The Lavender Teacup

by Mary Bowers

  “Very fetching,” I said.

  He noticed that I was wearing sandals but Lily was still barefoot. He told her, “Listen, before you go back in there, I want you to put some shoes on. I think we got all the glass, but in the morning we’ll check again, when we can see it sparkle in the light. Okay?”

  “I’ll be careful,” she said.

  Without bothering to explain the change in plan, we told them good night and walked back into the bedroom, where I gave Teddy the icepack. He arranged it behind Arielle’s head tenderly, then sent me into the bathroom for a towel when she said it was too cold against her skin. He wrapped the towel around the icepack, settled her again and gazed at her lingeringly.

  I saw Lily looking down at the floor as Teddy murmured little reassurances to the patient.

  Michael said, “Well, which is it going to be, ladies – playing cards or books?”

  “I’m sending Lily to bed,” I said. “I’m wide awake anyway. I’m going to come with you and get some clothes on and grab my Kindle. Teddy, will you wait with her until I get back? I won’t be five minutes.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I expected Lily to come with us, but she didn’t. Another bad sign: she wasn’t leaving Teddy and Arielle alone in the bedroom for even a few minutes.

  When I got back, Teddy gave me firm instructions. “Now make sure you don’t doze off. You can read, but don’t play any games or listen to music through earbuds. I think it’s pretty clear now that Arielle is the object’s new target. It’s a shame we weren’t able to get the attack on camera. No security cameras in here, Arielle? No, of course not. This is your bedroom.” They shared a little smile. “Anyway, we don’t want any more incidents before we’re able to deal with this thing. But I think this shows, Lily, that we’re going to have to use Elle in the show, don’t you agree?”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” she said.

  Teddy hung a down bit closer to Arielle and told her, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be our bait.”

  After stiffening, Arielle looked deeper into his eyes and gave a tiny nod, looking small and frightened.

  “Good girl.” He was still sitting on the bedside and holding her hand. “Now don’t worry. I’ll be beside you during the whole shoot. Just stay close to me. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  I followed him to the door of the bedroom. “It’s getting close to 4:00,” I told him. “Why don’t you undo the alarm before you go to bed, in case you sleep late. I think we’ve all had enough adrenaline rushes for one night.”

  “Good idea.”

  Pausing just outside the bedroom door, Lily asked me, “Where’s your new friend, Bella?”

  “The cat? Probably still back in my room, on the bed. That’s kind of funny, though, now that you mention it. Arielle is her mistress, and I’m her new bestie. For either one or both of us, you’d think she’d at least come and see what’s going on.”

  “If she’s your new magic cat, she probably knows it was no big deal,” she said, making a joke of it. “So it’s probably a good sign. Apparently, she’s not worried about either one of you right now. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”

  “Real sure.” I raised my voice and looked back into the bedroom. “We’re going to be fine, aren’t we Arielle?”

  She gave me a sleepy smile and murmured something, but what she really wanted was Teddy.

  Chapter 22

  I had been perfectly correct: I wouldn’t have been able to get back to sleep, even if I’d tried. My wristwatch trudged along toward 5:00, then 5:30, and I tried to wait until the little hand made it all the way to the twelve again, but I couldn’t. At 5:56 I stood up, stretched, went to see if Arielle was awake and breathing (no and yes), and then I decided we were officially safe from the nighttime boogies and went into the kitchen to get the coffee started.

  Imagine my surprise when I saw The Marvelous Dobbs sitting at the cooking island quietly gazing at a tablet device.

  “My, you’re a sneaky one,” I said. “I didn’t even hear you come in, and I’ve been awake.”

  “I used to be a magician, remember?” he said.

  “Luck was on your side anyway, honey. This place has a burglar alarm, but it wasn’t set.”

  He shrugged. “I’m a lucky guy.”

  I’d forgotten how charming he was. His sun-streaked hair was attractively disheveled and he looked tired, but not the kind of tired that had collapsed in the gutter the night before. The kind of tired that had glistening eyes from yawning, a friendly smile playing about the mouth and a hint of stubble on a firm young jaw. His skin still had the cinnamon-tinted tan I remembered, and his face looked as if it had just had a splash of water and a rub, bringing up color and freshness.

