From Herring to Eternity

by Delia Rosen

  It was busier than usual, word of Thom’s exploits apparently having spread. The added crowd was mostly regulars who came to inquire as to her well-being and mental state. Most found it incredible that the serene, churchgoing Thomasina had snapped.

  But not everyone: One was me; I saw how she had acted with Dickson during their first encounter. The other was Karen Kerr, who just happened to be getting out of jail while Thom was being ushered in.

  Her six-foot, four-inch frame was hunched at the shoulders and her long blond hair hung carelessly around her lean-jawed face. She looked like Thor just back from a war with the Frost Giants.

  We didn’t know each other well enough to do more than exchange looks and tentative how-are-you? smiles. She glanced at a menu and just sat there, staring.

  I took over the counter from Raylene, who just looked at me like a lamb who’d lost Bo Peep. Which she had. Thom was a shepherdess to us all.

  “What can I get for you?” I asked K-Two.

  “A job,” she said.

  “Sorry?” I asked.

  “A Reuben with horseradish,” she said in a deep voice, coated with a trace of what sounded like New England—Maine, maybe. “And a chocolate milk shake.”

  I wrote out the order, passed it to Newt. “Did you say you needed a job?” I asked.

  She nodded glumly. “I need busywork. I don’t want to think.”

  “Rough patch?” I asked, deciding to play dumb.

  “Couple days in jail,” she said. “They thought I killed that guy up the street. Then discovered I didn’t. Then couldn’t decide whether I contributed to it. Then decided I didn’t. He blew his horn in my ear, startled me—like an air horn at a match, y’know?”

  “I can imagine,” I said, though I really couldn’t conceive of what it would be like to be in a cage with a roaring crowd, air horns, and someone trying to put you in a leg lock or worse.

  “I came here because I heard at the pen that Thomasina took a swing at someone,” she said. “She’s so sweet. Guy must’ve really been a jerk.”

  “He is a jerk,” I said.

  The woman’s blue eyes came up for the first time. “You know the dude?”

  “I know him.”

  The woman’s mouth twisted as she considered the information. Then her eyes went back down. “I’d go over to have a talk with him about not pressing charges, but—probably not a good idea right now.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Not with the manslaughter thing you just got behind you.”

  “It’s not just that,” she said. “There’s a commission that’s part of the Mixed Martial Arts Federation. You get arrested, there’s a waiting period—like buying a gun—when you’re benched. I’ve got to wait for a formal hearing so I can present my case.”

  “Even though the charges were dropped?”

  She nodded. “The murder charges, not the assault charges.”

  “But—the victim is deceased.”

  “Right, but a committee still has to review the police reports, my own statement, all of that stuff.”

  I slid over to take an order, then came back. “That’s a bum deal,” I said, trying to pick up the lingo.

  “Seriously. I was never even in a prison before,” she said distractedly. “I mean, it’s bad for the career, but it would have been a good place to stay in shape. Nothing to do except push-ups, crunches, jumping jacks, and sleep.”

  I moved to take another order, then returned.

  “Speaking of what happened with Lippy, I am curious, though,” I said. “You didn’t happen to see anyone around you when he fell?”

  She raised and lowered a shoulder. “Cops asked me that, too. Honestly? I was too surprised to pay attention. There was just this horn in my ear, a loud blat that made my elbow go sideways into his jaw, and he fell. Boom! I tried to grab him, but, I swear, it was like he was already on the way down when I turned. Which maybe he was, according to what I heard—that he was poisoned.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

  “From my lawyer,” she said. “When I thought about it later, it made sense. It was like he was having a heart attack or something and just screamed into his horn.” She shook her head as I handed her her meal. “Who would want to kill a musician? And his sister, too.”

  “I think Tippi was an afterthought,” I told her. “I think someone killed Lippy to get his instrument case.”

  She looked up again with her mouth full of corned beef, sauerkraut dangling from both sides. “What kind of sense does that make?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not a criminal.”

  I took an order for old Michael Dickles’s matzo ball soup and dry rye toast on the other side of the counter.

  “You really think that’s why this happened?” she asked, washing her big bite down with milk shake. “The case? You don’t think, maybe, someone pinched it for the money?”

  “Why not just grab the cash, then?” I asked.

  She thought for a second. “Because now that I think of it, there wasn’t any,” she said. “He was just starting the day.”

  “But don’t these guys usually put a few bills in the bucket to encourage passersby to—,” I said, but my voice trailed off. “Except that Lippy was broke,” I said mostly to myself. “He didn’t even have coins to drop in there.” I wandered off to give Dickles his soup and toast, then drifted back.

  “That means someone specifically wanted the case,” K-Two said.

  That spun my attention back to “Robber” Barron, but only for a moment. The crowd was growing and I was busy for the next half-hour until Dani arrived. Young, wide blue-eyed, eager-to-please Dani Petunia Spicer. Thom was a surrogate mother to the kid. She blew in through the door so firm of purpose that if it weren’t for the nose piercing and spiky blond hair, I might not have recognized her.

