“And then…?” I prompted.
Dark eyes met mine. “You know what I’ve told you about ongoing police investigations.”
Of course. Still, I wouldn’t be dissuaded that easily. “Okay, you don’t have to tell me outright. Just blink once if I’m right.”
“Selena, this isn’t junior high.”
I refused to be offended. “I know. But you wouldn’t have this piece of evidence at all if it weren’t for my help, so can’t you give me just a little bit?”
An unwilling chuckle escaped his lips. “You’re very persistent, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “It’s just…I want to know what happened. No, I need to know what happened, because otherwise, everyone’s going to keep on thinking that I had something to do with Lucien’s murder even if you don’t have enough evidence to charge me. And that’s no way to start a new life in a new town.”
“Well, that’s true.” Calvin’s expression was almost sympathetic. He hesitated a moment before saying, “After I check the medallion for fingerprints, I’m going to talk to Athene Kappas again. Whether or not she’ll give me any actionable information is, of course, up to her. Is that enough for you?”
I supposed it would have to be. As easygoing as Calvin was being right now, I doubted he’d let me do a ride-along on that particular interview. “It is for now,” I replied, and he chuckled again.
“All right, you do have a vested interest in all this. I get it.”
“And you don’t think I’m guilty?”
His gaze caught mine and held. A little shiver went through me, the kind of pleasant thrill I might get from touching a nicely charged crystal.
Actually, it was way more than that. I just didn’t know whether he felt any of the same things I did.
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think you are.”
It turned out that I really didn’t need Calvin to give me the skinny on what was going on, not when I had Josie Woodrow on my side.
She rang the buzzer for the back entrance off the shop, since it was Sunday and the store was closed. I hurried down the stairs, wondering who could be calling and inwardly hoping it was Calvin Standingbear.
No such luck…but a little gossip with Josie wasn’t a bad second place.
I asked her if she wanted some iced tea, and of course, she accepted. Glass in hand, she settled on my couch, eyes alight with anticipation.
“I talked to Betsy, my friend with the Airbnb,” she told me in confidential tones. “It seems the woman staying there left this morning.”
“‘Left’?” I repeated. “But I thought Calvin Standingbear told her she had to stay in town.”
Josie didn’t exactly say, “aha!”, but an air of triumph about her after hearing that news told me I’d just dropped a piece of important information. Damn it. One problem with being a Gemini — you tended to run at the mouth.
“Well, she’s gone,” Josie said. “Betsy said the place was a mess, too — towels on the floor in the bathroom, half the bedclothes on the floor as well, sink full of dishes. And she said it stank so much of incense, she wasn’t sure whether she was ever going to get the smell out of the upholstery.”
I hoped Betsy had gotten a hefty deposit from Lucien and Athene. Somehow, I guessed she probably wouldn’t have any other way of covering her cleaning costs. Which led me to wonder who — if anyone — he’d designated as the heir to his not-inconsiderable fortune. He didn’t have any children, but his parents were still alive. And I knew he had a younger brother named Eugene, who’d followed in their father’s footsteps and was a dentist of some sort, although I didn’t know much more than that. I’d gotten the impression he wasn’t much involved in Lucien’s life, which I supposed was understandable.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” I said. “I suppose if Athene left in a hurry, that would explain the mess, but still.”
Josie sipped some of her iced tea. “It may explain it, but it certainly doesn’t excuse it. Betsy has her cleaning gal over there now, so I hope she can get the place straightened up without too much trouble. But where do you think she could have gone?” she went on, barely stopping to take a breath before changing the subject.
I had to guess that the “she” in Josie’s question wasn’t a reference to Betsy’s cleaning lady. “I have no idea. I mean, she didn’t have access to Lucien’s car, but I suppose she could have called Travis Cox to give her a ride somewhere.”
That suggestion made her eyes light up. “You know, that’s exactly it. We should call Calvin to let him know he should question Travis!”
“I’m pretty sure Calvin can figure that out for himself,” I responded. While he’d been friendly enough during our meeting earlier that morning, he’d also given me the impression that he wouldn’t appreciate too much more interference on my part. “In fact, since he said he was going to talk to her again this morning, it’s probably a pretty safe bet that he’s already discovered she’s missing and has put two and two together.”
“Was there a particular reason why he wanted to talk to her again so soon?”
There, I hesitated. I could have tried to tell myself I was only having a cozy gossip with a friend, but at the bottom of it all, this was still a very fresh murder investigation. The irritation Calvin had showed earlier over my attempts to get more information told me all I needed to know about how he’d feel if I started spreading every detail of the inquiry all over town.
“Oh, I think he probably just wanted to go over a few things. She’s his only lead, after all.”
This reply seemed to satisfy Josie, because she nodded and drank some more iced tea. Then she said, “Well, this Athene person is going to stick out like a sore thumb here in Globe. I’m sure someone will spot her soon enough.”
Normally, I would have agreed with Josie’s rosy outlook on the situation. I knew how cagey Athene could be, however, and so I had no way of knowing if she’d simply decided to relocate to another Airbnb or hotel in town, or whether she really had gotten Travis to drive her to the airport.
