A Cast-Off Coven

by Juliet Blackwell

  Eventually I reverted to Co’cola so I could drive us home. On the way, I veered off the road at a handwritten sign for a garage sale. This was an occupational hazard: I careen as recklessly as Bronwyn when I see a sign for a sale. And the handwritten ones are, by far, the best.

  Half a dozen people meandered about a scraggly lawn, poking at the myriad bits and pieces laid out on card tables, holding up the occasional item to the sun for inspection. A sixtyish woman sat in a folding beach chair; her floppy sun hat and glasses made her look as if she were sitting on a tropical beach. She smiled a welcome at us newcomers, then turned her attention back to her thick historical novel.

  Garage sales are a uniquely North American institution. Sure, there are flea markets all over the world where people sell secondhand goods, but the garage sale is a different animal entirely. You have a bunch of stuff you don’t want anymore, but rather than toss it or give it away, you spend an entire weekend just sitting out with your goods, making money a dollar at a time. A pewter tankard for a quarter; a hand-knitted scarf for a dollar, or seventy-five cents if you haggle; old 45s; a slightly used tricycle—the offerings are always different and almost always interesting.

  Home-based sales are especially attractive to me because the goods are attached to their place of origin, so I can get a sense of locale, as well as just the vibrations from the items. This sale had no great vintage clothing, but I ferreted out a Public Enemy T-shirt and three pairs of faded classic Levi’s, perfect for my Haight-Ashbury clientele.

  I picked up a Scrabble board marked for sale at fifty cents, but almost put it back when I realized it was missing most of its little wooden letters. Then I thought of Marlene’s love of ephemera, and wondered whether she could use the remaining dozen or so letters in one of her collages. I decided to invest two quarters, just in case, and moved on to a small collection of shoes, where I found a pair of tooled and stitched cowboy boots in metallic copper leather, and the pièce de résistance, a pair of platform gladiator sandals. That made the trip worthwhile right there.

  Finally I turned my attention to the kitchenware.

  Unlike a lot of collectors, I was not drawn to typical antiques such as fine furniture or porcelain figurines. Instead, I adored kitchen items. They were used day in and day out, and they carried the precious vibrations of steady, tranquil, quotidian human interactions. I found several items made of milky jade green and rosy pink depression-era glass, which reminded me of the hodgepodge in my mother’s kitchen cabinets when I was growing up. Mama was always embarrassed that we couldn’t afford a matching set of modern dinnerware, but I loved the different colors and patterns. It made the table seem bright and festive—one of the few such examples in our lives at the time.

  As I added a vintage grater, egg beater, and iron corn bread mold to my collection of garage sale loot, I thought I might have to create a separate section for vintage kitchenwares in Aunt Cora’s Closet. Maybe I could rename it Aunt Cora’s Closet and Pantry? Though as Maya had pointed out to me last time I brought home a bright yellow vintage Sunbeam mixer, I was going to have to annex the neighbor’s shop space soon if I kept acquiring goods.

  “What’s that?” Susan asked of the iron pan.

  “You use it for corn bread. My mama had one. I think I was a teenager before I saw corn bread that wasn’t shaped like little cobs of corn.”

  “That’s adorable! I love good corn bread.”

  “I’ll have you over,” I said impulsively. Though I liked to cook, in my life I had never had people over for a dinner I had prepared. Not long ago, Bronwyn and Maya had joined me in my apartment and we ordered Chinese food, and already that was a first. But this friendship thing was seductive. “Do you like gumbo? My mama’s people were from Louisiana, so she cooked Cajun.”

  “I adore Cajun!” gushed Susan, making me smile. I imagined that Susan would adore anything I had suggested; snake stew, even. Her enthusiasm was de lightful.

  Susan found a charming watercolor of Stinson Beach, the carved frame for which was probably worth more than the painting, and Bronwyn bought a few old paperback romance novels for herself and a Madame Alexander doll for her granddaughter. I wound up buying much more than I needed, but especially given the mystery that was unwinding before me, I felt drawn to the normalness of these items. They pulsated with wholesome, straightforward vibrations.

