Page 90 of Mountain Man’s Mystic Touch

The difference between them is subtle. The deputy gathers facts after something happens. Rocco looks at the same facts and sees the choices made before it happened.

He steps through the opening first. Grant has positioned a portable light outside, its beam cutting across the interior without touching the table. The crystals and candles remain exactly where I placed them. My massage table stands folded against the back panel. Even the chair left slightly crooked after my last appointment appears undisturbed.

The Tower lies in the center of the dark cloth. Upright.

A stone building rises against a black sky, its crown split by lightning while two figures fall toward jagged rocks below. Flames pour from the windows. The image has always been dramatic, but I have never found it frightening. Destruction is not always punishment. Sometimes a structure must fall because it was never strong enough to shelter anyone.

Tonight, the card feels different.

Rocco positions himself between me and the open side of the booth. “Is it yours?”

“I need to see the deck.”

“Where is it?”

I point toward the narrow drawer beneath the reading table. From the aisle, it looks like part of the decorative wooden frame. Someone would have to study the table closely to notice the small groove I use as a handle. Rocco crouches without touching it.

“Was it closed when you left?”

“Yes.”

“It’s open now.”

Barely. A quarter of an inch, perhaps less, but enough that I can see the interruption in the clean line of the wood.

“May I put on gloves and open it?” I ask Carver.

He removes a pair from his pocket but hands them to Rocco. “Let him.”

Rocco pulls them on and slowly opens the drawer. Inside is the wooden box that holds the deck I use for festival readings. I recognize immediately that the lid isn’t seated properly.

“He opened that too,” I say.

Rocco lifts the lid and steps aside so I can see without moving closer. The cards are stacked inside, but one corner rises higher than the others, as if someone handled them and returned them carelessly.

“Can you tell if one is missing without touching them?” Carver asks.

“There should be seventy-eight.”

Grant begins counting photographs on his phone while Rocco removes the cards one at a time, placing them in careful rows on a clean evidence sheet. I know before he finishes.

Seventy-seven cards.

He looks at the Tower on the table. “It came from your deck.”

“Yes.”

The word leaves me quietly, but the certainty behind it spreads through the booth.

This was not a stranger carrying a random card chosen because the picture looked threatening. Someone entered my space, found a drawer most people never notice, opened the wooden box, and deliberately selected the Tower from my deck.

Rocco straightens. “Who saw you put the cards away?”

“I don’t know. Anyone walking past could have seen me.”

“Did anyone ask where you kept them?”

“No.”