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Maybe I should have been working harder on solving this mystery, but right then, I was tired, and only wanted to pretend everything was normal…
…and hope like hell that inspiration would strike me the next day.
8
Where There’s a Will
I didn’t know about inspiration, but I realized the next morning — after I’d woken up earlier than usual and knew I’d be dressed and ready for the day long before I needed to be at the shop — that I might as well put my unexpected extra time to some good use.
In this case, that meant breaking out my Tarot cards and seeing if they could help point me in the direction I needed to go.
Calvin had already left for work; he was doing as many Saturday shifts as possible before I went on maternity leave, just so there wouldn’t be too much resentment about him working mostly weekdays once I was home with the baby. Normally, I would have been glad for the extra peace and quiet — it wasn’t that my husband bothered me when I was in my office, but sometimes simply the presence of an additional person in the house could disrupt my readings — but right then, I didn’t know for sure whether the cards could help me at all, or whether it would turn out I was just as blocked from receiving their messages as I seemed to be from everything else psychic or spiritual.
Still, I lit some incense and the tea lights that sat on my altar, and breathed in and out for a moment, doing my best to let the calming perfume of the white sage incense settle into my soul and bring me the clarity I so desperately needed. Sadie followed me into the room and settled herself in her bed, but she was always around when I performed my readings, and having a dog in the space was nothing like having a person there.
Two separate questions tumbled through my mind, both of them important, both of them inextricably linked.
What made Jeffrey Sellers decide to blackmail Archie? And who really killed him?
I shuffled the cards and shuffled them…and shuffled them. Usually, I’d experience a little twinge or tingle when I got to the right card, a gentle sign from the universe that it was time to stop shuffling and make a pull at that particular moment, but I didn’t seem to be receiving any such signals today.
Even though I could already feel my neck beginning to tense, I told myself it was all right, that this wasn’t the first time when it appeared the universe wasn’t quite ready to communicate with me.
True enough, but after losing my auras, this was not what I wanted to be dealing with right now.
Any chance you could tell your “medicine” to take a hike for a bit? I asked the baby, and set down the cards I held so I could place a hand against my belly. It was just starting to swell in earnest, although a casual onlooker still probably wouldn’t have guessed I was pregnant, might have only thought I needed to lay off the pizza and sweets for a while.
No response, of course, because it was too early for the baby to really start kicking, but I had to hope he or she was listening.
I picked up the cards again and began shuffling them, telling myself I wasn’t going to wait for a sign, but was just going to keep mixing them together for at least another minute. Then I could go ahead with my card pull.
Which I did, taking three cards and laying them down on my altar, on top of the pretty autumn-hued cloth I used at this time of year. In a few weeks, I’d switch it out for my Halloween one, with its ravens and black roses, but for now, the backs of my Everyday Witch cards stared up at me from a backdrop of fall leaves.
There was my old friend, the Ten of Swords, with the hapless witch lying face down with all ten of those blades sticking right out of her back.
So…betrayal of some sort, which didn’t even require a signal from the universe to be clear. Generally, getting poisoned was a pretty good sign someone had betrayed you.
If, as I’d speculated earlier, Jeffrey Sellers had been poisoned at all, and hadn’t merely been struck down by an untimely heart attack or stroke.
The second card was the Moon. It was often a trickier one to interpret, mostly because it dealt with things hidden, sometimes illusion or deception. Again, this didn’t seem too out of place when we were dealing with a murder, because right now, the truth of who might be at fault was as obscured as the moon on a cloudy night.
The third card was the Fool, reversed. A lot of the time, I didn’t do reversals in my readings, but in this case, I knew the card was upside down for a reason. The upright Fool meant new beginnings, faith in the universe — symbolized by the literal “leap of faith” the person depicted on the card was making — but reversed, it could mean chaos, folly, lack of judgment.
Had Jeffrey Sellers made a colossal error in judgment?
Well, most people would probably say that deciding to blackmail an innocent man was a terrible error in judgment, but I had to believe something else was going on here. Exactly what, I didn’t know yet, but as I scooped up the cards, I couldn’t help feeling just a bit relieved. I hadn’t gotten a clear sign that these were the cards I’d been meant to pull, but at the same time, it had been a consistent enough reading, one that seemed to tell me I was still getting signals from the universe, even if I was a bit slow about receiving those messages.
Considering how much I’d been doubting myself lately, I’d take it.
Because it was a warm, friendly Saturday in early October, the shop was busier than it had been the preceding few days. We had several tour buses stop by, along with a lot of foot traffic, including Joyce Lewis, Henry’s wife. She dropped off a box of her wonderful scented candles and looked as though she wanted to chat, but we were just busy enough that it wasn’t really feasible. I introduced her to Melanie, thanked her for the candles, and said I hoped we’d be able to talk the following week.
Otherwise, not much of note occurred, although Calvin texted me early in the afternoon to tell me he’d learned a few things about Jeffrey Sellers and that we could talk more when we both got home that evening. I was a little disappointed we couldn’t talk then, although I told myself it would be better to wait to have that conversation when we were alone. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Melanie, but I certainly didn’t know her well enough yet to take her into my confidence.
And Victoria came by in the late afternoon, looking a bit strained. Because Melanie had just stepped out to take her afternoon break, I didn’t have to worry about her overhearing anything the two of us said.
“Everything okay?” I asked, and Victoria gave a brief nod.
“Sure,” she replied, and I raised an eyebrow, knowing that she wasn’t telling me the complete story.
