Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  And maybe that won't work out either.

  The guys went off to rejoin their Orm and I started unpacking the stock. I was the only one up here on the barn's second floor so far; it was peaceful and quiet, and provided the solitude I'd wamted this morning and never gotten. But what I'd wanted to use it for was lost just now. I worked instead.

  Back in New York I'd taken the precaution of labeling the most important box in three-inch-high letters, so I had no trouble now in finding the cashbox (thirty dollars in ones and change-rolls), the tablecloth, the drape to cover the stock at night, and the credit card machine. After those things were on the table —and the top cover set somewhere I wouldn't bury it again, I hoped—I unfolded the two chairs and started in on the stock boxes. Fortunately I'd found the box-cutter early on, as Brianna had a free hand with a tape gun.

  There was enough daylight coming in through the windows under the eaves for me to see; there are lights strung up here, but they're the pull-chain type and have to be turned on one by one, by hand, and it's a real pain. I knew the stock well enough to know what it looked like in the half dark, even if Julian had packed most of it.

  So it was dark, and I was all the way back in the comer, away from the table bent over the box of jewelry, which was why the two of them didn't see me when they came in.

  326 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "I don't believe you had the nerve to come up here!" Maidjene said in a furious undertone.

  "You're just lucky I did, now that one of your little buddies popped that fruitcake in the woods. You're lucky they haven't arrested you already, Philly."

  "They didn't arrest me because 1 didn't kill anybody, Larry," Maidjene said, deadly flat. I'd already recognized the voice. Larry Wagner, Maidjene's survivalist-fruitcake soon-to-be-ex-husband.

  "That's more than you can say for your so-called friends. I've heard them talk about karma and holy wars —and Hairm was one of those funny-mentalist Christians. He was stabbed, wasn't he? Everybody knows that one of those weenies you keep inviting over to our house did it."

  Larry Wagner was an ordinary sort of pear-shaped whiteboy, with light brown hair that was starting to go and horn-rimmed glasses that'd probably wowed 'em in college. He had the sort of mouth that looked as if it spent most of its time in self-justification; not quite petulant but not exactly prim. He was dressed, as usual, as if he expected to be called to active military service at any moment: jungle-pattern camo parka, olive pants bloused into gleaming paratrooper boots, and black leather gloves. He was probably also carrying a gun: Larry loved concealed weapons and showed them off at every opportunity.

  'The only 'weenie' I see here is you, Larry. Now fuck off."

  "I'm not going to let you ruin your life over this, Philly. These people don't care about you. Once you come to your senses you'll thank me —I've seen you go through these crazes before; remember that time you had that crush on David Bowie? Religion is a tool of the government; everyone knows that—"

  Larry didn't seem to have cashed too many Reality Checks lately, but that was nothing new, and listening to him call Maidjene "Philly" (not her real name) was starting to get on my nerves. I straightened up slowly and looked out the window. There was thirtysomething feet of Winnebago camper parked right outside the bam, snarling traffic even further. I recognized it: the infamous "Warwagon," named out of the Mack Bolan books amd Larry's pride and joy. One year somebody'd chalked "Lasciate ogni sper-anza, voi ch'entrate" on the side, and Larry left it there for most of a day until someone translated the Italian for him.

  The Warwagon contained every form of paralegal radar detector and emergency band scanner known to man —at least it had

  used to —so I could take a pretty good guess that Larry's "sources" had been tuned to the sheriffs band. But were they really saying that we were responsible for Harm's death?

  "Philly, all I want is for you to be happy," Larry was whining now. "When are you going to forget all this Wicca crap and come home? How are you going to manage on your own? You can't get a job —nobody's going to hire you the way you look." That was Larry all over, ever the gentleman. "Look, I'm sorry about your stupid book. If I'd known it meant so much to you —"

  "You'd have done what you did an3^way, seeing as it's just Wicca crap,'" Maidjene shot back with deadly mimicry.

  "It's a stupid bunch of— You don't really believe that stuff, do you? If you stick around here, you're only going to get into real trouble this time!"

