Death in the Cards

by Sharon Short

  My eyes stung, and I realized I’d been crying for a few minutes now, quietly, my face slicked with tears. I glanced around. The couple in front of me was preoccupied with their two toddlers and a baby. I glanced over my shoulder. No one was behind me yet, but I saw a teenaged couple smooching over by the Winesaps, taking guilty pleasure from quick little pecks on each other’s lips.

  The line shuffled forward. Sonya was serving the family in front of me. I dug through my purse, pulled out a tissue and wiped my face, then stuffed the crumpled tissue into my pocket.

  The family moved on, and Sonya’s grin upon seeing me quickly shifted to a look of concern. “You okay, Josie? I heard about Guy taking ill.”

  “You heard, huh?”

  “Ella Withers heard about it from Naomi Crider who heard about it from Mrs. Beavy. Naomi was in your laundromat this morning and then ran into Ella up at the Pick-N-Save. Ella stopped by here on her way back from Masonville and told me about it. Said she’d already put Guy and you on the prayer chain.”

  I smiled at that. Ella’s the head of the prayer chain at the Paradise United Methodist Church. I wasn’t sure I believed that the chain really made that much difference in the outcomes of whatever the chain members prayed over, but it made me feel better knowing that many people would be thinking of me and Guy and caring about us. Maybe that was the real power of such things.

  “Ella said she wasn’t sure, but she thought Guy has . . .” Sonya dropped her voice to a whisper, as if that would take away from the power of whatever dread disease she was about to name. “. . . well, she heard he has leukemia.”

  I shook my head. “God willing, not that. The doctors at the hospital tested him for all kinds of things. They think he has diabetes. I’m taking him in Monday for more testing.”

  Sonya exhaled in relief, which made fresh tears well up in my eyes. “Well, diabetes is bad enough—my mama’s had high sugar for several years now—but that’s easier to deal with than the other. Do you mind if I get you on our prayer chain, too?”

  I smiled. “That’d be fine.” I’d take good thoughts from everyone who wanted to spare a synapse generating them. Did Wiccans have prayer chains? I might ask, later, when I got back to the psychic fair. “Thanks. How about a pint of the regular?”

  Sonya laughed when I said that. Beeker Orchard only sells one liquid refreshment, their homemade cider. It’s not like you can get it in decaf, or low-carb/sugar-free. That’s one of the beauties of cider.

  “Just a pint?” she said, knowing I usually got a gallon, which lasted a week, as long as I portioned out a glass in the morning, another in the evening, making sure to savor it. You can only get Beeker’s cider for a scant eight weeks out of the year. Then you can buy pints or quarts and freeze it (after pouring a bit off the top, to keep the plastic jug from bursting), but I’ve just got a regular freezer, and only freeze two quarts at the end of the season. One I thaw at Thanksgiving, the other in February, on some particularly gray and gloomy and heartbreaking day.

  “I’m staying at the Red Horse,” I said. “My place was evacuated because of the water main break. I just have a minifridge in my room.”

  Sonya looked concerned. “I’m sorry to hear that. I heard there was a water main break, but not specifically where. You need anything?”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine. I was able to get in my apartment long enough to get the essentials for a few days—clothes, toiletries, and such.” And green tomato relish to try with the crab Rangoons, tortilla chips, and a bottle of wine . . . but I didn’t mention those things.

  I heard some people get in line behind me. Sonya walked over to the large glass-fronted refrigerator unit behind her. “Well, now, you give us a holler if you need anything while you’re over there,” she said over her shoulder.

  She came back with a pint of cider and an apple covered in gooey melted caramel and chopped peanuts. I eyed the caramel apple.

  “It’s on us,” Sonya said.

  I accepted her generosity gratefully and took comfort in the accepting. There are a few good things about living in a small town, after all.

  “What do you want to know about?” Skylar Temple asked gently.

  What I wanted to know was what Skylar had told Ginny that had made her dash out of the psychic fair to the dismay of all the people waiting in her line.

