The phone rang, and I answered it.
I know—pigeon move, right?
You look at the caller ID and it says something like VALUTECH LLC or LUXURY LIVING or (in this case) WHEELER AND ASSOC and you know what that means. Or I do, anyway. Because usually I’m the one on the other end of the line, and I only need a few minutes of your time to discuss an exciting opportunity that could radically alter your financial outlook, but it’s a limited-time offer and you’ll have to act now.
Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was professional courtesy, one call-center phone monkey to another. Maybe I was just in a “what the hell?” mood—that wasn’t uncommon.
Anyway, I picked up.
“Hello?”
“Alanis McLachlan?” a man said.
I pulled a Coke from the fridge and briefly considered leaving the phone in its place. Let the guy try to sell his time shares or hot-hot stocks to my leftover pizza and moldy tofu dogs.
“Yes.”
I popped open the can and took a drink.
“Also known as Sophie Harper?”
The old training paid off.
Never let them see you sweat, Biddle used to say.
And never let them hear you spit-take Coke all over your kitchen.
I managed to swallow.
“Yes. That’s me, too.”
“I’m calling about Athena Passalis, also known as Barbra Harper.”
The first name I’d never heard before. The second made me grit my teeth.
“Does she want money,” I asked, “or is she dead?”
I knew it had to be one or the other. Either she needed something from me or she’d never need anything again.
“Oh, um, actually…” the man stammered.
And that answered my question.
Athena Passalis, aka Barbra Harper, aka Mom had finally done the one and only thing she ever could or would do to make the world a better place. She’d left it.
Or “passed on,” as the man put it.
I let that sink in a moment. Then I asked the first question that came to mind.
“Who killed her?”
What else were you going to say when you found out someone like my mother was dead? “Was it the hepatitis she picked up in the Peace Corps”? No. “I told her donating a kidney to a stranger was crazy”? No. “I can’t believe she went back into that burning building for a cat”? No.
The man on the phone gave me another “oh, um, actually…” Then: “The police don’t know.”
“Of course they don’t,” I could have said. “Whoever finally got Mom was going to be smart.”
“What happened?” I said instead.
So the guy told me the details. There weren’t many to tell, apparently. A simple case of burglarus interruptus. You know the old story: innocent citizen finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just a tragic stroke of bad luck.
Yeah, right.
“I’m very sorry,” the man said. “I’m sure all this comes as a great shock.”
“Eh,” I said.
The guy’s name was Eugene Wheeler and he was an attorney and he did manage to give me a great shock eventually. He told me Barbra had a will, and I was in it.
When we were done talking, I hung up and walked to the kitchen table and took a seat.
My mother was dead.
My mother was dead.
My mother was dead.
I even said it out loud. “My mother is dead.”
I waited for the tears to come. All I could manage was a sigh.
I didn’t owe the woman more tears anyway. She’d had plenty from me already.
There was a debt, though. One I hadn’t been sure I’d ever repay, but now perhaps I could.
I owed my mother justice.
I called my boss.
“I’ll be out the rest of the week. My mom died.”
“You have a mom?”
“Biologically, yeah.”
“But…wait. Didn’t your mother die two years ago?”
“That was my I’m-going-to-Hawaii mother. This is my real mother.”
“You lied about that?”
“Wanna fire me?”
My boss thought it over.
“You have till the twelfth. That’s it. And no horseshit about a dead father.”
“I don’t have a father,” I said. “My mother carved me out of wood.”
I went to Berdache, which is easier said than done. When you find out you’re going there, certain questions arise.
“What the hell is Berdache?” (Answer: A town you’ve never heard of.)
“Where the hell is Berdache?” (Answer: Yavapai County, Arizona—if that helps.)
“How the hell do I get to Berdache?” (Answer: Fly to Phoenix, drive up to Sedona, keep driving into the craggy, scrub-crusted desert until you’re thinking, “Really? People actually live out here?” Stop when you see buildings.)
And last but not least, “Why the hell am I going to Berdache?” (Answer: It’s complicated.)
