Utterly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  “You’re the one who chose the name,” Nora said.

  “Yes,” Blackstone said, seeming at first to confirm what Nora had just said. Then he added, in clarification, “She won’t find it as long as things remain as they are now.”

  Nora frowned. “That’s giving me a lot of control over something that’s important to you.”

  “Yes.” Blackstone stood. He seemed taller than he had before.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why me?”

  “Because,” he said, “you’re perfect.”

  She felt a flush build in her cheeks. She knew she’d be reliving that sentence for days. But she had to make a pretense at keeping her distance. “Thanks. But flattery won’t work. Why me?”

  “Because,” Sancho said quickly as if he were covering for his friend. “You believe just enough to take a chance.”

  Believe? Believe what? In magic? In them? “I don’t believe in anything,” she said.

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be standing here, now would you?” Blackstone asked.

  She supposed not. She closed her eyes, shook her head, and bit back the retort that came to mind, a retort as ridiculous as his “you don’t understand.”

  “What happens to you now?” she asked as she opened her eyes. The sentence sort of trailed off. Blackstone was gone. There was no Lincoln, no snake, and no annoying little man. She was the only person standing in this section of the garage.

  She looked over her shoulder. No, she hadn’t gotten turned around. She was alone.

  “Damn,” she said. “I’ve decided I hate it when people do that.”

  But there was no answering reappearance, no giggle from Sancho, no hiss from the snake. She was well and truly alone.

  She didn’t like the feeling.

  She adjusted the purse strap on her shoulder and headed toward her office. Maybe they were invisible and watching her. Maybe she had imagined the whole thing.

  But of course she hadn’t. The smell of smoke trailed her like a homeless puppy. She got into the elevator and leaned on the cracked mirror, like she always did. She looked no different, except for her swollen and reddened eyes, but she felt different—angry, yes, at being left alone like that, but beneath the anger was an exhilaration. Her father would have given everything for a day like the one she had had. Her father would have seen it as proof that magic did exist.

  She didn’t know how she could doubt it. And then she stood up. Of course she did. It had been what she had been thinking of when she came back to the office. She would get the key, go to the garage, and look in the microbus. If there was a dead woman in the coffin, then she had a problem on her hands.

  She let out a small sigh. But if Blackstone was to be believed, she would have a dead woman on her hands if she opened the coffin. If she left it closed, then she kept the woman alive.

  Theoretically.

  Well, in ten years, if that person in the coffin was really dead, at some point the decay would cause a smell that someone would notice.

  Nora winced. The elevator door opened. The lights in the corridor were dim. Now there was no one here. Of course, when she finally looked presentable. She walked through the hall to her office, and as she opened the door, she noted that the cleaning service had already been there. The place had the faint odor of lemon. She thought about the added cost and then realized that with the check Max had given her, and the fees she would be taking from Sancho’s escrow account every month, she would never have to worry about incidentals again.

  Max. She hadn’t even checked to see if the cab got him home safely. Before she thought about what she was doing, she leaned across Ruthie’s desk and dialed Max’s number. It startled her to realize that she had it memorized.

  The phone rang six times. She was about to hang up when someone answered.

  “Max?” she asked.

  “You looked,” he said.

  And in that response, she felt a deep and profound relief. She hadn’t imagined any of this.

  “No,” Nora said. “But I did realize that we’d skipped dinner. You want to go?”

  “Now?” he asked. It was nearly midnight.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is this… a date?”

  There was enough hesitation in his voice to make her hesitate too. But dating Max was something she had wanted to do since she met him years ago. She had just never had the courage to take the initiative before. Maybe she had learned today that if she didn’t do what she wanted, no one else would make her wishes come true.

  “I guess it is,” she said.

  He laughed. “Who’d’ve thought—after a day like this—well, maybe dreams do come true.”

  “Max?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Muttering. I’d love dinner. I think I’m a little more sober now than I was before.”

  “I’ll pick you up,” she said. “In ten minutes.”

  She hung up before he could change his mind. And then she did a small dance around the office. Maybe some good would come of this after all. She smiled. How strange. She had met a magic man, and he had indirectly granted her two wishes—a date with Max and enough money to keep her law firm open.

  Be careful what you wish for. The voice belonged to her grandmother, her father’s mother, a kind old woman who had been raised in a strict Germanic community in the Midwest. Nora stopped dancing. The voice had come from her memory, hadn’t it?

  Be careful what you wish for, Norrie. You might not like it when it comes.

  Of course she would like it. How could anyone not like her dreams? She was simply being too cautious, unable to believe the strange luck that had visited her these last few days.

  She decided to leave the garage key in its place, and she promised herself she would check on the microbus once a month, just to earn her fee. And then she walked out of the office, heading toward dinner, heading toward Max, heading toward her future, and leaving this weird incident behind her. Maybe she could convince herself she’d gotten the money from mobsters too. Maybe, but not likely. First, that meant she’d sold out her vaunted ethics. Second, it would really complicate things with the garage.

