Hexes and Hemlines

by Juliet Blackwell

  “I know it was against regulations, but . . . Malachi seemed so . . . gallant? I guess that’s the word. Sort of courtly and old-fashioned. I just felt sure he wouldn’t harm the cat . . . he was such a sweet soul.”

  “Despite his penchant for bad luck charms.”

  “Yeah, I guess that was sort of odd.”

  “I don’t suppose you could take the cat back to the shelter?” I said, looking around for the feline.

  “The cat? Malachi’s cat? I didn’t think to ask what happened to it. Do the police have it?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “You mean Zazi’s black cat? How did you get it?”

  “It’s a long story. It’s around here somewhere. Would you be willing to take it back?”

  “Of course, we can take it back at the shelter. I can’t take it myself because I’m apartment sitting and they already have two dogs.”

  “If the cat goes back to the shelter . . . ?”

  “We’re a no-kill facility,” Claudia hastened to say. “But I can’t guarantee we’ll find it a home. It’s a little older than most people like. And as strange as it is to say, there’s a prejudice against black animals among adopters. I guess they’re associated with bad luck, still, in a lot of people’s minds. Black dogs are even worse, interestingly enough. Something about them being devil’s creatures. . . . It never ceases to amaze me how mean people can be.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll try to find it a home.”

  Claudia thanked us again for our help with her dress for the ball and left. The bell over the door tinkled when she let herself out, and I watched her walk down the street until she was out of sight.

  Claudia was apartment sitting in Malachi Zazi’s building. She came into the store for her dress and love potion last week, long before I had ever been called in to consult on a crime scene, or heard of anyone named Zazi. Could it truly be a coincidence, or was there some sort of link? Could Malachi have known about me—had he been some sort of supernatural practitioner himself? That would help explain the strange lack of vibrations from his garment collection, as well as the whole apartment seemingly wiped down for psychic prints.

  On the other hand, Claudia mentioned seeing the write-up of Aunt Cora’s Closet in the Art Deco newsletter. So maybe it was just that simple. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot of “simple” in my life.

  “Poor Claudia,” said Maya as she changed the paper roll on the register. “You’re still planning on going to the dance, though, right? Even if Max isn’t back?”

  Talk about a lack of “simple.” Flying solo was not a new concept for me. But not long ago I’d met a journalist, Max Carmichael, and I was intrigued at the idea of actually having an escort to the Art Deco Ball. Unfortunately he was back east on assignment . . . and while he was there, he was trying to figure out how he felt about me. As I said to Aidan earlier: I wasn’t willing to explain myself. Max had a hard time with my powers, and I wasn’t about to deny them or hide them for his comfort.

  But all my bravado aside, I was hoping he’d find the strength to deal with what was, for him, a whole new magical world.

  “Have you heard anything from him?” Maya continued.

  “He’s called a couple of times.”

  That was almost an exaggeration. Max had called once on the store phone, but I wasn’t alone and our conversation unfolded like one of distant friends: How are you? How’s Oscar? How’s business? He also called and left a message on my home machine, marginally better: I’ve been thinking of you. I was embarrassed to admit I kept the message and had already replayed it twice. Still, I hadn’t heard from him again, and there had been plenty of opportunity. Every night before bed I thought maybe he’d call, hoped he’d call. But he hadn’t. I was tempted to cast a spell to force his hand, but I stopped myself. I might have a certain moral flexibility when it came to using my powers, but I was above forcing a man into wanting me.

  Obviously, as a twenty-first-century woman, I could call him; but he was three hours ahead, and under the circumstances of our parting . . . it felt like I should let Max come to me when he was ready, rather than push him.

  In the old days—the burning times—men who loved witches were considered pawns of the devil’s handmaidens, and were often condemned to death by hanging, drowning, or burning, just as were their mothers, wives, daughters. Thousands, maybe millions had died alongside their womenfolk.

