Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  Fawkes takes a sip of his coffee as I have a seat at the great messy desk by the window. I pluck one newspaper clipping, then another. I recognize many of the names in the headlines. Some of them were neighbors.

  “These are all obits,” I murmur, and turn to the figure in the bed. “Are these all people you knew?” He doesn’t answer me. I read the headline on the next clipping I pull from the pile and my heart gives a queer thump. “Why did you save Henry Dryden’s obituary?”

  “Awfully fishy, the way he died. Always thought I might just be able to piece together what really happened to the poor fellow.” Given the stacks of obituaries on the desk, it seems he found a lot of local deaths worthy of suspicion. (I flip through a few more, coming upon Julius Mettle’s, but oddly enough I don’t find one for Helena’s second husband. Jack was the manager of an abattoir two towns over and came home every night with blood on his collar.)

  “What made you suspicious, Mr. Fawkes?”

  “There was talk of him running around with his secretary. Plenty can go wrong when a man strays—seldom doesn’t.”

  “That’s my family you’re talking about, Mr. Fawkes. Gossip doesn’t make fact no matter how many times you repeat it.”

  “Well, yeeeeeah. I remembered too late that he was your granddad. Sorry, kid. He was still a good man and all though,” he adds quickly.

  I brush his words aside and fix him with a stare. “Did you know his secretary? Belva Mettle? I see you have her father’s obituary here as well.”

  “Dr. Julius,” Fawkes says with a sigh. “He was a good man too. Used to pay me to do odd jobs around his house when I was a kid. Paid well.” He pauses. “I’ll tell you one thing—them two deaths was linked somehow, I just know it.”

  The gooseflesh rises on my arms. “You mean you think the same person murdered them both?”

  “No, no, not saying that exactly …”

  “It doesn’t seem likely,” I say. “They died almost ten years apart.”

  “That don’t matter.”

  “And what about Belva? Did you know her?”

  “A little,” he says with a shrug. “I can say this about her: she wasn’t so meek as she pretended. Not much to look at, but Lord, she had something. I saw her work her charm on a man once. Never saw anything like it. Uncanny.”

  “Which man? Henry?”

  Fawkes eyes me with renewed suspicion. “Why d’you call your granddad by his given name, anyway?”

  “Grandpa Henry. Happy? Now tell me whom she bewitched.”

  “Don’t know. Some fellow down at the Blind Pig. It was long after Henry passed.”

  “Did you hear any talk about Hel—my grandmother? His wife?”

  “What kinda talk?”

  “That she might have been implicated in his death.”

  Fawkes frowns in thought, then glances out the window, distracted by the laughter coming from the mews below.

  “Think, man! You said it was suspicious—now whom was it you suspected?”

  “If I knew, I might have gotten somewhere,” he says with an exasperated swat of a hand. “He was murdered. No question in my mind.” He pauses, and I catch a malevolent glint in his eye. “But with a family big as yours, I guess you’ve got more skeletons in your closets than average folk do.”

  “You, talking of skeletons! Now there’s a gem.” I hold out my right hand and wiggle my fingers so my ring glitters in the sunlight. “Do you recognize this?”

  Fawkes shrugs.

  “I bought it in your shop. Mr. Ibis told me you’d gotten it off the finger bone of a French aristocrat.”

  “I’ve never robbed a grave in my life,” Fawkes says darkly. The look he’s giving me very clearly says If I weren’t infirm I’d be making you mighty sorry right now.

  “That may be, but does it matter if you paid some local scag to do it for you?” I give a little shrug of triumph. “By rights, I’d say you deserve to have your own grave looted a hundred times over.”

  That remark seems to soften him up, though I can’t say how. He chuckles and says, “More’n a hundred, I reckon.”

  Fawkes takes another sip from the paper cup, and after a short silence I tell him I’d better wash the dishes. I leave the dirty tray on the kitchen counter and venture into the sitting room. Justin looks up from the TV. “I needed a break,” he says.

