The Fortune Teller(66)

Her heart pounded in her ears like the ocean in a shell. She unwrapped the paper with shaky hands to find Rinalto’s wooden box, the one so perfectly described in the manuscript.

When Semele opened the lid she felt like a part of her was no longer in the room. Her world and Ionna’s had finally collided.

“My word,” Helen said. “What are those?”

Semele placed the cards on the table.

Time had preserved their brilliance. The twenty-two cards—Ionna’s originals—looked more weathered than Rinalto’s matching fifty-six. But together they created the oldest tarot deck in existence.

There was a photo tucked inside the box. It was a small black-and-white of two women: a mother who looked about forty-five and a young girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen. Semele knew exactly who they were.

There was no mistaking the dark-haired girl, posed with a hand on her hip and a dare in her eyes—Semele’s real mother when she was young. Her grandmother looked just as Semele had imagined, except for the sorrow in her eyes.

Nettie was staring straight into the camera lens, as if she knew the picture was meant for Semele. Semele turned the photo over.

Semele,

I cannot cut the card in half

and come back for you.

Forgive me.

We are always yours,

Nettie

Semele took a seat at the table, unable to speak.

Nettie had foreseen Semele’s question from the card exhibit in Amsterdam, the one she had carried inside her heart every day afterward.

Her grandmother had written the answer before Semele had even asked the question.

Semele could feel her reality shifting. Her grandmother was the Nettie in the story. These cards had been kept for her, entrusted to her father, who had known their worth and hidden them in the safest place he knew. As curator of the Beinecke, he had recognized their incredible significance.

Her mother hovered beside her, looking concerned.

“Do you want to open the other package?” she asked gently.

“No,” Semele whispered. “You do it.”

While her mother opened the envelope, Semele studied Nettie’s handwriting, analyzing every line and curve. Nettie had been left-handed. Her hands had been shaking with nerves—or illness—when she wrote the message. The script slanted downward with sadness, yet the lines showed strong conviction.

“Oh, I’d wondered what happened to this,” Helen said as she pulled the pages from the envelope. “Why is this here?”

When Semele saw what her mother was holding her whole body went rigid. She had been prepared for the cards, but not this.

Reaching out, she took the pages. It was a photocopy of Ionna’s writing alongside her father’s handwritten translation.

“How did Dad get this?” Semele asked, her voice now barely a whisper.

“Some collector in Europe asked for his help earlier this year. I don’t remember his name. Your father was shut up in his office for weeks translating it.”

Marcel Bossard.

Her mother had no idea what these pages were. Semele flipped to the back and found the place where she had stopped reading the night before. Here were the lost pages. Marcel had given her father a complete copy of Ionna’s manuscript, and her father had translated every last word.





King of Pentacles

Semele looked out the train window on her way to New York. The scenery passed by in a muted blur, like an impressionistic painting she was no longer a part of. She now had Ionna’s cards along with her father’s copy of the manuscript.

This must have been why Marcel and her father were going to meet.

Semele shook her head, her mind spinning at the implications. She tried to center her thoughts. First she needed to authenticate and date the cards. She had to be sure they were real, and there was only one person in the world she could trust with that project.

She had called Cabe right before getting on the train. He agreed to meet at their favorite coffeehouse. He would run the tests today and then get the cards back to her after her morning meeting with Mikhail. Her only problem was how to broach the subject of Raina with Cabe. He needed to know she couldn’t be trusted.

Semele’s hands instinctively tightened around her purse. Rinalto’s rosewood box was nestled inside, bundled in some of Helen’s old scarves for protection. She was afraid to even look at the cards. Her father’s translation was tucked next to them.

Why was her father’s version complete, while hers had missing pages? She could have taken out the remaining pages and read them on the train, but she was worried about what she would find at the conclusion of Nettie’s story. Someone else didn’t want her to see that part either, or they wouldn’t have hidden the pages from her.

Theo—he was at the heart of all this. He had to have known about their fathers’ connection, that Marcel had given Joseph the manuscript. She had so many questions for him. Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.

*

As soon as she got back to Manhattan she backed up her hard drive on an external. Then, borrowing a page from her father, she opened a safe-deposit box and locked away the hard drive. If her computer was stolen, she would still have a copy of the manuscript. That alleviated some of her fear. She kept her father’s translated copy with her. No one knew about that—she hoped.

She hurried to the café to meet Cabe but slowed down in horror as soon as she walked through the door.