Carnival

by Kory M. Shrum

  Piper pulled out one of the vinyl records and opened it on her lap. It was Sam Cooke, Portrait of a Legend. She fingered the edges. She frowned at him. “Why is this one so much newer than the others?”

  “It’s a replacement.” He scraped the last bite of noodles off his plate into his mouth. “Lou—if I gave you the name of someone—no. Shit. I don’t have a name.”

  Lou turned toward him, clearly intrigued.

  King scratched his jaw. “If I said find the man who killed Rita Cross, would you be able to do it?”

  She knew what he meant. “Yes.”

  “Really? That would be enough?”

  “When I found Fish, all I was thinking was ‘Give me someone who kills women and thinks he’s getting away with it.’”

  King couldn’t hide his surprise. “Huh. That’s impressive.”

  “Who’s Rita Cross?” Lou asked.

  “A woman who was murdered. Do you…” He searched for a word. “Get any vibes about where her killer might be?”

  Konstantine be damned. If the killer was around, he deserved to answer for his crimes.

  “No,” Lou said.

  “No what?”

  “Nothing is coming up.”

  King took another drink of his soda, aware that it was way too late at night to be drinking this shit. “What does that mean?”

  “He could be dead.”

  He is being dealt with. Wasn’t that what Konstantine promised?

  Piper looked up from the record. “How does Mel seem to you?”

  King thought of Mel’s anger as she told him to back off earlier that day.

  “She’s okay.”

  Piper shook her head. “See, no. I can’t be the only one who sees it. Something is getting to her. When I showed up for work the other day she was halfway to a panic attack about something, and asked me to read her cards. Spoiler, they weren’t happy cards. Then that guy came in and was giving her shit.”

  “The guy with the feather in his hat?” King asked. “The bone choker.”

  “Yes.” Piper groaned. “I don’t like him. I think he’s The Devil.”

  Lou had gone so still beside him King had to turn his head to make sure she was still there.

  He arched a brow. “Do you mean this literally or—”

  “When I read her cards, she drew The Devil. It’s a person who screws with you. Gets in your head. You know, a bad person.”

  “Or it could mean you’re lying to yourself,” King said.

  Piper crinkled her nose. “True. But I think in this case, it’s him.”

  King thought of the way Lady had growled, her nose through the slats of his balcony.

  “I’ve seen him around.” King pushed away the plate and reached for his soda. “Do you think he’s harassing her?”

  “Want me to pick him up?” Lou asked.

  King snorted. “Not yet, Cujo. We don’t know that he’s actually the problem.”

  “I wish she’d just talk to us,” Piper said. She slipped the vinyl back into the pile and stood. “Why can’t she just talk to us? We’re her friends, right?”

  King took a long drink and smacked his lips. “Some people like to handle their problems on their own. Mel is one of those people.”

  “That’s stupid. We love her and—” Piper began.

  “Are you trying to tell me you’re not one of those people? Because I seem to remember you standing in the middle of the office with tears rolling down your face, and you sure didn’t tell me what was going on.”

  Piper pushed out her lower lip. “Not fair.”

  “She knows we’re here for her,” King said. “If she needs help, she’ll ask.”

  Lou was regarding him with a cold expression that he couldn’t quite read. But it made the hair on the back of his neck rise up.

  That’s big talk coming from you, Robert, Lucy whispered in his mind. And then, Those in the most danger don’t even know how to ask.

  She’s a capable woman, King thought. Nothing is going to happen to her.

  Even to himself, he couldn’t tell if he was stating a fact or a wish.

  20

  Mel opened her side table drawer. She shoved aside the notepads, the pens, the sticky notes, the half-used tube of lip balm. She slammed the drawer shut and yanked open the next one.

  Lady barked, a sharp, alerting sound.

  “Calme,” Mel hissed.

  Lady’s ears lay flat against her head.

