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“You don’t charge for those,” he said flatly.

She shook her head. Two bits a reading, a long time ago in a tent beside dusty red dirt roads. Not now. Not any more.

He pulled another card out of his coat. A photo, she realized. A head shot of a man of medium build, average looking with short dark hair. He seemed like an earnest fellow. This one could have been her son, if she’d ever had a son. “This tell you anything?”

Someone has a camera, she thought, but bit off the words. “N-no.”

“Hmm.” He stared. “I’ll buy you coffee again next week. You think of anything, you write it down in that little book.” He left thirty-five cents tip on the table and stood, taking his hat off the coat hook on the wall.

As the postal inspector left, she realized two things. She hadn’t pulled out the memo book since meeting him, and he’d never told her his name. At least he’d left her the letters.

She palmed the tip as she picked up her mail and shuffled off for home.

That Friday there was another postcard from Dallas in her box. This one showed a city park, with a road running through it to disappear under a railway overpass. There were a few monuments scattered around. She looked at the back, at the almost familiar handwriting.

Why not tell him to stay in the white house?

Hands shaking, she set the postcard down. She laid her copy of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew atop it and set to folding more brochures.

She spent the entire weekend wondering if the postal inspector would reappear. She assumed he’d be at the East Portland postal station, but with him anything seemed possible. She sat on bus benches and waved the drivers past, then shuffled onward when she’d been in one place too long.

They’d run more than a few times, she and pappy back in those years. Somehow it had always been funny. Afterward, at least, if not in the moment. Sheriff’s deputies, town constables, preachers, angry wives, angry husbands-her memory was a parade of red faces and southern accents and the squeal of tires on gravel. Even when they’d been cornered, as happened once outside New Orleans, and probably a few other places as well, pappy would launch into some oration in that voice of his and eventually find the keys to unlock the hearts of their pursuers.

She’d thought her grandfather was old then, but she would swear to being older now. His gift had been the gift of gab, the flim flam grift that flowed from his lips like sand from a child’s fingers.

Her gift was real. They both knew it back then. They just never used it for anything. She could have played the ponies, picked stocks, found some way to make it into real money so they could retire to Havana or Miami or Nag’s Head. But it was never time, and there was always an element of danger, of betrayal.

So she’d told fortunes across the south and west for so many years she’d forgotten to ever make her own. Besides which, people didn’t want to know their real future. They wanted to know their imagined future, the one they cherished instead of fearing.

He was waiting for her Monday. He had her mail again, one grubby letter. Sometimes those didn’t even have money, just a simple request. Rarely begging, but she knew how to read an envelope just like she knew how to read a mark.

“Tell me,” the postal inspector asked as they walked to coffee-and-tea. “What is the true secret of magic?”

In spite of herself, she laughed. “You really want to know?”

“Sure. We got time.”

She heard the lie in his voice and knew that something drove this man, something invisible to her but as real as cholera in a well. “A dollar ninety-eight.”

“You want me to pay you?” He sounded disgusted now.

“No, no, you don’t understand. The true secret of magic is in the numbers. You have the numbers, you have everything. Like elections, you see? It’s not the votes, it’s the counting.”

“Hmm.”

She went on. “Wall Street. Who makes money? The brokers, not the poor bastards who pay for the stock. Numbers are magic.”

“That’s not magic. That’s… that’s economics.”

“An economist can tell the future.”

“But he’s not right,” the postal inspector protested.

“How do you know? Anyone can call spirits from the vasty deep, but will they come?”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re twisting the question.”

“Oh, a big cop like you, he never did such a thing?”

He laughed. “You must have been quite something in your day, lady.”

“Ma’am,” she said quietly.

“Ma’am.”

“I’m still something today, sonny. I’m just something different.”

A few minutes later, over their steaming mugs, he leaned toward her. “So, what do you know about my boy there?”

“ Texas,” she said, surprising herself. She wasn’t inclined to trust him, not a cop, especially one who wouldn’t even give her his name.

“He the one sending you those postcards?”

“Who knows?” She sipped. “All I can say is Texas. I don’t know why.”

“I hope you get better at spirit calling.”

Step outside on a new moon night. Walk to a park or a railroad siding, or even a rooftop, somewhere away from the street lights and the late night buses. Now look up and try to count the stars.

How many did you find? How many do you think there are?

Magic tells you that you don’t need to know, that there are as many stars as the sky can hold. Magic tells you how to find the one you want, like looking for a diamond in a mile of beach sand. Magic is the art of picking out the impossible from all the things which might be or have been. Magic is the star under which you were born.

They went on into the autumn, meeting every week or two. He badgered her, he twitted her, but he never pushed her. She came to respect him for not trying to pull the answer from her. Somehow this man with the gray suit and the badge understood at least that much about what she did.

He let her keep answering her letters. Eight dollars one week, twelve the next, once a twenty-dollar week. She put three dollars aside that week, in her coffee can, and that was after buying a pork chop at Fred Meyer’s.

Still, something drove him. His attitude became slowly more urgent. She got more postcards from Dallas, all of them cryptic. Pappy whispered the answers to her, no less strange.

A textbook killing.

Hobos hidden atop the grassy hill.

Officer Tippit has three children.

She kept the answers to herself. There were some things he did not need to know. Coffee every week or two did not buy trust. Besides, he’d surely read all the Texas postcards.

In mid-November, she got another one of the postcards from Texas on a day when there were no other letters. This one had a mail order rifle ad from the Sears catalog pasted over the face. On the back it read, Why only one bullet?

She stood in the post office, looking at the card. His hand reached around and plucked it from her grasp. “You’ve received one hundred and two letters since I’ve had you under surveillance, Miss Redheart. That’s one hundred and two separate counts of postal fraud. You’ve also received twelve of these postcards from Dallas, mixed in with thirty-eight others from around the United States. A secret admirer in Texas, perhaps?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” She thought of the earnest young man in his photograph of the previous summer. “Maybe you should ask that fellow whose picture you showed me.”

“I’d like to,” he said. “I really would. I just don’t know who he is.”

“Why did you bring him to me?”

He glanced at his shoes a moment. “Because I saw your classified in the Oregonian. I… I received that photo in a very strange fashion. Nothing I could make sense of.” He tugged it out of his pocket and turned the picture over. On the back was written 11/22/63 in the same bold, black handwriting as all her postcards. Below it was a drawing of a goblet with a line through it. He continued, “I’ve been waiting for an answer I could give someone. Something I could say.”