A longer answer:
In the rocky hills around Sedona there are “vortexes” of powerful psychic energy, they say. Of course, “they” want to take you on tours and sell you maps and books and crystals and guide you through ancient Indian ceremonies that will purge you of bad juju and excess cash.
Apparently there are vortexes around Berdache, too, but they aren’t as powerful. You can tell because the signs for them are smaller and their psychic energy is only strong enough to support half a dozen occult bookstores and New Age trinket shops. One of these stores is the White Magic Five & Dime.
According to Eugene Wheeler, it belonged to me.
My mother had died inside it.
Eugene looked like a Eugene. He had small-town anchorman helmet hair and a gray mustache and a layer of belly blubber that bubbled up out of his chinos like lava. He was wearing a corduroy jacket and a powder-blue oxford shirt and a red-and-yellow striped tie with a knot as big as my fist. I got the feeling he’d looked and dressed like this since he was eight, mustache included. Maybe if his parents had called him Rocco he would’ve turned out differently. But they’d made him a Eugene, and that’s destiny.
There’s a reason people don’t name their kids Eugene anymore.
This particular Eugene had a small storefront office on Berdache’s main drag. read the sign out front, but the associates were either on vacation or imaginary.
Eugene couldn’t work up much enthusiasm when I walked in and introduced myself. On the phone, he’d played up the advantages of “monetizing” my new assets. Selling them, in other words—with a percentage of the revenue going to the executor, of course. Him.
But no. Instead I’d come to look everything over before deciding what to do.
Some people hate it when you do that. Con men, for instance. And your average, everyday, ordinary businessman, which is what Eugene Wheeler looked like.
Sign here, he said.
And here.
And here and here and here annnnnnd…here.
Now sign this and initial this and don’t forget to date that and would you mind giving a blood sample?
It took two hours, mostly because I always read everything I sign. Always. Everything. I don’t put my name on a Christmas card until I’ve double-checked the fine print on the back.
“Sorry this is taking so long,” I said.
Eugene tried to smile. “No problem. You’re doing exactly what I tell all my clients to do.”
The difference being they never actually do it.
I went back to reading.
When every here, here, here, and there had been signed and dated and sprinkled with holy water, I was the proud owner of not just the White Magic Five & Dime but the apartment above it and the black Cadillac behind it and the $45,246.79 in the bank up the road. I could go back to my crappy Chicagoland one-bedroom richer than I’d ever been in my life.
But I wasn’t done in Berdache just yet. There was one more bit of business to attend to—one I couldn’t clear up by simply signing on the dotted line.
“Anything new on my mother’s murder?” I asked.
Eugene winced. He’d still been trying to slide by with references to her “passing.” So much less murdery.
“No, not that I’ve heard,” he said. “I’m sure it’s our police department’s number-one priority, though. A nice, respectable lady attacked in her place of business—that’s thrown quite a fright into people, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
A nice, respectable lady?
I studied Eugene’s face for any trace of sarcasm. I didn’t find any.
“How well did you know my mother?” I asked.
“Not very. I mean, I knew her, of course. There are only five thousand people in Berdache. I know everybody. But…” He shrugged. “Some better than others.”
“So you never did business with her?”
“No. Not until about three weeks ago. That’s when she came to see me about a will.”
“Did she say why she suddenly wanted one?”
“Oh, she gave the usual reasons—reaching a certain age, wanting to be sure her affairs were in order. But you know you’re never too young to have a will drawn up. That’s something everyone should do, especially if they’ve got property or a lot of money in the bank to think about.”
“I think you’re probably right.”
Eugene smiled.
“That’s why I’ve had a will since I was nineteen,” I went on. “Everything goes to my cats.”
Eugene kept smiling, but his eyes weren’t in it anymore.
It was a lie, though. I don’t have a will. I operate on the assumption that I’m going to live forever. I haven’t been proved wrong yet.
I don’t have any cats, either. They remind me too much of my mother. Beautiful, finicky, aloof, and you’re the one who always has to clean up their crap.
