The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery) Read online

  “Then why did you come to Berdache? How come you’re still here? You act like you don’t give a shit, but you won’t leave.”

  “You really want to know what I’m doing here? Why I had to come?”

  Clarice didn’t answer. She could probably tell she didn’t have to. I was going to keep talking anyway.

  There are so many stories I’ve got hoarded up inside me.

  It was time I finally shared one with somebody.

  Upheaval. Destruction. A sudden and violent ending. Utter rack and ruin. (Or at least ruin. What is “rack,” anyway?) In other words: uh-oh. Change is on its way, whether you’re ready for it or not. What comes next might turn out to be an improvement, but getting through it won’t be easy. Or fun. Or even survivable.

  Yippee! Don’t you just love getting good news?

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  One day, the girl’s mother came back to their hotel room with a scale. This was not a good sign.

  The diet started the next morning.

  “I don’t need to lose weight,” the girl said.

  “I’m just trying to help you be healthier.”

  “No, you’re trying to make me skinnier. Why?”

  “Eat your Special K.”

  By the end of the summer, the girl was ten pounds lighter. She was a blond, too. Her mother took her to a salon to get her newly dyed hair cut just so.

  “Mom, it’s the nineties,” the girl said as her mother told the stylist what to do. “Nobody wants to look like Farrah Fawcett anymore.”

  “You’re going to be beautiful,” her mother said. “Trust me.”

  “I’ve seen what happens to people who do that,” the girl mumbled.

  “What did you say?”

  “Huh? Did I say something? I didn’t hear it. I stopped listening to myself years ago because nothing I say matters anyway.”

  Her mother turned to the stylist and sighed. “Teenagers, right?”

  She was smiling that smile of hers that always got a smile in return. But to the girl, watching her in the big salon mirror, it seemed more like she was just baring her teeth.

  A few days later, her mother announced that their business in City X was done. Which meant it was time to pack up and slip out in the middle of the night.

  “Where are we going?” the girl asked.

  “I’ve been scouting something out. First we’re going to need a little warm-up, though.”

  “That’s great. Where are we going?”

  “To an orthodontists’ convention.”

  The girl hoped she was joking.

  She wasn’t.

  The convention was at a big hotel in St. Louis. The mother checked them in under the name “Barbra Harper.” It was a name she used sparingly, so it hadn’t been permanently burned yet. Not like “Cathy Scarpelli” and “Veronica Sternwood,” who were wanted in a dozen states. Not like “Olivia Lake,” who’d made serious enemies on the East Coast. Not like “Mary Foster Morris,” “Marlo Hollinger,” “Rhoda Penmark,” and twenty others, all of them banished to limbo for one reason or another.

  “Barbra Harper” had outlasted them all. Sometimes the girl thought it might even be her mother’s real name. Which might have made her real name the one she used when Mom was Barbra: Sophie Harper.

  It would’ve been nice to have a real name. Most days, she felt like a mask with no face underneath.

  “Okay,” Barbra said once they were settled in their room, “let’s talk.”

  There were two queen-sized beds. The woman was sitting on the edge of one, back straight, hands on her knees. The girl sat on the other.

  Barbra was finally going to explain why they were there. The girl assumed it was a scam to get her free braces.

  “You had a good summer, didn’t you? Read a lot of books. Watched a lot of movies.”

  “Is that a good summer?”

  “But the vacation’s over. You know how things have been different since Stine left.”

  The girl grimaced. She couldn’t help it. Stine always made her grimace.

  She’d thought of the man as Biddle 2. As usual, the sequel hadn’t been as good as the original.

  When Stine disappeared, so had most of her mother’s money.

  “You need to start contributing,” Barbra said. “I mean really contributing, not just as my roper or pickup. I could train a monkey to do that.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “There are things you can bring to the table, and it’s time they were brought.”

  The girl went very, very still, like an animal in the forest that hears the snap of a twig and thinks something’s coming…

  The hair.

  The diet.

  This wasn’t about braces.

  “Here’s the play,” Barbra said. “There are three thousand orthodontists in town for this convention, and tonight they’re all going to be downstairs slapping each other’s backs and buying each other drinks. Orthodontists have money, and people trust them to work with their kids. Plus, they like to party. That creates an opportunity.”

  The girl didn’t need to hear any more. She could see the “opportunity,” and she knew she should either jump up and scratch her mother’s bitch eyes out or run to the bathroom and barf.

  Yet she stayed still.

  “This is a nice place,” she said, and her own words sounded distant to her, almost echoey, as if spoken by someone from the bottom of a well. “They’re going to be on the lookout for anything like that. And if we’re caught, that’s corruption of a minor for you, on top of pandering.”

  Barbra shook her head. She looked almost proud of her daughter for thinking through the risks like a pro.

  Almost.

