A Vision in Velvet: A Witchcraft Mystery

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Sewing false labels into dresses constitutes fraud.”

  “They’re not false! They’re real labels!”

  “I mean, sewing a label into a dress where it doesn’t belong. . . . That’s a crime.”

  “But you could make a load of money.”

  “I can’t make money by fooling people into thinking their dresses are something they aren’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I meant to say I won’t.”

  “I don’t see the problem. Your customers’ll think they’ve got a collector’s item for a great deal, and you make buckets of cash. Everybody wins.”

  While I pondered how to explain this to my morally dubious familiar, I studied the labels more closely. As far as I could tell, they appeared to be genuine and had probably been removed from unwearable clothing or minor items such as scarves. I was no expert, but I’d learned a lot about vintage clothing since I’d been in the business. These labels belonged to garments that were well out of my league. Not only were originals hard to come by and extremely expensive, but they required a level of care I simply could not provide. I might see the occasional Chanel or Oscar de la Renta come through my doors, but nothing like a Madame Grès. That was museum-quality stuff.

  “You don’t like my present,” Oscar grumbled.

  “I love that you thought to give me a present, Oscar. It’s just . . . it concerns me that it’s possible to buy designer labels on the Internet. That could lead to some serious vintage clothing fraud. But thank you so much for thinking of me on your birthday. And happy birthday!”

  He picked at his scaly claws, clearly offended.

  “Wait a minute—you know what occurs to me?”

  Oscar shrugged, still grumpy.

  “It occurs to me that a birthday requires a birthday cake. How about it? Chocolate cake with coconut icing?” Oscar had been on a coconut kick ever since we had watched Cast Away during an impromptu Tom Hanks film festival with Maya and Bronwyn one night after closing.

  I didn’t have to ask twice. Like Bronwyn, my familiar couldn’t hold a grudge. Not if there was food involved.

  “Real coconut? Not from a package?” He leaped up to perch on the kitchen counter. It was a bad habit I’d tried to break him of—like standing on the stove while he cooked, apparently impervious to the heat—but needless to say, I’d failed in my attempts.

  “Is there any other kind?”

  “Oh, and, mistress? Another thing.”

  “Yes, Oscar?”

  “Don’t forget you’re taking the GED on Saturday.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “It’s just that you kept forgetting to register, remember? So I thought I should remind you.”

  “Thank you. I haven’t forgotten.” How could I? My friends, and Oscar, were practically hounding me about the subject. All because a fit of absentmindedness had led me to miss the exam once. And I had forgotten to register for the next one until it was almost too late.

  They knew the truth: I didn’t want to take it. I was afraid of algebra.

  Fortunately, I had no such fear of cooking. I brought down my old battered tin canisters of organic flour and cocoa from a high shelf and took out some whole milk in the old-fashioned glass bottle and a couple of brown eggs I’d bought at the farmers’ market.

  “Want me to drive you to the test?” Oscar asked.

  “No.” I mixed the dry ingredients, then combined them in a large mixing bowl with the milk and eggs and turned on the mixer, enjoying the old machine’s familiar cranking sound. “Wait. You know how to drive?”

  “’Course I know how to drive! I just had a birthday. I’m no kid.” Oscar stuck one long bony finger into the batter and brought a chocolate dollop to his mouth.

  “But—”

  Suddenly my heart sped up, I could hear pounding in my ears, and I smelled roses. Not long ago, I might have been afraid I was experiencing a seizure of some kind. But I now knew the signs: a certain sexy, grumpy psychic named Sailor must be nearby.

  There was a smart rapping on the door of my apartment.

  Last week, in a gesture of trust I could scarcely believe myself, I had given Sailor a key to Aunt Cora’s Closet, as well as to my apartment above the store. Still and all, he always knocked. He was a gentleman that way.

  I hurried to open the door, then stepped back, embarrassed by my own eagerness.