  King’s voice rumbled from across the hallway, but then nothing. Whatever he wanted, it wasn’t important. But this momentary interruption allowed Mel to look up from her work and see her surroundings for the first time.

  Every drawer in her kitchen and living room was pulled open. The cushions on her couch had been lifted and thrown to the floor. The pillows were strewn everywhere.

  She’d searched every inch of this apartment. Every inch.

  Her tarot cards were gone. She had a horrible feeling she knew where they were.

  No, she begged. No, I’ve just put them somewhere and forgotten.

  They’ve been in our family since 1804, Grandmamie’s voice chided. Over two hundred years, and you’ve lost them.

  “I haven’t lost them,” Mel mumbled, pulling her shawl tighter around her. And they aren’t really two hundred years old. But even as she thought this, her heart sagged in her chest.

  According to Grandmamie’s account, the original deck was given to her great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt Josephine Beloit by her mother, Simone, when Haiti won its independence. We make our own future now, she was supposed to have said. Who knew if it was true.

  As the deck was passed from woman to woman throughout the centuries, it was updated as necessary. If a card was damaged, it was redrawn by its owner’s hand. That explained the varied styles spread throughout the generations. Mel was certain that none of the cards in the current deck were original to the deck Josephine received in 1804. But she also couldn’t say they weren’t.

  The Ace of Cups and The Fool, for example, looked older than dirt.

  Grandmamie had always insisted that it wasn’t the age of the cards themselves. It was that their own spirits had imprinted on the deck, and as long as it passed through their family, it didn’t matter if they were touching the exact same card or not.

  It’s our history in the cards. It’s our blood and sweat in these cards, Grandmamie used to say. We made the magic. Don’t forget that.

  “I haven’t lost them,” she said again, and stepped out of her apartment into the hallway.

  Lady moved to follow her, but Mel held up her hand.

  “Restez.”

  Lady whined, the closest thing to an objection Mel had ever heard, but she obeyed. She fell back on her haunches, her ears lying flat against her head.

  “I just want to look one more place.”

  Mel paused outside King’s apartment door. She raised her fist to knock but then heard Lou’s voice. She hesitated. They were working. She shouldn’t bother them. And she’d already shown too much of her distress as it was. If she alerted them now that she’d misplaced her cards, they would only worry more.

  They might get involved in the situation she’d worked so hard to keep them out of.

  She crept away, trying to keep her footfall silent as she descended the steps into the shop. She checked the cubbies beneath the register. She checked—nonsensically—the register itself. She pulled back the purple curtain and gazed into the nook where she conducted her readings with the full air of Melandra the Magnificent, or whatever her customers called her behind her back.

  But there were only the two low benches, covered in bright Bedouin cushions, and the wood table resting between. She lifted the extinguished candles as if to find something hidden beneath. She ran her hand along the cushions.

  No cards. On neither her side nor the customer’s.

  She sat down with her face in her hands and pushed back against the tears. “When did he take them?” she whispered. “When di
d he have the chance?”

  It hardly mattered now, did it? It mattered only that Terry had managed to get his filthy hands on them in the first place.

  She stepped from the nook and pulled the curtain behind her.

  A ghostly face hung in the glass outside her shop door. Its skull-like visage and skeleton grin filled her with rage. Tremors shot down each arm, curling her hands into fists. Without consciously deciding to, she stormed to the door, unlocked the bolt, and pushed out into the chaotic night.

  The music rose to a nauseating cacophony. The scents of booze, piss, and fried foods hit her like a physical force, even as the cold February wind seized and tumbled her hair.

  “Give them back,” she hissed, letting the door fall closed behind her. “You goddamn bastard, give them back!”

  Terry’s grin only widened. “Give what back?”

  She shoved him hard. “Don’t bullshit me, Terry! You took ’em. I know you took ’em from my own damn pockets. Hand them over!”

  Was it when he’d slammed her against the building? She couldn’t be sure. When had she used them last? All her appointments since then had been palm readings, hadn’t they? Had she brought out her cards at all?

