Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  But when the time came to show The Book of Moons to her nephew and new partner, Stuart Hepburn, Ilona didn't have it. Because Ned Skelton, her part-time clerk, whose other job it was to go in and out of strangers' apartments with his set of master passkeys, had branched out, entering many apartments and carefully removing from each an item that was valueless except to the Witch who had written it—or to someone who desperately wanted the moral validity that being Wiccan would give him: the Books of Shadows.

  So Ned stole Ilona's book among his other thefts. The Book of Moons. Mary's book. The one thing that tied all of this together: the McGuffin, without which, as the saying goes, one cannot hunt tigers in Scotland.

  The subway arrived at my destination. I crossed Dyckman. Belle had better be home this time.

  Belle's apartment is on the fifth floor of an end building overlooking High Bridge Park, and the landlord has been intermittently trying to get her to move out for years. The place has four bedrooms, no furniture to speak of, and a door chime and sound system courtesy of The Cat, whose motto is Better Living Through Technology.

  My shoes made wounded gazelle rhythms across the lobby and up five flights of stairs. The doorbell's selection this month sampled the "Mars Movement" from Hoist's The Planets as played on

  246 Bell, Book, and Murder

  the glockenspiel. I leaned on it for a while. Eventually Belle caiine to the peephole.

  "Bast?" she said, as if there were hundreds of people out there in Fun City impersonating me.

  "Yeah," I said. "I need to tell you something."

  Normal people use the phone, or E-mail, or at least don't come banging on other people's doors at eleven o'clock at night unannounced. Belle is used to the differently normal. She let me in. She did not say, "What are you got up as?" because Belle's acceptance is all-encompassing.

  She was wearing a yellow terry-cloth bathrobe, a garment that makes her look like an enormous baby chicken. She went to put on tea. The kitchen light was the only light in the apartment.

  I wandered around the living room. There were seashells and crystals and candles on the windowsills, a "lives alone with no cats" clutter. Belle doesn't have any living room curtains, and in the dark her collection of colored suncatchers looked dull against the glass. A car swung up Riverside, and in the shine of its headlights I saw that it had started to rain.

  I sat down on Belle's emotional rescue couch, the piece of furniture on which more Pagan New Yorkers have had crises than any other. The light from the kitchen made a yellowish trapezoid against the bare wood floor.

  Belle came in and sat down next to me. "Glitter called me," she said.

  "Ned gave me a box to hold for him," I said. "Look, do you still know that guy in the police?" *

  "Lieutenant Hodiac?" Belle said.

  One of Belle's outreach functions is being Wicca advisor to the police. As far as I can determine, this involves going downtown and identifying pieces of jewelry and photographs of strange designs about four times a year and sorting out the difference between Wicca and rock music in the police mind.

  "Whoever," I said.

  "Bast, what are you — ?" Belle said.

  "I'm losing my last marble. Look. This is not a good day. I need to tell you a story, and then you tell me what I do with it."

  "Okay," Belle said, looking worried. She went and got the tea, and some cookies that were still left over from the picnic. I took one and was about to bite it until I remembered that Ned had

  brought cookies that day and maybe these were those. I set it back down and sipped my tea.

  "Ilona Saunders and Ned Skelton are dead," I said, as carefully specific as if I were arguing a case. "You remember what happened at the picnic; Ned's announcement and all. The next day I heard Ilona was dead, and then —the same day—Ned asked me to hold a package for him. That was Monday.

  'Tuesday night around five-thirty he called and told me he'd been burgled Monday late sometime. He wanted a banishing ritual done on the place, you know? I left right away, but by the time I got there they were putting him into the ambulance. Shot dead, Glitter said today. In the back of the head with something small."

  Belle put her hand over mine. I held it.

  "What was in the box?" she said.

  "Books. Books of Shadows. All the ones he stole. Glitter's. Everyone's. He was a building super; he had passkeys for all the standard locks. He asked me not to open it, or ask what was in it, but he was dead so I did. I've got—"

  I realized that I didn't have Diana-27 and Otterleaf s books with me. 'There are two of them I need your help to get back to their owners."

