An Incantation of Cats

by Clea Simon

  “Margaret.” The woman looked at the cookie and then, apparently thinking better of it, put it down. “Margaret Cross.”

  “Margaret Cross.” As Becca repeated the name, her pencil scratched across the paper with an intriguing noise that drew Laurel back into the living room.

  “What’s going on?” She nuzzled her younger sibling. Becca, meanwhile, was asking her visitor to detail her complaint.

  “Another client,” Clara murmured. “But something’s weird about her, too. Can you hear what’s on her mind?”

  It was risky, asking Laurel to use her special powers. Vain about her own lustrous coat, the middle sister tended to focus on Becca’s looks—and her romantic prospects. Clara wasn’t sure what she’d make of another female, and an older, rather unkempt one at that.

  Laurel must have picked up on some of her sister’s anxiety, because she turned to glare at the little calico and even showed a bit of fang. “Of course I can,” she growled.

  “Sorry.” Clara dipped her head in a gesture of submission. Laurel, even more than Harriet, could be a stickler about status.

  “What’s going on with your cats?” The wiry-haired woman was staring down at them, brows like angry caterpillars butting heads over her pronounced nose.

  Becca bit her lip. “They’re littermates,” she said. “Sisters. They fight sometimes.”

  “Sisters.” Her laugh sounded like a bark. “Tell me about it. Where were we?”

  “You were telling me what you brought you here today.” Becca spoke with an exaggerated formality. It didn’t take Laurel’s sensitivity to know she felt somewhat uncomfortable with this newcomer and her singularly ungracious attitude. “I’d asked you to start at the beginning.”

  “You could say my sister is behind it. Behind everything, usually.” The client, Margaret, shuffled slightly in her seat. Rather like Harriet did, thought Clara, when she was getting comfortable. “Or when she’s ready to tell a lie,” Laurel hissed, her voice barely audible even to her sister’s sensitive ears.

  “A lie?” Clara turned toward her sister, intrigued, if a little disconcerted. Had her sister just read the calico’s own thoughts? But a brown paw batted away her question, as just then, the newcomer began to tell her tale.

  “She’s the one who wanted to open the shop. She’s the one with the interest, but then she unloaded it on me.”

  She glared at Becca as if her host were responsible. Becca, Clara was pleased to see, sat still and waited, much as she or her sisters would when stalking a mouse.

  “She’s flighty like that,” the visitor started talking again. “I should’ve known it was a stupid idea. When she said ‘hire this girl,’ I should’ve known something was up, like maybe they’re in on it. But that makes no sense.” She paused, lips pursing like she’d bit into a lemon.

  “Anyway, at first, I thought it was an error.” As she spoke, she picked up her mug. Becca had filled it with the fragrant tea, which would surely rinse the bad taste out of her mouth, her cat thought. But the sour-faced woman didn’t appear to even taste it. “You know, in retail, there’s always a little loss. The silver dollar given out instead of a quarter. The odd mistake in math.”

  The mug went back down to the tray as she leaned forward. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m no pushover. I can’t afford the latest equipment, but I keep a calculator right by the register, and everyone is supposed to double-check their totals, especially if it’s a large order.”

  Becca murmured something that could have been agreement. If she had other thoughts about busy clerks being asked to do the same tasks twice, she kept them to herself.

  “I told the girl that she had to be careful. That I was going to start deducting from her paycheck if it kept up.” Another scowl, one not even a cookie could have sweetened. “Usually, that brings them back in line.”

  Laurel tilted her head at that, but Clara was busy watching her person. Becca clearly wanted to respond to her visitor—or, at least, to her visitor’s ideas about management—but she kept quiet. Only her cat could see the strain in the skin around her lips. If she had whiskers they would be bristling.

  “Then I realized it was following a pattern.” The client leaned forward again, but not for a cookie. “Every day, it was a little more. But it was never more than twenty bucks. Until this weekend, that is. Last night, Friday, when we closed, the total was fifty bucks off.”

