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

Robin cut her off. Zelda clearly didn’t have her husband’s skill with words. “It’s not just his job,” she continued. “It’s a whole lifestyle: the house, the country club, the Caribbean vacations — none of which he’d be able to afford if he has to divide his assets with his wife. Believe me, this is not a man who’s going to move with you to New England to run a B and B, no matter what he might have said in a love letter.”

Julie stared at her in shock and disbelief.

Looking up, Robin sliced a finger across her neck. “Three weeks and you’re history.”

There was silence for a few minutes. Then Julie spoke: “I thought it was going to be different this time.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, her tone despondent. She started sobbing — deep, lurching sobs.

“Much as I hate to say it, there are no accidents,” Robin told her. It was a phrase she had used often — one whose meaning Julie knew very well.

Robin passed her the box of tissues.

Phase II went into effect the next week. Robin called it her Gaslight campaign, after the old movie with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Its aim was nothing less than the destruction of the Tower, which had been the outcome card in Julie’s initial reading about the affair. The heartbreak remained. There was depression and loneliness. The central card was the Nine of Swords, which showed a woman sitting up in bed, crying. “It depicts the dark night of the soul,” she told Julie. And there was worse to come: Julie would have a car accident by the time the week was out. Nothing serious: a fender bender. But expensive to fix. Robin had no trouble arranging this in the parking lot at the strip mall out on the highway. Especially with her new SUV, which grossly outweighed Julie’s compact. She simply backed into the door while Julie was in the drugstore, crumpling it like a piece of cardboard. Nobody was around to notice; Robin had made certain of that.

The stolen pocketbook, which was to be the next week’s woe, took a little more finesse to pull off. Robin didn’t want to be arrested for purse snatching. But Julie turned out to be even more careless than Robin had thought, which might have been due to her state of mind. After removing her money, credit cards, and driver’s license in order to maximize the hassle factor, she tossed the purse into the nearest mailbox. The third week was the hate letters, crazy and illiterate, which Robin constructed out of letters and words that she clipped from newspapers and magazines, like the letters sent by the psychopathic creeps in suspense thrillers.

By the fourth week, Julie was primed for disaster. Although Robin may have recognized that the future predicted in the cards wasn’t fixed, Julie had no such notion. Especially after her love affair — every detail of which had been spelled out in the cards — and the events of the last few weeks. She arrived for her session in a state of extreme agitation. She was pale and jumpy; she appeared to have lost weight.

“C’mon,” said Robin blithely after Julie had confided her apprehensions. “What else could go wrong?” (Little did she know.) “Besides, don’t you know that bad luck comes in threes? You’ve just had a run of it, that’s all.”

After Julie had carefully shuffled and cut the cards, Robin proceeded to lay them out. The spread wasn’t coming out well at all. Swords — the suit of strife and misfortune — were everywhere; there were lots of reversed cards, too, which generally weren’t a good sign.

“You’re going to fall ill soon,” Robin said as she threw the card for approaching influence. “It’s going to be a serious illness involving your heart,” she added as she turned over the card representing the immediate future.

“But how could that be?” Julie cried. “I’m only twenty-seven.”

Robin shrugged as if to say, There are no accidents.

Julie thought for a moment, and then added, “As a matter of fact, I haven’t been feeling well lately. I have this sensation that my heart is beating too rapidly.” She raised her palm to her chest. “It feels like a bird beating its wings.”

Robin nodded knowingly. “Maybe you should see a doctor,” she suggested as she turned over the card for how others viewed the subject. It was as frail and vulnerable, which confirmed how Julie was feeling about herself. Then came the card for her hopes, which were for a renewal of love. Finally, there was the outcome card.

Julie watched intently as Robin turned the card over. It was the thirteenth card of the major arcana: the Death card. A menacing skeleton armed with a scythe cleared the ground around him, in which were scattered the heads and hands of his victims.

“Death,” Julie whispered. Her eyes bulged and a sweat broke out on the fine, youthful skin of her temples.