Spellcasting in Silk: A Witchcraft Mystery

by Juliet Blackwell

  But then . . . Knox told me Betty had warned Nicky away from El Pajarito. So surely Betty wouldn’t have left her estate to Ursula Moreno. But then, unless Betty had specified that someone else inherit her estate, Knox was now the sole surviving family member. He had four kids. That must be expensive, especially in the Bay Area.

  Who else? There was Fred, Betty’s boyfriend. Could he have wanted to inherit Betty’s house so badly that he was willing—and able—to kill Nicky Utley? Maybe to keep her from reuniting with her mother? But that would still leave Betty’s son, Knox, to inherit, and taking out both of Betty’s children would surely arouse suspicion.

  Finally, what about Selena and Lupita? They were missing, which seemed mighty suspicious. Unless, of course, they had simply run off to Mexico or somewhere where life was less complicated than with Ursula and her possessed herbal store.

  Then I remembered: Maya had printed out the transcript of her talk with Betty.

  I got out of the bath and pulled on a Victorian-style robe made of soft lawn, then crept down the stairs to the store. I found the transcript near the register in a manila folder neatly labeled: Betty Marie North.

  I started flipping through the pages as I climbed the steps, pausing to read when I found a relevant section.

  Betty: I’m sorry to say I haven’t got a maternal bone in my body. I love my children, of course I do, but . . . they’re better off with their father. They call themselves military brats, can you imagine? They seem quite proud of their father, and I think the strict lifestyle has been good for them.

  Maya: Do you ever see them?

  Betty: Rarely, I . . . I’m sorry. It’s not something I like to talk about. But do you know, recently I’ve been doing a little babysitting. Me! Can you believe that? For the first time I understand why people might like children. Does that sound terrible? Of course it does. But then, this is not a typical little girl. She’s very special.

  I froze.

  Ursula mentioned Lupita sometimes took Selena with her on outings. Could one of those outings been to Betty North’s house? Hervé said Selena left right after he and Caterina spoke about babysitting—maybe it gave her an idea, jogged her to think about Betty. If Selena was fourteen she was too old to need a babysitter per se, but she might well have spent time with Betty. Finally, Finn had mentioned that things had been moved around in Betty’s house.

  Maybe it wasn’t a ghost at all. Maybe it was a little lost girl.

  It was worth a try.

  I pulled on the same dress I’d worn that day, pondering logistics. Maya didn’t answer her phone; she typically went to bed early. I considered calling Finn or Knox to get the combination for the lockbox at Betty’s house, but it was almost ten at night, which was late for a lot of working people. And even if it wasn’t, what possible legitimate reason could I offer for wanting access to Betty’s house?

  I called Sailor and left a message that I wouldn’t be coming over tonight, after all. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him why, or to ask him to meet me at Betty’s house. But he was busy with Patience.

  Besides, if I was right, and Selena was hiding in Betty’s house . . . it would be best to deal with her myself, just the two of us “oddballs.”

  Finally, I rifled through the steamer trunk that doubled as a coffee table in my small living room. In it I kept tucked away, out of sight, many of my most precious magical items. I pushed aside small crates of stones and crystals, packages of rare feathers, and bags of specialty dust from cemeteries and dust storms, until I unearthed a leather-bound box. Setting it on the couch, I opened it to reveal a Hand of Glory, which I had long ago recovered from a supernatural crime scene. It was a gruesome artifact, but came in handy in cases such as these.

  A genuine Hand of Glory is the preserved left hand of a hanged man, in whose palm is placed a candle. The one who holds this macabre item can open locks and see in the dark as though it were bright as day. As much as I didn’t relish touching the grisly thing, it was one of my most useful possessions.

  “Where we going?” asked a sleepy-sounding Oscar from behind me. He was wearing an old-fashioned nightcap, the kind pictured in old books of fairy tales.

  “What’s with the nightcap?”

  “What, you want a drink? Okay, I’m game. What’ll it be? Scotch? Bourbon? Brandy?”

