Frederick, draped around Charlene’s neck, raised his head and sniffed.
“So,” she said, “if its meaning is hidden, that means it’s occult.” She pumped her fists in the air. “Woo-hoo, we’ve got an occult mystery on our hands!”
“We don’t know if it’s occult. It could be anything. Or nothing.”
“Keep on thinking that.” She hooked her pie-plate UFO to the end of the fishing wire.
A breeze tossed my hair. I’d taken it out of its band because my head was starting to hurt. Though on reflection, that might not have been due to a too-tight hairdo.
“Do we have to take this pie-plate photo now?” I asked.
“No time like the present. And with this view, I can make the UFO attack San Francisco.” She cackled. “When I get the perspective right, it’ll look huge.”
“Considering your interest in real UFOs, I’m a little surprised you’re spoofing an old hoax.”
A shadow crossed her wrinkled face. Charlene spun away, the UFO whizzing over my head, and I ducked.
“Aren’t you over your fear of being kidnapped by aliens?” she asked. “I’m a little surprised by your own lack of enthusiasm.”
I stiffened. “It has nothing to do with . . . I’m not afraid of UFOs.” I’d gotten to the bottom of that phobia, rooted in an incident in my childhood when, thanks to my father, I really had been taken. Just not by aliens. Because they don’t exist.
Probably.
“Whatever. Here. Hold this.” She handed me the fishing pole and directed me to a spot on a grassy mound overlooking the bay.
“A little to the left . . .” She peered through the camera on her phone. “A little to the right . . . There!”
After we got a photo that met Charlene’s high hoaxing standards, we returned the equipment to her Jeep.
She looked up at the bell tower. “I wonder if—”
“No,” I said sharply, determined to nip that bad idea in the bud.
“But—”
“I’m not dangling from a bell tower for a UFO selfie. Nearly breaking my neck on Father Serra was enough.”
“Suit yourself.”
We made our way to the English department.
“I do have a theory, you know,” Charlene said.
“About the murder?”
“About your UFO phobia.”
“I don’t have one anymore.” I raised my palms. “We know what caused it, and it’s over.” I held open a glass door, and she walked into the bleak hallway.
“Is it?” she asked.
“Sure it is.”
“Because I think sometimes we hold on to things because subconsciously we get something from them.”
“I get zero from a fear of UFOs.” My voice echoed off the tile floor, and I snapped my mouth shut. “Which is why I’m no longer afraid.”
“Your phobia doesn’t remind you of anyone?”
“Who could the phobia I don’t have possibly remind me of? That doesn’t even make sense. There’s the main office.”
I strode inside a drab, seventies-era room with wood-paneled walls.
A receptionist peered up at us from behind the counter. “Can I help you?” she asked without much enthusiasm.
“Yes,” I said. “Where—?”
Charlene whipped the pie-making invitation from the pocket of her pale green, knit tunic. “An invitation for Professor Jezek.”
The receptionist glanced from the envelope in Charlene’s hand to a row of cubbies ten feet behind her. Her expression suggested a horde of spiders might crawl from the wooden boxes.
“Professor Jezek should be in his office right now,” the receptionist said.
“We’d rather not disturb him,” I said.
The receptionist snorted. “Then you know Professor Jezek.”
“Not that well,” I said. “Is it true what they say . . . ?” Hopeful, I let that thought dangle.
“That he sacrifices co-eds and walled his mentor up in his basement?” The receptionist adjusted her glasses. “Probably not. He’d just like everyone to think that.”
“I was thinking more about that business in the parking lot,” I said.
“What business?”
“I guess I was wrong,” I said. “Um, where’s his office again?”
The receptionist pointed with a pen. “Number one-fifty-two. Down the hall, second right.”
“Thanks.” I glanced over my shoulder at the hallway behind us. “Er, have any tall, handsome men been asking about the professor recently?” Because I really didn’t want to run into Gordon here again.