  But I knew she’d shut down cold if I asked directly like that, even without her mama hovering in the background.

  “Your mama’s not here,” I said.

  “What?” Skylar looked startled by the question, then annoyed. “Oh. Well, she went to take a rest. Headache.” Skylar laughed, but without mirth. “She’s tense because now that Ginny’s gone, she says the lighting where we’re sitting is poor, and that’s why people are avoiding my table.”

  “You had a line earlier,” I said.

  “My mother says that’s because Ginny wasn’t here to hog all the clients. Maybe. But whatever advantage that gave me, my mother ruined by hovering nearby while I worked. I keep telling her it makes people nervous.” Skylar looked around as if she were afraid that her mother might suddenly reappear and take offense at the comment. “Talking to a psychic is a private affair.”

  I glanced around. On the surface, it didn’t seem all that private. Just a few feet away, Samantha Mulligan, the pet psychic, was talking to a man holding his guinea pig. On the other side, Max Whitstone was holding the hand of a middle-aged woman, and stroking her palm slowly as she stared at his cowboy-hat-shadowed face in fascination.

  But I couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying at the other tables. Everything was conducted in soft murmurs. And I could understand that if Karen, Skylar’s mother, was usually insistent on hovering behind the table, that would drive away potential clients. When I’d returned to the psychic fair, after putting away my cider and apples (including the luscious caramel one), I’d noticed that Skylar was the only psychic with no clients. The crowd had thinned. It was 6:30, the heart of the heartland’s dinner hour, but the other psychics, those who hadn’t left for dinner themselves, all had clients.

  Skylar had brightened when I’d walked up to her table, then looked serious as she asked, “What do you want to know about?” as she did now, repeating the question.

  Maybe after I got a reading from her, I could convince her to take a break, tell me about what happened between her and Ginny before she took off for the corn maze.

  I definitely wanted to know about that.

  But what did I want to know about personally?

  If Guy would be okay, for starters. How soon I could get back to my laundromat and home. My future with Owen . . .

  “I want to know about my future love life.”

  “What kind of future are you hoping for?”

  My mind went immediately to the families I’d watched at the Beeker Orchard. “Marriage. Children.”

  The words stunned me. Did I want that? Really? I’d never thought so. Back in high school, when I had sat out on Aunt Clara and Uncle Horace’s porch on too-hot nights, I’d dreamed of traveling to faraway places—Greece, Nepal, Arizona—anywhere I’d read about in the books and magazines from the bookmobile.

  Then I’d taken on the laundromat and Guy’s care and found a steady, peaceful fulfillment in those things. I was so focused on making sure I was a good caretaker for Guy that I hadn’t really thought about marriage or children for me. At least not on the surface of my mind. But maybe deep down . . .

  Could my future really be found in a pack of cards? Could Skylar really have some kind of gift that maybe the cards nudged into action, the cards being just a tool for her true gift of sensing the future . . . my future?

  Skylar sensed my hesitation and spent some time giving me a general introduction to tarot, since I’d never had a reading done before. She explained that she did not view tarot reading as going to an oracle and getting an exact prediction. Ginny, she said, had tended in that direction, at least in her later years, but Skylar’s view was that what a ta
rot reading did was help the person getting the reading to tap into insights already in their subconscious; the tarot reader’s psychic gift was to intuitively guide the person toward those insights.

  Skylar told me no one really was sure where tarot cards, or even the word tarot, came from, although many thought tarot cards were developed in medieval Italy, and the word “tarot” might come from the medieval Italian game tarocco.

  Hmm, I thought, at that bit of information. The same people who gave the world pasta and cannoli may have developed tarot. Well, then, tarot couldn’t be all bad. I relaxed a little.

  Skylar went on to tell me that there were many designs available and that readers picked sets based on anything from intuition to carefully researching the imagery. She herself used a Celtic tarot for her own readings and for regular customers, and a classic set for psychic fairs.

