Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  “HE’S A CAPRICORN , a musician,” said Maddie as she took one of the carved chairs beside the table in the front of the store. Some readers she knew could only work in the quiet surroundings of Diana’s candlelit back rooms. Diana had lived with the tarot as an armature of her thought processes so long that she could drop in and out of the half-tranced state of contemplation at will.

  The Seeker After Igneous Truth was still sitting on the floor in the Lost Knowledge section, deep in communion with Hidden Secrets of the Lost Library. Llyr and Mr. Gaunt, the two store cats, dozed heavily before the heater. Outside the usual ruckus of taxi horns and police sirens yowled from Washington Square, but the store itself was quiet.

  Diana’s large, competent hands flipped a card from the deck, then passed the remainder to Maddie. “The Nine of Pentacles?” asked Maddie, startled. “But Phil…”

  “I don’t know anything about Phil,” replied Diana evenly. “Nor do you, if you’ve asked me to do a reading about him and, I assume, your feelings for him…?”

  Maddie nodded.

  “You can’t learn about him through the cards. But you can learn about you . It’s about where he fits into your life, not where you fit yourself into his .”

  Maddie shuffled the deck, breathing deeply, as Diana had taught her, sinking herself into the state of light trance where she could be better able to act as a channel for the energies aligning the universe. When she’d first come to New York seven years ago and taken Diana’s tarot class, she had done little the first year but learn techniques of trance and meditation. Diana did not believe in hurrying too quickly to knowledge: It’s like picking up a hot pan off the stove, before you’ve made yourself a glove to protect your hand, she would say. The knowledge isn’t going anywhere. The energies that rule the cosmos will still work the same way a year from now.

  For the past year and a half, Maddie had used the Nine of Pentacles as her own card in readings. The picture on it was of a wealthy woman alone in her garden, a pet hawk on her fist. She watched it now as Diana built up the reading around it, Past and Future, Hopes and Fears. As well as the dark-browed King of Pentacles, the Knight of Cups rode his horse along the edge of the sea, “the coming of a matter of the heart.” Maddie smiled as she recognized the Fool—Sandy stepping blithely off the edge of a cliff, the way he always did, his eyes on the illusion that it was possible to live without discomfort. It was in the position of a thing that influenced her outlook. Sandy had certainly done that.

  Or was it herself, she wondered, who had stepped off the cliff edge of loving, without knowing whether it was safe or not?

  In the position that marked the future, the Lovers clasped hands and smiled. Maddie saw also the Three of Cups, the Graces partying hearty. Above them was one of the best of the Greater Trumps, the sign of the Dancer at the Heart of the World.

  “There’s danger in the future.” Diana touched the Nine of Wands, the beat-up hero defending the gap in the palisade. “And a warning here, about danger that arises out of the past….”

  “The Devil has shown up in so many of my readings I’d be disappointed if he didn’t put in an appearance here, too,” sighed Maddie resignedly, looking down at the grinning shape with its torch and its chained slaves. When Diana read the cards, she often described how she saw pathways linking them. Maddie wondered if she saw them now.

  “Is this Phil?” She tapped the King of Pentacles, lurking at the nadir of the reading, the basis from which the problem sprang. Yet looking at the card, she felt an echo of the darkness of the Glendower Building around her, heard the whisper in her ear. Like the pathways Diana saw, Maddie sensed that this wasn’t Phil at all, but something else. Something wicked, and old.

  Bitch…little sluts are all alike .

  “It may be some aspect of him that you will need to deal with,” said Diana slowly. “I’m more inclined to think that it may be someone else entirely, someone you haven’t yet met. But there’s another warning here, of danger, the Five of Wands.” She glanced up at Maddie, her brown eyes troubled. “For something that has the promise of a joyful outcome, this is a bad reading, Maddie. A warning. But not, I think—” her fingers brushed the Lovers and she smiled “—about your friend Phil.”

  Her smile faded, and she gathered up the cards. “You be careful, dear.”