“Did my mom give you my phone number or did you have to track it down yourself?” I asked.
“She gave it to me, of course. I wouldn’t let a client designate an heir without current contact information.”
“Did she say how she got it?”
“Got…your phone number?”
Eugene furrowed his brow, but the hair patty just above it didn’t move an inch. It looked like a gray beret taped to the top of his head.
“I haven’t spoken to my mother in twenty years,” I said, “and the last time I saw her, I had a different name.”
“I see. I’m sorry. No. She didn’t say how she found you.”
“It doesn’t matter. She was always good at getting information…when she wanted it.”
I stood up and thanked Eugene for his time.
“Guess I’ll go take a look at my new place.”
“I’m afraid we’re not quite done yet. There’s something else we need to discuss.”
“Yeah?”
“Your mother.”
“What about her?”
“You need to decide what’s to be done.”
“What’s to be…? Oh. You mean with her.”
Eugene nodded. “The body’s at the county morgue. Once the medical examiner’s finalized his report, they’ll release the body to you. You should know what your plans are.”
“It was right there in the will. She wants to be cremated.”
“Yes, but where? What kind of service would you like? What kind of urn? What kind of marker? I know it’s overwhelming, especially at an emotional time like this, but you have a lot of decisions to make, Alanis. I’d be happy to make all the arrangements, if you’d like.”
Who says chivalry is dead? And I’m sure he’d only charge me ninety-five bucks an hour instead of his usual hundred.
“That’s awful sweet of you, Eugene, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated,” I told him. “Where would you go around here to pick up some charcoal briquettes?”
I was standing across the street from the place where my mother had died—a place I now owned—and I had two thoughts in my head.
#1: What happened here?
#2: Wow, Mom…tacky.
I was looking at a dingy white two-story building between a mom-and-pop hardware store and a mom-and-pop “psychic massage studio.” (Everything in Berdache looked mom and pop—or maybe mom and mom or pop and pop. You can never tell with the New Agey types.) A neon sign hung in the big picture window facing the street. Off, of course. Around it, painted on the glass, were tarot cards and a crystal ball and assorted signs of the zodiac—Leo the Lion and Cancer the Crab and Alvin the Chipmunk or whoever.
And there were these words:
The White Magic
Five & Dime
Divination * Revelation * Bargains
For obvious reasons, Mom had left off her true stock in trade: lies.
I’d come a long way for this—to see for myself who my mother had become and what had become of her. All I had to do was step off the curb and walk across the street and use the keys Eugene had given me. Yet now, with only fifty feet to go, I found myself frozen, unable to move forward.
Why was I really here? Did I truly think I could bring my mother justice? Did someone like her even deserve it?
Anyone? Anyone…?
I turned my back to the road.
Directly across the street from the White Magic Five & Dime was its mirror image. House of Arcana, it was called. Inside I could see books, candles, incense, cards, crystals, bullshit, horseshit, and crap. And a woman looking back at me from behind the counter. She had frizzy gray hair and a macramé shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a welcoming smile on her placid face. Her baggy yellow frock looked like something Obi-Wan Kenobi would wear, and I got the feeling it was either woven from hemp or meant to look like it was.
Hello, Earth Mother. The only things missing were flowers in her hair and the smell of patchouli.
I waited for her to start belting out “Aquarius.”
She just kept smiling.
Fine.
Maybe my mother wasn’t around to explain her last scam, but she wasn’t the only one running it.
I went inside.
The woman’s name was Josette, and she was good. She projected all the right vibes—warmth, curiosity, a touch of disarming ditziness—while stifling the sound of gears turning, turning, turning in her head. She kept smiling as she sized me up, no doubt thinking, “Stranger in her mid-thirties, alone, casual clothes, no jewelry, no makeup, no manicure, short Supercuts hair, radiating bemusement and amusement but, underneath, confused.”
I knew that’s how she saw me because that’s how I would’ve seen myself. Every con artist of every kind knows how to cold-read a mark. I’d been doing it since before I could read books, and I was good at it. Mom and Biddle had made sure of that.
