by Olivia Boler
He glares at me with a sudden ferocity, but I don’t step back. “Tell me, woman, what have you done to her?”
“I assure you I’ve done nothing. She came to me. She asked me to watch them, and then she left. How did you even find us?”
“She called me while I was driving. She told me she was here with our daughters.”
“Viveka told you this.”
He nods. I go over in my head all the people who know I’m here. There’s Ned, of course, and Cooper. The band members and their crew, who are also staying here. That’s it. Viveka is not one of them. Did she call my home after I left? No, Cooper would have mentioned it.
“Someone tricked you,” I say.
“But she was in your room.”
“You mean here at the hotel? My room here?” I look over to Bill, but he just shrugs. “That’s not possible. I would know.” I say this more with more bravado than I feel.
“I saw her!” His voice is full of desperation. “She was lying on the balcony.” He looks at his hands, the cuts and nicks. “I tried to open the latch but my hands shook too much. So I picked up a chair and I threw it.” He pauses, his eyes tracking the memory. “But she was gone. When I got out there, she was gone.” He looks up at me. “So my question to you, witch, is what did you do with my wife?”
I swallow. “Non-practicing witch,” I say. Even breaths, I remind myself. Steady heartbeats. “And Viveka was one too, you know. And I’ve done nothing with her.” But someone has. I give Bill a good cosmic going-over, but he’s clean.
I turn back to Jesus Christ. “I wish I could tell you where Viveka is—” I do a quick magickal check, just in case. Nada. “But I don’t know. She’s not here, though. I’m sure I’d sense her.”
His eyebrows raise. “Sense her? You know, she was never a believer.” J.C. slumps back down to a sitting position, the fire gone from his eyes. He glances at me with heavy lids and a tear streaks its way down his cheek. “You must be Memphis.”
Hm. My reputation precedes me. “Yes. How did you know that?”
“She has spoken very little of the past she renounced in the name of the one true God, but she has mentioned you. A powerful witch, she told me.”
Well, I can’t deny that I’m flattered.
“I’m a sinner and a heretic to you, if I understand Viv’s current religious course,” I say. “You must have felt triumphant in converting her.”
He smiles a sad, weary smile. “We’re all sinners, Miss Memphis. We’re trying our best to be one with God.”
His words give me pause. Not about God, but about being one. “Do you think that’s why Viveka disappeared? Is she trying to become one with God?”
His features cloud, the lines on his face casting ashy shadows on his brown skin, and his apprehension becomes more palpable. “I’m sure it’s more mundane than that.” Viv said they were having problems. He sits for a while in silence with his thoughts. “If you will pardon me, I must pray.” He bows his head and clasps his hands.
“Of course.” I turn back to Bill, who is trying to clear his still sore throat discreetly.
“Okay Bill, don’t lie to me.” I turn fully on him. “I know there’s more to your story than letting this guy into my room for a fat gratuity. Spill.”
Bill coughs freely now. He appears to be wracking his pea-brain, and I crack the knuckles in my fingers. And then—ding ding ding!—his face brightens. “There was a guy—a scruffy older dude. He wanted into your room—your old room, I mean—before you checked in this afternoon. He said he had stayed there a few nights ago—when I wasn’t on duty—and that he’d forgotten something. So I let him in.” He shrugs. “That’s all.”
I concentrate a moment, but Bill’s aura is bullshit-free. “All right. I believe you.” A scruffy older guy. For some reason that rings a bell, but I can’t remember which one. Damned expired memory enchantment!
“Are you really a witch?” There is awe in Bill’s voice.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I sigh.
Jesus Christ stands up, startling both Bill and me.
“Please,” he says. “I must apologize for my outburst earlier. It is God’s will that I am a passionate man. It is my cross. Tell me more of what you know.”
I’m not sure what he wants, so I explain my need to go on a business trip, about my reluctance to bring the girls along, about my inability to figure out an alternative that Viveka would approve. I tell him everything, leaving out only our magickal encounters—those would probably only raise his “passions.” He listens, his eyes glued to a place far away, and I’m glad. He only looks up when I pull from my pocket the permission slip to take care of the girls that Viveka gave me.