  “Can’t say I blame you. What’s he going to do for dinner?”

  “Uncle Harry’s bringing takeout. I guess we can go now.” He switches off the television and goes back to Emmet’s room. I turn to the pile of dirty dishes with a sigh. Not enough oomph.

  “There’s something odd about that girl,” I hear Emmet saying as I turn off the faucet. “Can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Emmet, please. Not everyone’s as deaf as you are.”

  “Come again?”

  “She can hear you, Emmet!”

  “It don’t matter,” he says as I come down the hallway. “She knows she’s odd.”

  “Right,” Justin replies as I pause in the doorway. “We’ll see you later, Emmet. Take care of yourself.”

  “Hah! Life ain’t worth living once you can’t wipe your own bottom.”

  “Amen to that,” I call over my shoulder with a laugh. Justin gives me a funny look as he holds the door open for me.

  BUT IF Fawkes’s words have sparked some doubt in him, he doesn’t show it. I’m only passing time between the evenings we spend together, and when I see him again I can sense he feels the same. Some nights we get tipsy and I sing for him, mostly bawdy old pub songs. Later on he starts talking the most marvelous nonsense, things like I could have been a rocket scientist if I’d only applied myself and Humility is the one true religion.

  “I thought love was the one true religion,” I say.

  “Who knew you were such a softie!” he says as he tousles my hair. He tells me about this lodge in backwater Alaska where they serve fillet of defrosted mammoth at two thousand dollars a plate. He swears up and down that two of his college buddies visited such a restaurant, though naturally they could not afford to try the dish themselves.

  “Brings new meaning to ‘free-range organic,’ ” I say. “And what do they serve on the side? Oeufs moulés du pterodactyl?” We laugh and laugh over the silliest things—dare I say it?—just as we used to. And whenever we go out to eat, he finishes the meal with the same five words he always has.

  Yes, the days with Justin pass so happily that it’s all too easy to half forget my sister is, essentially, on trial for murder.

  Curious Kitties

  21.

  CURIOSITY, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  THE GILLENDER Building is an odd little skyscraper, a mere twenty-five feet wide. It was erected in 1897 and torn down only thirteen years later, and at twenty stories it was, at the time, the tallest building ever demolished in the history of New York City. Pandora Securities Limited has occupied the entire building since its reclamation. Twenty narrow stories might seem like insufficient space to store all the secrets of the witching world, but we make do.

  Skyscrapers are rare in the Wall Street warren—most of them were too ugly to bother saving—and so the Gillender rises against the sky like a frosted ladyfinger. We reach it through a broom closet of the Bankers Trust Company, and when we venture back into a different lobby than the one we’d entered we find an expanse of fine black marble and brass filigree. High above the porter’s desk a moose trophy snores tremorously. The man behind the counter is absorbed in a crossword, immune to the noise it seems, and he doesn’t even glance at us as we pass.

  Pandora Securities provides more than just a place to stash your hookahs and nudie postcards. There are cozy soundproof cubby rooms on each floor—oak wainscoting, oriental carpets, big leather armchairs, Tiffany reading lamps, all very old-money, you know—and each room is equipped with a combination of ashtray, phonograph, film projector, television, and/or hig
h-powered magnifying glass, all so that one may dally with one’s secrets in perfect privacy.

  But first, of course, one must access the secrets in question. The vault—a long, narrow room lit with Nouveau chandeliers and tiled in milky green marble—looks a bit like a vast card catalog, with row upon row of little brass-plated boxes set into the walls on either side. Each box has an ornamental sphinx holding the number between its paws. There are no keyholes.

  Once we’ve signed our names in the registry book on the second floor we proceed to the ninth-floor vault. We locate box 91153 and Morven taps the number plate with a forefinger.

  The eyes of the little brass sphinx swivel to meet hers. “Please provide the full names of your maternal twice-great grandmothers, in order of birth,” it says in a clear, slightly tinny voice.

  We turn away from the lock head and put our hands to our mouths to compose our answer. Morven frowns in thought. “Was Lilith or Theodora first?”

