From Herring to Eternity

by Delia Rosen

  “I’m truly sorry,” I said. “It was either that or watch my friend, someone who is very dear to me—like a sister, a true sister—go to prison.”

  “We are not your sisters?” Mad asked with a wounded expression.

  “Apparently, we are not,” Sally declared.

  “No, it isn’t like that,” I insisted. “We are a little sorority. But I thought the purpose here was to prevent an unhappy earth, right? To keep the bad guys from digging up the camp of the dead.”

  Sally came closer. I smelled ugly weed on her clothes. I wondered if it was burned mandrake root.

  “You used us,” she said.

  “That’s not true,” I replied.

  The other women were moving around in a kind of semicircle. I was starting to get a little scared. Whoever would have thought that my cats were smarter than me? Besides them, I mean.

  I was considering making a dash for the bedroom and barricading myself inside when the doorbell rang. It was like a church bell on All Hallows dawn, when all the frolicking demons go home. The women stopped and looked to Sally. I took that opportunity to shoot over to the front door.

  “Dr. Sterne,” I said, ridiculously loud and welcoming. “Come in!”

  He seemed as surprised as I was by the effusive greeting. I almost slammed the screen door in my eagerness to admit the big man onto my campus. He entered and hesitated, obviously confused by the gathering. He was clutching his worn leather portfolio tightly, as if it were a life preserver.

  “We sisters were just having a little impromptu meeting of the hive of the Nashville Wiccan Coven,” I explained.

  “We did have an appointment—?” Sterne asked.

  “Absolutely,” I assured him. “And appointment trumps impromptu,” I said to Sally.

  If looks could kill—and perhaps they could, with this band of necromancers—I was not long for this world. Sally looked from me to Sterne to the ceiling. She turned her hands palm up and held them before her bosom, as though they were supporting an invisible cup.

  “The tears of the One Source, the Divine Incarnate, flow on this, our sacerdotal womb,” she said. Her eyes drifted down to me. “We shall all know sadness until the earth is once again joyful.” The others raised their hands like hers and they all shut their eyes. And in a mournful voice accompanied by her own tears, Sally intoned with the others:

  Mar to ainghlich is naoimhich

  A toighe air neamh.

  Gach duar agus soillse,

  Gach la agus oidhche,

  Gach uair ann an caoimhe,

  Thoir duinn do ghne.

  When they were finished, they began to hum.

  Sterne leaned toward me. “That was Celtic,” he whispered. “A prayer, I think.”

  “Saying what?”

  “The only words I recognize are ainghlich is naoimhich, ‘angels and saints,’” he said. “I would imagine they are asking for celestial help.”

  “Swell.”

  The humming stopped a few seconds later and, as one, the women opened their eyes. From somewhere in the distance—the bathroom off my bedroom, it sounded like—the cats mewed miserably in unison. Smiling, Sally left, the women falling in behind her.

  I watched them vanish in the darkness, then turned to Sterne. “Well, that was New Age-y,” I said.

  “Old Age-y is a more apt description,” he said. “Fourth or fifth century B.C., I would guess.”

  He had corrected me in that professorial manner that reminded me of just one more reason why I didn’t like him. We stood in dumb silence for a few moments after that. I realized I had nothing to say to this self-serving jerk who had helped set up dear Thomasina for a fall.

  “You have papers for me?” I asked, turning my back and walking to the sofa. I slid behind the coffee table and sat.

  He unzipped the pouch and stood there. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “Yeah, it does. Extortion is a dirty business.”

  “I’m truly sorry about that,” he said. “Bringing in a coven wasn’t exactly fair play, either. And from where I stood, those Wiccans seemed none too pleased.”

  “I was desperate,” I said.

  “So was I,” Sterne replied. “This research we’re doing is important. Your uncle lived here long enough to understand that. We’re trying to retrieve history that has been plowed over. He said something to the effect that, as a kid, he was always frustrated by the fact that there were no pictures of Moses or Abraham or Solomon.”

