“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.”

“An answer about what?” she asked, her voice so soft she could barely hear herself.

“Why I’m so afraid of this picture.”

“Big man like you, afraid of a photo?” She was sorry for the words as soon as she said them, but it was too late. His face hardened and he turned away.

Go to Dallas, said pappy plain as day just behind her ear.

The postal inspector turned back. “What?”

“My father says you should go to Dallas.”

He drew a deep breath. “It’s too late, I think. You should have told me that a long time ago.”

“I told you Texas, the first time we met.”

He nodded. “Yes… I suppose you did.”

She went home and folded brochures. It all made sense now, except the why. Something in the numbers of the world had tried to warn her of the true secret that would arrive tomorrow. A man, a gun, a bullet. She wondered if the postal inspector would board a night airmail plane and fly to Texas, looking to stop whatever might have been.

The shadows deepened in her tiny apartment, day slipping westward as the night took up its watch on the horizon’s battlements. As the first stars came out, she found her coffee can and took five of the eleven dollars out.

She hadn’t eaten steak in years, and besides, the world was going to end tomorrow, or good as. Magic was little more than grift, pappy had been dead for years, and the postal inspector had never asked her the right questions that might have saved a man’s life on November 22nd, 1963.

The boatman who would be king was going to die tomorrow. She ate well on the scant proceeds of her mail fraud and drank to his life, before stumbling home amid the memories and ghosts of night.

Maybe it was time to change her ad.

The Sweet Smell of Cherries by Devon Monk

Mama’s restaurant is a greasy dive hunkered in the kind of neighborhood outsiders avoid during the day and insiders try to ignore at night. Magic isn’t what’s wrong with the neighborhood. It’s a dead zone, far enough outside the glass and lead lines that carry magic throughout the rest of Portland that it takes someone with college learning, or a hell of a knack, to cast anything stronger than a light-off spell. Yet even without the help of magic, dark things move on these streets. Very dark and hungry things.

But I was there because Mama’s food was so cheap even I could afford to eat out once a week. A girl needed a place to get away from her job, right? This was my place. Or at least that’s what I’d been telling myself for the last month. What I didn’t like to admit was that I wasn’t sleeping so well any more, wasn’t eating so well, and lately had been having a hard time deciding if I should spend my money on rent or booze. Rent still won out (what can I say? I’m a creature of comfort and like a roof over my head), but it didn’t take a genius to see how dangerously close I was to burning out.

And burnout is a fatal sort of situation in my line of work.