Of course, every con artist knows how to hide vulnerability, too. But I wanted mine to show. It’s good bait.
I poked around for a few minutes, answering the woman’s carefully bland questions (“In from out of town? Been out this way before?”) while pretending to take an interest in her rune stones and anointing oils and plastic-wrapped spell kits. It took her five minutes to get to the pitch.
“I have a feeling,” she said, “that you’ve come here with questions.”
“Wow! How did you know?”
I expected to hear that her spirit guides had told her. Or maybe it was my troubled aura.
“You were staring at the store across the street for a long time,” she said instead. “It looked like you were trying to work up the nerve to go in.”
The lady wasn’t just good, she was very good.
Short con or long, it has to start with trust. And what better way to begin building that than with a little dribble of truth? Just enough to clear the way for the snake oil.
“I was,” I said.
“Thought so. I’m afraid the White Magic Five & Dime isn’t open anymore.” Josette’s smile grew a little wider. “But I do readings, too.”
“So the Five & Dime went out of business?” I said as I shuffled the cards Josette had handed me.
We were at a table in a curtained-off nook at the back of the store. Before sitting down, Josette had locked the front door and hung up a sign saying . So we wouldn’t be disturbed, she’d said, but I figured it had more to do with sticky-fingered tourists who might wander in and help themselves to handfuls of healing crystals and pentagram pendants.
“Focus on your question,” Josette said. “What is it you’d like to ask the cards?”
What the hell was my mother up to around here? I thought.
“How do I become a happier, healthier person?” I said.
Josette held out a hand.
“Good. Now give me the deck.”
I handed it over. I’d paid in advance (naturally) for a seven-card reading. I didn’t feel like shelling out thirty bucks for the “standard ten-card spread” when with three cards and five dollars less I could get the same old crock.
Josette laid the cards out like this:
“Looks like an airplane.”
Josette seemed pleased with herself. “It’s a spread of my own. I call it the Weather Vane. It’s good for showing which way the wind’s blowing.”
“You can just make up a ‘spread’ yourself?”
“You can do anything with the tarot.” Josette reached out and touched the card at the center of the crisscrossing rows of three—the middle of the airplane. “Ready?”
I nodded.
“All right, then. Let’s begin.”
“Ahhh,” Josette said as she turned over the first card. “This is your present—your current situation—and we’ve got the Two of Swords. A sword is an instrument of war—of conflict—but it can also bring liberation. It cuts through the things that bind us. The woman here has two swords, but look: She’s not using them. She’s just holding them over her chest, blocking her heart. She thinks she doesn’t need her emotions and her instincts, but that’s blinded her. She can’t truly see herself or her situation, so she’s paralyzed. Stuck.
“Moving up to the next card, we see what’s in the conscious mind.
“More swords! Only the swords on the Six here aren’t being used as weapons. They’re going with someone on a voyage. Does that boat remind you of anything? The boatman? The dead being ferried across the River Styx, maybe? Perhaps someone close to you has died—though it doesn’t have to be that. It could refer to any important life passage. A painful time is being put behind you. You’re continuing on to someplace new, but the pain goes with you.
“Moving down now, we see what’s going on in your subconscious.
“Swords again! The Eight. In this card, the swords form a wall. A pen. A prison. But see that gap? The wall’s incomplete. She could walk away anytime, yet she doesn’t because she can’t see the way out. Swords is the suit of intellect, of the mind. Here that’s a trap, though. This woman—she’s imprisoned by the things she thinks she knows.
“Going back now, we look at the past.
“Interesting. The Queen of Wands. Wands is the suit of energy, will, ambition, action. But the Queen’s reversed, so what we have is a strong, intelligent, creative woman who’s turned herself to unproductive pursuits. She’s a powerful influence, but not a good one. Whoever this is, she’s a bit of a…well.
“Moving forward, we step into the future. And what do we have?