  “Lilith” is my firm reply.

  “Right.” Morven turns back to the sphinx.

  “Answer, please,” says the sphinx.

  “Lilith Harbinger, Theodora Harbinger, Margery Moore, Gillian Peacock,” she says, enunciating carefully.

  The sphinx doesn’t tell us we’ve given the correct answer, it just goes on to the next question, and the second and third are as easy as the first—list, in chronological order, your daughters’ names and birthdays; what is the name of your tabby cat? Indeed, they are simple enough that any member of Helena’s family could easily access her box at any time. This we find a little bit odd. Not that Helena shouldn’t trust us, but …

  “Access granted,” announces the little sphinx, and after a brief sound of clicking gears and popping hinges the drawer slides forward. We pull it out and proceed to one of those cozy little rooms down the hall to explore the contents of the box. At the top we find a sheaf of official documents, her own will as well as Henry’s, and beneath those a plain wooden jewelry box full of heirloom gems she lends her granddaughters on special occasions.

  Underneath all this stuff you’d expect to find in a safe-deposit box, we come upon something not so ordinary: a book, thick as a telephone directory and wrapped in a sheet of protective plastic. We pull off the plastic and find a leather cover dotted with mold, the title embossing obscured by years of wear. This book is at least three centuries old, maybe more. Morven looks at me with profound anxiety.

  I crack the cover and cough with all the dust that flies up. I turn to the title page and we gasp in unison:

  DYVERS EXPERIMENTS IN THE BLACKE ARTS:

  A Treatyse by An Anonymus Wytch

  Printed by Howatch & Brayburn, London, 1699

  The book is jammed with inserted pages—well used and annotated, though not in Helena’s hand of course. No beldame would ever need or want a book like this.

  “Eve! For goodness’ sake, don’t read any of it!”

  “Relax,” I reply as I thumb through the first chapter. “It doesn’t make you evil if you only read a line or two.”

  Shoulde another woman be made the wife of the man thou lov’st, a Needle slipp’d inside her bedde will see her in the ground before the yeare is out …

  To glympse thine enemy from afar, conceal the eyes of a Fish or Lyzarde within the chamber in which she is most inclyn’d her secrets to reveal …

  “Oh, bother,” Morven sighs. “This does make her look a little bit guilty.”

  WE TAKE the loo flue back to the first-floor powder room and confront Helena in the kitchen, where she is beating a cake batter by hand. That in itself is fishy, as she only bakes the long way when she wants to distract herself from some unshakable unpleasantness. “I want to tell you both something,” she says without turning round. “I’ve decided to give up the B and B.”

  “What?” Morven gasps.

  Helena puts down the whisk and turns to face us, and I put on my best schoolmarm demeanor. “Why in heaven’s name do you have a copy of Dyvers Experiments in the Blacke Arts in your safe-deposit box?”

  “I didn’t want it in the house,” Helena replies reasonably.

  “You aren’t annoyed that we opened your box?”

  She sniffs. “If I had anything to hide, don’t you think I’d have made the questions harder to answer?”

  “But you did have something to hide, Helena! What are you doing with that thing?”

  “I wasn’t hiding it, I was storing it—and it should be perfectly apparent that I am not doing anything with it,” she replies. “It’s been sitting in that safe-deposit box since the day I got it.”

  “But what did you even buy it for?”

  “I didn’t buy it.”

  “Who gave it to you, then?”

  She turns away on pretense of pouring the batter into a baking pan. “I couldn’t say,” she murmurs.

  “This isn’t the time for secrets, Helena,” Morven says gently. “Surely you of all people know that.”

  Helena puts the mixing bowl down and drops into a kitchen chair with a sigh. “The plain truth is that I don’t know who gave it to me. It came in the post one afternoon, years and years ago. It was addressed to me, but I had no way of knowing who’d sent it.”

