A Cast-Off Coven

by Juliet Blackwell

“It doesn’t matter. What worries me at the moment is that you believe my brother when he says he’s been possessed. Call me a cynic, but I’m thinking you both need help.”

  “You think he’s making it up? What reason would he have to do such a thing?”

  “Luc’s always been a drama queen. He’s probably having trouble sleeping, just as I have been lately, and fell asleep at his desk. Or . . .” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  Max shrugged. “Luc’s had a drinking problem. He’s been sober for almost a year, but . . . it’s possible he relapsed and just blacked out.”

  “Oh, I see. Still, I need to look into it, at the very least.”

  “Why? Why are you mucking around over at the scene of a criminal investigation in the first place? It’s not your job. You’re not a cop, or a private investigator. Just walk away.”

  “Whatever is going on at the School of Fine Arts is well outside the expertise of the SFPD.”

  “And this requires your intervention why, exactly?”

  I took a deep breath. “This is who I am, Max. If there’s some sort of spiritual entity terrorizing people, and I can help . . . well, I feel obligated to do what I can. Can you understand that?”

  There was a long pause. Finally, he said, “I don’t know.”

  That irked me. But at least it was honest. And what did I expect from a self-declared “mythbuster”? A proclamation of love and affection despite our diametrically opposed views of the natural—and supernatural—world?

  “Well, then, I suggest you figure it out. Now, tell me, why were you looking into Jerry Becker’s death?”

  “Checking out his finances, mostly. I heard about Becker when Luc took the position at the school, and got curious. His was one of those meteoric rags to riches tales that folks love to read about. It’s all laid out in the article. Unlike some people, I don’t keep secrets.”

  “Really. What happened with your wife, Max?”

  The muscle in his jaw clenched.

  “I’m going to run upstairs, find something for Oscar to eat. Don’t mind me,” Bronwyn said. At the sound of her voice, Max and I both jumped. We’d forgotten she was there.

  “I’d best be going, anyway,” Max remarked. “Let you two get some work done. Besides, my attempt to apologize seems to be something of a bust.”

  “Not entirely,” I said.

  “I’ll call you later, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course.”

  The bell jingled as he left. My eyes followed his tall, broad-shouldered form as he made his way down the street. I hated to admit it, but maybe Aidan Rhodes was right: Max was my Darrin, and I was his Samantha . . . unfortunately, this Bewitched redux wasn’t very funny.

  Bronwyn and I washed slips, bloomers, camisoles, skirts, and dresses until our shoulders ached. Two hours later, we both looked up at the door, grateful to see Susan Rogers.

  “I brought you a copy of my book!”

  I dried my hands and flipped through the large coffee-table book. It included fine-colored illustrations, historical photos, and pictures of the movers and shakers in Bay Area fashion design, past and present.

  “I believe it sold at least fifty copies, probably forty-nine of those to my mother and her friends,” Susan said with a rueful smile. “But Booksmith still keeps a handful of copies on the shelf, since I’m local. They’re a great bookstore. Pages twenty-six and twenty-seven have the bit about the School of Fine Arts.”

  I turned to the pages and noted an old photograph of the school, appearing essentially the same as it did now. There was also a reprint of a brochure with a description of the school from back in its designer days. And finally, there was an even earlier, sepia-toned image that chilled me: It showed a group of five young nuns.

  The caption read, Novices newly arrived in America from France, mere weeks before the 1906 earthquake.

  “Do you know anything more about this group of novices from France?” I asked.

  Susan shook her head and looked over my shoulder at the photo. “I got that from the California Historical Society, down on Mission. It was the only photo I could find from the days when the school building was a nunnery. There’s very little information about what convent they came from in France. No one knew them, and they spoke no English when they arrived. The only interesting thing I remember reading about was that not long after they moved in to the convent, they were disciplined for ‘immodest behavior.’ ”

  “What would qualify as immodest behavior for a nun back then?” Maybe they really had been performing in bawdy plays?