  It was nearly five o’clock by the time we climbed back into the Mustang, crossed the Golden Gate, and paused to pay our six dollars at the toll booth. Luckily we were traveling in the noncommute direction; rush hour traffic was bumper-to-bumper coming out of the city.

  While Susan and Bronwyn chatted about their favorite spots in Marin County, I pondered what Eugenia had told us about Jerry Becker, John Daniels, and a group of mysterious nuns.

  I knew I was probably jumping to conclusions, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Could a young, jealous Jerry have pushed his rival, John Daniels, down the stairs those many years ago? And then would Daniels’s ghost have waited all this time to exact his revenge? But even if so, how did any of that relate to the demon in the nuns’ closet, or were they related at all? If there were multiple spirits inhabiting the building, it was hard to believe they wouldn’t interact at some point. Could Jerry Becker really have discovered something untoward in that closet? Something like a demon? Could it have helped him with his ambitious ways? One thing was clear: I needed to know much more than I did about Becker’s past, and the undead.

  Chapter 12

  “Back to our washing?” Bronwyn asked after we lugged the Hefty bags from Eugenia’s house into Aunt Cora’s Closet. She acted as game as ever, but I didn’t have to read her vibrations to know she was not looking forward to more backbreaking work.

  “Why don’t you go on home and relax? I’m actually fixin’ to meet with a friend this evening.”

  That was a stretch. It was more that I wanted to have a little chat with someone who had known Jerry Becker well, or at least the paternal aspect of the man.

  “If you’re sure . . . but I don’t want to leave you with all this.”

  “Go on—I’m sure your granddaughter will be excited to get her present. Really, I’m not going to do any more washing today.”

  I dug the scrap of paper Walker had given me out of my backpack and dialed Andromeda Becker, woman of the pink feathers and black spikes.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Andromeda asked over the phone.

  “About your dad. But I do better in person—would it be all right if I dropped by?” I asked.

  It sounded as though she put her hand over the speaker; I heard muffled voices.

  “Okay,” she said when she came back. “Wanna come over now?”

  “Perfect,” I said, hung up, and looked down at my grumpy, neglected familiar. “Want to come for a ride? You’ll have to stay in the car, but you’re welcome to join me.”

  Oscar seemed torn between sullenness and eagerness. Given his visage, it was hard to tell. Finally he decided to come along, sailing into the front passenger seat.

  I checked the map before making my way to the address on Russian Hill, not far from the school. The neighborhood was tidy and obviously well-to-do, though cramped. Narrow streets were laid out in a stubborn grid on the steep hills, resulting in some of the most precipitous grades in the city—the kind where the nose of your car goes over the ledge and you just have to have faith there’s a road under you somewhere. Some stretches did away with auto-accessible roadways altogether, replacing them with staircases. A few tourist-laden cars were backed up at the top of Lombard Street, a brick stretch of road characterized by sharp switchbacks and featured in any number of movies and TV shows.

  I squeezed my car into a narrow space between a late-model Jaguar and a shiny Lexus. On the other side of a four-foot wall along the dead end of the street was a sheer two-hundred-foot cliff of rock all the way to Chestnut Street below, interrupted only by a few tenacious scrub bushes.

  The address Andr
omeda gave me was spelled out in brass numbers on a plain wooden door. It was a modern structure, with lots of wood and glass, taking advantage of the incredible view—not exactly the cold-water walk-up of your average starving artist.

  While waiting for someone to answer the bell, I tried to quell my nervousness. After a childhood spent being turned away from doors in my hometown, I still felt out of place when asking permission to enter a house.

  Andromeda Becker opened the door. Now her hair was purple, but she’d gone back to soft feathers rather than gelled spikes.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “Sure.” She turned and led the way into the apartment. I trailed her in, closing the door behind me. A great bank of sliding glass doors stood open to reveal a man sitting at a table out on the deck.

