Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  There was a loud clatter in the attic, then the sound of Lund yelling at his underlings to be more careful.

  If the clatter had come from my attic, I would have run upstairs to find out what was ruined, as well as which animal—fox, wyvern, or hellhound—was responsible for the damages.

  Krinkle, however, seemed unconcerned. If anything, she appeared pleased to have so many visitors within her house. She had greeted Dr. Lund and the CSI techs warmly, as though she was running a Bed and Breakfast and they were day guests, arriving right on time as per their reservation.

  Bentley leaned forward and sniffed his empty tea cup. “Were there rose petals in the tea?”

  “No.” Krinkle fanned her face with one hand.

  “I smell roses.”

  Krinkle’s magnified green eye twitched behind her thick eyeglass lens. “That must be my perfume you smell.”

  “It smells familiar,” he said. “There must be someone at my office who wears the same brand.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said, laughing haughtily. “It’s a custom blend given to me by my dear friend, Queenie Gilbert, rest her soul. It’s a blend of rose, magnolia, bergamot, and something she claimed to be otherworldly.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Both of Krinkle’s hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh, dear! That must be my friend, Louis. In all the fuss, I completely forgot! He must be here to take me to the meeting.”

  She excused herself and went to the front door, moving quickly for a woman her age.

  Bentley and I followed, in case the visitor was another crime scene technician, or someone there to tie up loose ends from a kidnapping.

  Standing on the front step was a tall man in his sixties. I didn’t know him. He had a long, leathery face, and a bulbous, pockmarked nose. He had jet black hair, worn back in a low ponytail, and an equally dark goatee. He wore black trousers and a black shirt, despite the summer weather.

  He looked at us with surprise and said, “Temperance, you have company!”

  “It has been quite the morning,” she said. “These are the police. I called them about my visions, the ones I told you about. Now they’re conducting a very important investigation, thanks to me.”

  He winced. “Temperance, you didn’t.”

  “Louis, I told you. My visions are real!”

  The man looked past her, at Bentley, and said, “I apologize on behalf of my friend. I’ve been taking her to meetings at the community center to get her out of the house and away from that imagination of hers. I hope she hasn’t wasted too much of your time.”

  He hadn’t been addressing me, but I cut in, asking, “What meetings?”

  He looked down and shuffled his feet. “It’s, uh, sort of a group for people going through life changes.”

  “The Awakenlings,” I said.

  All three of them jerked their heads and stared at me.

  “I hear things,” I said enigmatically.

  Bentley fixed his silver-eyed gaze on me. “How do you know about this group?”

  “One of the library patrons invited me. A woman named Jasmine Carter-Pressman.”

  His nostrils flared. “Pressman?”

  Louis said, “I know Jasmine. She’s a good woman. Been through a lot this year. She makes my problems look like nothing at all.” He rubbed his black goatee and glanced over his shoulder at a black car that was double-parked in the street. “Temperance, let me park the car, then I’ll come in and help straighten things out.”

  “No, no, no!” She pushed him out of the doorway. “Don’t you dare trouble yourself with my business, Louis. You go ahead to the meeting. Say hello to everyone for me. I’ll be fine here on my own. Trust me.”

  He tried to get into the house despite her protests, but she playfully swatted him on the arms until he agreed to leave.

  We went back inside with Krinkle, sat at the table, and went over the same questions. She still didn’t know any more about the missing woman than when we’d arrived.

  After a while, my phone buzzed. I checked the screen, and all my thoughts about Krinkle and the dollhouse left my head. My mom priorities completely took over.

  Bentley, leaning over to look at my phone, asked, “What is it?”

  I held the phone to my chest. “Nothing to do with our current business.”

  “You made a noise when you read the message. What does it say?”

  I showed him the screen. “It’s just my daughter. Asking about the spare tire for Foxy Pumpkin.”

  “She’s got a flat tire?”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “You figured that out from my clues? I can see why they made you a detective.”

  He groaned.

  “I’ll be fine here on my own,” Krinkle said. “You should go and see about that... Did you say pumpkin?”

  Bentley wagged a finger at the woman as he stood. “You have my card and all my numbers,” he said. “Don’t let Dr. Lund examine you again, and don’t go anywhere with him. Do you understand?”

  She giggled, as though it had been a joke. Krinkle didn’t know how serious Lund could be about the research aspects of his career. I’d heard him talk excitedly about taking apart bodies to see what made them “tick.” He was looking for physical connections to magic abilities. I secretly hoped he wouldn’t succeed.

  We said goodbye to Krinkle, and left the house.

  Zoey’s flat tire had happened near the museum, so I told Bentley, and we headed there.

  “Don’t think I forgot about your promise of lunch,” I said once we were driving.

  “I would never think you forgot about lunch,” he said.

  Or a promise you made, I thought.

  Chapter 10

  CHET MOORE

  MOORE RESIDENCE

  Inside his kitchen, Chet Moore placed a glass of chilly orange juice on a serving tray. He wiped the condensation from the glass off his fingers with a tea towel. The meal was almost perfect. All it needed was a finishing touch.