  No. She would look on it as a strange side trip, a place where she had stepped into the twilight zone, where she had learned that her father’s dreams had a basis in fact.

  And that was enough for one life.

  Wasn’t it?

  Now

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  Nora hung up her cell phone and steered the Lexus that Max had bought her for their last anniversary across the Banfield bridge. Maybe she should trade the Lexus in on a new Volkswagen Bug. She had always liked those, and she had never had one of her own. The Lexus just wasn’t her, and it never had been. That was one of the many things Max had never understood.

  Besides, she hadn’t felt right driving the car since the divorce had turned so sour.

  Portland was beautiful this morning: clear blue skies over the equally blue river, the mountains in the background, and the city sparkling in the amazingly pure light. No matter what happened, she loved it here. She loved it enough to continue sharing the city with Max, no matter how ugly things got.

  She ran her hand over the phone’s receiver and frowned. She hadn’t been entirely honest with Ruthie. Ruthie, who had become her right hand, deserved to know why Nora was postponing her 9:00 a.m. with the head of the legal team for one of the largest athletic shoe manufacturers in the country, if not the world. The appointment had been on the books for weeks, and it had bothered Nora for weeks, even though she hadn’t admitted it to herself.

  And she would have gone to the meeting, too, if she hadn’t had the dream again last night.

  The dream was quite vivid and quite horrifying. She had been having it for ten years, ever since she had met that strangely beautiful man, Blackstone, and his even stranger companion, Sancho Panza or whatever his name was.

  The dream would begin as Nora awoke in a glass box, in semidarkness, confused and alone
, pressing her hands against the top and unable to get out. In the logic of dreams, there was a digital clock above her, giving the day and the time and the date. As she shoved on the glass top, trying to break the glass sides, trying to find a way to move within her narrow prison, the hours ticked by. Eventually she would gasp for air and wonder how long she had before she stopped breathing altogether.

  At that point, she would always wake up, coughing as if she really hadn’t gotten enough air and holding her pillow above her as if it had doubled for the glass coffin’s lid.

  In the early days of their relationship, Max hadn’t laughed at the dream. He had confessed to similar dreams himself, and he had always held her and comforted her. In those days, he had believed in magic. Sometimes sharing moments with him as simple as a sunset made her think of her father and his beliefs.

  But Max stopped talking about magic as time went on. As his fame grew, not just locally but statewide, and he began eyeing the careers of really famous defense attorneys like F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran, he seemed to lose any sympathy for the strange events that had brought them together.

  Fantasy doesn’t win cases, Nora, he would say. Talent, hard work, and clear-eyed perspective does.

  She believed in talent, hard work, and a clear-eyed perspective. She really did. But ever since that strange day ten years ago, she also believed in magic. The storybook kind.

  The head of legal for the shoe company would reschedule. After all, it was her expertise he was coming to see her for; she had developed several specialties, and one of them was suddenly of use to the company. If they needed her badly, they could wait. She certainly didn’t need them, not even with the divorce.

  As the Banfield left the river, she took the first exit in the Hollywood District. She had had to find a new garage; the old one had burned years ago, all but her rental, which was left standing in the middle of completely flattened devastation. The police—who were investigating the fire as an arson tied to insurance fraud—said they had never seen anything like it. It was as if, they said, that particular garage was shielded from the flames. There wasn’t even a charred stretch of paint.

  She had moved the microbus to a new garage owned by a reputable national company and had left it there for the past three years. In the past ten, she hadn’t seen or heard from Sancho or Blackstone. Max came home pale and shaken one afternoon about five years ago and said he had seen the not-dead woman in his courtroom, but when Nora asked him about that later, he denied it. He said he had only thought someone looked like the not-dead woman. Nora wasn’t so sure.

  Nora monitored her rear and side mirrors carefully as she went to the garage. She wasn’t being followed—at least, she wasn’t being followed by someone obvious. She drove into the garage and storage unit place, parked in front of her rental, and took a deep breath.

  Did she really believe dates and times she saw in dreams? Did she think that something was going to happen on this day at this time or was she here to destroy the last bit of belief she had? Max had done a good number on her. He was, in some ways, helping her reenact her parents’ relationship: she was the believer in magic, and Max was the one who wanted to destroy that. At the very last party they’d attended, before the very last screaming fight they’d ever had, he had told a colleague that in his first years of practice, the largest payoff he’d ever had was for getting a mobster out of jail before the man had ever been charged.

  The colleague had frowned as if he had known Max was lying and said, “A mobster? In Portland?” and then walked to the other side of the room. Nora had seen that as a small victory. But she still couldn’t believe that Max had bothered to tell the story, even though he had once warned her that was how he chose to remember things.

  Nora hadn’t confronted Max in person, but she had on the way home. She had asked him about the magic, about the fires, about the ruined neighborhood, about the not-dead woman, for heaven’s sake, and he had an explanation for all of them. There is no such thing as magic, he had said. There were no fires. I never saw the neighborhood you talk about, and the woman was merely riding in the ambulance.