  “Well, aren’t you just a sight for sore eyes,” Sailor growled, setting down his motorcycle helmet and taking me in his arms. He smelled of fresh laundry, leather jacket, and that indefinable scent that was just . . . Sailor. He had dark eyes and hair, was tall and lean but strong, and I was obsessed with a different body part every time I saw him. Lately it was his forearms. They were broad and capable and covered with dark hair.

  We kissed for a long moment, the connection deepening until he pushed me gently up against the wall, leaned into me, and—

  “Ahem,” said Oscar from the kitchen, his arms folded over his scaly chest.

  Oscar liked Sailor, even had a bit of hero worship for him, but he wasn’t fond of what he called “PDA,” or public displays of affection. The fact that we were in my apartment and not on a crowded street didn’t matter. If Oscar could see something, he considered it “public.”

  “Ever hear the saying: Don’t count your change in front of the poor?” Oscar groused.

  “Sorry, little guy,” I said with a smile. In fact, my familiar had stolen that saying from me.

  Sailor shot him a dirty look. “Maybe it’s time you moved out, found your own place.”

  Oscar’s eyes grew so wide you could drown in their bottle-glass green depths.

  “Mistress,” he breathed. “Mistress, tell me you’re not planning on making me—”

  “Of course not,” I said, hitting Sailor lightly on the shoulder. He just grinned. “You bully, don’t be mean.” I turned to my familiar. “Oscar, as long as I have a home, you have a home. And even if we didn’t have a place to live, we’d be each other’s home. We’re family.”

  Oscar’s bony shoulders sagged in relief, and he moped back into the kitchen to turn off the mixer, mumbling as he went, “Batter’s prob’ly past ready.”

  “You can’t say things like that to him,” I scolded Sailor in a low voice. “He’s sensitive.”

  “He’s a gobgoyle.”

  “He’s a sensitive gobgoyle. Now we’ll have to spend the whole night making it up to him.”

  “Don’t worry so much. As soon as I make him one of my famous grilled cheese sandwiches, all will be forgiven.”

  True. As much as Oscar liked me, he adored food.

  “Speaking of food, something smells delicious.” The aromas of rosemary, oregano, marjoram, and thyme wafted through the apartment, filling the air with the delectable scents of herb-encrusted roasting chicken.

  “It’ll be ready in half an hour. Join us for dinner?”

  “Twist my arm,” said Sailor as we headed toward the kitchen.

  I had been deliberating on something since shortly after finding poor Sebastian. I had tried playing by the rules, but it hadn’t gotten me very far. Given how often I seemed to land in the middle of homicide investigations, I was beginning to realize I should get comfortable playing by what Graciela used to call “witches’ rules.” We weren’t out to hurt anybody, but sometimes we needed to color outside the lines. And it was all much easier with an accomplice.

  “Super. And after dinner . . . I need a favor.”

  “Uh-oh. Why do I think this favor doesn’t have anything to do with us rolling around in bed?”

  I felt my cheeks burn. According to folklore, witches can’t blush. So either I wasn’t one hundred percent witch, or the folklore was wrong, which was often the case. History and customs were easily muddled over time, given the very human tendency for exa
ggeration and misinterpretation.

  “Let me pour you a drink.”

  “Now I’m really worried,” he said, but he followed me into the kitchen and leaned against the tile counter while I poured a shot of amber tequila into a handblown shot glass.

  “A man was found dead this afternoon . . .” I said, as I began to butter and flour the cake pans.

  “You killed him?”

  I gasped. “What?”

  “You need help disposing of the body?” offered Oscar from his cubby over the refrigerator.

  “My stars, why would you say something like that? What is with you two?”

  Sailor shrugged. “I’m just saying, if you did kill somebody, you probably had cause. A demon of some sort?”

  “No,” I said. I glanced at Oscar, who was looking at me with interest but mimicking Sailor’s shrug. These two seemed to have faith that if I had done such a thing, it was justified. Or else they just didn’t care that much. Then again, Sailor and Oscar adhered to a different sort of moral code from a lot of folks. Perhaps that’s why they hung around the likes of me. It was enough to make a witch worry.

