Fool Me Once: A Tarot Mystery

by Steve Hockensmith

  Clarice said something to me that seventeen-year-olds aren’t ever supposed to say to adults (or anyone).

  I said it back to her with a voice full of sisterly love. Then I hung up.

  I looked over at Victor.

  He was watching me wide-eyed.

  “That’s…um…an interesting family dynamic you’ve got going there,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “We’re an interesting family.”

  I didn’t feel like driving all the way back to Berdache for supplies (or dealing with Clarice when we got there), so I pulled off the road the first time I spotted a dollar store. I told Victor to wait for me, then came out a couple minutes later with a package of batteries and the only flashlights the store had in stock.

  “You get your pick,” I said as I handed everything to Victor. “Spider-Man or Batman.”

  “I guess I’ll take Batman,” Victor sighed. “My mom always tells me I look like George Clooney.”

  He opened all the packages and began putting batteries in the flashlights as I drove us back to Oak Creek Golf Resort and Estates.

  During the day, the little guard house at the entrance to the Oak Creek development was empty and the gate was up. At night, we discovered, there was a uniformed guard and the gate was down.

  Fortunately, I had the magic key: I was a well-dressed white woman in a Cadillac.

  “Mr. Kyle said he’d wait in the office for us if we couldn’t get here in time for the last presentation,” I told the guard. I smiled and crossed my fingers. “If we can work out the financing, you might be looking at Oak Creek’s newest residents.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Kyle can make it happen,” the guard said, smiling back. “Congratulations.”

  He put up the gate, and we cruised through and headed to the sales office—which we cruised past on our way to our true destination.

  We stopped on a street that was half homes, half empty lots. One of the houses still had nothing but reddish dirt for a lawn, plastic instead of glass in some of the windows, and a Huggins Construction sign out front.

  It also still had keep the red rocks red—whites go home spray-painted on one side.

  I was guessing that this was Oak Creek lot #235. Harry Kyle had a note about a late-night meeting at #235 with a “J.S.” a few days before. And the Indian Liberation Front kept targeting the house—an impressive feat considering they didn’t exist.

  There was something special about this place—some key role it had played in Riggs’s extortion plan. But what?

  Victor and I sat and waited for the world to get darker. When there was no light left at all, we would make our move.

  Victor passed the time talking. I passed the time listening.

  Not that Victor was being a bore. I just didn’t have a lot I wanted to add.

  It had started with me jokingly asking what his mother would think of our second “date.”

  “She’d be thrilled if our second date was a bank heist,” Victor said. “I have three sisters and eleven cousins and I’m the oldest and I’m the only one who’s not married.”

  “Tell me about them,” I said. “Your family.”

  And Victor had obliged. It lit him up in a way I’d never seen before. Stolid, straight Victor had a spark inside him after all.

  He told me about sibling rivalries, family vacations, holidays, weddings, funerals, births. It obviously made him happy to talk about it, and I guess it just as obviously made me sad.

  Victor stopped himself in the middle of a story about the way his father used to tease his mother.

  “You all right?” he asked, peering at me in the darkness. “You got really quiet there.”

  “I’m fine. It’s just…your life sounds nice.”

  “It is. I know I’m lucky to—”

  Victor stopped himself again.

  “I’m sorry, Alanis. I just realized. You said earlier you didn’t even know your father, and here I am going on and on about my dad.”

  “It’s okay. I like hearing about happy families. It’s like listening to a fairy tale, except it’s real.”

  “Did you know any of your extended family at all?”

  “Nope. The only family I knew when I was kid was my mother and her boyfriend Biddle.”

  “How long was the boyfriend around?”

  “Years. My whole childhood, pretty much.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t your father?”

  “Because he was black, and whatever I am…well, it ain’t black.”

  “I guess that is a bit of a giveaway,” Victor said. “Hey—how about Clarice? She’s half black, isn’t she? Is Biddle her father?”

  I shook my head. “Biddle died a long, long time before she was born. He crossed the wrong people, and…”

  My words trailed off. If they’d kept going, they would’ve dredged up memories I didn’t feel like reliving just then.

  Victor got it.

  “When you’re ready to tell your stories,” he said, “I’d like to hear them.”

  He reached out and put one of his hands over mine.

  “Thanks, Victor. You’re a good man,” I said. “Now let’s go break into that house, shall we?”

  I thought of GW Fletcher as we walked around the house. I didn’t have him or his tool kit with me for this B&E. The man was a liar, a cheat, and a thief, but I was going to end up missing him in a minute if we couldn’t find a way inside.

  “Can you pick a lock?” Victor whispered as we slinked up to the sliding glass door at the back of the house.

  “I’ve managed it once or twice, but it’s not a specialty,” I whispered back. I reached out for the door handle. “Hopefully we’ll get insanely lucky, and—well, I’ll be damned.”

  We’d gotten insanely lucky. The back door slid aside easily. It had been left unlocked.

  We went inside and closed the door behind us. I turned on my Spider-Man flashlight, and Victor turned on Batman.

