THE EMPRESS
A woman sits sidewise on a throne, surrounded by trees and a waterfall. She wears a crown of stars and holds a wand.
Upright: creativity, nature, harmony, art, passion
Reversed: insecurity, overbearing tendencies, negligence
The lights extinguishing is not a planned occurrence. The crowd does what crowds do—they collectively panic. But three in the crowd see the darkness as opportunity:
Pax, who retrieves the gun from his waistband.
Kiyoko, who grabs a candlestick to continue this charade of a séance, planning next to rap messages “from beyond” underneath the table, during what she believes is simply a spectacular show.
And Evalyn Walsh McLean, who in her drugged state, thinks this would be the perfect time to dispose of the fake Hope Diamond she wears.
Ah, how clever she is! (She thinks.)
How delightfully cunning! (She believes.)
In the darkness, Evalyn crosses to the punch bowl in the foyer, dumps the fake necklace inside, and hopes the large blue sugar gem will disintegrate fully before the lights come back on.
But returning to the table in her hazed state is troublesome, and when she hears the gunshot, she trips over the shoe of someone nearby. She falls headfirst into the massive mahogany dining room table.
When the lights come back on, that is where the plan goes awry:
A gunshot, unplanned.
A bleeding head wound, unintentional.
And a woman wielding a candlestick, unexplained.
Three people misread the darkness as an opportunity.
(That metaphor is not lost on me, here on this cusp, on the horizon where light and dark are offered as my choices.)
And oh, my Stella. I feel her queasy light-headedness as a spinny, echoing sensation. She hears Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shout into the mouthpiece, “Operator? Yes, operator. Send the authorities. Quickly! We have an attempted murder.”
And ten stories below, in an apartment owned by Carole, Laura the librarian’s aunt, William intercepts Doyle’s call to the police, replying, “Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
This is a party line; all the tenants in this building share the same telephone connection.
In most cases, a party line is a necessary inconvenience; sharing a telephone line with others means one must be patient and wait one’s turn, until one’s neighbor has wrapped up her gossip.
But to our merry band of bandits, it is exactly the tool we need.
Doyle shouts at what he believes is an operator, but his request instead goes to William.
William, downstairs, alerts the boys in blue. The next step of the plan is underway.