Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

  He wasn’t wrong; the main textbook for Joy’s class ran somewhere around eighty dollars. “That sounds interesting.”

  “I like to give back a little. I can’t spend all my time in the garden.” Malone unwrapped the cord from around the accordion file. “All right. You know, when I was a kid, my uncle used to pull quarters out of my ear and call it magic. That was before everybody and their brother was portalling up to the lake and buying MagicWave Ovens. World has changed.” He whispered something under his breath, and his chubby fingers did a sort of dance. He reached into the file and came out with three pages stapled together. Simple spatial distortion. Joy was struck with an image of Markie Malone and Amanda — Carla Drake’s mother — as a couple. She felt oddly convinced that they would like each other.

  “Apex Landscaping,” Malone read. “Address is in Chicago. Huh.”

  “Something interesting?” Joy asked.

  “Could be nothing. But it says here this account was opened on the day your package was sent, and that’s the only thing that’s ever been charged to it.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  “Be my guest, Agent. Or is it Professor?” Markie Malone stared up at her through his wide round lenses as he handed her the document. “Something interesting going on at that school?”

  “Mind your business,” said Renard.

  “Oh, I always do that. But you know…part of my business is information.”

  Joy looked over the document and pretended to ignore what Malone was saying. She’d considered obscuring her name on the packing slip, but Malone would have had access to that information in his records anyway. Magic made undercover work tricky in the best of cases, but Joy was beginning to think that the only people who didn’t know she was working for the FBMA were the ones she had no particular reason to suspect.

  Renard sighed. “So now we’re to the transactional part of the visit, is that it?”

  “Look,” said Malone. “I have no interest in jeopardizing whatever it is you’re investigating, and even less interest in jeopardizing Agent Wilkins. But someone might be interested. I’m willing to forget that I even met her if you do me a small favor.”

  “Brady,” said Renard.

  “He’s on my mind.” Malone took off his glasses, folded them up, and set them on the small glass table next to his lounge chair. “Worrying about him keeps me up nights.”

  Joy had no idea who Brady was, but she recognized a transactional conversation when she heard it, and she had nothing to trade herself.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll bet. Look, I’ll have a chat with the prosecutor, and I’ll be in touch. Sound OK?”

  “Well, I don’t know yet. I’ll need to get a night or two of uninterrupted sleep before I can be sure.” Malone smiled and stood. “This has been a nice visit. You have what you need, right?”

  “I do.” Joy shook his offered hand. “Do you mind if I keep this?”

  “No, of course not. I got copies. Terry, you show my friends out, OK? Mr. Renard’s gonna stop by again soon — remember he’s our guest.”

  “Yes, Mr. Malone.” Terry led them back through the house to the front door and shut it behind them without another word.

  “Hospitable folks,” said Renard.

  Joy waited until they were back in the car. “What was that about Brady?”

  Renard nodded and took a deep breath. “Yeah. You were starting to like Markie, weren’t you?”

  Joy didn’t answer, because it was true. Malone’s aura had made her want to trust him. The problem was that it was perfectly possible for someone to be sociable and to love their family and still to be ruthless in other aspects of their life.

  “Tim Brady is one of Malone’s lieutenants. St. Paul cops picked him up for involvement with a shooting three weeks ago. He didn’t pull the trigger, but we think he passed the order down.”

  “Would he have given up Malone?”

  Renard made a skeptical noise. “I doubt it,” he said. “Don’t worry, I went in knowing that would be the price. Flood said to help you out. Besides, Martin was my boss too. If you’ve got a chance to figure out who was behind his death, I’m going to help out however I can.”

  “Thanks,” said Joy.

  “Don’t thank me. Just nail the fuckers.”

  The salesgirl at the Frog’s Umbrella was probably paid to look that good, but Zelda felt put on the defensive by it anyway. “Can I help you find something?” the girl asked, and something in her tone made Zelda feel sure that her fear was obvious.

