“Marilyn Houdini Blackstone,” she said with a grand gesture of introduction. “Give me the cards you took off the top.” He did, and she counted them. Nine. She deposited them casually on top of the deck. “Now, you’re going to tell me your three names, and I’m going to deal off the cards and spell them. If I spell them wrong, don’t tell me, okay?”
“Okay. First, Menger.”
“Well, that one I know. M-e-n-g-e-r.” She dropped a card faceup with each letter.
“Hedda.”
“As in, Hedda Krause?”
“I wasn’t sure how to spell her name.”
An unusual, and unwelcome, tremor zipped through Dini’s hand. “H-e-d-d-a.”
“Oh good. I spelled it right.” He seemed genuinely relieved. “Last one, Irvin.”
Her finger was poised on the top card, but at the mention of the name, her hand dropped to the table. “Irvin? Why Irvin?”
“Does it matter?”
The tone of his question ran everywhere from teasing to—maybe, but probably not—flirting. “It’s kind of a random choice.”
A tiny shrug. “Not so random. It’s my name.”
To say that Dini froze in that moment would not be quite accurate. Breath moved in and out, she blinked, and her left hand closed on the deck of cards with a death grip. Still a jab of ice pick–sharp pain stabbed at her head, like she’d taken an ill-advised gulp of a frozen drink. She fought—and, probably failed—to keep a neutral expression on her face as it waned.
Quin mirrored her gesture of introduction. “Irvin no-middle-name Carmichael, the Fifth.”
She’d get back to that later. “I-r-v-i-n.” She looked up. “Do you remember your card?”
“King of diamonds.”
“And you had nine cards drawn.” She counted them out, dropping them face up on the pile. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight”—dramatic pause—“King of diamonds.”
“Cool,” he said and took a sip of his beer. “The trick I get—you put the cards down in reverse order. But keeping the stack intact while you shuffle? That was amazing.”
Dini decided not to confront his condescension, even though it irked her.
“Do you know who you are?”
“Do any of us really, Dini? And isn’t that question a little too existential for a first date?”
The response caught her so off guard she laughed and fumbled her shuffle. She put the cards away and took the cooling mug in her hands. “This isn’t a date.”
“A date is in the eye of the beholder.”
“Dates don’t have secrets, Quin Carmichael. And I have a feeling you’re carrying one.”
“Not a secret, exactly. More like a mystery. Here it goes.” Quin shifted himself as if settling in for a long story. “A few years ago, we—my sisters and I—were clearing out my grandparents’ house. It was originally owned by my great-great-grandfather. Built sometime in the 1890s. We all had a chance to go through and take whatever heirlooms or knickknacks or furniture we wanted, and I found this.” Quin reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and began scrolling. He held it out to Dini, who saw a battered cardboard box, loosely tied with string. “It was at the back of the closet in the master bedroom. So far back that I had the feeling it was hidden.”
“Feeling.”
“Sixth sense, you know? And when I opened it…just this weird assortment of stuff. A couple of magazines, newspaper clippings, and”—he all but shuddered—“photographs.”
Everything within her sparked. So much so, she imagined tiny lightning bolts shooting from her curls as she forced her voice to remain calm. “So how did you know to connect it all to here?”
“The newspaper articles mostly. About the, um—”
“The robbery?”
“Yeah. I did some googling and learned more about the place. And since I had some time on my hands, I finally decided to come and check it out. See what I could learn. I came in here for dinner and told the guy behind the bar—”
“Gil.”
“—and he said he knew someone who could tell me the whole story inside and out. And that you’d be leading a tour. So I signed up. And here we are.”
“Here we are.” No doubt Gil was relieved that she had a new audience for her obsession.
“So, I’m here until Thursday morning. Maybe we could meet up again? And you could kind of …? Because I have to tell you, some of it’s pretty …”
He had that speech pattern that made statements sound like questions, allowing spoken thoughts to drift off into vague hand gestures. He was clearly a gregarious sort—instantly at ease with a stranger, a quality Dini never quite understood. She had no idea how much silence had elapsed since he stopped talking, but she knew her cue was to pick up the thread.
“You won’t be able to understand any of it if you don’t know the whole story.”
“So tell me the story. You’re an awesome storyteller. I listened to you out on the tour for, like, two hours. Excellent. Chills.”
She wanted to tell him that most of what he heard was a script, memorized and repeated. Despite his apparent lack of historical intuitiveness, he seemed harmless enough. Her week was pretty empty, save a birthday party tomorrow and an afternoon event on Wednesday. And she might get a free meal or two—call it her fee.
Plus, he was the in-flesh descendant of the man who had vicariously broken her heart a thousand times over.
“What do you know about your great-great-grandfather?”
“Not much. Not as much as I should. He worked for the FBI? Back in the day before it was, you know, the FBI.” He punctuated this with a duh-duh-duhn. “So much of my family followed him on that. My grandfather. And two of my sisters, but they’re forensic accountants. I took the wimp route and went into teaching. Not that I haven’t had my share of rough days there.”
Dini filed all of this away the way she filed everything—neatly and without effort.
“What do you know about Hedda Krause?”
“Again, not much,” he said. “There’s a couple of pictures and newspaper clippings. I did some online searching about her too and didn’t come up with any more than what you said on the tour. I mean, I don’t even know if all of the stuff in the box is related. So, like I said, I was coming to town anyway and thought I’d—”
“You said you had time on your hands and decided to come here. That’s not the same thing as coming here anyway.”
“Does it matter?”
Dini looked at him, thinking about the story of Hedda Krause and Irvin Carmichael. A story she knew by heart. A story that her mother had handed down, that they had spent hours telling and retelling each other on long bus rides and in cheap motels while her father slept in the next bed. She wasn’t about to recount this story to a stranger like it was one of her farfetched Alamo Haunting Spirits Ghost Tour tall tales, no matter how desperately she wanted to get her hands on what he tossed aside as a few photos and clippings.
“I suppose not. But when I say you need to know the whole story, I mean—I think you should learn it from Hedda herself.”