  “I try to be,” said Maddie, and put on her coat and scarf again. “But the trick is always to know what to be careful of.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THROUGHOUT THE LONG RIDE to Westhampton, it was as if Sandy Weinraub occupied the seat at Maddie’s side.

  Her physical passion for Phil confused her. She wanted him, but knew in her heart that it was much more than that. The reawakening of desire was followed closely—as it had been last night—by misgivings about herself and her judgment.

  She had loved Sandy, passionately and completely. It had seemed to her right and logical to surrender things she loved in order to be with him and to keep him happy. The first night they’d been together, she remembered very clearly, he had spent sipping vodka, never seeming really drunk. Not that it would have mattered, as long as they were together.

  She had willed herself not to notice. Not to have it matter.

  She let her breath out in a sigh, her body moving with the jostle of the train. In retrospect she couldn’t imagine how she could have been that stupid.

  Stupid to love him, she thought. Stupid to marry him. Stupid to pound her head against the wall of thinking she could change him, by threats to leave, by pleas, by reasoning, by all her offers of help. She still didn’t know whether he’d actually loved her or not. Could addicts really love?

  Had it all been lies?

  She loved Phil. She knew that as surely as she knew her name, and the knowledge filled her with terror and despair.

  If he was lying to her—about loving, about sanity—she didn’t think she could go through all that pain again. Every instinct she possessed told her that Phil Cooper was a man she could love, a man she could trust. He was strong and funny and listened to what other people said, to say nothing of the fact that just being in the same room with him made her want to rip his clothes off and drag him into bed….

  But every instinct she possessed had once told her that Sandy loved her. And that their love was good and right.

  Which left her where?

  Bay Shore. Patchogue. Exhausted shoppers bundled in overcoats and rubber boots trying to juggle purses, magazines, brown Bloomie’s bags from the after-Christmas sales, umbrellas, crying children who should have been settled down for naps and cookies hours ago. Early darkness flashed by the windows of the train, hiding the long gray shape of cold beaches, colder sea.

  In the river parishes along the Mississippi they’d be lighting bonfires, huge frames of logs whose orange glare was visible for miles through the dense winter fog. Everyone would be getting ready for Mardi Gras and holding King Cake parties—if you got the plastic baby in your slice of King Cake you’d have to throw the next party—and the whole world smelled of burning sugar from the refineries. Though it would be damply cold, it was seldom the wet, brutal, uncaring cold of New York.

  “I came down here the minute I discovered there were places in the world where it didn’t snow,” Sandy had said to her, with his sly sidelong grin, as they’d walked up St. Peter Street to the Café du Monde from his apartment in the French Quarter, through that damp sugar-smelling fog and the glaring lights of Mardi Gras. Maddie had leaned into the shelter of his arm and laughed.

  That first year of living in New Orleans—of her going to classes and pretending to all her friends that she wasn’t having an affair with the writing teacher—there had been a lot of laughter.

  After he came to New York to work as an editor for Galactic magazine, it seemed to Maddie that he had never actually worked again. She’d worked, mostly waiting tables. During his year at Galactic she had, in fact, done a lot of unpaid editing while he was “not feeling well.” She’d gotten money once
from her mother, but the emotional interest payments were simply too high: if she had to hear her mother one more time on the subject of the career as a professional dancer she’d just thrown away, she would have said something—as her aunts liked to put in—that did not do credit to her raising.

  It had been easier to pretend that everything was all right.

  Didn’t he see what it was doing to me? she wondered. Didn’t he care?

  When Maddie had returned from Darkness Visible that afternoon to the apartment on Thirty-second Street to get ready for her gig, she’d found Sandy’s leather jacket laid neatly over the back of the couch. Just the sight of it hit her hard. Oh, my God, he’s turned up again ….

  Forgetting, for that first instant, that he was never going to turn up again.

