Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

If you’ll pardon the pun, tarot was never in the cards when I began writing Skeletons in the Attic. I knew I’d have a protagonist, Calamity (Callie) Barnstable, who would be thrust into the position of finding out what happened when her mother disappeared thirty years earlier. I knew she’d be a fish out of water, a big city Toronto woman heading to Marketville, a town she described as the sort of place a family with two kids, a cat and a collie moved to. I even knew there was a scheming psychic, Misty Rivers, ready to take on Callie’s assignment if Callie turned it down. But my original thinking was more along the line of a crystal ball and tea leaves. Tarot? Not on the radar.

And then one day I walked into a quirky little gift shop attached to a large natural foods store. Among the crystals…