So she"d told fortunes across the south and west for so many years she"d forgotten to ever make her own. Besides which, people didn"t want to know their real future. They wanted to know their imagined future, the one they cherished instead of fearing.
He was waiting for her Monday. He had her mail again, one grubby letter. Sometimes those didn"t even have money, just a simple request. Rarely begging, but she knew how to read an envelope just like she knew how to read a mark.
"Tell me," the postal inspector asked as they walked to coffee-and-tea. "What is the true secret of magic?"
In spite of herself, she laughed. "You really want to know?"
"Sure. We got time."
She heard the lie in his voice and knew that something drove this man, something invisible to her but as real as cholera in a well. "A dollar ninety-eight."
"You want me to pay you?" He sounded disgusted now.
"No, no, you don"t understand. The true secret of magic is in the numbers. You have the numbers, you have everything. Like elections, you see? It"s not the votes, it"s the counting."
"Hmm."
She went on. "Wall Street. Who makes money? The brokers, not the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who pay for the stock. Numbers are magic."
"That"s not magic. That"s... that"s economics."
"An economist can tell the future."
"But he"s not right," the postal inspector protested.
"How do you know? Anyone can call spirits from the vasty deep, but will they come?"
His eyes narrowed. "You"re twisting the question."
"Oh, a big cop like you, he never did such a thing?"
He laughed. "You must have been quite something in your day, lady."
"Ma"am," she said quietly.
"Ma"am."
"I"m still something today, sonny. I"m just something different."
A few minutes later, over their steaming mugs, he leaned toward her. "So, what do you know about my boy there?"
" Texas," she said, surprising herself. She wasn"t inclined to trust him, not a cop, especially one who wouldn"t even give her his name.
"He the one sending you those postcards?"
"Who knows?" She sipped. "All I can say is Texas. I don"t know why."
"I hope you get better at spirit calling."
Step outside on a new moon night. Walk to a park or a railroad siding, or even a rooftop, somewhere away from the street lights and the late night buses. Now look up and try to count the stars.
How many did you find? How many do you think there are?
Magic tells you that you don"t need to know, that there are as many stars as the sky can hold. Magic tells you how to find the one you want, like looking for a diamond in a mile of beach sand. Magic is the art of picking out the impossible from all the things which might be or have been. Magic is the star under which you were born.
They went on into the autumn, meeting every week or two. He badgered her, he twitted her, but he never pushed her. She came to respect him for not trying to pull the answer from her. Somehow this man with the gray suit and the badge understood at least that much about what she did.
He let her keep answering her letters. Eight dollars one week, twelve the next, once a twenty-dollar week. She put three dollars aside that week, in her coffee can, and that was after buying a pork chop at Fred Meyer"s.
Still, something drove him. His att.i.tude became slowly more urgent. She got more postcards from Dallas, all of them cryptic. Pappy whispered the answers to her, no less strange.
A textbook killing.
Hobos hidden atop the gra.s.sy hill.
Officer Tippit has three children.
She kept the answers to herself. There were some things he did not need to know. Coffee every week or two did not buy trust. Besides, he"d surely read all the Texas postcards.
In mid-November, she got another one of the postcards from Texas on a day when there were no other letters. This one had a mail order rifle ad from the Sears catalog pasted over the face. On the back it read, Why only one bullet?
She stood in the post office, looking at the card. His hand reached around and plucked it from her grasp. "You"ve received one hundred and two letters since I"ve had you under surveillance, Miss Redheart. That"s one hundred and two separate counts of postal fraud. You"ve also received twelve of these postcards from Dallas, mixed in with thirty-eight others from around the United States. A secret admirer in Texas, perhaps?"
"I"m sure I don"t know." She thought of the earnest young man in his photograph of the previous summer. "Maybe you should ask that fellow whose picture you showed me."
"I"d like to," he said. "I really would. I just don"t know who he is."
"Why did you bring him to me?"
He glanced at his shoes a moment. "Because I saw your cla.s.sified in the Oregonian. I... I received that photo in a very strange fashion. Nothing I could make sense of." He tugged it out of his pocket and turned the picture over. On the back was written 11/22/63 in the same bold, black handwriting as all her postcards. Below it was a drawing of a goblet with a line through it. He continued, "I"ve been waiting for an answer I could give someone. Something I could say."
"An answer about what?" she asked, her voice so soft she could barely hear herself.
