Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  "God, I missed that. Look, who are you — "

  The burgers arrived.

  Who are you working with? he'd been going to say. Who was my working partner? A reasonable question, since everyone but a Ceremonial Magician had one. Would it be him? It was a question I'd been asking myself all weekend; a question I'd had in the back of my mind ever since I'd accepted the reality of the split from Changing. But now that he'd brought up a subject I was determined to talk to him about anyway, I found myself unable to continue with it, tongue-tied as a nervous virgin. Which we were not, to each other, in any sense.

  So why couldn't I get off the dime?

  Lark devoted himself to lunch in a fashion that suggested he hadn't been fed for weeks, but he had to come up for air sometime.

  "So who are you going to be working with?" he said when he did. "Anybody I know?—not that I know anybody out here anymore."

  "Why did you leave?" I said. It wasn't a question I'd thought I had any interest in the answer to, but I've been wrong before.

  "I was young and stupid." His inflection gave the sentence neither regret nor irony.

  "And you're older and wiser now?"

  "Older, anyway. And Second. And Long Island," Lark said, reminding me that he was not only a ranking member of our tradi-

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  tion, but that he came from the same branch: the Gardnerians who could trace their lineage back to the Long Island Coven founded back in the sixties by Rosemary and Raymond Buckland, whose spiritual mandate —for what that was worth —had come from Gerald Gardner himself.

  "You know we work well together," he added.

  "Not for ten years. It'd be like starting over."

  "You'd be starting fresh with whoever you pick."

  "I haven't even made up my mind. I've never run a coven."

  "I have. Goddammit, Bast, you've been around for years and watched everything Belle does—what are you waiting for, a handbook?"

  "Yeah, well, maybe," I admitted.

  "So write one. What about it?" Lark said.

  He was doing nothing more than echoing my own thoughts back to me, but things seemed to be moving too fast; everything he said sounded as if it ought to be the right answers, but I felt as if I were being pushed into making a choice that I wouldn't make if I had time to think about it.

  "Lark, you've just gotten back. It's been a long time; this isn't the time to be making decisions like that. I mean, somebody stabbed Jackson Harm, and—"

  "And you think I did it," Lark said, deadly flat. I felt a warning prickle of the little hairs on the back of my neck. "Hell, why not— what's a little murder among friends?"

  He thought I already knew. I didn't, but I managed to piece it together from what he said then. He'd been working in a family-planning clinic in Orange County, California, which had gotten the same flack that clinics everywhere get in these antichoice times. And then one day it had burned in a highly suspicious fashion.

  "So I figured if Heather Dearest could bomb a GYN clinic she ought to expect a little Christian charity in return."

  And Lark had felt that biblical retribution was in order. An eye for an eye. A building for a building.

  "Local merchants wouldn't let the place reopen—bad for business, they said, and everybody knowing that good old Reverend Heather Grace Barrows had been yapping about 'cleansing fire from heaven' in her sermons for weeks, so 'who will rid me of this turbulent priest,' right?" Lark snarled. And two years ago this month —they make you stick close during your probation — he'd been released from the Orange County Correctional Facility after serving eighteen months of a three-year sentence for arson.

  "Honest to Goddess, Lark," I said helplessly. It was, I supposed, justice of a sort—bomb a clinic, get bombed in return —providing any of what I'd heard was true. But it was vigilante justice, and a society which allows individuals to take the law into their own hands is doomed.

  "The bimb wasn't home. Nobody was; I checked—which was more than she did for us. And that tax-dodging bitch could afford a new coat of paint."

  "But Lark-"

  "And you know what the real joke was?" He looked into my eyes, smiling his twisted grin. "Everybody in Ocean Circle'd been saying it was time for some Instant Karma—only when it came down, all of a sudden it was nobody's idea but mine."

  Oh, Lark, what did you expect? I shook my head sadly. Even if what he'd done had been legal as church on Sunday he probably wouldn't have gotten the support he'd been expecting—as I knew to my cost. Our Community isn't a Community, not really. It's an assemblage of chance-met fellow travelers, singularly unwilling to make moral judgments.