  These days the immediate consequences for being close to someone like me weren’t nearly so dramatic or so gruesome, but there was still a cost. No matter that I was finding a supportive community; I wasn’t the kind of woman an ordinary man would be proud to bring home to meet the parents.

  I was still weird, still frightening. Still Other.

  So I was hurt. But I understood. It wasn’t easy to love a witch.

  A tingle of awareness yanked my attention from my thoughts.

  Time slowed, elongated.

  One of the recently arrived customers walked toward me with a hips-first, runway-model stride, her kinky dishwater blond hair falling in a mass around her face and down her back. She was backed up by her two companions: a petite but chubby woman who cut her auburn hair short, like a pixie, with green eyes and freckles; and an older man, goateed, with hair dyed a sooty, fakelooking black.

  The blonde was not nearly as young as her hair, bright makeup, and gauzy costume might imply; I would guess in her early fifties. She was tall and thin, more striking than pretty. Her bright blue-green eyes were abnormally shiny, fixated upon me.

  “I’m Doura,” she said in a quiet, high-pitched, almost baby-doll voice.

  I looked around, but I could feel myself moving as though in slow motion, or underwater. The other customers, and Maya, were still moving and talking, but time had slowed. They appeared not to hear us.

  Doura held something in her hand. Was it a power stick of some sort? No, a plain old pen. My pen, the one I had left on the counter. The one I had been holding only seconds ago. The one I had absentmindedly put to my mouth as I wrote out Claudia’s care instructions for her new ball gown.

  “Leave this matter alone,” Doura said. “Walk away.”

  “What are you talking about? Who are you?” My voice sounded deep and distorted, as though it were in slow motion as well. It was a nightmarish sensation.

  “Walk away. Malachi is no concern of yours. Consider this your warning.”

  She gave me a wicked, sickly smile as she deliberately set the pen back down on the counter.

  I stroked the medicine bag hanging on the braided belt around my waist, closed my eyes, and mumbled a protective spell.

  “Speaking of the Art Deco Ball,” said Maya, bringing me back to reality. Time seemed to normalize. “Mom says she’ll have the alterations on your dress done by tomorrow, but she wants to do one more fitting with you.”

  “Great. Thanks,” I said, looking around for the woman. She and her companions had disappeared. “Maya, did you see . . . did you notice the blonde who was in here? She was with another woman and a man with a goatee . . . ?”

  “Not really. Is something wrong?”

  “I . . . no, everything’s fine.” Except it wasn’t so fine. Unless I was very much mistaken, I had just been visited by some sort of witch. A powerful witch.

  Could Aidan have sent her? Would he have stooped so low? Doura didn’t scare me much with her witchy parlor tricks, but she certainly got my attention. Anyone who could muck with time, like weather, garnered a lot of respect in my book. Besides, to be perfectly honest, I felt a little twinge of . . . something. Aidan and I might not see eye to eye, and it was true that we were on the outs at the moment, but I still thought we had a special sort of connection. As though I was his only female witch.

  Now that I thought about it, I realized that despite his reputation for running the local witchy contingent, I had never seen him with other witches before . . . much less another woman.

  I left the shop in Maya’s capable hands,
and went off in search of answers.

  Chapter 8

  Only heaven knew what kind of trouble Oscar might get into today with the new cat, so I put a couple of blankets, a few snacks, and a jug of water in the back of my purple work van and packed up both animals.

  Then I headed for the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, at the corner of Fifth and Mission.

  I’m probably the last soul under the age of eighty without a cell phone. As an outcast, I rely on my assessments of people to survive; as a witch, I could feel their vibrations, note their eyes, their hands, their twitches. So rather than call ahead, I just stopped by in the hopes that I might find a disinterested source. Nigel Thorne was at the top of that list.

  As I rode the elevator up from the parking garage, I couldn’t help but think about the last time I was here. Max Carmichael had challenged me, belittled me, then wound up following me on a visit to a voodoo priest. And asking me out on a date.

  The good old days.