The receptionist snorted. “Why would they?”
“Great. Charlene—”
But Charlene had already disappeared from the office.
I trotted into the hallway and caught up with her outside the closed door to 152.
She rapped on the wooden door, and something crashed inside.
A curse, the sound of things being shifted. “Come in,” a sepulchral voice intoned and hiccupped.
We glanced at each other, then opened the door and walked inside.
I stopped short. The walls were covered with prints of gilt icons. They glimmered, dazzling, beneath the fluorescent light. In the center of the prints was a framed, wooden icon—Saint George slaying the dragon. A black, square-shaped cross had been painted above the window.
“Suffering cats,” Charlene said.
Professor Jezek looked up from his desk and tugged on his mustache. His lined face was haggard. “Can I help you?” His eyes sloped downward in his domed forehead. The professor’s thick gray hair crawled over the collar of his black sports jacket.
The office smelled heavily of booze.
“Um . . . yeah,” I stammered, dizzied by the shimmering walls. “I mean, no. We brought your invitation to the pie-making class.”
“How kind of you to bring it personally.” His gaze darted about the room as if seeking escape. “So few people understand the power of the personal touch. It’s all texting these days.”
Staring openmouthed at the array of big-eyed saints, Charlene pulled the invitation from her pocket. She extended it to the professor. “What’s with the icons?”
His head twitched. “A tribute to my Georgian heritage, on my mother’s side. Georgia the country, not the state.” He plucked the envelope from Charlene’s hand and opened it, pulling out the thick, paper invite. The professor scanned it. “Perfect. I shall be there. Will it be a very large class?”
“No, just you and Dorothy Hastings and Rudolph and maybe Aidan,” Charlene said, gawking at the icons.
I closed my eyes briefly. Charlene!
He blanched. “I . . . see. These were your randomly drawn guests from the poetry reading?”
Whoops. I had told him that, hadn’t I? And Dorothy hadn’t been at the reading.
He steepled his fingers. His hands quivered slightly. “I suppose it was inevitable after the murder,” he muttered.
“What was inevitable?” I asked.
“Everything is connected, is it not?” He frowned.
“I guess,” I said, baffled. But it was as good a segue as any into a little light interrogation. “Did you know Professor Starke well?”
“As well as neighbors can, which here in California is not very well.”
“You were neighbors?” I asked.
His head spasmed again. “Unfortunately, in life and in work. He had the office next door, one-fifty. Michael made the perfect murder victim. Arrogant, ignorant, and leaving a trail of destruction in his wake.”
The saints stared down at me, and I shifted my weight. Was he confessing? “Who would have killed him?”
“Who was always a step behind him,” he slurred, “never quite measuring up?”
“Measuring up?” I prompted.
“Professionally nor romantically,” he said.
Charlene rubbed her chin. “Romantically, eh? I suppose you’re talking about Professor Aidan McClary.”
“Professor McCla
ry accused Starke of plagiarism,” I said. “Do you know anything about that?”
Another odd twitch of the head. “No,” he said, “but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Let us say that in meetings, Professor Starke had a habit of hearing other people’s ideas and making them his own.”
“Anyone else want him dead?” Charlene asked.
Hands trembling, he shuffled a stack of papers from one side of his desk to the other. A half-dozen pages whispered to the cheap linoleum floor. “There’s always the ex-wife, Dorothy. No one knows our weaknesses as well as our exes, don’t you think?”
“You think Dorothy and Aidan did it together?” Charlene asked.
“Are you aware that Aidan’s visa is about to expire?” The professor hiccupped.
“So he needs tenure to stay?” I asked.
“Immigration officials don’t care about tenure. But I imagine marrying an American would keep him in the country at this point.”
“You mean, marry Dorothy?” I asked. “But what’s stopping them? She’s divorced.”
“I think I’d prefer not to speculate further. Thank you for the invitation. I look forward to an . . . enlightening evening.” He bent his head to the computer on his desk, his long fingers flying across the keyboard.