  “Fifty...” Becca jotted down the number. “And this has been going on for how long?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t put up with it for that long. Three weeks, I’ve been aware of it.” The woman nodded to herself, setting her wiry hair bobbing. “So nearly five hundred bucks. Five hundred bucks!”

  Becca’s eyes widened in surprise, though whether because of the older woman’s sudden vehemence or some other factor, her cat couldn’t tell.

  In response, the woman scowled again. “That’s a lot to a small business owner like me.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Becca rushed to reassure her potential client. “Do you have evidence you could share with me? Account books or surveillance tape?”

  A huff of dismissal. “What do you think I am? The Pentagon? No, we’re a small business. I just know what I’m spending and what’s in the cash register at the end of the day.”

  Becca took that in. “And you believe you know who the suspect is?”

  “I do.” The woman sat back with a satisfied smirk. “It’s got to be the girl I hired. Gail—Gail Linquist.”

  Becca jotted down the name and paused. But the question she asked wasn’t the one Clara expected. “And did you say you suspect your sister of collusion?”

  “What? No.” Margaret waved her be-ringed hands like she was fanning away an odor. “Elizabeth’s nutty, but, no. I’m sure she’s not involved.”

  Becca paused, pen in the air and a quizzical expression worthy of a cat on her face. “Then, Ms. Cross, may I ask what services you want from me?”

  It was a reasonable question, but when Clara looked at her sealpoint sister in satisfaction, she saw Laurel’s nose quivering in concentration.

  “I need you to catch her, of course.” The older woman spoke as if her objective was plain to see, her gruff voice ratcheting up in both tone and volume. “I want her punished, and I need you to figure out how she’s doing it and get the evidence. If you can catch her in the act, so much the better.”

  Clara looked from her person to her sister. Surely, it wasn’t just the visitor’s volume that had set Laurel’s chocolate-brown ears back on her head.

  “I understand that.” Becca spoke in that calming voice she used when the cats were upset, but Clara didn’t think she’d even noticed her pet’s distress. Indeed, she was looking down at her notes as she spoke, biting her lip like she was peeved at herself.

  “And, believe me, I appreciate your interest, but I’m not sure I understand. You’re a small business owner and you believe one of your employees is, as they say, skimming off the top. This sounds like a matter for the police. Why did you come to me?”

  “To you?” Finally unburdened, the visitor reached for a cookie. “I thought it would be obvious,” she said, taking a bite.

  Becca waited, but Clara could feel her rising impatience.

  “I figure you’ll blend in better than any fat old cop who comes snooping around,” the old woman said at last. “I own Charm and Cherish, where you hung your notice about being a witch detective. How do you think I found you?”

  Chapter 3

  “This is just too much of a coincidence,” Becca said as she washed her latest visitor’s mug. “Two clients, both with questionable cases, and they both know each other through Charm and Cherish?”

  Clara, who sat at her feet, didn’t answer, but she was listening. Becca might not think her pets understood everything she said. Still, she’d gotten in the habit of talking to them. To Clara especially, the little cat knew. Which was why the calico remained in the kitchen, even after
Laurel had retired for a nap and Harriet had harrumphed off in disgust once the cookies had been placed back in their tin. Something about her mixed-up coloring—the black patch over one eye, orange over the other—made her look approachable, Clara surmised as she gazed up at her person, green eyes wide.

  “What do you think, Clara? Do you think something else is going on here? Some kind of personal vendetta? I swear you’d answer me if you could.”

  The cat blinked, warmed by the acknowledgement.

  Becca couldn’t know that her smallest cat was teased for her coloring—“Clara the calico? Clara the clown!” her sisters mocked—but if it made her person feel more comfortable confiding in her, she was content. Besides, her spotted coat, especially that whorl of gray on her side, made it easier for Clara to shade herself into near invisibility. This is the simplest cat magic, as anyone who has cohabited with a feline knows. But it was a skill at which Clara excelled, and one that proved particularly useful as Becca finished cleaning up and prepared to go out.

