The Tarot Reader, page 1
THE TAROT READER
A NOVEL
FINLEY TURNER
To Roman and Ellie
CHAPTER
1
Jade
WITH THE LIGHTS dimmed in the room, all I could see was the glimmer of each sitter’s eyes as they sat eagerly at the table. There was a shimmer there—hope, mostly, but also fear.
We sat in a circle, palms pressed firmly into the glossy wood, waiting.
“Beloved spirits, we seek your guidance,” I said. “We ask that you commune with us and move among us.”
Wind whipped into the windows, causing the thick, old glass to creak against the windowpanes. The sitters—what we called those who sat with us for readings and séances—tensed in their seats. Some shifted their shoulders back, eager and confident, while others curled them inward, as if it could protect them from forces they couldn’t see.
The wind snapped against the windows again. “Ah, someone has joined us,” I said softly. “Welcome.”
The older woman directly across from me whimpered, and the other sitters glanced at her but quickly returned their focus to their hands on the table.
I tilted my head back, speaking into the air above the table. “If you are with us, please give us a sign to indicate your willingness to communicate.”
We sat in silence, waiting for a signal. After a moment, the man to my left sighed and shifted in his seat.
“Give us a sign,” I urged again, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.
The sitters flinched at a thump behind the wall, and the woman who had whimpered earlier silently cried.
I raised my hands, hovering them higher above the table. “This space is protected, and we command that if you have ill intentions, you must leave this instant.”
Wind lashed against the window once more, and although it remained closed, a cold breeze curled through the room. I shivered, anticipating what was to come. Another thump, harder now, and a painting rattled against the wall and came loose. Its thick frame smashed into the floor, the impact vibrating against our feet, yet the glass remained unbroken.
With a low voice I said, “We recognize your presence. Who do you wish to speak to?”
As I’d instructed each sitter before the séance, they lifted their palms off the table, raising them a few inches to the ceiling. I said their names one by one as their hands hovered.
“Stacey Carter,” I said. Her hands trembled as she raised them. There was only silence, and after a few moments, I motioned for her to lower her hands.
“Dylan Carter.” He raised his palms with confidence. His wedding band cut into the thick flesh of his ring finger, the gold gleaming against the candlelight.
A knock against the wall behind me made us all jump, followed by scratching, like fingernails burrowing into the walls, trying to get in. The timing of it didn’t make sense, and my heartbeat quickened.
“Buddy?” Dylan whimpered, and his wife gripped his hand. They were desperate to make contact with the spirit of their teenage son, who had passed in a car accident one year prior. Dylan raised his hands off the table again, slipping his right hand out from his wife’s despite her tight grasp on it.
I gulped, my cheeks flushed. “If you wish to commune with Dylan Carter, please make the same noise.” My voice was commanding and confident, but my throat tightened with uneasiness. Something was wrong.
About twenty seconds passed, only our breath and the patter of rain on the window audible in the dark room. The muscles in my throat loosened, relief coming over me. “I’m sorry, Dylan. The spirits did not react to your call.” I motioned for him to lower his hands.
One tear trickled down his cheek and into his beard. He wiped it away before resting his hands on the table.
“Catherine Belaforte,” I said. She raised her palms, pushing through hesitation made clear by her rapid breathing. She closed her eyes. I could tell she truly believed, more so than the others.
A floorboard creaked at the doorway, followed by silence. The sitters’ eyes darted around the room, checking to see there was no one there. Seconds later it creaked again, closer to the table that sat in the middle of the dark room. The tension in the room built. Something was coming.
“Catherine Belaforte,” I said again, louder this time. Immediately, the floorboard creaked once more, right behind Catherine’s seat.
She gasped at the noise near her, her eyes searching the dim room for the source. Catherine was an older woman, made older in appearance by the grief of her father’s recent death. As she searched the darkness, the wrinkles around her narrowed eyes deepened.
“Do you wish to speak to Catherine?” I said into the darkness. The candle flickered as another breeze disrupted the room’s stillness.
Wind gusted again outside. The curtains, which were partially open, snapped themselves back, exposing the brutality of the storm outside. The sitters’ heads whipped to the window, their chairs creaking as they twisted to look.
Lightning struck, outlining the shape of a human figure. But there was something deeply irregular about it. The torso was too lanky, the rib cage too narrow. The figure was utterly still in the brief flash of the lightning. Dylan Carter’s chair smacked against the floor as he jumped to his feet.
“Did you see that?” His voice was half accusatory, half excited. Mumbles of nervous affirmation bubbled around the room.
“Yes,” I confirmed. “It’s a strong spirit. It’s rare to see such a stark physical manifestation. Catherine, this spirit is here for you. Your connection must be strong to have allowed us to witness this.”
Catherine smiled, the whites of her wet teeth shining against the candlelight as tears streamed down her face. Lightning flashed again, and the sitters looked eagerly out the window, desperate for a sight of something from the beyond. But there was nothing.