  She stripped off her coat like Diana Prince becoming Wonder Woman, locked eyes on me for a moment as she took my place, and said one word: “Go.”

  I went.

  I called Grant as I hurried to my car. He hadn’t heard about Thom’s arrest and—snapping into unemotional just-the-facts-ma’am policeman mode—he found out where they were keeping her, since I hadn’t asked K-Two where she had been held.

  Like a car that has been towed, I thought. Just look it up, pass the info along, collect the bail.

  “She’s at the Criminal Justice Center, 448 Second Avenue North,” he said. “Bail hasn’t been set—that’ll come down in about an hour, after a judge has reviewed the charges against Ms. Jackson.”

  He was being cop-formal now, too. The woman who had always been “Thom” to him was now “Ms. Jackson.” What a tin-eared dope. He always was “the job” before “the lover.” I had just been too distracted by sex and companionship to see that.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, though,” he went on. “She’s not a danger to the community, no likelihood of flight, not charged with a serious crime, nothing drug related. And the officers confiscated the evidence—a Windex bottle?”

  “Yeah. I don’t believe in generic.”

  He didn’t get the joke. He never had.

  “Anyway, I’m guessing it’ll be five hundred bucks.”

  “Thanks,” I said, hanging up as I punched the address into my GPS. I didn’t feel like talking to him just then. Or maybe ever. Functional was the new boring.

  I followed the calm, reassuring directions of the GPS voice, and pulled up to the six-story brick building that seemed darker and more dungeony than it probably was. I went to an imposing receptionist who sat behind bulletproof glass. She buzzed me into an area where an equally broad-shouldered lady clerk gave me a stack of papers to fill out. The pile of forms actually had weight that probably went to pounds rather than ounces. I was happy to see, announced right on the top of the first document, that I could charge Thom’s bail.

  After nearly fifty minutes of hand-cramping detail—how did people have all this information, like bank accounts and phone numbers for the
last five years, at the ready in the criminal era before cell phones?—my credit card was taken and run through, after which I was instructed to wait. Everything said here was a short, monotone order. What were those Star Trek aliens? The one with the hive minds? That’s who I felt I was with. I was informed that Thom was in a holding cell and would be brought to me. I stood—for a half-hour, it turned out—trying to think of what I would say to my poor, probably humiliated manager.

  To my utter surprise, Thom not only came out proud, she was still angry. I could tell from the forehead-up tilt of her head and the tight line of her lips.

  She was not handcuffed, but she was led by a big woman’s firm grip on her forearm. I thought, distractedly, that I should ask for a job application and pass it along to K-Two. She’d fit in with the Amazons I’d seen here so far.

  “I hear they have good locks here,” I said.

  It took a moment, but Thom got it and smiled. “Thanks for coming.”

  The hefty guard didn’t leave until we were buzzed out and the door had clicked shut. “Thanks for coming to get me,” Thom said as we stepped into the sunlight. She winced. I offered my sunglasses but she declined.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “That attorney baited me,” she said. “And I bit. He said he wanted to see you but I think he wanted to see me. I told him you weren’t there and he started talking about my brother, about how they’d take your house the same way, by eminent domain, because the witch women hadn’t registered their intent to open a temple—”

  “That’s not how eminent domain works,” I said. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew that much.

  “I know, but I just snapped, Nash. I think he rehearsed the whole thing. Didn’t take a minute, about as long as he would’ve had to wait to see you if you were there.”

  We got in the car and drove back, me in thoughtful silence and Thom still venting. Over the course of the drive, she grew angrier at herself than at Dickson, alternately asking for the forgiveness of me and of Jesus, and—as she rambled—I think she actually became more and more enamored of the idea of being a martyr.

  “That man is bad,” was the mantra to which she kept returning, as if she were playing priest and parishioner both, and that was the congregation’s response.

  I knew that she would never get to be that martyr, of course, because the whole thing was a setup aimed at me. Sure enough, when we got back to the deli and Thom had taken up her post at the cash register—with happy smiles from the staff, which seemed to soften her mood considerably—I got around to checking my e-mails, and there was a message from His Academic Eminence to call him “at my earliest convenience, of course”—he was so proper and considerate now, I wanted to barf—to discuss “this morning’s unfortunate but not irreversible situation.”

  The subtext, unwritten but unhidden, was: we’ll drop the charges against Thom if you let us into your house. Thom would never have heard of it, naturally, but they had to know I would never let her arrest stand.

  I called his cell right then, which was my earliest convenience, and he took the call.

  “You both stink like bad salmon,” I said in response to his “Hello, Ms. Katz.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re not yet using ‘witch’ metaphors,” he said. “When you do, I’ve smelled burning mandrake root and that’s not so nice, either.”

  We both went silent. He was quick on the recovery, I’ll give him that.

  “Now that the pleasantries are out of the way,” he went on, “why don’t we look for a way out of this impasse.”

  “A way,” I repeated. “Is there more than one?”

  “There’s always more than one choice,” he said. “At minimum, there are two—a good one and a bad one.”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “Understandable,” he replied affably. “Nonetheless, how do you want this to go? And I mean realistically, not the ‘good for me, bad for you’ repartee of which you seem to be so fond.”