  Although Becca had packed up her notes and slid her laptop into the messenger bag she usually carried, Clara knew she wasn’t heading to the library, her usual haunt, or even the city’s hall of records, where she did so much of her research. She had heard her call Maddy, her best friend, as soon as her second visitor had left. Clarification rituals were all well and good, but sometimes one needed to mull things over with a real person, she had explained to Clara as she donned her hat and coat. Saturday midday, that meant coffee and sweets at her favorite café.

  Not that her friend was always as ready a listener as her cat. Or as prompt.

  “Those people are crazy.” Maddy had been flustered when she’d finally burst into the crowded café a half hour after Becca had claimed a table. As if making up for lost time, she barely let Becca get to the end of her story before chiming in. “You don’t even have to finish. Let me guess. You took both cases?”

  “Are you okay, Maddy?” Becca answered her friend with a question of her own.

  “I’m fine.” Becca’s longtime friend pushed her normally neat-as-a-pin dark hair back from her round face. “Just bothered. There was some kind of an accident last night, and they’ve closed a lane on the bridge. I don’t know what they were looking for, but I was stuck on the number one bus forever.”

  “I’m sorry.” Becca began to commiserate but her friend waved her off.

  “It’s nothing—but it did give me time to think about what you told me on the phone. I really hope you told that Cross lady to get lost.” Maddy returned to her theme, still clearly aggravated. Clara, who had hunkered down beneath their table, kept a careful eye on her swinging foot. “Cross—appropriate name, huh? And that other one, too. What was her name?”

  “Gaia. Gaia Linquist,” Becca answered, hoping to calm her friend. But not even the oversized chocolate chip cookie she had resisted breaking into while she waited for Maddy seemed to placate her longtime buddy, nor was the extra caffeine helping to clear the questions that kept rattling around her own head. “Or Gail, as her boss called her.”

  She ate a piece of that cookie finally and pushed the plate toward her friend.

  “Gaia?” Maddy only shook her head. “Crazy.”

  “At first, I thought it was a coincidence.” Breaking off another piece of cookie, Becca circled back to the older woman’s visit. Maddy might have reached her own conclusions, but to Becca there were still loose ends. “I mean, okay, they both got my number from the card I put on the bulletin board at Charm and Cherish. That didn’t mean anything. After all, it makes sense that the clientele and the staff of a magic shop would be the most likely to hire a witch detective.”

  Maddy’s raised eyebrows said it all, but as a true friend, she kept her skepticism silent. Becca, who had already heard tons from her old buddy about her new vocation, ignored it and moved on.

  “And then, when the owner, Margaret, said she suspected her employee, I didn’t question it. I mean, I don’t know how many people work for her. But then when she started telling me about her sales associate Gail, I had to ask—”

  “You had to know Gaia wasn’t her real name.” Maddy sipped her latte, but her eyes were on her friend.

  “I assumed it was a name she chose.” Becca had a more generous attitude toward self-re-creation. “There’s nothing wrong with that, Maddy.”

  “It’s pretentious.” With that, her friend succumbed, taking a Harriet-sized chunk of the cookie. “And silly. But enough about her name.”

  This time, Becca ignored the interruption. “Anyway, when I realized that the woman Margaret suspected of stealing from her was the same woman who had come in to see me earlier, I had to wonder. And there’s that thing with the sister, too. Ms. Cross—Margaret—didn’t want to talk about it, but she brought it up. Something about how her sister urged her to hire Gaia. Only then she told me not to follow up with her sister, Elizabeth. But how can I not? I mean, it almost sounds like a setup, doesn’t it?”

  “Either that, or the sisters have some kind of feud going on and they’re dragging the poor shop girl into it. They’d probably drag any bystander into it, too.” Maddy scanned the nearby tables, but none of the bleary-eyed occupants—students, probably, another sign of fall—looked up. “Anyway, you don’t need to get caught up in that.”

