My imagination spun like an old 33 1/3 rpm record on an older 78 rpm turntable (before there were tapes and CDs, there were record players—I know about record players because my parents had one). I began to construct scenarios. Had Kevin come to again beg me for money, or was he really looking for Amy?
“What’s going on in that brain of yours?” Roger asked.
The thought, Solve the crime to end the guilt, rushed to my mind. “Huh? What makes you think—?”
“Don’t give me that, Emlyn. I’ve watched you.” He leaned over, and tapped my forehead with his finger. “When your eyes go this narrow, big cogwheels are turning in there.”
“I was just thinking—”
“Uh-oh,” Rebecca said.
“No, really. I just remembered something.”
“Yeah?” they both said.
“Well, I could be wrong. And even if I’m not, it might not mean anything.”
“Let me judge that,” Roger said.
I told them what I’d seen during Jimmy’s funeral, and then among the stacks of books before my reading.
“You think they planned a—what do you writers call it—a tryst?” Rebecca asked.
“A slime bucket like Kevin Reinhart with a woman like Amy Woodward?” Roger said. “Even if I caught them in bed together, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Rebecca considered this for a moment. “Both of them in the same place at the same time twice, it can’t just be a coincidence.”
“Maybe not.” Deep furrows on his forehead, Roger glanced to the French doors. It was as if he thought he might see my ex slip from tree to tree in my backyard. “A guy like Kevin, desperate for money—blackmail is more likely.”
“What could Amy Woodward be blackmailed over?” I asked.
“No, wait,” Rebecca said. “You just told us the way she reacted at the cemetery. Maybe Kevin found out she’s having an affair.”
Roger rubbed the graying hair at his temple. “I don’t see it. Still, the way Woody reacted this evening, maybe he thinks something like that is going on. And with the Feds hunting for Kevin—”
“Drugs. The two of them in it together. And right under your boss’s nose.” Rebecca nodded, as if she concluded a husband really could be so dense.
“No. It just doesn’t add,” Roger said. “No matter how I try, I can’t put Amy in Kevin’s circle.
Elvira was again on the coffee table, her lascivious pink eyes on the glass of scotch.
“Hey, that’s not good for you.” Roger shoved her away.
“This is all speculation,” I said, though it was me who started speculating in the first place. “Besides, whether Amy Woodward and my ex are part of the drug ring or they’re having an affair—”
“Or both,” Rebecca offered.
“Even then, what does it have to do with Jimmy getting murdered? Eight bullets in the chest isn’t a hit. What would either of them be so angry about?” I thought again about the cost of a new Corvette and the Osborn wedding. “But, if they’re having an affair and Jimmy found out—could it be he was the blackmailer?”
“Or maybe the Osborn killing has nothing to do with Kevin and Amy Woodward,” Rebecca said.
“Damned if I know,” Roger said. “There are so many possibilities, I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. But, all this happening in the same circle of people at the same time, it sure smells like it’s tied together.”
“How?” Rebecca asked.
With a grunt, Roger pulled his feet from the coffee table. “That’s what I’m gonna find out.”
He grabbed his coat from the back of the kitchen chair. After a glance at the front door, he crossed the living room and pulled the French doors open. Wind blowing his hair, he said, “No reason the Feds parked out front need to know I’ve left.” As he slipped into the night, he added, “You have my cell number. Call if anyone tries to get in.”
***
The icy breeze Roger let into my house blew away the alcohol cloud in my mind, and with it, my feeling of guilt. Only anger was left. I grabbed a crutch and hobbled to the French doors. With the blind pulled aside, I peeked out. The azalea bushes slapped the glass. The branches of the naked beech tree in the center of my yard waved and hissed. The stand of trees guarding the Niagara River was a thick shadow. My calendar said this was the day of a new moon, though it was hard to tell with the sky so overcast.
After gazing around the yard to be certain my ex didn’t lurk back there, I said, “Is anyone out front?”