No, strike that. I had lots of ways of finding out things — none of which I could employ while Josie Woodrow was hanging out in my apartment.
“Probably,” I said. “Luckily, she’s Calvin’s problem, not mine.”
Those words made Josie tilt her head and give me a curious look. “Are you sure of that? Because if she’s really a murderer…and the jealous type….”
I knew I had to cut off that line of thinking before she allowed it to go any further. “Athene Kappas is not the jealous type,” I said. “I maybe could see her killing Lucien over a business disagreement or something like that, but she wouldn’t have cared if there was anything going on between him and another woman. In fact, there were things going on between him and plenty of other women, come to think of it.”
“Playboy type,” Josie remarked, disapproval clear in her voice. “I can’t see why. Betsy said he wasn’t an attractive man at all.”
No, feature for feature, he wasn’t. Since I’d been immune to his particular brand of charm, I could see why Josie’s friend would have made such an observation about him. I shrugged and drank some of my iced tea. “For some people, it’s about power and money, not looks.”
The “hmph” sound Josie made told me all I needed to know about her opinion on the subject. I had to agree with her. Or rather, a man’s personality and looks in combination were what I found attractive, not how much money he had or his influence over other people.
And although I’d done my best not to think about him, I couldn’t quite keep my thoughts from straying to Calvin Standingbear, to the beautifully secluded property he called home. Not so long ago, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see the charm in a place so perfectly suited to both its landscape and the man who lived there, but once I’d seen Calvin at home, I honestly couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He seemed one with the place, comfortable with where he was in the world.
Was there anything mo
re attractive than that?
“Anyway,” I went on, pushing aside the image of him leaning up against the counter in his kitchen, the flash of the moon-phase tattoo on his forearm as he lifted his mug of Lemon Zinger to take a sip, “none of us knows for sure if Athene is the only suspect. Besides me,” I added, as Josie’s eyebrow took on a tilt and she looked as though she was about to protest.
“Oh, you’re not really a suspect,” she said, voice firm with conviction. “Anyone can see you’re not capable of such a thing. I’m sure Calvin only considered you at all because you’re the only person here in town who knew the victim.”
Since he’d said basically the same thing to me already, I just nodded. “I hope he can find Athene. I’m not sure what she was thinking — taking off like this only makes her look more guilty.”
To my surprise, Josie looked almost sympathetic. “She was probably feeling desperate. Alone in a strange town, the man who was her business partner murdered…I have a feeling she couldn’t have been thinking straight.”
If it had been anyone else, I might have agreed. However, Athene Kappas seemed like one of the last people who would lose her cool like that. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle her.
“I hope that’s all it is,” I said, and decided to leave it there. After all, we could spend the entire afternoon speculating and wouldn’t be any closer to the truth.
Josie seemed to realize I didn’t have much more to say on the topic, because she excused herself a few minutes later, saying she had a pre-listing inspection she needed to do. I walked her to the front of the apartment and said goodbye, then closed the door behind her while I released a silent sigh of relief.
Now I could get to work.
10
On the Ball
Archie was asleep in his bed when I entered the office. He cracked an eyelid as I made my way over to the table that held my altar, but didn’t seem otherwise inclined to pay much attention to what I was doing.
Good. I could work with an audience, but I preferred not to.
Because the pendulum had worked so well for me when I was looking for evidence along the San Ramon River, I figured I’d go ahead and start there. If that didn’t work, there were my Tarot cards, or my rune stones. If neither of those provided any illumination, then I’d have to bring in the big guns, but I had to hope I wouldn’t be pushed to that resort.
I went to the closet and got out the pendulum cloth I used for this sort of work, then lifted a clear quartz pendulum from inside the carved box where I normally kept it. For a moment, I stood there quietly, letting it dangle from my hand as I adjusted my energies from the level required for gossiping with a friend to what I needed in order to pursue a slightly more esoteric goal.
Next, to fix my intentions. I wasn’t trying to hunt down Athene Kappas to bring her to justice. That was Calvin’s job, not mine…if she was even guilty in the first place. No, what I really wanted to know was whether any harm had come to her, or whether she was even still in Globe at all.
Show me Athene, I thought. Not literally, of course; a pendulum wouldn’t grant me any visions. But it could spell out clues that would guide me to her.
For a second or two, the pendulum hung straight down, without even a hint of any movement. Then it began to swing in a circle, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it became almost a blur.
I’d never seen it do that before. In fact, I had to reach out and grab the thing before it tore itself from my hand and went flying across the room.
What in the world…?
All right, maybe the pendulum hadn’t been the best choice for this particular quest.
I secured it in its box, then reached for another box, the one that held my two favorite decks of Tarot cards. For this particular question, which required a bit of far-seeing, I thought the crow deck was probably my best choice.
Holding the words, Show me Athene, once again in my mind, I pulled a card from the deck.
The Queen of Swords, reversed.
Well, maybe I was being a bit too literal. Or rather, the cards were, since the Queen of Swords in the upside-down position could refer to a woman who seemed cold-hearted and — dare I say it? — bitchy, both words I’d used to mentally describe the woman in question.
