A Catastrophic Theft

by P. D. Workman

  “It wasn’t Starlight,” Reg insisted. “It’s impossible. He hasn’t left the house. Unless you think he’s capable of walking through walls or apparating in remote locations.”

  “I’ll be in touch, Miss Rawlins.”

  “Yeah? You want to make an appointment to come and interview the cat?” Reg regretted the sarcasm the minute the words left her mouth. Being snide and confrontational with a police detective was not the way to get her off of Reg’s back.

  Reg sat down at one of the stools at the kitchen island and slumped over, resting her face in her hands.

  Reg sat in her favorite chair and placed the crystal ball on the table in front of her. She had only purchased it as a prop, one of those things that would help her clients to believe that she was legitimate and that what she was telling them was true. It was a solid globe of glass, with no special powers of its own, pretty but not a functional object.

  Only, she had been able to see things in it. Sometimes when her thoughts were cloudy and confused, she looked into the crystal and was able to see clearly. She had seen Calliopia leaving home and being picked up by Ruan, running away with him. Callie had clearly not held her kidnapping by the pixies against Ruan. Whether he had known what they were going to do to her or not, she had forgiven him, and he had apparently deserted his realm to be with her.

  Reg stared into the crystal, trying to calm and focus her thoughts. She was worried about Sarah, who would die if the emerald necklace was not found quickly. Furious at Corvin. Disappointed with Detective Jessup for not believing her. She hadn’t stolen the necklace and it was unfair of Jessup not to believe her. And then there was Starlight…

  Reg knew he hadn’t left the house. As she had told Jessup, unless the cat were able to walk through walls or teleport himself, he had never left the cottage since he had returned with the yarrow. That was before the party, and Sarah had worn the necklace to the party.

  There was a movement within the crystal. Reg unfocused her eyes instead of focusing them. She needed to see with her third eye, not her physical eyes. That imaginative, intuitive part of her brain that she had spent her whole life fighting, that only on moving to Black Sands did she realize was actually psychic ability. A gift, not the curse she had grown up believe it was. How many teachers and foster parents had told her to stop telling stories? Even when Reg had tried to tell the truth, they had still accused her of making things up. Tell a child she was a liar enough times, and that’s what she would become. What was the point in telling the truth?

  The figure in the ball became more clear. Reg was able to turn the shape she saw in her mind. She rotated the representation of a diminutive young woman around to study the face. She was so familiar. Blue eyes, brown wavy hair. Clothes that were neat but worn. Reg racked her brain. Where had she seen that face? Why did it keep coming back to her?

  “It’s the girl on TV,” she whispered finally to Starlight, who she could sense hovering nearby. “I watched her on my phone the other day. She was on a news report.”

  But she couldn’t remember any more details than those. Had she watched the news report? Had she been interrupted? She couldn’t remember anything about it.

  “Come on…” Reg urged. “Come back to me. Who are you? What do you have to do with anything?”

  The young woman turned and looked at her, lips parted slightly, and then she dissolved.

  Reg didn’t want to go to sleep until she knew who it was that had stolen Sarah’s emerald. She would stay awake, do research, and figure out before the police could what exactly had happened. A little logic, a little research, and she’d have the answer. Then Sarah wouldn’t have to age another day. At the rate that her age was advancing, Reg was afraid it wouldn’t be too long before enough of her years caught up with her to kill her.

  She wasn’t sure why she felt responsible. She hadn’t had anything at all to do with the disappearance of the emerald, and yet she felt like it was her fault. Maybe that was because she was being blamed for it. She wanted to prove that it hadn’t been her. And she wanted to save Sarah. Sarah often irritated Reg, interfering more than she had the right to, but Reg had to admit a certain amount of affection for the old crone. It was like having a mother around. Mothers were interfering and annoying, but it was still nice to know she had someone looking out for her interests. Someone who apparently liked her and cared for her.

  She couldn’t just let Sarah die. She had to do everything within her power to prevent it.

  A stack of books that Reg had borrowed from the public library went crashing off of her desk in the spare bedroom, making Reg jump. She hurried to see what had happened and, for a minute or two, just stared at the books where they had landed.

  Maybe it was a sign.

  She wasn’t a reader, so she wasn’t even sure why she had gone to the library in the first place. She had been curious about the history of Black Sands and the paranormal community there, and there really wasn’t anything useful on the internet. But the books from the library had stayed there on her desk, untouched, for a week already. Reg didn’t want to actually have to read them.

  “Did you knock these down?” she asked without looking around.

  There was no answering meow. And she remembered that Starlight had been in the living room with her. He had not knocked the stack of books over.

  Maybe it was an omen. Maybe if she just read those books…

  Reg bent over to pick one up, and flicked through it with distaste. Read all of those books? Who was she kidding? She hadn’t read a single book since finishing school. She didn’t even read the newspaper or the backs of cereal boxes. Having to read road signs and cold medicine instructions was bad enough.