  He stood and came toward us.

  “Dave Kessler,” he said in that hale and hearty way common to athletic men of a certain age. He was in his mid- to late forties, average looking, probably bald on top, and wearing a faded black and orange Giants baseball cap to hide it.

  He held out his hand and we shook.

  “Lily Ivory,” I said, sorry Andromeda and I weren’t alone. Dave’s vibrations were confident and cautious. Self-protective, self-satisfied . . . self-interested.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Dave, gesturing to a chair at the table on the deck. “Have a seat and join us. It’s just some wine and cheese, a nice vintage I picked up last week in Sonoma, a Seghesio Rockpile Zinfandel. Do you know it?”

  “I’m just beginning to learn about wine,” I said, slipping into a wrought-iron chair. “I don’t know much.”

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “West Texas, originally.”

  “Not many vineyards there.”

  “Not hardly. Moonshine’s more likely.”

  He chuckled and poured me a glass of the deep red wine. I took a sip; it was rich and full-bodied.

  “Andi and I were just going over recent events,” Dave said.

  “The cops keep talking to me. I don’t get why this is such a deal,” Andromeda said as she sank into a chair, putting one foot up on the seat like a child. “About Dad . . . being killed. That ghost did it—we’ve all heard it. Anyway, he’ll get his.”

  Dave rolled his eyes and raised his eyebrows, looking over at me as if to say, Can you believe this?

  I smiled, but my thoughts were on Andromeda’s posture on the chair. Graciela, my grandmother, would have given me a withering look at best—a smart rap on the head was more likely—for sitting like that. She had drummed it into me: A lady sits with her feet flat on the floor and her legs together. Not that I worried much about being considered ladylike these days, but youthful training ran deep.

  “Andromeda, babe,” Dave said with a pained look on his face, “we all know you were raised in a somewhat unconventional manner in Berkeley, but please, you’re a grown woman. There’s no such thing as ghosts, for Pete’s sake.”

  His condescending tone put me on edge like fingernails on a chalkboard. At his words, or perhaps just his tone, the brash Andromeda seemed to fold in on herself.

  “How would you explain the noises?” I asked Dave.

  “The sounds?” He shrugged. “Old pipes, wind knocking at the windows. Imagination run amok, most likely.”

  “I take it you haven’t spent the night on the grounds?”

  “You’re telling me you believe this stuff?”

  “I’m saying I don’t dismiss things out of hand without checking them out.”

  He sat back, let out a mirthless chuckle, and fixed Andromeda and me, one after the other, with a look.

  “So you think a ghost killed Jerry,” he said in a patronizing tone. He shook his head, then peered through the wine in his glass, as though concentrating on the way the light streamed through it.

  “No,” I conceded. “But I think something very odd is going on at that school.”

  “Well, tell you what,” Dave chuckled again, “if anyone could get a ghost mad enough to kill him, that’d be our Jerry. He was like a walking motive to murder.”

  “How so?”

  “A couple of ex-wives, just to start. His kids hated him. Business associates who’ve been burned. And you wanna get started on the lovers?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “On top of everything else, he was a real bastard, through and through.”

  “What’s your association with him?”

  “I’m a friend of the family.”

  Could’ve fooled me.

  “Or I was,” Dave clarified. “Jerry and I had a bit of a falling-out ourselves.”

  “What kind of falling-out?”

  “A business deal gone awry, what else? I set up a big deal, and he swooped in at the last moment to steal it out from under me. Classic Jerry. Don’t worry, I told all this to the police.”

  “So who do you think killed Becker?” I asked.

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t Andi, here, and I told the police they should leave her alone already. Either charge her with something, or let it drop. She didn’t have any motive, anyway—his money’s slated to go to the school, not to his kids.”

  “He wrote you out of the will?” I asked Andromeda. She opened her mouth to speak, but Kessler beat her to it. “Not entirely. She’ll still be comfortable; I’m just saying that the bulk of his wealth is going elsewhere.”

