Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  The speaking parts were cast entirely from Changing, both so that other people wouldn't feel obliged to stick around and to give Changing—which was, after all, responsible for all this —the chance to shine, now that adl the politicking had been done. Once the ritual was over there wouldn't be much else in the way of site aftercare. Pagans making a you-should-pardon-the-expression religion of leaving their campsites cleaner than they found them. At least when someone else was looking.

  Topper and Coral were Priest and Priestess, standing in the center with their kids Jamie and Heather, who would someday be able to boast, like many of their generation, that they were hereditary Witches, raised in the faith of their foremothers — and finally, after all the lies and unprovable asseverations, it would be true. If their parents weren't arrested first.

  Ah, political correctness, the gentle art of minding somebody else's business.

  It had been a long day, but fortunately I could do this particular set of closings practically in my sleep, even if I couldn't enunciate as clearly as Xharina. I kissed my hand to the Lion in the South and passed the metaphysical ball to West, North, East again, and home.

  And the First Annual Beltane Ecumenipicnic was over.

  Of course. Belle was already talking about next year.

  5

  ^•^J^ MONDAY, MAY 2, 11:00 a.m. ^'^^

  Most people get particularly stupid just after pulling off something large. It's the letdown of having worked real hard and now it's over and you're left chock-full of energy and intention with nothing to apply them to.

  The moral is, don't do anything when you're tired, when you're rattled, when you're pumped full of adrenaline.

  It's just too bad that nobody ever takes their own good advice.

  What I did take advantage of was that seniority which hath its privileges to show up around eleven at Houston Graphics, which meant that Ray was waving a phone at me before I quite got the door open.

  Most of us didn't start life intending to end up at Houston Graphics, and Ray is no particular exception. He used to be a dancer—Jazz Ballet of Harlem and a bunch of Broadway shows — until something happened. When Ray wears shorts to work you can see the scairs the surgery left; big black S-shaped marks on the inside and the outside of his knee.

  So Ray took up graphic design. Mikey Pontifex owns the business, but Ray runs it. And keeps us all happy. More or less.

  "No, she just walked in," Ray explained to the phone. "Yo, Kitty—it's for you."

  Ray Lawrence also has a differently abled sense of humor.

  "Hello?" I said cautiously into the phone. Unless America has

  204 Bell, Book, and Murder

  declared war on Manhattan, nobody calls me at work between nine and five.

  "Bast?" Glitter. Her breathing was jerky, as if she'd been running.

  "Yes?" I waited for the punch line.

  "Ilona's dead. Someone killed her."

  No, not running. Crying.

  I looked at Ray, who was waiting, with the full force of his personality, for his phone back. I wished Mikey would put in a second line.

  "Where are you?" 1 said. "Let me cadi you back."

  Glitter was at work. I gave Ray back his phone.

  "I'll be right back," I said, heading for the door.

  "Nice of you to stop by," Ray said. Such a wit.

  I hoofed it downstairs to the deli next door, which has in addition to other amenities, a phone. I ordered a cqffe latte and called Glitter back. By that time she was crying so hard I had difficulty in making out what she was sa3ring.

  Ilona was dead. Sometime Saturday. The landlord had found the body. There'd been a break-in and she'd died.

  "How did you find out?"

  "Maura told me." Maura is a cop who frequently arrests the people who later become Glitter's clients. "She knew 1 knew her, and she— And they— It isn't/air.'" Glitter wailed.

  Life is pain, I remembered Xharina sa3ang to Arioch. Yeah. And pain hurts.

  I stayed on with Glitter for several quarters' worth of phone time while my coffee grew cold and undrinkable. There was nothing to do, nothing for anyone to do but the police and the coroner. Ilona's death was just another point on the curve plotting the urban evolution toward the apocalypse.

  I got back upstairs forty minutes later. The phone rang as I came in. Ray picked it up. "Houston Graphics."

  There was a pause.

  "It's for you," Ray said to me.

  Thank the good Goddess that Mikey wasn't there. I took the phone from Ray.

  "Yes?"

