Page 84 of Dead Beat

Mira nodded, but slowly, as if trying to remember. How could she not be sure if she’d seen the father of her child again?

“You never called him?” she pressed.

“Of course I did.”

Now Alex heard the embarrassment in her mother’s voice. She had tried to reach him—maybe to yell at him for disappearing, or to beg him to come back, or to tell him she was pregnant. The reason didn’t much matter when you were the one making the call, just the hope and the shame that followed when no one picked up.

“Maybe something happened to him,” Alex offered.

Mira gave a long sigh. “Maybe. That’s all in the way back when.”

She was closing the book, story completed. Alex wasn’t going to get more out of her mother. Maybe if she’d had a few months or years to work on her, but they didn’t have that time.

Alex gestured to Dawes. “One sec, Mom, Mercy needs something.”

She muted the call. “Okay … Just be careful.”

“You’re sure?” Darlington asked.

Alex nodded. She turned her mic back on.

“Hey, Mom, can my friend Dawes ask you a question? She’s really into tarot.”

Mira’s face lit. “Oh, I haven’t done a reading in years!”

“Well, you know more than I do, that’s for sure.”

Dawes scooted a chair closer to Alex. “Hi, Ms. Stern.”

“Mira, please. You’re a student of tarot?”

Dawes’s long-unfinished thesis was, in fact, on tarot, and she probably knew more about its history and theory than every supposed seer Mira had handed her credit card over to.

But all Dawes said was “It’s a hobby.” Outside the frame, she gestured to Darlington. One mirror was set on the table, and he dangled the other above it.

Dawes held up a tarot card, the Three of Cups. “Do you recognize this deck?”

A drop of liquid splashed from the mirror Darlington held. It almost looked like its surface was bending, as if the substance of the mirror was turning molten. It struck the mirror on the table.

Mira peered at the screen. She blinked slowly. “I don’t think so?”

Another drop followed, then another, a broken line connecting the two mirrors.

Dawes flipped the card. Now it was the Queen of Swords. “How about this one?”

“I don’t think so.”

Dawes continued to turn the card, and each time, it changed. Five of Wands. Death. Eight of Pentacles. And then the Wheel. A bell sounded from somewhere in the distance and the stream of connection between the two mirrors seemed to turn solid, a single gleaming thread of silver.

The air around Mira shimmered, a barely detectable halo that distorted the objects on the shelf behind her.

“Okay,” Dawes said. “She won’t remember the rest.”

“Mira,” Darlington began, “what was Chushi’s real name?”

Mira frowned. “Chushi.”

“Do you remember where he worked?”