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Can she? Really read minds, that is.
It is 1890, eleven-year old Kyame Piddington must take the place of her dead mother in the family second sight mindreading act as she and her father travel the American West. Kyame must convince their audiences, along with the intrusive and sometimes insulting reporters, that she can read her father's mind, that she can actually see through his eyes ... or they don't eat.
At first she fails. Kyame is badly shaken by their strident ridicule, but she swears to her father that she will scare them all -- all of them "down to their shoes"!
With each experience and refining her "smokey acting", Kyame learns to read the people, and the reporters as she gains skills from the remarkable men and women they encounter backstage and in the shadows that transform her into a lethal presence.
Kyame becomes so effective that the line between illusion and reality becomes ever thinner -- until at sixteen -- to the hatchet men of the Bing On tong in San Francisco -- Kyame has become an occult wraith, a tulku, who can walk through walls and locked doors, kill, and then vanish.
The Bing On tong is almost right.
The reader learns how it is done as Kyame learns herself.