“Will I meet someone?” Sara liked the question from this woman because she’d seen Mr. Peterson looking at her in church. Sara told her that if she didn’t immediately buy four new tires at Peterson’s Wheels she’d have a wreck—and also, Arthur Peterson had a sp
iritual message for her so she needed to talk to him personally. The woman left in a hurry, and Sara hoped she was on her way to the garage.
Sara told two teenage girls to stop smoking in secret and to wear longer skirts. They went away laughing hilariously.
The worst part of the job was hearing crowds in the distance as they cheered at the games. She wondered what Mike was doing now. She’d never seen him jump rope. How good was he? That was, of course, a rhetorical question as there didn’t seem to be a sport that Mike wasn’t brilliant at.
Smiling, Sara wondered if their children would inherit his talents. She’d like a boy who was a martial arts expert. On the other hand, she hoped she didn’t get a daughter who thought tree climbing was an art form. How would Sara relate to her?
“Oh, dear, I seem to have interrupted some serious daydreaming.”
She looked up to see Mrs. Myers hobbling into the tent. She was a widow in her eighties who lived in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of town and regularly attended church. She hadn’t been in Edilean long, but it was said that she’d lived there as a child and had returned when her husband died a few years ago. The poor woman walked with two canes, and even that was difficult. At church, she was always in the first five of any list of people needing charity.
As Mrs. Myers sat down, Sara shuffled the tarot cards, being careful not to bend them. “And what questions can I answer for you today?” Please, she thought, don’t ask me how long you have to live.
“Oh, the usual, dear. When am I going to meet a man?”
Sara tried not to laugh, but when she saw the twinkle in the woman’s eyes, she couldn’t help but smile from behind the semitransparent veil. “How about a nice, healthy retired businessman?”
“I’d rather have a horseman, lean and dark, a man who will carry me across the fields on his black stallion and make love to me in the moonlight.”
Sara’s mouth dropped open. “I rather like that idea myself.”
Mrs. Myers was squinting as she looked at the tarot cards. “So what does it say about me in there?”
Sara didn’t know enough about the woman to come up with a fake fortune that fit her. But she did know she wasn’t rich. “Money,” Sara said firmly as she put down three cards. “I see a fortune in your future.”
“Do you? And what card would that be?”
Sara wasn’t sure what each card meant, but it made sense that coins meant money. She pointed to the one that had Greg scowling and surrounded by six women’s faces on gold coins. “This one.”
Mrs. Myers opened her handbag—so old it had cracks in the leather—and removed her reading glasses. As she opened them, she said, “I once wore a veil very much like the one you have on.”
“Did you?” Sara said, smiling. “And did it get you what you wanted?”
“It got me a big, handsome husband,” Mrs. Myers said as she put on her glasses. “He was a little old, maybe, but still in working order.”
“Then it was worth it,” Sara said, but her heart was pounding. A veil that got her a husband? A handsome young man who made love in the moonlight? Could he have been Greg’s father? Was it possible that this woman was the notorious Mitzi Vandlo? She was much older than fifty-three, but when Sara looked at the woman’s hands, she saw that they were mostly unlined and younger than her face. No one had suggested that Mitzi might disguise herself by looking older, and also, this woman didn’t have the big nose that was prominent in her only photo.
Sara realized that if Mrs. Myers had told anyone else her story about a veil getting her a husband, it would have been a good joke. It was only because of what Mike had told her that Sara could recognize the woman.
Sara’s first thought was that she wished she had a buzzer to push with her foot. She’d not asked Mike about the cameras in the fortune-telling tent, and now she wished she had. Was someone monitoring them or were they just making a recording that would be looked at later? If she made a gesture toward a camera, would it be seen by an agent?
Stay calm, she told herself as she quickly hid the card with Greg’s face on it and spread others out on the little table. She reassured herself that if Mitzi had seen Sara and Mike together, it was all right because right now she was protected by the fact that everyone thought she was Joce, not Sara. This was good, because for all she knew, Mrs. Myers’s old handbag contained a gun. To reassert her identity, she let her rings flash. Joce was a married woman.
Mrs. Myers was looking at the cards through her reading glasses, and her eyes were wide. “Where did you get that deck?” The woman’s voice was breathless, as though she was seeing something wonderful.
The doubt of her being Mitzi Vandlo fled. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” Sara said rather loudly. “There are only six sets in the world. My husband’s publishing house printed them. They were going to use them for publicity for one of his books, but they were too expensive to produce, so these are the only decks that will ever be printed.”
Mrs. Myers bent over to study the cards on the little table. “Do I recognize some of the faces?”
“Oh, yes. Shamus Frazier drew them all, and he surprised us by making portraits.” Sara picked up the Judgment card with her mother’s face on it. She was wearing a red dress, with a big handkerchief over her head, and gold earrings. “That’s Mrs. Shaw, my friend Sara’s mother.” As surreptitiously as she could, Sara slipped a card with Stefan’s face on it under the stack. She thought it was better not to let the woman see Stefan as a thoroughly unpleasant-looking man. “But I seem to be telling you all about my life, when I’m supposed to be talking about yours.”
In spite of everything she could do, Sara felt panic rising inside of her. What should she do? Stay in the tent, be a psychic and wait, or run to Mike? But she knew that leaving was impossible. This woman had been eluding law authorities all her life, so she’d never stay there and wait to be captured.
Sara decided to do her best to keep the woman interested so she’d stay as long as possible and give someone time to come and … What? Arrest her? Sara tried to remember everything Mike had told her about Mitzi, but it wasn’t easy, as her heart was in her throat.
“Let me see. Ah, yes.” She looked at the woman. “Do you want to hear the truth of what I see in the cards, or are you like the others and just want sugarcoated candy?”