The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  That was the last thing out of my mouth until the car stopped.

  Grandi slowed and turned onto a gravel road. We were miles from Berdache, miles from Sedona, miles from anywhere. All I could see in the headlights were rocks and dirt and, here and gone in an instant, the glowing eyes of something watching us from the scrub by the side of the road.

  Clarice whimpered. I couldn’t blame her. Maybe I even joined in, I don’t know.

  Any second now we’d pull behind a convenient bluff and there would be the shallow pit dug earlier in the day. Or maybe just a pair of shovels. Or an abandoned well or mine shaft.

  We reached the end of the road.

  There was the bluff, just as I’d expected. And on the other side of it, not a hole. A house.

  It was one story, ranch style. Not much bigger than a mobile home. There was no mailbox, no yard, no car in the driveway. No driveway, for that matter, unless you counted the road that simply stopped thirty yards away.

  “Inside,” Grandi said.

  He didn’t bother pulling out his gun again. Where were we going to run to?

  We followed him into the house, the woman a few steps behind us. She wasn’t taking any chances. Her gun was pointed at my back.

  The house was a mess. It looked like a run-down spring break rental after two dozen college kids were through with it. There were crumpled soda cans and junk food wrappers everywhere, and the air smelled of cigarettes and garbage someone should have taken out weeks ago.

  “Don’t tell me you kidnapped us because you’re too cheap to hire Merry Maids,” I said.

  Grandi finally came alive.

  He smiled.

  “Hey, that’s not a bad idea.”

  He went into the kitchen and came back with some plastic bags. He handed one to me, one to Clarice. One he kept for himself.

  “Start cleaning,” he said.

  When we were done picking up trash, Grandi brought me a broom and told me to sweep.

  I held up my hands. Handcuffs still dangled from the wrists.

  “That’d be a lot easier without these.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Grandi said. And he shoved the broom into my hands and walked off.

  Clarice was sent into the bathroom with a roll of paper towels.

  “Ew,” I heard her say.

  “Shut up and scrub,” the woman snapped.

  “Geez, Grandi—we’re in Arizona and you need us for slave labor?” I said. “I thought that’s what illegal immigrants were for.”

  He didn’t bother answering.

  He was trying to find the 409.

  I started sweeping down the hall, moving closer to the red-headed woman.

  Closer.

  Closer…

  Almost close enough to bring the broom handle down on her hand, then up again into her face.

  “Back off or you’ll be sweeping up your own guts,” she said.

  I started sweeping up the hall, moving farther away from the red-headed woman.

  Farther.

  Farther…

  “All right. That’s enough,” Grandi announced.

  I leaned my broom against the wall. “Can we wait till tomorrow to start on the lawn? I’m exhausted.”

  Grandi pulled out his gun again. “End of the hall, room on the right. Go.”

  I didn’t move.

  Would they have plastic sheeting ready back there? A tarp? Something to keep the splatter off the walls?

  No. They had miles of darkened desert all around. Why make a mess in the house? The one you just cleaned?

  None of this made any sense.

  Grandi hadn’t been pointing his gun anywhere in particular, but he corrected that now by aiming at my face.

  “Go.”

  I went.

  The room was small and bare. A single light bulb overhead, nothing on the walls, no furniture other than a ratty mattress in one corner and, across from it, a bucket.

  I stayed as far away from the bucket as possible.

  The room’s one window was barred, and there was a padlock on the outside of the door.

  Grandi took off our handcuffs—while his sister covered us from the doorway, of course—then stepped outside and locked us in.

  “Oh my god, Alanis,” Clarice said the second the door was closed. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know. This isn’t how I expected things to play out.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Not spring cleaning, that’s for sure.” I waved a hand at the room around us. “Obviously this is Grandi’s private Guantánamo. I assume he sweats people here from time to time. Maybe when he’s looking for leads on someone who’s jumped bail. Maybe when he wants to give someone a choice: back to jail or…I don’t know. Whatever they’ve got to give.”

  “But why bring us here?”

  “To show he’s serious about me leaving town?” I said with a shrug.

  “It doesn’t sound like you really think that.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Clarice. Grandi suddenly starts threatening me, then he suddenly stops, then he suddenly hauls us off at gunpoint. I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe he’s nuts.”

  “That’s a comforting thought.”

  I walked to the door and brought an ear in close. I could hear Grandi and the woman talking in the living room, but they kept their voices low and I could only catch the occasional word. One kept coming up again and again, though. From both of them.

  Mom.

  If it had been mother, I might have assumed they were talking about mine. But not mom. That was too informal, too personal.

  “I think that woman might be Grandi’s sister,” I said.

  “Jesus. What a family.”

  “Judge not. What are we, the Huxtables?”

  “Who the hell are the Huxtables?”

  “They’re…never mind.”