  The offices were essentially one big room of cubicles, ringed by glassed-in offices. Under the fluorescent lights the writers and staff looked, to a person, gray-faced and hassled. Nigel fit right in. Today he wore khaki pants, a light blue button-up shirt, and a brown tweed jacket. He had a coffee stain on his shirt, right where his paunch strained at the buttons. His graying brown hair frizzed out from the side of his head, and his eyebrows were hawklike and overgrown, giving him a demanding air that was betrayed by the gentleness in his voice.

  Nigel Thorne’s vibrations were warm, with an edge of cynicism I wasn’t surprised to find in a man who spent much of his time investigating and reporting on crime and criminals.

  “Good to see you, Lily.”

  “You, too, Nigel. How’s your family?” His messy cubicle was personalized with multiple framed photos of his wife and daughters.

  “Everyone’s great, thanks. My youngest’ll be finishing up college this spring. You believe it?”

  “You can’t possibly be old enough to have grown children.”

  “Yeah, right,” he snorted. “Nice try. You’re no good at lying, ya know that?”

  I smiled. “Do you have a quick minute?”

  “Sure,” he said. His desk chair squeaked as he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Waiting on a bunch of callbacks, anyway. Mondays. What’s up?”

  “I noticed that you wrote a short piece in today’s paper on the death of Malachi Zazi.”

  “You know him?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Did you?”

  He cocked his head in a gesture that was neither a nod nor a shake. “I interviewed him once about his club.”

  “The Serpentarian Society?”

  “Yep. You know it?”

  “I’ve heard of it, but only in relation to him. Could you tell me about it?”

  He sat up, put his elbows on his knees, and leaned toward me. “It was based on an old group called the Thirteen Club, which operated in the late 1800s in New York City. Spiritualism of all sorts was huge back then, and a group of wealthy men set out to debunk the notions by addressing bad luck symbols, that sort of thing. They met at eight thirteen on the thirteenth day of the month, with thirteen people around the table.”

  “A whole club based on unlucky thirteen?”

  “Pretty much. Problem is, one of them died.”

  “How?”

  “Pneumonia, something like that. But the superstition was that someone would die within the year, and that’s what happened.”

  “A club like that makes some sense for that era, but doesn’t it seem odd in today’s world?”

  “You would think, right? But triskaidekaphobia—” He smiled. “That’s the fear of thirteen. Took me a month to learn to pronounce that one—anyway, it’s pretty widespread, and not just here. In Scotland there are no gates thirteen in airports; some airplanes skip the row thirteen; and you know as well as I do that buildings often skip the thirteenth floor. Some streets skip over the address as well. There were thirteen people at the Last Supper; Loki was the thirteenth fellow invited to a disastrous dinner at Valhalla; on Friday the thirteenth the Knights of the Templar were arrested and destroyed.”

  “There’s also a strong association of thirteen with paganism,” I said.

  “That’s right, because of the thirteen lunar months.”

  When organized religion took over in Europe, denigrating thirteen was one of its accomplishments. The Druids and Celts had twelve signs of their mundane zodiac, and a secret thirteenth called “the weaver,” or the cosmic spider in the center of life. There were also thirteen covens of Logres in Britain. The number was prominent on the female side of occult work.

  “Anyhoo, the members of the original Thirteen Club in New York were besieged by bad luck, every last one of them.”

  “What kind of bad luck?”

  “Deaths in the family, business failures, injuries . . . just about anything you can think of. The group finally disbanded when they seemed to be proving anything but what they’d set out to do.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. Had they truly called havoc down upon their own heads?

  He pushed a manila folder over to me. Inside were photographs: sepia, slightly fuzzy pictures of people dressed in gowns and suits.

  “Are these original photos?” I asked. They appeared much newer, or photography was better back in the late 1800s than I would have guessed.

  “Oh, no, these are from Malachi Zazi’s group.”

  “All dressed up.”

