“That she is. So if it’s not actually a kite?”
Mark examined the journal more closely. He was doing the squinting thing. “Maybe a bat?”
“Must be a pretty big bat,” I sneered. “Otherwise, you’d need a whole bunch of them to do much damage. Besides – witches and bats? May as well throw in a pointy black hat. I don’t see Penelope spending much time on a cliché like that. There’s got to be something bigger going on here.”
♦
Edgar was getting stronger every day. I exercised his wing for him, extending it and flexing it to help increase his muscle tone. He seemed to like the attention and chattered to me as we worked. When our sessions were finished, Edgar would spread his wings and shake out his feathers, then preen them into a shining cloak.
One morning at breakfast, Edgar glided from his manzanita perch to the balcony rail. I rose to rescue him, afraid he would fall to the courtyard below.
“Leave him alone, Maggie,” John said.
“But...”
“He’s a bird. Let him do what birds do.”
John was right, of course, but I could barely stand to watch as Edgar spread his wings to feel the breeze. The edges of his feathers ruffled in the updraft.
And then he was gone. Edgar hunched down on his legs and used them as springs to propel himself out into the air. He disappeared below the balcony.
John and I were both on our feet in an instant, hoping against hope that we wouldn’t see his crumpled body on the pavement far below. But as we reached the railing, Edgar shot straight up in the air, inches from our faces. He was flying.
We watched him take a victory lap around the courtyard before he came back to perch in the manzanita branch.
“This must be what it feels like to send your kid off to kindergarten,” I said to John. I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. The family that John and I had planned for so long would never happen now. Embarrassed, I turned back to Edgar.
“Good bird!” I said, but Edgar was already asleep with his head tucked under his wing.
♦
I couldn’t guarantee that Mark would always be around to solve the puzzle ball quickly. I needed a shortcut.
I explained the problem to my aunt Daisy, who cheerfully agreed to pitch in. Daisy and I started with my grandmother’s spellbook. Marie-Eglise was born in Louisiana, but she was steeped in European magical tradition from her Huguenot ancestors. There was a lot of good stuff in there if you didn’t mind a little old-school wing of bat, eye of newt.
We found what we wanted in, of all things, a spell to untangle a loom. It was, apparently, a serious problem in the late Middle Ages. The spell was simple enough: it called on each layer of the work to align itself with the heddle, whatever that was.
We worked out a simple rhyme, easily remembered. Daisy made me learn it backward and forwards until I could recite it from memory.
We decided to test our new spell on a scale model. I went looking for the slotted cat ball that Orion had brought for Edgar and found it stashed under the mattress in Frank’s bed behind the front counter. The war continues, I guess.
Somewhere in the storeroom, I had some leftover Styrofoam balls that I’d used to make holiday decorations a few years ago. I found them in the back of an unlabeled file drawer.
Meanwhile, Daisy had pried the cat toy apart, and its two halves lay open on the oak table. I slipped one of the Styrofoam balls inside and snapped the ball back together again.
A half-inch hole at each pole pierced the cat toy, and I used a pencil to punch through into the Styrofoam inside to make a corresponding hole on each end. Daisy shook the cat toy until two sets of holes were no longer aligned.
“Shall we?” I asked tentatively.
“This is your project,” Daisy said with a smile. “Be my guest.”
I held the cat toy in the palm of my hand and recited our little rhyme. There was a scratching noise as the Styrofoam ball rotated to align its holes with the cat toy again.
Daisy and I grinned at each other like Cheshire cats.
On to the main event. I popped down to the vault and brought Emil Portiere’s dragon puzzle ball up to the oak table.
This puzzle was far more complicated than our scale model, but we hoped that the principles held true. For safety, we recited the rhyme together while I held the ball cupped in my hands. It wouldn’t do to drop the thing if it started moving too vigorously.
For a moment, there was no reaction. Then, just as with the Styrofoam test ball, we heard a subtle grinding noise inside the puzzle as the concentric layers began to move.
The holes that ran between the outer surface of the puzzle ball and the layer immediately beneath it were the first to line up. Daisy reached for a chopstick, but before she could drop it in, the layer below that one snapped into place. The core glowed violet.
The dragons carved into the surface of the puzzle ball began to writhe.
I met Daisy’s eyes – but before I could act on the panic that engulfed me, Daisy repeated the words of the spell backward at a speed I would not have thought possible.
The dragons were still.
Daisy smiled softly to herself. “I think I could use a nice cup of tea now, mon trésor,” Daisy said.
♦
Daisy waited until my hands stopped shaking before she handed me a china teacup and saucer. Emil Portiere’s dragon puzzle ball was safely back in the vault, with yet one more protection spell tucking it in.
“And what did we learn?” Daisy asked.
“Not to play with dragon puzzle balls,” I answered.
She gave me a look I remembered from my childhood whenever I slacked off in her herbal medicine lessons. “You’re a scientist. Think physics.”
I tried again. “I still don’t understand the underlying magic, but I think those holes in the puzzle ball behave like the control rods in a nuclear reactor. As the holes align, the energy of the puzzle ball expands geometrically.”