  The memory of her struggle against him was still burningly clear. When she’d asked him to leave she’d had the locks changed, but she knew Sandy was cunning. Her greatest fear, during the eleven months between his departure and his death, had been that he’d get evicted from whatever friend he was sponging off, or single flophouse room he was living in, and that she’d come home some afternoon and find his jacket on the back of the couch and his stuff piled in the living room: This is just for a couple of days or weeks….

  And she’d have to go through the whole agony again of finding him a place, paying first-’n’-last, and getting him out of her apartment and out of her life. She’d have to steel herself against the panic attacks, the frantic declarations of love, the sobbed promises of reform.

  She’d gone over and picked up the jacket, and found under it two CDs. Wind on the Water and Dust Storm, instrumental music by Phil Cooper. Produced by one of the myriad of tiny private music companies that had sprung up in the wake of inexpensive CD technology, complete with Photoshop covers and a not-quite-professional black-and-white picture of Phil on the back.

  What her mother would say if Maddie informed her that she was in love with yet another penniless artist—and another Yankee at that—she didn’t like to think.

  I love him. Does he love me?

  She didn’t know whether she hoped he did, or not.

  It would be easier to simply have a bone-shaking, teeth-rattling, back-clawing affair and call it quits. See, I am too worth something .

  Easier all around to go on living with Tessa and Baby, to dance and teach and read the cards for those throngs of black-clothed Midwestern Goths and Gothettes who wandered through the West Village in search of sex, drugs and body-piercings. To seek her own strength, as Diana had advised, rather than spend her life guessing about someone else’s weakness.

  Like the Nine of Pentacles, the lady in her own garden, with the hawk on her fist. Alone.

  The lights of Mastic Beach whipped by in the dark.

  But the Nine of Pentacles, Maddie knew, like all the nines in the tarot deck, had the meaning of being one less than the ten. Nine was the place where you could stop the train and get off, if you didn’t have the courage or the faith or the blind willfulness to continue to the ultimate outcome of the meaning of the suit. In the suit of the Swords, nine could mean—one of its several meanings—a wake-up call, the horror of realizing where violence and strife will lead. In the Wands it was a warning: Is this what you really want? before you reached the ambiguous burden of what your will has brought you. In the suits of the Cups and the Pentacles, it carried implications of settling for what seems best—worldly riches or solitary content—rather than pressing on to the joys of greater love that lay beyond.

  Diana had seen danger around her. Not from Phil, she had said, and had smiled.

  Why am I so ready to believe the spread that tells me he is the whisperer in the dark of the Glendower Building, while my mind balks at the spread that tells me he isn’t?

  Maddie touched the insulated lunch box in which she carried her CDs—the party’s hostess, Mrs. Buz, had promised her a live band but Maddie knew far better than to trust a client’s assurances about anything. She fished out Wind on the Water , though it was too noisy in the train to play it, or anything, on her Discman. Gazed for a time at that grainy shot of the craggy, thoughtful face, the kitten he’d chosen to have photographed with him.

  If the building isn’t haunted, Phil may be a lunatic. If it is, Tessa is probably in danger. Or am I just ready to believe the worst of him because I’m looking for a reason to run back into my garden and slam the gate? Keep your distance, pal, or I’ll sic my hawk on you.

  FOUR SONS AND A GRANDSON of Mrs. Buz were waiting at the Westhampton station in an enormous SUV to drive Maddie to their mother’s house. Maddie put the CD—and the subject of its composer—aside, and the rest of the evening passed in a kaleidoscope of music, chatter and enough lamb and couscous to feed the Turkish army. Resplendent in green and gold, she danced for a wildly appreciative audience, the men springing up to dance with her—or flipping showers of dollar bills onto her head in the far-more-polite Middle Eastern fashion of tipping the dancer—and the women howling and ululating behind their hands.

  As every dancer of Maddie’s acquaintance could attest, private parties were always very much of a tossup. She’d performed at birthday and retirement gigs where she’d come away with liquor and worse things in her hair, swearing she’d quit dancing for good. There were always people who treated dancers as if they’d just jumped out of a cake or stepped off the walkway at some Jersey strip joint. Like all her dancer friends, she’d had her share of occasions where she’d showed up and found twenty-five drunks and only a boom box for the promised “sound system,” and had ended up having to change into her costume in the pantry.

