With steady hands, the fortune teller shuffled the deck of tarot cards and laid three of them out facedown on the green velvet cloth. Inside the tent, it smelled of cedar incense. The only light came from flickering candles that cast long shadows across the fortune teller and the woman sitting on the other side of her table.
“What is the matter that you wish to bring to the cards today, my dear?”
The woman shuffled in her seat. She was tall and had broad, tattooed arms and a platinum-blond buzz cut. “Well, I’m thinking about opening a little coffee stand to supplement the income from the main coffee shop. I guess—”
“Silence!” the fortune teller said. She gestured to the candles, the crystal ball out for display, and the divan covered in richly embroidered pillows where a tough-looking brown-and-black cat looked up from his nap and yawned. “In this tent, we do not guess. We know! And now we shall see what we know.”
With a deft motion, she turned over the first card. A man danced among nine golden goblets, each filled with a translucent liquid. His face was turned away, but his back was facing a sunlit meadow and his arms stretched out wide. In one hand, he held a cup that overflowed with water. The fortune teller nodded appreciatively. “In your past, you were full of joy and happiness. Your coffee shop flourished as Undertown grew and changed.”
“I guess you could say that, yeah. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve had good times.”
“Now let’s see your present situation.”
“I thought we were supposed to be looking into the future—”
“Silence! The future means nothing without the present.” In a swift, annoyed gesture, the fortune teller turned over the second card. It was the ace of swords. The tip of an ornate blade peeked out from behind a dark gray stone. The hilt, wrapped in gold, shone against a background of deep blue stained glass. Her brow furrowed, and she stared at the card in silence for some time.
“Is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it?” her client asked.
“No, it’s not necessarily bad. However, the mystic forces— Oh, who am I kidding? Hold on a second.” The fortune teller let out an enormous sigh and pulled a book from under the table. She rifled through it until she found the ace of swords. “It says here that the ace of swords is all about strife and conflict. Does that make sense?”
“Hey, Emma, you’re breaking character,” Viv said, laughing.
“Well, what do you expect? There’s like a million different tarot cards, and we just came up with this whole fortune teller idea last week. How did I ever think I could memorize all the stuff so quickly? I barely even had time to study after all those trips to World Market to buy incense and satiny pillows.”
“Have you ever tried, you know, not using the book?”
“What do you mean? I barely even know the names of these cards. How could I not use the book?”
“Now forgive me if I misunderstood something, but I thought you were a literal psychic. From a family of psychics, no less. Shouldn’t you just be able to—I don’t know—look at the cards and figure something out?”
“No! In case you haven’t noticed, I’m like the worst psychic in the world. I mean, sure, I can talk to spirits. I can’t just look at some tarot cards and… guess. My aunt Cora was a legend at this stuff. She never guessed. She knew. She took care of the neighborhood.” Emma looked away and shook her head. “Now that’s my job and I don’t want to let people down, even if this is just a silly booth at the Winter Festival.”
“You’re not letting anyone down, Em. Maybe it’s not about guessing. Maybe it’s about listening. You know, paying attention. Aren’t you also supposed to be a scientist?”
“Well, it’s been six months since I’ve set foot in the lab, so that is up for debate. Anyway—”
Emma didn’t get to finish her sentence because the tent was filled with the sound of a chainsaw. She looked at Viv and sighed. “Really? I’m going to go outside and see when that jerk is going to be done. How am I supposed to do tarot readings when people can’t even hear what I’m saying?” Emma paused for a minute, considering that it might be better if people didn’t hear what she said, but in the end decided it had to be addressed. She stood and walked to the tent flap, passing Viv, who stood up as well.
She was so intent on confronting the chainsaw artist that Emma didn’t realize that her sleeve caught the corner of a third card, which was hanging on the edge of the table. As they left the tent, it fluttered to the ground and landed on the thick rug, face up.
It was a dark knight on horseback, clad in armor, visor up. Looking out from inside that helmet were the cavernous eye sockets of a fleshless skull. Death.
Emma pushed through the flap, startling a group of crows that had gathered near the tent. They jumped, beating their wings and calling out, only to land a few feet away and peck at a doughnut that some festivalgoer had dropped.
Her tent had been set up just a few feet away from the row of food vendors dishing up snacks to happy families. From there, festivalgoers went on their way to hear a musical performance, to skate at the large ice rink that had been erected in front of the library, or to gawk at the enormous red curtain that blocked off the great section of the park from view.
It was toward that curtain and the small podium in front of it that Emma and Viv now walked. The chainsaw noise, combined with all other kinds of machine noises, got louder as they approached it. Great white clouds of steam and fine, powdery snow rose above the curtained area and were blown over the barricades. It was cold enough that where the snow landed, it stayed, covering the ground in a thin layer of white.
Emma shivered as an icy wind blew up the back of her blouse.
“I grabbed your coat for you,” Viv said, handing the blue puffer jacket to Emma.
“You jerk. Why didn’t you give it to me sooner?”
The tall woman laughed. “I was waiting to see how long it would take you to notice that you forgot it.”
Emma gratefully took the jacket, put it on, and felt her body settle into its warmth. “Who’s in charge of this thing anyway? When is it going to be done?”
“Well, my understanding is that the artist is an acquaintance of Diedre’s. She presented the Neighborhood Association with a portfolio of his work, and they thought he would be a delightful addition to the winter festival. Of course, they should’ve known that any friend of Diedre’s would be unusual. I mean, nothing says cheerful winter festival like an enormous ice maze based on Dante’s Inferno.”
“I honestly don’t care what it’s based on. I just want him to be done with it. The guy’s been out here with his snowmaker and chainsaw every day at six a.m. for the past week.” Emma glanced across the park toward her house. She could just see the bedroom window peeking out above the festival tents. “The sleep deprivation is hitting me hard.”
“Well, the sign says grand opening at six p.m., so we only have a couple more hours.”
“Are you ladies enjoying the winter noise?” a voice said from behind them. It was Marcus, Undertown’s chief social worker and reluctant liaison to the county sheriff.
Next to him, a diminutive old lady with gray hair looked on the worksite scornfully. “I never saw such nonsense.”
“Come on now, Ma, this is a good thing. More people are moving into the neighborhood. A lot of people are moving back to the neighborhood now after what happened in the seventies.”
“Don’t tell me about the seventies. Besides, I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about this fool of a maze. And that artist—been all over town, looking like some sort of wild man.” She pulled out a little rectangle of white paper. “Gave me his card, like I would ever need a blasphemous snow maze on my lawn.”
“Hi, Marcus. Hi, Ettie,” Emma said, greeting them both.
Viv reached into her pocket and pulled out an identical business card. “I got one too. He came into the coffee shop every morning to refuel. He’s a real self-promoter.”
“And now I’m hearing rumors of wild animals running around. Never happened before that man showed up.” Ettie continued with her complaint.
“Wild animals?” Emma asked her.
“Millicent from church swears she saw something running around on the tops of buildings. I told her, ‘Now, Millicent, your eyes aren’t what they used to be,’ but she insisted she was wearing her spectacles.”
“Maybe he just flushed them out of other hiding places with all the noise,” Emma said absentmindedly, her attention suddenly elsewhere. She had noticed that a strange woman was walking toward them.