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “I suppose drinking, dancing, fraternizing with men . . . maybe worse. Those were quite the wild days in San Francisco history, you know. It was called the Barbary Coast for a reason: Barbarous amounts of drinking, gambling, and whoring went on.”

  “You’re not suggesting the nuns ran a brothel out of the convent, are you?” Bronwyn asked.

  “Of course not . . . All we know is that there were some scandals of untoward behavior. Then the whole group of them disappeared during the 1906 earthquake.”

  “Disappeared?” I said.

  “Like poof? Up in a cloud of smoke?” Bronwyn asked.

  “Oh, they probably just left, moved someplace safer,” said Susan. “A lot of displaced San Franciscans made their way across the bay to Oakland. Nobody saw the nuns go, but it was a madhouse. Certainly no one was keeping records in the chaos after the quake, and worse, the fire.”

  “Fire?” I asked.

  Bronwyn nodded. “The earthquake was bad and destroyed a good many buildings. But the real devastation was caused by a massive fire that broke out afterward, when gas mains ruptured. The fire raged for days and wiped out huge portions of the city.”

  “But not the convent?”

  “No, it survived, but it was shut up for more than a decade, before it was renovated and turned into the school,” Susan said.

  “Hmmm. Anything else odd about the building’s history?”

  “A few decades ago,” Susan said, “a young man threw himself down the bell tower stairs. Suicide.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Susan extracted a lime green file from her satchel, from which she drew several photocopied articles. “I pulled these off the microfiche.” She spread the articles out on my sales counter, and we all perused them. “Looks as though the school tried to keep it quiet, but I found a mention of the death in the Examiner newspaper.”

  “No photo of the deceased?”

  She shook her head.

  “This doesn’t mention suicide, or even where the death occurred,” I said.

  “The school must have hoped the death notice would fly under the radar. A suicide would be dramatic, bring unwanted attention to the school.”

  Something bothered me: Ginny claimed to have read about the suicide and made her sketch from a photo of John Daniels. Where did she get the photo?

  “But what does this have to do with the clothes in the closet?” I wondered aloud.

  “I don’t know—maybe nothing,” Susan said. “But want to hear the kicker?”

  “There’s a kicker?”

  “The woman in question in that little romantic tragedy still lives nearby—right across the bay in Sausalito.”

  “How in the world did you find her?” Bronwyn asked. Susan smiled. “I have my sources . . . and then I just looked her up in the phone book. Seems she kept her name—Eugenia Morisett. I gave her a call last night; she’s happy to talk to us. And here’s the best part: She has some old clothing she’s willing to part with.” Susan favored Bronwyn and me with a cat-and-canary smile. “Anyone feel like having lunch in Sausalito?”

  Bronwyn and I left several dresses to drip-dry over the big tub, a few others blocked out on mesh boards, several hanging in the fresh breeze, and one very disgruntled potbellied pig who was told he had to stay home.

  As we left the store, Conrad shuffled over and said in an urgent whisper, “Dudettes,
run!”

  “What is it?” My question was answered a second later when I spied Inspector Carlos Romero ambling across the street toward us.

  “Don’t worry, Conrad,” I said. “He’s a . . . friend.”

  “He’s a cop,” Conrad mumbled as he disappeared around the corner.

  Romero reached the sidewalk and nodded. “Good afternoon, ladies.”

  “Hello, Inspector,” I replied. “I’m afraid we were just leaving.”

  “I have a couple of things I’d like to go over with you first.”

  “Susan and I’ll pop into Coffee to the People for a few minutes,” Bronwyn said. “Get you anything?”

  Carlos and I declined, and I let him inside the quiet shop.

  Oscar was beside himself with joy, convinced I had come to my senses and decided to bring him along. He ran circles around us, bringing a reluctant smile to Carlos’s typically solemn face. Poor Oscar would be doubly upset to learn I was going again; I was sure my familiar would have a few choice words for me when I returned home later that day.