  I had been staring at a dent in the carpet made by the leg of the sofa. I looked up at him. “Uncle Murray said that?”

  “On the record at a town council meeting,” Sterne said. “There are descendants of the African Americans who lived here who feel the same—”

  There was a sharp rap against the front window that caused us both to start. I stepped over, saw a small crack in the glass, and went outside. A dead bat was lying belly up on top of the rose bushes in front of the window. Its head was bloodied. I looked across the yard. At the edge of the yellow glow cast by the porch light, I saw the Wiccans standing by the street, pointing at me.

  It was too far for them to have actually thrown the poor—but disgusting—little creature. It must have flown right into the glass.

  “Please go or we’ll call the police,” said my knight in shining tweed.

  “Call whomever you wish,” Sally said. “You are the trespassers, not us. We will be back to see that our pact is not perverted.”

  “Hey, I have a bat, too,” I said. “His name is Louisville.”

  The women stepped back into the darkness. I heard engines start, saw headlights snap on, and in a minute they were only distant sounds on the rural street.

  “You have gardening gloves and a Baggie?” Sterne asked, looking over at the dead bat.

  “I’ve got a shovel,” I said. “I’ll deal with it—but thanks.”

  We went back inside to finish our business. Sterne withdrew a manila folder and sat beside me. There was the letter I had requested along with three copies of my uncle’s signed agreement with the university—to which a new line had been added for my signature. I signed without reading it. He left one copy of the agreement and the letter promising to drop the charges against Thom.

  “Is there any way I can make this better?” he asked as he put the letters back in the pouch. The zipping noise made me wince. It sounded final, impersonal, but triumphant—which it was.

  “Not that I can think of,” I said. “But there is one thing you can do for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to hire some kind of security, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The campus uses—”

  “I want you to hire a woman I know,” I said.

  “Has she been bonded?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I told him. “But she’s a good woman who needs a job.”

  “You understand, Ms. Katz, that’s not typically the kind of recommendation we seek—”

  “You asked me a question, I answered,” I said. “Her name is Karen Kerr and she’s a mixed martial arts fighter.”

  “K-Two?” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “How do you know her?”

  “She gives self-defense instruction at the school,” he said. “My kid sister has taken her classes.”

  “Good,” I said. “She’s out of work right now and I think she’d be willing to start tomorrow.”

  “Ms. Katz, this usually takes a little time,” he said. “There’s paperwork to process and we won’t even be on-site for another—”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Or didn’t you notice—your Civil War campground is under assault from Wiccans and kamikaze wildlife.”

  He thought for a moment, then took out his cell phone and started texting. “You have a very good point,” he agreed. “I’m letting my site director know.”

  I sat back and looked at the window. “How the hell did they do that?” I muttered.

  “Probably a dog
whistle,” he said. “Something to interfere with the bat’s echolocation.”

  “Or, it could be witchcraft,” I said, mostly to myself.

  Sterne snickered. “Please. You didn’t do this because you subscribe to their belief in the supernatural.” He glanced at me as he poked at his phone. “Did you?”

  I noticed my sandwich, took a bite, went back to staring at the carpet. I had never believed in ghosts—not even as a little girl, when my grandma told me she had once met a dybbuk, the wandering soul of the dead.

  “It was in a hayloft in Rovinj, Croatia,” she had said when she was baby-sitting. “I was resting from milking the cows and I heard it stirring. It spoke in a terrible voice and I ran away. It was gone when I returned with my father.”

  I was ten and I half believed her for about two years, until my great-uncle Oskar confided, at her funeral, as we were walking from the gravesite, that it was him and her best friend Milanka who were up in that hayloft.

  “Your Grandma Vesna wanted ghosts and angels to be real because it meant there was a world after this one,” he told me. “So to her, they were real. But you must not confuse wishes with truth. Do not accept the ridiculous when there is a logical explanation.”