"Why I"m so afraid of this picture."
"Big man like you, afraid of a photo?" She was sorry for the words as soon as she said them, but it was too late. His face hardened and he turned away.
Go to Dallas, said pappy plain as day just behind her ear.
The postal inspector turned back. "What?"
"My father says you should go to Dallas."
He drew a deep breath. "It"s too late, I think. You should have told me that a long time ago."
"I told you Texas, the first time we met."
He nodded. "Yes... I suppose you did."
She went home and folded brochures. It all made sense now, except the why. Something in the numbers of the world had tried to warn her of the true secret that would arrive tomorrow. A man, a gun, a bullet. She wondered if the postal inspector would board a night airmail plane and fly to Texas, looking to stop whatever might have been.
The shadows deepened in her tiny apartment, day slipping westward as the night took up its watch on the horizon"s battlements. As the first stars came out, she found her coffee can and took five of the eleven dollars out.
She hadn"t eaten steak in years, and besides, the world was going to end tomorrow, or good as. Magic was little more than grift, pappy had been dead for years, and the postal inspector had never asked her the right questions that might have saved a man"s life on November 22nd, 1963.
The boatman who would be king was going to die tomorrow. She ate well on the scant proceeds of her mail fraud and drank to his life, before stumbling home amid the memories and ghosts of night.
Maybe it was time to change her ad.
The Sweet Smell of Cherries.
by Devon Monk.
Mama"s restaurant is a greasy dive hunkered in the kind of neighborhood outsiders avoid during the day and insiders try to ignore at night. Magic isn"t what"s wrong with the neighborhood. It"s a dead zone, far enough outside the gla.s.s and lead lines that carry magic throughout the rest of Portland that it takes someone with college learning, or a h.e.l.l of a knack, to cast anything stronger than a light-off spell. Yet even without the help of magic, dark things move on these streets. Very dark and hungry things.
But I was there because Mama"s food was so cheap even I could afford to eat out once a week. A girl needed a place to get away from her job, right? This was my place. Or at least that"s what I"d been telling myself for the last month. What I didn"t like to admit was that I wasn"t sleeping so well any more, wasn"t eating so well, and lately had been having a hard time deciding if I should spend my money on rent or booze. Rent still won out (what can I say? I"m a creature of comfort and like a roof over my head), but it didn"t take a genius to see how dangerously close I was to burning out.
And burnout is a fatal sort of situation in my line of work.
Hounding magic is not for the weak of heart. Use magic, and it uses you right back. And I"d been magic"s favorite punching bag for months now. It wasn"t any one thing-I knew how to set my disburs.e.m.e.nt spells, I knew how to choose what price magic would make me pay: headache, flu, bruises, bleeding, breaks-all the old standbys. But after a year of Hounding on my own, the little pains were starting to add up.
I needed a month-h.e.l.l, I needed a week-off. I"d even settle for a full twenty-four hours blissfully free of any new ache or pain. After this job, just this last one, I"d take some time off.
Yeah, right. I"d been saying that for a year.
"You eat, Allie girl." Mama, five foot nothing and tough as shoe leather, dropped a plate heaped with potatoes, eggs, and onions on the table in front of me. I hadn"t even ordered yet.
"Someone skip out on the bill?"
She pulled a coffee cup out of her ap.r.o.n, set it on the table, and filled it with coffee that had been sitting on the burner so long it had reduced down to a bitter acid syrup.
"I know you come tonight. You meet with Lulu for job."
Apparently this Lulu-my might-be client-had a big mouth. It irritated me that she had spoken to Mama. I"d been doing my best to keep a low profile since coming back to town, but really, who was I kidding? Everyone knew my father-or knew his company. He was responsible for the technology that allowed magic to go public: all those lead and gla.s.s glyph-worked lines that ran beneath the city and caged in the buildings, all those gold-tipped storm rods that sucked magic out of the wild storms that came in off the Pacific Ocean. A modern miracle worker, my dad. The Thomas Edison of magic. And an empty-hearted, power-hungry b.a.s.t.a.r.d I was doing my best to avoid.
I shoveled a fork full of potatoes into my mouth and almost moaned. I was hungry. Really hungry. I had no idea how long it had been since I last ate. Maybe yesterday? Night before?
"It"s really good." And it was. The best I"d ever eaten here. Which might make me suspicious, if I were the suspicious type. And I was.