  “No, not that kind of nightcap—the actual nightcap. The one on your head.”

  He shrugged. “I found it in the shop. Don’t you think it looks good on me?”

  “It looks great on you,” I said with a smile.

  “So, where we going?”

  “You’re not going anywhere, you’re staying here.”

  His shoulders slumped and he kicked at the ground. “I’ll wear the stupid leash.”

  “No, sorry, little guy, not this time. I . . . well, it’s hard to explain. But tonight I’m better on my own.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “No.” At least, I didn’t think so. How dangerous could a teenage witch be? Don’t answer that.

  “I should go with you. You might need your Oscar backup. You know how you are.”

  “Listen . . . I really don’t think it’s dangerous this time. I’ll bring my protective amulets and a jar of brew. And if I sense anything worrisome, I’ll call for you, okay? Go on back to your cubby.”

  He grumbled, but disappeared into his bed over the refrigerator.

  Twenty minutes later I pulled up to Betty’s yellow stucco house, switched off the engine, and sat for a moment, studying the building from the safety of the car. It seemed vaguely sinister now, a dark facade against the city-bright night sky. When I was here with Maya—was it only two days ago?—it had seemed cheery enough, full of souvenirs of a good life. Now I couldn’t help but think about that ugly voodoo doll, Betty’s estrangement from her children, Nicky Utley’s suspicious death, and the havoc being wreaked at Ursula’s shop. How did it all come together?

  I couldn’t figure it out.

  With no further insight, I climbed the front stairs and extracted my macabre charm. The Hand of Glory did its job and unlocked the front door with ease, then filled the house with light.

  Finn had been hard at work. The cabinets had been cleared of their curios, which were now laid out in neat groupings on long tables covered in white cloths. The furniture had all been priced, each tagged with a 3 x 5 card holding a description: “Antique walnut highboy with cherry and oak inlay, circa 1920 with original hardware” and “Cherry dining room set, 1950s, with two leaves to seat ten.”

  The descriptions revealed a salesman’s skilled ability to make lemonade out of lemons: an ugly, plaid-covered couch became a “Midcentury classic streamlined sofa.” I smiled. Every once in a while I acquired some truly wretched items for Aunt Cora’s Closet, but lo and behold, if they were presented with sufficient aplomb, someone would go home with that shiny Lycra jumpsuit they’d always wanted.

  I stood for a moment in the living room, breathing deeply, trying to feel.

  But I sensed no errant vibrations. Nothing more than the creepiness of trespassing in a stranger’s house, uninvited, in the middle of the night. Witchy sensitivity or no, that was just plain eerie.

  I checked the bedrooms and found more of the same: white-cloth-covered tables holding everything from ceramic dogs to silk flowers, and items of furniture tagged with prices and descriptions. The many prescription bottles had been discarded, as well as all prosaic, everyday objects such as toothpaste and toothbrushes. As the little items of daily life were culled, the traces of Betty North disappeared.

  The house was no longer a home, but one huge display case.

  It made me feel sad for Betty. Was she mourned by anyone besides Maya, and perhaps Fred? Did her children grieve for her? One of those children had supposedly committed suicide, I reminded myself, not long after her mother’s passing.

  Had death connected Betty with her daughter in a way that life had not?

  In the kitchen the cupboard doors st
ood open, displaying sets of china alongside more utilitarian dishes. A stack of vintage cookbooks sat on the counter, and I squelched the impulse to thumb through their pages . . . but I made a mental note to ask Finn about them. I was trying to resist buying vintage kitchen accessories, but surely cookbooks were another matter altogether.

  The door to the stairs leading to the rumpus room was ajar. Thick carpeting muffled my footsteps as I descended.

  Finn had been at work here as well. There were tables lining the walls, and two in the center, all covered in white cloths with shining silver items neatly laid out: several tea services, platters, charger plates, pitchers, vases, cutlery. They gleamed brightly, even in the dim light of the sconces, but in their formality they looked out of place against the bright orange Naugahyde of the rumpus room.

  Halfway down the stairs I paused, midstep.