  I told him, honestly, that the spirits of the dead were easier to imagine than him making out with a great-aunt Milanka.

  He’d smiled a big smile and laughed when I’d said that. The other funeral-goers had looked at us with open horror, but it was our best moment together. On those rare occasions when my cranky uncle laughed, the wrinkles and the dentures and the tired, watery eyes seemed to vanish into an aura of renewed youth.

  “You are right, Gwenka,” he’d said, using his term of endearment. “A ghost does make better sense.”

  “Ms. Katz?”

  I heard my name and looked at Sterne. “Yes?” I had forgotten—was there a pending question?

  “What do you believe?” he asked.

  “I believe that my carpet needs to be cleaned,” I told him.

  “What does that have to do with the spirit world?”

  “Nothing, unless the guy who used to do my mother’s Persian rugs is listening.” I had another bite of sandwich, then wrapped it back up. “Time for you to go,” I said.

  Sterne seemed a little surprised. He stood with his portfolio tucked neatly under his arm. “So—no peace pipe?” he asked.

  “I’m not kicking you out,” I said. “That’s something.”

  “All right, then,” he said with a formal little bow, “if that’s how you want it. I’ll be in touch.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said as he turned to go.

  “Dr. Sterne?” I said.

  He turned warily. With good reason. “Yes?”

  I walked over to him, watching the curiosity play out in his lips, which moved expectantly, like little caterpillars. They didn’t know whether to smile, talk, or purse.

  “You want to know what I believe?” I asked. “That I have a conscience. I feel bad about misleading those women, I truly do. But you? I don’t believe you feel that you did anything wrong.”

  The caterpillars straightened. “You’re right,” he agreed. “I don’t.”

  Sterne left on the other side of a big bang from the screen door. I felt very alone then, not because he was gone, but because everyone was. This reminded me of how much I missed everyone I’d ever known well or cared about—and everyone who knew about me.

  “Gramma, are you here?” I asked hopefully when Sterne had driven away. “Anybody? Uncle Oskar? Uncle Murray?”

  Silence.

  I put the rest of my sandwich in the refrigerator and noticed that the cats were back eating their dinner—the cowards. I looked around at the emptiness, I looked in at the emptiness, and I thought enviously of Thom, out with the staff. Why didn’t I join them?

  Because you are not, and never have been, a social party girl, I reminded myself. Not in high school, not in college, not on Wall Street. You did your job, you went home to your husband, you had lunch with your mother or a few girlfriends, and that was life.

  You came here to change that, I pointed out to myself. Partly to get away from the past, but also to change.

  Which did not mean fraternizing with the people I saw all day or men I didn’t really want to see at all. Which left just one thing to do. Three, actually. First, I went to check the window the bat had hit. Quite a zetz. Actually shattered the double pane. Next, I got a food-prep glove, slipped it on, went outside, and picked up the bat. He felt like a toy, fuzzy and warm—albeit one that had been dropped in ketchup. I put him in a Baggie and placed the thing in my handbag. When that was done, I slipped on a leather jacket—a freebie from one of my meat suppliers, not a holdover from my rebellious streak, which had lasted about a semester in college when I’d taken Salina Buben’s course in matriarchal socialism—then grabbed my keys and went out to do what I apparently did best.

  Make trouble.

  For myself.

  Chapter 12

  The silhouette of Robert Barron’s boat hulked in the dark. There were no onboard lights, which meant he was either sleeping or out.

  Sleeping at nine p.m. on one of the few days he was in town? Not likely. Out with his Eskimo pal? Much more likely.

  I decided to go aboard. The good thing about being a woman is I could always say I was there to see him and, not finding him there, I waited. He would probably be too surprised and maybe a little too tipsy to question that. If Yutu White was with him, I could sow jealous confusion and slip away.

  I didn’t know if any of that was practical. But it kept my mind off the fact that I had signed over the rights to my den. That made me want to cry.

