Vision quest

Among journalists, there's a common practice called the three-source rule: Before publishing a juicy piece of news, a reporter should find three sources to confirm it. Recently I decided to apply the rule to area psychics (visiting five for good measure) to see whether any of their insights matched up.

Informing each one that I was a reporter, I launched my otherworldly journey with a careful but open mind, and a fair warning from a veteran practitioner: "Watch out for [psychics who] . . . try to scare people with the idea that they have negative entities attached to them so they'll come back for subsequent treatments," said Kurt Leland, a popular psychic and author in Boston.

I began with a visit to MaryLee Trettenero, a former hotel manager who has worked as a psychic intuitive for the past 15 years. Trettenero gives readings out of her living room in Charlestown but serves most of her clients over the phone.

"We're working with energy," she said. "Distance is kind of a manmade or artificial thing."

Most clients want love-life consultations, she said, but she also deals in matters of the wallet. For four years she has been working with a money market manager who consults her for tips. (She rates potential stocks according to images of flowers that their names invoke. "If the flower is crispy or droopy, the stock's not going to do well," she said.)

Trettenero works with a tarot deck, a set of cards featuring allegorical images, as well as with words and images that pop into her head during a reading.

The half-hour reading included some platitudes - "There are changes on the horizon for you," "Don't be led down a garden path" - but also some spot-on insights. She asked whether I had been thinking about moving away from Boston; I had, in fact. She said the spirits suggested that I wait.

She went on to say that I'd be spending a lot of professional time in New York, which seemed likely to me, based on past writing assignments.

As for her visions: "I see you riding a camel through the desert," she said, twice. "I'm not supposed to interpret images, but maybe you're going through a dry period?"

I hadn't told her that I'm planning a trip to Israel.

Next stop: the Tremont Tearoom, located on the third floor of a gritty building near Downtown Crossing above the Falafel King. Founded in 1936, it's the oldest psychic salon in the United States, but the décor tends more toward the 1980s.

I met with two of the Tearoom's 11 psychics: Alex Palermo, the gregarious owner, and Raymond (who prefers not to give his last name), the oldest and most popular psychic there.

Palermo came across like a sassy BFF who isn't afraid to dole out the tough love when you need it.

"Man," he said, looking down at my tarot cards. "Someone left your cake out in the rain."

He offered a damning and largely accurate assessment of my romantic history. "No offense," he concluded, "but when it comes to love you're not very bright."

My professional future looked brighter, and overlapped with Trettenero's predictions: "I think you'll be brought into a project that will bring you to New York or San Francisco," Palermo said.

I moved on to Raymond, who reminded me of a thin, skittish, smiling, psychic version of Wilford Brimley.

"You're still juggling a lot, wondering about whether to go to New York," he told me. According to the three-source rule, I was officially in a New York state of mind.

"You're still having trouble writing that book," he said. That was true. I am having trouble writing a book.

Twice in Raymond's 15-minute reading I pulled the same tarot card - a heart pierced by multiple swords.

"That doesn't seem good," I said.

He nodded. "You're certainly a wreck right now," he said. "But you can straighten it out."

Then he asked if Ben Vereen meant anything to me, personally. I shook my head. He shrugged. "He's dead, right?" Raymond said. I nodded.

Both Palermo and Raymond considered their gifts to be a mixed blessing. Palermo told me that he didn't get enough sleep, due, in part, to ghosts. Recently, he said, he awoke to the spirit of an Iraq War veteran in his bedroom. (The soldier meant to visit the house two doors down, Palermo said.)

Dubbed Spirituality Girl, Mary D'Alba has a day job as a corporate trainer but hopes to make psychic readings her full-time vocation someday. We met at dusk on a recent Thursday and sat down at my kitchen table with a deck of tarot cards. She immediately offered a disclaimer, which bred both comfort and skepticism.

"You can always change things," she said. "This is only a snapshot of what is."

D'Alba's initial assessment of me seemed off target. She described me as an outgoing person whose positive energy draws lots of people who proceed to drain it. I disagreed. I'm kind of a downer, I said. But like Raymond, D'Alba saw me writing a book soon.

And she proceeded to impress me. "Do you have an old friend named Sarah?" she said. In fact, Sarah was my best friend in high school. "They're telling me you guys should reconnect," she said. I hadn't talked to her for almost two years, but I e-mailed her that night. "The psychic's right!" she wrote back. "I have been thinking about you!"

Finally, I headed to Belmont to visit Gayle Kirk. She's a psychic medium, someone who specializes in summoning, describing, and communicating with the spirits of departed friends and relatives. Kirk took me to a small room in her apartment and sat me in a comfortable chair near a wall with symbols of Western and Eastern religions - and a photo of two fluffy rabbits.

Kirk told me to concentrate on a few deceased loved ones. I thought hard about my maternal grandparents, a family friend named Bob, and my childhood dog.

After a few minutes she stood behind me, placed her hands on my shoulders, and commenced the communication. Initially she said she was feeling my father's parents, who are still alive.

But Kirk, too, told me that the spirits want me to write that book.

And as for the family friend, she summoned the name "Bob"; it was the first name she mentioned. She said he was a funny guy - he was - and she started to laugh, but she couldn't tell me exactly why she was laughing.

So, five psychics later, I'm deciding to believe the triple-sourced prediction that I'm going to write a book and hang out in New York a lot. Mostly, though, I think that a psychic reading - like a life - is largely what you make of it.

"If someone isn't into this, they're not going to get a good reading," said the Tremont Tearoom's Palermo. "If you decide you're not into pedicures, you're not going to enjoy the experience, no matter how much gunk they dig out of your toenails."

For more tarot card insights, see tomorrow's Hanging With in Sidekick.