  But the most appealing thing about Dobbs was the boy-man inside. Even when you didn’t want to like him, you just had to.

  “And while we’re at it,” I said, “how did you get in?”

  “Refer to my previous answer. How are you, Taylor?”

  “Peachy-keen. Now for part three: Why are you here? And don’t tell me it’s got something to do with having been a magician.”

  “No, that would be because of my current profession: paranormal investigator. Ed called and said he needed my help.”

  “I know. I was right there when he called, though I didn’t listen to every word. I must have missed the part where he told you to actually get into your car and drive here. You did drive?”

  “Sure.”

  “Impressive. I seem to remember that you don’t need much sleep.” And the longer he went without sleep, the cuter he got, but I didn’t tell him that. I was pretty sure he already knew it. “I thought Ed was waiting for a PDF, not a warm body. You were supposed to be doing research in his office.”

  “And I was. But I found it impossible to condense the information into a PDF on such short notice. Besides, it’s so hard to know exactly what Ed is looking for. After taking a stab at it, I decided to just gather up the materials and bring them instead. So . . . when’s the shoot?”

  Uh huh. “Your timing is impeccable. It’s tonight. You, my friend,” I said, moving toward the coffeemaker, “will not be participating. Call that Part A of what Ed is after here. What you’re doing is sort of a side-issue. Call it Part B.”

  From the doorway, Edson Darby-Deaver, PhD, freshly showered, dressed and glaring through clean glasses, said, “Don’t be so sure that Part B isn’t directly related to Part A, Taylor. What are you doing here, Dobbs?”

  “I brought those materials you wanted,” he said, standing up as if a superior officer had entered the room.

  Ed frowned. “How did you know where to find me? I didn’t tell you the name of the bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Don’t be modest, Ed. Your record-keeping is legendary. I found your itinerary in your files.”

  “Um hmm.” Ed looked at me. “You were right about letting him loose in my office. In future, I’ll take that into consideration.”

  “I wasn’t snooping – I needed to expand the parameters of the search to cover all the bases, and I didn’t want to be constantly bothering you . . . .” Et cetera, et cetera. I let them go at it while I went to the back counter to put the coffee on, listening, shaking my head, and mostly, smiling.

  When the coffee was brewed, I poured out three cups. I set Dobbs’s cup in front of him, looked into his sleepy amber eyes and said, “You know, it’s actually good to see you, kid. There’s been a lot going on here.”

  “Quite,” Ed said. “In fact, people have been dying, Dobbs, and the attacks are accelerating. A woman who had recently been in possession of the artifact drowned only last night, and afterwards a woman was assaulted right here in the bed-and-breakfast in the small hours of the morning.”

  “Why here, do you think?” Dobbs asked.

  “Because the artifact is here.”

  Dobbs was impressed, and taking their coffee, they went to Ed’s room to look at the thing.

  I check
ed on Arielle and she was still asleep and alive, so I decided to preheat the oven so I could put the strata right in as soon as people began to get up. Arielle served breakfast at eight, but we weren’t on the B&B’s schedule today. We were on a countdown to showtime.

  * * * * *

  Since Lily was sleeping alone these days, I felt I could go ahead and barge in on her. I wanted to know if she’d succeeded in rooting around in the kitchen during the two hours when the B&B had been quiet. I was pretty sure she had. She hadn’t made much noise, but either Lily had been fulfilling her mission or Arielle had mice. I never even wondered if that had been Dobbs; if he hadn’t wanted to be heard, he wouldn’t have been heard.

  I slipped into her room like a thief in the night and closed the door behind me, expecting to have to wake her up, but she was already awake and sitting up, fully dressed, reading a small, brown, cloth-bound book by the light of another of those ugly double-bubble lamps.