“Oh! Lovely! The Two of Cups! (Some people call them Chalices, but I like Cups. More down to earth, don’t you think?) Anywho, Cups is the suit of love. That can be all kinds of love, of course, but would you just look at that couple there? Aren’t they adorable? I think you might have something special to look forward to. Someone special.
“Now, in the last row, hopefully we’ll find a little guidance for you. Going up, we’ve got the energies you should be trying to harness. And what we find is…well, well.
“The Fool. Now don’t get the wrong idea about him! The Fool’s actually someone we should respect. He’s brave. He trusts his impulses enough to take what looks like a dangerous step. He could be going right off that cliff, but at least he’s taking the first step toward something. Don’t give in to fear is the message here. Do something.
“Finally, moving down, we’ll see what energies you should avoid.
“The Four of Pentacles. Hmm. I see two possible meanings here. First, the obvious. Here’s someone who’s clinging to something—a big coin. That could be money or it could be material things or it could be a belief in material things and material things only. A rejection of the spiritual side of life. Do you see the other pentacle over his head, though? It’s almost like a halo or a crown. That’s some achievement of his—some gift; a special ability, maybe. But he’s hording it; keeping it to himself. He should share it, use it, not hide it away. He needs to be more like the Fool. He needs to just go for it! And I think that’s what you need to do, too.
“Now…how would you like to start going for it like a Fool by buying a nice big expensive bag of healing crystals I scooped out of my fish tank this morning?”
Josette didn’t actually say the thing about the healing crystals from the fish tank, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.
Her advice boiled down to this: Turn off your brain. Let your emotions take over. Don’t worry about what you know or don’t know. Just focus on what you want.
It’s the starting point of every con.
Clearly she thought I’d turned my brain off a long, long time ago.
I respected the woman’s technique, though. Forget good or very good; she was masterful. Cold reading will only get you so far. Then you have to start asking leading questions and throwing out vague comments the mark can interpret however they want. You have to fish. But not Josette. Somehow she’d pegged me as the product of a Mommy Dearest without a single word about it from me.
I wondered if she knew who I was.
I faked my way through some follow-up questions, but Josette was admirably patient. She didn’t try to tap me for more cash. She was working Biddle-style.
A fool and his money are soon parted, he liked to say. So why rush it unless someone else is trying to part the fool from it first?
Eventually Josette went to the front of the store and opened the door again.
“So,” I said, “your main competitor’s gone, huh?”
I pointed at the White Magic Five & Dime.
“There are still plenty of other readers around Berdache and Sedona,” Josette said.
“So I’ve seen. But the person running that place across the street must not have been one of the better ones. If they could really tell the future, they’d still be in business. I mean, you all oughta be millionaires, right? Just gaze into your crystal ball until you see tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, then call your stock broker and wait for the dividends to roll in.”
Josette smiled at a joke I’m sure she’d only heard a million times too many.
“I don’t believe readers see the future,” she said. “I believe they see the possible.”
I nodded as if this made sense.
“So what happened to the Five & Dime’s owner, anyway?”
Josette’s smile wavered. “I’m not really sure.”
Nice dodge. The Berdache Tourism Bureau would be pleased.
I thanked Josette for the reading—it had been so insightful, really it had—and left.
The reading had provided some insights—into my mother.
No wonder she’d opened the White Magic Five & Dime. Twenty- five tax-free bucks for a sprinkling of Fairyland pixie-dust bullshit? It was too easy.
Only she wouldn’t have stopped there. Not Mom. All that trust being placed in her—all that pain and confusion being shared—it would add up to one thing for her: leverage. And she would have used it—to push. Until someone finally pushed back.
Mom hadn’t just met her death over in that store. She’d invited it inside, done business with it in there, tried to cheat it in there. And if I gave a rat’s ass about that, I’d go in there, too.
But did I? Should I?
I found myself standing on the sidewalk again, staring at the White Magic Five & Dime across the street. Wondering why I would avenge a woman I’d never even forgiven.
I was still wondering even as I stepped off the curb and started toward the store.