I gasped, drawing their attention to me. “I’m sorry.” I put my hand to my face, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Something is happening.” A low humming noise began, a deep buzz that sounded half human and half mechanical. “I feel unwell,” I said.
Concern flashed across the sitters’ faces, and a mix of something else—something I was familiar with. It was the look of someone silently demanding Don’t do this. Don’t take this away from me.
“I’m okay.” I answered their silent question. “I just need a moment.” I swayed slightly, almost indiscernibly, back and forth.
“Darling girl,” I said, but the voice was not my own. It was deep and gruff but laced with immense longing.
“Daddy?” Catherine exclaimed with a tight voice, so small, like she’d regressed back into childhood. “I love you.”
The energy drained from my body so violently that my head slammed into the table. As though from a great distance, I could hear the worried gasps of the sitters. The two sitters to each side of me reached out, their hands pressed firmly into my back, trying to rouse me.
When I picked my head up, Catherine Belaforte took a sharp inhale. “Jesus, Ms. Ravencroft. You’re bleeding.”
I brought my hands to my face, feeling the warm, syrupy trickle of liquid coming from my nose.
“You fainted,” Stacey Carter said. “You must have hit your nose.”
“I’m so sorry. This sometimes happens when the spirits are too eager to speak through me. I’m too weak to continue.”
“You called me darling girl. Nobody has ever called me that except for my father.”
The Carters were whispering back and forth. “Why did she get to talk to him?”
Catherine spoke again. “It’s a miracle, Jade. Truly a miracle.”
* * *
I waved goodbye to the sitters as they exited the shop. The Carters lingered behind, clearly unhappy they couldn’t communicate with their son but still in awe of the appearance of Catherine’s father.
“Can we come back again? We were so close to speaking to him,” Stacey Carter asked as she handed me her payment.
The promise of returning clients sent a thrill through me, as did the feel of the growing wad of money in my pocket. “Absolutely. I can still sense him waiting to speak with you. We just need to do some special preparations. I can do a private session for you two, and with an added ritual it will only be fifty extra dollars.”
“Perfect,” they said in unison.
Catherine approached as the Carters left. The wide smile she wore wiped years off her, and she stood taller. “Thank you so much. I finally was able to say goodbye. I never had the chance.”
She startled me by gripping me tightly in a hug, and I couldn’t help but smile. That was one of my favorite parts of my job—the sense of closure and relief that I could give sitters.
When they were all out of sight, I locked the door and blew out the candles in the front room. I made my way back to the séance room and opened the giant wooden armoire, pushing on the back of it and ducking through into the adjoining room.
My sister Stevie sat surrounded by gadgets, props, and a box of Cheez-Its. She was leaning back in her chair, tossing snacks into her mouth with one hand.
“No more smoking before séances,” I grumbled, snatching a rod out of her hand and tossing it on the ground. Fishing wire dangled from it, with a dull, rusty hook on the end. She pulled back, making sure I couldn’t snatch the snacks out of her hands.
“I didn’t smoke!” she squeaked. She looked at me with wide, red eyes and pressed her lips together to stifle a laugh. Her hair was soaking wet and limp down her shoulders.
I rolled my eyes. T
“I just did a little baking,” she said with faux innocence. She stood and picked the rod off the floor, wrapping the fishing wire around the metal pole. “Want a brownie?” Her eyes were so narrowed that I couldn’t see her irises. A high-pitched giggle escaped, and she tried to disguise it by clearing her throat.
“You idiot. Get it together.” I ripped off my wig, tossed it on the table, and furiously scratched my scalp. “I can’t stand this thing,” I grumbled, frustrated by the lingering itch.
“That’s what you get for buying a wig from a Halloween store,” Stevie said.
“You have no idea how hard it is to talk normally with a blood capsule shoved up your nose.” I pointed to the wig. “And trust me, when I have the money, I’m buying one of those five-hundred-dollar real virgin hair wigs.”
Stevie waved her fingers in the air and put on an accent. “Ah yes, the hair and soul of a virgin to fuel your mystical powers.”
“What accent was that supposed to be?”
“Russian, obviously.”
“Well, it sounded Jamaican.”
“Whatever. Nice incantation, by the way. I think I heard it on an episode of Charmed.”
I grabbed a towel off the chair and tossed it to her, but her reaction speed was so slow it hit her in the face. She left it there for a moment before pulling it off.
“Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was going to rain.”
“Clearly,” I laughed. I’d bought her a black rain jacket months ago for situations like this, but she’d obviously forgotten. “You messed up a lot tonight. They bought it all, but it really screwed with me.”
“My performance was immaculate. What did I screw up so badly?”
“You picked the wrong cutout, for one,” I said, thinking of the eerily long-limbed figure outside the window during the séance. The sight of it had scared me at first. I’d expected to see the cutout we typically used for older spirits—slightly hunched shoulders, a bit wider and shorter.
“No I didn’t,” she said. She shoved a fistful of Cheez-Its in her mouth.