  The house had a large open interior with a high steepled ceiling. We were standing in what would probably be the dining room. The kitchen was to our left: the countertops were in place, but there were just blank spaces for the stove, refrigerator, and sink. Ahead of us was what would be the living room. At the far end of it was the front door and the stairs leading up to the second floor. Here and there along the floorboards were rectangular holes where outlets would presumably go, but there was no wiring in sight.

  “I thought it was going to feel more finished than this,” Victor said.

  “I know what you mean. The outside looks pretty much done.”

  We did a slow tour of the first floor, hoping Spider-Man and Batman would reveal something to justify our being there. But the house was just a shell; there was nothing inside.

  “I hate to say it—” Victor began.

  “Then don’t bother,” I cut in sharply.

  I knew what he was going to say already because I was thinking it, too. The house was a dead end, which wasn’t Victor’s fault.

  “Sorry,” I said to him.

  “It’s okay. I understand,” he said. “Why don’t we check out the second floor before we decide what to do next?”

  “Good idea.”

  We started up the stairs, which creaked alarmingly with our every footfall.

  “I might take back that good idea,” I said. “I feel like I’m about to fall right through the staircase.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Victor reached out to steady himself with the banister. It wobbled so badly that he quickly snatched his hand back.

  “This place is a death trap,” he grumbled.

  “Please don’t use that phrase right now.”

  “Sorry,” Victor said. “But you know what I mean. I would’ve thought the houses out here would be built better than this. This place feels like it’s made out of papier-mâché.”

  I paused a few steps from the top of the staircase.

  “Maybe that’s what makes this house special,” I sa
id.

  “It’s especially crappy?”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “The point would be—shit.”

  I turned off Spider-Man. Victor quickly did the same with Batman. He’d heard it, too.

  Something moving. Inside the house.

  We stood there on the stairs and listened. Then there it was again: a rattling, scratching, banging somewhere off in the darkness.

  “I think it’s coming from the second floor,” Victor whispered.

  “I agree.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Well, I’m not leaving till I know what it is,” I said.

  There was a pause while Victor let that sink in. If we’d been in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, I would’ve heard him gulp.

  “Me neither,” he eventually said. “So…lights or no lights?”

  “No lights. For now.”

  “Right. Lead on.”

  Slowly, cringing with every creak of the floorboards, I moved to the top of the staircase. When there were no more steps, I reached out to my right, found the wall, and followed it by touch.

  I was moving down a hallway I couldn’t see. But I knew that at the end of it would be a door.

  A door that was still rattling.

  I came to a doorway, but it wasn’t the right one. The noise was still ahead of me. I kept going, still blind.

  I reached another doorway. The rattling seemed slightly to my left now, and the noise echoed slightly in a way that told me the door I was looking for was in a small room.

  I turned on Spider-Man.

  I’d been right. I was facing a bedroom—the not particularly big kind the youngest kid in the family might get stuck with. On the far wall was a closet door.

  The door rattled again. Something was trying to get out.

  “You ready for this?” I whispered to Victor.

  He was still right behind me.

  “No,” he whispered back. “But let’s do it anyway.”

  We crept toward the closet. When we were about ten feet from it, Victor motioned for me to stop. He was going to take the last few steps alone.

  I pointed Spider-Man at my face so Victor could see that I was shaking my head. I mouthed one word.

  Together.

  Victor nodded.

  We reached the closet door. It was clattering in a wild, frantic way now, as if whatever was on the other side knew we were there.

  I put a hand on the doorknob and started to turn it.

  The door burst open, knocking me in the nose, and I heard something go scrambling past us and shoot out of the room.

  “Ow!” I said.

  “Jesus!” said Victor.

  And then all was quiet again. Whatever it was had startled us so badly, it had gotten away before we could even see what it was. The smell told me, though.

  The stench came pouring out of the closet like an invisible wave of yuck.

  Ammonia and feces.

  I shined my flashlight into the closet. The floor was one big yellow puddle pocked here and there with large brown lumps.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Victor said, “but I think that was a cat.”

  “Not just any cat,” I said. “That was Son of Kong.”

  “Uhhh…huh?”

  “He belonged to one of the Riggs’s neighbors. Bill Riggs hated him, apparently. The neighbor thought Riggs had killed him, but obviously not. He brought him here.”

  “And stuck it in a closet? Why would he do that? Just to starve the poor thing to death?”

  “To kill him, yes. But not to starve him. Riggs knew what was going to happen to this house. And I finally do, too.”

  Son of Kong let out a “mrow!” as he went skittering down the stairs.

  “Come on,” I said. “We need to get out of here before—”

  I froze.

  It was too late for before. Downstairs, someone was sliding open the back door.

  Son of Kong cut loose another mighty “mrow!” and I could hear him scrambling across the floorboards.

  “Yah!” a man said.

  “What the hell?” said another.

  Then they both laughed.

  “It was that damn cat,” I heard the first man say. “He must’ve clawed his way through the door.”

  “I’m not surprised, the way this piece of shit is built,” said the second man. “Well, good for him. I was going to let him out before we did this anyway.”