We edged from the room and shut the door behind us.
“For someone who’d prefer not to speculate,” I muttered, “he was quick enough to throw Dorothy and Aidan under the bus.”
“No wonder that receptionist thought he murdered coeds,” Charlene said loudly. “Anyone who needs that many saints on his walls has got a guilty conscience. And he needs a haircut.”
“Did you notice the crosses over the window and the door?” I asked, stopping in front of room 150.
“No. But we get the picture he’s religious.”
“That seemed like something more,” I said. “I’ve got a friend from college who’s Georgian. I’ll ask her.”
“You think he killed Aidan out of some religious mania?”
I studied a sheet of paper on the door. A tiny symbol had been drawn inside the O in OFFICE HOURS—a snake, caduceus, and wheel.
Uneasily, I frowned. “Here it is again.” But what did it mean?
Charlene hissed. “That symbol. It could be a warning from a secret occult society. Maybe he was being targeted. Maybe Starke and Jezek were occulting together, and Jezek killed him?”
“Hm. Did you notice what Saint George was using to kill that dragon?”
“Looked like a big spear.” She snapped her fingers. “Jezek thinks he’s Saint George and Michael Starke was the dragon. That explains the sword Starke was stuck with.”
“The fact that the guy’s creepy doesn’t make him a murderer. I mean, even if he did have some Saint George complex, what made Starke the dragon? There still needs to be some kind of a motive.”
“Crazy is a motive.”
I shivered. “We don’t know he’s crazy.”
“We don’t know he’s not.”
CHAPTER 13
“Done!” Hunter whipped the Pie Town apron over his head, knocking his hairnet askew. He dropped the apron on the just-cleaned kitchen counter. “Can I go?”
I propped the mop against the wall and wiped my brow. After a murder-free Tuesday, I was feeling generous. “The dishes are all put away?”
He pointed to the racks, filled with steaming dishes.
“Good enough,” I said. “Have a great—”
He fled out the alley door, and it banged behind him.
“—night,” I finished. Sheesh. Was the job that bad?
The door to the dining area swung open, and Charlene poked her head inside the kitchen.
“What are you doing here this late?” I asked. “Did you learn something about Professor Starke?”
“No. Did you learn anything from that Georgian friend of yours?”
“I talked to her last night.” I returned clean baking implements to their ceramic jars on the work island. “She said collecting lots of icons isn’t uncommon. Some people do it out of a sense of Georgian pride. Others collect them because the icons are beautiful, and others because they’re religious.”
“Hmph. I need to use your office computer.”
“Do I want to know why?”
“Probably not. Nothing to do with the murder.”
“The password’s EATPIE, all caps.”
“Duh.” She vanished through the swinging door.
I finished mopping and replaced the black fatigue mats, letting them fall to the floor and then nudging them into place with my feet. They were surprisingly heavy.
Grabbing my mop and bucket, I strode into the flour-work room. But I didn’t start cleaning. Instead, I leaned against the central butcher-block worktable to enjoy the air-conditioning and the silence.
I flapped the collar of my Pies Before Guys t-shirt, trying to get some air circulating beneath the cotton. Who needed the gym next door? Lifting fifty-pound sacks of flour and shoving a mop around was plenty of exercise.
I sighed and got to work. Mopping was always the last thing I did. We worked from the top down when it came to cleaning. Having Hunter around had eased a lot of my workload in that regard, but I still didn’t quite trust him to clean in the corners.
Outside, glass shattered, and my shoulders hunched. But whatever Charlene had broken, she’d deal with. Or, more likely, I’d deal with later.
I backed to the door and let myself into the kitchen. An acrid scent burned my nostrils. Startled, I turned. Smoke billowed from the restaurant through the order window to the kitchen.
Fear prickled my scalp. “Fire!”