  "Is this, um. Bast?" The caller sounded like an anemic bassoon.

  "Yes?" Who the hell was it? No one's voice I recognized.

  "I got your number out of the phone book. Remember, you said where you worked? I hope it's okay to call you," the voice went on forlornly.

  No, it wasn't. Ray was staring at me with a fixed non-expression.

  "Is there something I can do for you?" I said to the phone in carefully correct accents.

  "This is Ned Skelton," the forlorn voice said. Now I recognized it—and I remembered that I had indeed mentioned Houston Graphics' name, somewhere during that dinner two weeks ago.

  "Ilona's dead," Ned told me. "I came to work this morning, there was a police notice on the door, and I went down to the station like it said and—"

  I'd completely forgotten that Ned worked for Ilona. There was no way I could cut him off without being cruel. I semaphored apologies at Ray. He turned back to the job he was working on with ostentatious disinterest.

  "I have to see you," Ned said desperately. "Please!"

  I started to tell him okay, but he must have heard it as a refusal. Maybe Ned Skelton was used to hearing a lot of refusals.

  "No!" he said. "You don't understand. It's not for me. I've heard a lot about you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I never meant— At the party. You were right. At the picnic. It was wrong. It's a sacred trust, you can't just— Everybody says you're fair. You have to— I need you to— It's just a box. That's all it is, I swear it. Just a box, just for a few days. Oh, please, please—"

  Despite the ease with which we bandy the word about, most people have never heard someone actually beg. Ned was begging now, and I found myself willing to promise almost anything to make him stop.

  "Yes. Okay, Ned. I'll do it. It's all right," I soothed.

  I wasn't quite sure what I'd agreed to. Something about a box for a few days. At this point I didn't really care.

  "I'll do it," I repeated. Ray gave me a funny look.

  There was a brief silence. Over the open line I could hear the faint sounds of Ned trying to be quiet.

  "Can I bring it over now?" he said at last. My jaws ached in sympathy with the effort he was making to hold on to his self-control.

  "Yes," I said. I asked him where he was. He told me: uptown, on the West Side. I gave him directions. He said it would be about an hour and a half. I told him we could go have lunch.

  1 handed the phone back to Ray.

  206 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "Finished with your social life?" Ray said.

  "And the horse you rode in on," I told him sweetly. "His boss was murdered Saturday night."

  "Bummer," Ray saiid, accepting my apology. He was specing a job, £ind I looked over his shoulder to see what it was. Ned and his box would be here about one-thirty, but meanwhile I was out of work.

  "You can have this when it comes back," Ray said, laying the typesheet down on the copy and making obscure notes in the margin. Designers make good money—Ray was one of the few Houston Graphics inmates making a living wage.

  "Great," I said. But not that great because it would be at least two weeks and maybe three before StereoType got the raw type back to us, and what was I going to do in the meantime?

  "So you got anything for me now?" I said.

  "You think you deserve work, after tying up the phone all morning?" Ray asked.

  I didn't dignify that with a reply.

 
; "Couple'a binding dies," he said, relenting.

  I went over to the shelves where incoming and outgoing jobs are stacked and found the jobs. The type had already been set; it was paper-clipped to each mock-up.

  Even though book cover design has long since been supplanted by book jacket design, book spines —like the one on Mary: A Rose Among the Shadows — rtc still stamped with title and author and publisher's logo. The way the stamp looks is up to places like Houston.

  There were six of them; ten hours' work if I dogged it unspeakably. I took them back to my board and got to work.

  One of the better fringe benefits of this business is that jobs are frequently no-brainers. While I filled my pen and cut and ruled my board and kerned (adjusted the spacing between the letters by hand) the waxed repro into place I had plenty of time to think about things I didn't want to think about.

  Ned. Ilona. Mary, Queen of Scots. Stuart Hepburn. Urban violence. Passion and free-range stupidity. And what would happen to Lothlorien now? Would Ilona's partner take it over?

  If it wasn't unfair, you wouldn't know it was Life.