  “If it’s not a dead body . . . does this have to do with the cape?” asked Oscar.

  “Oscar, I thought we agreed we weren’t going to mention that to people,” I reminded him.

  “Sailor’s not people.”

  “Sailor’s curious,” Sailor said. “What cape?”

  “Um . . . yes. So, earlier today I purchased an old trunk full of clothes from an antiques dealer named Sebastian Crowley. And later in the day he was found dead under an oak tree in Golden Gate Park.”

  “I don’t get why you bought worthless clothes from the likes of that guy,” grumped Oscar, “stuff he prob’ly stole anyway, and then you don’t like my present.”

  “Why do I have the feeling I missed something?” Sailor said.

  “I do appreciate your present, I just can’t use it,” I said to Oscar, then turned to Sailor. “Oscar gave me a present today. A collection of designer clothing labels.”

  “That sounds . . . imaginative. Why labels?”

  “Mistress can sew them into the clothes and ratchet up her prices! It’s genius!” Oscar said.

  “It’s fraud,” I insisted.

  Sailor nodded thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea.”

  “What?” I said. “Are you saying you endorse an act of fraud?”

  He grinned, as if to say “gotcha,” and Oscar cackled.

  I glared at the two of them. “As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, a man died in Golden Gate Park today, not long after I bought a trunk from him.”

  “I hope we get to the good part soon,” Sailor said in a dry tone that reminded me of how sardonic he’d been when I first met him . . . and how it used to put me off. No longer.

  Oscar nodded in agreement.

  “Y’all are awful—you know that?” I said. “A man died today. Think about his poor family.”

  “Didn’t have no family,” said Oscar.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “Sebastian Crowley, right? Didn’t have family. No great loss to the world, just sayin’.”

  “You knew him?”

  Oscar smiled, which always looked like a grimace. “You’re kiddin’ me, right?”

  “Crowley was the go-to guy for a certain kind of antique, if you catch my drift,” Sailor explained. “His business practices were . . . shady, to be kind. Why’d you buy a trunk from him? That’s inviting trouble. Is it still here? Have you cast an extra protection spell?”

  “The police took it this afternoon, in case it could tell them anything related to the murder.” I stared back and forth between Sailor and my familiar. “So you’re saying Sebastian was a practitioner of some kind? Why don’t I know about this? I’ll bet Aidan knows about this.”

  Aidan Rhodes was the local witchy godfather of sorts, a powerful practitioner who knew everyone and everything magical in the Bay Area. He had also been Oscar’s master until gifting the critter to me. Aidan and I had worked together in the past, but I trusted him about as far as I could throw him. Aidan always had something up his enchanted sleeve. Still, to be fair, he had probably saved my life on more than one occasion.

  “You’re on a, whaddayacallit? A need-to-know basis. Like in the top-secret military. Like James Bond. Dun de de DUN de de duh . . .” Oscar started humming the theme from the James Bond franchise, and I feared an 007 marathon was in my immediate future.

  My familiar had been catching up on popular culture lately, giving me the distinct impression I wasn’t keeping him busy enough. When he wasn’t hanging out in Aunt Cora’s Closet, trying to spy on women in the changing room or being petted by the customers and cradled by Bronwyn, he spent a lot of time watching DVDs or reading mysteries and eating bonbons at home. Not that he complained; it was a tough job, Oscar was fond of saying, but somebody had to do it. Still . . . as my mother used to say: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

  Of course, in my case she had meant it quite literally.

  “Anyway, maybe Sebastian Crowley wasn’t a great guy, but murder is wrong, no matter who the victim is,” I said. “Besides, among other things, it means there’s a murderer out on the streets running loose.”

  “You know what I’m really not enjoying about this conversation?” said Sailor. “Other than the obvious, which I’ve already mentioned. What I’m not enjoying is that your next observation will be that you, somehow, are the one who will have to track down this murderer.”