  But this, for once, was the other kind of party. Completely apart from a five-hundred-dollar check and nearly half that much again in tips, Maddie enjoyed herself thoroughly. There was always something infinitely delightful about dancing with a live band—oud, mizmar, doumbek and accordion—and about dancing for an audience that knew the kind of dancing they were looking at, rather than Omaha tourists out to see belly rolls. As always, the dancing freed her mind, washing away any concerns about Phil, or Sandy, or whether or not she’d ever be able to love and trust again or if she wanted to try.

  The energies that rule the cosmos aren’t going anywhere, Diana had said. There is no way that you can miss what you’re intended to have.

  At times like this, it made great sense to Maddie that there were sects of Hinduism that saw the guiding god of the universe as a dancer.

  Afterward, Mrs. Buz and her sisters packed up several pounds of leftover couscous, kebabs, lokum and sarigi burma and begged her to take it away with her “for your little roommate and your friends”—during the course of the evening the hostesses had gotten out of her all about Tessa and Phil. “You are too skinny—you need flesh to dance!”

  Then they all hugged her, jammed more tips into her hands and put her in the family SUV to take her to the station for the last train to the city.

  It was now midnight, freezing cold and snowing. It was the twelfth of January, the small hours of the year, when light and spring seem furthest away. A cold moon winked through bitter scuds of cloud. Almost no one was on the late train back to the city, leaving Maddie time and quiet to slip Wind on the Water into her Discman, and put the earphones over her ears.

  Maddie had heard it said many times that you can’t hide on the dance floor. She didn’t know enough about music to know if it revealed the inner soul to the same degree—Richard Wagner at least seemed to be proof that one could compose exquisite melodies and still be a class-A prick—but if evil lurked in Phil Cooper’s inner soul, it certainly didn’t come out in his art.

  Mostly piano, though he also played both mandolin and guitar, sometimes—according to the liner notes—multiple-tracking all three. He also played harpsichord, the light, jangly notes flowing into a style like jeweled ragtime. The music itself was beautiful, melodic, sometimes simple and sometimes complex, and absolutely nothing like anything either commercial or modern that Maddie h
ad ever heard.

  It delighted her, and she knew instinctively that it was too odd to be marketed as pop, too melodic to be what currently passed for classical style, and too unpretentiously old-fashioned for any of the New Wave stations she’d heard.

  It was a beautiful anomaly, and it no longer surprised her that Phil was scratching to make ends meet.

  Nor was it strange that he was getting a ration of grief over it from an elderly contractor in Tulsa.

  She turned the jewel case over, regarded the harsh features and the gently smiling dark eyes. You can’t learn about him through the cards , Diana had said. It’s about where he fits into your life, not where you fit yourself into his .

  The last song on the disk was called “Step Off the Edge and Fly.” Something in the soaring cascades of notes told her that he understood.

  You can’t learn about him through the cards. The only way was the real way, the hard way everybody did it: putting in the time, putting out your heart, and seeing how you felt about it at the end of every day.

  PENN STATION WAS NEARLY deserted—hard, flat surfaces echoing coldly the voices of those few unfortunate travelers still en route to someplace or other at one-thirty on a Sunday morning in January. Though it was only a few blocks, Maddie got a cab to the apartment on Thirty-second Street. “And another thing,” the driver ranted at her the moment she shut the door, “there were videotapes of Kennedy’s assassination, and Bobby Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s. How come there wasn’t a videotape of John Lennon’s assassination? You tell me that!”

  It was fortunately a short ride. Maddie paid him and he zoomed away without pausing for breath.

  When she slipped through the door of the apartment as silently as she could, the first thing she did was look at the couch. Her stomach sank with dread.

  No Tessa. The bedding hadn’t even been made up.