  “No thanks,” Zelda said quickly. She was sure that she had said it too quickly, and too loudly, so she turned and began looking through a rack of skirts. Only after the woman chirped at her to feel free to ask questions and then wandered off did she realize that she was looking at a rack of juniors’ skirts. Maybe it was the Pretenders song on the store’s sound system that was causing her to flash back twenty years; whatever the cause, she moved deeper into the store.

  The Frog’s Umbrella was the place in town, or so Zelda had overheard her students saying more than once. It was a vintage clothing shop just a block north of the town square, about halfway between the Gooseberry Bluff campus and Arthur Stag College. Supposedly it stocked the most stylish dresses this side of the Twin Cities; even more interesting, the proprietor carefully scanned every item for psychic residue, removing any lingering negative energies but leaving the positive ones. Zelda was prepared to reserve judgment on whether or not such things were plausible. She had been teaching magic for long enough to realize that neither she nor anyone else knew the precise limits of magic or how it worked.

  In fact, it was the possibility of “extras” that came free with purchase that had brought Zelda in here. She had heard a group of young women discussing the place in the college cafeteria, and one of them had referred to her “lucky” dress enough times and in such a context as to make Zelda sure that she meant romantic, or just plain sexual, luck. Zelda would prefer some simple, straightforward luck, but she wasn’t going to turn down some of the other if she found it.

  Her date with Hector was Thursday night, if she didn’t call him to cancel it. She considered doing so every ten minutes or so. She was considering it now, as she went through a rack of dresses, most of which were too long in the torso for her, or too small in the bust, or both. It wasn’t just the curse that had her worrying about Hector. She had questions about him, mostly related to what had happened on Saturday night, in the library. Why had he been on his way to meet Joy, anyway? What had really happened with Joy and Freddie Larch? She wanted to ask him about these things — she felt that she had to ask about them — but she wasn’t sure that a date was the place for that conversation, and to call him and interrogate him before the date seemed even more awkward.

  Zelda was about to ask the salesgirl where the magic dresses were when Ingrid Ingwiersen walked in. She was dressed in what looked like pajamas and looked as though she’d been crying.

  “Can I help you?” the salesgirl asked. Her tone was noticeably less eager than when she had asked Zelda the same question.

  “Hi. I need a few outfits. It’s kind of an emergency, I…my, my roommate destroyed most of my clothes while I was in the shower.”

  “Oh my God,” said the girl. “That’s awful! I’m so sorry. You should really call the police!”

  “Right,” said Ingrid. “Maybe I will. Right now I need some things for work, though.”

  Zelda realized she had been staring and looked away. She hadn’t known that Ingwiersen had a roommate…unless she really meant that it was a boyfriend, or a girlfriend. Zelda thought she had heard that the conjuration professor was bisexual, but she didn’t know her well enough to be sure. She browsed while Ingwiersen gave the girl her sizes and a list of things she needed. Then, when the girl told her she’d be right back, Zelda pulled a couple of dresses off the rack she had just finished looking through and carried them over to Ingwiersen.

  “Hi,” she said.

&nbs
p; “Hi,” said Ingwiersen, looking blank.

  “I’m Zelda Akbulut? I teach in the alchemy department? We were both on the Faculty Development Committee a couple of years ago?” Zelda cringed inwardly at the way that everything she said came out sounding like a question.

  “Oh, right. Sorry, I’m distracted. It’s…I’m having a weird day.”

  “I sort of overheard. I was thinking…I saw these over there. You’re so tall, I think they would work on you.”

  For a moment, as Ingwiersen took the brightly colored dresses, Zelda felt sure she was going to laugh at her. She hadn’t thought about it, but the conjuration professor’s style was much more utilitarian, almost masculine. Then again, she had come into this store and not Fleet Farm, so perhaps she was looking for something softer.

  “Thank you,” said Ingwiersen, holding the dresses up to the light as if they were counterfeit bills. “I’ll just try these on, then.”