  "Judge not, lest ye be Judged, " the rabbi from Galilee is rumored to have said, and his followers have always assumed it was a command, even as they ignored it. But it's not a command. It's a re-£dity. Judge and be judged. No one here gets out alive.

  "So you just stay wrapped up in your sanctimonious little shroud with that silver-plated virgin looking down on you from Heaven, sweetheart. Some of us are living in the real world."

  Lark dug a twenty out of his pocket and tossed it on the table. He was out of the booth and halfway to the door before I readized what was happening.

  "Come back here you son of a bitchr

  I caught up with him just as he reached his bike.

  "Don't you talk to me about the real world!" I said, grabbing his arm. "And don't you go using it as an excuse."

  I didn't have the slightest idea what I meant. All I knew was that all the adrenaline left over from the Larry and the Klingon episode had finally found a home.

  "Maybe I did do it," Lark taunted. "Yeah, here I am: the Homed Avenger, doing what you're too scared to!"

  I wished I knew why everybody was so convinced I wanted Harm dead. Before this weekend I'd barely known he existed.

  "I just love the odor of sanctity you're exuding—is that a new cologne?" We're never so eloquent as when we're flaying old lovers.

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  "What makes you think that murder has suddenly become a moral act?"

  "It's better than moral cowardice," Lark said. "You're afraid to stick up for what you believe in —and you're afraid of anyone who does."

  "I sure as hell hope that pedestal is comfortable," I snarled back. "Seeing as you're going to spend so much time up there."

  Lark jerked away from me and swung his leg over the seat of the bike.

  "Did you kill him?" I said to Lark's back, more to piss him off than because I cared about the answer just now.

  "Sure," Lark said. He kicked the bike to life. "I shot him right through the heart."

  I watched Lark skim off down the road. It wasn't me he was angry with, although the realization wasn't particularly comforting. I was standing in for Ocean Circle, and everything they hadn't done.

  1 hadn't known about Lark's prison record until just now, but once I did, it didn't take much of a leap of imagination to wonder if someone who'd firebombed one anti-abortionist might not have killed another. It would have been damned unlikely that Harm wasn't anti-Choice, given the rest of his platform. Or Harm could have recognized Lark—I imagine Lark's trial and conviction had been front-page news with pictures in the Godbotherer's Gazette.

  But Lark—who'd been mad enough not to choose his words carefully—had said that Harm had been shot, just as Larry had. It was a reasonable assumption, but it wasn't the truth. Harm had been stabbed.

  Was it an ignorant-therefore-innocent assumption? Or had Lark learned tactics in the last ten years?

  I went back inside the diner.

  Everyone stared at me when I went in. I went back to the booth, sat down, and tried to ignore them. The dishes hadn't been cleared away yet. I tried my coffee. It was cold.

  "Have a fight with your boyfriend?" the waitress said sympathetically. "I could ask Charlie can he give you a lift as far as Tamerlane. You could get a bus from there."

  'Thanks," I said, "but I do
n't think I'm going that far." I looked at the ruins of two Double Bacon Cheeseburger Deluxes and decided I could call the campground to see if Ironshadow or some-

  one could come and get me. Or maybe there was something approaching a taxi service. Or I could walk it, which would at least have the advantage of keeping me out of trouble. "Do you think I could have some more coffee and the dessert menu?"

  Lark caime back about the time I was finishing my apple pie a la mode and a third cup of coffee.

  "You coming back to the campground or not?" he said ungraciously.

  "You want dessert?" I said without looking up. Lark waited until it was obvious even to him that I wasn't moving and slid back into the opposite side of the booth.

  I had the hopeless feeling that today's lunchtime theater was going to be a report on somebody's desk before dinner. I wondered what they'd say and do. The fact that I wasn't going to be the one in trouble was scant comfort. I finished my pie, although it wasn't easy.

  "I'm not going to apologize," Lark said.

  "So don't," I said.