  She looked at the pictures. Early settlements in the Black Sands area. She wasn’t sure where everything would be if she overlaid a map of the current city, but she was sure one of the pages in the book would show her. She looked at the black and white and sepia tinted pictures, making out small communities of witches, fairies, and other magical races she wasn’t sure about. It was strange to think of how the different races and gifts had thrived long before she was born. Back through the ages, as far as the fairy tales reached back.

  She turned pages slowly, not reading the words, but looking at the pictures. All of the different peoples trying to carve out safe communities for themselves. There were pictures of meetings between magical races, handshaking or signing documents that Reg supposed were the treaties she had heard of between the humans and the pixies and other similar documents. Somehow, they had managed to achieve relative peace among the disparate communities, letting them coexist side-by-side, even if they didn’t generally mingle.

  Reg saw the little pixies, a head or two shorter than the humans, slender, with childish faces and bodies, their tattered clothes making them look like street urchins.

  Reg sat down with a thump, letting the book land in her lap.

  Street kids. That was the connection that her brain had been refusing to make. The girl whose face she had seen on TV had been talking about homeless people. Youth on the street. Runaways and throwaways. She’d been looking for her sister.

  Reg closed her eyes and brought the face up again. Much more clear now that she had been able to associate some of the details. An older adolescent or young adult. She had acted like an adult in the TV interview, but when Reg had seen her in person…

  “What?” she said aloud.

  Starlight padded into the room and looked at her inquiringly, as if she had called him and he wanted to know what it was all about.

  “When did I see her? I never saw her.”

  This was apparently of no interest to Starlight. He sniffed at the books on the floor, then jumped up on her desk and walked over to the window to look out. He sat on the other side of her laptop, his back to her, the tip of his tail twitching occasionally as he watched the birds and squirrels in the trees and the garden.

  “She came here,” Reg said, trying out the thought. It didn’t ma
tter that there was no one to talk to and Starlight wasn’t really paying her any attention. She didn’t need him to answer her, she just wanted to hear the words aloud. “She came here to talk to me.”

  Even though she didn’t remember it, the words made sense and clicked into place as if she were fitting the pieces of a puzzle together.

  “Okay. She came here to talk to me because she wanted help…”

  Yes. That was right. Reg stared out the window for a few minutes with Starlight, letting her mind wander. She looked back down at the picture of the pixies in the book, studying their childish faces.

  ‘I’m looking for my sister,’ she heard the girl say.

  She was nervous, looking around the house as if it were somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. Maybe she had been told by her parents not to pursue it. Not to talk to a psychic. Just to wait and see if her sister eventually came home on her own. Maybe they knew where she was or what had happened to her.

  The reading had been uneventful. Reg didn’t remember much about it. She tried to pin it down in time. It had been after the attack by Hawthorne-Rose, but before Jessup asked her to consult on Calliopia’s case. The girl had initially gone to the main house, and Sarah had escorted her to the cottage to introduce her to Reg.

  The girl had clearly been a pixie, though Reg hadn’t realized it at the time. Since it was before Reg and Jessup had gone to the pixie realm, she’d had no idea what pixies looked like. She thought the girl had just been young and down on her luck. Knowing what she did now, the clear blue eyes, curly brown hair, diminutive height and worn clothing were obvious indicators.

  The girl had been pleasant, far more polite than the other pixies Reg had met. But she had wanted something from Reg, and none of the other pixies had wanted anything to do with her.

  What had the girl’s name been? What was the name of the sister she was looking for?

  Alice or some form of the name, Reg thought. That was the name of the sister. Something more exotic-sounding than that. The girl who had come to her had a short name. Carol?

  “Not that any of this matters,” she told Starlight. “It doesn’t have any connection to the missing emerald. The emerald is the mystery I need to solve. Do you know where it is? Can you seek it?”

  Starlight looked over his shoulder at her for a minute, then started to wash himself. Not helpful. He stopped and stared out the window as if something important had caught his attention. Reg leaned forward to have a look.

  “What are you watching out there?”

  He yowled and bumped his nose against the glass. Reg cranked the lever to open the window an inch, and Starlight sniffed at the fresh air coming in through the screen with great interest.

  Reg flipped a few more pages in the book. She needed to put it down and think of some way to investigate the theft of the necklace. Some way that Detective Jessup wouldn’t have thought of.

  ⋆ Chapter Thirteen ⋆

  R

  eg didn’t know how long she had been browsing through the books, fascinated with the pictures of witches, warlocks, and others in the Black Sands of olden times when there was a sharp knock on the door. She tapped a key on her computer to wake it up and look at the time. It was late. Sarah should be in bed and Reg didn’t know who else would be calling on her. She didn’t like the idea of random callers late at night. Sometimes clients showed up without appointments during the day, but she didn’t want anyone intruding on her after dark. She put the book down on the chair as she got up and crept up to the door.

  She tried to avoid getting in the line of sight of the windows, even though the blinds should not allow anyone to peek in at her. The outside lights were hooked up to a motion detector, so she didn’t have to worry about giving herself away by turning on the outside light in order to see the visitor through the peephole.