  "Only if I kill someone," Maidjene said, in a voice that indicated it was a possibility.

  "And I'd have to tell them that you people are anti-Christian — look, you come on home right now and that'll be that, okay? Nobody has to know anything," Larry wheedled.

  "I've left you, asshole," Maidjene said, with frayed patience. "I have filed for divorce. We are separated. And I would rather starve in a ditch than ever have anything to do with you again. Okay?"

  "Now look, Philly—" Larry began.

  "You having problems, Jeannie?" a new voice said.

  The newcomer was wearing a HallowFest T-shirt, shorts, and Birkenstocks. Larry was dressed like Bizarro Rambo. Guess who looked more dangerous?

  Ironshadow has a mundane name —I think it's Pat—but he's known through the SCA and the Community by the name he puts on his knives: Ironshadow. He stands about six-four and is old enough for his black hair to be liberally streaked with gray. He has a face that looks as if it's been remodeled several times on barroom floors, which is probably not too far from the facts. He's also a pussycat—if he likes you.

  "I want you out of here," Maidjene snarled at Larry. "I want you out of this state."

  Larry smiled unpleasantly; I could hear it in his voice. "I've got my membership paid up. I'm staying right here. I'm entitled."

  "I don't think you need to stay quite this close," Ironshadow rumbled. He has the deep bass voice that my new acquaintance Orm Klash had been trying to imitate. Larry looked at him.

  328 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "You've got to move your vehicle down to the RV parking, for one thing," Ironshadow went on, with scrupulous mildness, "and then you'd better go and register and get your badge, if you're staying. And after that I guess you better go tell the Sheriffs Department where you were when Harm was killed."

  Larry made a faint stuttering noise in the back of his throat, as if he were trying to talk but couldn't remember his lines.

  "And if you keep bothering Jeannie, 1 think you're probably going to run into a tree. Several times. So I'd be careful, if 1 were you," Ironshadow said solicitously.

  To say that Larry flounced out in a huff might be cruder than necessary. There was a sad side to the little sitcom I'd just inadvertently witnessed: Maidjene had changed, Larry hadn't. And Larry wasn't accepting the inevitable consequences with anything approaching grace. Which might have been unfair to Larry, but I didn't like him very well to begin with —he'd thought of HallowFest as his own Happy Hunting Ground for years and was notorious for hitting on the female attendees. I was glad Maidjene was dumping him.

  "I don't know what to do." Maidjene was crying now. I felt guilty that I hadn't been the one to stop Larry and told myself that my arrival would only have raised the stakes of the confrontation.

  "You'll do what you have to. You know that," Ironshadow said.

  "Yeah. Well—Niceness Rules." Maidjene's voice was tired.

  She turned and went down the stairs. Ironshadow followed her, but came back almost immediately with a suitcase. He must have left it on the steps before.

  "You can come out now," he said to me.

  I stepped from behind the joist and went over to hug him. It was about like hugging a tree: rock solid and full of energy. He hugged back, hard.

  "I thought I saw you back there," he said after I caught my breath.

  "I was setting up. I didn't want to interrupt them. But I would have if it got too nasty. Larry's such a weasel."

  "He's got a few problems," Ironshadow
agreed. "But not as many as the Reverend Harm seems to have gotten rid of."

  " 'Marley was dead,'" I quoted, sourly.

  "And you're the one who found him."

  I nodded. It was hardly a secret, even if HallowFest weren't capable of fielding an Olympic-quality Gossip Team on five minutes' notice anyway. But Ironshadow didn't —gossip, at least.

  "Look, 'shadow—if you wanted to kill a guy with a knife, how would you do it?"

  He grinned. A short knife I hadn't seen a moment before appeared in his hand. Ironshadow throws knives as well as makes them.

  I shook my head. 'There wasn't any blood," I said, and heard the surprise in my voice. That was the thing that had bothered me all morning—had bothered me, in fact, from the moment I laid eyes on Hellfire Harm.

  There was no blood.