  “There’s more,” I said.

  “Imagine my shock,” Sailor said. “The cape, I presume.”

  “The cape,” Oscar echoed.

  “The cape was in the trunk. When I put it on . . . It’s hard to explain, but it was as though I had been transported to another time and place. Not a particularly welcoming time and place.”

  “Where is this cape?” Sailor asked. “Let me see if I can sense anything from it.”

  I brought the basket to Sailor, took off the black silk cloth, and set it before him.

  He pressed his lips together, his eyes half-closed, in an expression of displeasure I knew only too well. Since we’d gotten together, I saw it less frequently—in fact, he even laughed from time to time. But now I saw the old Sailor, the supremely dissatisfied, scornful man for whom I had fallen head over heels.

  Sailor said nothing, but took the gold velvet garment out of the basket and held it to his chest. His eyelids fluttered closed and he breathed deeply, then stood stock-still. Oscar and I watched and waited in silence.

  Finally, he let the cloak fall into the basket and shook his head.

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  “No. But that’s not unusual for me with textiles. And . . . as you know, lately things just haven’t been the same.”

  When I first met Sailor, he was a powerful psychic. Unhappy, grumpy as all get-out, but extremely sensitive to vibrations and even able to communicate to the world beyond the veil. But ever since he’d had a falling-out with Aidan, his old “boss,” things had changed. He was still intuitive, but something was blocking his psychic abilities. Either that, or Aidan’s patronage had given Sailor an extra boost that evaporated when they split. It was unclear what was going on, but it was plain to see that Sailor was frustrated—even embarrassed—by it. After years of not wanting his psychic abilities, he had realized they were an important part of him.

  Sailor and Oscar shared a look; then Sailor let out a loud breath.

  “Okay, you see a vision of something nasty when you put on this cape. So maybe it once belonged to someone in a violent or threatening situation. That could leave an energy trace—perhaps enough of a mark that someone like you can feel it. Big deal. You often get sensations from clothing, don’t you? I mean, that’s the whole thing with Aunt Cora’s Closet.”
<
br />   “Yes, but this is different. It isn’t just sensations or vibrations; when I put the cloak on, I felt transported somewhere, somewhere from the past. So finding Sebastian Crowley dead at the base of an oak tree right afterward, well, that seems like quite a coincidence. Maybe someone was after this cloak? And on top of everything else, the police seemed suspicious of Conrad.”

  “Conrad? He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “That’s what I said. But he was the first on the scene, with blood on his hands. And he told the police that he always slept there, and . . . I haven’t seen him the rest of the afternoon. I’m afraid they’ve been interviewing him.”

  Our eyes caught and held for a moment.

  “So let me guess,” said Sailor with an exasperated sigh. “Now you want to track down the source of this cape and try to figure out its connection with the oak tree.”

  “And here I thought you couldn’t read my mind,” I said, trying my best to be coquettish.

  Sailor poured himself another shot of tequila and raised it in salute to Oscar. “One thing I can say for your mistress, Oscar. She’s as mad as a hatter.”

  “Ain’t she just?” said my familiar, pride in his voice.

  Chapter 5

  “One of these days you’re going to have to explain how I go from looking for a drink and a kiss at your place, to breaking into an antiques store,” Sailor whispered as he used a slim bit of metal to defeat the ancient lock on Sebastian Crowley’s shop. “Especially one that’s still a crime scene.”

  “Well, for one thing, you were looking for more than a kiss. I can tell you that much.”

  He grunted softly and tilted his head closer to the locking mechanism, as though he was listening for something. Latex gloves covered his long, graceful fingers.

  The narrow alley at Balance and Gold Streets was illuminated only by the milky glow of a streetlamp. After a warm day, thick fog had settled like a blanket over the city, giving the air a damp, heavy feel. A dripping sound overhead echoed in the silence, and though I knew it was my imagination, I could have sworn the old brick buildings on either side were leaning in toward us.