I shuffled the deck again, asking it to show me where Athene had gone. The next two cards were the two of cups and the four of wands, neither of which seemed applicable to the current situation.
Maybe I should try my moon deck.
However, when it turned up the Queen of Swords once again, I guessed that the Tarot just wasn’t operating on the correct wavelength for me.
I slid both decks into their protective bags and returned them to their box. Next to it stood my crystal ball, resting on the pretty stand of four crescent moons that I’d bought on Etsy a while back.
Looked like it was time to bring in the big guns, since I had a feeling my rune stones wouldn’t be any more helpful than the pendulum and the Tarot cards had proved to be.
Reluctantly, I reached for the ball and pulled it closer to where I stood. Its surface was cool against my fingertips, and I made myself take a breath.
I wasn’t a medium, wasn’t someone who communed with the dead. What I was about to do was subtly different…but that difference mattered.
Calling on one’s ancestors for guidance has always been a big part of witchcraft going back centuries, if even longer than that. I never knew my maternal grandmother, because she died of breast cancer when my mother was only twenty, three years before she even had me. But when I first picked up my crystal ball and laid my hands on it, asking for guidance from the spirit world, it had been Ellen Marx staring back at me from within the crystal.
Actually, at first I hadn’t even realized it was her, because the face of the woman who’d reached out to make that connection looked just as young as mine, and most of the pictures I’d seen of her had been when she was in her thirties and forties, raising her young daughter alone after her husband — my grandfather — walked out. It had always seemed grossly unfair to me that she’d gone through so much, only to lose her life to cancer before she was even fifty years old, but she didn’t seem too bitter about it.
Most of the time, I tried my best to get the answers I needed through other means of divination. I hadn’t seen the need to reach out to Grandma Ellen when making the decision to move to Globe, since the pendulum and the Tarot cards had made it pretty damn clear where I was supposed to go.
This time, though, I thought I needed some extra help. I didn’t know what force was clouding Athene’s location, but I didn’t seem able to break through that veil on my own.
The blue eyes looking out at me from within the crystal ball were almost identical to my own. All three generations of Marx women had those same eyes, although my hair was much darker, thanks to the genes I’d inherited from my father, a guitarist in a failed hair band that my mother had hooked up with back in the early ’90s.
“You moved,” my grandmother said, her tone almost but not quite accusing.
“I thought it was time for a change of pace.”
Her tawny brows lifted, although she refrained from commenting. I never could tell exactly how much she knew of what was going on in my life — or in my head — although it seemed obvious to me that she caught enough to know about any major life changes. “What do you need, Selena?”
As usual, there was something almost impatient about her manner, as if she had a packed schedule in the afterlife and kept getting dragged away from it by my constant interruptions. Maybe she did. She never told me much about what she did with her time when she wasn’t hanging out in the crystal ball and dispensing bits of advice, so far all I knew, she spent her days lying poolside while heavenly cabana boys brought her mai tais or something.
“I’m trying to find someone,” I said. “Her name is Athene Kappas. She was Lucien Dumond’s business partner.”
A flicker of distaste flared in my grandmother’s eyes. “Oh, h
e’s a nasty piece of work. Odd that he didn’t get immediately recycled.”
Her term for people being sent back to Earth to live another life. I didn’t know why my grandmother had been allowed to stay in the afterlife — or the summerlands, if you wanted to use the ancient phrase — rather than being sent back to live all over again. I supposed it was possible that she’d reached the end of her karmic journey, and was now allowed to stay in her version of heaven and dispense advice.
“Is he up there?” I asked next. I tended to think of the summerlands as “up,” although directions as mortals thought of them really weren’t a thing when it came to describing the etheric planes. And it seemed strange to me that Lucien would be hanging around there when I doubted he was anywhere close to the end of his travels on the wheel of existence.
A pause, and then Grandma Ellen said, “No. At least, I didn’t sense him come through. I suppose I could have missed it. I see a lot, but I don’t see everything.”
“Well, here’s hoping he evolves a bit on the next go-’round, whenever that is,” I said lightly. “Anyway, Athene and I are the main suspects in his murder, and now that she’s missing — ”
“Why would anyone suspect you of murdering Lucien Dumond?” Grandma Ellen broke in. “You’re the kind of person who puts spiders out rather than kill them.”
True enough. I wouldn’t say there weren’t a few times when I’d been sorely tempted to squish a particularly scary specimen, but I’d told myself to be brave and let the spider carry on…just not in my bedroom or my shower. Yet another downside to being in a place where no one knew me very well. Back in L.A., I probably would have had plenty of people who could vouch for my pacifist nature.
“Lucien and I had an argument that was overheard,” I said briefly. “It’s all right, though — the police chief doesn’t think I did it. But we need to talk to Athene and find out what she’s hiding.”
“Hmm,” my grandmother said, and frowned. Her eyes closed, showing off her thick eyelashes — lashes I’d also inherited. It was always odd to look at her youthful face and see much of myself in her — the oval face and full mouth, the just slightly longish nose — but at the same time, it was easier to recognize those attributes because I was looking at a face that didn’t seem any older than mine.
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