  Clarice started to sit on the mattress, then changed her mind when she got a good look at it. She kicked it instead.

  “Maybe this is why Athena left the Five & Dime to you,” she said. “She knew it’d suck you into all this shit.”

  I barked out a bitter little laugh. “That’d be so perfect, wouldn’t it? Her last will and testament is really her last scam, and I’m the…Jesus.”

  “You’re the Jesus?”

  “No. I think you might be right. I’m the mark.”

  “Oh, come on, Alanis. I was only joking.”

  I wasn’t.

  I’d thought maybe my mother had forgiven me.

  Ha. Now there’s a joke.

  She was getting her revenge.

  Mom had known she was dying, so she had started squaring things away.

  She’d made sure Clarice was legally emancipated. There’d be no social workers or foster homes for her to run away from.

  Fly free, little bird…and maybe starve. That’s up to you.

  So that was one daughter taken care of, as Mom would see it. What to do about the other? The one who’d freed herself?

  To me she left everything—except an explanation. Which pretty much guaranteed that Clarice would hate my guts. And when I came to collect my inheritance, I’d find all Mom’s schemes brewing and the Grandis seething about it and a police detective sniffing around the whole rotten mess. If I was still up to my old ways—her ways—I’d slide right into her place and right into her troubles. And if I’d gone straight, maybe this was just the setup that would bend me crooked again.

  She’d prove I was no better than her by helping me become her. And if I didn’t go along with it—well, maybe I’d just get myself killed.

  You had to give it to her: The woman was good. Even dead, she could still out-con me.

  Time passed. We brooded.

  “
Alanis,” Clarice eventually said, “I want you to be honest with me.”

  “All right.”

  “Are the Grandis going to kill us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But if you had to guess—?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Because you’re hoping I’ll say something different.”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “Then don’t tell me to be honest.”

  I listened to the voices down the hall rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall. After a while, I thought I heard more than just the two I recognized. Perhaps another man. Perhaps another woman.

  Maybe that’s what Grandi had been making us wait for.

  The burial detail.

  There were footsteps in the hall.

  “They’re coming,” I said.

  Clarice cringed against the far wall.

  I positioned myself in the middle of the room, between her and the door. As if that would help. But it seemed like the thing to do.

  The door opened, and Grandi’s sister came in. Still with her gun, of course.

  Grandi was behind her. With a folding table.

  He walked up to me, set up the table, then left the room. He returned almost immediately with two folding chairs.

  “Hell of a time for poker,” I said.

  He unfolded the chairs. One he pushed over to me. The other he left on the opposite side of the table.

  “All right,” Grandi said loudly. Not to me—to someone out in the hall.

  There was a long, ominous silence. Then she came into the room. Slowly, almost shuffling.

  The most adorable little grandma you ever saw.

  She was short but plump, a little dumpling in a powder-blue pantsuit. She had a hunched back and wrinkly wattles that swayed with each step and hair permed up into a wavy-gray mushroom cloud erupting from her head.

  She set her white handbag on the table, eased herself into the chair across from me, then looked up at Grandi.

  “Now get out,” she said.

  “But Mom—”

  “Get. Out. Anthony. Thomas.”

  I think it was the Anthony Thomas that did the trick. My mother never pulled the First Name-Middle Name thing with me—which of my names would she even use?—but I’ve seen it work wonders in “normal” families.

  Grandi’s blocky face reddened, and he stalked out of the room.

  “You, too, Rosalee,” the old woman said.

  Grandi’s sister knew better than to argue. Instead, she spoke to me.

  “Touch one hair on her head, and I’ll feed you to the coyotes in pieces.”

  Then out she went, too.

  “And close the goddamn door!” her mother barked after her.

  Now I knew why they’d made us clean.

  Mrs. Grandi looked me up and down. The up part seemed to displease her. The down part filled her with disgust.

  “So,” she said. “You’re the nosy bitch who’s been causing all the trouble.”

  A cussing granny’s kind of funny in a bad movie.

  Isn’t that cute? Baba Phoebe called the stuck-up father-in-law “assmunch”…and now she’s rapping about his tiny penis!

  It’s not funny in real life. Not when you look into the little old lady’s little old eyes and see that the blankness there isn’t just cataracts. Whatever soul the crone ever had is as withered and warped as the rest of her.

  The Grandis wouldn’t spare Clarice and me because Mom was in the house. They’d just try a little harder not to make a mess.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am the nosy bitch.”

  Mrs. Grandi held a trembling claw out toward the chair beside me.

  “You hoping I’ll break my neck staring up at you like this? Sit.”

  I sat.

  Behind me I could hear Clarice moving around to the right to get a better view of the two of us.

  The old lady ignored her.

  “There were times,” she said, “when I thought I was going to have this conversation with your mother. But I never did. Live and let live—that worked for us.”

  “Until it didn’t.”