  Her heart fell when she saw that it was Detective Jessup. Not there, Reg was sure, to update her on the latest developments in the case. And although Jessup had been working alone the last few times Reg had seen her, this time she had a cadre of other policemen with her. Jessup was facing the peephole stoically, and held a piece of paper out toward the peephole as if identifying herself to Reg.

  Reg didn’t try to talk to Jessup through the door. She knew what was going on.

  She unlocked the door and opened it. “Detective Jessup.”

  Jessup held the paper out toward her. “Warrant to search the premises.”

  Reg didn’t take it from her or examine the densely-written legal document. It was her worst nightmare come true. She’d spent many wakeful nights in the past worrying that someone might suspect her and get a warrant to search her property, revealing all of her secrets.

  But this time, she had nothing to hide. Unless Starlight really had stolen the emerald, the search wasn’t going to turn anything up in connection with crimes committed in Black Sands. And surely that was all the warrant covered.

  She stepped back from the door and let Jessup and the others in.

  “Please sit down on the couch,” Jessup instructed, pointing. “In the middle, please.”

  Reg obeyed.

  “I need you to stay there and not move while the search is being conducted.”

  Reg didn’t say anything. Jessup gave a grimace, so fleeting that Reg couldn’t have sworn she had really seen it, and then it was gone. She left one officer in the living room to keep guard over Reg and disappeared into the bedrooms in the back of the cottage with the others. Reg sat there, listening to the bangs of drawers, squeaks of doors, and scraping of coat hangers as the police looked through the contents of her bedroom and spare room. There were murmurs as they talked to each other, too quiet to make out. Starlight was disturbed by their movements or sent on his way and wandered out into the kitchen to look at his bowl, and then walked up to Reg and sat looking at her.

  “Well,” Reg asked him, “are they finding anything interesting?”

  Starlight began to wash, starting with the tip of his tail. The policeman guarding or supervising Reg stared at her, but looked away when he caught her eyes on him. At least he was trying to be respectful.

  Starlight chewed and licked at his fur as if he were filthy from a roll in the dirt, rather than just having jumped down from the dust-free desk. It was, Reg sensed, a snub of the policemen, showing them just how distasteful Starlight found it that they had invaded his living space.

  “I know,” she told him. “Me too.”

  She was going to have a shower when they left. In fact, she was going to want to clean the whole place once they were out of there, wiping away all of their fingerprints, vacuuming up all of their footprints.

  Jessup walked out of the spare room and approached Reg, one of the library books in her hand. Reg looked at it, raising her eyebrows in query. A library book was certainly nothing for the police to be concerned about. It wasn’t even overdue. Jessup sat down in the chair across from Reg, putting the heavy history book down on the coffee table between them, oriented toward Reg.

  “I thought this was interesting,” she said in a neutral voice.

  Reg shrugged, looking at the book. Maybe Jessup liked history books. Jessup fanned the corners of the pages with her thumb, stopping and sliding her thumb in where one of the pages had been dog-eared. Reg looked at the page spreads, looking for what had interested Jessup. Scanning over the pictures, she stopped at one and cocked her head.

  There was a black and white photo of a woman who looked like Sarah. She was wearing a large hat, standing proudly outside a tent, smiling at the camera. She was slimmer than the Sarah Reg knew, with fewer wrinkles, but looked remarkably similar.

  “Wow. That must be Sarah’s grandmother,” Reg said, “there sure is a family resemblance.”

  Jessup just stared at her. Reg looked down at the page to see if there was something else she was supposed to have noticed. When she couldn’t find anything else of note, Jessup put her finger under the picture, pointing to the caption. Reg squinted at the words. />
  Sarah Bishop stands outside the new cookhouse.

  Reg’s jaw dropped. She looked at the black and white photo more carefully, and searched out the four-digit number underneath.

  “That’s more than a hundred years ago.”

  Jessup glanced over at the policeman standing guard, and gave a tiny nod meant only for Reg’s eyes. She looked at the picture again.

  “Her grandmother had the same name,” Reg tried, looking for a logical explanation.

  “No. That’s Sarah.”

  “It can’t be. She might have looked like that five years ago. Not… no. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You knew this,” Jessup said, tapping the photo with her finger again. “You had these books out on your desk. You’ve been researching Black Sands history. You found this and you marked the page. You knew that Sarah was… long lived. You did some more research to find out why. And you learned about the emerald necklace.”

  “No.” Reg shook her head vehemently. “I never saw that picture until you showed me just now. And if I had seen it, I never would have thought it was really Sarah. Just someone who looked like her. Someone from her family.”

  “The lies are starting to pile up, Reg,” Jessup said quietly. “Why don’t you stop while you can? You knew about Sarah and you found out the reason for her longevity. You thought that the necklace would do the same for you. You probably didn’t realize that taking it would have such a negative effect on Sarah. You thought she would live out her life at the usual pace. But now you’ve seen what’s happening to her. If you didn’t understand before now, I’m telling you. She’ll be dead within the week if you don’t give the necklace back.”

  “I don’t have it! I never had it. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. If I had it, yeah, I’d give it back. I don’t want to kill anyone. But I don’t have it. So I can’t give it back.”