John went to Memphis, more for show than anything, and returned to the Holiday Inn Friday morning, as Marvel was leaving for the capital. LuEllen sat in the Coffee Klatch Café across from the City Hall, watching the City Hall and prowling the adjacent stores. I was on the boat alone when Dessusdelit showed up. John was right: She seemed to be coming undone and asked if I was in the mind to do a reading.

“Guess I could,” I said. “LuEllen’s not here, she’s up in town shopping-“

“I simply would like to see what the cards say.” She was on the dock, and I was on top of the cabin, looking down. She was gray-faced, haggard. In the cabin I got out the deck, shuffled the cards, and pushed them across at her. She shuffled a dozen times, pushed them back.

“Cut?”

She hesitated, nibbling her lip, and finally cut.

The cards rolled out, and as happens in most tarot readings, there was no clear, dramatic direction. What the cards said was more subtle than that. The Five of Pentacles - sometimes interpreted as a poverty card - popped up, and her sharp intake of breath indicated that she knew what it was.

“Remember that everything is relative, and the cards have a hard time dealing with relativity,” I told her. “I could roll the Five of Pentacles for a Rockefeller, and it might mean that he’d be cut back to his last billion.”

“It’s so much different from the last time,” she said in a small voice, seeming almost lost.

The last card to come up was one of the major arcana, the High Priestess. I was startled but kept my face straight and started picking the spread apart.

“There’s a secret,” I concluded, tapping the High Priestess. “I don’t know whether you have a secret or somebody has a secret they’re hiding from you. But if the secret comes out, there’ll be terrible problems. You can see how that influence in the High Priestess cuts right back to the Five of Pentacles, the loss card, the poverty card.”

She was becoming increasingly agitated, clutching a wadded Kleenex in her fist, her knuckles white as marble.

“Is it going to come out?”

I shrugged. “I can’t see that.”

“Can we do another spread?”

I shook my head. “If you do too many, the influences tend to get mixed up. If you’d like a really good reading

“

“Yes?”

“Focus on a question. You don’t even have to tell me what it is. But focus, spend the day and the night thinking about it, and come back tomorrow morning. Then we’ll take out the cards, and we’ll see if we can do something more definitive.”

Her head jerked in assent. “Tomorrow,” she said, getting up.

“Sure. But focus. We need that psychic energy.”

“And you think we’ll get something definitive.”