  'Then he didn't die by the blade," Ironshadow said. "Unless he was lying down when he got it. Standing up, even if you get him right through the pump, he's going to bleed for a couple seconds at least."

  I nodded. Every mystery reader knows that. You bleed as long as your heart is pumping, or as long as gravity is draining the wound. There had been neither heartbeat nor gravity operating in the case of the Reverend Jackson Harm. There had been no blood an3^where around his body.

  "Well, he was lying down," I said. "He was lying on his back." I went on to describe what I'd found as accurately as I could to the only person 1 could think of who might be able to answer my questions. I don't know how many of the tales Ironshadow tells on himself are true, but he's led a well-traveled life.

  "Well, assuming he didn't get himself shot where you didn't see it, or overdosed on something," Ironshadow said, "assuming that what you saw killed him, then the only thing that fits is that the Reverend had to be stabbed while he was already lying down, and by somebody with one hell of a right arm on him."

  "How come?" I asked, obligingly. Ironshadow snorted.

  "You ever try to stab somebody through the heart. Bast? There's a lot of stuff in the way—bone and gristle and even muscle. You gotta grab 'em like this — "

  Suddenly my back was to him and his arm was across my throat. I wrapped both hands about it as if I were going to chin myself. It was like grabbing one of the barn's cross-beams.

  " — and then you gotta punch 'em real hard." He tapped me lightly on the chest with his other fist, right about where the puncture had been on Harm.

  "Or you aren't going to make it through all that," he finished, letting me go. "And getting there with an overhand blow from a kneeling position would be even harder."

  330 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I tried to imagine the choreography involved in that scenario and gave up. "Maybe he was asleep," 1 suggested dubiously.

  But no. That theory required him to fall asleep —in the woods, in October, in street clothes — sleep through somebody half undressing him—neither his shirt nor T-shirt had been ripped, only stained — and continue to sleep while someone killed him with one powerful thrust to the heart.

  "It doesn't make sense," I said.

  "If it made sense, it wouldn't be Reality," Ironshadow said. "Look, watch this stuff for me a minute while I go get my table, oka}^"

  "Can I look through it?"

  "Just don't break anything."

  Ironshadow carries his stock in a battered suitcase. I laid it on its side and popped the latches. I lifted off the top layer of sponge padding and took a look. Ironshadow athames; standard issue from Pagan Central Supply, most of them: six-inch double-edged blades with black lathe-turned hilts and your choice of decorator pommels: hematite, cloudy amber, even a quartz point. The union card for most Wiccans and their fellow travelers in the Earth Religions. There were a dozen of them; he might very well sell them all this weekend.

  I lifted out the athames and the sponge padding together and set them carefully aside. Next down was the expensive stuff, most of them probably special-order pieces being delivered here. One had a staghom hilt with vaguely-familiar runes inlaid in silver and a blade so heavily greased that I knew it was iron, not steel; one had a rosewood hilt and enough J imping on the blade to make it look like fancy lacework. That one had a clear quartz marble slightly smaller than a Ping-Pong ball for a pommel-weight.

  I coveted them both, mostly out of habit, while at the same time part of me was comparing every blade I saw to the mark on the late Reverend Harm and coming up empty.

  There were a couple of other pieces — showpieces Ironshadow had little chance of selling here, but wondrous fair to look upon. I admired them all, taking my time.

  The last item wasn't an athame—or even a knife.

  It had a short hilt of opalized bone that put it right out of my price range and the blade was a sickle-shape of pure copper that was already showing an oxidization rainbow.

  "Four hundred," Ironshadow said, setting down a card table, a camp stool, and another suitcase. "It isn't spoken for."

  I turned it over in my hands. A boline, the companion blade to the athame. Traditionally a copper sickle, used to gather and prepare spell ingredients.

  "Nice," I said wistfully, setting it back among its kindred.

  "I could hold it for you," Ironshadow said.

  "Hah." There was no way I could afford to drop four bills—my day job wasn't that dependable, and the outside freelance money I counted on to fill in the cracks had been scanty lately. I looked at the opalized bone glinting in the dim light of the baim.

  "I'll think about it," I said.