  "And he left the box with you on Monday?" Belle said.

  "What, you think he did it Tuesday after he died?" I snapped. I let go of her hand. I drank my tea and Jittered.

  "I'm just trying to figure out what's going on here and how I can help," Belle said soothingly.

  "What's going on is I almost had dinner with the guy who clocked both him and Ilona and the reason he did it is sitting in my studio." I stood up. I wandered. I leaned against the win-dowsill. "I'm trying to make a straight story out of this," I complained, "and it keeps getting all tangled up."

  "Just tell it any way you need to. You seem awfully upset," Belle said.

  My HPS, the mistress of tactful understatement.

  "He must have started doing it in April. Maybe Glitter's was the first, and then when we didn't call him to join Changing he stole all the others. Ned. I heard about it at the picnic —the missing books, I mean. That there were missing books," I amplified carefully. "Glitter was right all along. She didn't lose it, she didn't misplace it. Ned took it. He went up to Glitter's apartment with Ilona for dinner, and he came back and took it. They knew each other;

  248 Bell, Book, and Murder

  you gave him the look-see because Glitter asked you to. That's why you asked me to dinner instead of her—she couldn't be objective."

  Belle nodded. I came back and sat down, feeling my way through the explanation.

  "Ned was stealing Books of Shadows because he wanted to be a Witch and nobody'd initiate him. Apparently he'd been around the track a couple of times: Reisha, Maidjene, Xharina, Lorelli— he'd worked with plenty of people in the Conmiunity and nobody'd give him a tumble. He knew where they lived; he went in on his keys and got their books — only he didn't think of himself as a thief; he didn't take anything else. He stole their books," I repeated, "but that didn't get him what he really wanted." I held up a hand, just as if Belle were about to interrupt, which she wasn't.

  "But then —I'm guessing, but it all fits —he took something out of Lothlorien. The Book of Moons."

  Belle frowned disbelievingly.

  "Ask Beaner," I said. "The building'd been sold, her rent'd been raised, she was going to have to go, except she told us she was going to buy the building. She could afford to, she said, because she'd made up her mind to sell an old faimily heirloom. The Book of Moons —Mary, Queen of Scots's, Book of Shadows."

  Damned, doomed, dazzled Mary—whose bare naime, four centuries later, caused people to turn off their common sense.

  "Bast," Belle said patiently, "if a major historical figure had been a Witch, we'd know. You don't believe — "

  "Money," I said.

  Belle looked at me.

  "I have seen this book," I enunciated clearly. "It can be one of three things. It can be real, it can be a forgery of the period, or it can be a modem forgery. If it is modem, it is a good enough fake to be taken for old, which means it is worth money. Hitler-diaries money. Jack-the-Ripper diaries money—and it doesn't matter if both of those were faked; they were front-page news and million-dollar auctions. Enough to buy full-bore Manhattan real estate. Forget Mary. I don't care what The Book of Moons really is. It doesn't matter what it really is, when what it is, is money."

  Belle sighed, and I realized then that I'd lost her. Maybe it was unfair of me to want her to believe on my bare say-so, when I'd had all the days s
ince the picnic and the chance to hold The Book of Moons in my hands to help convince me.

  That, and seeing Stuart's eyes.

  "Maybe it sounds unlikely. But it's true."

  Belle sighed. "I know you think of it as true," she said, trying to be kind.

  That hurt. Belle looked at me and then padded off to the kitchen. She came back with a glass full of wine that looked like grape jelly and tasted (1 knew from experience) like cough syrup. I set it down untasted.

  Elitism is the stalking horse of American culture. Critics are automatically elitists, beginning the moment they say that something is better than something else. In our headlong rush to throw down an aristocracy that has not existed in two centuries, we avow hysterically that everything is not only as good as everything else, but is, in fact, everything else.

  But when everything is everything, how do you define anything?

