The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery) (7 page)

“Thanks for the coffee,” I said, and I darted off after the woman who’d been trying to get into the White Magic Five & Dime. She’d started to walk off, and I couldn’t let my first customer get away.

The Hierophant’s got the priestly robes, the worshipful acolytes, and the keys to knowledge both worldly and spiritual just lying there at his feet. He even seems to be saying the Boy Scout pledge. Who could be more worthy of our trust, right? But watch out—this isn’t wisdom we’re seeing, it’s pomp and circumstance. Ritual. Spectacle. Dogma. And we all remember what happened to the dogma when it got too close to the karma.

Miss Chance,
Infinite Roads to Knowing

“Sorry!” I
called out. “Coffee break!”

The woman turned to face me, looking confused.

I waved a hand at the White Magic Five & Dime.

“We’re open, if you’re interested. I just ran down the street to the coffee shop. Can’t get my eyes open in the morning without a cappuccino. Not even my third one.”

The woman didn’t stop looking confused and start looking something else.

“My third eye, I mean,” I could have stammered. “You know…like psychics supposedly have? In, uh, mysticism and stuff? Sorry. I’m new at occult humor.”

Instead, I smiled. Hell, I
beamed
.

A confident bastard will get a lot further than a saint with low self-esteem
, Biddle used to say.

The woman peered past me at the shop. She was fortyish, heavyish, shortish, owlish—extremely
-ish
all around. As blandly American as a block of Velveeta.

Her hands looked strong and rough, though. And her arms were long enough to reach across a table.

You wouldn’t see her type on wanted posters very often, but that didn’t mean anything. I was looking for a victim—an angry one—not a criminal.

“Is Athena in?” the woman said.

She seemed sincere. But then again, so did I.

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “There’s been a change of ownership. I run the Five & Dime now. Come on in and I’ll make you a cup of tea. Is Red Zinger all right? I’ve got friends who swear by it, but like I said, cappuccino’s the only thing that gets
my
motor running.”

This was hustling-the-mark-along talk. But the woman wasn’t moving.

I got her unstuck the easy way.

“Did I mention? Returning customers get their first reading free.”

She followed me inside.

Her name
was Alice Fisk (she claimed), and she lived in the next county over. She didn’t get into Berdache much, but the last time she had she’d come into the White Magic Five & Dime on a whim. Athena had been very persuasive. Very perceptive. Very helpful.

Very patient.

Alice hadn’t cleaned out her life savings so Athena could invest in the deal she’d foreseen would make them rich. She hadn’t dug out her private papers—including birth certificate and social security card—so Athena could use them to “work up a chart” that would plot the course of her entire life. All she’d brought, she told me, was forty dollars for the “special expanded reading” Athena had promised her.

“Oh,” I said. “I can do those.”

We didn’t have any Red Zinger next to the microwave and minifridge in the office, so I made do. Alice got a tablespoon of Lipton Diet Lemon Iced Tea Mix stirred into boiling-hot water.

“Here you go.” I put the mug on the table in the reading room.

“Thank you.”

The woman picked up the tea and brought it toward her mouth, then simply blew on it and put it back down. I’d nuked it so long it wouldn’t be cool enough to drink for a week.

“What happened to Athena?” Alice asked.

“Health issues. Came on very suddenly.”

“Oh, no. I hope she’ll be all right.”

“She’s stable at the moment. The doctors don’t expect her to get any worse.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“It is, it is. Now…please shuffle these.” I slid a tarot deck across the table and tried to remember Josette Berg’s patter at the House of Arcana the day before. “While you’re doing that, meditate on your question. What is it you’d like the cards to tell you?”

“Should I say it out loud?”

“If you wish.”

Alice closed her eyes as she shuffled. After about twenty seconds, she put the deck down and opened her eyes again.

She looked at me expectantly.

Silently.

Great.

You don’t have to push for details,
Biddle used to tell me.
Citizens never pass up an opportunity to talk about themselves.

Sometimes Biddle was full of shit.

I put my hand over the deck and drew it toward me. I had to fight the sudden irrational impulse to palm the top card. That was how I’d been taught to play. But it was a whole new game I was trying to master now.

I started laying out the cards in the pattern I’d seen Josette use—“the Weather Vane.”

“You’re not going to use the whatchamacallit?” Alice asked. “The Celtics Cross?”

“No,” I said. Because I didn’t know what a “Celtics Cross” was. I hadn’t seen anything about them in
Infinite Roads to Knowing
.

Then again, I was only on page 98.

“This is a spread of my own creation,” I said. “I call it the
Phoenix
.”

“Looks like an airplane.”

“Exactly. Both move on the winds of chance.”

Alice looked dubious.

I flipped over a card, fast, and found myself looking at a knight of the Round Table planting giant carrots.

“Ahhh,” I said. “The Seven of Rods.”

“Rods?”

“As it is called in the old texts, yes. You might have heard it referred to by its newer name”—I stole a quick squint at the little words printed faintly across the top of the card—“Wands. Now, this first card represents your current life situation. If we look at it closely, we can plainly see that you’re…”

What? Sir Lancelot? A giant carrot farmer? They both seemed unlikely.

“On the defensive,” I said. “The man there, he’s building a wall around himself. A fortification. He feels besieged.”

Alice’s eyes went wide and watery.

Bingo.

I turned over another card.

“Very interesting. The Seven of Pentacles.”

On the card, a guy who looked like Robin Hood was leaning against a hoe as he looked down at golden pentagrams growing on vines like a bunch of Satanic watermelons.

“Here we see what’s in your conscious mind. You’re contemplating past decisions and endeavors—taking stock of the fruit of your long toil. It looks like you’ve got a fine crop there…but is it really?”

Alice gave me an encouraging nod.

I had accurately perceived that someone who visits a fortune-teller would be thinking about the choices she’s made in life.

Like,
amazing
, right? I must be psychic.

I moved on, sticking as close as I could to Josette’s gibberishy script.

“And here we find what’s in your subconscious mind.”

“Oh-ho! The King of Swords! Now isn’t
that
something?”

What kind of
something,
I didn’t know. The picture didn’t give me much to work with: just a dude with a sword on a throne. Maybe the illustrator ran out of ideas after the devilmelons.

“Here we see someone who’s very…kingly,” I said. “He’s calm, cool, totally in charge. This is what you’d like to be—what you aspire to. But you’re not sure if you can achieve it.”

Alice nodded again, more vigorously this time.

“With the next card, we gaze into the past to see what shaped your life as you know it now—the choice that brought you to your current predicament. And we get…
ahhh
.”

“Ahhh?” Alice said. She put her hands on the table and leaned forward to stare at the card. A band of gold was wrapped around the ring finger of her left hand.

“A man,” I said. “One who seemingly comes to you bearing some great gift. But see? He’s upside down. Whatever’s in the chalice pours out. The gift is squandered. The promise is broken.”

The hogwash is blatant.

I wasn’t risking anything, though. If the woman had a happy marriage, she’d think of some other man who’d let her down. There’s always one, if not dozens. And if she didn’t have a happy marriage…

Tears began to well up in Alice’s eyes.

That answered that.

To my right, pressed up against the wall of the reading room, was a squat bookcase. Sitting on top of it were a box of Kleenex and a crystal ball so big you could take it bowling.

I passed the Kleenex to Alice. She dabbed at her eyes.

“It’s so true,” she said. “That’s just the way things turned out. So much big talk in the beginning, but then what?”

I nodded sympathetically, although I felt bad for Mr. Alice. Here I was making him the bad guy and I didn’t even know his name.

I decided to give the next card a happy spin no matter what it was.

“Now we turn to the future.”