  “It won’t be pandering, and we’re not going to get caught,” Barbra said. “It’s not like you’ll be sashaying around the lobby in hot pants and a boob tube. You’re going to look like a nice, clean-cut dental hygienist from Ohio. That’s the beauty of it: the mark won’t even know what he’s messing with till it’s too late. You’ve always seemed older than your age. You’ll pull it off.”

  “Even if I do, what’s the take? Whatever the mark’s got on him? A few hundred if we’re lucky? It’s not worth the risk.”

  “This is just a practice run. The real play’s going to get us a lot more than a few hundred.”

  And then it all made sense.

  Somewhere out there was a man—possibly a man with important responsibilities, probably a man with a high profile in his community, certainly a man with too much money. And undoubtedly a man with a weakness for skinny young blonds.

  Barbra couldn’t be a skinny young blond anymore, but she could create one. And now she just had to make sure the blond was ready.

  The blond wasn’t.

  “Mom…please…no…,” the girl said. And this time it didn’t sound like somebody else’s voice. This was her, really her, her true self. Not debating anymore. Crying.

  “Oh, knock it off,” Barbra said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ll bust in before things go too far. That’s the way the play works.”

  The girl nodded and wiped away her tears even though she knew the truth.

  What gives you more leverage: something that happened or something that almost happened?

  “All right, then,” Barbra said. She stood and headed for the door. “You relax up here for a while. I’m going to go down and see what all the dental hygienists are wearing this year. When I come back, we’ll go over the plan.”

  The girl started crying again the second the door was closed.

  The girl had run away twice since Biddle died. The first time, her mother found her within a day. The second time, it took three.

  “I hope you like the pigeon drop,” her mother told her. “Because we’re running it till y
ou’ve paid back every cent I could’ve earned when I was out beating the bushes for you. And don’t give me that look. You think I’m bad, you just see how you like a pimp. Because that’s what you’d end up with quick if I wasn’t looking out for you.”

  And now the girl did have a pimp, more or less, and her mother was right.

  She didn’t like it.

  The girl prowled the seventh floor until she found what she wanted: a room-service tray left in the hall for the maids to clear away.

  She took the salt shaker from it, stuffed it in her pocket, and hurried back to her room. Then she poured half the salt in a glass of water, stirred it with a swizzle stick, and turned on the television.

  The timing would have to be just right.

  An hour later, when she heard her mother at the door, she gave the water another quick stir, drank it all down, then slid the glass under the bed with the salt shaker.

  It was agony waiting, but she waited.

  Her mother had to see for herself. No fingers.

  Barbra stepped into the room.

  “Since when do you watch Guiding Light?” she said, glancing at the TV screen.

  The girl wanted to give it a few more minutes, let the conversation play out naturally, but she couldn’t.

  “Mom,” she croaked. “I’ve been thinking about tonight, and it…it makes me…”

  She bolted from the bed, snatched up a trash can, and filled it with saltwater and half-digested Denny’s pancakes.

  “Ew,” her mother said. “Don’t get any of that on the carpet. I don’t want the place smelling like Sunday morning in a frat house.”

  The girl cleaned up the mess, then crawled into bed.

  Barbra came over and put her hand on her forehead.

  “No fever,” she said. “Just nerves.”

  “Can we put everything off for a while? Maybe come up with something else?”

  Barbra mulled it over.

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “It’s probably better that way anyway.”

  “Yeah?”

  Barbra nodded.

  “Tomorrow night everyone’s going to be drunk, hung over, and sleep deprived,” she said. “Their beer goggles’ll be twice as thick.”

  The next morning, the girl announced that she wanted a movie day. To help her relax, she said.

  “Sure, fine,” Barbra told her. “Do what you’ve got to. Just be back by nine.”

  “Thanks.”

  The girl started toward the door.

  “I mean it, though,” her mother said. “Be back by nine.”

  What she really meant was this:

  Don’t make me come find you.

  The girl was back at eight thirty.

  “So what’d you see?” Barbra asked.

  Barbra almost never asked her daughter what movies she’d seen. She almost never asked her daughter anything.

  “Wild at Heart, Pump Up the Volume, Postcards from the Edge, and then Pump Up the Volume again.”

  Barbra nodded as if the names meant something to her.

  “Fun?”

  “It was okay,” the girl said. “One of the guys who works at the theater caught me sneaking around.”

  “Oh? What happened?”

  “I talked him into giving me free popcorn.”

  “With butter?”

  “And a Coke.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Barbra never said “that’s my girl,” either. It was a Biddle thing.

  “Well,” she said, “guess we’d better get you in costume.”

  An outfit had already been laid out on the bed. White blouse, black pumps, glasses, pinstriped pantsuit with shoulders padded enough for the NFL. Once the girl was dressed, her mother started fussing with her hair.

  “If we do this right,” she said, “you’ll look like a thirty-year-old trying to seem twenty-four instead of a seventeen-year-old trying to seem thirty.”

  “What if no one…you know…takes the bait?”

  “This kind of bait always gets taken. Now let’s get some rouge on those cheeks.”

