Page 18 of Death Card

There’s no answer, but the ceiling creaks. I take the stairs two at a time, tossing my bag onto my bed before continuing up to the third floor.

Gramps’s voice grows louder the closer I get to the top. I pause at the cracked door and peer inside. He’s got his back to me, sitting at his desk. On the computer screen, boxes of faces stare back at him.

“We’ve got to be more aggressive in discrediting his statements,” Gramps says. “Dupree won’t take this challenge lying down—it’s not the way men like him operate. He’ll say or do anything to win this race.”

“I don’t believe that’s our path forward, Ezekiel,” one of the virtual faces says. “You should present yourself as a foil to his aggression. The people want to see a friendly face, someone they can believe in.”

“But—”

“Do you really want to come across as an angry Black man?” someone else asks.

Ouch.

I tiptoe back down to the second floor and take a seat on the bottom step. The last thing I want to do is interfere with his campaign. Besides trying to take over all the businesses on our street, Mike Dupree was a guest on a podcast recently and spouted off terrible things about women and immigrants. My blood boiled hearing him speak.

Gramps has to win this race.

I can keep myself from combusting for a few more minutes while he has his meeting.

Gramps gave us access to the shop’s email account once we were old enough to be trusted. I log in and my heart sinks when I see that Joelle’s application has already been opened. Damn. There’s no way I can delete it now that Gramps has already seen it. I click open the PDF scan instead and study her looping, delicate handwriting.

My finger brushes over her full name:Joelle Murphy.The girl destined to kill me.

She was seriously so gorgeous, too. The universe can’t let me have one good thing, I swear.

When I open the sent messages, I can see that Gramps already emailed to set up a phone interview. It’s not too late to stop this. Once I tell him about the vision, there’s no way he’ll let her work in the shop.

I need to stay far away from that girl. The last thing I want to do is give her any opportunity to get close enough to stab me.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t stalk her on social media.

I open Instagram and type in her name. Only a couple Joelle Murphys appear, but none of them is the girl who sat across from me in my reading room.

Time for a different approach. I switch to Google and plug variations of Joelle Murphy plus the names of small towns in the vicinity of Salem, Massachusetts, into the search bar until I find a newspaper article about a talented junior tennis player. An image of a slightly younger, darker-haired Joelle swinging her racket stares back at me from the top of the page.

Bingo!

As I scroll through the article, I tamp down rising feelings of admiration. It makes Joelle out to be the darling of the town. If you can believe the writer, she was single-handedly responsible for getting her high school’s team to the regional semifinals.

I scroll through more Google results, but I can’t find anything else about her aside from a shorter article with a more recent image. This time, Joelle’s curls are dyed in vibrant shades of purple and blue. The photo captures her mid-handshake with her opponent.

Who is this girl? And why does she want to kill me?

The door at the top of the stairs swings open, startling me from my research. I click my phone off and face Gramps, who leans in the doorway, staring down at me. “Shouldn’t you be at the shop?” he asks.

I trudge up the stairs, pausing one step below. “I saw something in the cards today.”

“I would hope so,” he chuckles. “That’s your job.”

“Gramps.” My tone stops him mid-laugh. “This is serious. We need to talk.”

He backs up, allowing me to step into the office.

The curtains are thrown open, casting the room in near-blinding sunlight. A stack of photo albums sits on Gran’s desknext to an open box. More boxes are scattered across her side of the room. Inside one, her glass trinkets are bundled up in Bubble Wrap.

If my emotions weren’t already so thrown off by watching my own death, then seeing the pieces of Gran’s life packed away would send me to tears. It’s taken Gramps a whole year to clear out her space, but honestly, it still feels too soon.

I steady my shaky hands against my thighs and take a seat in her creaky desk chair.