  An apparition stood at one of the tables, polishing silver.

  Chapter 17

  She was dressed from another time: a ruffled pink-and-purple ensemble that looked like an old-fashioned grandmother’s idea of a child’s wardrobe, not that of a modern American teenager. Her hair was pulled back tightly and hung in two long, tight braids down her back, both tied with pink ribbons. She appeared painfully thin, with gangly arms and legs. Two sparkly brooches, so large and garish they looked absurd on her small frame, were pinned to her lavender sweater. And her hands were covered with prim white cotton gloves.

  She was laying things out, humming absentmindedly, off-key.

  “Selena?”

  She looked up, and I almost wished she hadn’t. Her eyes bulged in her thin, pinched face, and were so dark they looked black. But it was the emptiness that worried me. She didn’t seem surprised; indeed, she hardly seemed to register my presence.

  “Selena, I’m Lily. Lily Ivory. Your grandmother Ursula asked me to find you and take care of you until she can come home.”

  Carlos said Selena was fourteen, but this girl looked younger than that, just on the verge of adolescence. Much less mature than her schoolmate Emma Utley, for instance. But then, I’m no expert when it comes to kids.

  Still . . . I couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong. I knew it. I felt it. She doesn’t fit in. She’s weird. A misfit.

  “Hablas ingles?” I asked her if she spoke English, hoping the answer was yes; my Spanish is a strange mélange of English, Spanish, and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs that my grandmother grew up speaking. The only Spanish I speak fluently is the version I used for spellcasting and ordering herbs and specialty items, like Dragon’s Blood resin and freeze-dried bats.

  “I knew you were here. I smelled lilies,” Selena finally said, wrinkling her nose and turning back to rearranging the silver serving spoons. “Betty didn’t like the silver to be mixed up. She said they went in this order. It’s important to place them in order.”

  I watched her for a long moment as she laid out the place settings, complete with dessert spoons and salad forks in addition to the basic spoon, knife, and fork.

  It was like looking in a mirror at my adolescent self: gawky, fearful . . . magical. I was picking up her powerful vibrations from across the room.

  Great. A troubled teenage witch.

  Selena seemed to study the layout for another long moment before finally nodding and giving the silver a final pat.

  “Betty says always to wear white gloves when handling silver. Not rubber gloves. Rubber tarnishes.”

  “My grandmother told me the same thing,” I said, walking toward her slowly. “Though we didn’t have nearly this much silver, just a serving bowl or two.”

  “I used to help her clean it. We washed off the tarnish. Betty says no matter how bad the tarnish, it can be removed with ketchup. Not the toxic stuff.”

  “Ketchup?” I gave a soft laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I’ve never heard of using ketchup to wash tarnish off silver.”

  “What do you use?”

  “To tell you the truth, I mostly ignore it.”

  Selena shook her head, looking down at the silver arrayed before her. “You shouldn’t do that. That’s not right. Silver is meant to be shiny.”

  She started humming again, picking items up and cleaning them.

  “Selena,” I began in as gentle a voice as I could manage. “I’d like you to come home with me.”

  She gazed at me, an empty, unblinking stare.

  Selena gestured to the brooches on her chest. “I didn’t steal these. She gave them to me. She said I could have anything I wanted in the house. Anything.”

  I nodded. “Okay. I’m sure you can keep the brooches. It’s not a problem. Hey, Selena . . .” I felt compelled to get her out of this house, bring her home and feed her. It was late and it occurred to me Betty’s spirit might be lurking, perhaps kept here by Selena’s energy. I wanted to get Selena on my turf, surrounded by my magical resources, so I could control things . . . and try to figure things out. Though controlling Selena was going to be a challenge, I could feel it.

  “Do you like pigs?” I asked.

  That got her attention.

  “I’ve got a miniature one,” I continued. “Though with pigs, even miniature is pretty hefty. But he’ll like you, no worries. As long as you pet him occasionally, and maybe sneak him a snack now and then.”