  Like her own room behind the kitchen, Arielle hadn’t started redecorating Lily’s room yet, and it badly needed freshening up. It was still Early American, a leftover from the E-A craze of the ‘70s, and nearly fifty years later it was looking very tired. Arielle had called it Victorian, which was close enough, I supposed.

  Since it was just the two of us, the gloves were off. “The bitch has been dabbling around in black magic, just like we thought,” Lily said, proffering the book. “She’s been doing using this.”

  I took the tattered little missal from her and flipped through it. “Oh, brother,” I murmured. Then I closed the cover and read the title: “The LIFE and Workings of DR. DEE, Astrologer to the QUEEN.” It also had one of those pompous subtitles that started a bit smaller than the title and got smaller and smaller all the way down the front cover. It ran: “Being a Compleat Historie of that Most Excellent Doctor’s INQUIRIES into the LAWS OF NATURE which are most Commonly Hidden from the EYES OF MAN.”

  The gilt of the imprint was disappearing, and the s’s had been made to look like lower case f’s, making it even harder to read, but by letting the light from the lamp strike across the cover horizontally, I managed to make it out. Then I opened the book again.

  The text was full of almost indecipherable descriptions of spiritualistic experiments that Dr. John Dee, an alchemist and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I of England, had conducted during the 16th Century. Many of the pages were dog-eared, some of them flattened out again, some of them having lost the corner altogether. Scattered throughout the narrative text were instructions for compounding various potions, using ingredients you can’t exactly get at Walmart.

  Other than using the spelling “magick” and adding the occasional extra “e” at the end of names and words, the body of the work sounded kind of bogus to me, so I looked at the copyright page. Sure enough, it said it had been printed in 1904, during the silly season before World War I when new-old occultism and new religions devised by drug-addled, stupid-rich aristocrats were all the rage. The author’s name was given as Roderigo Salamander, an obvious pen name. I wondered vaguely if this might be one of the minor works of that demented conman, Aleister Crowley. He’d been active around that time. I remembered reading that Crowley had declared himself to be the reincarnation of Dr. Dee’s assistant, so he’d been interested in the alchemist. And long-winded enough to have written that subtitle.

  I experimented with letting the book fall open by itself to see what Arielle had been working on, but it was in such bad shape that I was worried that flopping it around too much would make the cover come off altogether. So many pages were dog-eared it wasn’t any help to look through them, and some dog-eared pages had no formulae on them. Even though it wasn’t truly ancient, the book was old enough that there was no telling who had dog-eared the pages anyway. There were stamps and marks on the flyleaf showing that it had been through more than one used book store.

  “Have you been able to make any sense out of this yet?” I asked, handing it back.

  “The only potion I found that called for anything like wax was one for improving fertility.”

  We looked at one another and simultaneously said, “Nah.”

  “I think we’d better show this to Ed,” I told her. “He’ll probably put his finger on it right away. Oh – and who do you think has showed up in person?”

  “Let me take a wild guess. The Marvelous Dobbs?”

  I stared at her. “He came in while you were searching the kitchen.”

  “The other way around: when I went into the kitchen he was already there. He offered to help. He acted like snooping around for evidence of witchcraft at 4:45 in the morning was all in a day’s work.”

  “For him, it is.”

  “He’s cute.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And a really nice guy.”

  “Yeah, that too.” A sinking feeling came over me, then I just shrugged. He couldn’t be any worse than Teddy.

  “Come on, Lily. We need to show this thing to Ed and then get it back into its hiding place before The Fabulous Arielle is back on her feet. It’s probably the first thing she’s going to look for.”

  I shoved the little book underneath my tee shirt and led her quietly down the hall.

  * * * * *

  “Ah, yes, the 1904 Dr. Dee,” Ed said, turning it over. “It’s in terrible condition. My copy is pristine.”

  “Your copy?” I asked, but I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “I wish I’d seen this before I called Dobbs,” he went on. “We started off on the wrong foot altogether. Voodoo didn’t even exist in Dr. Dee’s time, other than in its earlier form of Vodun, in West Africa, of which I’m sure Dr. Dee wasn’t aware.”

