Deadly Gamble

I swallowed the lump, blinked back tears and crossed the room to stand next to her, bending to kiss her lightly on top of the head.

“Hello,” I said gently.

She looked up at me, and for a moment recognition sparked in her sunken eyes. She grasped my hand, squeezed it with a strange urgency and made a soft sound that I chose to interpret as a greeting.

I dragged up a chair to sit knee to knee with her, opened the bag of doughnuts I’d picked up on the way down from Cave Creek and offered her favorite, a double-frosted maple bar.

She shook her wobbly head, like one of those bobble-figures they give away at baseball games, but her watery eyes were full of longing. Lillian had been an off-the-rack size 16 ever since I could remember, but now she looked almost skeletal, with big dents at her temples and under her cheekbones. It was as though her skull were eating its way to the surface.

I broke off a piece of the maple bar and held it to her lips. She took a nibble, like a baby bird being fed in the nest. My heart twisted.

Laboriously, Lillian gummed the morsel and swallowed.

“You look good,” I lied.

“Cods,” Lillian said.

I frowned. “Cods?” She wanted fish?

“Cods,” Lillian insisted.

“She’s talking about these,” a female voice put in, nearly scaring me out of my skin.

I turned to see a pudgy nurse’s aide standing by Lillian’s neatly made bed, holding up a familiar deck of cards. Of course, I thought. The Tarot cards.

I didn’t recognize the aide. The turnover was huge at Sunset Villa.

Lillian began to squirm in her chair, reaching with what seemed a desperate eagerness. “Cods!” she croaked.

“They’re the devil’s work,” the nurse’s aide said, with a self-righteous little sniff. She was overweight and looked like she might attend one of those churches where they drink antifreeze and juggle snakes. “Only thing worse is them Ouija boards, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” I pointed out, crisply polite as I dropped the maple bar back into the bakery bag and went to claim Lillian’s deck. They were her most treasured possession, those creased and battered cards. When we were on the run, after my folks were killed, she’d sometimes given readings to pay for a tank of gas or a meal in some diner. They’d warned us, those cards, Lillian claimed, when somebody recognized my picture from the back of a milk carton, and the Tarot had predicted disaster if I married Nick.

I should have listened.

I took the cards and stared at the nurse’s aide, bristling in her flowered scrubs, until, in a minor snit, she turned around and left the room.

“Give,” Lillian demanded.

I handed her the cards, bracing myself to watch the inevitable struggle. Once, Lillian had plied that deck with the skill of a riverboat poker sharp, but that was when her fingers were straight and strong, with a hotline to her brain.

She gripped the cards in both hands, and I saw a tremor pass through her as she closed her eyes to concentrate. I wondered, not for the first time, if large portions of her mind were dark and boarded up, as the doctors said, or if the old Lillian crouched in there someplace, smart as ever.

I didn’t know what to hope for. For a woman as bright and full of life as Lillian had been, it would be hell if the wires were down between her mind and her body. On the other hand, being a vegetable was no fun, either.

It tortured me, wondering how it was for her.

I watched bleakly as the woman who’d saved me from so many things fumbled with a pack of tattered playing cards.

She turned the deck over, thumbed them until she settled on one. The Queen of Pentacles, a colorful card, showing a medieval woman seated on a throne. That one dropped into her lap, followed, after more excruciating selection, by the Page of Cups. A young man in tights, holding up a chalice with a fish, presumably dead, flopping over the rim.

I waited tensely, resisting the urge to help her.

Lillian still had her pride. I had to believe that.

When it came to interpretation, I was useless. The deck was a familiar fixture, since Lillian had carried it in her pocket or purse for as long as I could remember, but I knew next to nothing about the images, even though I’d seen them many times.

It was almost an anticlimax when she settled on the third and apparently final card—Death. It showed a skeleton, wearing black armor and mounted on a fierce-looking horse, bodies littering the ground beneath. I drew in my breath.

Lillian’s hands relaxed suddenly, and she looked up at me, her contorted face imploring me to understand.

“Take,” she ground out.

I plucked the three cards from where they’d fallen onto the pilled afghan covering her thin legs. My palms sweated as I examined the pictures, one by one. I knew there was a message, but the circuits were blocked.

I tried to hand them back.

“Take,” Lillian repeated, and shrank back in her wheelchair, the remaining cards bending in her grasp.

I bit my lower lip, nodded and tucked the Queen, the Page and Death gently into the side-flap of my purse. I’d stop at a bookstore on the way back to Cave Creek, I decided. Pick up a Damn Fool’s Guide to Tarot. I wasn’t ready to leave Lillian, but she was clearly overwrought, and staying too long might plunge her into an even steeper decline.

“Want some more of the maple bar?” I asked, and practically choked on the words. If she’d been in her usual staring mode, I might have told her about last night’s visit from Nick, just to have a sounding board, but she was too agitated to listen to a ghost story. Besides, even if she understood, what could she do?

“No,” she said clearly, and at first I thought she was answering my question about the maple bar. Instead, her gaze was fixed on the doorway.

A tall man stood on the threshold, a finger hooked in the suit jacket hanging behind his right shoulder. He had a full head of gray hair and one of those benignly handsome faces that inspire instant confidence. I felt a spike of recognition and reached out to close my fingers over Lillian’s hands. They were clenched.

My uncle, Clive Larimer, smiled.

“Hello, Mary Josephine,” he greeted me. “Long time no see.”

Lillian began a soft, gurgling murmur.

Larimer stepped into the room, momentarily distracted when the nurse’s aide pushed past him and rushed over to Lillian.

“What’s the matter, Mrs. Travers?” she asked anxiously.

I peeped at her name tag. Felicia.

A tear slipped down Lillian’s right cheek.

“You’ll have to leave, both of you,” Felicia decreed.

Larimer backed into the corridor, out of sight. I forgot all about him, in my concern for Lillian.

“It’s those damn devil-cards,” Felicia declared, but she was patting Lillian’s shoulder, and Lillian seemed to be calming down a little. “Time for your medicine anyway, isn’t it, Mrs. Travers? And after that, you can take a nice nap.” Felicia paused to glare at me. “That’s what Mrs. Travers needs. Medicine and a nap. You’d better go now.”

I didn’t protest. I’d already made the decision to split, after all. Lillian had drifted back into herself, and the cards lay forgotten between her palms. I might have been transparent, the way she stared through me.