  She shrugged, and started pulling off her gloves. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick, red and raw looking. Poor thing. My heart hurt on her behalf. And yet . . . part of me wanted nothing to do with her, didn’t want to be reminded of my own past, of who I used to be. It was like ripping the Band-Aid off the scab of my youth.

  But fortunately for me, my grandmother Graciela had been there to guide me, to give me love and mentoring at that fragile time in my life.

  “I’ll stay here,” said Selena with a shake of her head.

  “Selena, you can’t stay here by yourself.”

  “I can. I have.”

  “Do you know where Lupita is? Has she been around?

  She shook her head.

  “It’s important that I speak with her.”

  “I haven’t seen her, but that’s okay. I don’t really like people.”

  “Selena, you can’t stay here. There’s going to be an estate sale here in the house. It’ll be full of people.”

  “I don’t like people coming in here.”

  “I understand. But it’s not really Betty’s house anymore—”

  “It is.”

  “Still, there will be people coming through here. First for the estate sale, and then when the house is for sale.”

  “I can hide. I’m very good at hiding.”

  “Maybe so. But . . . you need someone to look after you.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You must be hungry. There’s no food here, sugar pie,” I said, the endearment a relic from my own childhood. I remembered my mother saying it to me, when I was young and she still looked upon me fondly. “I’m an awfully good cook, if I do say so myself. You like enchiladas? Tacos?”

  This got her attention. Her thin lips parted, a tiny pink tongue darted out to wet them. “I like cheeseburgers better.”

  “Well, it just so happens I make a mighty mean cheeseburger. Best you’ve ever tasted. Just ask my pig.”

  “Pigs’ll eat anything.”

  I smiled. “I suppose that’s true . . . but I really do make a good burger.”

  “All right, then. Want me to drive? I can drive.”

  “No, thank you, I’ll drive.”

  She shrugged, tucked the gloves in the oversized pockets of her skirt, and swept regally past me up the stairs.

  As I trailed along behind, I tried to quell the sense of foreboding. My instincts were shrieking at me to put some distance between me and the girl. But I couldn’t. She was a child, and I had promised to help her.

  And I had no doubt that if this odd girl—this strange young woman—was shunted into the foster care system, someone was going to get
hurt.

  * * *

  “Where’s the pig?” Selena asked as soon as we walked into Aunt Cora’s Closet. We had stopped at an all-night grocery store for hamburger, buns, and ice cream. I had everything else I needed in my well-stocked kitchen.

  “He might be upstairs.” Now that I had freed Oscar from Aidan’s service, he disappeared even more frequently than he used to. “But if not, he’ll be back soon enough.”

  “What is this place?” She walked around the store, her hands out at her side, palms forward, feeling for vibrations.

  “It’s my shop. I sell vintage clothes.”

  She glared at me, her eyes narrow slits. “Dead people’s clothes.”

  “Sometimes, yes,” I said, clamping down on my exasperation. First Finn, now her. “I prefer to think of them as reclaimed, or antique. Passed down.”

  Suddenly she ran across the shop and flung open the brocade curtain that led to the workroom where Finn had set the bags of clothing I’d purchased from Betty’s estate.

  Selena fell to her knees in front of one pile, and brought an emerald green shirtwaist dress up to her nose.

  She inhaled deeply. “These are Betty’s clothes.”

  “Yes. I bought them from Finn, the man who’s organizing the estate sale.”

  “I know. But . . . but why did you take Betty’s clothes? What right do you ha-ave?” Her voice cracked on the last word.

  I went to her side and reached out slowly, very slowly, and placed my hand on her head. She was like a wild animal; I didn’t know which way she would jump, or if she would run away. Or bite.

  The palm of my hand tingled before I even made contact. The girl’s energy was frenetic, unfocused, zinging every which way. I remained absolutely still for a moment, afraid to spook her. Then I began to stroke her head, slowly and gently. Her hair was bound in tight braids on either side of her head, but a few soft wisps around her temples had escaped.

  After a very long time she looked up, her eyes dark and impenetrable, and said: “Do you ever wish you could cry?”