  I didn't want to be the only one to see things the way I saw them. No one is that secure. But I wasn't going to say 1 didn't see them, either.

  "She would not say she was not married when she was." Catherine of Aragon. Another queen, another adjudicated destruction. Paths of glory lead only to the grave.

  "Where is this book now?" Belle asked finally.

  "Wrapped up like the others, sitting at the studio," I said, forgetting that Diana-27's and Otterleaf s were at my apartment. "But you aren't interested in my theories. I'm sony I bothered you."

  The more I thought about Belle's remark—mild, really—the angrier I got. Either because it was true, or because she thought it was true, or because I needed to be angry.

  "Who'd you get all dressed up for?" Belle asked.

  "Stuart Hepburn." I stood up. 'The man who killed Ilona Saunders and Ned Skelton. For the book. For money."

  "What makes you say that?"

  She was treating me like a patient; standing back and reserving judgment. But I hadn't come here for that. I'd come for a partisan, a friend, someone who believed the things I did.

  But I already knew she didn't.

  I'd thought we'd patched up our friendship. I'd thought things were going to be the same between us. I knew that Belle'd thought so too.

  We'd both been wrong.

  Why had I come here?

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  "Don't fucking patronize me; I'm going home." I felt enormously tired; alone and betrayed, which was gothic adolescent nonsense. I wasn't betrayed. Not yet.

  "What did you think I could do?" Belle asked in her best psychiatrist voice, meaning "Don't you think this is a lot oj trouble to go to Just to get out of a date?"

  'Tell your cop friend Hodiac that Stuart Hepburn had a motive. Uona Saunders was his aunt, and his aunt Ilona claimed to have a family heirloom and turned up dead. Ned, who stole Books of Shadows for a hobby, stole The Book of Moons and wound up dead. I think that The Book of Moons and Ilona's heirloom are the same thing and the only person who could trace that connection is Stuart Hepburn and I'm the one with the thing now so could we please tell the police?"

  "It makes more sense if Ned killed Ilona to get the book—by accident," Belle said.

  'Then who killed Ned—and why?"

  Ned would not kill someone for gain and then brag about his spoils later. I felt very protective of Ned, now that he was dead. He had no one else to speak for him now, to tell them that he'd meant well, or at least not as badly as things had come out. All his history and the bubble reputation that he'd sought (not in the cannon's mouth, but in living rooms like this one) were in my wardship now. There was no one else left to care.

  "Bast, sometimes things just happen," Belle said helplessly. "You think that by weaving it all together into some enormous plot that only you can see, you can control it—"

  "Sure. I'm sorry to take up your time." I headed for the door.

  "Bast," Belle said, "Karen."

  I stopped and looked back. Belle was invoking Karen High-tower, but she herself had helped me turn Karen into Lady Bast of the Wicca a lifetime ago. The woman she was calling—that woman's way of seeing things —no longer existed.

  The lighting carved Belle's face, making her look the way she would when she was old. Once we had both believed the same things. She was the woman who had trained me. How could our internal landscapes have become so divergent?

  "You don't need to mythologize your life," Belle said. "All of this criminal conspiracy—it's something you superimpose on what happens. It isn't real. People die. People are killed. There don't have to be reasons."

  And Ned wasn't dead, nor Ilona. Possibly I didn't have an antique real-or-forged Book of Shadows on my shelf at work. I should have remembered that Belle, Lady Bellflower of the Wicca, did not believe in magic.

  But she had, once. She'd told me that magic could transform the world. Which of us had changed? When had it happened?

  "Stuart Hepburn had knowledge, opportunity, connection, and motive for two murders. 1 wish you'd find it in your heart to mention it to somebody at the police, Belle, because it's going to sound very weird coming in off the street from me. But I will."

  "1 think—" Belle said.

  "Good night," 1 said. I opened the door and closed it, and as I walked down the hall I heard Belle locking up after me.

  I sat in the subway heading downtown and felt cold, tired, and stupid. If Belle didn't know who 1 was, why did I think I was anything more than a figment of my imagination?