  “No, I don’t.” Becca took another piece of the giant cookie and nibbled on it. But even Maddy must have been able to see that her friend was barely tasting its buttery goodness. “The thing is, I do need clients.” She paused to wipe a crumb from her lip. “And if I can help two members of the Wiccan community, well, those are my people, Maddy.”

  “Don’t.” Her friend held up one hand to stop her. “Please, Becca. I’m your people. Researchers are your people. Academics are your people, and historians. I know you’ve gotten into this whole witch thing since you lost your job with the historical society, but please don’t go overboard.”

  “I’ve solved some cases, Maddy.” Her friend cared for her, Becca knew that, but her lack of faith was clearly beginning to smart. “You know I have.”

  “I know.” Maddy nodded, resignation sneaking a sigh into her voice. In truth, Becca had solved the murder of a member of her own small coven. Since then, she’d used her considerable powers of observation and skill as a researcher to help others as well. The fact that her three cats had assisted was something neither of the two friends could know. “I’m sorry. Getting stuck in traffic must have gotten to me. But, really, two clients in one day—and one of them is accusing the other?”

  “It is odd.” Becca’s hand went up to her necklace. “But I think they were both being honest in their fashion.” Her brows knotted together in a way that her friend knew, from long experience, meant she was about to reach a conclusion.

  “Please, Becca.” Maddy made one more last-ditch attempt. “You’re going to call these two back, right? Tell them you can’t take their so-called cases?”

  “I think I have to call Margaret Cross.” Becca ignored her. “I have to tell her that I can’t accept her case. I should have as soon as I heard her employee’s name, but it took me a minute to put it all together. All I have to do is tell her I have a conflict because of an existing client. After all, I took Gail’s—Gaia’s—case before her boss walked in.”

  Maddy slouched in her seat. “So you’re going to keep Ms. Glitter Goth?”

  Becca shot her a look. “I should never have told you about her sneakers. They were really cute, and Laurel couldn’t get enough of them. But that’s not why—no, I’m not going to drop Gaia Linquist as a client.”

  “Please, don’t say it.” Becca had seen Maddy put her mug down in preparation for launching into a speech. “I know I could get a job with you at Reynolds and Associates. But I need to give this a chance—I need to give myself a chance, Maddy. I’m good at detecting, even if the witchcraft part is still kind of iffy.”

  A true friend, Maddy bit her lip and waited for Becc
a to go on.

  “And this is serious. Wolf’s bane can kill you.”

  “So don’t you think this is a matter for the police?”

  Becca shook her head sadly. “It’s a root in a coffee mug. And the complainant is a young girl with dyed-black hair and sparkly sneakers, whose boss may be trying to get rid of her. You didn’t believe her, Maddy. Why would they?”

  Chapter 4

  Clara slipped through the door only seconds ahead of Becca, after a last breathless dash. Her person couldn’t have known the little calico had followed her out. Had, in fact, been napping beneath her feet as the conversation had turned to Maddy’s job and her ongoing campaign to get Becca to join her, and had trotted alongside her most of the eight blocks home. But she didn’t want Becca to worry, in case she called her cats together for a consult upon returning home and Clara had been slow to appear.

  “What did you find out?” Laurel was at the door and reached her brown nose down to touch her little sister’s bi-colored one. “Was I right about that sneak?”

  “Is she bringing home any treats?” Harriet ambled over. Neither of Clara’s older sisters had quite the facility that the little calico had with passing through physical barriers, like doors. And neither could quite so easily mask themselves into near invisibility—Clara suspected that skill had to do with her multicolor markings. But Harriet in particular was made of solid stuff. Her own special skill—making physical objects appear—might have been an extension of her corporeality. It wasn’t always helpful. In the recent past, she had caused a golden amulet and, at one especially troublesome juncture, a pillow to appear, each time causing havoc in Becca’s world.

  In addition, because the objects Harriet summoned from the ether were either conjured out of air itself or crafted around some small, pre-existing item, they were never quite as good as the real thing. Which was why the always hungry longhair had given up on summoning treats. Especially since their person was usually so good about indulging them.