  “The dressing rooms are over there,” said Zelda. “I’ll make sure the girl knows you’re in there.”

  “Thanks again,” said Ingwiersen, and ducked into one of the booths.

  Oh shit, Zelda thought. I’m being helpful. This was what crushes did to you: they made you cheerful and humanity loving and stupid. Zelda had discontinued using the blindness formula and mixed up a variation on the itching cream, but she had no guarantee yet that it was working. Stupid Hector, making her fall for him. Making her want more. It wasn’t fair. She leafed through dresses like they were pages in a book she wasn’t interested in. Stupid clothes. Stupid dating. Stupid perilous situations involving cats magnifying feelings that were probably a terrible idea to begin with.

  Ingrid Ingwiersen came out of the dressing room wearing a yellow shirtdress patterned with white lilies. Zelda smiled at her. “It fits,” she said.

  Ingwiersen nodded. “Thanks again.” She set the clothes on the counter and glanced at a couple of blouses the salesgirl had brought over for her. “I’ll take all of these,” she said.

  “You’re lucky,” Zelda said. “You’re just the type designers have in mind when they make clothes like these. If I wore that I’d look like a hippo stuck in a pup tent.” She laughed, though inwardly she was mortified by this outburst of self-loathing.

  Ingwiersen squinted at her. “I’ve always thought you were rather attractive,” she said.

  “Oh.” Zelda’s ears burned; she must be bright red. She looked down at the dresses. “That’s very nice of you to say,” she finally said, but when she looked up Ingwiersen was already gone.

  Zelda sighed and gave up. She wasn’t going to buy anything today. She kept thinking back to Hector and Joy and the library. She liked Joy, but there was something going on there that she didn’t understand. She was a bit too interested in everyone else at the school. Maybe it was political? Ambition Zelda could understand, but it seemed early for Joy to be bucking for anything long-term here. She had to do the work first.

  She thanked the salesgirl and walked out to her car, still thinking about Joy. Maybe the thing to do was just to ask her.

  Zelda grasped her crystal and said Joy’s name. A moment later Joy picked up.

  “Joy, it’s Zelda. I was wondering — would you like to have lunch tomorrow?”

  “That would be lovely,” said Joy. “Say the Mandrake at about eleven thirty?”

  “Perfect,” came Zelda’s voice, just exactly as if she were not four hundred miles away.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” said Joy, and ended the call.

  “Any more personal business?” asked Agent Gray. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it.”

  Joy had worked with Gray a fair amount, but still not enough to tell if he was always a little grumpy or just chronically sarcastic. “As soon as the landlord gets here, we will.”

  They were outside the Chicago address that Markie Malone had provided. Joy had portalled to the Chicago office from Minneapolis after putting in a request for Gray to accompany her. Security detail or not, she wasn’t going into a field situation without backup if her undercover status didn’t dictate it. And she wanted a truth-teller with her, because she had a lot of questions for the people at Apex Landscaping.

  They had tried the door and the buzzer several times, but the outer door had a security code and a deadbolt. Joy had asked the field office to try the office phone, only to find out that it was disconnected. Justice had expedited a warrant, and the landlord was on his way from downtown — after grumbling at Joy for nearly ten minutes on the crystal first.

  Apex was located in a warehouse district north of the Ashland-Lake intersection, just a short distance west of downtown. They were surrounded by two-story buildings of red brick, with windows covered by metal screens. The building they were looking at had a locked loading dock at one end and a NO SOLICITATION sign on the curb out front. A gray food truck at the corner had attracted a few workers, but it was the sort of area that probably looked deserted for most of the day and was best avoided at night.

  “Nice neighborhood,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but excess sarcasm gives me a headache,” said Gray. “Literally. It’s a cognitive dissonance kind of a thing. Also it gives off this weird buzzing sound.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. You’re not nearly as bad as my nephew. He’s fifteen.”