  In any case, she told me, the tarot deck has seventy-eight cards, fifty-six of them in the minor (or lesser) “arcana,” and the rest in the major (or greater) “arcana.” The minor cards are divided into four suits—swords, wands, cups, and pentacles, each representing a different element or idea—and into cards numbered Ace (or one) through ten, plus a King, Queen, Knight, and Page.

  Skylar’s cards were lushly illustrated with some pictures that I liked—“Temperance,” for example, or “the Lovers.” But some of them were just as frightening as they were beautiful, like “the Hanged Man,” and “Devil,” and “Death,” which also happened to be the thirteenth card of the major arcana.

  Skylar smiled at my reaction to that one. “Most people don’t like seeing this one,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean you’ll get hit by a bus, any more than the ‘Devil’ means the evil one is lurking around the corner. That one represents people who aren’t good for you, or unhealthy or unwise behaviors. Like eating cheese puffs when you know you should have carrots.”

  I had to laugh at her lighthearted explanation.

  “The ‘Death’ card is symbolic—like all the others. It can mean that some aspect of your current life has to die before something new, something you really want, can emerge, for example.” Skylar gathered up the tarot cards and began shuffling them. “You said you wanted guidance about your future relationships—marriage, children.”

  I nodded, suddenly feeling a lump in my throat take the place of laughter.

  “Let’s focus the reading a bit, maybe on a current relationship. You have a boyfriend?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Owen.”

  She nodded. “All right. Let’s see what kind of insight we can gain about your relationship with him.”

  Truth be told, I don’t remember all the details of the reading Skylar gave me. It was a complicated affair—Skylar said she was using a “Celtic spread,” one of any number of spreads, or arrangements, of cards that could be used.

  She had me pick one card to represent me—I chose “Temperance—”and then she had me shuffle the remaining cards. Then she laid out the top twelve cards. By the time she was done, I was looking down at a funny shaped H, with the twelfth and thirteenth cards making a little hook off the top right of the H.

  The cards represented my current situation, my past, and my future. Skylar pointed out that the future is always open, its unfolding subject to the choices we make in the present and influences from the past.

  Still, I listened carefully, torn between what I thought I wanted to hear—that everything would work out fine between Owen and me—and being open to however Skylar’s interpretation might resonate in my mind.

  The “Two of Pentacles” took the spot of the current situation, and signified restlessness. The “Five of Swords” suggested partings, or someone leaving. Similarly, the “Hermit” suggested that in the near future, I might need to withdraw or pull back, perhaps, Skylar said, working on personal development first or being sure of what I wanted, before rushing to commitment with someone else.

  Despite Skylar’s earlier comments, I shuddered at the “Death” card, which fell into the “turning point” spot. This signified a need for change before being able to move forward, possibly a change in my current relationship or a change of my own heart. Did that mean, I wondered, that Owen and I should develop a way to communicate that we’d both be comfortable with? Or did it mean that our relationship would end?

  But the “Ace of Cups,” the true card of love, Skylar said, fell in the “outcome” place. That meant, she said, that things looked promising for a new—or renewed—long-term relationship.

  By the time Skylar was done, my head was spinning. How could she keep all those cards, and their meanings, and the significance of the positions in the spread, straight?

  And as for the significance of the reading to me . . . well, it looked as though I was in for some difficult times, relationshipwise, which I already knew. But that things would eventually work out well. Which I already hoped for. Still. I have to say that somehow the reading made me feel better.

  At the end of the reading, I said as much to Skylar, then added, “You know, it would have been simpler if you’d just said, don’t worry Josie, things will work out with you and Owen, or Josie, give up now.”

  Skylar laughed, then looked serious again. “It’s not that straightforward. The path is never clearly given for any of us. Through this art,” she waved her hand over her cards, “we can only know of possible obstacles or helps that may come along our path. Knowing that can help us choose our path carefully.”