Rebecca went to kitchen, and looked out the window. “The only thing I see is Roger’s car,” she said. “I thought he’s going to look for his boss.”
“He is. Or maybe he’s trying to find Kevin.”
“On foot?”
“I doubt it. He keeps a Harley under a tarp on the far side of his garage. He’ll probably walk it around the curve in the road before he starts it up.”
“But, to get to the city he’ll still need to pass the guys who’re watching your house.”
“Uh-uh. Roger knows maybe fifteen ways to circle around them. I’ll bet he’ll start out headed toward Buffalo, turn up Ward Road, and go through North Tonawanda.”
Back in the living room, Rebecca began to pick up the wine glasses.
“Leave those. We’ve got work to do.”
A glass in each hand, she said, “What are you thinking?” She seemed afraid to look at me.
Stone sober, I’d stumbled into the middle of this swamp. I guess Rebecca figured with half a bottle of Varney Estates and a touch of Johnny Walker sloshing through my veins, I was about to drag her into the morass.
“I need to find out if my idiot ex was fooling around with Amy Woodward.”
Rebecca hooded her eyes. “You’re not gonna try another divination rite.”
It wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer.
She straightened up. “Don’t you ever learn?”
I shrugged. “The killer’s come after me twice. Next time he might succeed. Don’t you see? I’ve got nothing to lose. Things can’t get much worse.”
It was a foolish thing to say. Tweaking the nose of fate, even a little bit, is never a bright thing to do. But recently, bright ideas hadn’t been my forte.
Rebecca glanced toward the front door.
“You can leave if you’re afraid the spell will boomerang,” I said.
She sighed and put down the glasses. “I didn’t put out the fire on your leg just to let you go up in smoke now. No, I’m staying. Someone’s gotta keep you from blowing yourself up.”
“I don’t plan to blow either of us up,” I said, and turned a complete circle. “Where’s Elvira? I need her for this.”
Rebecca bent low enough to see under the coffee table. The cat was curled up on the floor, snoring. Except for the broad, stupid grin on her face, the animal resembled a giant white Nerf ball. “Not much of a drinker,” she said. “Come to think of it, maybe Elvira has the right idea. Let’s pop another cork.”
I refused to be distracted. Reaching for my other crutch, I said, “No. I’ve got to unravel who’s after me. I won’t be safe till I do.”
“But the last time you tried this—”
Rebecca’s objection was rather mild, I thought. With her hip flung out, she stared at the ancient book on my coffee table.
“I must have misread Sarah Goode’s instructions,” I said. “You’ll help me figure out what I did wrong.”
That Sarah’s book was more a diary than a user’s manual didn’t register at the moment.
This time Rebecca’s sigh was one of surrender. I knew then, for all her resistance, my friend wanted to see what spells Sarah wrote about, and learn if they actually worked. She couldn’t try them by herself. It needed someone who had the right genes, she’d told me when we started to explore my heritage months before. It needed old Sarah’s genes.
With no further argument, she lifted the book so carefully it might have been the Holy Grail. She sat in the wingback chair and opened the book
to where I had slid a folded sheet from my yellow pad. She had far less trouble than I with the arcane prose. Aloud, she read:
“These people who knew me as a child would swear an oath they are friends. Yet to my back these friends who claim to be God-fearing, curse my name, call me filthy, mean-spirited. It is only poor I am, and in need. Mean-spirited? Aye, I have become that. I beg at doors for a crust of bread. Would I turn my townsfolk away if they, not I, were in need? Would I laugh at them and hide my children when they pass me on the street? Would I slide away from them, whispering, on the bench in church? These friends of my childhood. It is a crime, I think, to be poor in this Salem town. Ah, had my dear George Burroughs taken me as his own when my father died and left me with naught but a good name. Would that he had taken me before I wed Dan Poole whose life of debt stole from me even that good name. I am bitter, yes. Having seized my heart, George Burroughs fled this town against rumors he is a brother to the Devil. But he is a man of God, and is strong because of it. He knows the Lord will shield him from such accusations. So perchance it is another woman he has chosen, and he has run to her. Tonight I will know.”
