The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery) (17 page)

The girl had been weeping silently. Now she felt like throwing up. They’d be stopping soon, yes. But not just by the side of the road to let the bald man out.

The girl knew what her mother was looking for.

Another cornfield.

Talk about an angel—this one’s fixing us a drink! A martini, perhaps? A cosmopolitan? Cool, refreshing pond scum with a dash of yummy mud? It doesn’t matter. The important thing is the angel’s a mixologist—in more ways than one. Just check out the feet. One’s on land, one’s in water. True balance is found by having a toehold in more than one place, more than one world, more than one outlook. Who cares if they’re supposedly incompatible? What do gin and vermouth have in common? But throw them together with an olive and you’ve got something that’ll rock your world.

Miss Chance,
Infinite Roads to Knowing

I went
to Clarice’s room again. Finding my mother’s pictures of Biddle had got me thinking.

Teenage girl + jock boyfriend - pictures = no way. And I hadn’t seen a single picture of Matt Gorman when I’d searched Clarice’s room for the missing jewelry.

Not that I knew what the kid looked like. I knew the type, though.
Homo sapiens
male. They’re fairly recognizable. I didn’t see any in the few pictures scattered around Clarice’s room. Just her friend Ceecee and a few other girls, all of them always screaming at something hysterical that was happening just off-camera.

Maybe high-school girls don’t bother with printed pictures of their boyfriends anymore. They just snap shots of them with their cell phones all day, then start over with a new phone when they run out of memory. How would I know? The last time I’d had what you could call a boyfriend, the only pictures I had of him were painted on a cave wall with mashed berries and mastodon blood. Ba-da
bing
.

Still, I found no “I
♥
M.G.” doodles either. No dried-out prom corsages. No Trojans tucked in with the Strawberry Hill in the dresser. No sign of a boyfriend at all.

And no sign of a family. Clarice was half black, by the look of her, yet all the girls in her pictures were either white or Latino. Where were her parents or her favorite aunts and uncles? How about the black cousins who probably lived somewhere more racially diverse than the Arizona desert? Had Clarice’s childhood really been so horrific she’d want nothing to remember her relatives by at all?

I heard a rapping sound downstairs. It was soft and timid at first, but it grew stronger, more insistent.

I went down and found Marsha Riggs knocking on the back door. It was a bit of shock to see her out of her house, in the sunlight. I’d thought of her as her husband’s hamster. Something small and meek he could keep caged until he wanted to play with her.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said when I opened the door. “It took me twenty minutes to walk over from my house. It would’ve killed me to walk all the way back without seeing you.”

“Why didn’t you just call first?”

Marsha looked at her toes and shrugged.

Fear, that was the answer. Fear that someone would find out she’d made the call.

“Well, anyway, it worked out,” I said. “Come on in, and I’ll make you some tea. You like Red Zinger?”

“I don’t have any money.”

Marsha forced herself to look up again.

There was a bruise under her left eye, and her bangs were combed down over what looked like a welt on her forehead.

“Didn’t I mention it?” I said. “I’m running a special for all Mom’s old customers. First reading’s on the house.”

Marsha smiled. She did it tentatively, warily, as if smiles were something she couldn’t trust. Maybe because they always ended so soon.

She followed me down the hall to the reading room.

I had
Marsha shuffle and think about what she wanted to ask the cards. Then I took the deck and laid out a Celtic Cross: a card, another over it sideways, four cards clustered around them, then four more in a straight line along the side.

All the reading I’d done in
Infinite Roads to Knowing
was starting to pay off. I’d remembered the pattern easily, instinctively, without having to pause and think it through.

It was almost
too
easy, though. I turned over the first card and said, “Let’s begin with where you’re at right now,” but I’d forgotten to stop and ask Marsha what her question was.

It didn’t matter. I knew. And even if I hadn’t, the first card would’ve been all the reminder I’d need.

A man on a throne, upside down.

“The Emperor reversed,” I said. “Someone with strength and authority is oppressing you—using his power over you harshly.”

Marsha’s lips trembled, but no words came out.

Her eyes, though, said, “God, yes!”

I flipped the next card and saw a blindfolded woman holding up two swords, her arms crisscrossed over her chest. I’d seen the card before. It was the first one Josette Berg had turned over when she’d done a reading for me.

“The Two of Swords. A woman trapped, unable to take action, because she’s blinded herself to her own power. She can’t hold those swords like that forever. She’s got to either do something with them or drop them. ‘Use it or lose it.’ Now…on to the root of your problem.”

I knew what I wanted to see. I was going to make Marsha see it no matter what card came up.

Want happiness? Run from your husband. And in the process, stop hiding anything he might want hidden. Especially if it involved more bruises on somebody else. Bruises around her neck perhaps.

Again, the cards made it easy for me. So easy, I had to stop and ask myself,
you didn’t stack this deck, did you
?

“The Lovers reversed,” I said. “A destructive relationship. An unhappy coupling.”

“You can just say it. A lousy marriage.”

I nodded. “A lousy marriage.”

The next cards weren’t so obvious. Yet I found I didn’t have to fake my way through interpretations. What came up fit the situation with only a little imagination and intuition. And for the first time in my life, “imagination and intuition” didn’t just mean BS.

The Two of Pentacles: a man awkwardly juggling two golden plates. Marsha had made an important decision—who to marry—based on worries about money.

The Seven of Wands: a man trying to fight off unseen attackers with his staff, but the card was upside down. Marsha wasn’t defending herself.

The Ace of Swords: a hand clutching an Excalibur-style blade with a crown around the tip. Time to take a stand. Time to fight.

The Four of Pentacles: a man clutching gold plates to himself as if trying to keep someone from taking them. Financial troubles again. Marsha was letting anxiety about money keep her from acting on her own behalf.

Marsha looked amazed by what I was saying. I hoped I didn’t, too. Because I sure
felt
amazed.

How could this be going so perfectly when I wasn’t even cheating? How could I be getting at the truth without lying to do it?

There were only three cards left now. Three more chances for the tarot to send me sideways just as I tried to seal the deal and turn Marsha against her son-of-a-bitch husband.

But the cards didn’t go sideways. They liked William Riggs about as much as I did.