  Lights from the shop windows sparked in his eyes. They shone liquid black.

  He smirked, capturing her wrists in his grip. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know how much those cards mean to me. You know.”

  For the first time, she felt herself on the verge of real tears. Whether she was crying from anger, loss, or perhaps both, she couldn’t be sure.

  His smile spread too wide, revealing too many wolfish teeth. “It’s a good trick, isn’t it? You pick up a lot of tricks in prison.”

  She yanked her wrists from his grip and stormed into the throbbing crowd. She batted the drunks aside as she stepped through the streets, searching, looking for—There.

  “Donny!” Melandra called. She waved at the uniformed officer. “Donny!”

  The cop who’d been standing on the corner talking to another officer turned at the sound of his name. His black wool coat brushed his chin but didn’t hide his smile.

  “I need to report a theft!” She pointed at Terry. “Thief!”

  A rough hand seized her upper arm. It squeezed so hard she cried out.

  “Shut your mouth, woman,” he said. “Shut it now. If you tell him a damn thing you’ll never see your cards again. I’ll burn every single one, you hear me? And once I’m done with that, I’ll make a confession of my own. I’ll tell them what you did, you hear me? I’ll tell them everything. Then we can rot in prison together.”

  Melandra remembered the first time she saw Terry in Hokum’s Bar and Grill down by the interstate. She’d been only fifteen at the time, but looked old enough that Bill Hokum let her wait tables three nights a week after school. Bill had been a good friend of Grandmamie’s, and she’d trusted him to keep an eye on her girl.

  On Friday nights, men from the neighboring parish came into the bar and played pool in the back. One evening, a new boy came in with the Henrietta crowd. Mel met his eyes instantly, as if she’d felt him enter the bar.

  He’d smiled first, and she hadn’t returned it even though the heat in her face was enough to give her away.

  Something inside her prayed that would be the end of it.

  Forty minutes later, he was at the bar, placing a dollar bill on the counter. “Quarters for the jukebox, miss.”

  His voice was how she’d imagined it. Smooth bourbon poured into a glass like Grandmamie drank on Sunday nights after church.

  She’d made change without looking higher than his mouth.

  “You mute or something?” he asked, taking the quarters she’d placed where the dollar had been a minute before.

  “No, she just don’t talk to strangers,” Bob had called from the end of the bar. “Get out of here.”

  And if only that had been the end of it.

  But Terry had kept playing pool in the back with his friends. Melandra eventually began talking, and before she knew it, she was hustling half the pool halls in three parishes with him.

  If only I’d honored Grandmamie’s wish, Mel cursed herself. If only I hadn’t been such a damn fool.

  It was the biggest fight they’d had in her life, the night Grandmamie had demanded Melandra stay away from Terry. Have you learned nothing from my mistakes? Nothing at all?

  The old woman had hissed. And she was an old woman then, aging for reasons Mel wouldn’t understand until later.

  When Grandmamie got her pancreatic cancer diagnosis and was given months to live, Mel did finally honor her request. She stopped going to the bar. She stayed with her grandmother day and night until she died just seven months later.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Grandmamie had begged her in one of her last lucid moments.

  Not two hours later, Terry was in her driveway in his Firebird, beckoning her to “Come on now. You’ve had enough of all this.”

  And she had. For better or worse, she had left with him. She’d never been so desperate to escape anything in her life, not since living in the small apartment with her strung-out mother in Baton Rouge—those dark days before her mother overdosed and her life with Grandmamie began.

  She’d used to think those early days with her mother were the darkest of her life. That was only because her time with Terry had not begun. The hustling, the drinking, the vagabond way he liked to crisscross below the Mason–Dixon line. All of it culminating in the worst moment of her life.

  “Will you drive?” Terry had asked her.

  And though it was dark and pouring rain, and though she’d had a couple of drinks herself, she’d said yes.

