She rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Ever since, I’ve been having weird visions. Not the usual stuff. Normally I get a glimpse of something, of someone, but they have to be … available to me. They have to be near me, close enough for me to see them, to get a sense of them, the way they move in the world. But this … I don’t know. I’ve been having visions that don’t have any context.”

“What kinds of things are you seeing?”

She hesitated. “A few days after he showed up, I started seeing things and hearing things, but I couldn’t tell why, where they were coming from. Music, mostly, but also this weird vision of a bloody tooth that was like … knocked loose.” I couldn’t help but wince and touch the tips of my fingers to my mouth. “Then another woman came to me and she was acting really weird. She ended up leaving before I even read her cards. A few days later, I started hearing a baby, crying, screaming.”

“Okay … ” What was she getting at? Was I falling for a ruse?

“Like I said, that’s not how things work. But for days, I was hearing this crying sound. When I was on the boardwalk, when I was in the casinos, at night when I was trying to sleep.” She smoothed her hand over her upper arm. “And I keep getting this feeling, like something is crawling over my skin.”

“You’re not on drugs, are you?”

“No! Come on, be serious. I never ask anyone for anything. But I feel like I’m going crazy. And I need help.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Can’t all of those … visions … just be some kind of … I don’t know, fluke? Like you’ve got a signal crossed or something?” The absurdity of the situation wasn’t wasted on me, sitting there parsing out problems with a psychic’s sixth sense. I didn’t even have the vocabulary for a conversation like that. But Clara seemed genuinely upset. The detached, composed girl I had met on my first day of work was gone. She was asking for help.

“Yeah but then, a week later, another woman comes and she has this first woman’s purse. Said she found it on the side of the road, which makes me think something happened to the first woman. Maybe the crying was, like, a warning. Maybe there was something I was supposed to do. Or that I’m still supposed to do. A few days ago, I started having visions of blurred streetlights. Like I was in a car. And I felt sick, like I was going to throw up. There were other things, too, sort of random. Someone’s hands, with lots of little cuts around the knuckles. The floor underneath a bed.”

“But those things have nothing to do with one another.”