  “Uh-huh. Apparently Zazi bought the stash of clothes at auction. Those outfits are supposedly from the original Thirteen Club.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  He pointed at faces as he listed them off. “That’s Malachi Zazi there, Ellen Chambers, and Gregory Petrovic, Nichol Huffman, and that must be her brother, Oliver, though he’s turned away from the camera—they’re children of Senator Huffman—and this is Mike Perkins, of course.”

  “I understand Perkins is a pharmaceutical giant.”

  “That’s an understatement. Haven’t heard of him having any bad luck, but Petrovic’s not doing all that well, and the Huffmans are all screwed up. Ellen Chambers is in the hospital following a car accident, and a lot of the other dinner guests have had a string of bad luck: accidents, problems at work, broken bones, divorce.”

  “And it’s all being attributed to playing with bad luck symbols?”

  He nodded.

  “How did you get hold of these photos?”

  “The dinners themselves were private, but in actuality the club was all about the publicity. They were promoted to the public, photographed, and even filmed. The point, after all, was to prove that the superstitions were false; that’s why Zazi set the place up like that.”

  “And now the bad luck host is dead. What do you make of all this?”

  He shrugged. “If you’re asking whether I think Zazi died of bad luck, I say it’s a bunch of baloney. Zazi inherited money—that’s a more likely source of murder than a broken mirror.”

  “His parents were wealthy?”

  “His mother had money. But his father”—Nigel rolled his eyes exaggeratedly—“whew! Talk about your freak shows. He wasn’t society, though. In fact, before he became the devil guy he played the Wurlitzer over at the Lost Weekend Lounge.”

  “The ‘devil guy’?”

  “Malachi’s father—calls himself Prince High Zazi.”

  “He’s royalty of some sort?”

  “Not exactly. You’re not from here, so you probably never heard of the ‘black abode’ on California?”

  I shook my head.

  “Back in the sixties and seventies, things were in upheaval. Lots of strange stuff going on locally—the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped and brainwashed Patty Hearst, there were cults on the rise, then the tragedy of Jonestown.”

  “I’ve heard of those.”

  “So this guy buys a house, a typical Victorian job on California out in the
Richmond District, paints the whole thing black. The whole damned thing, walls inside and out, trim. Everything. Surrounds the place with a security fence. Then he installs these cameras, like video cameras, on the outside so he can see who’s coming. Back then it was a big deal—no one had cameras like that except maybe the embassies, the White House.”

  “What was he up to?”

  “That was the house Malachi Zazi grew up in. Prince High claimed he was all about the devil. I’m not sure how far he took the whole thing, but he wrote several books on the subject. Made lots of money by saying scandalous things against established religions and espousing a sort of materialistic philosophy when most of the world was exploring cooperation.”

  “You think he really believed in it, or was it a stunt of some kind?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a journalist. I don’t dismiss anything until I’ve had a chance to research it. Then again, I don’t believe anything until I delve into it, either. Anyway, by the eighties the whole furor had died down. Prince High keeps to himself these days.”

  “Where did you say the black abode was? Out in the Richmond?”

  “You’re not planning on going over there, are you?”

  “Just thought I’d do a roll-by, get a visual.”

  “Don’t underestimate the guy. I don’t buy the devil garbage, but I know for a fact someone like that’s gotta be a whack job. Anyway, as I understand it, Malachi and his father have been on the outs for some time. Malachi inherited plenty of money from his mother, and he kind of took on the whole society thing, most likely in opposition to his father.”

  “I have to say, I’m surprised to learn that there’s a ‘society thing’ in San Francisco. The town seems so laidback and West Coast, I hadn’t realized.”

  “Oh, sure. Doesn’t hold a candle to New York, nothing like that, but it’s there. Malachi went to the college prep with all the other rich kids. Too much money, too much time on their hands. They’re always into something. These dinner parties he has, the whole bad luck thing seems to me like a challenge to his father’s world. It’s become chic to attend. But whether it’s his father’s shenanigans or his bad luck dinners, the whole thing still makes me nervous.”