  “So are you thinking someone connected to the school killed Becker?”

  “Personally, I’d check out sweet little Ginny Mueller.”

  “Ginny? What’s she got to do with it?”

  “She was jealous of Andi here. Crazy jealous. Plus, Jerry was . . . well, let’s just say that Ginny had reason to be jealous on a number of fronts.”

  “Aside from the fact that there’s a big leap from being angry at someone to actually killing them,” I said, “Ginny couldn’t have done it. She was with me at the time of Jerry’s death. Andromeda saw us.”

  “Then there’s that whack-job, Walker—” Dave began.

  “Could you give me a ride to school?” Andromeda asked, jumping up and knocking over her chair in her haste.

  “Oh, um, sure.” The cheese plate remained untouched.

  “Nice to meet you, Dave.”

  He nodded but did not get up. Andromeda grabbed her purple backpack and left the house without saying good-bye.

  “Are you . . . Do you not want to talk about Walker?” I asked as we closed the door behind us.

  “I’m just tired of all these guys talking about each other, running each other down. And I am so sick of people telling me what to do.”

  We walked the rest of the way to the car in silence. Andromeda went to the curbside to climb in the passenger’s seat, but she lingered for a moment, looking down over the cliff.

  “A few months ago some poor guy was breaking into cars right here on this street,” Andromeda said. “And when some cop chased him, he jumped over this wall and fell to his death. He didn’t mean to—he thought it was just a low wall.”

  She stood looking down over the cliff for so long that I started to get worried. I went to stand beside her.

  “But sometimes when you jump,” she continued, “you don’t know how far down the other side is.”

  “Andromeda, are you okay?”

  “Sure. How do you mean?” She strode past me and climbed into the car. “Hi, pig,” she said to Oscar, who was snorting in the backseat.

  I pulled out of the parking space and started making my way down the hill.

  “Is there anything more you could tell me about your father’s death, about what happened?” I asked. “When I saw you that night, you were crying. You said you two had an argument?”

  “We did, but that wasn’t what I was crying about.”

  “What were you crying about?”

  “I saw Todd. You know him? Marlene’s
boy toy? He tried to talk to me about the whole Walker thing.” She shrugged. “Dave’s right, you know. My dad really was a head case, or at least made everyone around him a head case.”

  “But Dave still counts himself a friend of the family?”

  “Yeah, well, he’s still friends with the rest of us.”

  “What was Todd going to tell you about Walker?”

  “He thought Walker had some hold over Dad.”

  “What kind of hold? About what?”

  Andromeda shrugged and looked out the window. Several minutes of silence ensued.

  “And your mother was which wife?” I changed the subject.

  “Number two. Dad had two kids with his first, then me with my mom, Connie. The police have been talking to all of us, asking a lot of questions. I guess when people get murdered they look to the family, right?”

  “That’s what I hear. Do you think any of the family was involved?”

  “One of my half brothers lives in London, the other in Bangkok, trying to get as far away from Dad as possible, I think. So I guess they’re off the hook.”

  “But you think one of them might have done this, if they were given the chance?”

  She shrugged but started tearing up. Suddenly the mask of haughty artist and self-obsessed youth fell away, and she just looked like a child. My heart went out to her.

  “Dad used to call us worthless, that sort of thing. He just wasn’t very nice. I mean, even my name. Walker told me about the myth I was named after—there was this father who gave his daughter as a sacrifice to the sea monster; had her tied up naked at the water’s edge. What kind of backstory is that to give a kid?”

  Good question. Luckily, Andromeda was looking out her side window, so I didn’t have to come up with a response. We drove past one neat flowering garden after another, full of early-spring color.

  “I heard something about your dad wanting you and Walker Landau to get together?”

  “Yeah, that was weird. Like all of a sudden, he decided I should settle down already, and he sure didn’t mean with Dave. Dad said I had to go out with Walker some, at least give him a try.”