  Too little sleep. Too little food. I'd missed dinner, and I couldn't remember having lunch, actually. I still thought 1 was right, but it'd been stupid to go to Belle's. What could she do?

  It was weird to accuse Belle of judgmentalism, but in a way it was true. Belle wouldn't pass judgment on people, but she would judge events. And she had judged my events impossible, therefore she refused to see them.

  It was, it occurred to me suddenly, the same reason Belle does not do magic, though once upon a time she'd at least tedked about doing it. Magic is a part of Wicca, from the magical worldview to the spells braided into our daily lives, but Changing does no magic beyond visualization. A coven created in Belle's image.

  As all covens reflect the worldview of those who form them. This was not news. And I was going to have to deal with Belle, and my anger at Belle, later. Right now I had to deal with reality. And perceptions of reality.

  Cold on my bare arms. Unforgiving hard orange plastic seat sticky against the backs of my nylon-stockinged thighs. Fluorescent lighting turning my skin fish-belly white. This was reality.

  Perception is a seduction. The willingness to see has to exist before anything cam be seen, the encouragement of visualization that borders on the creation of phenomena without ever quite fadling over the edge. To see you must be willing to see, and to place no limitations on what you may see.

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  The danger in that is that you may see what isn't there.

  Was that how it had happened—the rift in the lute, which by and by makes the music mute? Had Belle and I, starting from the same place, both fine-tuned our perceptions of the world, hers to exclude magic, mine to include it? If two viewpoints contradict each other, mustn't one of them be right?

  Or are both of them wrong?

  Not in this case, I didn't think. The whole thing fitted together with a facility that was frightening. The events, at least, were real.

  My mind flipped back to my first conversation with Stuart: "I understand that the witchcult can trace its roots fairly Jar back," he'd said. He'd wanted information about Books of Shadows even then, but I'd been too blind to see it. He must have known almost nothing about The Book of Moons to begin with and been trying to get information at the picnic.

  Had he seen Ned there —or heard him? Had he talked to Ned, somewhere in the dark hours before Ned's panic-stricken Monday call to me? Was that why Ned had left the books with me — to protect them from Stuart?

  It made such a lovely plausible pattern.

  Once upon a time, Ilona S
aunders had a book. Say it was an Elizabethan forgery; it could be a forgery and known to be a forgery and still be incredibly valuable if it were four centuries old. She decided to sell it to save Lothlorien . . .

  "She's bringing someone with her. Nephew. New partner in Lothlorien, " Glitter had told me. Her only living relative, Stuart had said tonight. If you make someone your partner, sometimes you tell them where the money's coming from.

  The subway rocked, accelerating on the long express run down to Fifty-ninth Street. The money. Cherchez la gelt. And Stuart Hepburn, child of earls, might see no reason to plow such a chunk of capital back into the marginal bookstore that was all Ilona's heart.

  Argument, as inevitable as gravity. I could hear his voice in my mind: "Oh, don't talk a lot of rot, Auntie; no one cares about a place like this anymore. But this book of yours, this book is worth millions ..."

  Where is it?

  Where is it. Auntie, dear?

  Let me see it . . .

  A bright Beltane morning at Lothlorien Books. Stuart Hep-bum, recently from England, has arrived, at Lothlorien to escort

  I

  Book of Moons 253

  dear Aunt Ilona to Belle's picnic. It doesn't matter why or how the topic of The Book of Moons comes up, or why Stuart asks to see it. By May first, Ned has already stolen it—hadn't he told me Sunday morning when we were watching Morris dancers in the park that he had a surprise announcement to make at the picnic later in the day?

  She tells him about the book. Stuart asks to see it. Is she willing? I could not imagine Ilona Saunders as anything other than forthright. She would produce it if she could.

  But she couldn't.

  The absence of the book must have been the cause for what came next—an accident that left Ilona dead, because why should Stuart kill her before he knew where the book was? If it was missing, they could look for it together, as allies. Or had things gone too far for that? But why kill at all when you can merely steal?