Jesus studies it intently, holding the paper up to his face with both hands, then away, like Cooper does when he’s too lazy to put on his glasses. “That is her handwriting,” he says, sounding regretful. “She has been much distraught since her mother’s suicide.”
“Sadie committed suicide? Viveka said she drowned.”
“In the bathtub.” He frowns. “It was strange.. Most suicides slash their wrists before the bath. How she managed to keep herself under so long without resisting the urge to breathe…” He trails off and looks at me. “Viveka is convinced it was an accident. She does not want to think her mother has not gone to her reward in Heaven.”
“It does seem odd,” I murmur. My thoughts dart around. “I still don’t understand why Viv left the girls with me.”
“I was at a church leadership conference in Belize,” he says. “I’m a minister. Did you know that, Miss Memphis?”
“Holy Revival Redeemer.”
“That’s right.” He smiles. “I returned home early to an empty house. I was not expecting this. There was a note from my wife saying she had taken the children to California to visit some friends of her mother.”
“Did you try calling her?”
“Yes, I called her.” His voice grows impatient.
“’Course you did, dude,” says Bill soothingly. I nod in agreement—it’s best to keep this one calm. I reach out to J.C. with my mind and catch a flash of his hand whipping through the air connecting with warm skin and, underneath it, muscle and bone. I feel the ghost of a sting across my cheek and remind myself that this has not happened, that this is only what he wants to do.
“I called her,” he says, his tone now more miserable than heated. “She never answered. I waited a day. Then I decided to find her.”
Indeed. I never knew she and Sadie were that close. I try not to envy them, as I do others, their close mother-daughter bond. I know I’ll grieve for my mom when her time comes, but I can’t imagine needing to go off somewhere by myself because of it.
“Did you try Gru’s?”
“My wife and her grandmother had a falling out years ago.”
“What about?”
He gives me a look that says, do you really have to ask?
“Religion,” I guess.
“Me.”
Same diff. “They were never really close.”
“That’s what my wife has told me.” He shakes his head at some private thought. “It must be her father she is visiting.”
I try to find her with my mind again. Still nothing.
“I will go.” J.C. starts to stand but stops and looks at me. “Unless…you want to prevent me.”
I shake my head. “Why would I do that? I want to know where she is too. But what about your daughters?” He should take them, I tell myself, even as I’m not convinced. What am I, family court? Then again, maybe children don’t always belong with their parents.
He straightens up, a frown on his face. “I am not—I am not the one who cares for them, primarily. I travel so often. Miss Memphis, can I impose on your maternal generosity a while longer?”
This sounds suspiciously chauvinistic to me. I suppose anyone with female plumbing will do when it comes to watching out for his girls. Even a witch.
“Besides,” he continues. “I don’t know wha
t I might find once I locate my wife.”
This is true. I try not to imagine the possibilities. They seem boundless.
“All right.” I sigh. I must be insane. But the fairy is nodding his head in approval. I look at Bill, who seems riveted by our conversation now. All he needs is a bowl of popcorn. “I’ll be back in San Francisco day after tomorrow. Will you come to my place and take the girls home?”
“I promise, Miss Memphis. I love them. They are my children. They are God’s gift to me.”
I nod politely and look away. I feel his eyes on me and look back. He is staring at my locket.
“It’s not hers.” I open it up and show him the empty inside. “My boyfriend gave it to me.”
He nods. “Hers was a gift from her mother.”
“From Sadie.”
He nods again.
I think about what this might mean. Sadie must have stayed friends with Gladys Jones aka Bright Vixen. I wonder what Gladys knows about Sadie’s “suicide.” Before we head down to San Diego tomorrow, I’ll stop by her place for a little chat.
My eyes wander over the drying blood on J.C.’s arms. “You should get those cuts taken care of.”
Bill comes alive, holding out the bandages and gauze. Jesus Christ takes them. “Thank you. Thank you both.” He starts to leave, then turns back. “May God exalt you.”