I reached into my apron pocket for my cell phone, and then I remembered Charlene. My pulse rocketed. Was she still in my office?
“Charlene!” I plowed through the swinging door and into a bank of gray smoke. Lungs searing, I fumbled, blind, for the office door.
I found the knob and stumbled inside, gasping.
“What’d you break?” She glared up from my desktop computer, and her eyes widened. “What—? That’s smoke!”
“Fire in the restaurant. Come on.”
She leapt to her feet and handed me the base of the computer, wrenched its cable from the wall.
I hurried to the door.
“Wait,” she said. “Frederick!”
I turned, computer under my arm, one hand on the knob. Frederick was, as usual, draped around her neck.
“He won’t know to hold his breath,” she wailed. “He’s just a cat!”
“He’ll figure it out.” I laid my hand on the door. It was cool, which meant there were probably no flames behind it.
“How? How will he figure it out?”
I grabbed a discarded silky scarf from the bookshelf and draped it over his head. “There. Take a breath!” I opened the door and grasped her hand.
We plunged into the hallway, dark as tornado weather. Panic, hot and jagged and choking, lurched in my throat. Charlene and I stumbled through the swinging door and into the kitchen. It was easier to see here, the smoke lighter. Coughing, we made our way to the alley door and stumbled outside and into the cool air.
Charlene wheezed and bent, hands on her knees. “Frederick,” she croaked.
My eyes streamed as I carefully pulled the scarf from his head.
He was purring.
Setting the computer against the tire of my pie van, I called 911. I spoke in ragged, hysterical bites, frantic with worry. Now that I knew Charlene and Frederick were safe, my fear turned to the pie shop.
My bakery. I’d put everything into Pie Town. It was my life, my livelihood. Would I be able to salvage anything besides the hard drive Charlene had grabbed? And all that was good for was telling me exactly how much I’d just lost.
Drained, I slithered down the brick wall. My t-shirt bunched against my back, my phone loose in my hand.
Sirens wailed.
“It’ll be all right.
” Charlene coughed, her face blackened by soot. “You’ve got insurance.”
My stomach butter-churned. But would insurance cover the loss? I hadn’t splurged for business-interruption insurance. Sure, fire insurance would replace what was damaged. But Pie Town would be closed during that time. My staff wouldn’t be paid, and so they’d move on. Meanwhile, I’d have to keep paying rent while I wasn’t earning any money. . . . I moaned.
The sirens grew louder.
“No one was hurt,” Charlene said, stroking Frederick’s fur. “That’s what matters. We’re alive to fight another day.”
I forced myself to smile. “You’re right.”
Gordon raced down the alley, the tails of his suit jacket flapping. “Val!”
I clambered to my feet.
He pulled me into a hug. “Are you all right? What happened?”
I clung to him, and now the tears in my eyes were not because of the smoke. A despairing ache swelled behind my ribs. I shook my head and tried not to cough into his muscular chest. “I was in the flour-work room, and when I came out, there was smoke pouring from the dining area.” I stepped away and grimaced. I’d left soot on his white dress shirt.
His brow creased. “The dining area? Not the kitchen?”
That . . . was strange. There was nothing to burn in the restaurant itself. Unless there’d been an electrical fire. “There was a crash,” I said.
“I heard it too,” Charlene said. “I was editing my picture of the UFO over San Francisco, and then I heard Val break something in the kitchen.”
“I thought you’d broken something in my office,” I said.
“All right,” Gordon said. “Wait here. I’ll see what’s happening with the fire department.”
He strode down the alley.
Charlene and I looked at each other. I set the computer on the floor of the van. Wordlessly, we followed him around the corner and to Main Street.
A police officer stopped us outside the comic shop. “Sorry, you’ll have to wait here.”
Two ladder trucks blocked Main Street. Their lights cascaded across the darkened storefronts. People in workout clothes clustered outside Heidi’s gym and gawked. Two uniformed policemen ordered them away.
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