  I hated him even more right then. He wasn’t just a bastard, he was a controlling man who had control over me like I was one of his damned students. It was tough to push that aside and think of Thom.

  “You name the terms, I’ll agree to them,” I said.

  “Wow,” Sterne said. “That’s frankly more than I hoped for—”

  “With one provision,” I added. “If your putz of an attorney shows up at the deli again, Thom is immune from prosecution for any harm that may befall him.”

  “Thom is a grown woman. She should be able to—”

  “Hit the guy who did dirt to her brother, even if it was legal?” I said. “I agree. I want it in writing.”

  “What if he comes to your award-winning deli for lunch?”

  Now the guy was just being difficult. “Then I might poison him myself,” I said, hoping that Dickson didn’t, in fact, subsequently go the way of Lippy and Tippi. I’d be in a pretty tough spot then.

  “Ms. Katz, I don’t know if we can indemnify Ms. Jackson against a murder—”

  “Fine. Attorney Dickson does not come here, ever, for any reason,” I said. “And I don’t want him at my home, either. Those are my terms.”

  “I’ll talk to him—”

  “Your word, now,” I said. “I’ll futz around with witches to protect my property, but you mess with my friends, we’re at war. I will go down to my basement and take a pickax to the floor before you ever get near the place.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Please. I agree. You’ll never see Dickson again.”

  “Bring whatever you need me to sign to my house, tonight,” I told him. “Eight o’clock. That includes a promise that Thom won’t be prosecuted for what happened this morning.”

  “I don’t know if I can make—”

  “Come eight-o-one, I won’t hear the door because of all the chopping.”

  “I’ll be there,” he promised.

  I hung up feeling good for having stood up to the guy, but bad for what I had just committed to let them do. I decided to leave the rest of my e-mails till later and figured, as far as the dig was concerned, that was that and I’d just have to live with it.

  But in the life of any human being, when is “that” ever really “that”?

  Chapter 11

  I worked in the dining area the rest of the day and left after making sure that Thom wasn’t going to suffer a delayed reaction to the traumatic events of the morning.

  “I’ll be okay,” she assured me. “Me and Lord Jesus have a good working relationship. I pray to Him and He supports me when I’m uncertain. In fact, I spoke to Christ in jail—along with my cellmate, Françoise Shabazz.”

  I commented on the unusual combination of those names and Thom said she was a French African woman being held for a visa violation. It made sense, but it still sounded strange.

  Since Jesus seemed to have things well under control, and the camaraderie of the staff seemed to buoy Thom, I felt all right when they left—Dani and Luke, who were an item, taking her to a new frozen yogurt shop for a shake or two. I quietly prayed that Dickson didn’t have a similar craving.

  I made a pastrami on rye with mustard to go, got home around seven-thirty, fed the cats, and was just sitting down to eat when my “that was that” got flipped on its ear.

  It wasn’t Robert Barron or Grant Daniels or even Andrew Dickson who showed up at my door—adversarial people and one annoyingly neutral person who had actually played a part in my day. No, with the growl of a motorcycle and the slamming of car doors, it was my friends. My new friends. Or, rather—as they called themselves—my sisters.

  It turns out that in the Wiccan world, establishing a temple means just that: you’ve set up a house of worship where people could come and pray. For Wiccans, that turned out to be at night when there was a moon and stars, owls hooting on chimneys, and a general quieting of mechanized society.

  At least, that’s how Sally Biglake explained it when she showed up at my door with Mad and a small group of wo
men I did not know.

  “I didn’t realize that consecration means my door is always open,” I said.

  Sally seemed genuinely surprised. “What did you think it meant?”

  I couldn’t tell her the truth; I thought it meant absolutely nothing.

  “May we come in?” Sally pressed.

  I stepped aside, not without some reluctance, and the women filed in. There were six in addition to Sally and Mad. My cats fled their dinner bowls when they entered—something they never did with strangers.

  “How often will you be having these gatherings?” I asked.

  “Every new moon, every night of the full moon, and every Samhain,” she said. Before I could ask, she said, “That is the end-of-summer celebration marking the final harvest and the arrival of dark winter. Typically, on November first.”

  “Great,” I said. “You can help eat my trick-or-treat candy.”

  “That’s very considerate,” Sally replied.

  This was going to be terrible. The woman had no sense of irony. She wouldn’t see that this whole thing was a really bad joke.

  “Don’t you have other temples you can use to kind of spread the worship?” I asked.

  “It is customary to use the site that has been most newly sanctified,” she replied.

  “Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “In about fifteen minutes, a man is coming who, through a strange series of circumstances, I’ve had to agree to let dig in the—the temple. You should probably bless some other place because this one isn’t going to be available for a year or so.”

  The look that settled on her wide face could best be described as war-painted minus the paint.

  It was little Mad who stepped forward and said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I’ve obviously inconvenienced all of my, uh—sisters.”

  “You’ve done far, far worse,” Mad said, pointing at me with a crooked finger. “You have made us unhappy.”