  The pier sounded creakier at night. I took out my cell phone and pretended to talk on it, like I wasn’t afraid to be seen or heard. I waved into the dark, in case someone saw me, acting as if I belonged there. There were sounds from inside and outside the boat next to Robert’s, but no one paid me much attention. I climbed the plank-thing onto the deck, passed my nemesis the skinny, sagging chain, went to the main cabin, and tried the door. It was locked, of course. So were the windows.

  Enter the culprit.

  I took the bat-Baggie from my purse and emptied the tiny corpse onto the deck. It slid clingingly from the plastic and hit the floor with a soft little thud. Then, stepping just above him, I drove my right elbow hard into the window.

  That did nothing but hurt my elbow. Chastened, the next time I hit the window I used my keys wrapped inside a kerchief. The window didn’t just crack, it shattered. It sounded like a breaking beer bottle, which was probably a good thing. The shards fell on the dead bat, which was perfect. He was buried in the fruits of his “crime,” even though he looked so tiny there, I wasn’t sure anyone would buy it. Unfortunately, I didn’t think I’d be able to find a dead seagull before I left. This would have to be the story.

  I zipped my leather jacket so I wouldn’t cut myself on the fragments that still jutted from the window frame, then—looking around to make sure no one had heard, or cared much if they did—I crawled in like a Washington Square Park squirrel going along a branch: in spastic little fits. There was an armchair under the window, so at least I had the back of it on which to support myself, push-up style, as I maneuvered my hands onto the armrests and drew my legs in after me. It was inelegant and I grunted a lot, but I made it.

  A light came on as I got my feet under me.

  “You could have just knocked,” a voice said from across the room.

  I stood there, stupidly looking at Yutu White. I say stupidly because I was not only busted, I was overdressed for the occasion. He was on the sofa, propped on an elbow, his other hand on the base of a lamp. He was shirtless and pantless, save for some brief briefs, under a thin top sheet. He was wincing from the brightness and shielded his eyes.

  “I thought it was just Barron drinking on the pier,” he said. “But that is clearly not the case.”

  “No,”
I said.

  “You want to flip off the Cruisair beside you?”

  “The what?”

  “The air conditioner—I don’t appear to need it anymore.”

  I looked around, saw the grill in the wall. There was a knob beneath it. I put my bag on the floor and turned it. “Quiet little thing,” I said admiringly.

  “Yes. I like the cold.”

  “I guess you would have to,” I replied.

  “Right. Because I’m an Eskimo.”

  “I guess that was a little stereotyped,” I told him. “I’m, uh—I’m Gwen Katz. In case you forgot.”

  “I had not,” the man replied, sitting up. The action seemed to discomfit him slightly.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Just some lingering seasickness.”

  “Are you taking anything for that?”

  He grinned. “You mean like pills or—chicken soup, isn’t it?”

  I smiled. It really was annoying when the shoe was on my foot.

  “Barron is not here,” Yutu said. “I have to be awake very early so I turned in.”

  “Right. You said you were leaving tomorrow. Sorry to disturb you.”

  He blinked out sleep. “Now that you have, why are you here? I assume not to see Barron, or you would have telephoned.”

  “No,” I admitted. “I’m looking for a trumpet case.”

  I knew how utterly ridiculous that sounded. So did Yutu.

  “Yours?” he inquired.

  “No. It belonged to a dead man.”

  That sounded even sillier. Yutu dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. “There was a proverb of which my father was most fond,” the man said. “If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.” He looked at me. “You are surely dancing.”

  “I am,” I agreed.

  “Don’t be bashful,” he said. “I do it, too.”

  “I don’t usually—well, maybe I do—but there’s a reason,” I went on. “A trumpet player was killed the other day—”

  “A friend?”

  “No, just—” I hesitated. Yutu was sitting on the sofa in just his briefs. He had smooth, heavily muscled legs. Probably from all that ice dancing. “Do you want to put on a robe or something?”