  “Of course you could have found out who—”

  Helena shakes her head. “Whoever sent it didn’t want me to know. And how could I get rid of it? It may be a dabbler’s book, but I still couldn’t risk burning it. And it wasn’t the sort of thing I could ever try to trade in at a secondhand store, now, was it?”

  We have to concede that point.

  “I was stuck with it. So I stowed it in the safe-deposit box and figured none of you would ever feel the need to open it.”

  Helena was always very good at shaming us without appearing to try.

  THAT NIGHT I go over to Justin’s apartment, but I’m still feeling out of sorts. I keep thinking about Dyvers Experiments in the Blacke Arts and wondering if I know my own sister so well as I thought I did. I’m angry at myself for doubting her, angry with us both for having doubted her before we’d found any real cause to. But now we have, and I’ve got a wormy feeling that something has begun to unravel.

  “I want to travel with you,” he says dreamily. We are lying on his bed, déshabillé. “I want to hike the Inca Trail with you, and go bird-watching in the Galápagos, and rummage through the market stalls at Marrakesh. I want to drink Turkish coffee with you, and eat rice and beans for dinner with our fingers, and walk up and down the Great Wall of China. I want to go diving at the Great Barrier Reef …” Eventually he shakes himself out of his reverie and eyes me eyeing him with amusement. “Am I scaring you?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, then.”

  “I can’t,” I say sadly.

  “What is it?” he asks. “Is it that time of the month?”

  Hah! Haven’t been on the rag since the Nixon administration.

  “Eve?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why d’you always have to be so cagey about everything?”

  “Why did you have to get so serious all of a sudden?” I roll away from him and make for the loo. “Nobody likes a spoilsport. And here I thought you were perfectly plastered—”

  He grabs hold of my arm, pulls me back onto the bed, and rolls over so he’s on top of me. He puts his face an inch from mine and looks into my eyes. I squirm but he clamps his hands on my cheeks so I can’t look away. “I mean it, Eve. You won’t tell me what you do, or where you went to school, or even how old you are.”

  “I’ve already answered you on all three.”

  “Yeah, right: ‘retired spy, St. Hildegard’s, and a hundred and forty-nine’? I wish you’d stop playing with me, Eve. I Googled St. Hildegard’s—there’s no such school anywhere in the state.”

  “I told you, it closed years ago.”

  He holds me fast, his face colored with frustration. “Stop lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you, and don’t you da
re ask me to prove it. If you can’t take me at my word, then you need never see me again.”

  I see a flash of desperation in his eyes. “Why don’t we ever go to your place?”

  “You know I live with my sister.”

  “So? Don’t tell me she never brings anybody home.”

  I wriggle out of his grasp and sit up. “Actually, she doesn’t.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eleven months older than I am.”

  “Oh ho, your parents were busy. How come I’ve never met her at your aunt’s house?”

  “She doesn’t come home as often as I do.”

  “You won’t bring me home, then? Home to New York, I mean?”

  “I can’t, Justin. I’m sorry.”

  “Where do you go the nights I don’t see you?”

  No place, I should say. Stay at home. Don’t even leave the chair. But when I shrug and say, “Oh, no place, really,” he can’t take me at my word.

  “But what do you do?” he cries.

  Sudoku. Crochet. Dr. Scholl’s foot baths.

  “Tell me you’re not seeing other guys.”

  “Is it the truth you want or a bit of reassurance?”

  “Does that mean you are?”

  “Why should I tell you I’m not if you won’t believe it anyway?”

  “I haven’t gone out with another girl since I met you.”

  This revelation downright startles me. “Really?”

  “Really,” he says.

  “Not even in Budapest?”

  “Not even in Budapest.”

  “Hah! Who’d you go with to the opera, then?”

  “I didn’t go with anyone,” he says, clearly affronted. “I went alone. Eve … I don’t want you to see anybody else either.”

  “That’s fine. Because I’m not.”

  “Swear?”

  “I’ll swear on the grave of your choice.”

  He seems satisfied at this, but after a pensive pause he adds, “Promise me you’ll travel with me. Even if it’s just for a weekend.”