Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

“Amazing!” Julie exclaimed as she made a notation in her journal. “It’s an apartment, actually,” she offered. “In lower Manhattan. His company maintains it for business guests. We’ve been meeting there several times a week, just as you said.”

All of this Robin had already pieced together for herself and had arranged the second deck of cards, which she adroitly substituted for the one Julie had cut, accordingly.

“You’re finding him an ardent lover,” she said. “Eager to please you,” (though this will change, she thought) “though perhaps not as capable a performer as a younger man.”

Julie looked up and a blush crept up her long white neck.

Though he was her husband, Robin could have made the prediction even without personal experience: He was, after all, an out-of-shape executive in his mid fifties — not exactly a candidate for sexual athletics.

“The wife is still in the picture,” Robin went on, “though she’s in the background at the moment. Apparently, she hasn’t found out yet.”

“That’s the only thing the cards have been wrong about,” Julie said. “At least, I think they were wrong. He says she has no idea.”

Little does he know, Robin thought. “Here’s something nice,” she said. She pointed with a smile to the Page of Cups. “He’s going to send you a gift. I would guess it’s flowers. Yes, roses,” she said definitely. “Not just one, not just a dozen” — she threw out her arms in a gesture of expansiveness — “dozens of roses. Five or six dozen red roses.”

Julie looked sceptical. “He’s not the type,” she said, quite accurately.

“Love can make people do things that are quite out of character.”

“I suppose,” Julie agreed reluctantly. She smiled her timid smile. “It would be nice if he did. Nobody’s ever sent me flowers. My junior-prom date gave me a single rose, but nobody’s ever sent me a bouquet. I’ve never gotten a love letter, either.”

“Well, that’s about to change. Look for your flowers within the next few days.”

The flowers arrived at Julie’s apartment on Sunday: six dozen red roses. She didn’t even have enough vases for them, she later told Robin. She’d had to use her coffeepot for one bunch. They covered every available surface in her tiny living room. “It all came true exactly as you said,” Julie had marveled. She had showed Robin the entry in her tarot journal. “You said five or six dozen red roses and it was six dozen.”

The next week was the love letter. Though Robin had been an English major, it had been many years since she’d used her writing skills, and it took her a number of drafts before she got it right: just the requisite degree of mush. Not so much that it would be unbelievable coming from an undemonstrative King of Pentacles, or so little that it wouldn’t have the desired impact.

“There’s nothing in all the world I want but you — and your precious love. All the material things are nothing...” she wrote, cribbing shamelessly from Zelda’s letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, which she happened to have on her bookshelf. She wrote it on the computer. Thank God for the electronic age; at least she hadn’t been called upon to forge Ron’s handwriting. She knew he’d be too cowardly to disavow authorship.

The computer gave her another idea, which she used for week three: e-mail. Over the course of the week, she sent Julie several e-mails from Ron’s computer at the office. She figured the password would be the same as for his e-mail at home, which it was. Ron was predictable — he was King of Pentacles, after all. Having once worked at the office, Robin wasn’t an unusual visitor; only now she made sure to drop in only when he wasn’t there.

The next week it was mash notes that she faxed from Ron’s office. After that, it was sexy lingerie in the mail, and finally — for the finale on week six — the ring.

It looked more expensive than it was: a cubic-zirconium solitaire — very much like an engagement ring, in fact. Robin had always been a fan of cubic zirconium: Why pay for the real thing when the illusion was so effective?

All of these events in Julie’s life had been duly predicted in the cards.

Ron was tense and anxious over cocktails in the library that evening — the evening of the day Julie had received the ring. In fact, he’d been becoming increasingly tense and anxious over the last five weeks. He had mixed himself his usual martini, but, contrary to custom, it was nearly all gin. The set of his shoulders was stiff, his manner even more remote than usual. He sat in his leather wing chair in front of the fire. A silver tray of canapés rested on the coffee table.

The scene was set. “What is it, honey?” Robin asked solicitously as she passed him the tray. “Is everything all right at the office?”

“No, as a matter of fact,” he growled, helping himself to crackers with caviar.