  The inspector’s dark eyes alit on the frilly garments hanging from a nearby rack. He reached out and rubbed a piece of delicate hand-tatted lace between thumb and forefinger. I watched with interest—I would have thought Romero too serious of mind to be distracted by such things as corsets and lingerie. Then again, as Luc had pointed out yesterday, adolescent fantasies ran deep.

  “Inspector?” I urged at his continued silence.

  He dropped the lace, almost guiltily. “I hear you were hanging around campus yesterday, asking questions.”

  “Not the whole day—I just passed by there in the afternoon. I wanted to retrieve the vintage clothing Marlene Mueller had promised me.”

  “Who did you speak to while you were there?”

  “I met Luc Carmichael, whose office is near the third-floor closet where the clothes were kept, and then I stopped by to speak to Walker Landau before I left.” I decided not to mention the supernatural light-and-sound show Luc and I had been treated to in the closet.

  “Why did you want to talk to Landau?”

  I shrugged. “He was in the café with Becker the night he died. And Marlene said he was nervous.”

  “Provost Mueller? You spoke to her as well?”

  “Oh, yes, to confirm it was all right to pick up the clothes. And her husband, Todd.”

  “Anyone else?”

  I thought for a moment and shook my head.

  “Uh-huh.” Romero’s dark eyes swept around the shop. “Okay, what I’m still not getting here is why you’re involved in this investigation at all.”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m involved. . . .”

  The inspector fixed me with a cross between a stare and a glare.

  “I asked a few questions yesterday when my curiosity got the better of me. I suppose I thought maybe people would open up to me more easily than to you. No offense.”

  His lip curled up in the barest semblance of a smile. “Did you find out anything?”

  “I think Walker Landau’s telling the truth, for what it’s worth. Becker was useful to him alive. He stood to gain nothing by murdering him.”

  Romero let out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know why Walker Landau’s so fixated on his being the number one suspect. At this point his guilty response is the only thing making me look at him.”

  “He does seem a little high-strung,” I said.

  “That’s the understatement of the year. Truth is, Landau’s no more a person of interest than anyone else. Jerry Becker had more enemies than Adolf Hitler. We’ve got suspects coming out our ears. This was not a well-liked man.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” I said. “Some people are all right till they get two sets of britches.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wealth doesn’t suit some people.”

  “Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your homespun wisdom?”

  I laughed. “What about Luc Carmichael? Is he a suspect as well?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, until this case is closed, my own mother’s a suspect.”

  I smiled, but Romero looked serious.

  “Tell me once again who was with you when you were ghost hunting?”

  “The security guard, Kevin something, Ginny Mueller, and Maya Jackson.”

  “Ginny’s an unexpected beneficiary of Becker’s death—lucky for her you gave her an alibi.”

  “What do you mean she’s a beneficiary?”

  He ignored the question, but clearly had something else to add. He cleared his throat, looked down at the medallions in my display case, over at Bronwyn’s jars of herbs, then finally back at me.

  “Inspector Romero?” I asked.

  “I think I might have heard that bumping you were so interested in.”

  “Bumping?”

  Romero shifted his weight uneasily. “Sounds. Strange sounds. At the school.”

  “I see.”

  “If you repeat any of this to anyone I’ll arrest you and lose the paperwork.”

  I smiled. “It’s not a crime to admit you heard strange noises.”

  “I’m a rational man, Lily. A police officer. An SFPD Homicide Inspector. I can’t exactly go around telling people the building’s haunted, much less that maybe a ghost killed Jerry Becker.”

  “For what it’s worth, I do believe in this stuff, but I don’t think a ghost was responsible, either. It’s really not normal spectral behavior.”

  “That would reassure me, except that I find myself discussing what is and what is not ‘normal’ ghost behavior.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “No, I don’t think I will.”

  There was something of an awkward pause.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Carlos, “I’ve been meaning to tell you that you can get your clothes back.”

  My mind was blank. “What clothes?”

  “The ones we confiscated when you were involved in the last death.”

