Lavinia Rose was left as a baby in a carpet bag on the steps of the Loretto School for Girls (run by the Loretto Nuns) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Along with baby Lavinia, there was a substantial packet of money to provide for her care and a legal note bearing her name and awarding guardianship to the School.

The Loretto Nuns raised Lavinia with love and care, considering her a charge from God. But they found her to sometimes be an odd or difficult child. By the age of six, Lavinia was known for saying the strangest and sometimes scariest things. One day as a school benefactor and his pregnant wife passed by in the school hallway, the words just seemed to pop out of Lavinia’s mouth… “The baby will be born a boy and he will die the day after.” Lavinia was immediately shushed away and chastened by the nuns.

However, the morbid prediction came to pass exactly as Lavinia had predicted. The nuns who had heard her words marked Lavinia as a shadowed child and avoided her whenever possible. Lavinia even wondered herself if she had somehow cursed the child and caused the death but her dead grandmother assured her that she had not

Lavinai’s grandmother had been with her as long as she could remember. The nuns and other girls had at first assumed she was simply playing with an imaginary friend. When they learned from Lavinia that her imaginary friend was her grandmother and, in fact, dead. She was confirmed as that “crazy girl”, best avoided.

By the age of 10, Lavinia’s regular behavior of talking to her ghost grandmother had become mundane. Some of Lavinia’s schoolmates even became brave about teasing Lavinia over her imaginary grandmother. Days later, the meanest girl teasing Lavinia fell and broke her leg in two places. All of the school girls decided that this must somehow be the “curse of Lavinia” and shunned her thereafter.

Lavinia soon found a place at the school/mission that gave her great comfort… the graveyard. With no other girls to play with, she learned to be content in her own company and that of her ever-present dead grandmother.

Although a pariah to the other students, Lavinia found that she was able to gain back some acceptance from the nuns by throwing herself into her religious studies and expressing some pretty sincere holy zeal. She told the nuns that her time in the graveyard was all about meditation and prayer – “just like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane”…

Lavinia found that she could pass off her grandmother’s conversations as prayer or “speaking to Mother Mary” Odd things she might blurt out were “Holy visions”. This was not at all true, but It got her off the hook. She studied hard at school and said she said she hoped to someday become a novice in the order and eventually a Nun… which she truly did.

However, by the age of 13, Lavinia’s visions and strange dreams had become more frequent and intense. Her grandmother also began to chide her about her religious plans and say to her instead, “This is not your path. You must be true to yourself”

Lavinia also loved to draw and found herself compelled to draw the symbols and images she would increasingly see in her dreams. She cut these symbols out and hid them as a small stack of cards, hoping to eventually understand their meaning.

One day, a nun discovered a drawing of a skull figure in a cape under Lavinia’s bed. Recognizing it to be an image of Santa Muerte, the nun went to Mother Superior, and Lavinia was confined to her bedroom. She remained there for several weeks. Finally, a Priest arrived at the school to examine her. He determined that she must be possessed and would need exorcism the following day,

That night, Lavinia’s grandmother appeared in her dreams again and told her that it was important to leave the school tonight. Lavinia rose from the bed, put on the few clothes she had, and gathered her small possessions – especially her cards and drawings, into the old carpetbag she had arrived in. Opening the window, Lavinia crawled out onto the sill, slid down the drainpipe, and crept into the night.

After wandering the muddy alleys and byways of darkened Santa Fe, Lavinia found herself on the edge of town where a wagon train was scheduled to depart back to Denver the next day. Lavinia stowed away on the wagon train and was not discovered until the next day. With nowhere to send her, the Wagon Master grudgingly allowed her to continue on.

As the wagon train stopped near one of the new frontier settlements along the trail, they crossed paths with a small and rather sad-appearing traveling medicine show. Lavinia’s grandmother told her to approach the head Pitchman of the traveling show and present herself as a fortune teller.

The rather rough-looking pitchman laughed at first, but as Lavinia narrated to him the prophetic words her grandmother told her, his expression changed to dumfounder wonder for she seemed to know everything about him.

The Medicine Show already had a fortune teller of sorts in the form of the pitchman’s wife who had no real ability but did it for the extra money. Upon seeing and hearing Lavinia, the woman claimed her as though she were her own and seemed quite happy that this little one would be there to help her “communicate with the spirits” Little did she believe or know that was what was truly happening.

Lavinia’s presence made a great difference to the prosperity of the little traveling show and the pitchman and his wife could easily see it. Soon they were prosperous enough to buy a better caravan wagon, then two. Soon after that, they found they were well received in more towns both east and west.

Shortly after joining the caravan, Lavinia noticed something odd about her old carpet bag. It was the only thing she really possessed and a hole had frayed through the side, just above the bottom edge.

When Lavinia looked to find the hole from the inside, it was not there! The carpet bag’s bottom was not the same on the inside as the outside. Something quite thick was hidden in the base.

No one ever bothered to really look at the bag before because it was eternally full of old hand-me-downs, and even the swaddlings she had been delivered to the school in. Now, as Lavinia took more time to examine the bag interior, she found a secret catch that opened a compartment to shockingly reveal a skull, a folded sickle, a bag of runed knuckle bones, and a deck of hand-drawn tarot cards.

She knew at once it was her grandmother’s skull. It did not seem to terrify her as perhaps it should, rather it was a comfort to now understand that this was why her grandmother remained and still spoke with her from time to time.

Lavinia kept the discovery of the secret possessions from everyone. When she was alone, she would commune with her grandmother and learn the ways of the cards and the bones.

As years passed, the Medicine Show grew to become a Carnival and Lavinia grew along with it into a young woman. With more years, Lavinia matured into a charismatic and quite formidable Oracle. The folk she traveled with felt a special sort of awe around her. They trusted and respected her, and protected her should anyone question her cards. It was a wonderful exotic life, always on the road to a new place and the next extravaganza.

Fifty years have passed now since Lavinia fled the orphanage and yet it seems only a matter of days. Lavinia has become old. She remains comfortable in her very own Vardo among the Carnival wagons and owns a decent little stake in the show. But something will not let her rest.

The dreams had begun a few years before and have become stronger with each passing season. As an adult, Lavinia would sometimes go years without a visitation from her ghostly Grandmother. Now “Abuela Malla” as Lavinia called her was present nearly every week.

Abuela Malla would not tell Lavina what was happening, but Lavinia sensed that something was changing, and not for the better. Her spirit grandmother seemed to wait for her expectantly. Something was about to happen.

The dream of the train was so real. More vivid than any dream in the past. Lavinia had no doubt it meant a journey for her very soon. In her dream vision, she could clearly see the name of the Overland Flyer on programs and postcards laid about the side tables.

When Lavinia awoke, she packed her carpet bag and had one of the Carny boys drive her into town to the train station. There, Lavinia booked a one-way ticket west.