Rebecca looked up from the book. “There’s nothing here to help.”
I’d hobbled back and forth across the living room all the time she read. Thud, step, thud, step: crutches in front then swing past them. Now I stopped in front of her. “Keep reading,” I said. “Sarah always rambles before she gets down to it.”
Rebecca pulled her long braid over her left shoulder, and stroked it as if she were petting a cat while she scanned the next page. Her eyebrows pinched, she at last said, “What Sarah did…I don’t think we have the skill to control it.”
“Read,” I insisted.
As if to say, I’m sorry I got you started in this, she rolled her eyes.
“Sarah’s about to tell us how she learned if George Burroughs ran off with his soul mate,” I said.
“If he did, it would make one of you.” She peered at the French doors through which Roger had left.
“Let it go, Rebecca. I like him, but not that way.”
“Yeah, right. Tell me another story.” Instead of pushing further, she turned her eyes down to the open book on her lap.
“Anil is needed to dye the beeswax,” she read, then stopped and looked up at me. “Makes sense—deep blue is the color of clairvoyance.”
“Maybe that’s why I got in trouble last time. I didn’t use blue candles. What’s next?”
Running a long red fingernail across the words, she again scanned the page. “A black cape.”
“Black? Was Sarah planning to put a hex on George Burroughs if she saw him with another woman?”
In a flash of imagination, my distant relative became the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz movie. Green face, bent nose, she cackled over her crystal ball. Had the use of magic turned the witch’s skin green? I stopped in front of the mirror near my desk, leaned on a crutch, and touched my face.
Rebecca’s voice put an end to my rumination over whether magic would inevitably lead to a discolored complexion. “In the old days, black wasn’t considered evil,” she said while she turned another page in the book. “Many practicing Wicca’s don’t know this anymore. Black is the absence of color. It symbolizes the night, the universe. Black is the absence of falsehood.”
“Okay, I’ve got a black silk robe in my closet. More than one, actually.”
“Do you? Roger will like that.”
“Rebecca!”
“I’m just saying.”
“And I’m not listening. What else do we need?”
“Incense. Gotta have the aroma of musk. Wait a minute.” She went to the kitchen and retuned with her shoulder bag. “Yeah, I’ve got what we need to make it.” She began to pull small jars from her bag. “Sandalwood, gum mastic, ambergris—got any nutmeg and mustard powder in the house?”
“Did you bring your whole shop with you?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“When I woke up this morning, I had a feeling you’d insist on doing this.”
“A feeling, huh? Like the one that told you, you’d need a salve for my burns?”
She gave me the same arcane smile I’d seen the day I met her at The Black Cat. “A woman’s gotta be prepared.”
Though her tone was light, I sensed something she held back. “Prepared for what?”
She turned to the chair and fluffed the cushion. “For what we’re about to do, of course.”
Running in the circle of her logic left me dizzier than the alcohol I’d imbibed. A tad annoyed, I pointed to Sarah’s book and said, “Then we have what we need?”
Rebecca’s nod was anything but eager.
“Wake Elvira up,” I said as I switched off the lamps. “Let’s get started.”
Chapter Sixteen
Things Better Unseen
The living room was almost as black as my robe. The only light came from three candles flickering on the end table we moved near the French doors. The candlesticks were arranged in a triangle the way Sarah Goode had instructed. The mini-blinds were raised so we would feel as though we were under the sky and could peer up to the eternity beyond. Sarah wrote she would be outside when she performed this rite. The night was far too cold for us to follow that instruction. Even if we were outside, low clouds hid the stars Sarah chanted to. It didn’t matter. I intended to proceed.