  Fortunately Royce got into work before Ned did, which put a little glamour into my day. It was 12:40 by the clock on the wall, and it was instantly obvious what had taken Royce so long.

  This was a Dress Day.

  Royce was wearing a little brown frock with white polka dots, a saucy brown straw cocktail hat with a scrap of a veil, full maquil-lage, and white gloves. The shoes were modem—brown ankle-strap Capezios—but everything else was vintage.

  Royce collects. It's a good thing he's skinny, or he'd never find retro clothing to fit him.

  He saluted Ray and waved to me and went over to his desk. Nobody said anything—Tyrell'd used to, but he'd stopped.

  Beaner camps, on the reasonable presumption that performing artists are obliged to provide street theater, but Royce has never queened it in my presence. He's always the same person no matter what he's wearing; it's just that sometimes he's wearing dresses: a warrior in the cause of laissez-faire. I smiled to myself and went back to work.

  Ned arrived more or less on schedule. I'd finished one die and started a second. I wasn't in a lot of hurry. When I'm not working, I'm not earning.

  He was carrying a stuffed knapsack (what male New Yorkers carry because purses are for sissies). I went over to the door when I saw him.

  "Come on in," I said.

  He stared in all directions when I let him into the studio. It's just one big room, not quite square, with a rectangle-shaped bite out of our space near the door to make room for restrooms for this floor of the building. In the comer thus created stands the stat camera, blue and hulking and requiring disassembly for cleaning by Royce every Tuesday morning. We're supposed to kick back a dollar a stat to the studio if we use the machine for our own projects, but nobody ever does.

  The rest of the room contains Mikey's desk, Ray's light table, innumerable metal bookshelves filled with past successes, and a bunch of four-foot-high free-standing partitions sheltering light tables and stools, set at right angles down the middle to give everyone a little storage area and the illusion of a private work space.

  'This your place?" Ned said.

  I looked him over carefully. Ned Skelton had the particularly brittle, sharp-edged look of someone who'd had a severe shock and was currently refusing to admit it. A confrontation with mortality, even if it's only someone else's, tends to have that effect. There were dark soot-bruise smudges under his eyes and his skin looked

  208 Bell, Book, and Murder

  over-scrubbed. He was wearing jeans and a work shirt and was doing a complex impersonation of someone who was just fine.

  "I work here," I admitted.

  "They know you're—you know?" he asked, lowering his voice conspiratorially.

  An odd question, on the face of it.

  "They wouldn't care if they did know," I said, which is true. Both Mikey and Ray are remarkably uninterested in anything that doesn't make them money.

  "What would happen if somebody told them?" Ned persisted.

  I gave him a sharp look, wondering if agreeing to help him had been a mistake.

  "Nothing would happen, Ned," I said with a sigh, "because nobody cares. Now, where's this package?"

  He dragged it out of the knapsack, which deflated conspicuously. The package was a brown cardboard box, about thirteen by twenty, and eight inches deep. The box had probably originally been used to ship books in and was almost completely cocooned in monofilament-reinforced strapping tape, as if Ned were afraiid something inside might get out.

  He held it out to me in a fashion suggesting it was a large box of chocolates I should be pleased to receive. Ray, Seiko, Eloi, and Royce watched with interest.

  I took it. It was heavy—two or three pounds —and solid. 1 wondered what was in it. I was afraid I knew.

  But how? That was always the question: How?

  "Just for a few days, okay?" Ned said.

  "Sure," I said. I shook it gently. Nothing shifted.

  "Be careful," Ned said warily. "Don't open it."

  "Let's go get lunch." I stuffed the package into the storage shelf in my carrel next to The Casablanca Cookbook.

  Around the comer from the deli there's a restaurant that ought to be more upscale than it is considering how convenient it is to New York University and CBGB's. It has a fine selection of imported beers, and the only decent thing on the menu is the burgers.

  I ordered a burger. I warned Ned. He ordered cheesecake and a Coke.

  "So what are you going to do now?" I asked. Now that your former employer's been murdered, I meant. I didn't wonder why Ilona was dead. This is New York. There's hardly ever a "why."