  Damn her, she’d said yes.

  Terrence jerked his hand free of Melandra’s arm, and she found herself in the present moment again, surrounded by pushing bodies, with only her pain left to contend with.

  “Careful what you say now,” Terry spat.

  Donny pushed aside the last bodies between them and reached her, smiling. As soon as he saw her face, his smile faded.

  “Mel, what’s wrong? What’s been stolen?”

  Mel wrung her hands. She leaned her weight against the brick. “I—”

  She turned, but Terrence was gone. He’d faded into the crowd, and with him any chance that she could get her cards back tonight.

  She searched the crowd but didn’t see him. She couldn’t spot the leather hat or that single black crow feather in the sea of laughing, horrible faces. There was no hint of that wild, murderous smile.

  It didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.

  “I’m sorry,” Melandra stuttered. She forced a smile. “I’m so sorry for calling you over like that, Mr. Edwards.”

  Donny frowned, clearly taken aback by her sudden formality. “What happened?”

  Mel straightened her shoulders and released a slow breath between her teeth. “I thought someone had pickpocketed me.”

  She let out a laugh. It was supposed to sound relieved, bordering on nonchalant. But it sounded strained and nervous to her own ears. She forced a smile. “But I’ve got everything on me. So I’m very sorry to have scared you like that.”

  Donny was still frowning.

  Another sharp laugh. “You probably think I’m one of those hysterical women that cry about everything.”

  “I don’t think that.” Donny’s frown only deepened. He was searching her face. “Are you really okay?”

  “I’m fine. I feel stupid for overreacting, but I’m fine.”

  This was partially true. Mel had never felt so stupid in her life. Stupid for ever having gotten involved with Terrence in the first place.

  “Honestly,” she said with an air of conspiracy. “I haven’t been sleeping well this week. I think it’s the noise.”

  Donny favored her with a polite smile. “That’s all of us. Carnival.” He gestured at the masked faces around them. The throbbing bodies swayed, drinks spilling over from their cups
and splashing on the street.

  Mel nodded companionably. “I’m going to try to get some sleep now. Thank you for coming over when I called you. I’m so sorry if I scared you.”

  The frown was back. “You can always call on us, Mel. Always.”

  She nodded, making her apologies. Stupid. Stupid, stupid woman.

  When she reached the door of Fortunes and Fixes, a hand clamped over hers, pinning it against the handle. She wasn’t surprised. She’d known he’d stay close.

  “You’ll get your cards back when I get my money,” a voice whispered in her ear.

  She jerked her head back. She didn’t want his breath on her.

  Terrence glared down at her. “You have until Friday to pay me or I’m going to burn them. I swear to God. Just pay me and I’ll leave.”

  “How do I know you’ll really leave?” she asked. Because she was more than aware that he could stay. He could stay and haunt her for the rest of her life. What was stopping him?

  His skeleton grin was back. So many teeth.

  That’s how he’d looked that night on a backroad somewhere in west Louisiana. The rain beating down on his head and shoulders as he stared down at the road, his face bright in the headlights as the windshield wipers furiously worked back and forth across the fogging glass.

  “Did I kill her?” Mel had asked. “Did I—”

  “Stay in the car,” he’d said.

  And she had. God forgive her, she had.

  He released her hand, but not his hold on her, and he knew it. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”

  21

  King leaned back in his office chair, pressing the phone to his opposite ear. His eyes roved the sunlit office, taking in the coffee station and the red plastic chairs. Piper’s laptop was still open, the way she’d left it before stepping out to grab them sandwiches. King glanced at his watch and wondered how long he would have to wait on hold.

  “Here it is,” Sampson said finally, the line crackling with the sound of movement. Maybe it was papers shuffling or the phone brushing the collar of Sampson’s shirt. “Jeffrey Rodgers Fish. Shadyville High School, American History teacher. Sound right to you?”