Daisy beamed. “You get a gold star. And if they are all suddenly aligned at once?”
I followed her analogy. When all the rods are pulled from a nuclear reactor at once…
I felt the color drain from my face. “Meltdown,” I whispered.
♦
“What if Emil wasn’t killed for the dragon puzzle?” Mark asked when he showed up at Pentacle Pawn unannounced the next evening.
I shook my head. “Of course he was.”
“I’m not so sure,” Mark said. “It’s not just finders keepers. Using the dragon puzzle, either as a binder or a finder, requires specific knowledge and skills, right?” He tapped the cover of Violet’s red journal. “To have the full power of the puzzle, you need to have both the physical object and the instruction book.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “And not just have them, but own them. You need to be the legitimate owner to invoke the puzzle, and you’d want to keep the book close by while you learned all the nuances.” I told him about Daisy’s nuclear reactor analogy.
Mark was nodding along now. “You sure wouldn’t want to be guessing about something this powerful while you worked out the kinks.”
I remembered that horrible bruised-looking violet aura that emanated from the large puzzle the first time I tried to examine it. “That’s for sure. So that helps us narrow down our list of suspects.”
Mark shot me a sly grin. “What are you – Sherlock Holmes, now?”
The look I gave him let him know I didn’t much appreciate the teasing. “Somebody literally laid this problem at my doorstep. If you hadn’t moved Emil’s body back to his house, we might’ve had to deal with the police on the premises.” We both thought for a moment about the ramifications that would’ve had. “Somebody was pretty determined to get us involved.”
Mark leafed through the worn pages of the journal. “And that same somebody would have had to have known about Violet’s books. This is someone who has been involved with Emil’s family for a long time.” He looked up at
me. “Who referred Emil Portiere to you?”
“It was one of those friend-of-a-friend things. The call came from the Paris shop, but if I’m remembering this right, Adele didn’t actually know him. The reference came at the request of a straw buyer she trusted. It was somebody she’d worked with before, so she thought it was okay.”
“So nobody you trust actually had eyes on this guy before he showed up at your door to sell you the puzzle?”
Chapter Eight
John finally found the connection. He barely let me get my shoes off when I got home that morning before he summoned me to the computer.
On the screen was the web page for the local newspaper, opened to the society pages. “I found your friend Emil,” John said, pointing, “and look who he’s with.”
At first, I didn’t see it. The screen was filled with pictures from various charity events over the last year. Almost all of the photos showed lines of wealthy people, grinning into the camera. Sometimes they wore designer gowns and tuxes; other times they were decked out in cowboy boots – the men and the women – and laden with antique silver and turquoise Navajo jewelry.
A few of the pictures were action shots of people eating barbecue or filet mignon, or dancing to an orchestra or a country band. I focused on the picture in the center.
“That looks like your guy Emil,” John said, “doesn’t it?”
He flipped over to another screen, and I saw Emil’s obituary. The photo was flattering, but it was at least 20 years old. Still, I saw the likeness.
John went back to the page with the charity events, and I took a closer look at the couple dancing in the center picture.
“Good for you!” I said. “You got him. How did you do that?”
John looked smug. “Facial recognition software. There’s an online app. Once I had his headshot, it was easy.”
I blew him a kiss.
“There’s more. Want to see them?”
John had apparently spent some time preparing this little presentation. He closed the windows for the charity events and Emil’s obituary. Underneath them was a third screen of images.
“These are the matches that the facial recognition found. Your friend Emil liked having his picture taken.”
This screen showed more pictures of charity balls and barbecues. John moved out of the desk chair, and I slid in. I looked at each image, one by one, looking to see who Emil was with at each event.
It didn’t take long for me to see the pattern. Emil, a lifelong bachelor, had formed an alliance with another socialite so he’d never have to go stag. In the majority of the shots, he had a stunning blonde on his arm.
His steady date was Penelope Silver.
♦
My involvement with Emil Portiere’s dragon puzzle ball came to an abrupt halt when my anonymous European buyer finally came through. I was equal parts relieved and troubled when the proxy called me and agreed to pay full price.
I called Portiere’s lawyer and gave him the good news. I was happy when he offered to handle the escrow for the transaction for Emil’s estate. I trusted him: he was not just a lawyer, but a long-time client of Pentacle Pawn with formidable magical skills of his own.
Still, sending that puzzle ball back out into the world worried me. In the wrong hands, it could cause devastation. I put an extra ward on it before Barry and Mark delivered it to the lawyer, hoping the ball would behave itself at least until it was out of my custody.
Now, all I had to do was find a new home for Violet's puzzle ball and spellbooks, and this whole mess would be over.
♦
It turns out, my fear was justified. Twenty-four hours later, the lawyer was on the phone.
“Ms. Flournoy,” the lawyer said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.” He sounded shaken.
My heart sank. “What happened?”
“My courier was intercepted on the way to the airport. I’m sorry to say: Mr. Portiere’s puzzle ball is gone.”
♦
So was Penelope.
There was a text message on my phone when I got up the next morning: Latte. 11:00. You’re buying.
