“Maybe we’ll get the afternoon crowd,” said Ophelia doubtfully. “Tonight’s going to be a bust. If it’s like last night I might close up early.”
“Sure,” said Dianna. “Whatever you want.”
She used a bottle-green fingernail to run down the list of names. It was a nearly even split between her regulars—mostly older locals who just wanted to know that this was not going to be another Black Harvest year—and new names she didn’t recognize. Some of the names were the kind of nicknames or stage names that immediately marked them as people from Boundary Street. The Fringe. Or whatever it was called, depending on who you asked. Kiki LaOomph had to be a burlesque dancer, and Dianna figured, either transvestite or actual trans-woman. The name made her smile, made her want to read her cards but also catch the act. Other names included Skinz, Brutal John, Yo-Yo, Jellicho, and Tammiduck. Names that defined the metamorphic identity and true persona of each, rather than the birth names that often carried baggage. Dianna had once considered changing her own name after the divorce from Jaden, but hadn’t. She’d kept her so-called maiden name when they’d gotten hitched, and Dianna was Nanny’s middle name. So … she kept it. But she understood the desire to reinvent oneself all the way down to the birth name.
“First one’ll be in soon,” said Ophelia, which was also not her real name. She’d been born Mary Janowitz but shed that skin twenty years back to become Ophelia. Just Ophelia, except on social media, where she was OpeheliaUndrowned.
“Thanks,” said Diana, folding the schedule and tucking it under the stack of tarot cards. “I’ll play for a bit.”
When Ophelia left, Dianna considered the decks of cards. She had over a hundred decks at home and always selected seven at random—as much as anything a sensitive does is truly random—and brought them to work. Standard Arcana as well as oracle cards of different kinds.
The reading she’d done half an hour ago at the kitchen table hovered around her like a cloud. It had been so intense, so threatening that it felt like a betrayal, as if the cards had decided to turn on her. But when she looked through the window the town was not crumbling down and no one she knew was in any kind of real crisis. Dianna told herself it was a hangover reading. Last night had been a bit wild, with a few too many exotic vodka drinks at Tank Girl and more than her share of a big bottle of wine with Nellie, a petite blond with piercings in very interesting places.
Just a crazy night, she told herself. Only that.
Dianna took a cleansing breath and then ran her fingers lightly down the stack, eyes unfocused, letting the cards speak to her. They always did.
Her fingers slipped off the edge of the last deck and thumped the tablecloth.
Dianna blinked in surprise.
Not only had none of the cards given her that tingle, none of them even felt cold. Warm cards were nothing, they were asleep. When a deck went cold it was like opening a window to look out into another world. There was always one deck or another that was like touching an ice cube, especially when she was doing her own morning three-card reading.
She leaned back in her chair and studied the cards, her fingers resting on the curved edge of the table. The cloth was a deep purple velvet and embroidered with birds, insects, and flowers stylized to suggest pre-Colombian art. She’d had it since college, when it had been a wall hanging. Like the cards, the cloth was an old friend. As were the crystals Dianna often handled to cleanse her energy between clients. Now, though, the cloth felt oddly rough beneath her fingertips.
“Don’t be that way,” she said. The cards, being cards, managed not to look contrite. She wasn’t fooled, though. They could hear and understand her.
A shadow crossed the weak sunlight, rubbing it out and casting the storefront in dirty gray shadows. All the colors seemed to drain from the amethysts and turquoise and apophyllite on display in the window. And even the Lemurian seed points and heulandite clusters looked washed out. By itself she would never have taken particular note. After all, the rain had been almost unstoppable in town this fall. However, Dianna was not the kind of person to ignore patterns, especially when she was as open and receptive as she usually was at the start of a long day.
The cards, the cloth, the crystals, and the clouds.
“I—” she began, but the jangle of the bell above the door pulled her immediately out of the pattern of thought that had begun to form. Not just the bell, but the man who came in.
He was not big, not impressive-looking, not handsome, not in any way pleasant to look at. At the same time, there was nothing specific about him that made Dianna recoil. Except, maybe, that he was completely hairless. Totally bald, no mustache or beard, and as he approached she saw he had no eyebrows or eyelashes. A cancer patient? Maybe. There was definitely something sick about him. His skin was pallid, doughy, tending toward gray-white. Like something grown in the dark when no one was looking.
Lord of flies.
The three words flashed into her head, unbidden, unconnected to any deeper thought.
Don’t be here for me.
For a moment the man stood there, looking around at the store layout. The shelves of spiritual books, the many tables of stones and crystals, the displays of statues—Ganesha, Buddha, Kokopelli, Quan Yin—and all of the other items for sale. Things to uplift, expand, deepen.
She watched the slow smile that formed on his mouth. No, not formed. Crept. As if the smile were an insect sneaking out from under the fridge, ugly and knowing.
Don’t come over here.
She thought it, pushed at the thought, tried to load it like a bullet into the barrel of her desire. But even as she thought it, even before he turned that smile in her direction, Dianna knew that he was here for her.
For her.
For her.
His grin widened but did not brighten. It was as gray as the dirty clouds. His eyes were pale, the color of spit. He walked toward her, his body lumpy, his gait awkward. Dianna looked away, then down at the schedule sheet. Her fingers shook as she pulled it out and opened it. The first name was one she did not know, one she thought was someone from Boundary Street.
Owen Minor.
Lord of flies, hissed her inner voice.
And then his shadow fell across the table.
10
The story the couple—Corinne and Andrew Duncan—told Officer Mike Sweeney confused the living hell out of him.
“Wait, wait,” he said, interrupting the wife’s second telling of her side. “Go back to the part where you hit him.”
“Of course I hit him,” she yelled. “You would, too. You’d have probably shot him if he did that to you. Are you married? No? Well, if you were married and your wife went through cancer—twice—and your husband, the man who is supposed to love you until death do us part—”
“For Christ’s sake, Corinne,” bleated the husband, “of course I love you.”
“—but then does something as mean and callous and cold-hearted as that, you’d hit him, too. I mean, he pretended that he never even had it in the first place.”
She was crying now, and Mike felt deeply uneasy. He was never good with people crying. He cleared his throat again and gave the husband a hard look.
“May I see your arm?”
“Why? I told her and I’m telling you,” said the husband, “that I never had any damn tattoo. Don’t you think I would remember if I had a fucking tattoo?”