I grabbed my hat and headed out.
When unsettling things happen, people seek solace in normalcy. I headed for the Snake.
When I got there, Elvis was blessedly silent aind the store was reasonably empty. I had the section marked "Witchcraft and Women's Mysteries" completely to myself. It had been restocked recently.
The Grimoire of Lady Sheba by Lady Sheba. The Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland. A Book of Pagan Rituals, Herman Slater, ed. Mastering Witchcraft by Paul Huson. A Witch's Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar. The book alleging to be Gerald Gardner's unpublished notebooks, which almost certainly wasn't.
And that was just the top rack.
In short, more published, legally accessible books of Wiccan and Pagan rituals than any one person could possibly need.
So who was stealing the homegrown ones? And why? And—and this was what was driving me crazy—hou;?
If I could only figure out "how" I'd be willing to suspect Ned of it, since my gothic imagination couldn't think of any better contents for the box he'd left with me. I freely admitted this, in the privacy of my own brain.
Unfortunately for my future as a lurid fiction writer, I couldn't make all the pieces fit.
"Why" would be simple: revenge.
But after that, things started falling apart, starting with "How" and ending with "And Then What."
Skip, for the moment, how Ned, my villain-elect, got into all those apartments without leaving a trace, and where did that leave you?
Nowhere. Because someone who knew the Community well enough to know where to go to steal all those books wouldn't have pulled a dumb stunt like that hoaxical announcement at the picnic.
Or would they?
And, that aside, even if I was willing to jump to the conclusion that there was a stolen BoS—or half a dozen of them —in the box Ned had left with me (though unfounded suspicion was no
212 Bell, Book, and Murder
grounds for breaking a promise), I couldn't come up with a reason for his leaving them with me.
Why me?
Nothing made sense. Whichever way I tried the frame, it fell apart.
"Hey, Bast," someone said from over my shoulder. A voice I recognized.
It was Ivorelli Lee.
Lx)reUi Lee is one of those people who reassures me that looking straight is still an option here on the New Aquarian Frontier. She is of average height and weight and build. She has mouse-blond hair that she wears in one of those shoulder-length styles that would be invisible in any office in the country, a not unreasonable number of holes punched in each ear, and vision-correcting glasses that do not suggest that she is the visiting shootist from any one of a number of left-wing military organizations.
She wears skirts. She has been known to wear them with coordinating jackets. She maintains a lucrative and responsible accounting practice, standing between a number of fringy small-business owners and freelaince service providers (such as Yours Truly) and the unveiled wrath of the IRS.
"Ilona Saunders died, did you know?" I said. "Over the weekend."
"No!" Lorelli's protest was the automatic one of someone who didn't know the other person particularly well.
"Saturday night," I said. Which explained her absence from the picnic, now that I thought about it. "And — "
"Hi, Bast," Julian said, appearing not quite in a puff of smoke. "I was hoping you'd come in. Per Aurum's just sent us their spring shipment, but I haven't gotten around to getting it out."
He looked, as usual, like a dissolute priest. It is rumored that he attended seminary somewhere and left before taking his vows, but I try to ignore rumors.
"You want to tag them and check off the manifest for me? Off the books," he added.
With the way things were going at work I could use a second job, but I didn't want to put my non-relationship with Julian on such a mercantile basis.
"Store credit—wholesale," I counteroffered, and Julian actually smiled.
"Deal," he said, and held out his hand. We shook on it. It was the first time I'd ever touched Julian.
And that was how I wound up sitting in the Snake's secret temple at SIX o'clock at night with seventy-five hundred dollars' worth of wholesale jewelry plus manifest.
I always derive an immense furtive kick every time I go back here, although the Snake's "clandestine" temple is probably the best known secret in the entire Community. The rack that holds the robes (back right, next to the figurine candles) swings out to reveal the hallway that leads to the bathroom at one end (important urban survival information) and the temple at the other. I'd sorted through the boxes waiting in the hallway until I found the one from Per Aurum, collected the box and everything else I needed, and gone back into the temple to work.