  He stepped out to his back yard, walked over to the flower garden, and selected the loveliest peony blossom. He’d forgotten to bring the pruning shears from his potting shed, so he glanced around to make sure nobody was watching, then shook his hand to shift two fingers into sharp claws. He rotated one finger, forming scissors, and neatly clipped the blossom. A bird screeched overhead. A snail shell crushed beneath his shoe.

  He returned to the kitchen, where he nestled the short stem into a bud vase. Peonies were not Chessa’s absolute favorite—she preferred the crisp symmetry and pointed petals of white dahlias—but she would appreciate the peony because she loved all white flowers. And she loved Chet. Or so she said.

  It was funny, how she’d never felt so distant from him as she did now, after her return. Perhaps she had been gone too long, and everything that wasn’t Chessa had changed too much while she stayed the same. He, Chet, her loving fiancé, had changed too much. He had changed in spite of holding on so tight, making himself so rigid against change while he waited for her to return.

  Chet’s upper back ached as he rearranged all the items on the tray, swapping the position of the orange juice and the bud vase with the peony, and then swapping them back again.

  He held one hand over the waffles. They had been steaming, emitting a delicate vanilla scent, but now they had grown cool. Not distant and cool, like Chessa, but cool nonetheless.

  He looked over at the bowl of batter and the still-steaming waffle iron. He decided to make another batch of fresh waffles.

  Ten minutes later, he once again found himself rearranging the items on the tray. The waffles were cooling. He was stalling.

  Get it together, he told himself. She needs you to be strong for her. Don’t wimp out now. Not when life is finally almost good again.

  He picked up the tray, and felt the creak of stiffness in his neck as he did, along with the rigidity in his rib cage.

  Breathe, he told himself. At his age, his body should have known to keep moving his diaphragm, to keep
working his lungs, to keep bringing fresh oxygen into his body without him having to think about it. And yet, a dozen times a day or more, Chet Moore felt the dimness creeping up his head. It was like a long shadow falling over his mind. Before passing out, he would realize the dimness and the long shadow was from lack of oxygen. Then he would order himself to breathe. He would tell himself to relax—not that it did much good. How could he relax, knowing as much about life as he did? The only people walking around happy and relaxed were the ones who had no clue what was actually going on.

  The fools.

  The damn lucky fools.

  With the tray in his hands, he marched up the stairs and into the master bedroom.

  The love of his life lay crumpled within the bed linens, folded into herself like clean but forgotten laundry. Her platinum hair looked heavy, as though soaked with water.

  Chessa appeared to be fast asleep, but as soon as he drew near the bed, her ocean-blue eyes flashed open. She pushed herself upright at once.

  “I thought I smelled breakfast,” she said sleepily.

  “More like brunch,” he said.

  They both glanced over at the room’s clock.

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep in,” she gently scolded.

  He started to say she’d looked like she needed more sleep, but he bit his tongue. He had learned not to speak about her sleeping habits. It was far better to suffer through her yawning and grumpiness. It was easier for everyone if Chet pretended that it was reasonable for her to cut short her sleep every night as a way of stealing back the time that had been taken from her during her year in a coma.

  “I made waffles,” he said, stupid though it was to state the obvious.

  She pushed herself further up the bed, until her back was resting against the tufted headboard. She licked her lips and looked over the food as Chet folded down the tray’s legs at the sides and placed the tray over her legs.

  “That peony is lovely,” she said.

  “There’s a whole garden full of them. Would you like me to take everything outside, to the back yard?”

  “No,” she answered, sharply and quickly. “Eating in bed sounds luxurious.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “These waffles smell heavenly,” she said. “Everything is perfect. You must have done this without Corvin helping. Whatever did you use to distract the boy and keep him out of the kitchen?” She used the dessert fork to stab pieces of fruit in the bowl.

  “No distractions,” he said. “He’s with the dog walker for the whole day.”

  She looked up from fruit stabbing and raised an eyebrow. “You certainly are a clever one, Mr. Linklater.” She put extra stress on the fake name Chet had been using to make arrangements for Corvin. “Am I to presume that I will be spending an entire romantic day alone with you?”

  “Like it or not, I am yours for the whole day. No work. Just the two of us, doing whatever we want on a lazy Saturday.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t say that. You’ll tempt fate.”

  “Oh, Chessa.”

  “I know I shouldn’t be superstitious, but every time you say you-know-what, the office calls.”

  “What? You’re imagining things.”

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “I swear they must have a magical alert on you saying the phrase ‘lazy Saturday.’ All you have to do is say ‘lazy Saturday’ three times, and you immediately get called in for some crazy emergency.”

  He frowned at her.

  Just then, both of their phones rang with the tone that indicated exactly such an emergency.

  “This is your fault,” she said in mock anger. “Your fault, Mr. Linklater.”

  He gave her a guilty look as he answered his phone. “Chet Moore,” he said. “What’s up, Knox?”

  *

  The news from the Department of Water and Magic had not been what Chet Moore would have deemed an emergency, if he were the person in charge of such things. But he wasn’t in charge. The mayor was. And when Mayor Paladini declared an emergency, people reported to the office, whether it was their “lazy Saturday” off or not.