  “Does your thing run in the family?”

  “My ‘thing’? Really?”

  “You know what I mean. Truth-telling.”

  “My thing does not run in the family. Does yours?”

  Joy was surprised to realize that she had never thought about her sight in that way. “No, it doesn’t, now that you ask.”

  “You have siblings?”

  “Yeah. A sister and a brother.”

  “They have kids?”

  “My sister does. My niece is seven and my nephew is almost two.”

  “I figured out my truth-telling at about three. I’d always heard the fuzziness in certain things people said, but it wasn’t until that age that I understood why it was happening. My parents, as you can probably guess, were not thrilled about it. I think…maybe every relationship has some necessary lies. But I think the parent-child relationship definitely has that dynamic, in most cases.”

  Joy was thinking about the lies, necessary and otherwise, that were accumulating in her relationship with AD Flood. She was supposed to brief him after this, and she didn’t know what she was going to tell him about the dinner party at Yves’s place. “You’re divorced, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s not too surprising, really. What’s amazing is that my parents are still married, and my brother and sister-in-law. My dad has four brothers, and they were all divorced by the time I was your niece’s age. I’m still not invited to the family holidays.”

  “That’s…shitty.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve hung around with a couple of other truth-tellers, and they are pretty damn insufferable.” He nodded at an SUV pulling up across the street. “I think this is our guy.”

  Joy and Gray stepped out to meet the landlord. He wore a suit without a tie and was even more agitated than he had been when Joy called him, to judge by his aura and the fact that he couldn’t seem to stop shaking his head. “I don’t know about anything illegal going on in there,” he said.

  “We understand that,” said Joy. “There may not be anything illegal, but there is something suspicious going on.” She handed him the warrant; he didn’t even glance at it.

  “Well, I never even saw them move in.” He went to the security keypad, entered a code, mumbled something, and the outer door popped open. He led them up a half flight of stairs. “This woman came by to look at it, her references checked out, and she gave me first and last months’ rent. Never saw her again.”

  “When was that?” Joy asked. She pounded three times on the heavy green door and nodded at Gray. They both pulled out their guns.

  The landlord backed up when he saw t
he weapons. “Last week. Thursday, I guess.”

  “Please unlock the door and step aside,” said Joy.

  He grunted, but Joy noticed that his hands shook as he sorted through his keys. “I don’t want any shooting,” he said, and retreated back down the steps.

  The interior was huge, dark, and apparently empty. The floor was wooden planking painted rust red; the air was warm and smelled like oil and sawdust. Joy scanned what she could see of the left side of the room and nodded at Gray, who stepped in to check out the right. There was only the faint light from the north-facing windows to navigate by, and their footfalls echoed in the space.

  Joy spotted an office at the other end of the warehouse and waved at Gray to bring it to his attention. There was a large window looking into it, or rather out onto the working floor. Joy took the right side again, the side where the office door stood. She kept glancing up into the dark above — the ceiling was at least twenty feet high. For whatever reason, she kept thinking that there could be something up there, rather than someone.

  Joy looked in the office window but saw only carpet. She glanced at Gray, who shrugged, then nodded. Joy tried the door.

  Nothing. No one. The place was empty.

  “I told you, I never saw them move anything in,” the landlord said after they brought him in to turn on the lights. He trailed them and made helpful comments as they combed the place. Helpful comments like, “That’s the loading dock,” and “There used to be a shelving unit there.” He gave Gray a description of the woman — Joy found that taking descriptions was like transcribing messages in a language she didn’t know — and asked if they were finished.

  “I don’t think we can call in the lab guys,” Joy said. “We don’t have a crime here, exactly.”

  “I don’t think they’d find anything, anyway,” said Gray. “I don’t think anyone was ever here after he showed her the place.”

  Joy agreed. Another dead end. They could track down the credit card that had been used for the PoofPost account, but anyone this careful would have themselves covered on that end as well.