The Snake's temple (and lecture hall) is actually the back third or so of the shop footage. The walls are painted matte black, and someone—probably Tris—has installed enough track lighting to qualify the place as a theater of the absurd.
At the moment two floods—one blue, one purple—were focused on the built-to-spec altar that was still set up from the O.T.O.'s weekly Wednesday ritual. I sat down on the bottom step of the altar and ripped the box open, being careful not to cut into any paperwork that might be on top, assuming Per Aurum'd remembered to send it.
I found the invoice. Good. I looked it over. No surprises.
Notwithstanding that their name translates from the Latin as "By (means of) Gold," most of what 1 unpacked in the Per Aurum shipment was silver.
Item: Thirty-six plain pentacles, the interwoven star in a circle that no self-respecting Neopagan would be without; a dozen each of small, medium, and large. The mainstay of the Snake's business, even in these troubled times.
Item: Two dozen medium pentacles set with assorted stones: lapis, amethyst, hematite.
I counted them and stacked them in neat piles, each one in its slippery self-seal bag, and checked them off on the invoice. After I had everything logged in, I could price them for sale, a simple matter of multiplying the wholesale cost by 300 percent—a process called triple keystoning.
I said the Snake's merchandise was overpriced.
214 Bell, Book, and Murder
I continued my explorations. A dozen pentacle rings, sterling. A dozen moon and star rings, ditto.
Six Art Nouveau Moon-Goddess or maybe Fairy Queen stickpins. Or maybe they were angels; angels were a hot property just now, for people who liked the idea of a twenty-four-hour feathered yenta in their lives.
Pentacle earrings, pairs. A dozen—no, the manifest said a dozen and a half. I hunted through slippery plastic packets to find the other six pair.
"How're you doing?" Lorelli asked, coming through the secret door. She was carrying a pizza box and a couple of containers of coffee. I looked down at what I held in my hand and tried to decide whether this was a Celtic pendant or a Norse pendant.
"Norse or Celtic?" I replied, holding it up. She studied it for a minute.
"Norse. They're gold with pewter accents. The Celtic ones are pewter with gold accents."
Lorelli sat down on the step next to me, careful not to dislodge the small piles of jewelry, and set down the box. 'They're both regular," she said of the coffees, which in New York means cream, no sugar. 1 took one.
"Thanks," I said.
"Dinnertime, amyway," Lorelli said. "I made Julian buy."
I took a slice of pizza.
"You said Ilona'd died?" Lorelli said, taking up the conversation where it'd been left.
The talk drifted around Lothlorien's demise, Ilona's death, and mutual acquaintance. I filled Lorelli in on the details of the picnic.
"And it's funny," I added, not really thinking about what I was saying, "but everyone seems to be missing Books of Shadows."
Lorelli choked, and sprayed a mouthful of coffee hallway across the room.
"Really?" she said, when she could speak. "Because mine's gone, too."
"I keep wondering if I just misplaced
it," Lorelli said, in the tone of one trjang an unworkable theory on for size anyway. "It was in my office with the account books. It looks pretty much like them. But then it was gone."
I began removing silver pentacles from their bags. I wrote control numbers and grossly inflated prices on tiny white tags and started threading them through the bail at the top of each one.
"When?" I asked, seeing what a direct question would get me.
"I'd wanted to use something in it for last Saturday. So, a week ago Thursday I missed it."
That would be around the twenty-eighth of April, about two weeks after Glitter lost hers. I bet if I could get real answers out of people, I'd find that practically everyone's book had vanished sometime in April.
Why?
Lorelli took a pen and a sheet of sticky dots and began pricing the Celtic pendants.
"Somebody broke in?" I suggested.