  I studied her somber face. Skylar was only twenty-three and yet she had the conviction of someone twice her age. There was something very consoling about her complete seriousness.

  Her gaze wandered a bit, and her look brightened. I glanced back over my shoulder. In fact, someone was coming up to her table. I started to say “thanks” and leave—maybe I could catch her later to ask questions about Ginny—but then I saw Skylar’s mother trotting from the bar area over to us, ready to hover just behind her daughter.

  Skylar’s expression fell in disappointment, and then hardened. I didn’t have to glance over my shoulder again to know what had happened. The potential client, having seen Skylar’s infamous mother, was detouring to another psychic’s table.

  “My mother’s back,” Skylar said stonily.

  “Coming right up behind you,” I said. “Hey—I think I’ll grab a bite over at the bar. I know the owners. Greta makes the best grilled cheese sandwich on earth. Want to join me?”

  Skylar was standing up before I even finished the question. “I’d love to.”

  “Yoo hoo, Skylar, dear!” Karen trilled. “My headache’s much better now. Where are you going?”

  Skylar tensed, said through gritted teeth without turning around, “Just to get a bite of dinner, mother.”

  “Oh, okay, I’ll come with you, then—”

  Skylar turned, faced her mother who was now standing right behind Skylar’s chair. “No, mother. You stay here. Just in case anyone comes along wanting a reading. Tell them I’ll be back in forty-five minutes or so.”

  For just a second, Karen looked crestfallen. Then, as Skylar edged around the table toward me—I was standing now—Karen’s face brightened again. She sat down in Skylar’s chair. “Good idea, sweetie,” Karen said. “And while I’m here, I’ll just straighten up these brochures.”

  I don’t think Skylar heard her, though. She was already heading toward the bar.

  16

  “How do I tell my mother that it’s time she had her own life? I’ve got to be the only psychic who has a stage mama,” Skylar moaned. “How is it that I can give other people readings about their future but mine is totally foggy?”

  Then Skylar bit into her grilled cheese sandwich—her first bite, and golden cheese oozed out of the other side. I’d already eaten half of mine. We’d ordered Big Fizz colas to go with our sandwiches, which came with chips and pickles, and I’d asked Greta to see if she had an item I’d need later. It was something that might help me solve Ginny’s murder, but I didn’t t
ell her that.

  Skylar moaned again, this time in appreciation of the grilled cheese. “My Lord, this is divine.”

  I grinned. “Isn’t it though? Greta Rhinegold is magic with a grill. I think she misses the days when this was a full service restaurant, but this event will have her sleeping for a week.”

  “Hard times around here?” Skylar said, relieved to be focusing on someone else’s problems again.

  “Always,” I said. But I wasn’t about to let her off that easily. “Tell me about how you became a psychic.”

  “You sure you want to hear about that?”

  Of course, I thought, especially if it meant I could eventually ask Skylar about her conversation with Ginny.

  I gave a casual shrug. “I’m not gifted in the psychic arts. But I’m a good listener and I’m pretty good with everyday common-sense advice. And it looks to me like you could use some of that about how to handle your mama.”

  Skylar sighed and nodded, pushing back her plate of grilled cheese and pickles. The thought of her troubles had stolen her appetite for even Greta’s fare.

  “I was sick as a kid. Nothing too serious—but always catching whatever went around and staying sick longer than everyone else. Too skinny. My mother was divorced, my father living in Texas. He sent plenty of money, visited twice a year, called once a week, but it was my mother who got the worrying part of parenthood,” Skylar said. “And she was plenty good at that. She took me to every doctor she could find, who gave me every test, it seemed, to see why I was always sick. Was it allergies? Anemia? Something worse? Nope, nope, and nope. I always got a clean bill of health, but I was always run down and sick anyway.

  “Finally, my mom took me to Ginny. Mom had been seeing her about once a month for a few years and Ginny had let it slip that she had been a psychic healer, a long time ago.”