Page 60 of The Witch’s Orchard

My mouth opens and then snaps shut again, and Susan gives me a sardonic look.

She gets up, goes into the other room. I hear the opening and closing of a drawer and then she comes back. She puts a battered tin box on the table between us and clears away the plates. The box has the imprint of a queen of hearts on the lid.

Susan opens the box and takes out a set of grungy playing cards. The backs feature art nouveau daffodils, the green and white set against a deep red field, all made darker by years of use.

“My daddy served in World War Two. Brought these back,” she says, shuffling the cards. “From England.”

“They’re very pretty,” I say.

She nods, puts the cards down in front of me, taps them with the hard end of her first finger, says, “Shuffle ’em.”

I laugh.

Susan clears her throat once and says, “You came here. You asked me questions. You ate my food. Now I offer you a reading for free, you know what you do? You do the polite thing. You shuffle the cards and you get your reading and you say, ‘Thank you, Miss Susan.’”

I let out a long breath through my nose and take the cards. I shuffle them in a low bridge, but they’re so fragile-feeling that I change to overhand instead and just mix up choppy piles. I look across the table and find Susan watching my hands.

“Where did you learn to read cards?” I ask.

“Don’t really know. I don’t read ’em like you’re supposed to, probably. They just help me focus. That’s enough.”

I set the cards in the middle of the table and Susan picks them up and then deals four cards, face down, in a line between us.

“This,” she says, tapping the card on her farthest left and moving right, “is where you came from. This is where you are now. This one is where you are going, and this”—she taps the last card, set a little aside—“iswhoyou are.”

“Okay,” I say.

She flips the first card, my past. It’s the five of diamonds, and she nods at the card like it’s the one she was expecting. “You came out of hardship. A darkness and a struggle. You still carry the weight of it.”

She flips the next card, my present. It’s the five of hearts. She makes aHhmsound, deep in her throat, and says, “You are grieving. You played a game and you lost and now you are injured. It’s… This is because of Molly. This is Molly’s card.”

She runs a thumb over the grimy red heart in the center and shakes her head. “You lost Molly and now your heart is angry, you want to fight, but there is nothing to fight. Not yet.”

She glances up at me, and I meet her eyes and realize my face is set, hard, tense. I’m frowning at what she’s saying, the hard thump of my heart, the sweat on my palms.

“Go on,” I say.

She flips the next card, my future. It’s the five of clubs. Now Susan tilts her head to the side, staring at it. She laughs silently, her shoulders bouncing once and then settling.

“It will not get easier,” she says. “Forces are working against you. You will struggle. You will struggle and you will fight. There is darkness.”

She closes her eyes and raises one hand to touch the crown of her head. Her eyelids flutter and she says, “A betrayal. And… anger. Sadness. Deep sadness.”

She takes her hand from her head and opens her eyes as if waking from a dream. I’ve seen psychics on street corners all over the world. I know how it works. I know that they trade in vagaries and happenstance. I know that we remember what we want to remember, that we all just want to believe we’re being watched over, that we want a shortcut to answers and so, when all is said and done, we recollect the hits and forget the misses.

I know all this. And yet I can’t stop my heart from pounding as she puts her finger on the last card. Turns it. It’s the jack of spades. A blond man, looking to the right, holds a curly staff, maybe a halberd. It’s too smudged to tell.

“As I told Max,” she says. “The warrior. You are governed by what you feel is right in your heart and you use your sharp tongue like a weapon though it opens no doors for you. You are not big or strong and, sometimes, you are reckless. But you will fight like a dog for the truth.”

She taps the card and says, “But, listen now, one day this fighting may get you killed.”

I meet her eyes, so dark and shiny I can’t tell pupil from iris, and I ask, “Susan, where do you think Jessica Hoyle is?”

“Not dead,” she says. “I feel certain of it.”

“Who do you think took those girls? Why leave an applehead doll in their place?”

“I don’t know,” Susan answers. “I wish I did. Only thing I have is a feeling. A feeling of desperate, desperate longing.”