  Dobbs spoke up suddenly, sticking his index finger up in the air. “I think I brought your copy of that book, Ed. Good thing I expanded the search, huh? Witchcraft is only one square over and two squares down from voodoo, and the way you described Arielle Barkely, I figured broomsticks and cats, not wax dolls and pins.”

  He went to root around in the box of books he’d set on one of the chairs.

  “It was the wax that made me think voodoo,” Lily said, moving close to Dobbs to see what he was doing.

  “It was still a pretty good call,” he said, looking at her happily, “but wax is a pretty common ingredient. Historically, it’s always been available, as in beeswax, and it gives form and substance to pulverized decoctions. Got it! Here you go, Ed,” he said, proudly handing up a much better-looking copy of the same book.

  “Lily, get away from that guy and come with me,” I said. “You have to show me where Arielle had it hidden. We can get it back there now, since we have Ed’s copy.”

  We made it. Nobody was in the kitchen yet, and the level of coffee in the carafe hadn’t gone down any, so nobody had been around. Arielle, showing a lack of imagination a witch should be ashamed of, had simply hoiked it behind a row of cookbooks on a little shelf above a built-in desk.

  Back in Ed’s room, we shut the door and started to delve into the book.

  “Maybe we should have kept Arielle’s copy a little longer,” Lily said. “We might have been able to figure out which page she was working on.”

  “No,” I said. “I tried that. Her copy has been handled so much over the years that it’s hopeless.”

  Ed was holding his copy of the book and carefully paging through it, examining every section. He was sitting on the end of the bed, and I went and sat beside him, trying to see into the book.

  After a few minutes, I said, “Well, what do you think?”

  “I’ve studied this book before, under more relaxed circumstances. I’ve never found any anachronisms or slippages into modern speech, but somehow it’s always struck me as inauthentic. I’ve never been able to trace the author. Salamander is an obvious nom de plume for someone interested in magic.”

  “I thought so too. Is this book a little something from Aleister Crowley, do you think? Or one of his acolytes?”

  He looked at me with sudden de
light. “Taylor!” he said. “You’ve been doing research! Oh, bravo. I’m thrilled.”

  I was sorry I’d mentioned it. “He popped up in a sidebar, one time when I was poking around in Wikipedia. It’s no big deal.”

  “Now, Taylor, don’t be modest. And you may be right. Although this book describes methodology for the usual compounding, and Crowley’s crowd tried to gather magical forces by more, um, physical means.”

  Lily and Dobbs didn’t know what we were talking about, and Dobbs said, “Crowley, you say? I’ll have to look him up.”

  “No, don’t,” Ed said quickly. “It’ll only expose you to bad ideas, and there’s enough evil in the world already. Here’s something,” he added so quickly I suspected it was to get Dobbs away from the path to ruination. “They call the substance involved a ‘philter,’ which is a potion, and I think it’s meant to effect some kind of mind control.”

  “Like making zombies?” I commented. “Does it call for wax?”

  “Rats. No. Actually, I think it’s just something silly like a love potion. Moving on.”

  About fifteen minutes later, Ed and I had settled on a particular set of instructions (I won’t call it a formula – it involved timing and magic passes). It was meant to produce an ‘undulating flux’ that involved wax.

  “Bingo,” I said. “We’ve got wax.”

  I looked up to see Lily and Dobbs sitting together on a big Victorian steamer trunk, giggling over a large black book. When I spoke, Dobbs shut the book guiltily and pushed it behind Ed’s laptop, on the desk beside him.

  “What are we up to, kids?” I asked brightly.

  “Research,” Dobbs said.

  “With illustrations,” Lily added, stone-faced. Then they both burst out laughing.

  Ed recognized the book and gave Dobbs a stern look. “We think we’ve figured out what Arielle was doing,” he said. “She was making offerings. Forming wax figures is a way of creating icons.”

  “Icons of who?” Lily asked. They stopped giggling together and came to stand over us.

  Ed lifted his free hand while holding the book open towards them. “There’s no way of telling. It could be an image or a symbol of any demon Arielle chooses.”