The River Widow(4)
The cards were mainly props, but they sometimes gave her insights, and she read them as best she could.
In this case, the first two cards she turned for the handsome man showed favorable things. But now she rested her hand on the most important card, the third one, the card that would pull all three together and focus the reading into a cohesive picture.
She turned it, and a stone dropped into the vat of her stomach. She had to hold herself from instinctively drawing away.
The hanged man, reversed. Upright, the card showed a male figure hanging upside down by one foot, tied by a leather strap to a living wood gallows. The man’s hands were bound, but his expression as he faced outward was peaceful, not in apparent pain. Even upright, the hanged man was the most confusing and mysterious card in the deck. He could represent any number of things, but reversed, he signified selfishness of the worst kind, self-interest of the greatest magnitude.
Adah looked into the handsome man’s lovely doe-brown eyes, then gazed back at the three cards before her, and finally, steeling herself, perused his face again. There was something there below his skin, something seething beneath the surface, a secret, something not exactly frightening, but unsettling anyway. His face was peaceful, yet there was a twitch on the outside corner of his left eye, one he didn’t seem to notice, or else ignored. Jessamine had once told her that everyone had a secret, and sometimes the cards revealed it. What was this man’s? What secret could command such power?
As she studied him, her back instinctively stiffened, and the stone inside her stomach dug in deeper, but she didn’t hesitate to tell him what she saw.
She centered her head and her gaze. “Nothing is as it seems here. All the rest, all the previous things I’ve related to you—the comfortable life, the healing, the happy home—it’s but a fa?ade. I think you’re quite miserable. And as for your future—I’m sorry I can’t say . . .”
He held her stare. Then, slowly, a smile began to form at the corners of his delicious mouth, spreading to encompass his entire face. He had a thoughtful face, a compassionate face, and this confused Adah. He had pulled the hanged man, reversed, as his final and most important card. It had never before come up this way. A reading had never affected Adah this way before, either. Once in a while she’d felt moved—as though something true and helpful had been revealed—but not normally. This reading, however, was powerful. A gut reaction told her the bad signs were true.
The man’s face became relaxed, the skin looser, as if he was relieved instead of angered by her reading. He said, “You’re right.”
She had hoped she wasn’t. Adah let her eyes fall to the tabletop and pushed the three cards together.
“Is that it?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
He hadn’t moved. Adah glanced up. “Please don’t ask for another reading. I can’t do another one until some time has passed.”
His voice was mild, quiet, summer wind–like. “Why would I ask for another reading if I believe the first one?”
“Many people do.” She glanced around the interior of the tent she had worked in since Jessamine died, then faced him again. “Times are tough for most people, and I hate to give out dire predictions. On the other hand, I relay the truth. Often people don’t like what they hear, so they ask me, sometimes even beg me, for another reading.”
His eyes softened. “I’m fine. I’ll just pay you and be on my way.”
In her confused state, Adah had almost forgotten to ask for payment. Normally she requested a nickel or a dime, but she wanted more from him. “Twenty-five cents, then.”
Lester stood, reached into his right hip pocket, and left on the table a crisp and neatly folded one-dollar bill.
She breathed out gratitude that he was gone. He was a different breed of man—part self-assurance, part curiosity, and part pure animal need, which unnerved her.
Adah always made note of her transactions in a ledger, and after this one she listed: Handsome man, many secrets. $1.00.
Later that night as she looked over her ledger, her eyes fell on the line occupied by the man she would later know as Lester, and she underlined his entry with a wavy stream of ink. Something about him called to her with a hooked finger and an alluring smile.
If only he had never come back.
In deeper water now, she could no longer reach the bottom and went under again. Her head surfaced for a moment, and she pulled in a desperate breath, then was sucked under once more. Beneath the surface, it was as if all the muddy, swollen streams were joining in and magnifying the flood—her muffled, thick grave. She pushed back up with her arms and legs and found air, just as something hit her hard in her bruised ribs. Debris, logs, branches, pieces of metal, plywood, tires, and railroad ties flew along the surface; she grabbed for something to hang on to, held tight for mere moments before it got free of her and then vanished like some phantom friend.
Hit again, this time on her shoulder, she clutched a slablike thing that seemed to be a door and clung to it. She worked to slide up on it at least partway, the air hitting her trembling body with a blast of cold that took her breath away. But she was above the water now, and though still flying downstream in the deluge, she had a chance. She could hear people shouting, either nearby on the banks or also caught and flowing with the river to nowhere. Maybe they would all eventually end up in the Mississippi and then the broad, wild sea.