  “I wasn’t involved.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. You’ve been in town three months, and you’ve been associated with two suspicious deaths. Given what the police from your hometown tell me about your unusual . . . ‘upbringing’? . . . and what you were accused of back in Texas, it gives me the willies.”

  “Is that a technical police term?”

  The corner of his mouth kicked up in another slight smile. “What can I say? I listen to my intuition, for better or for worse.”

  I nodded. He didn’t trust me. Maybe Conrad was right; we weren’t friends after all. . . . Carlos Romero was first, last, and always, a cop.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “you can get the clothes back now that the case is closed. I’ll make sure they’re released.”

  “Thanks. So, back to the School of Fine Arts—is it all right with you if I poke around a little more? I won’t interfere with your investigation. I’m just trying to figure out what we’re dealing with here. Until I do, the, uh, ‘bumping’ will continue.”

  He nodded. “Tell you what: You do what you do, and I’m going to keep doing what I do, namely search for a real live person who was responsible for this. But if you run across anything, however crazy it sounds, I want to be your first call.” He reached into his jacket pocket and laid a business card on the table. “Your very first call.”

  “I’m proud of you, Inspector Romero. It’s not easy to admit you’ve experienced something unexplainable.”

  He snorted and turned to leave.

  “Inspector, could I ask you a question about Max? Max Carmichael?”

  His expression shifted, almost imperceptibly. “What about him?”

  “I don’t . . . I mean this is probably going to sound rather forward, but he tells me his late wife was related to you.”

  “My cousin,” he said with a curt nod. I noticed a small tic at the corner of his eye.

  “And her death . . .”

  “Was his fault.”

  Romero’s dark eyes w
ere deep and unfathomable. I wished I could read what he was thinking.

  “His fault?”

  “And he’s the first to admit it. Unfortunately, all the regret in the world won’t bring her back.” He started to turn away, but hesitated and looked back over his shoulder. “It’s none of my business, but if I were you, I’d be careful around the man. He doesn’t have the greatest track record with women.”

  “Shall we take my car?” I offered. “We can put down the top and enjoy the sunny day.”

  Bronwyn and Susan agreed with enthusiasm, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Last week, Bronwyn drove me across town to pick up some fresh goat’s milk from a new source in the Mission, and within three few blocks I vowed never again to enter a vehicle with her at the wheel. She was full of good intentions, but drove as she did everything else—with joyful abandon and sweeping gestures, which sent us careening all over the road.

  My companions directed me to head north across the majestic Golden Gate Bridge. The day was perfect: A robin’s egg blue sky provided the ideal backdrop to cottony clouds that looked made to cradle angels. Hawks and seagulls swooped overhead while tourists crammed the bridge’s walkways, taking souvenir photographs and relishing the famous vistas. The rugged Marin headlands, just on the other side of the span, jutted out into the Pacific Ocean.

  I was so busy enjoying the view myself that I managed to miss the first Sausalito exit. Instead I took the second, which dropped us off in an unmarked residential area.

  “Just keep heading downhill,” said Bronwyn.

  That was easier said than done.

  Sausalito’s narrow streets wind about the hills like a meandering river that defies gravity. The road started out downhill, then snaked back up before heading down again. I found San Francisco twisty and hilly, but compared to Sausalito, it’s positively tame. The area is overgrown and wooded, with the houses built right on the streets so that meeting a car coming the other way requires one or both vehicles to pull into a nearby driveway or cling to the edge of the road. Old Victorians, simple beach bungalows, Italianate manors, and sleek modern structures pepper the hillsides in a fascinating mélange.

  We looped and swooped around zigzagging hairpin turns, avoiding bicyclists, walkers, and children in strollers until we finally reached a main drag on the edge of the water, a natural inlet of the bay directly across from what locals refer to simply as “the City.” Looking past the jostling crowd of tourists thronging the sidewalks, one could see the architectural remnants of Sausalito’s history as a sleepy fishing village. The bay was jammed with sailboats, a passenger ferry, and two tugboatescorted freighters lumbering past on their way to the port of Oakland.