I do.”
    “Either do or not, no damn guessin’ about it.”
    After the least bit of hesitation, my father said, “I do.”
    The Lady opened the silver filigreed box and shook six small bones out on the table. “Put down the pebbles,” she said. “Pick up those in your right hand.”
    Dad looked distastefully at what lay before him. “Do I have to?”
    The Lady paused. Then she sighed and said, “Naw. It’s a mood-setter, is all.” She used the edge of her hand to sweep the bones back into the silver box. She closed it and set it aside. Then she reached into the doctor’s bag again. This time her hand came out with a small bottle of clear liquid and a plastic bag full of cotton swabs. She set these between them and opened the bottle. “You’ll have to put the pebbles down, though. Hold out your index finger.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I said so.”
    He did it. The Lady opened the bottle and upturned it over one of the cotton swabs. Then she dabbed the tip of Dad’s index finger. “Alcohol,” she explained. “Get it from Dr. Parrish.” She spread the Nifty typing paper down on the table. Then she unwrapped the object in the blue cloth. It was a stick with two needles driven through one end. “Keep your finger still,” she told him as she picked up the needled stick.
    “What’re you gonna do? You’re not gonna jab me with those, are-”
    The needles came down fast and rather roughly into the tip of Dad’s finger. “Ouch!” he said. I, too, had winced, my index finger stinging with phantom pain. Instantly blood began to well up from the needle holes. “Keep your blood off that paper,” the Lady told him. Working quickly, she dabbed alcohol on the index finger of her own right hand and with her left she whacked the needles down. Here blood was drawn, too. She said, “Ask your question. Not aloud, but in your mind. Ask it clearly. Ask it like you expect an answer. Go ahead.”
    “All right,” Dad said after a few seconds. “What now?”
    “What was the date that car went into Saxon’s Lake?”
    “March sixteenth.”
    “Squeeze eight drops of blood on the center of the paper. Don’t be stingy. Eight drops. Not one more and not one less.”
    Dad squeezed his finger, and the blood began dripping. The Lady added eight drops of her own red blood to the white paper. Dad said, “Good thing it didn’t happen on the thirty-first.”
    “Take the paper in your left hand and crumple it up with the blood inside it,” the Lady instructed him, ignoring his witticism. Dad did as she said. “Hold it and repeat the question aloud.”
    “Who killed that man at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake?”
    “Hold it tight,” the Lady told him, and she pressed another cotton swab to her bleeding finger.
    “Are your friends here right this minute?” Dad asked, his left fist around the crumpled-up paper.
    “We’ll soon find out, won’t we?” She held out her left palm. “Give it to me.” When it was lodged there, she said sternly to the air, “Don’t ya’ll show me up to be a fool, now. This is an important question, and it deserves an answer. Not no riddle, neither. An answer we can figure out. Ya’ll gone help us, or not?” She waited perhaps fifteen more seconds. Then she placed the crumpled paper in the middle of the table. “Open it,” she said.
    Dad took it. As he began to uncrumple it, my heart was slamming. If Dr. Lezander was scrawled there in blood, I was going to split my skin.
    When the paper was open, Mom and I peered over his shoulder. There was a great big blotch of blood in the middle of the paper and other blotches all around it. I couldn’t see a name in that mess to save my life. Then the Lady took a pencil from her bag and studied the paper for a moment, after which she began to play connect-the-blotches.
    “I don’t see a thing,” Dad said.
    “Have faith,” she told him. I watched the pencil’s tip at work, moving between the blood. I watched a long, curvy line swing out and in.
    And suddenly I realized I was looking at a 3.
    The pencil’s tip kept moving. Curving again. Out and in, out and in.
    A second 3. And then the pencil’s tip ran out of blood blotches to connect.
    “That’s it,” the Lady said. She frowned. “Two threes.”
    “That’s sure not a name, is it?” Dad asked.
    “They’ve riddled me again, is what they’ve done. I swear, I wish they’d make somethin’ easy every once in a while!” She thunked