"I keep the room locked, there's a gate on the window, the front door is locked." Lorelli recited the list in a singsong monotone, as if it were something she'd gone over and over. Probably she had. "I don't have a group meet at my house, I'm not all that out, cyber-Welsh is a self-created trad." She stopped, shrugging. "I c£in replace just about all of it," she added.
"Sure," I said. I finished tagging the small pentacles.
Her head was down, bent over the sheet of labels. Colored lights turned her skin and hair a ghastly, ghostly color.
Translated from the Paganspeak, Lorelli did not have either a study group or a coven meeting at her house, she was not "in your face" about her religion to the outside world, and since cyber-Welsh was a self-created Neopagan tradition, that meant she'd assembled it herself from public—and published—material, so she didn't have any hidden unpublished secrets to steal.
Locked, she'd said, doors and windows both. If either'd been forced, she would have said. So it was another "walks-through-walls" reasonless theft.
If it was a theft at all—but Lorelli seemed both reliable and organized.
"You know, I must just have misplaced it, you know?" Lorelli said wistfully.
I knew.
I finished marking up the shipment and went and told Julian he owed me sixteen dollars of store credit. On the way out I ran into Stuart Hepburn.
"Well, hello there," Stuart said. He smiled. I smiled. He still looked well favored and aggressively normal.
"I see you're taking my advice," I said.
'This is quite a place," Stuart said, looking around.
216 Bell, Book, and Murder
To call the Snake "quite a place" is like calling Versailles a little villa in the country. I admired Stuart's English reticence.
"I work here sometimes," I said. "Can I show you around?"
I showed him the Witchcraft section and made some recommendations. Stuart poked through some of the Books of Shadows but didn't seem to find what he was looking for.
"But none of these is really old," he said.
'The really old stuff is in the case behind the counter," 1 told him, "But you won't find any Books of Shadows there. Just gri-moires."
The talk turned personal. Stuart asked if he could see me. I forbore to mention that he was looking right at me, since that wasn't what he meant.
1 wondered, perversely, if Julian could see us back here and if he was jealous.
Not a chance.
I said yes. I gave Stuart the card with my home number on it. He said he'd call tomorrow or Wednesday, since he had some business appointments that weren't too definite yet. He left.
I wondered if 1 could successfully get through a date without making too big a fool of myself, which at least made a nice change from everything else I'd been wondering about lately.
1 got home around nine, unlocked and relocked my door, got myself a beer and a shot, and realized with regret that it was again approaching the time of year during which even a large fan in my only window would not render my apartment inhabitable. 1 picked up Mary Stuart: A Rose in the Shadows and popped a cassette containing, among other light classics, "Tom O'Bedlam" into my newest electronic toy. When I hit "play" it was the middle of the song.
"With a host of furious fancies / Whereof I am commander— "
Beaner'd said it was a political ballad about Mary, Queen of Scots. The lyrics were printed on the lyric sheet folded into the cassette box, and made about as much sense three hundred years after the fact as the jokes on "Laugh-In" do after a slightly shorter period. Gibberish.
"The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn /And the roaring boys ' bravado — "
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Thus the beginning of another perfect week in the Attitude Capital of the World.
6
TUESDAY, MAY 3, 5:15 p.m. ^-^^
Tuesday was normal until a quarter after five. I was at Houston that late because High Tor Graphics, my freelance business, had picked up some work: a complete series of invoices and tracking forms for a company calling itself "Sopht-Wear."
The Cat could have run them up in an hour on a CAD-CAM system.
I glared at the pile of technology m the comer of the studio. Last year Mikey'd bought a low-end CAD-CAM system for the studio, intending to obsolete all of us (the hand-drawing of charts and graphs is a good third of the studio workload). Fortunately for job security he had not internalized the knowledge that the hardware would have fits when the temperature spiked over eighty degrees.
Since my place of employment, Houston Graphics, maintains its fingerhold on solvency by not squandering money on useless inessentials like air-conditioning (or heat in the winter), the temperature in the studio is well over eighty much of the year between June and September.
