The Characters
Mira Morales
Psychic, mom, bookstore owner, widow, empath, lover. Born October 27, 1962 at 3:03 PM in Miami Florida, Mira Morales has been seeing what others don’t for as long as she can remember. Her parents thought she simply had an overactive imagination. But her grandmother, Nadine, a Cuban santera, recognized Mira’s talent and helped her to nurture and develop it.
When Mira was in her twenties, she met and married Tom Morales, a Cuban attorney. He and Nadine financed her first bookstore in Fort Lauderdale, where Mira also did psychic readings and Nadine taught yoga. The store prospered and in 1989, Mira and Tom had a daughter, Annie.
On Annie’s third birthday, Tom was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was gunned down in a convenience store, during a robbery. The killer was never found. The only psychic information Mira ever picked up about the man was that he wore sneakers with lime green shoelaces.
In The Hanged Man, Mira psychically witnesses the murder of a prominent psychiatrist. Her involvement in the investigation leads her and a local cop, Wayne Sheppard, to the man who killed Tom Morales. In between The Hanged Man and Black Water, the publicity generated by her involvement in the investigation prompted Mira to sell her bookstore and move to Tango Key with her daughter and grandmother, where she opened One World Books. Sheppard followed shortly afterward.
In the five years that she and Sheppard have been involved, the central issue in their relationship is her exceptional ability. Even though she has worked with him on numerous criminal investigations and he recognizes the accuracy of her psychic impressions, he can’t quite wrap his mind around it when her impressions become personal.
Wayne Sheppard
Born to American parents in Caracas, Venezuela, Sheppard shares a cultural ambiguity with Mira and her family. He’s bilingual, often feels displaced, and has an ongoing love affair with South America.
Trained as a lawyer, he hated practicing law and signed on with the FBI. His first stint with the bureau ended about the same time that his first marriage did, in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, when he witnessed unspeakable things that he detailed in his resignation letter. Shortly afterward, he was visited by government officials who told him he was suffering from Post Traumatic Syndrome and could seek counseling at the government’s expense. Instead, Sheppard sold everything he owned and spent three months in South America, maxing out his credit cards. When he returned to the states, he eventually ended up in Lauderdale, working for the local county as a homicide detective. It was here he met Mira and since then, he feels that his life has been a continuous X-File. He moved to the island when he was hired to head up the bureau’s new Tango Key office.
In the five years he has known Mira, his beliefs about what is possible have undergone a radical transformation, from diehard skeptic to believer, at least where Mira’s abilities are concerned. But the fundamental riddle of his life is that he really doesn’t grasp who she is separate from her ability.
Annie Morales
Sometimes, Annie feels as if she’s the youngest member of a psychic coven. And it isn’t a piece of cake. As a teenager with secrets and a need for independence, the abilities of her mother and great-grandmother are intrusive and generate weirdness. She knows that she, too, has abilities, but she has never felt that she’s equal to either her mother or her great-grandmother. Then again, so what? She wants to act or write, maybe both, and the Vulcan mind-meld isn’t necessarily part of her equation. The possibility exists, of course, that she’s entirely wrong about her purpose here and that all the weirdness is leading up to something. The clues – the strangeness of Tango Key, the synchronicities that punctuate her life, being raised by two unusual women, her mother’s relationship with Sheppard, her dead father’s appearance now and then, well, it must all mean something, right?
Nadine Cantrell
In her ordinary life, as a woman in her eighties, she has been widowed twice, is estranged from her daughter, Mira’s mother, and is a yoga teacher, vegetarian, and Mira’s business partner. In her spiritual life, she’s a renown santera, a practitioner of a Cuban mystery religion. Despite Sheppard’s Hispanic roots, she considers him to be “a gringo with a gun,” who typifies much of what is wrong in the world. She doesn’t hide her dislike of Sheppard and the fact that it’s mutual doesn’t help matters.
John “Goot” Gutierrez
He was the first person Sheppard hired when the bureau’s Tango Key office opened. A Cuban to the bone, his connection with Mira’s family dates back to before he was born, when his grandmother and Nadine were both practicing santeras in Havana. Raised in a family where mysticism was the norm, Gutierrez understands Mira’s ability in a way that Sheppard never will and, like Sheppard, maintains a healthy skepticism about things that go bump in the night.
Ace & Luke
Ace, a gay black street performer in his forties, has known Mira since she was married to Tom Morales, who got him off of a trumped-up drug charge years ago in Fort Lauderdale. He’s now her client and one of her closest friends. He and his partner, Luke, started out as performers on the Key West pier – Ace as an escape artist and Luke, as a trapeze artist. They eventually moved to the Tango pier and perform every evening as the sun is setting.