  Chessa, who would be on sick leave for a week due to her surgery on Wednesday, had gotten a courtesy update rather than a call to come in. She’d expressed relief that she could stay in bed “for a few more hours.” Chet knew she would probably still be there whenever he managed to get home again.

  His platinum-haired fiancée had been camped out in the master bedroom since coming out of surgery on Wednesday. Her reluctance to get out of bed had nothing to do with the actual procedure, which she had recovered from—physically, at least—almost instantaneously. In fact, her body was so strong, the surgeon had to use magic spells and ancient instruments to remove Chessa’s damaged ovaries. Dr. Lund had been beside himself with excitement, though he tried to mask it. Chessa had been awake and conscious for the entire procedure. Chet couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. But it had been her idea to stay conscious. She insisted on destroying the biological material herself, and never having any part of her leave her possession. Not again.

  It was such a horrible procedure, and for such awful reasons, yet she had calmly prepared for the surgery as though she were a regular person getting a cavity filled at the dentist.

  After the procedure, however, had been a different story. All the sadness she’d been holding back was able to burst through the dam. She’d lain in bed, listless.

  Her sisters came to visit on Thursday, which was when they’d been given the news. Chessa hadn’t prepared the girls during their last get-together, because she feared one or both might talk her out of taking such drastic measures.

  After receiving the news, Charlize and Chloe bickered in the bedroom for hours. Chessa didn’t put a stop to their arguing.

  It was Chet’s father, Don, who finally stopped the racket. He barged into the room and told the three sisters he’d rather have his brain eaten by brainweevils all over again than have to listen to their fighting for one more minute. Charlize and Chloe left in a huff.

  Chet had been anything but sad to see the two go. They meant well, he supposed, but they were also the worst, always drawing Chessa into their petty rivalries.

  Charlize wasn’t so bad on her own—Chet considered her one of his best friends, along with Knox and Rob—but when those three got together, it brought out the worst in them. He suspected Chloe was the problem, that she was the one with the toxic personality that infected the others, but he’d never had any reason to spend time with her on his own, and he wasn’t curious enough to try.

  Chet accepted that he would never understand their complicated family dynamics. He was an only child, and had always been glad of it, except it did leave him completely clueless about sibling rivalry.

  That Saturday afternoon, as he arrived at the underground headquarters and reported in for debriefing, Chet kept thinking about Chessa, and how her depression showed no sign of lifting. Things had been bad before the surgery, and now her heartbreak had only gotten worse.

  *

  As the suited man from the mayor’s office talked about the new Magical Calamity of the Week, Chet struggled to sit upright in his chair and keep his mind focused.

  The whole hullabaloo was about a valuable book that had been stolen from the archives. The book had since been recovered at a civilian’s house, so tracking it down was not the issue. The problem was that the theft had been an inside job.

  Chet rubbed his temples. All this fuss, for a book they had back on site? There hadn’t been this much fuss over the last couple of agent-on-agent homicides.

  Another person in a suit interrupted the presentation with an update on something unrelated but important.

  There were some technical issues regarding Codex. That was the new AI software that had been forced upon them without enough testing. Charlize had warned that it wasn’t ready, but Charlize wasn’t in charge of implementation. Just programming. And the AI’s irritating personality. That was a
ll Charlize.

  Chet rubbed his forehead and pretended to be listening.

  The IT department technician turned the microphone back over to the young man who worked under the mayor. What was the fellow’s name? Alistair Something? The kid tried his best. He’d even brought visual aids: images projected onto the viewing screen in the gallery. It was always nice to have visuals at a debriefing, but photographs of a boring old leather-bound book couldn’t hold Chet’s attention.

  Chet felt like shifting into a wolf and howling for the meeting to end. He couldn’t pay attention to any more of this crap.

  And it was such crap. All of it. Or, in his father Don’s wise words, What the wing-dang-doodle was all this bullcrap?

  If the DWM didn’t keep such valuable archives in the first place, agents like Chet and his friends wouldn’t be sitting ducks on top of a tempting bunker full of valuable books, and prophetic scrolls, and various objects with powers beyond comprehension. There were millions of dollars in gemstones alone. These were exactly the sort of things that evil forces—the bad guys—were constantly trying to steal.

  The Department must have been spending close to three-quarters of their resources on internal security alone. It was wasteful, and stupid. It was like keeping your sugar bowl inside an ant colony and constantly holding emergency briefings about how the ants were trying to get the sugar again.

  Whatever happened to the good ol’ days, when magical objects were scattered hither and thither? Sure, some encursed gemstone or magicked-up dune buggy or evil, indestructible lamp popped up every now and then, causing trouble, but that was what made magic fun.

  Keeping everything in one storehouse was asking to have security breaches. Of course someone stole a book of ancient deity resurrection spells from the archives. The temptation was too much for most people to withstand.

  What was that other expression his father used to say? A wise man knows better than to flash his Rolex in a dive bar. Don’s expressions were becoming more and more likely to pop up in Chet’s head as he grew older. He was becoming his old man. Who knew? Soon he’d be cutting deals for extra slices of bacon. Now that was a funny/sad idea.