I smile. “Thanks.”
Jesus Christ sprints over to a big SUV and climbs in. We watch him drive away.
“Hey,” Bill says after the roar of the car’s engine has faded away. “Are you, like, all-powerful?”
“Do you think if I were all-powerful I’d be in this mess?”
He doesn’t say anything. I look up at the shelves, but the fairy is gone.
Chapter Sixteen
Tyson is covering my breasts with hot, wet kisses. We are naked, pressed up against each other, and I open my legs to encircle his torso. We grind a little, our sweat making us more slippery, and he reaches up and kisses me deeply. I am holding onto his hair with one hand, grabbing his ass with the other. With delicate probing, I guide him inside me. We are trying to be quiet—there are others nearby and we can’t wake them up, but it makes what we’re doing even sicker and therefore hotter. I groan, open my eyes, and the dream is over.
Fortunately, I didn’t wake Viveka’s girls with my X-rated reverie. They are already in the bathroom brushing their teeth and getting dressed.
I sit up in bed. I really need to pee, and I hope that when I do all this pent-up sexual tension will go away as my bladder shrinks.
What the hell am I going to do?
****
The girls are going to town on bowls of oatmeal, which they’ve doctored with copious amounts of brown sugar, honey, banana slices, and cream.
“Mama never lets us have this much bad stuff!” Romola says, licking her lips and spoon.
“Live it up.” I sip a cup of scalding black coffee and reach for a piece of dry wheat toast from the hotel’s continental breakfast bar.
We’re surrounded by a heady mix of fellow travelers in the lobby’s breakfast room: rotund vacationing families who barely speak as they turn their docile gazes to the TV, tuned to CNN; Middle Eastern businessmen wearing suit pants and white, open-collared shirts; aged bus-tour folk. None of the Yeah Right/Arsenic Playground posse has made an appearance yet. I would have slept until our 12 p.m. checkout as well, but the little lasses under my care had other ideas. To look at them, you wouldn’t know they’re operating on fewer than six hours of shut-eye. That can’t be healthy for little girls. Me, I’m used to insomnia nights, but I can’t tolerate hangovers and this is what I feel now, even though I didn’t drink a drop yesterday. This is a magick hangover.
After Bill scurried off to his bellhop post, I went back to the room and stayed up into the wee hours. I read tarot cards, meditated, and threw every revelatory spell I know at that damn locket. Someone really wants me to work hard at getting it open, as it were. Is it to protect that someone, or to protect me? I wonder. I even checked all of our hotel room’s vents for traces of fairy. Not a speck of pixie dust. Around almost four, I fell asleep only to dream about getting caught in an avalanche as I skied down a mountain toward a giant, pool-sized hot toddy. Underneath the rocks and snow and ice, I was paralyzed and could barely move or breathe, until Tyson miraculously pulled me out. Then the porno portion began.
As I blow on my burnt coffee, my dreamland Lothario slides into the seat next to me. His sunglasses are on, his shoulders hunched under a black cowboy shirt. He looks the way I feel. I make a point of giving him a friendly smile.
“Tyson!” Cleo squeaks. “Tyson, Tyson, Tyson, Tyson, Tyson.”
“Ladies.” He holds his hands up and the girls high-five him, the sounds of their glancing slaps like kitten sneezes.
“So what happened last night?” he asks me in a low voice. For a minute, I think he means the kiss or possibly even my horny little nightmare, but he says, “Chad said someone broke into your room. That’s not cool.” He points his thumbs at the girls.
“A misunderstanding.” I keep my voice quiet as well, even as I feel my cheeks starting to flame. “It’ll all be cleared up soon, I’m sure.” I have to wonder at these half-truths I’ve gotten so used to telling. Do I have a bottomless bag of them, or will I someday run out?
Tyson doesn’t press me. He turns to the girls. “How you pipsqueaks doing?”
“Our Daddy is sad,” Cleo says in the same voice she might report what goodies Santa left in her stocking. Romola, looking embarrassed, grabs her sister’s arm and shushes her. I stare at Cleo.