She scowled. "You surprised Mama cook you good food?"
I thought about telling her well, yes, since I"d never tasted anything here that wasn"t too greasy, too spicy, or too cold before, it did seem strange that she"d be waiting for me on this particular evening with a plate of killer hash browns.
I took a drink of coffee to stall while I thought up a convincing lie. The coffee hit the back of my throat in a wave of bitter and burned, and I suddenly wished I had about a quart of water to wash it down with. Forget the lie. Mama was the kind of woman who would see right through it anyway.
"I"m not surprised, just suspicious. What"s so unusual about this Lulu friend of yours that I"m getting the special treatment?"
Mama held very still, coffee pot in one hand, her other hand in her ap.r.o.n pocket and quite possibly on the gun she carried there.
I kept eating. I watched her out of the corner of my eye while trying to look like it didn"t matter what she said. But my gut told me something was wrong around here-or maybe just more wrong than usual.
Finally, Mama spoke. "She is not my friend. You Hound for her, Allie girl. You Hound."
So much for keeping a low profile. I wanted to ask her why she thought I should take the job, but she stormed off toward the kitchen yelling at one of her many sons who helped her run the place.
If I were a smart girl, I"d eat the food, leave some cash, and get out of Dodge. If I paid my electricity bill short, I could probably make rent without this job. I could take my day or maybe a whole week off right now. There were too d.a.m.n many crazy people in this town who had access to magic, and my gut was telling me this whole Lulu thing was a bad idea. I swigged down as much of the coffee as I could stand and ate one last bite of potatoes. I put a ten on the table, hoping it would cover the bill.
That was when the door swung open, and in strolled Lulu.
How did I know it was her? Let"s say it was the way she stopped, like a child caught with one hand in her mother"s purse, when she got a look at me. Let"s also say that I didn"t even have to Hound her to smell the stink of used magic, the sickening sweet cherry smell of Blood magic to be exact, that clung to her thrift store sun dress. From the gla.s.sy look in her eyes, she"d been mixing Blood magic with something that had her soaring high out of her head.
Blood magic was not something I wanted to deal with. Not today. Not any day. Time to cut out and call it good.
I walked toward her. Since I am a tall woman, six feet barefoot, and since I also had on three-inch heels, I towered over Lulu, who probably clocked in at about five-five and maybe a hundred pounds. I had the physical advantage, which meant I had the power of intimidation on my side.
Hooray for me.
"You"re Lulu," I told her.
She did the one thing I didn"t expect. She whispered a soft mantra-a jump-rope rhyme-and moved her left hand in an awkward zag. She might be an awkward caster, but she was fast. I didn"t even have time to pull magic, much less a defense, before she and I were surrounded by some sort of sound-dampening spell. The clatter of dishes and Mama"s constant yelling weren"t gone, they just sounded very far away.
A sheen of sweat spread across Lulu"s face and dripped down her chest. Along with the smell of sweet cherries, I caught a whiff of a vanilla perfume that wasn"t doing any good to cover up the stink of her terror.
"He already told you, didn"t he? Sent you to find me?"
Great. She was one of the crazy ones.
"No one"s sent me anywhere. I"m not going to take the job," I said. "Get yourself another Hound-try the phone book and the net."
Her eyes, which were so brown they were almost black, narrowed. "You don"t even know what the job is."
I didn"t answer. I actually did know what the job was-or rather I knew what she had told me it was over the phone. Her dog had been lost, she thought kidnapped, maybe by an ex-roommate. I thought it would be easy money. I thought wrong.
"I"m out." I said. "Nice meeting you." I tried to move past her, which shouldn"t be a problem because even though we were in a quiet zone, it wasn"t a solid sort of thing and would unravel as soon as I got out of her range. But she was quick, that crazy Lulu.
She took my hand and pressed her palm to mine. Her hand was hot-fever hot. I felt the cool press of paper, maybe a photo, between us. Lulu smiled, shook my hand as though we were old friends, and let the spell drop away. She wavered, just slightly, and I wondered if I was going to have to catch her before she pa.s.sed out.
"Sorry it didn"t work out," she said. And there was more she didn"t say, in her body language, in her eyes. There was "please help me."
Sweet h.e.l.ls. n.o.body should love their dog that much.
I gave her a noncommittal nod and walked out the door, but not before sticking the photo in my pocket.