  Ned shrugged. "I'm okay. I've got another job. It was only part-time. Lx)thlorien."

  rd thought we were going to talk about Sunday and other things, like the possibility the box Ned had handed me contained the fictional Book of Moons that he'd been raving about at the picnic. We were not, it developed, going to talk. Ned's discovery of Ilona's death seemed to have shoved Sunday's picnic so far into history for him that bringing it up would be as relevant as discussing the siege of Troy.

  But I couldn't leave it alone.

  "About Sunday, Ned—"

  "They're all wrong. And they're going to be sorry. It really is old," he said. "And it's real Wicca. Margaret Murray was right."

  He said it as if it were the only thing he had left to hold on to. It might be.

  Dr. Margaret Murray was a nice, respectable Egyptologist until the day she got the notion that the medieval witch-trial records should be taken literally. She wrote three books of progressively less mainstream scholarship: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, The God of the Witches, and The Divine King in England, in which she links more of the English nobility to Wicca than any writer untU Katharine Kurtz—and swears that Wicca is a religion stretching in unbroken practice back to the caves at Lascaux.

  "Why are they going to be sorry, Ned?" I asked in my best imitation of Belle's psychiatrist voice.

  Ned's eyes slid away from mine and he flushed. 'They just will," he mumbled. "You're— Look, you're not mad at me, are you?" he blurted out.

  It was not a question one adult should ask another. It contains too much acknowledgment of subservicence, of emotional comfort that depends on someone else's whim. But Ned Skelton was — still—looking for someone else to provide that. Looking for someone else to give him what he thought he needed: power.

  As the ad campaign for the Godfather movies reminds us, power cannot be given, only taken. The great flaw in the Western mind-set is the conviction that power must always be taken from someone else.

  We all have power. It can't be given to us. And when we take it, we take it for ourselves, not from anyone. This is the great mystery.

  210 Bell, Book, and Murder

  The secret is that there is no secret.

  "No, Ned. I'm not mad at you."

  Not yet, anyway. But I
could get that way.

  "What's in the box?" I added.

  And why leave it with me?

  He winced as if I'd slapped him and gazed pleadingly at me with those hangdog hazel eyes. "Could I. . . Could I tell you next week?" he asked. Humbly. "I will. I promise. I'll tell you next week, if you'll just keep it for me now. Please?"

  I couldn't stand it.

  "Sure," I said gently. "It's all right." I'd make a lousy domina-trix.

  I hunted around and found one of my cards that has my business name —High Tor Graphics, Freelance Design Work—and my legal name—Karen High tower—and nothing else on it. I wrote the studio number down. "It's better to call me after five, though."

  Lunch straggled painfully to its end. I paid my check. Ned paid his. We went to the door.

  "You won't open it, will you?" Ned asked. "You promise?"

  The chill I felt then was entirely the product of my own overactive imagination. While I suspected that if I opened Ned's box I'd be unhappily surprised, I couldn't pin my conscious mind down to the form the surprise would take.

  "Why did you want me to hold it?" I asked, unable to resist any longer.

  "Everyone says you —" Ned hesitated and actually shuffled his feet. I was filled with agonizing curiosity about "everybody."

  'They say you'll keep your word."

  A Witch's word is law. Belle had told me that during my training. It doesn't mean what it sounds as if it does. What it means is that oathbreakers make lousy magicians, and what you say, you'd better do.

  "I won't open it until I see you again," I promised. "Call me soon, okay?"

  "Sure," Ned said.

  Later I'd say to myself that some part of him already knew what was going to happen, but hindsight's always twenty-twenty.

  I was back in the studio by three. Seiko'd left, which left me, Chantal, Royce, and Eloi —and Ray, of course. I applied myself to the binding dies, and by the time it was five o'clock I'd finished three of them.

  I decided to save the rest for tomorrow. Maybe there'd be more work then, depending on the calls Mikey'd made today.

  I left Ned's package on the shelf. It was just as safe there as it'd be at home, and this way I didn't have to lug it around.