  Mrs. Grandi shrugged. “It didn’t work for someone. But I’m here to talk about you. You know what we do, right? My family?”

  “I know your son’s a bail bondsman and some of your other relatives read tarot cards and as a sideline there’s a little extortion and blackmail.”

  “‘Some of my other relatives read tarot cards,’” Mrs. Grandi sneered. “I have two sisters, four daughters, three nieces, and one granddaughter in the business. You get your fortune told in Arizona or New Mexico, even money it’s one of us who’s doing it. And it all started from one shop—the one I opened thirty-two years ago.”

  I held my applause.

  “What about the blackmail?” I said. “Did you start that, too?”

  “I don’t see you in a habit, Mother Teresa. What is it you do wherever you come from?”

  “I’m in telemarketing.”

  Mrs. Grandi grimaced to let me know what she thought of that.

  “And do you want to stay in telemarketing?” she asked.

  “I’d certainly prefer it to what I’m doing right now.”

  The old woman snorted.

  “Jokes,” she said with another grimace to show what she thought of those. “My son thinks you’re—”

  She touched her forehead, then raised her hand high, the fingers fluttering.

  “A bird?” I said.

  “Crazy.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t like dealing with crazy people. They’re unpredictable.”

  “Well, then you’d better—”

  “And I don’t like smartasses, either.”

  I didn’t finish my thought.

  “I hear you’ve reopened the White Magic Five & Dime,” Mrs. Grandi said. “Do you even read tarot?”

  “I’m learning.”

  “What do you think so far?”

  “It’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Bullshit.”

  “And you don’t think it’s bullshit now?”

  “I don’t think it has to be.”

  “Do you believe the cards foretell the future?”

  “I believe they can be used to identify and explore possible outcomes.”

  “Don’t double-talk me. Do you believe the cards foretell the future?”

  “Well…I wouldn’t say foretell so much as foreshadow.”

  The old woman swiped a hand at me. “Bah!”

  “Look,” I said. “If you want me to say it, I’ll say it: The cards aren’t just a scam. There’s something there if you really look.”

  A small, sly smile tightened the sagging corners of Mrs. Grandi’s mouth.

  “There we go. Was that so hard to admit? Wait. Never mind. I know the answer.” The woman cocked her head, and her smile went a little wider. “Now you’re starting to wonder if the old dingbat’s senile, am I right?”

  “I just don’t know why you would care what I think about tarot.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  Mrs. Grandi reached into her handbag and pulled out a small silver case engraved with swirling stars and crescent moons. She popped open the lid and took out a deck of tarot cards.

  “You’re going to do a reading for me. How do you like to start?”

  I glanced to my right, at Clarice.

  If this is a dream, please wake me up, the look on my face was supposed to say.

  Clarice just stared back at me.

  “Well,” I said, “first you should shuffle while thinking about what you want to ask. When you feel like you have the right words for your questi
on, say them out loud. Then give me the deck.”

  Mrs. Grandi nodded, still smiling. Her fingers may have looked like a bunch of knobby white twigs, but they shuffled the cards smoothly and quickly.

  “Oh, I know my question already. It’s very simple,” the old woman said. “Yes or no: should I have you killed?”

  She handed me the deck.

  “No,” I said.

  Mrs. Grandi squinted at me.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “That’s what the cards are going to say: no. I can feel it already. I’ve gotten really good at reading their vibe before I even deal them.”

  Mrs. Grandi reached for her handbag again.

  “Maybe I’ll just flip a coin.”

  “No!”

  The old woman froze, glaring at me.

  “I mean…let’s see how the cards play out, shall we?” I said. “The answer’s going to be no, like I said, but we ought to at least see the reasons why. Now I’m thinking we don’t need a full Celtic Cross for something this straightforward. A five-card Dilemma spread will do the trick.”

  It also had the advantage of being in Infinite Roads to Knowing. I’d read about it the day before. I’d just have to leave out one little detail.

  “Five cards. Good choice,” Mrs. Grandi said. “If most are reversed, the answer’s no. If most are right-side up, the answer’s yes.”

  “Uhhh…exactly.”

  That was the little detail.

  I started to wonder if I should have gone with the coin toss.

  I laid out five cards in a line between us, then pointed at the first two.

  “Reasons for a yes.”

  I pointed at the next two.

  “Reasons for a no.”

  I tapped the last card.

  “The most important thing to keep in mind when making your decision.”

  “All right. Get on with it.”

  “Fine. Reasons for a yes.”

  I flipped over the first card. It was right-side up for Mrs. Grandi—which meant it was reversed for the person reading the cards, and that’s what counted.

  It was a no.

  Chalk one up for mercy.

  I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding.

  “The Five of Wands reversed. A card of conflict.”

  “Five always means conflict,” Mrs. Grandi said.

  I nodded as if I knew this already and it made perfect sense.