  There was a shushing sound as the men closed the sliding door behind them.

  Son of Kong had escaped.

  It wouldn’t be so easy for me and Victor.

  I turned off my Spidey light and moved as quietly as I could—which wasn’t as quietly as I would’ve liked—to the room’s one window. I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. Either it hadn’t been installed properly or it had been painted shut.

  “Dumb idea anyway,” I muttered.

  We would’ve had to drop all the way to the ground, and it’s not easy to make a clean getaway on broken ankles.

  There was no avoiding it. We were going to have to go downstairs.

  “What are they doing down there?” Victor whispered.

  We could hear the men walking around the first floor. Every now and then there would be a slosh or a splash.

  I moved to the doorway and sucked in a long, deep breath through my nose. I smelled what I expected—and dreaded.

  Gasoline.

  “We’ve gotta go,” I said.

  Then Victor smelled it, too. “Oh my god. They’re about to burn the place down.”

  “With us in it, if we don’t leave now. The front door is at the bottom of the steps. Hopefully, it’s unlocked. If it’s not—”

  Victor finished my sentence for me.

  “We’re going to have to fight our way out of here,” he said.

  Actually, I’d been thinking we’re screwed. I didn’t correct him.

  We tiptoed up the hall to the top of the stairs. Then the time for tiptoeing was over.

  The men had brought a flashlight with them. It was lying on the floor near the back door. In the low light it threw across the room, we could see what we were up against: big, bald, beflanneled Jack Schramm and the other Huggins Construction worker we’d met at the picnic that day, leathery-brown Carl Luchetti. They were hunched over, walking backwards. Each had a plastic canister that was gurgling gasoline out onto the floor.

  If we came down the stairs, they’d see us for sure. But if we didn’t come down the stairs, we’d be trapped on the second floor when they lit up the gas.

  So down the stairs we came, quickly and not quietly.

  “Whoa!” one of the men said, startled.

  “Hey!” said the other.

  I reached the front door just before Victor. I grabbed the knob and turned—or tried to, anyway.

  It was locked.

  We looked at each other. The grim determination on Victor’s face made it plain what he was thinking.

  So we fight.

  I could only hope what was going through my mind wasn’t so obvious.

  Because I still figured we were screwed.

  They say a man’s home is his castle, and you thought you’d built a solid one for yourself—a place to feel safe and secure once the drawbridge is up. But look at it from another angle—upside down, maybe—and you can see how flimsy it really is. It’s not strong walls that keep you safe; it’s who you have inside those walls with you. So don’t be fooled by spiffy towers and turrets and the best moat money can buy. Maybe all you’ve really built for yourself is one hell of a mausoleum.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  Victor and I turned to face Jack Schramm and Carl Luchetti.

  Schramm was on the left side of the living room, near a half-finished chimney. Luchetti was on the right side of the room, closer to the kitchen. Here and there, puddles of gasoline shimmered in the dim light.

  “It’s those people fro
m the picnic,” Schramm said. He was a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than Luchetti and had a deeper voice to go with the extra heft. “The girls were right about them.”

  “So what’ll we do?” Luchetti said.

  I was thinking the same thing. And I hoped I had an answer.

  When the going gets tough, the tough get going—out the back door, Biddle used to say.

  I could see the sliding glass door at the back of the house, thirty feet beyond Schramm and Luchetti. The gap between the two men was all of twenty-five-feet wide.

  It would have to be enough.

  “Run!” I shouted.

  I took my own advice, of course, bolting across the living room. Victor had been ready to make Castellanos’s Last Stand, but I could hear him follow me half a second later. We splashed through the gasoline as we went, and I could feel the hem of my dress growing more soaked with every pounding step. The fumes were so strong, they made my head swim. But I didn’t stop.

  I was three steps from the back door, already reaching out for the handle, when someone grabbed my wrist and jerked me to a halt.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Schramm growled.

  “Out,” I said, and I went for the classic move in such situations: I tried to knee the guy in the balls.

  Unfortunately, I was out of practice, and Schramm was so much taller than me I couldn’t get my leg up high enough to do any real damage. Instead of doubling over in pain, Schramm just glared at me in rage.

  “Mistake,” he spat—just before Victor’s fist flew in from the side and slammed into his jaw.

  Schramm let go of me and stumbled into the wall.

  “Keep going!” Victor yelled. Only he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Luchetti had already thrown himself onto his back.

  I knew Victor coached the high school wrestling team, but I didn’t know till that moment how good he must be at it. He went with Luchetti’s momentum, moving forward but falling to his knees and hunching his back at the same time. As his knees hit the floor, he reached around with one arm, grabbed Luchetti by the shirt, and threw him off his back.

  Luchetti flew forward and hit the floor hard.

  Victor popped back up to his feet—just in time for Schramm to lunge forward with a punch that caught him in the side of the head. It looked like Victor had been clobbered by a bald Paul Bunyon. He staggered sideways a few steps, and before he could recover, Schramm had wrapped his big arms around him.