  Nora found she couldn’t argue with such intense denial, and she finally admitted what she had been denying herself: the marriage didn’t work. It hadn’t really worked from the beginning. They had been too shy with each other. He had been too ambitious, for himself and for her. She didn’t live up to his idea of what a good defense lawyer’s wife should be. And so on and so on. She had suggested irreconcilable differences and thought the divorce would be easy.

  Of course she was wrong. Two attorneys couldn’t order a pizza without filing several briefs; they certainly couldn’t let something like a divorce occur without some sort of legal warfare.

  She glanced at her watch. It was 8:50 a.m. She had used the Internet that morning, checked Greenwich Mean Time, and done the math so that her watch was on Pacific Daylight Time to the second. Somehow she had felt that to be important.

  As she got out of the Lexus, she looked around. The storage and garage units were simple structures with rippled metal doors and relatively thin walls, mostly built for holding things, but not for keeping them in any kind of good condition. There were no other cars parked on the asphalt near hers, and the office was far enough away that no one could see her. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

  She took the key out of her pocket and unlocked the padlock holding the gate shut. She hung the lock in one of the holders and pulled the door open.

  The garage looked just like she’d left it: the microbus parked haphazardly in the space. The tires were low, and the entire front end was covered in dust. She remembered the drive from several years ago; years in storage had left the interior with a thousand spiderwebs, and she had brushed them off as she had driven, wondering what weighed the thing down in back and made it corner so poorly, and vowing, yet again, not to find out.

  She went inside. Her heart was pounding. She had promised herself that she would never look in the back of this thing, and she was breaking that promise this morning. She was even dressed for it, in frayed denim jeans and one of Max’s ratty University of Oregon sweatshirts. She pushed up the sleeves and grabbed the rusted handle on the microbus’s back end.

  For a moment, she thought the handle wasn’t going to turn. Then it did, with a creak that sounded like the squeal of bad brakes. The door popped open, and surprisingly the dome light went on, faint, but somehow comforting.

  She glanced at her watch. It was 8:55 a.m.

  The floor and walls and ceiling were carpeted in brown and orange shag—a detail that hadn’t been in her dream—and in the very center of that was a glass coffin. It wasn’t clear glass, like she had thought it would be, but frosted glass, or glass that was so very old that moisture had gotten into its layers.

  On top of the coffin was an envelope with Quixotic Inc. in the upper left-hand corner. She remembered the ornate logo as if she had just seen it the day before. But the envelope had been there a long time. The tape holding it in place was brown and brittle. In familiar flowing script below the logo were the words, Read Me.

  She felt as if she had stepped into Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Maybe if she pushed hard enough she would find herself in another world, with a bottle that said Drink Me and a talking cat that dispensed advice.

  It was 8:56. She was running out of time. If Nora’s dreams were right—and who was to say they weren’t—the girl in the coffin would wake at precisely 9:00 a.m.

  Nora ripped the envelope off the top of the coffin. She slid an unpainted fingernail behind the flap and pulled out the paper inside.

  Nora Barr: If you are reading this before 9:00 a.m. on July 15, ten years to the day from the moment we met, the paper read, then things have gone according to plan. You must follow the enclosed instructions precisely. A life is at stake.

  It was signed, quite simply, Sancho.

  She felt a small wave of disappointment at that. When she had seen the envelop
e, she had somehow thought it was from Blackstone.

  She turned the page. On this second page, the handwriting was completely different, not ornate at all. It was full of angles and slashes and had an almost artistic look to it. The paper was yellowed, and after a moment, she realized that the instructions were written in India ink, faded, and almost illegible. The signature at the bottom of this page was as familiar as her own, even though she had only seen this signature once before:

  Aethelstan Blackstone.

  Nora glanced at her watch. It was 8:58 a.m. She scanned the instructions. They read like gibberish to her. But she would do as they said.

  She had come this far.

  She stuffed the paper into the back pocket of her jeans and climbed inside the bumper of the microbus. There she sat on the wheel well, staring at the glow-in-the-dark digital readout on her watch.

  At 9:00 a.m. precisely, she took a deep breath and gripped the lid of the coffin. And yanked.

  It didn’t come up, of course. It had been closed for a thousand years. It didn’t even budge. She felt her heart’s pounding move into her throat. If she didn’t get this open, then the girl might die, and then what? Then she really would have problems with a possible murder, although she had no idea how she would explain it to the police.

  But Max would find a creative way to do it.

  Max.

  She shook her head. Max was a defense attorney. If things got that bad, she just might have to hire the bastard.

  The thought made her try harder, and the lid moved. She felt an answering pressure from inside, thought she saw movement through the glass, and that gave her an adrenaline burst.

  The lid groaned as it moved sideways. A small hand came through the opening, and inside a woman started yelling.

  “I’m here to help you,” Nora said, hoping that the yelling would stop. The last thing she needed was some Portlander stopping by his storage unit, hearing screams, and coming to investigate. How could she explain the ancient VW, the glass coffin, and the living woman inside?