  Barbra spent fifteen minutes on her daughter’s makeup. When she was done, she took a step back and looked the girl over from head to toe.

  Her gaze lingered on the eyes, staring hard and deep for a long, long time.

  Say it, the girl thought. Say we don’t have to do this. Say you’re sorry. Say it, and everything will be okay.

  “You need more mascara,” Barbra said.

  She turned away to look for the applicator.

  They went downstairs separately and took their positions in the lobby bar: the girl alone at a little table with her convention badge and booklet and fake ID (all supplied by her mother), and Barbra forty feet away, discouraging company with a trough-like bowl of Cobb salad and a copy of The Watchtower.

  The last thing Barbra had said before the girl left the room—her final advice to a daughter who’d never even held hands with a boy—was this: “Just smile and let the men talk. The booze’ll do the rest.”

  Barbra was right. Orthodontists liked to party. By ten the place was packed with them. Chattering, drinking, laughing, drinking, pairing up, drinking, drinking, drinking.

  The girl nursed a gin and tonic that tasted like rubbing alcohol and, for her mother’s benefit, tried to look friendly.

  She got stares. She got smiles. She got lascivious grins. She got a come-on-over jerk of the head she pretended not to see.

  “Is anyone sitting here?”

  And there he was, sliding in beside her. Just what Barbra wanted. The catch of the day throwing himself into the net.

  He was mature but not too mature. Handsome but not too handsome. Married (to judge by the wedding ring on his finger) but not too married (to judge by his behavior). And, most important of all, he was acting drunk but not too drunk.

  He had to be sober enough to get to her room. Sober enough to get himself in trouble. Sober enough to know he was in trouble and do whatever he could to get out of it.

  The girl did what her mother told her. She let the man talk. That didn’t mean she listened to him, though. She just smiled and looked into his eyes and thought, I want this over. I want this over.

  More drinks came, and with each sip the man seemed to lean in a little closer.

  He snaked an arm around her shoulders.

  A few minutes later, his other hand slid under the table.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  I want this over. I want this over.

  They went upstairs.

  Barbra had said she’d wait five minutes before bursting into the room. Long enough but not too long.

  “What’s going on here?” she would shout. “What are you doing to my daughter?”

  “D-d-daughter?” the mark would sputter.

  And his adrenaline would kick in and his brain would shut off (assuming it was working anyway) and he’d shed his money like a snake shedding its skin, eager to slither off under a rock and never look back. And the girl would have gained a little experience with men without losing anything in the process.

  That was the plan. That was the promise. And the girl knew it would be broken.

  How long would it be before the door finally opened? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? Every extra second that passed would be a brick the girl would carry forever. Another pound of hate weighing her down.

  So when the door opened again just three minutes after it had closed, the girl jumped up, startled.

  “Mom?” she blurted out.

  Barbra stalked into the room, glaring past her.

  “What’s going on here? What are you doing with my daughter?” she said.

  She couldn’t say “what are you doing to my daughter” because it was obvious nothing
was being done.

  The girl and the man had been on the bed together, not in it. Sitting silently side by side as they waited.

  “Barbra Harper,” the man said now, “you’re under arrest for criminal conspiracy, pandering, and the corruption of a minor. You have the right to remain silent.”

  Barbra whirled around and yanked open the door.

  Another man stood just outside, blocking her.

  Another cop.

  “Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law,” said the first cop—the one who’d been sitting with the girl at the bar and in the room. The one they’d eventually taken her to that afternoon when she’d walked into the police station and said “I’d like to report a crime.”

  Barbra turned toward him again.

  “You have the right to an attorney,” he said. “If you cannot afford an attorney—”

  Barbra focused on the girl standing beside him.

  “What have you done?” she said. “What have you done?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom! I…I thought you were going to…that you wouldn’t…”

  The girl buried her face in her hands and wept.

  When she looked up again, her mother and the other cop were gone.

  She never saw her mother again. Not alive, anyway.

  Back at the police station, there were forms to fill out. They’d started some that afternoon, but things had moved forward now, weren’t just hypothetical, and that meant more paperwork.

  Some of the forms were for the social worker who’d be placing the girl in emergency foster care.

  “Name?” the social worker asked.

  The girl wiped her eyes dry and thought for a long, long time.

  “Good question,” she said.

  It’s midnight at the oasis, and after a long, hard, thirsty journey—so long, hard, and thirsty our heroine somehow lost all her clothes—there’s finally water to spare. Our weary traveler even has enough left over to give the lawn a spritz now that her own thirst is quenched. Needs are met, good deeds are done, peace reigns. Enjoy it while you can, girlfriend!

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  “I was in a foster home for two days before I ran away,” I said. “I don’t know what happened with the charges against Mom. I assume they were dropped because I wasn’t around to testify. I don’t know. I never looked it up, and my mother never tracked me down. She got the message. She was better off without me. That’s why I was so surprised when she left me the White Magic Five & Dime. After what I did to get away from her…well, a forgiving heart wasn’t among her virtues. If she had any.”