“What—how—what makes you say that, Cleo?” I have trouble spitting out my words.
“Because he is. I looked at his dream.” She nods. “He thought he saw Mommy sleeping but that was my dream. I left it here yesterday. On the…what’s that called outside our room?”
“The balcony,” Romola says.
“The balcony.” Cleo nods again.
“What?” Tyson looks at me.
“Toddler talk,” I mutter. But my mind is working OT. I’ve heard of some witches that can remove their dreams from their memories and play them back for others or themselves. If Cleo is saying what I think she’s saying, Jesus Christ mistook his daughter’s dream for his wife. Well, that would explain that.
“Hey, space cadet.” Tyson snaps his fingers under my nose.
“Sorry.”
His mouth twists in thought. “Who wants to go to Legoland before we hit San Diego?”
“Me!”
“Me, me, me, me, me me me me me!”
This is the hard part. I’ve carried on a lively internal debate about what I should say to him, and I’m still not sure. “Look, Tyson—”
“Who?”
“Sorry. Ty. I don’t think we’re going to make the rest of the tour.”
His brow furrows above his sunglasses. “You know what,” he says. “I need coffee.”
“I’ll get a refill too.”
The girls agree to stay put. They are still savoring their dessert-like gruel.
Ty doesn’t look at me as we fill our cups. “Is this sudden urge to jump ship because of what happened between us?”
“No. Not at all.” Lie. “I’m probably going to get fired, but I really need to find the girls’ mother.” I tell him quickly about their dad and his search for their mom. I candy-coat it like a professional confectioner.
“Jesus Christ?” Tyson says. “That’s his name?”
“Let’s not be judgmental.”
“Damn, Memphis. What sort of people you mixed up with these days?”
I glance at his bedeviled shades. “I could ask you the same question.”
He shrugs and guffaws, like he gets the joke.
“If anyone asks,” I say, “Chad or Cheradon or anyone—don’t tell them anything, okay? Play dumb.”
He looks a little confused.
“Good,” I say. “Hold on to that expression.”
“What exactly are you going to do?”
I wrap my hands around my coffee cup, studying my toes for a good answer. I haven’t really figured out that part yet, even after staying up all night huddled on the floor next to my hotel bed with the girls’ soft breathing for company.
Tyson swirls his coffee with a swizzle stick, and I notice a fairy in one of the cereal dispensers behind his head. It’s one of the Goth fairies from the concert, her azure wings folded as she sits cross-legged on top of the cereal. She holds a cornflake in both hands and bites into it with gusto. A burp I can’t hear lifts her shoulders and she notices me watching. With a scowl, she turns her back.
“Nice attitude,” I mutter, and Tyson says, “Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
“So, what’s your plan, Memphis?”
I decide on a partial truth. “Well. Jesus Christ thinks Viveka might have been heading to her dad’s, so I thought I’d start looking for her there.” Right after we stop by Gladys Jones’s house in Santa Barbara.
“Where is her dad?”
I looked it up in the babysitting binder last night. “Near Pasadena.”
“Great. I’ll go with.”
“Ha ha.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“I can help,” he says.
I would like to pat him on the head and cast a forgetfulness charm on him, but I’m trying to mend my deviant magickal ways. At least, that’s what I resolved while I conditioned my hair this morning. Of course, by kissing an engaged man while in my own committed relationship, I’m creating all sorts of new deviant ways.
“Rock star,” I say. “You have to rock star.”
He shrugs. “We don’t have to be in SD till tomorrow. And Pasadena isn’t too off the beaten path. We go. We drop the girls off with their ma and pa. We continue on our merry way.”
“But…” I think about Tyson and whatever he’s involved with. I’ve narrowed it down to some sort of love spell, which Cheradon probably cooked up to snag him. Why pull him deeper into magick? Then there are the girls and what their father said about taking care of them. I feel a need to keep them close to me. Even if we find Viveka, I’m not sure I should give them back. “I don’t know if their mom is really there. Or their dad.”