  Lark stopped the bike by Mrs. Cooper's house and I got off. He fish-tailed around in a spray of dirt and gravel and sped off again. I thought he'd come back eventually, but I wasn't completely sure.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted my own shower and my own bed and my own refrigerator full of beer. I wanted to stop dealing with murder and other quaint native folkways not my own. The more I considered Jackson Harm's unsought quietus, the more I thought the identity of his killer wouldn't be anything I'd end up wanting to know.

  I should go talk to Belle and arrange for Lark's crash space out of a vindictive sense of moral superiority. I should go up and take over the table from Julian. I should go find Maidjene and give her a pound of flesh.

  What I did do was go back to the bungalow.

  You could lock the door from the inside, so I did. I wanted a bath and compromised with an unsatisfactory scrub in the rusty sink and a change of clothes, which made me feel a little better but not much. I'd never really gotten unpacked, so it didn't take long at all to bundle my stuff back into the duffel I'd brought it in.

  Maybe I could talk Julian into packing and leaving tonight. He already had his Ironshadow blade; picking it up had to be the rea-

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  son he'd come to the Festival. The selling was all but over and we could load the van tonight and be back in the city by four a.m. at the latest. Julian hadn't wanted to be here in the first place, and by now neither did I.

  Having a plan cheered me up; I took my duffel down to the van and loaded it in, feeling optimistic enough to roll my sleeping bag up and tie it, ready to go. But by the time 1 got back up the hill to the bam, I'd changed my mind again. I didn't want to be here, but I had the superstitious feeling that leaving would be worse —although tomorrow at noon it would become a moot point. Tomorrow at noon the Festival would be over, and everyone would leave.

  Including Harm's killer, if he —or she—were one of us. I kept a wary eye out for Larry and any stray PCingons as 1 headed for the bam.

  The news reached me before 1 reached it.

  "Larry Wagner's been arrested!" Lome said. Lome was a member of Summerisle—if Maidjene's soon-to-be-ex had been arrested, he'd know.

  I stopped and stared at him, and as 1 stood there wondering what to do, I heard the back door bang and Glitter came running toward me.

  "Is it true?" she demanded.

  "What?" I stared at her. Maidjene and Belle had followed her out. I walked over toward them. Glitter and Lome followed.

  "It isn't true," she told them.

  "They took him away!" Lome said. Maidjene had been crying, and she started to cry again.

  "Why didn't you tell me. Bast?" she said.

  "I was going to, but . . ."1 said.

  Maidjene shook her head, shutting me out. "1 could have done something!" she sobbed, which even in the confusion clued me that she could not be talking about my stealing the festival records.

  "You know what Larry's like," Belle said to Maidjene, soothingly. I looked at Glitter. The expression on her face said that things were not good.

  Larry arrested? "What's going on?" 1 said.

  "Larry said this Klingon beat you up," Glitter said. She inspected me critically. "You don't look beat-up."

  "A Klingon did not beat me up." 1 stared at Maidjene. "And you believed him?"

  Maidjene shook her head. "But she said he had a gun, and she went and told one of the deputies down by the lake, and we couldn't find you, and—"

  "It was kind of a mess," Belle admitted. "Everyone was looking for you because you were the only one who'd seen him with the gun besides Rhonda."

  Rhonda must be the Klingon.

  "1 went down to the diner," I said feebly.

  "What nobody could figure out was how he still had a gun," Glitter said with interest. 'They found it on him," she amplified.

  And possession being nine points of the law, Larry was now getting an even closer look at the judicial system of Gotham County. " 'Still'?" 1 asked.

  "Well, he didn't exactly have permits for the others, so they sort of confiscated all of them," Glitter, mistress of modifiers, said.

  "You should have said something!" Maidjene said, and while it was true, I could also not see how it could have changed the course of events, unless I'd talked Rhonda out of reporting Larry.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "Look," said Lome to Maidjene, "why don't you come on and lie down, okay? They aren't even going to set bail until tomorrow morning, and the sonovabitch sure had it coming. And you've got to go make a statement," he added to me.