Frost had crystallized in lacy patterns on the windows. Perfect jewels of frost. A stiff wind gusting from the north off Lake Ontario made me shiver, though my living room was quite warm. The constant tap-tap-tap of the azalea bushes on the windowpanes sounded like the knock of a spirit who wanted to be let in. I thought of it as the spirit of eternity come to participate in our ceremony.
My feet were bare. Rebecca’s feet were bare. Symbolically, we stood on the earth, and were one with nature. Elvira sat beside us, watching, as if wanting to be certain we would do everything right.
On the table, a bowl of water and a bowl of salt rested on either side of the navy blue candles. I had placed a third bowl with smoldering incense at my right hand. In the white dish to my left, grated nutmeg looked like sand on a beach spread before an ocean. In my imagination, I stood on the beach and stared out over the waves to where the water became one with the sky. One with the universe.
Of course, without my crutches I couldn’t stand on a beach or even on my carpeted floor. So, I leaned against the table with my right foot raised. In this position, I closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply. After our prayer to nature’s deities, if the order of our service was correct and we chanted the proper words, I would become one with the universe. I would float in the black sky and look down at the earth, at my urban and rural piece of it. In the tapestry of city streets and farmlands, the answer to the puzzle would be spread before me.
“Fiery God,” Rebecca and I intoned, “you who are the ruler of gods, master of the sun—”
She handed me the athame, my sharp, double bladed knife with runes carved in the hilt. Carefully, I drew a five-pointed star in the nutmeg then blessed the spice with the tip of my blade.
“—holding everything wild and free in your hands,” we sang, “Ancient begetter of woman and man—”
I pinched grains of nutmeg from the center of the star and sprinkled the grains into the incense bowl. The aroma of musk and spice filled my nostrils. I bent down, cut three white hairs from Elvira’s back. I dropped one in the flame of each candle.
“—Paramour of the Moon Goddess and shield of the Wicca, descend, we pray, with your blazing hands open wide—”
I began to feel sleepy. I didn’t fight the feeling. Again I inhaled the spiced aroma of the incense…
***
Night under a moonless sky. Instead of floating in the sky, I stand at the foot of an alley which stretches beyond my sight. No snow covers the cracked concrete, tarred over in spots. On either side of the lane are the backs of wood-framed two-story dwellings, some boarded up. They look as though they had been built nearly a hundr
ed years ago. Garages jut out, some with caved-in roofs, other roofs only sag.
I sense I’ve been here before. I feel as if there’s no place I haven’t been before.
A breeze, fragrant with musk and the promise of spring, gentles my hair. Rebecca’s voice floats on this breeze…
“Glorious Goddess, you who are the mother of gods, the light in the night, the womb of everything wild and free—”
I feel dizzy, might tumble if I take a step. It’s as if I’ve gotten drunk on the sweet air. I grasp the steel pole of a chain link fence, bend my neck. A single star glitters in the black sky. The Goddess?
“—defender of woman and man—” Rebecca sings.
Her voice, a whisper, becomes a shout, breaks in half. Now it is two voices arguing. “Why did you have to do it,” one says. The other voice, trembling: “I was wrong, I know it now.”
They shouldn’t fight while the Goddess watches.
A patch of white flashes past me. It’s Elvira. She races toward the raised voices.
I release the steel post and stagger after her.
“Bitch, it’s too late for apologies.” The fury in the first voice rends the night.
“No, no. Please, no!” The second cries.
“I killed once, and now you.”
I drop my crutches. No pain in my foot or leg, I’m free of the need for them. Now I run toward the voices, to where Elvira sits staring into the shadows. I recognize one of the voices, though I’ve never heard it other than smooth, soft.
“Why? Why?” it again cries.
Past rattling chain fences, past sagging garages, I continue to run. I am panting. A stitch in my side. I bend over, my hands on my thighs, catch my breath. Run again.
“I have to, you see?” The first voice is a hissed whisper. Male, female, I can’t determine. “If you tell, they’ll know. You understand?”
The Magic of Murder Page 14