“Your friend Penelope has been a very busy girl,” Jim said as I slid into the seat across from him.
Jim made some quiet inquiries through official channels and came up with some disturbing information. The proxy I had been dealing with was legit, but the anonymous European collector who was funding the sale didn’t exist. Jim managed to follow the money to a numbered account in the Caymans. The transaction was never completed, so the money had never been withdrawn. It was a dead end.
Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been the end of the trail. But these circumstances were far from normal, so Jim called in a favor. His source, an old friend who had retired to the islands to study indigenous Caribbean magic, worked in bank security. It didn’t take long to get a photo of the account holder from the morning that the account was opened.
Jim unlocked his tablet and showed me the photo. Penelope was grinning as she waved up at the hidden camera.
I suddenly understood how Emil had managed to get his invitation to Pentacle Pawn in the first place. If Penelope had been able to pressure Violet into luring him to be murdered in front of my door, it would have been a simple matter for her to get Emil’s sister to contact Penelope’s European proxy and request a referral. I should’ve seen it sooner.
“I’m afraid there’s more,” Jim said. “I’ve been looking at her for another suspicious death.”
This couldn’t be good.
“We believe that Penelope stole an Egyptian ossuary from a Spanish antiquities dealer,” Jim said. “She grabbed it in transit, just like she did the dragon puzzle. He was found dead in a pool cabana up at one of the big resorts. The coroner ruled it a heart attack. Happens all the time: tourists not used to the heat, too much sun, not enough liquids. But the coroner doesn’t know what we know. Penelope has killed this way before.”
I thought about Deborah Carter, murdered with a heart-stopping spell because Penelope wanted her blue amber necklace and the spellbook that controlled it. I thought about my neighbor Bop, drowned in the canal near a building, her heart stopped as she entered the water because Penelope mistook her for me. And I thought about how close I had come to being Penelope’s victim, too.
“Why did she want the ossuary?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the question. It was found in her room at the hotel when the maid came to make up the room the next morning.” Jim pulled out his tablet and showed me a photo of the inside of the hotel room.
It was an expensive room, nicely decorated, but what caught my eye was the small stone box sitting at the end of the bed like an ottoman. It had to weigh several hundred pounds; my first thought was to wonder how on earth Penelope had moved around. The answer, of course, was magic.
The lid of the ossuary was on the floor beside it. Inside the ossuary were bones, of course, and some scraps of ancient fabric. But Penelope had pulled anything that looked human out of the ossuary and dropped it on the floor.
“What on earth?” I asked.
“I contacted the dealer in Mozambique who brokered the sale to the Spaniard,” Jim said. “As part of the terms of the sale, the broker had paid a local archaeologist to do a full inventory of the ossuary. It’s not what was in there that’s interesting; it’s what’s missing.”
Jim took his tablet back and loaded more photographs. I saw the ossuary as it had originally been packed. The priestess had been buried with all her finery. Subsequent photographs show the box emptying as the archaeologists removed layers of artifacts.
What Penelope wanted was at the very bottom of the small stone casket: the knob end of an enormous animal bone. It was Lissa’s wedding present.
♦
Ossuaries, archaeologists, an ancient Egyptian priestess – I was in way over my head here, but I knew exactly who to call.
Clayton Coyote had flown in for Lissa and Orion’s wedding, but I was pretty sure he was s
till in town. Clayton wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to turn a social visit into a business trip, if he could manage it. With one or two phone calls, he’d be able to find an easy mark among the rich and famous up in the big houses on the hill.
Clayton had used his somewhat vague Native American heritage and his artistic talents to build himself a solid provenance with the international art community. He capitalized on the European fascination with the American West, and he had been celebrated in the best houses in the EU. If a few of their treasures managed to walk out the door in his suitcase, well, he figured that was just the price of his esteemed company.
Jim sent me a copy of the archaeologist’s report, and I forwarded it to Clayton. He phoned me back in minutes.
“Middle Kingdom – very nice,” he said without the preamble. “What’s up?”
I gave him the short version.
“So all she stole was that bone?” Clayton asked. “Incredible.” I could almost hear him totaling up the value of the ossuary contents in his head.
“Any idea why?” I asked. “What’s so special about that bone?”
“That’s easy,” Clayton said. “It’s magic.”
I explained to him that it most certainly was not; Mark and I had both checked it.
“No, not real magic,” Clayton said. “It was most likely some kind of prop. You know that Egyptian priests and priestesses were the forerunners of our modern stage magicians, right?”
I’d heard those tales. There’s even verification, of sorts, in the book of Exodus when Pharaoh’s wise men and sorcerers turn their staffs into snakes. “So?”
“So, magic has to be believable,” Clayton answered. “It only works if the audience believes the underlying story. Every culture has myths about monsters. How else do you explain those gigantic bones you find up in the cliffs? If you’re living in ancient China, you’ve never seen a dinosaur so you assume a dragon. I have no idea what that Egyptian priestess conjured with her bone, but I bet it was a pretty good trick.”
“So why does Penelope want that bone, if it’s just a stage prop?” I asked.
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