  I went back to work on The Snake's table and found that Julian had been even more optimistic than Ironshadow was—he'd packed two copies of La Tesoraria.

  La Tesoraria del Oro is a nineteenth-century grimoire drawing on a mixture of medieval French and Spanish sources. It's a Christian-based series of rituals designed, essentially, to obtain a bill of divorcement from God: to sever all ties to the natural world in order to study that world as a separate entity.

  It had been my big freelance job last winter: every once in a while. Tree of Wisdom has a spasm and goes into the book publishing business, coming out with —usually—some expensive limited-edition grimoire that no normal occult publisher in his right mind would consider cost-effective. And so I happened to know that in addition to being freshly translated, typeset, proofread, and having all its sigils and diagrcims redrawn, La Tesoraria went for about 250 dollars, hubbed spine, leather binding, sewn-in bookmark, fancy endpapers, and all.

  For those less daring. Tree of Wisdom produced a plain hardback for 75 dollars, and we had one of those, too. I said Julian was an optimist. He's also probably the only person who'd actually have the patience to go through the year's worth of rituals and nasty-minded asceticism that the book demands and figure out a way around the joker at the end: the impossible condition the magician has to meet to complete the work.

  Still, it's a pretty piece of bookmaking, even if it is—while not exactly evil—just about the antithesis of what I conceive Wicca to be. Still, it'd paid my rent when Houston Graphics hadn't. I set both copies out.

  332 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Merchanting was officially open by now; people started drifting in. I sold a few things while I was still setting up. I knew I should go and keep my appointment with the law, but I didn't want to leave the table unattended while there was a chance of the Snake turning a profit for the weekend. Goddess knew they needed to, from what I'd been hearing lately airound the store.

  It used to be that what you got at the Snake you couldn't get anywhere else, and so the shop scraped by, even with New York overheads. But today New Age is big business—Waldenbooks carries Tarot cards and shopping mall jewelry stores carry pentacles. And by undercutting the specialty store's prices, the mundane stores take away the profit margin that lets the specialty store carry the serious ritual magic supplies that the New Agers have no interest in.

  And sooner or later, free market economics means no occultism at all, something I hope to put off as long as possible. Fort
unately Julian showed up before one form of civic-mindedness won out over the other.

  He went over to Ironshadow's table first. The knives were all laid out and glittering, making a pretty show in the sun. Iron-shadow handed Julian one. Julian nodded, handed it back, and Ironshadow wrapped it. Money changed hands.

  This was interesting—almost as interesting as my love life. Julian buying an Ironshadow blade? Julian's a Ceremonial Magician, not a Pagan. He considers most forms of polytheism to be beneath him. What would he want with an Ironshadow blade?

  'Thanks for setting up," Julian said, coming around the table. "Why don't you come back at—five? —and take the cashbox and charge machine back to the van for the night. And maybe the jewelry."

  "Julian," 1 said, "there is something we have to talk about."

  He looked at me, waiting. I gritted my teeth and told myself I'd done harder things than this.

  "About last night. I've got a clean blood test." I donate regularly. "And you?" I kept my voice low; no one else was close enough to hear.

  There. It was said, and it hadn't killed me. Now all I had to work on was my timing.

  Julian smiled his detached plaster-saint smile, and I felt myself go hot all over. "Don't worry," he said. "You're safe. You're the first." He turned away and started rearranging the table I'd just arranged.

  Julian was a virgin? An ex-virgin? It was, I supposed, possible.

  "Are you sure?" 1 asked, then heard what I'd s£iid and wished I could be struck by lightning.

  "Run along," Julian told me. "I didn't kill you."

  But I would have been happy to kill someone—which made it fortunate, in a way, that my next date was with Deputy Twochuck. Not even I was self-absorbed enough to get in a sheriffs deputy's face out of season.

  He started with my prints, which now made two law enforcement agencies they were on file with. Taking the print doesn't hurt. They roll your finger back and forth to get the whole image on the paper, resulting in ten square blotches on a stiff white form. It's kind of pretty, in a post-industrial way.