Eventually Mikey'd decided the system he'd bought was simply unreliable, and none of us had any intention of enlightening him. 1 think a commercial air-conditioner would blow every fuse in the building anj^way.
The phone rang.
"Bookie-Joint-Can-I-Help-You?" I rattled off on one lungful,
218 Bell, Book, and Murder
because Mikey only owns tJie place until five. Since he doesn't want the studio phone answered afi:er five, we answer it that way. Most of life's problems can be worked out with a little creativity.
'This is Ned," Ned said. I shot a not-quite-willed glance down at Ned's package. "I need help."
Ten minutes later I hung up the phone. I'd promised to be there as soon as I could.
Ned had indeed been a Skelton of his word. Though his apartment had been burgled Monday night, he had waited to call me about it until after five p.m. Tuesday.
Nothing was taken. I'd asked. And Ned had spent today doing the right things, so far as filing reports and buying new locks went. What he'd wanted had been a subtler form of help.
Ned wanted his apartment blessed, so that the energy the burglar had brought—call it the stamp of his personality, for lack of a more precise term—could be removed. A psychic cleansing, to go with the physical tidying up.
There was no doubt that I'd go, although he didn't know it. The last time someone'd asked me for help, I'd been too late.
I went home and packed my Danish bookbag with what Belle calls my Traveling Priestess Kit: athame, charged water, incense, sea salt, and a few other things. Then I hit the subway. Ned had given me directions. They weren't too hard to follow, but the destination they led to was a bit of a surprise.
Fast Eddie Skelton, part-time bookstore clerk, lived on West End Avenue on the lower Upper West Side (above Lincoln Center, below Columbia), at an address where apartments rented for more than I made in an average month. I found Ned's building without much trouble.
There was an ambulance and a cop car in front of it, flashing red and amber keep-aways at a small huddle of licensed gawkers.
I saw them from across the street: the cops, the wagon, the crowd. It was unseasonably hot, but I felt cold down to my fingernails.
Coincidence. IVs coincidence, its coincidence, it's —
<
br /> I stayed where I was, as if to move would be to participate in this hideously routine street theater. It was someone else. Of course it was. How could it be Ned? He was young, healthy, and I'd spoken to him on the phone no more than an hour ago.
The two EMTs with the gumey came out of Ned's building. It
had a dark plastic mummy-bag on it, zipped-up shut the way there is when there's a dead body inside. They loaded it into the ambulance, and slammed the doors, £ind got inside, and drove away.
A few minutes later the cop came out and got into his cop car and did the same. Just another of our forty daily homicides here in Baghdad on the Hudson.
I was certain of what I'd find when 1 went into the building. Certain the way you aire in nightmares, outside of logic. That ought to mean 1 didn't need to go, to see for myself, but a few minutes later, when the crowd had diffused, I went in anyway, telling myself I was wrong.
I had the spooky hopeless feeling you have in tragedies, knowing you're going to say your lines and it isn't going to change the outcome. Insisting, meanwhile, that everything was fine, that Ned and I were going to go out for drinks.
The lobby was a study in genteelly-diminished elegance: gilded egg-and-dart molding, elaborate ceiling fixtures, a fireplace that might even have worked once. Ned's apartment was first-floor front.
There was a notice on the door, aind bright yellow tape. Not a surprise. Never a surprise — didn't you know that Witches can see the future? I gulped and gulped, swallowing hard, even though I knew what the notice said because I'd seen one before, at the last place I'd gotten to too late.
I tried the door and banged on it anyway, reaching through the tape that told me this was a crime scene, this was a murder.
"Hey, lady! Cut it out!"
I jumped. Guiltily.
The speaker was the tenant of the apartment across the lobby. He teetered on the verge of looking like a Brookl)ni truck driver, glaring at me. He was probably an expensive lawyer.
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