  I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, and gave up. Lome led Maidjene away.

  'There somebody still here?" I asked, and Glitter made a rude noise.

  "Follow me," she said.

  Glitter and I got to ride down to beautiful downtown Tamerlane in the back of one of their green-and-whites so the Gotham County Sheriffs Department could take my notarized statement in comfort. They were not really pleased with the idea that I'd just figured that the firearms display was just another case of Larry being Larry and therefore hadn't bothered to mention it to anybody. My vagueness earned me a long session in a private room with a detective and a stenographer. The room smelled of dust and Lysol and ancient cigarette smoke. The bulb in the ceiling was protected by a wire cage. There was a battered gray table in the middle of the room and four chairs that looked like they didn't want to have anything to do with it. The floor was covered with multi-

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  pie coats of battleship gray enamel, and the walls were painted a shade of greenish yellow that looked as if it wanted to be chartreuse but didn't have the energy. There was a frosted glass window in the wall opposite the door, and the walls had dingy two-color-process posters explaining the Heimlich maneuver and giving information on the "Cop Shot" hotline. It was just like the last copshop I'd been in, even though that one had been in Manhattan.

  I did my best to give them what they wanted, but it was hard to explain to anyone who hadn't been around for the last fifteen years about how Larry had always had guns —usually cheap small-caliber hideouts—and was always showing them off with the zeal of a Fuller Brush salesman. I finally explained that Larry had been trying to get me to effect a reconciliation with his wife, and I'd been so interested in getting out of there that I wasn't thinking very clearly.

  Which brought my story around to Lark. Lark with his prison record. Lark with his motive—for Jackson Harm's death, if no one else's. My conviction that he was innocent wouldn't cany as much weight as his prison record would.

  I told them I left the grounds with a friend. I had to give his name. But I was also able to cite Helen Cooper as a witness that he'd been nowhere near the bam, nor the trouble with Larry.

  Finally 1 got to leave.

  When Glitter and I got back to Paradise Lake it was late and so was I. When I got up
stairs in the bam there were customers three deep around the Snake's table.

  Lark was there, too. I felt a moment of appalled self-consciousness, as if the only thing he and Julian could possibly be discussing was me. It turned out I was right.

  I slid in behind the table, next to Julian, who removed his attention from Lark and started making change.

  "Where've you been?" Lark demanded, at the same time someone else wanted to know if Three Kings Incense was the saime as pure frankincense (it isn't).

  "Down in Tamerlane, making a statement to the police."

  Lark and Julian both stared at me. Lark's mouth had a set expression that reminded me —forcibly—of our lunchtime conversation. I wondered about the chat he and Julian had been having before I got there. It was hard to think of two people who had less

  common ground. Dionysus and Apollo; Sun and Moon; Wiccan and apostate . . .

  "It wasn't what you think," I said feebly. Julian handed me a stack of books to bag. "Larry's been arrested. I had to make a statement."

  "About what?" Lark asked with suspicious disbelief.

  "He had a gun," I said. ("No shit?" one of the customers asked with interest.) "I saw him with it," I added. Which wasn't quite the whole story, but the whole story wasn't for an audience.

  "Okay." Now that this had been settled. Lark remembered he was mad at me again. He glanced at Julian.

  "He wondered where you were," Julian said to me. His tone was neutral, but I could tell he was amused. "He thought I might tell him." He regarded Lark over the top of his glasses. Lark glared at him, not quite sure of the subtext but knowing he didn't like it.

  "I'm right here," I said ungraciously. Then I had to tell somebody why there were three Waite decks on the table and explain why they all had different prices. Albano-Waite; U.S. Games; and shot from original art, if you're interested.

  "I'll see you," Lark said, while I was in the middle of that. His inflection made it something in the nature of a vow, but I didn't know which of us he was talking to.

  "I'm certain of it," Julian murmured sweetly. I felt my face grow hot and hoped it wasn't as noticeable as it felt. Business picked up further. I started making change and supplying bags and tried to stop thinking about Lark or anything else.