The music grew louder. It sounded like the song playing at her mother’s house.
Semele opened her eyes and did a full 360, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Theo looked around, clearly not hearing anything.
“Listen.” She began walking, following the melody. Every note beckoned her like a finger pointing the way.
A soft breeze picked up and the song intensified.
Semele realized it was Simza’s song, “Find Me in the Wind.”
She took off, running down several blocks, turning corners and dodging pedestrians. She didn’t hear the angry swears or Theo’s apologies in French as he tried to keep up.
She raced to the end of a street corner and found a lively outdoor market under a canopy of century-old buildings.
What had brought her here? Had there been music? Because she couldn’t hear it anymore.
Theo caught up with her, slightly out of breath. “What is it?”
Semele shook her head, her senses still tingling. Then she looked behind her. There was a vendor with ornamental seashells for sale, including jewelry and purses made out of shells.
Semele walked over to the table, to the shell that was calling her, a spiraling conch with a blue iridescence that dazzled in the sun.
She lifted the shell up to find her mother’s pearl necklace resting underneath. Her body froze in shock, and for a suspended moment she was unable to accept what she was looking at. This was the necklace her father had given her mother on their anniversary, the one with the heart locket. Now here it was under a seashell, on a table in the middle of Paris.
And she had found it. What was going on?
The vendor was a young Rastafarian preoccupied with his iPad. He finally looked over. “Mama, that necklace is brand new. I sell it to you for two hundred euros,” he said in French.
Semele picked up the pearls, too distraught to speak. Theo didn’t need to be told whose necklace she was holding.
“How did you get this?” he demanded in French.
The vendor shrugged. “Guy sold it to me. You want it or not?”
The man seemed oblivious; he was just a pawn. Theo quickly paid him and guided Semele away by the arm. She was in a daze as she held the pearls in her hand, barely able to walk.
Her cell phone rang. She answered with shaking hands, already knowing it was him. “Hello?”
“Dear girl, you’re not trying hard enough,” he said.
“Yes, I am!” Semele couldn’t stop the shrill in her voice. “I found the necklace!”
“Please don’t delude yourself. You’re running out of time.”
Desperation, adrenaline, and fear hit her in a heady mix. She started to shake. “Then tell me where you are and we can end this game.”
“Oh, this isn’t a game, Semele. It’s empirical evidence.”
Semele had no idea how to handle this deranged man. She just didn’t want him to hang up. The more he talked, she might get a clue to her mother’s location. “So this is an experiment?”
“All psychic events are fifty percent coincidence and forty-five percent fraud, fabrication, and selective memory. That leaves five percent that cannot be explained. A five percent we call the ‘something else.’Youare that something else.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong person.”
He chuckled. “And yet you found the necklace,” he said, throwing her words back at her. “Do you know what entelechy is? The sense the acorn has of the oak tree. Sixth sense is actually the first sense, but our conscious minds keep us separated from it. Entelechy is the first step to remembering.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Her rage and frustration got the better of her. “You crazy bastard! Where is my mother?”