“Yes, you did. It was supposed to be for Catherine’s father. You picked the creepy one.” I pointed at the cardboard cutout that leaned against the wall with the four other variations we’d created. Rain still clung to the lamination of the one Stevie had mistakenly used tonight.
“Yeah, I guess it does look kind of demonic. But everything else went great, so you’re welcome.” She towel-dried her hair feverishly, reminding me of a wet dog shaking itself off.
I began to correct her, thinking of my panic as the fake spirits had thumped against the wall when I called on Dylan Carter. In our research leading up to the séance, we’d found much more information about Catherine Belaforte’s family than on the Carters. We’d catered the entire night to her, and if the Carters had been more forceful, I would have had to wing it. I’d done it successfully before, but I would much rather feel in control during a séance than have to rely on my nonexistent theater experience.
To be fair, Stevie whacking at the wall at the wrong time had ended up guaranteeing the Carters’ return. The poor souls believed it was a matter of which spirit was the strongest, when really it had been Stevie’s timing error.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out the wad of cash from tonight. After charging fifty dollars for each sitter, we’d made two hundred fifty dollars, which was decent enough. I plucked out seventy-five bucks and handed it to Stevie.
“Sah-weet,” she chirped. “Look at us, sis. Making the family proud.”
My stomach dropped when she said it, but I tucked the cash back into my pocket, ready for tonight to be over.
* * *
Harry Houdini once said there are three types of mediums: the deluded, the psychotics, and the criminals. I was the latter. I came from a long line of criminals. We didn’t break into people’s houses or rip purses from women’s arms as they walked down the streets. People came to us, and we only took what they gave. We were mediums.
Well, we acted like we were. If there really was such a thing, I owed them my greatest apologies. I was a fraud. A trickster. But I never went out of my way to hurt people. Hurt people came to me, seeking solace in the realms beyond ours, and I tried to give that to them.
A part of me didn’t feel bad about what we did for a living. People were glued to their televisions from the second they got home from work until they went to bed, and what were they doing? They were watching people pretend.
There was a reason it was called con artistry. It was a performance that required you to not only be the actress but also the stagehand, the set designer, and the director. It was a one-woman show, and I was the artist. I had my sister, but most of the time she was too stoned to help.
Neither of us had gone to college and I didn’t even make it through high school, so it wasn’t like we were set up for a great future. My younger sister, freshly twenty-one, bartended at a bar across town, and I ran our witchy little shop with her occasional help. Now I found myself juggling the roles of sister, mother, and businesswoman, all at the age of twenty-five. Scammed out of enjoying my twenties by my own parents.
When you looked at the row of cafés and shops on this street, it was clear we didn’t belong. Expensive cars sat parked outside storefronts, shaded by rows of perfect trees whose colors were shifting as autumn approached. A boutique down the street sold candles for forty dollars each, and an hour of talk therapy next door would cost you one hundred dollars an hour, even with insurance.
We had been grandfathered into the expensive property by my parents, who signed the lease agreement right before shit went south for them. Luckily, I’d been able to take over the lease.
All around us were crisp signs and seating dotted between manicured plants. Then there was us, with our chipping off-white paint and the stark black-and-white sign my sister had painted above the plum-colored door. When I’d asked her to come up with a logo for us, she’d been so excited she’d worked on it for days. There had been torn sheets of paper covering the floors and furniture with her early ideas. Then came the paint, which I was still finding specks of in our kitchen two years later.
Now, above our front door in delicate black lines, there was a crescent moon cupping a crystal ball, all surrounded by tiny stars.
Everyone had known who we were as soon as we hung the sign. We were mediums. Or palm readers, psychics, tarot readers. Whatever someone wanted us to be when they walked through the door. But they would never know the type of people we actually were. The type of family we came from. My sister and I were never going to be as bad as our parents. They’d crossed the line, and we were trying to distance ourselves from that life.
We were not thieves. We were scavengers.
CHAPTER
2
Jade
IT WAS EARLY morning, my favorite time of day. It was mostly because my sister slept until noon every day, fighting for her life in a cannabis-induced lucid dream, and it was my one moment of peace and quiet.
I pushed open the bedroom window and reveled in the crisp, chilly air. It cut through the stale smell of sleep and last night’s incense that clung to every piece of fabric in my bedroom. It was the end of September, and although fall was creeping in, the summer sun was still fighting for dominance. I longed for autumn, for overcast skies and chilled winds—the type of weather that always put people in a spooky mood, which was good for business. A cold front was coming soon, according to the news, and I looked forward to the additional clients it would bring.
I was about to tuck my head back inside when a voice shouted, “Hey!” to my left. It startled me, and I bumped the back of my head into the windowsill.
“Son of a bitch,” I hissed, my hand gripping the back of my head. I stuck my head farther out, looking for the source of the voice.
“Hi.” The man waved enthusiastically. He had the energy of a golden retriever, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“Hey, Daniel.” I let go of the growing knot on the back of my head and waved.
“They delivered one of your packages to my door again. Want me to bring it over?”
