Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77576 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77576 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
The tower.
Why haven’t I put it back into the deck?
But I know why.
I’ve been waiting. I’ve been waiting, hoping I could get some kind of positive thought from it.
But nothing has worked.
Not kneading bread this morning.
Hell, not even sex with Brendan last night.
I’m still getting nothing but negative feelings from the damned card.
Mother.
My mother.
I haven’t drawn that card—the empress—but why is my mom at the forefront of my thoughts?
Because the card sometimes can mean illness, and I’m so very afraid she’ll get sick again.
Ill, and about to celebrate her twenty-fifth anniversary.
Plus, she hasn’t gotten back to me with her interpretation of the message. She said she had apps that could help decode it. I certainly don’t have access to the kind of software my private investigator mother has, but I can easily find apps that may help.
I head to the sink, wash the flour off my hands. Then I fire up my laptop and type Darth Morgen.
Nothing I haven’t already seen.
My mother was thinking it might have a code embedded in the letters, with each of the letters standing for a different letter. I could start with R. It appears twice so it would be the same letter.
But what if it’s not?
What if the code isn’t letter per letter but based on something else?
Like perhaps, the letter that precedes it?
God, where to start?
I rise, grab a pad of paper and a pen from a drawer in the kitchen, and come back. I write the letters on the piece of paper.
Darth Morgen.
Then I start playing with them.
What if these letters were rearranged? What if it’s one big word? Or several small words? An anagram?
I play with it for a little while, finding several three-letter words and writing them down, but then I laugh.
“What the hell are you doing?” I say out loud. “If you’re looking for anagrams, find an anagram maker online.”
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I was so overwhelmed with my developing feelings for Brendan and with the cards that were telling me all kinds of horrible things. Plus, I was depending on my mother. My ex-cop private-investigator mother who said she could decipher it.
But she kept putting me off.
I do a quick search, and I come up with something called “Dante’s Anagram Maker.”
Good enough. I type in all the letters of “Darth Morgen.”
I close my eyes.
I’m not sure why, except something tells me that if I look, I’ll be faced with even more of a mystery.
So I sit for a moment, eyes closed, and I inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
I’m still waiting for some kind of positive feeling about the tower card still sitting on the table.
If I can get something—anything—that isn’t a negative feeling…
Then I can open my eyes.
And I can begin to solve the mystery of Darth Morgen.
So I wait.
I continue breathing.
But it doesn’t work.
Nothing works.
I open my eyes, and I glance at the screen.
And the word I see fills me with hope.
It’s not my mother.
My mother’s not ill. I feel that, and I know it in my heart, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Because the first word on the list of anagrams for Darth Morgen is…
Grandmother.