Deadly Gamble. Linda Miller Lael

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      I nodded, certain I’d break down and cry if I tried to say anything. I picked up my purse, leaving the bakery bag on the window sill, where I’d set it earlier, and dashed for the door.

      I ran smack into Uncle Clive in the corridor, and he steadied me by placing avuncular hands on my shoulders.

      “Mary Josephine,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it was really me.

      I bit my lower lip, speechless. I hadn’t seen the man since I was five, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized him at all if he hadn’t been a state senator, making regular appearances on TV and in every major newspaper in Arizona. He looked harmless, even friendly, but he was one of the people Lillian had wanted to avoid, all those years ago. She’d been scared to death, for herself and me, which was why she’d snatched me from the front yard of my foster home. At least, that was her account of what happened—I didn’t remember any of it.

      “Let’s have some coffee and talk,” Uncle Clive said quietly.

      I was twenty-eight years old, a self-supporting adult, not a kid. I’d been married and divorced. I’d read The Damn Fool’s Guide to Self-Defense for Women.

      There was nothing to be afraid of.

      And, besides, I was curious as hell.

      Uncle Clive was my mother’s older brother. He’d been around when the killings took place, and he could fill in a lot of gaps in my memory, bring me up to speed on my half brother, Geoff, who’d gone to prison at sixteen for second-degree murder.

      “Okay,” I said.

      CHAPTER 2

      The cafeteria at Sunset Villa wasn’t much, so we walked, my long-lost uncle and I, to a nearby Starbucks, with outside tables and misters to cool the customers. Even in April, it’s warm in Phoenix.

      I didn’t think I could choke down anything—the whole scenario was an excuse to talk, after all—but Clive bought us both a cup of classic roast. Except for a few university students bent over textbooks and one doughy guy with piercings and vampire teeth—a poet or a serial killer or both—we had the place to ourselves.

      “I can’t believe it’s you,” Clive said, as he joined me under the shade of a green-and-white striped umbrella, setting down our cups. His black metal chair, which matched the black metal table, scraped on the patio stones as he drew it back to sit.

      I didn’t answer. After twenty-three years, I didn’t know where to start.

      It СКАЧАТЬ