“How am I supposed to do that?” he asked. “We play almost every night. And even when I’m not playing with the Stakes, I can usually find work on my own or with other groups. But it doesn’t feel like I’m really going anywhere, you know?”
I don’t know, she might have told him. You’re looking at someone who caved early on and easily, afraid that her dreams would never earn a living.
“You keep your eyes open,” she said instead, “and you listen for every opportunity. Take gigs that support a cause or could get you some good publicity. Maybe you need to look for opportunities, too, even create them. Don’t just wait around for opportunity to find you.”
“Yeah, you’re right. You’re good.” He winked at her. “Better than any shrink I’ve ever seen—or bartender, for that matter.”
“Yeah, well, thanks,” she told him.
She looked at the cards. They were still just cards. She left the little inner room with him, they exchanged a few pleasantries, then he gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.
“You okay?” Mason asked her.
“Sure.”
“The reading was fine?”
“Yeah. I spewed my usual uplifting bull.”
“Alas, what an unbeliever.”
“And you really believe?”
“I never mock what my heart tells me,” he assured her. “I’m going to lunch, and it’s going to be a long lunch, okay? There are more boxes to open in back, if you get bored.”
She wasn’t bored; she was restless. On the one hand, she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact she was actually engaged in a sexual relationship with a man who was fascinating, compelling and unbelievable in bed. At the same time, she kept telling herself that no matter what she’d told him, she still wasn’t sure she even liked him. But she did want to see him again. Talk with him, even argue with him. Definitely sleep with him. And maybe…more. That was the scary part.
She tried not to think about Aidan, but not thinking about Aidan made her more nervous. She wandered into her office and picked up the deck of tarot cards she always used for readings. Since she was alone, she brought them back out front with her. She shuffled them and turned them up, not in a spread, but one by one.
When she found the Death card, it just stared up at her. It was flat. It was inanimate. It was a card.
She wasn’t doing a reading, though. Maybe she should read her own tarot spread.
No. No way.
But the thought of doing a reading made her even more anxious about Sheila Anderson.
She put through a call to the historical society where her friend worked, but Sheila’s boss seemed surprised by her call. “You know she isn’t due back until this weekend, right?” he asked her.
“Right. Thank you.”
Frustrated but still uneasy, she hung up.
She carefully returned the deck to her reading room, went into the back, pulled out the boxes Mason had mentioned and opened the first to find a new shipment of voodoo dolls. She walked out front and looked up at the shelf. There had been ten dolls in their first order.
She remembered selling two right away, and she had sold another three earlier this week.
But now there were only two on the top shelf.
When had Mason sold the others? This morning? Or…
There was no way out of it. Three were missing. Exactly three. The same number that had been found in front of Flynn Plantation.
The woman who owned the bed-and-breakfast was named Lily Fleur. Her husband’s name, she explained, as she cheerfully led them out to an old carriage house that was now her storeroom. He’d passed away a few years ago, and her daughter had moved to New York and her son to California. They were always urging her to move out to be with one of them, but this was her home, and she loved running a B and B.
“I called the police when she didn’t return,” she said now, “and they suggested I just hold on to her belongings, said she’d probably come back. I didn’t hear from them again, and quite frankly, I put the things away and then kind of forgot about them. I should have been more persistent, I guess, but I wasn’t. And I think I got her name wrong, anyway, because they didn’t find any record of her. I’ll show you where she signed in. It looks like she wrote Sherry Frend, not Jenny Trent. We talked a bit when she checked in, but she was only here for the night, and she paid me cash.” She opened the door to let them in.
“It was just the one backpack, so I figured she’d left most of her luggage in her car, or that she knew how to travel light.”
Aidan was glad she was so willing to turn the backpack over to him, rather than contacting the police again.
“Is Sherry all right?” the elderly woman asked. “Jenny, I mean.”
“I’m afraid she’s missing, Mrs. Fleur,” Aidan told her.
“Missing?” The woman was clearly upset. “That’s terrible!”
“She was trusting,” Vinnie said suddenly. Aidan looked at the man. He looked genuinely worried, more subdued than Aidan had ever seen him, as if he’d finally realized that something might really have happened to the girl he had walked home that night three months ago.
“Let’s see what she left,” Aidan said.